Among health "experts" who tweeted about Monkeypox, there was a dramatic tendency to get basic facts wrong.
For example, many claimed risk wasn't especially heightened among gay men.
PhDs were among the worst misinformation spreaders.
Being an "expert", being "credentialed", having "studied" something and so on, is not sufficient to make someone truly credible, to endow their words with reliability.
Being right is, and most popular "experts" were usually not right.
Roughly one-third of all of Japan's urban building was done through a process of replotting land parcels and reconstructing homes to increase local density while making way for new infrastructure🧵
Conceptually, it's like this:
In that diagram, you see an area of low-density homes that has undergone land rights conversion, where, when two-thirds of the area’s existing homeowners agree, everyone’s right to their land is converted to the rights to an equivalent part of a new building.
This works well to generate substantial, dense amounts of housing, and it's, crucially, democratic.
All the decision-making power was held by those who were directly affected, and not outsiders to the situation.
If 2/3 wanted to upzone, they could, and they did!
I've seen a lot of people recently claim that the prevalence of vitiligo is 0.5-2%.
This is just not true. In the U.S. today, it's closer to a sixth of a percent, with some notable age- and race-related differences.
But where did the 0.5-2% claim come from?🧵
The claim of a 0.5-2% prevalence emerged on here because Google's Gemini cited a 2020 review in the journal Dermatology which proclaimed as much in the abstract.
Simple enough, right? They must have a source that supports this estimate in the review somewhere.
They cite four studies for the 0.5-2% claim, so let's look into those studies.
Relationships between class and fertility and IQ and fertility used to routinely be negative in the not-so-distant past.
But across the developed world, they're increasingly positive, albeit only slightly. In this Swedish birth cohort (1951-67), the transition came early:
In this example, there's also some interesting confounding: between families, IQ isn't monotonically associated with fertility, but within families, it is.
Something seems to suppress the IQ-fertility relationship between families!
Sweden's positive IQ-fertility gradient (which, above, is just for males, since it's draftee data), has been around for quite a while (but has varied, too), whereas in countries like France, Japan, and the U.S., the gradient shift towards being slightly positive is more recent.