Radiant Energy Group recently published a massive international survey of opinions on nuclear energy.
It's full of some things you might already know, but it also contains some surprises🧵
For example, did you know French and German nuclear support isn't that different?
Nuclear does have less support than other green technologies, but in most places, it still receives net support.
This apparently low level of support looks higher when survey participants are asked about their ranked supported for different energy sources.
This support increases further if you subset to people who are techno-optimists or tech-neutral when it comes to fighting against climate change.
Unfortunately, most people aren't aware about nuclear is exceptionally clean. Even larger numbers think nuclear waste is a major point of worry.
The Simpsons has done incredible damage to the reputation of our best energy source.
Onto the demographics!
In some countries, the old are the most supportive of nuclear. In others, it's the young.
If you've seen other surveys on the demographics of nuclear support this one won't surprise you: men are universally more supportive of nuclear.
If you've seen other surveys on the relationship between science knowledge and nuclear support, this won't surprise you either: the most knowledgeable are (almost) universally the most supportive of nuclear.
Despite being the current best option for providing reliable, low-cost, and clean energy, being concerned about the climate generally predicts less support for nuclear.
When climate concern is represented by nonprofit membership, there's a similar result.
Despite the nuclear industry being aligned with numerous (typically) left-wing goals from protecting the environment to supporting labor unionization and high employee safety standards, it's the economically right wing that's more supportive of nuclear.
There's more in the report, but I'll end this thread on a happy note: globally, there's more support for additional nuclear builds than for additional nuclear shutdowns.
In the public imagination, these things go hand-in-hand.
But the link between poverty and crime is much weaker than people might imagine. It might not even be causal.
A new lottery study shows us just that:
🧵
To understand the causes of crime, there are other things you need to understand first.
For example, you need to understand the roles of sex and age.
In the whole country the lottery study results came from, you get this result when you plot both variables.
The collapse in criminal offending from adolescence is the crux of the "age-crime curve". The gap between men and women that declines with age is another important part.
Unlike age and crime, income and crime are nonlinearly related: after a certain level, income barely matters.
- Exercise without steroids
- Exercise with steroids
- Not exercise without steroids
- Not exercise with steroids
The guys who take steroids and don't exercise gain more muscle than the guys who exercise without steroids!
The above is the familiar outcome from this study. But they measured more things than just fat-free mass gains.
For example, they also measured bench presses.
People who exercised without steroids gained about the same amount as people who didn't exercise, with steroids.
Squats were also measured, and in that one, the people who exercised beat the people who didn't exercise but did take steroids, but both beat the ones who neither exercised nor took roids.
I think @AakashKalyani's recent JMP might have one of the most interesting explanations for why patent filings no longer track productivity growth:
It's because today's patents aren't very creative🧵
Patents describe invention features, and some invention features are less novel than others.
Kalyani used these descriptions to generate a measure of creativity based on a patent's number of novel word combinations.
Using this measure of patent creativity, we see that despite a substantial increase in patenting in recent years, the typical patent has become much less creative.