How bad are Richard Lynn's 2002 national IQ estimates?

They correlate at r = 0.93 with our current best estimates.

It turns out that they're really not bad, and they don't provide evidence of systematic bias on his part🧵 In this data, Lynn overestimated national IQs relative to the current best estimates by an average of 0.97 points.

The biggest overestimation took place in Latin America, where IQs were overestimated by an average of 4.2 points. Sub-Saharan Africa was underestimated by 1.89 pts.

If you use a relative standard to measure poverty, establishing the bottom x% are poor regardless of their absolute income, you will never win the war on poverty.

But President Johnson wanted an absolute standard. With such a standard, the poverty rate has fallen more than 90%🧵 The first thing you have to do to get to this is to adjust the equivalence scale of the official poverty rate, by recreating the poverty thresholds based on the square root of the number of family members rather than the formula used for the Official Poverty Measure (OPM):

Have you seen these charts on parental time use from Our World in Data, Financial Times, and The Economist?

These graphs are not good🧵



The charts come from Dotti Sani and Treas' (2016) paper in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

They depict, the results of a GLM of time use over time that lacks an equation in the paper. The results shown in the pictures come from their Model 3:

This is an image from a scanning electron microscope.

The banner along the bottom is the image metadata. That banner might be useful for detecting fraudulent research

🧵 First thing's first:

Scanning electron microscopes are useful, so they're finding their way into more and more published articles. Across 50 journals' articles published 2010 through early 2023, this has been the trend:

The best part of this, to me, was asking why Koreans didn't become rednecks.

There is a second reason we should ask this question, and it has to do with the origins of the word "redneck".

Short🧵

https://twitter.com/nathancofnas/status/1822940280040939864

Have you heard of the Bishops' Wars?

These were a series of wars fought in 1639 and 1640 between Scottish Covenanters and the English and their Scottish supporters.

These were the first of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, AKA the British Civil Wars.

The chief god of the Babylonians was Marduk, and Marduk was a canal digger.

His story and his role in their pantheon are amazing, because it turns out his story is about the birth of statehood🧵 In the Babylonian creation myth Enūma Eliš, Marduk gains his powers and his standing by killing his grandmother after she seeks to kill his father, uncles, aunts, and the other young gods who preemptively killed their father.

I know just one person over 100 with an actual birth certificate.

Across U.S. states, the total and per capita numbers of supercentenarians dramatically decline right after the introduction of birth certificates (blue line).

The reason? Most such cases are fake.

https://twitter.com/zwotheramabale/status/1827639087429189781

Also, have you ever noticed that supercentenarians are more common in areas with more crime, more poverty, and lower average life expectancies?

Here's data for England:

What do the Washington Post, Brookings, The Atlantic, and Business Insider have in common?

They all employ credulous writers who don't read about the things they write about.

The issue? Attacks on laptop-based notetaking🧵





Each of these outlets (among many others, unfortunately) reported on a a 2014 study by Mueller and Oppenheimer, in which it was reported that laptop-based note-taking was inferior to longhand note-taking for remembering content.

In the U.S., you are legally permitted to sell your blood plasma for money, but it's called "donation".

In recent years, the numbers of places set up for donations has skyrocketed, and the amount they're compensating donors has followed suit.

Let's dig in. Most of the visitors to these donation centers are highly local (A)

People are also more likely to visit donation centers in census block groups (CBGs) that are marked by poverty (B)

Why?

The fact that the most significant crime, socially, is violent crime, and it's not really driven by the economy should change the way we see and talk about crime.

Despite strong results, it doesn't seem to have permeated the public discourse.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1781379729276514388

Poverty as a major "root cause" is simply no longer on the table.

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1736922801230033396

There was a point in time when London shut down 70% of its police stations as part of a series of austerity cuts.

That was a bad idea🧵 Background:

A 2010 report from the British government led to a 29% budget cut for London's police.

In response, the mayor figured cutting down police stations and redistributing the frontline officers across the remainder could save money while achieving similar results.

The study they're reporting on is not causally informative and does not indicate actual reasons to be concerned.

The reasons for this are very simple, as I'll show below.

🧵

https://twitter.com/CBSEveningNews/status/1823497830721348013

First, sampling.

If I want to do a study on Holocaust survivors and I go and seek out people who survived it, I am looking for a select sample.

If, instead, I look in datasets that were sampled without respect to Holocaust survival and find survivors, my sample is nonselect.

These are the Baths of Caracalla. Or at least, this is what remains of them today.

These ruins might not look impressive now, but when they were constructed they might have been one of the finest examples of Roman architecture.

But then Europe forgot how to build them🧵 To get an idea of what the Baths looked like in their heyday, look at this rendering.

This palatial compound must have been a sight to behold since the baths rivaled medieval cathedrals like Laon, Notre-Dame, and Salisbury in scale.

New survey: Over half of researchers in Denmark and an international sample from Britain, America, Croatia, and Austria anonymously admitted that they:

- Cite papers they don't read
- Cite irrelevant papers
- Don't put in effort in peer review
- Misreport nonsignificant findings In another set of questions, the Danish researchers were asked to report their prevalence of engaging in questionable research practices in recent publications and what they estimated it was across the field.

Unless they undersold their prevalence, they were pessimistic.

This is exactly right.

Most growth restriction is asymmetrical—it impacts the body but spares the head—in and out of the womb.

Consider the different impacts of nutritional versus non-nutritional etiologies of intrauterine growth restriction: Also, James Flynn explicitly disconnected height and Flynn effect IQ gains:

Here is the geographic distribution of Adolf Hitler's Y-chromosomal haplogroup.

That Hitler had this Y-haplogroup that's relatively uncommon for Germans has prompted some to claim Hitler had Jewish paternal ancestry.

But did he?🧵 Firstly, how do we know this is Hitler's Y-haplogroup?

Illicit journalistic methods. Less politely: stalking.

A pair of Dutch journalists stalked Hitler's living relatives, gathered their DNA without their consent, and sequenced it to figure this out. Here's one example:

I'm delighted to see my charts have been posted in response to this multiple times.

If you look at American PISA performance, you see a consistent picture: Americans utterly dominate once you split them by race.

🧵

https://twitter.com/menhguin/status/1821965769842000105

Some people argue 'Ah, but you didn't split Europe by race. We would see the same picture!'

Nope. We have some European countries split by race (e.g., U.K.) and that's not the case, and notice the subtitle means most non-Europeans are already removed from the equation.

Stereotype threat is a proposed explanation for the Black-White IQ gap.

But is it real?🧵

In the original study, the scores for Blacks and Whites in conditions of stereotype threat and without that threat looked like this: Most people read about stereotype threat and think it fully explains the Black-White gap in scores, as in this hypothetical model:

The rates of police-recorded rape incidents in England and Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, have increased over time.

Frankly, I wasn't aware Northern Ireland was this particularly bad until today. Per an earlier (year-end 2022) report, police-recorded sexual offenses in England and Wales skyrocketed while rape became competitive with sexual assault for the top sexual offense category each year.

Unfortunately for economists, we don't send people to prison randomly, so it's hard to infer what the impacts of incarceration are on long-term socioeconomic outcomes.

How can we?

Through judges and lawmakers being weird!🧵 Data from Ohio was used to estimate the impact of incarceration by using variation in judges' propensities to assign harsher or more lenient sentences.

Since cases were randomly assigned to different judges, we get to clearly see the impact of their conviction habits.

The most common answer to this is some form of the claim 'mass shootings mostly use rifles'

It's still a bad idea (regulating for extremely rare events overburdens lawful users with little benefit) and not a true claim.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1817776973785038970

Between 1982 and 2023, rifles were only involved in 31% of mass shootings (defined as 4+ fatalities in a public place before 2013, 3+ after).