Crémieux Profile picture
I write about genetics, 'metrics, and demographics. Read my long-form writing at https://t.co/8hgA4nNS2A.
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Feb 3 4 tweets 2 min read
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
Jan 29 5 tweets 2 min read
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
Jan 28 22 tweets 8 min read
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
Jan 27 5 tweets 2 min read
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
Jan 17 6 tweets 2 min read
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
Jan 17 5 tweets 2 min read
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
Jan 14 4 tweets 1 min read
About a decade ago, a theory emerged:

If men do more of the housework and child care, fertility rates will rise!

Men have been doing increasingly large shares of the housework and child care.

Fertility is lower than ever.Image In fact, they're doing more in each generation, but fertility has continued to fall. Image
Jan 13 8 tweets 4 min read
American military veterans have a suicide problem.

Some have theorized the reason is deployment-related trauma.

Leveraging the random assignment of new soldiers to units with different deployment cycles, Bruhn et al. found that was wrong.

Deployment did not increase suicides. Image Looking only at violent deployments (ones with peer casualties), there aren't noncombat mortality effects either.

What explains veteran suicide rates? Image
Jan 12 9 tweets 4 min read
That aspect is probably not that unrealistic, unfortunately.

Across the OECD, on average, just 55% of 15-to-16-year-olds got this question right, and no country saw 80% get it.

Most people globally *do* struggle even reading simple tables. What else?

Thread.🧵 Image That table-reading question is "Level 3", which, amazingly, corresponds to an already-high level of ability, by global standards.

This is a simpler Level 1 question, but with this, 92% of the OECD got it, including just 65% of Brazilians and 53% of Peruvians. Image
Jan 10 5 tweets 2 min read
Credit card rewards are a great way to redistribute billions of dollars from people who are bad with money to people who are good with it.

With the advent of rewards cards (red), there's lots of cross-subsidization of people with high credit scores by people with low scores. Image Curiously, the degree of cross-subsidization is not just an income thing.

People with high incomes (green) and moderate incomes (yellow) take fewer rewards at low credit scores, although they take more at high credit scores. Image
Jan 7 18 tweets 7 min read
The host of NPR's This American Life once tried to raise a pit bull with his now ex-wife.

He let the dog ruin his life🧵

He ended up getting it on Prozac and Valium, feeding it kangaroo and ostrich, and making excuses for the many times it would attack people.Image Ira Glass' wife had a dog before they got married, but it died right before the ceremony.

That dog was a pit bull and it was a rescue, so they decided it would be good to rescue another one.

Per him, it originally came with the "slave name" Marley, which he changed to Piney. Image
Jan 5 18 tweets 7 min read
Pit bulls were bred to fight.

Animals in nature are not like that. Tigers and lions? They don't seek out combat. Nature doesn't seem to want to breed them into unrelenting killers.

This is why Britain banned the sport of "lion baiting"🧵 Image The nature of "baiting" is torment.

The idea is to put large, powerful animals like bulls or lions in the ring with several dogs, and the winner lives.

The sport has existed for thousands of years. One of our first records is of Indians showing it to Alexander the Great. Image
Jan 4 4 tweets 3 min read
There are ZERO rich countries that haven't embraced markets. Image You could say something like 'Ah, but this is just because the economic freedom index is constructed that way.'

No, it's not. We can all go and read how it's made. It's detailed every year. Failed excuse. Moreover, this has unintended predictive power:

fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/…Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/09/29/a-study-of-lights-at-night-suggests-dictators-lie-about-economic-growth
Jan 4 4 tweets 4 min read
How risky is it to own a pit bull?

I'm not talking fatalities, but bites, because bites are still a bad outcome and any dog who bites should be put down.

If we take the annual risk a dog bites its owner, scale it for pit bulls and Golden Retrievers, and extrapolate 30 years... Image How do you calculate this?

Simple.

First, we need estimates of the portion of the U.S. population bitten by dogs per year. Next, to adjust that, we need the portion of those bites that are to owners. So, for overall dogs, we get about 1.5% and roughly ~25% of that.

Then, to obtain lifetime risk figures, we need to pick a length for a 'lifetime'. I picked thirty years because that's what I picked. Sue me. It's about three dog lifetimes.

P(>=1 bite) = 1-(1-p)^t
It's pure probability math. To rescale for the breed, we need estimates of the relative risk of different dog being the perpetrators of bites. We'll use the NYC DOHMH's 2015-22 figures to get the risk for a Golden Retriever (breed = "Retriever" in the dataset) relative to all other dogs, and Lee et al. 2021's figures to get the risk for a pit bull. The results don't change much just using the NYC figures, they just became significantly higher risk for the pit bulls.

To rescale 'p' for b reed, it's just p_{breed} = p_{baseline} \times RR_{breed}.

Then you plug it back into the probability of a bite within thirty years. If you think, say, pit bulls are undercounted for the denominator for their RR, OK! Then let's take that to the limit and say that every 'Black' neighborhood in New York has one, halve the risk noticed for them, and bam, you still get 1-in-5 to 1-in-2.5 owners getting bit in the time they own pit bulls (30 years).

And mind you, bites are not nips. As Ira Glass had to be informed when he was talking about his notorious pit bull, it did not just "nip" two children, it drew blood, and that makes it a bite.

Final method note: the lower-bound for Golden Retriever risk was calculated out as 0.00131%, but that rounded down to 0. Over a typical pet dog lifespan of 10-13 years, an individual Golden Retriever will almost-certainly not bite its owner even once, whereas a given pit that lives 11.5 years will have an 18-33% chance of biting, and if we use the DOHMH RRs, it's much higher. If we use the DOHMH RR and double their population, that still holds.

The very high risk of a bite associated with a pit bull is highly robust and defies the notion that '99.XXXX% won't ever hurt anyone.' The idea that almost no pit bulls are bad is based on total fatality risk and it is a farcical argument on par with claiming that Great White Sharks shouldn't be avoided because they kill so few people.

Frankly, if we throw in non-owner risk, the typical pit bull *will* hurt some human or some animal over a typical pet dog's lifespan. And because pit bulls live a little bit shorter, you can adjust that down, but the result will still directionally hold because they are just that god-awful of a breed.

Final note:

Any dog that attacks a human or another dog that wasn't actively attacking them first should be put down. That is a big part of why this matters. These attacks indicate that the dogs in question must die.
Dec 31, 2025 4 tweets 2 min read
The male advantage in strength is insanely large.

Even when men and women are matched on muscle, men tend to be far stronger.

Add in that men tend to be to women like what linebackers are to normal men, and you might wonder how more women aren't constantly in fear. Image This logic applies very strongly.

Consider this: female athletes are generally weaker than average men! Image
Dec 31, 2025 4 tweets 2 min read
Let us never forget:

The Father of the American pit bull, one John P. Colby, didn't stop breeding them even after they

KILLED HIS NEPHEW and MAULED HIS SISTER

This breed has been malign since its creation. Excerpt from Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon. Page 70. Pit bulls were also killing disabled people shortly after their invention.

This headline is from 1901.

Basically, what happened is that this woman had an epileptic fit, so her pit bull, being the nanny dog it is, decided to eat through her neck.

Helpful! Image
Dec 30, 2025 7 tweets 3 min read
Researchers put together the data on which dogs were responsible for biting kids between 2013 and 2018.

Per capita, pit bulls were ~36-times as likely to bite compared to 'other breeds'.

To make matters worse, they were about 73-times as responsible for the more serious bites: Image How were pit bulls identified here?

Based on hospital medical records, reflecting owner or guardian reports or history provided at presentation.

33.4% of dogs were pets living at home, 22.4% were pets owned by friends or family, so breed was well-characterized.
Dec 30, 2025 10 tweets 4 min read
Pit bull breeders often have Instagram accounts where they post stuff like this, showing the creations they've made through having dogs from the same litter rape each other.

For example, "2x Pimpy 3x Bape" means this one was inbred 2x from a dog named "Pimpy" and 3x from "Bape". Image Typical pit bull family tree: Image
Dec 30, 2025 12 tweets 4 min read
There is a problem at pet shelters:

They're full because no one wants to adopt the dogs.

Why? Because they're pit bulls, and only the unaware or dim want them.

So, shelters often blatantly lie. Here are some examples. These four are *not* really "Labrador Retrievers": Image Adoptee: 'What breed is that?'

Employee 1: 'It's a p-'

Employee 2: 'You can't just tell them.'

Employee 2: 'Sir, that's a Corgi.' Image
Dec 29, 2025 9 tweets 4 min read
The whole "nanny dog" thing is made up. There is no historical evidence that pit bulls were ever bred to be stewards or friends to children.

The evidence for that myth is basically 'someone said it on Facebook'🧵 Image Even many sources that are favorable towards pit bulls or active promoters of them will occasionally admit there's no real basis for the "nanny dog" claim.

Example: Image
Dec 28, 2025 4 tweets 1 min read
To answer the question:

I was randomly attacked for the high crime of being in the pit bull's vicinity.

This dog had been wandering around everyone all night and seemed friendly, until it decided to jump up and bite my face at the end of the night for no apparent reason. This entire breed needs to be exterminated.

Dogs that randomly lash out should not exist.