Crémieux Profile picture
Apr 3, 2025 13 tweets 10 min read Read on X
Timeline's feeling down. Thread of good news.

At every age, the incidence of dementia is down. As a society, people are no longer suffering dementia nearly as often! Image
The world over, child mortality is way down. It's unusual for parents to experience the death of a child these days, where even a century ago, it was the global norm. Image
Each year, novel gene therapies are approved.

The number of gene therapies in the pipeline is also rapidly increasing. There is tons of progress to be made here, and the main issue is regulatory.

We have lots of low-hanging fruit in curing disease! Image
Global tree cover has increased in recent years with the greening and reforestation of the globe.

This trend holds on almost every continent! Image
Globally, fewer and fewer people are dying from natural disasters.

The rates of natural disaster death nowadays are a small fraction of what they used to be. Image
Moore's Law has accurately described the evolution of the number of transistors per microprocessor, and even after this animation ends, it seems to have continued holding.
Though America's homicide recently skyrocketed in the days after George Floyd's death, the rate has since returned to normal and is back on track to keep falling. Image
Mandatory enrichment of cereal grain products with folic acid led to a decline in the number of babies born with neural tube defects in the U.S. Image
America's cancer death rates are up if you fail to acknowledge that the country has gotten older.

Once you acknowledge that people have gotten older, it becomes apparent that America's cancer death rates have substantially declined! Image
When countries run campaigns to teach parents how to position their babies when they sleep, the result is typically a considerable reduction in SIDS death rates in just a few years. Image
It's true that people are getting fatter and fatter, but our medical system has kept up.

Despite rising obesity, cardiovascular disease is claiming fewer and fewer lives at each age. Image
There's more good news out there.

Every day, diseases are cured and prevented, people are losing weight, babies are born healthier than they've ever been, people get richer and their lives become more manageable, and more.

Day-to-day, things may seem hard, but progress is real!
Sources below.

Dementia:

Source: alzforum.org/news/research-… (Possible non-exciting explanation: More people are surviving to old age now, so maybe people who wouldn't have survived previously are disposed to lower dementia rates.)

Archive: archive.md/9RW41

Replication in Sweden: academic.oup.com/biomedgerontol…

Replication in England: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Related, supporting multi-country work: x.com/cremieuxrecuei…

Supportive German evidence: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

Evidence against this being due to education: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…, psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi…

Data showing that, despite falling age-specific incidence, prevalence is still up because the population is getting older: bmj.com/content/358/bm…, sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Child mortality:

Source: ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-…

Gene therapy:

Source: healthadvances.com/insights/blog/…

Archive: archive.md/WDuVB

Tree cover:

Source: humanprogress.org/trends/more-la…

Archive: archive.md/gyMtj

Natural disaster deaths:

Source: humanprogress.org/trends/a-safer…

Archive: archive.md/XjTVK

Moore's Law:

Source: reddit.com/r/dataisbeauti…

Archive: archive.md/TIWyA

More: ourworldindata.org/data-insights/…

Homicide: See CDC WONDER and my previous posts on the Floyd Effect.

Neural tube defects:

Source: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC45…

Age-standardized cancer death rates:

Source: ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer…

More: blogs.cdc.gov/nchs/2021/09/1…

SIDS:

Source: direct.mit.edu/rest/article-a…

Cardiovascular disease:

Source: ourworldindata.org/data-insights/…

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More from @cremieuxrecueil

Feb 3
Indeed!

This research directly militates against modern blood libel.

If people knew, for example, that Black and White men earned the same amounts on average at the same IQs, they would likely be a lot less convinced by basically-false discrimination narratives blaming Whites. Image
Add in that the intelligence differences cannot be explained by discrimination—because there *is* measurement invariance—and these sorts of findings are incredibly damning for discrimination-based narratives of racial inequality.

So, said findings must be condemned, proscribed. Image
The above chart is from the NLSY '79, but it replicates in plenty of other datasets, because it is broadly true.

For example, here are three independent replications:
Read 4 tweets
Jan 29
How well-known is this?

A lot of the major pieces of civil rights legislation were passed by White elites who were upset at the violence generated by the Great Migration and the riots.

Because of his association with this violence, most people at the time came to dislike MLK. Image
It's only *after* his death, and with his public beatification that he's come to enjoy a good reputation.

This comic from 1967 is a much better summation of how the public viewed him than what people are generally taught today. Image
And yes, he was viewed better by Blacks than by Whites.

But remember, at the time, Whites were almost nine-tenths of the population.

Near his death, Whites were maybe one-quarter favorable to MLK, and most of that favorability was weak. Image
Read 5 tweets
Jan 28
The Pope, like his recent predecessors, is good to take this position: anti-Semitism is manifestly idiotic!

On that note, did you know that the Catholic Church was actually one of the biggest forces in stopping the rise of the Nazis?

It's true!🧵 Image
You might say that the Catholics didn't vote for the Nazis because they had their own party: Zentrum.

This isn't the explanation.

Note: the Catholic Church opposed both forms of totalitarianism in Germany, but it had an asymmetric effect against the Nazis, not the Communists.Image
The real "Catholic effect" on far right vote shares was small.

In reality, Catholics only became poised against the far right when the church began to actively campaign against it.

But when the local clergymen were "Brown Priests" (Nazi-supporting priests) like Alois Hudal? Image
Read 22 tweets
Jan 27
The researcher who put together these numbers was investigated and almost charged with a crime for bringing these numbers to light when she hadn't received permission.

Now we have an update that goes through 2020!

First: Where are Sweden's rapists from?

Mostly not Sweden. Image
What countries were those foreign rapists from?

We only got information on the top five origins, constituting roughly half of the foreign-born samples, and thus about a quarter of all the rapists. Image
What about welfare usage? 35.1%.
Alcoholism? 14.9%
Drug addiction? 23.7%
A diagnosed psychiatric disorder besides that? 13%

What about a criminal prior? 52%. That compares to 13.4% of non-rapist criminals. So rapes? Considerably more preventable.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 17
Greater Male Variability rarely makes for an adequate explanation of sex differences in performance.

One exception may be the number of papers published by academics.

If you remove the top 7.5% of men, there's no longer a gap! Image
The disciplines covered here were ones with relatively equal sex ratios: Education, Nursing & Caring Science, Psychology, Public Health, Sociology, and Social Work.

Because these are stats on professors, this means that if there's greater male variability, it's mostly right-tail
Despite this, the very highest-performing women actually outperformed the very highest-performing men on average, albeit slightly.

The percentiles in this image are for the combined group, so these findings coexist for composition reasons. Image
Read 6 tweets
Jan 17
One of the issues with understanding Greater Male Variability on IQ tests is that groups that perform better tend to show greater variance

Therefore, to estimate the 'correct' male-female gap, you need to estimate it when the difference is 0

In the CogAT, that looks like this: Image
In Project Talent, that looks like this: Image
And comparing siblings in the NLSY '79, that looks like this: Image
Read 5 tweets

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