Ever wondered why advertisements heavily feature Black actors when they're just 12-14% of the population?
I might have an explanation:
Black viewers have a strong preference for seeing other Blacks in media, whereas Whites have no racial preferences.
These results are derived from a meta-analysis of 57 pre-2000 and 112 post-2000 effect sizes for Blacks alongside 76 and 87 such effect sizes for Whites.
If you look at them, you'll notice that Whites' initial, slight preference declined and maybe reversed.
It's worth asking if this is explained by publication bias.
It's not!
Neither aggregately (as pictured), nor with results separated by race.
This study also plotted an alternative measure of racial preferences: differences in thermometer ratings.
These are ratings of how "warm" people feel towards other groups.
For Blacks, a persistent, consistent in-group preference. For Whites, in the past, yes, but now, no.
The hypothesis that Black media overrepresentation is due to catering to higher propensities for Blacks to spend, all else equal, is interesting, but it fails on the merits (less total spending).
It seems plausible that advertisers and media creators are just catering to demand.
Of course, people could just ask.
We do see this crop up in many other areas too. There is usually a Black in-group bias, and at the very least, no/a small White net disdain for Blacks or preference for Whites.
I still think this is one of the most important recent papers on AI in the job market🧵
The website Freelancer added an option to generate cover letters with AI, and suddenly the quality associated with cover letters stopped predicting the odds of people getting hired!
LLMs do a few things to cover letters.
Firstly, they increase the quality, as measured by how well tailored they are to a given job listing.
Second, they make job applications in expensive, so people start spending less time shooting off applications.
More, rapidly-produced job applications becomes the norm.
Now, we have a breakdown of different types of rich people!
Among those who could be classified, the majority of the rich (79%; >=€1m net worth) were self-made, with a smaller, 21% share whose wealth came primarily from inheritances.
How do inheritors and the self-made differ in personality?
They're both more risk-tolerant and less neurotic than the average, but the inheritor profile looks like a mixture between the overall rich and normal people, with more agreeableness, less openness, etc.
Why have testosterone levels been rising over time?
The testosterone levels of American men are up compared to what they used to be, but no one has a good explanation.
Let's look through some possibilities🧵
Is it perhaps because of a racial composition change?
No.
Different races tend to have similar testosterone levels and trends within groups are similar.
Is it perhaps because of age composition change?
No.
The decline by age is much more graceful than people tend to suspect, and within each age group, levels are up without survey weighting, and in nearly all with it, they're still up.
In my latest article, I documented that the only RCT for functional medicine methods appears fraudulent🧵
Before getting into it, what's functional medicine?
It's a pseudoscience used to bilk patients by getting them on an unending cycle of tests, supplements, and more tests.
Functional medicine's practitioners claim that they can reveal and treat so-called "root causes" of people's health problems
These are proposed to be things like gut health, toxin burdens, and various chemical and hormonal imbalances
They find these things with unproven tests
If you run enough tests, you will be able to find something that looks 'off' about a patient, and if you're a functional medicine doctor, that's your 'A-ha!' moment, even if—as is usually the case—the result is just a false-positive and treating it is unlikely to do anything.
If you want to add beds to a hospital, build facilities, purchase diagnostic scanners, but you live somewhere with CON laws, then you have to prove you're not creating competition for other medical facilities in the area, which is often the whole state.
No. Competition. Allowed.
The idea behind these laws is that people will spend excessively on healthcare, so to combat that, we'll have people report if there's more spending needed before approving it.