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.
Innovation is the backbone of modern economic growth, and without the Protestants, we probably wouldn't have it🧵
Consider the period of the Counter-Reformation. During this time, the Catholic Church set science back in the territories it governed:
Before the Counter-Reformation, Catholic and Protestant Europe were on similar scientific trajectories:
They produced comparable numbers of scientists, comparably important intellectuals, and comparable numbers of inventions.
But, seemingly overnight, Catholics started rampaging against intellectualism, and they had a focused impact on scientists, with no appreciable impacts on artists or other types of intellectuals.
Protestantism promoted the separation of Church and Science, so this makes sense.
If you give them a battery of tests built for LLMs or covering topics like U.S. History, you can end up with a model that is unidimensional, much like how human intelligence is:
I previously attempted to fit such a model and was unsuccessful because many LLMs are practically the same person, leading to a fitting failure.
These authors obviated that issue by pruning highly similar LLMs with DBSCAN and other means.
I have a pretty major update for one of my articles.
It has to do with Justice Jackson's comment that when Black newborns are delivered by Black doctors, they're much more likely to survive, justifying racially discriminatory admissions.
We now know she was wrong🧵
So if you don't recall, here's how Justice Jackson described the original study's findings.
She was wrong to describe it this way, because she mixed up percentage points with percentages, and she's referring to the uncontrolled rather than the fully-controlled effect.
After I saw her mention this, I looked into the study and found that its results all seemed to have p-values between 0.10 and 0.01.
More than thirty countries globally have automatic non-filing options for taxpayers.
Many people claim these help to make the tax system more fair by taking out tax hassle and guesswork.
But German data suggests they might make the tax system less progressive🧵
The first thing to note is that the lower the income, the greater the odds of not filing, with almost 90% of those earning just €10,000 choosing not to file.
At an income of about €50,000, the relationship asymptotes at roughly 30% non-filers.
Another thing to note is that, consistent with the tax system being progressive in general, lower-income individuals are entitled to refunds more often.
The simple way to do this is to remove Sub-Saharan Africa from a regression of log(GDP PPP Per Capita), for which I'm using 2019 to avoid the pandemic and get closer to the sampling years.
Like this, we get:
Measured IQ: 71.96
Predicted IQ: 74.86
Predicted, sans SSA: 76.78
In other words, no big difference.
But, you might say, aren't logs doing the work? Well, they're appropriate here, so no, but without them, we get: