Post

More from @cremieuxrecueil

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

May 7

World War I devastated Britain and likely slowed down its technological progress🧵

The reason being, the youth are the engine of innovation.

Areas that saw more deaths saw larger declines in patenting in the years following the war.

To figure out the innovation effects of losing a large portion of a generation's young men who were just coming into the primes of their lives, the authors needed four pieces of data.

The first were the numbers and pre-war locations of soldiers who died.

The next components were the numbers and locations of patent filings.

If you look at both graphs, you see obvious total population effects. So, areas must be normalized.

Read 12 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

May 5

New Pangram validation!

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!

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2047026277064831016

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.

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2047026277064831016

You can also see the rise of AI-generated text and yet more evidence for Pangram's validity from looking at different journalists.

Large portions of the journalistic profession are lazy, so they cheat when they can.

For example, the Guardian's Bryan Graham = slop

Read 9 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

May 3

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.

Read 11 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

May 1

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.

Read 5 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Apr 24

"Food deserts" are an example of social scientists getting causality backwards

They saw poor people eating unhealthy foods and blamed local supply

They should have blamed demand!

Using data from 13 years of supermarket entries, there's basically no effects on healthy eating🧵

The significant effects are probably not meaningful. They're more likely under the null with this gigantic dataset (p's of 0.003 and 0.005 with a total sample size of ~2.9m)

Entry did affect sales for new stores, but not existing ones. It also affected more local places more.

When new supermarkets open up, they do nab a share of local grocery sales, but the effect on healthy eating in total, among low-income households, and in food deserts, just isn't there.

Read 8 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Apr 23

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

Read 7 tweets

Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

Crémieux

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @cremieuxrecueil

Crémieux

Crémieux

Crémieux

Crémieux

Crémieux

Crémieux

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Send Email!