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. Looking only at violent deployments (ones with peer casualties), there aren't noncombat mortality effects either.

What explains veteran suicide rates?

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.🧵

https://twitter.com/SakakiIsCute/status/2010615328674644233

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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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"🧵

https://twitter.com/contiarchive/status/2006861245631312133

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.

There are ZERO rich countries that haven't embraced markets.

https://twitter.com/goblinodds/status/2007701065651892435

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/…

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... 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.

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.

https://twitter.com/RatOrthodox/status/2006201294416179619

This logic applies very strongly.

Consider this: female athletes are generally weaker than average men!

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. 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!

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: 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.

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". Typical pit bull family tree:

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": 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.'

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'🧵 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:

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.

The Australian pension system is funded through mandatory contributions into private retirement accounts

During the COVID pandemic, the government allowed people to pull up to $20,000 from those accounts decades early

What happened?

Firstly, uneducated people pulled the most: Australia did this because they needed fiscal stimulus.

If they didn't allow people to make early withdrawals from their accounts—which normally remain inaccessible until retirement age—, they would have ended up in a very bad position.

But people did withdraw.

The biggest argument against using GLP-1s for weight loss is that they cause excess muscle loss.

But as it turns out... GLP-1s do not cause any more muscle loss than traditional weight loss methods!

Let's discuss🧵 The differences in weight loss in that chart showing data from different trials are not

1. Clinically significant—they're not large enough to matter physiologically

2. Statistically significant—each weight loss method is not distinguishable in current data

But that's lean mass

Why do identical twins have such similar personalities?

Is it because they're reared together? Is it because people treat them alike due to their visual similarity?

Nope! Neither theory holds water. Despite looking as similar as identical twins and being reared apart, look-alikes are not similar like identical twins are. In fact, they're no more similar than unrelated people.

This makes sense: they're only minimally more genetically similar than regular unrelated people.

Society is cognitively stratified:

Smart people tend to earn higher educations and higher incomes, and to work in more prestigious occupations.

This holds for people from excellent family backgrounds (Utopian Sample) and comparing siblings from the same families! This is true, meaningful, and the causal relationship runs strongly from IQ to SES, with little independent influence of SES. Just look at how similar the overall result and the within-family results are!

But also look at fertility in this table: quite the reverse!

After this article came out, several people responded, alleging that a cultural model made more sense.

Clark has a point-by-point response🧵

Let's start with the first thing: parent-child and sibling correlations in status measures are identical—hard to explain culturally!

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1673553538557833217

The reason this is hard to explain has to do with the fact that kids objectively have more similar environments to one another than to their parents.

In fact, for a cultural theory to recapitulate regression to the mean across generations, these things would need to differ!

The idea:

The internet gives everyone access to unlimited information, learning tools, and the new digital economy, so One Laptop Per Child should have major benefits.

The reality:

Another study just failed to find effects on academic performance.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1692386924495786073

This is one of those findings that's so much more damning than it at first appears.

The reason being, laptop access genuinely provides people with more information than was available to any kid at any previous generation in history.

If access was the issue, this resolves it.

What is the effect of having a parent get locked away on a kids' own risk of eventually committing crime?

As it turns out, basically nil.

Having a mother or a father locked away doesn't significantly increase risk, and indeed, may reduce it if it happens at an early age. This is relative to no incarceration, so the result should be interpreted as... pretty shocking!

Similarly, we can look at the effects of longer versus shorter parental sentences.

There's seemingly little effect of the length of time parents are incarcerated for.