There's a popular saying that if you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart, but if you're not a conservative by 40, you have no brain.
It might be more accurate to imagine that people's formative years have large, persistent impacts on their beliefs. A study by Andy Gelman showed how.
In the Gelman model, high presidential approval during a (White) birth cohort's teen years leads them to favor that president's party for the rest of their lives. Whatever the reason, it's as if they're acting to bring back the 'good old days' of their cognizant childhood. To get an idea of how this looks, look at Eisenhower Republicans:
The Eisenhower Republicans were those who missed most of the FDR years and were socialized in ten straight years of Republicans, of which the Eisenhower years had positive spin. As a result, that cohort became very pro-Republican, but then the very pro-Democrat Kennedy and Johnson years moderated them back to being a bit less pro-Republican.
The 1960s Liberals were born a bit later than the Eisenhower Republicans and they got to experience the pro-Kennedy and Johnson years in their formative years, but the next 25 years of strongly pro-Republican sentiment brought them to near-neutrality.
One of the most well-known political generations is the Reagan Conservatives. This generation got to experience strong pro-Republican sentiment and they ushered in the real Reagan Revolution: a cohort with strong pro-Republican leanings and little moderation due to the balance of sentiment between Clinton and Bush II, and Obama's nearly neutral sentiment.
Other cohorts like the New Deal Democrats and Millennials have their own biases that follow from the same dynamics, and if you plot them all together, you get a clear picture of the sentiment of the White electorate:
Now do note, I said Whites. This model works slightly better for non-Southern than for Southern Whites, and compared to those two groups, it works less than half as well for non-White minorities.
In any case, this model based on formative year impacts can explain roughly 90% of the variance in vote choices in the electorate. If you want to get people's votes, get them early in life, and you might be able to hold them through waves of less popular candidates from your own party.
The White House just released a really good executive order on cleaning up America's streets, re-institutionalizing insane people, and ending open air drug abuse and the problems it creates.
Here's a quick overview🧵
The first section is the one I'm most excited for. An alternative name for it could be "Bring Back The Asylums"
It instructs the administration to make it possible to involuntarily commit crazy people again
That crazy hobo pushing a cart full of urine bottles? He's going away!
The next section is one that you'll need to familiarize yourself with if you're interested in 'what happens next'.
This was a never achieved goal in Trump-I.
The idea is to compel cities to do what you want by withholding, barring, and giving discretionary funds for compliance.
What comes after myostatin inhibitors make everyone buff?
One new candidate is:
Safe, cheap, and easily-administered injections that locally remove fat. A new drug that just passed through phase 2 seems to do just that🧵
The new drug is called CBL-514.
It has a counterpart on the market in the form of deoxycholic acid injections—brand name Kybella.
Kybella is FDA-approved, and it works: it helps people to get rid of their double chins. But there's a catch.
Kybella, unfortunately, is not all that safe, and though many patients swear by it, there are notable side effects.
This is predictable, since the way Kybella works is through cytolysis: causing cells to die by rupturing them, releasing their contents, causing inflammation.
Pseudonyms afforded the protection needed to write things that were controversial, to engender debate over things they didn't themselves believe in, and to encourage focus on ideas over reputations
Thread of their known pseudonyms🧵
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay all wrote under the name Publius, after the Roman consul Publius Valerius Poplicola.
This shared authorship became known after Hamilton died, but the individual authors of the Federalist Papers Publius entries remain debated.
John Jay and John Stevens, Jr. shared the Americanus pseudonym when writing various Federalist essays.
One of my favorite papers in recent years included this diagram.
It shows the impact of controlling for three different types of variables: confounders, colliders, and mediators.
With confounders, control is good. With the others, you ruin your result by controlling.
If you have variables with measurement error, you can run into another problematic variable: the proxy.
Proxy variables can make all of these distortions much worse and much more difficult to deal with.
The paper makes this simple observation: statistical control requires causal justification. That's actually the title.
They gave several DAG-based examples. Consider this one: is edutainment a confounder or a mediator? Should you control for it, or would that bias your estimate?