Crémieux Profile picture
Aug 25, 2024 1 tweets 3 min read Read on X
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.

Source: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…Image
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More from @cremieuxrecueil

Jul 2
I've seen people mentioning that Europe's heat-related death issue is larger than American gun violence—true!

But people neglect saying how many heat-related deaths America has.

Approximately 1% of what Europe does even though America is hotter and Americans are less healthy! Image
Those factors mean Americans are more at-risk for heat-related deaths, even after accounting for Europe being a little older than America.

So let's be clear:

Europeans die from heat at relatively high rates; Americans survive it with technology. Image
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What technology?

It's the terraforming technology of air conditioning.

Install A/C and the heat-related deaths will mostly disappear, if Europe can keep their grid operational. Image
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Jul 2
What happens when scholars get canceled?

They end up publishing fewer papers and they receive fewer citations.

In other words, scientific productivity falls🧵 Image
Tons of scholars have been cancelled in recent years.

That is, they've received professional backlash for expressing views that people deem "controversial, unpopular, or misaligned with prevailing norms." Image
Cancellations happen outside of academia, but it's very bad in it.

Large portions of the academy dislike the freedom of speech. Many of those free speech opponents have high agency and the clout to cause material harm to people they dislike = particularly bad cancel culture. Image
Read 13 tweets
Jun 28
You must pick one:

Double the productivity of the bottom 20% or double the productivity of the top 1%:
Double the productivity of the bottom 40% or double the productivity of the top 1%:
Double the productivity of the bottom 60% or double the productivity of the top 1%:
Read 7 tweets
Jun 27
Phenotyping is the vast, minimally-explored frontier in genome-wide association studies.

Important thread🧵

Briefly, phenotyping is how you measure people's traits. Measure poorly, get bad results; measure well, get good results.

Example? Janky knees. Image
The janky knee example refers to osteoarthritis, the most common form of arthritis, which occurs when the cartilage between bones is worn down, so bones start rubbing against each other.

This ends up being very painful. Image
Everyone with this condition isn't necessarily diagnosed with it.

This is especially true for men, who tend to just ignore this (and many other conditions) more often than women do.

This is, in a word, annoying, because it means that if you study it, sampling is likely biased. Image
Read 35 tweets
Jun 25
ADHD is a condition that's suffered from diagnostic drift: it's been defined more leniently over time, so more people are getting diagnosed.

One way to see this is to look at the benefits of taking ADHD medication. As prescription rates increased, the benefits have declined. Image
Another way to understand diagnostic drift is to look at the factors that promote it.

For example, school accountability laws lead to more diagnoses and, as a result, more psychoactive drug prescriptions.

Schools are pressured by law into making this happen. Image
An even more direct way to understand ADHD's diagnostic drift is to look at what types of diagnoses happen over time.

The increase has been more about non-severe ADHD than clinical ADHD. In other words, people with less and lesser symptoms are getting diagnosed. Image
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Jun 24
I have a story to break.

Columbia is still practicing racially discriminatory admissions in defiance of the Supreme Court's ruling in SFFA v. Harvard.

Newly-leaked data shows they still prefer less-qualified Blacks and Hispanics over more-qualified Asians🧵Image
Columbia has made a big show of "complying" with SFFA v. Harvard by noting that their 2024 batch of admits involved slightly less discrimination:

Fewer Black and Hispanic students, more Asian students.

That's what should happen, because Asian students tend to perform better.Image
But, with this leaked admissions data, we can see that race still predicts admissions.

With fair admissions, race should not have a significant effect, and it should not be directionally consistent.

And yet, in this data, it's clear Columbia still discriminates against Asians. Image
Read 14 tweets

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