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"No" -Isildur https://t.co/4rOwJPGzP7 reading log alt: @shakoistsLog
Mikko Niskanen Profile picture 1 subscribed
May 6, 2023 13 tweets 3 min read
So I got this witch hazel face toner recently, I guess it's good for your skin or whatever. Not really the point.

The point is the wikipedia article says there is no real clinical evidence witch hazel does anything for your skin. but if you go to the wiki page, you'll see that the native americans used witch hazel all the time on cuts and abrasions.

I'm hardly the first person to notice that this type of accretive knowledge gathered over the ages can detect effect sizes modern clinical trials cant
Apr 5, 2023 21 tweets 6 min read
There is a thread on why police actually don't prevent crime. I actually really like this thread, because it's so succinct in listing the greatest hits of Actually Very Smart Academic Takes on criminality.

Let's call it in to question.

I am not going to link other studies. That's what I'd do if I were actually truly trying to convince other people and 'play by the rules' of academic sparring. But that's not what I actually believe. Most of these are wrong just based on some simple reasoning...
Mar 28, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
A lot of people are dunking on this take, which I don't want to do, but this topic is a great case study in how our implicit way of always thinking of some sort of "average" is often ill-posed ... I'm not going to do any sort of general science review here, but there is a lot of evidence that for some definition of average, home-births with midwives have better outcomes than hospital births. This is because, so is hypothesized, you're less likely to do unnecessary surgery
Feb 26, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
[scattered thoughts]

It's amazing how much of our understanding of the world is downstream from the contemporary philosophy of science we use within mathematics and the sciences.

so much of the 19th/20th century was an attempt to build some sturdy foundation for us to build mathematics and science. while in a strict sense we failed, the amount of formalization within math and physics was still incredible.

then so much of applied social sciences tried to build using that same approach towards understanding reality.