The FBI has finally released crime statistics for 2023!
Let's have a short thread.
First thing up is recent violent crime trends:
Now let's focus in on homicides.
The homicide statistics split by race show the same distribution they have for years.
As with every crime, it's still men doing the killing, but it's also largely men doing the dying.
What about Hispanics? Their data is still a mess, but here it is if you're interested.
The age-crime curve last year looked pretty typical. How about this year?
Same as always. Victims and offenders still have highly similar, relatively young ages.
Everything else, from locations to motives to weapons is pretty similar to previous years. What's different is that the OP might show incorrect numbers.
For the past two years, the FBI has silently updated their numbers after about two weeks.
You can use the web archive to see that the data from the OP is the data shown at release last year, and the data from 2023 is the 2022 data with the FBI's suggested reductions (i.e., -11.6% homicides, -2.8% aggravated assaults, -0.3% robberies, etc.).
But you can see on their site now that they've adjusted the numbers up, so the reduction they suggested has brought us down to a figure that's less impressive than my chart shows. The difference isn't huge so I showed the OP without updating to their new data.
For reference, 2022 as reported then had a homicide rate of 6.3/100k, and they silently updated that to 7.48/100k. The 2023 data they provided today actually has a murder rate of 6.61/100k, higher than last year's initially-reported number, but lower than the updated number. To make matters worse, if you use their Expanded Homicides Report, you get a rate of 5.94 for 2022 and 5.24 for 2023.
Methodology matters and we get to see inconsistency in this year's data, not even data that's been updated or anything. It's a mess, so take everything with a grain of salt and, in the interest of caution, only interpret trends. Trends are mostly common between all data sources even if the absolute magnitudes are off, constantly updated, etc.
You know how most books on Amazon are AI slop now? If you didn't, look at the publication numbers.
Compare those to the proportion Pangram flags as AI-generated. It's fully aligned with the implied numbers based on the rise over 2022 publication levels!
Similarly, the rise of pro se litigants has come with a rise in case filings detected as being AI-generated, and with virtually zero false-positives before AI was around.
Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play argued that France's early fertility decline was driven by its inheritance reforms, where estates had to be split up equally to all of the kids, including the girls.
There's likely something to this!🧵
For reference, the French Revolution ushered in a number of egalitarian laws.
A major example of these had to do with inheritance, and in particular with partibility.
In some areas of France, there was partible inheritance, and in others, it was impartible.
Partible inheritance refers to inheritance spread among all of a person's heirs, sometimes including girls, sometimes not.
Impartible inheritance on the other hands refers to the situation where the head of an estate can nominate a particular heir to get all or a select portion.
In terms of their employment, religion, and sex, people who joined the Nazi party started off incredibly distinct from the people in their communities.
It's only near the end of WWII when they started resembling everyday Germans.
Early on, a lot of this dissimilarity is due to hysteresis.
Even as the party was growing, people were selectively recruited because they were often recruited by their out-of-place friends, and they were themselves out-of-place.
It took huge growth to break that.
And you can see the decline of fervor based on the decline of Nazi imagery in people's portraits.
And while this is observed by-and-large, it's not observed among the SS, who had a consistently higher rate of symbolic fanaticism.
I simulated 100,000 people to show how often people are "thrice-exceptional": Smart, stable, and exceptionally hard-working.
I've highlighted these people in red in this chart:
If you reorient the chart to a bird's eye view, it looks like this:
In short, there are not many people who are thrice-exceptional, in the sense of being at least +2 standard deviations in conscientiousness, emotional stability (i.e., inverse neuroticism), and intelligence.
To replicate this, use 42 as the seed and assume linearity and normality
The decline of trust is something worth caring about, and reversing it is something worth doing.
We should not have to live constantly wondering if we're being lied to or scammed. Trust should be possible again.
I don't know how we go about regaining trust and promoting trustworthiness in society.
It feels like there's an immense level of toleration of untrustworthy behavior from everyone: scams are openly funded; academics congratulate their fraudster peers; all content is now slop.
What China's doing—corruption crackdowns and arresting fraudsters—seems laudable, and I think the U.S. and other Western nations should follow suit.
Fraud leads to so many lives being lost and so much progress being halted or delayed.
British fertility abruptly fell after one important court case: the Bradlaugh-Besant trial🧵
You can see its impact very visibly on this chart:
The trial involved Annie Besant (left) and Charles Bradlaugh (right).
These two were atheists—a scandalous position at the time!—and they wanted to promote free-thinking about practically everything that upset the puritanical society of their time.
They were on trial because they tried to sell a book entitled Fruits of Philosophy.
This was an American guide to tons of different aspects of family planning, and included birth control methods, some of which worked, others which did not.