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Crémieux Profile picture
@cremieuxrecueil
Apr 3 • 13 tweets • 10 min read • Read on X
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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

Crémieux Profile picture
Apr 3
Which is more impressive for China, its

GDP Per Capita, or its

Actual Individual Consumption Per Capita (AIC is a superior measure of how rich its people actually are. It's based on how much they really consume)

Answer is below.
Here's the GDP Per Capita data. Image
And here's the AIC data. Image
Read 5 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Apr 3
There's a common type of misunderstanding that sounds like this:

"If taller people tend to be more educated, and women tend to be shorter than men, how do you explain women tending to be more educated?"

The issue has to do with intercepts. Consider this plot: Image
You can see that, among Whites, women tend to be shorter than men, and they tend to have lower earnings.

But at the same time, to similar degrees in both sexes, taller people tend to have higher earnings.

Perplexed? You shouldn't be.
The fact is that there's more to this that differentiates men and women than height, so the intercept for women is shifted down, even though the slopes of the height * income relationship are fairly comparable.

You could also ask the same thing about race.
Read 8 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Apr 2
Debate about the value of essays in college admissions missed a key point:

Essays are biased, so should not be used.

Here's an example: High-income people know 'what to write' to look good to raters, so they outperform on essays relative to their other qualifications. Image
This shows up by race, too, and that's why admissions departments use essays to infer race for the express purpose of discriminating.

Write that you're Black; that you grew up as a poor immigrant; that you're gay or a cripple.

They love that!

The reason essays do not have a role to play in the admissions process is because they're biased. It's plain, it's simple, it doesn't need to be discussed any further.

And here's some good policy: Use tools that are not biased or lose public funding.
Read 4 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Apr 2
A new meta-analysis and systematic review on the effects of social media abstinence interventions on mental health has been published.

First result: No effect on positive affect: Image
Second result: No effect on negative affect. Image
Third result: No effect on life satisfaction in general. Image
Read 6 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Apr 2
Happy Autism Awareness Day! I think too many people are 'aware' of autism.

Have you ever met someone who claims to be autistic, but they've never been diagnosed?

Self-reported autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is practically uncorrelated with real, clinician-diagnosed autism🧵 Image
Sort self-reporters into those with high and low ASD scores, and you get the bars on the left. The "high-trait" self-reporters look like people with diagnosed autism (ASD column).

But they're more socially anxious (middle) and avoidant (right). Image
So far, the means of distinguishing diagnosed from self-reported autistics have been crude.

To get a more nuanced understanding of their differences, we have to look at behavior.

For that, we'll start with the social control task.
Read 14 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Apr 1
Someone asked me why Singapore is so poor relative to its high GDP, and I realized she was only familiar with European and Caribbean tax havens.

But if you have an eye on Asia, you'll realize that Singapore is often among the top three tax havens!

2015-19, it was #2!Image
That means it suffers the same problems countries like Ireland, Luxembourg, and Switzerland do.

They're well-off, sure. But they are much less well-off than their GDP levels indicate.

Contrarily, the U.S., U.K., Germany, and China? They're victims!
But, Singapore has said they'll take actions that might endanger their position as a tax haven.

I'm not sure if this is really happening though, so we'll see! Image
Read 4 tweets

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