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Crémieux Profile picture
Crémieux
@cremieuxrecueil
I write about genetics, 'metrics, and demographics. Read my long-form writing at https://t.co/8hgA4nNS2A.
Apr 21 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
British fertility abruptly fell after one important court case: the Bradlaugh-Besant trial🧵

You can see its impact very visibly on this chart: Image The trial involved Annie Besant (left) and Charles Bradlaugh (right).

These two were atheists—a scandalous position at the time!—and they wanted to promote free-thinking about practically everything that upset the puritanical society of their time. Image
Apr 17 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
One of the really interesting studies on the psychiatric effects of maltreatment is Danese and Widom's from Nat. Hum. Behavior a few years ago.

They found that only subjective (S), rather than objective (O) maltreatment predicted actually having a mental disorder.Image Phrased differently, if people subjectively believed they were abused, that predicted poor mental health, but objectively recorded maltreatment only predicted it if there was also a subjective report.

Some people might 'simply' be more resilient than others.
Apr 15 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Nature finally published it!

The Reich Lab article on genetic selection in Europe over the last 10,000 years is finally online, and it includes such interesting results as:

- Intelligence has increased
- People got lighter
- Mental disorders became less common

And more!Image They've added some interesting simulation results that show that these changes are unlikely to have happened without directional selection, under a variety of different model assumptions. Image
Apr 10 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
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!Image 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. Image
Apr 6 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
The authors of this work now have a newer study with a nine-times larger sample!🧵

The overall result is that the rich are:

- More risk-tolerant, open to experiences, extraverted, and conscientious
- Less neurotic
- No more agreeable than normal, non-rich people Image 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. Image
Apr 3 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
My latest article asks and answers the question:

When did being fat become a thing for poor people?🧵

We should start with the observation that, as countries get richer, they tend to get fatter. Image This might seem contradictory to the whole thesis, but it's not.

Countries become obese with wealth because poorer people within them are able to get fatter as they become richer.

The ecological and individual relationships differ.

Look internationally: Image
Mar 23 • 34 tweets • 10 min read
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🧵 Image Is it perhaps because of a racial composition change?

No.

Different races tend to have similar testosterone levels and trends within groups are similar. Image
Mar 13 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Today's deregulatory news is pretty big.

The White House is taking aim at the housing shortage by deregulating housing construction🧵 Image A big part of the American Dream was created by a massive housing boom when the troops came home

Since the Great Financial Crisis, practically everywhere has reduced the number of permits they issue for new housing

This has resulted in housing cost growth outpacing wage growth: Image
Mar 13 • 15 tweets • 6 min read
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. Image 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 Image
Mar 12 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
What you see here is called "lying"

It's what happens when someone's anti-competitive protections are under attack

CON laws are insane. Basically:

If you want to open a new medical practice somewhere, you have to get your potential competitors to sign off, saying you're needed Image 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. Image
Mar 11 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
Nutrition science is the area of science that's suffered the most in the replication crisis. It is a graveyard of theories and pseudoscientific bullshit.

Now:

The HHS is going to make doctors to sit through 40 hours of classes where they'll have to take that bullshit seriously. Image This reads like a list of the things that fared the worst in all of nutrition science and stuff with NO EVIDENCE.

When I read through this, my mouth was agape.

Whoever wrote this trash needs fired for incompetence. Mentally retarded people should not hold keep government posts.
Mar 10 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
You should be flexible and you should be strong.

Strength training is a highly effective way to improve your flexibility, and I've made a graphic to put this into understandable terms: Image This is from a meta-analysis of strength training trials.

What makes that so useful is that there's major publication bias for strength outcomes (pictured).

But, since authors weren't looking at it, there's no publication bias for flexibility outcomes.Image
Mar 9 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
State IQ maps are interesting because they mostly reflect racial demographic mix.

The much more interesting maps are the race-specific ones🧵

Here's a thread of county-level IQ maps by race. First up? Whites: Image The next-biggest group? Hispanics: Image
Feb 21 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
"Without Mohammed, Charlemagne would have been inconceivable."

This quote summarizes Pirenne's thesis that the European Dark Ages began with the rise of Islam because it destroyed the flow of trade across the Mediterranean, ending Antiquity. Image The decline in trade that resulted from differences in faith had profound consequences for the economic geography of Europe.

Byzantine economic activity depended on trade, and it collapsed, whereas the Frankish economy, which was never trade-dependent, transformed.
Feb 10 • 18 tweets • 7 min read
In the effort to pull out ALL the stops against GLP-1RAs, we've gotten to...

'GLP-1s cause scurvy'

On a tangentially related note, do you know why scurvy and the Sicilian Mafia are related to why British are called "Limeys"?🧵 Image Do you know this man?

Some of you who are familiar with medicine no doubt do, but if you don't, no worries: This is James Lind, the man most often credited with finding the cure for scurvy. Image
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 26 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
There's an essentially fake talking point that medical advances are masking a substantial increase in the homicide rate.

But this talking point runs into the fact that all violent crime is down, not just homicides. Image You could say the assault rate decline would be greater and the homicide rate would be higher were it not for medical advances, but this is actually something that requires evidence beyond the supposition generated in the original paper making that case.

And it is supposition: 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