In a new post, I investigate whether black-white homicide disparities in the United States can be accounted for economic disparities.

In short, I find that large systematic homicide disparities remain, even when economically similar people are compared. To address the question, I combine economic data from the American Community Survey, and homicide victimization data from the CDC; both at the geographical level of counties. Importantly, both being separated by race, so I can properly compare the groups.

What does research say about the risk of divorce after a spouse becomes ill, and particularly about the sex differences in divorce risk?

Recently I noted that one of the papers with claims of sex differences was retracted after an error was discovered.

https://twitter.com/Scientific_Bird/status/1743746334551658931

In the comments, critics argued that the original conclusion of the retracted paper was correct, pointing to a different 2009 paper in support.

But as this was the sole paper forwarded, and the sample was small (515 patients), I wanted to check whether the results replicate.

A new meta-analysis finds that undergraduate IQ has declined to a mere 102 on avg.

As they note, a great decline is a necessary consequence of the increasing share who enroll into college.

Imagine the extreme: if everyone goes to college, their IQs must necessarily be average. Imagine that 50% of the population go to college: the average IQ can at most be that of the top 50% (112).

In practice, the average IQ will be substantially lower as there is not perfect sorting into college (some high IQ individuals don't attend college, and some lower IQ do).

When did the rise of the West happen, and why?

I document the West's ascent by quantitatively tracking the birth of notable people of science. I then put this in context with other indicators of development. Blog post here and a short thread below.

inquisitivebird.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-… I use a database of notable people, combined with historical population estimates, to track per-capita rates of notable people of science throughout history. I focus mainly on 1000-1500, the period prior to colonialism.

nature.com/articles/s4159…

In this thread I will collect predictors of violent perpetration that have been established in large datasets, preferably with sibling comparisons.

People are very welcome to suggest any good studies I haven't included. (1/n) (2/n) A sibling comparison is one that associates a sibling difference in some characteristic to a sibling difference in violent perpetration. The advantage here is that it controls for things shared by siblings, making the association a more plausible causal candidate.

The cursed OkCupid graphs. What do they show? I might as well address it once and for all, so I don't feel the need to talk about them ever again.

The common criticism is that they are misleading, because they don't include message rates. This criticism makes sense. (1/n) (2/n) Here are the figures with the message distributions.

The difficulty here, however, is that the attractiveness ratings aren't comparable between the sexes (e.g., there are far more rated highly attractive by men than vice versa), leading to difficulty of interpretation.

This is one of those claims that survives in public discourse purely because it has been repeated so many times.

As far as I can tell, there is no, and there never has been, any compelling quantitative evidence demonstrating this claim.

https://twitter.com/vgonlin/status/1489293302998487052

She cites Crenshaw and Tim Wise, none of whom provide any quantitative evidence for this claim. She also cites a few other articles, but these articles themselves mostly just refer back to Crenshaw and Tim Wise (who didn't evidence the claim).

https://twitter.com/vgonlin/status/1489408743762714625

The Danish government has released their 2021 report of net financial contribution of immigrants.

With access to population registry data, Denmark has the ability to calculate more accurate estimates than most other countries.

I will translate a few of the figures.

[Thread] First, Figure 2.7 shows net financial contribution by age and region of origin (in currency of Danish kroner).

The countries are organized into a few regional categories: Western, MENAPT (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, Turkey), and other non-Western countries.

(2/n)

Sex differences in personality — a thread with studies of large samples (1/n)

In the commonly used "Big 5" model of personality, the largest differences are found in neuroticism and agreeableness (women higher on average).

Source (N > 120,000; Denmark):
doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo… (2/n) With a sample of over 200,000 across 53 nations, this study finds that the differences in neuroticism and agreeableness are quite consistent across a large set of nations.

Source:
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Statistics consistently show that men are more likely to be victims of stranger violence than women are. Yet, women are purportedly more afraid of such situations.

What are we to make of this?

Thread (1/n) (2/n) I think the first thing to say is that:

Feeling unsafe ≠ Actual risk

Some individuals are reckless. Without worry, they do things that put themselves in great physical danger. On the other hand, some individuals live in extreme debilitating paranoia.

Review argues that "male/female brain differences appear trivial" except differences in overall brain size.

A few comments... (1/n)

Source:
doi.org/10.1016/j.neub… (2/n) First, I agree that the sex difference in overall brain size is the most salient difference we can reliably observe. Mean effect size of around 1.4 standard deviations according to the large study by Ritchie et al. (doi.org/10.1093/cercor…).

A bizarre but surprisingly common argument is some version of: "SAT/IQ/etc is merely about parental income and nothing else."

This is simply empirically false. First off, the correlation between wealth/income of parents and offspring score is not even that high! [1/n] 2/n For example, a correlation of ~0.24 between parental income and SAT score.

Even being overly generous about measurement error etc, this fact alone shows that the vast majority of variation in SAT scores is not shared with parental income.

Source:

https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1275537038859796481

(1/n) This stuff about women hunters is still circulating, so I feel like I should clarify something.

It is absolutely the case that, even in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, women do hunt. Sometimes. It would absolutely be wrong to say that women never hunt. (2/n) However, it would also be misleading to portray big game hunting as gender-neutral. Here is a quantification from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample.

In the vast majority of societies, hunting of large fauna is predominantly a male activity. Not strictly, predominantly.

Statistical significance and p-values:

We often rely on conventional thresholds of statistical significance. We calculate that p<.05, so statistically significant, right?

However, here are a few things to at least consider first.

Thread. ● If you do multiple hypothesis tests, then by chance you're more likely to find some p-values below any threshold, even if the null hypothesis is true.

A team showed, if no corrections for false discovery rate, a dead salmon showed significant brain signal measured by fMRI!

(1/n) I've been trying to review the evidence of gender bias in the STEM pipeline. It seems somewhat inconsistent tbh.

An interesting experiment I've found (which I don't think many know of) comes from the site interviewing.io, a platform for technical interviewing. (2/n) Normally female interviewees were accepted at lower rates and were given lower technical scores on average.

To test whether this was due to implicit gender bias, they created a voice modulation tool that masked gender.

Are people with bigger brains smarter (on average)?

Here I will summarize some of the biggest studies which test whether there is a correlation between intelligence and brain size (within modern humans).

Thread. 2) In modern intelligence tests, you give individuals a battery of cognitive tests, testing a wide range of cognitive abilities at once. Then a general factor of intelligence can be estimated, in short "g".

Brain size can be measured with modern brain-imaging technology.

Who kill police officers?
I gathered FBI data from 2010-2018 of officers feloniously killed. Total:

No. of killers by sex:
● Male: 460 (97%)
● Female: 14 (3%)

By race:
● White: 260 (58%)
● Black: 175 (39.1%)
● American Indian: 8 (1.8%)
● Asian/Pacific Islander: 5 (1.1%) Of course, it should be added that this is in the United States.

For clarification, white includes hispanic.

Neither sex nor race is reported for every single killing, but they are for most. I've only counted those where it was reported.

Sex differences in scientific interests

The Relevance of Science Education (ROSE) project has tracked cross-cultural attitudes towards science education of 15-year-old students. It's not cited enough.

I will highlight where the largest sex differences lie. (1/n) (2/n) Before that, there is a large trend to keep in mind.

As countries develop, people get higher standards and are more selective in their interests.

This is true for sex differences as well. On average, the more developed the country, the larger the sex difference.

The New Egalitarianism

I was recommended a paper by a follower. It's quite short and good so I recommend reading it!

He describes "The New Egalitarians", which are commonly called other names such as "Intersectional left" or pejoratives (e.g. "SJW")
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… 1/n (2/n) I will highlight some parts I found interesting.

It is egalitarianism with a focus on identity.

What do women want career-wise as they become mothers? 👩‍👧‍👦

I've gathered a few surveys related to this question. (1/n) (2/n) Pew research has asked in 3 surveys about mothers' ideal situation in work/life-balance.

Consistently, nearly half say that they prefer part time work.

The rest of the half is roughly equally split between preferring full time and preferring no work at all (stay at home).

Which personality traits predict MONEY? 🤑💵

Thread. (1/n) (2/n) Among the big-5 traits, Gensowski finds that the largest effects on earnings as

● High conscientiousness
● High extraversion
● Low agreeableness

A very high IQ sample, and even within this restricted sample, IQ was also associated with earnings.
doi.org/10.1016/j.labe…