My Uber driver says

- His license is suspended
- He was once a soldier for a Mafia family
- He's telling me about his time in Rikers
- He's showing me YouTube videos
- He's telling me his theories about Jews He's telling me about gang wars he was in ad a kid.

He's wondering why all the Chinese girls are lined up - for an audition?

He says to go to Mother's Ruin for latin prostitutes.

All of this entirely unprompted.

This is just not true and it's sad that people believe it.

It's also indicting, when it's so obviously false if you just look out into the world. What you see should match what the statistics clearly show:

Estimated marriage effects for men and women are almost always similar🧵

https://twitter.com/musestoomuch/status/2060310307868680383

In that chart, I used the GSS and found something many people replicate:

1. Cross-sectionally, there's a relationship between being married and life satisfaction. It's similar for men and women.

2. Within persons—causally!—marriage boosts life satisfaction, but more for women.

As a recap on my appearance, Eli Lilly is pursuing:

- A one-dose drug for preventing most heart disease
- A vaccine for chlamydia
- A vaccine for gonorrhea
- A vaccine for Epstein-Barr
- A drug that lets you stay awake longer and feel more rested

It's a golden age of pharma!

https://twitter.com/MTSlive/status/2059310566783467782

And remember, Eli Lilly's big break historically was the University of Toronto licensing them to produce insulin.

They started off by giving it out for free, saving the world's diabetics at a time when there was no treatment available.

They've always been a force for good.

Eli Lilly has done it.

They've gone and made what seems to be a powerful, permanent gene therapy for LDL cholesterol.

That means they'll be able to effectively prevent most heart disease with a single infusion! Almost all of the side effects were just things you see with any infusion. Some people react poorly to needles and having to sit for a while🤷‍♀️

And that's what we expect, because the people with good PCSK9 genes naturally are totally fine. This therapy catches the rest of us up!

Are White women the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action?

That's a real claim that's commonly advanced by journalists, and the claim has gone so far that it's even made its way into academic publications and policy.

But the claim is completely false🧵 This claim doesn't make a lot of sense. After all, shouldn't the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action be the people who the policies primarily target?

In America, that's African Americans and, among them, women get an added benefit. How could it be Whites?

World War I devastated Britain and likely slowed down its technological progress🧵

The reason being, the youth are the engine of innovation.

Areas that saw more deaths saw larger declines in patenting in the years following the war. To figure out the innovation effects of losing a large portion of a generation's young men who were just coming into the primes of their lives, the authors needed four pieces of data.

The first were the numbers and pre-war locations of soldiers who died.

New Pangram validation!

You know how most books on Amazon are AI slop now? If you didn't, look at the publication numbers.

Compare those to the proportion Pangram flags as AI-generated. It's fully aligned with the implied numbers based on the rise over 2022 publication levels! Similarly, the rise of pro se litigants has come with a rise in case filings detected as being AI-generated, and with virtually zero false-positives before AI was around.

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2047026277064831016

Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play argued that France's early fertility decline was driven by its inheritance reforms, where estates had to be split up equally to all of the kids, including the girls.

There's likely something to this!🧵 For reference, the French Revolution ushered in a number of egalitarian laws.

A major example of these had to do with inheritance, and in particular with partibility.

In some areas of France, there was partible inheritance, and in others, it was impartible.

In terms of their employment, religion, and sex, people who joined the Nazi party started off incredibly distinct from the people in their communities.

It's only near the end of WWII when they started resembling everyday Germans. Early on, a lot of this dissimilarity is due to hysteresis.

Even as the party was growing, people were selectively recruited because they were often recruited by their out-of-place friends, and they were themselves out-of-place.

It took huge growth to break that.

"Food deserts" are an example of social scientists getting causality backwards

They saw poor people eating unhealthy foods and blamed local supply

They should have blamed demand!

Using data from 13 years of supermarket entries, there's basically no effects on healthy eating🧵 The significant effects are probably not meaningful. They're more likely under the null with this gigantic dataset (p's of 0.003 and 0.005 with a total sample size of ~2.9m)

Entry did affect sales for new stores, but not existing ones. It also affected more local places more.

I simulated 100,000 people to show how often people are "thrice-exceptional": Smart, stable, and exceptionally hard-working.

I've highlighted these people in red in this chart: If you reorient the chart to a bird's eye view, it looks like this:

I would like to live in a high-trust society.

The decline of trust is something worth caring about, and reversing it is something worth doing.

We should not have to live constantly wondering if we're being lied to or scammed. Trust should be possible again. I don't know how we go about regaining trust and promoting trustworthiness in society.

It feels like there's an immense level of toleration of untrustworthy behavior from everyone: scams are openly funded; academics congratulate their fraudster peers; all content is now slop.

British fertility abruptly fell after one important court case: the Bradlaugh-Besant trial🧵

You can see its impact very visibly on this chart: 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.

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. 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.

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! 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.

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! 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.

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

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2040901759661384056

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.

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. 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:

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🧵 Is it perhaps because of a racial composition change?

No.

Different races tend to have similar testosterone levels and trends within groups are similar.

Today's deregulatory news is pretty big.

The White House is taking aim at the housing shortage by deregulating housing construction🧵 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:

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. 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