College students make or are forced to make suboptimal choices about the times their classes take place🧵

For students who register for 8AM classes, about a third wake up after class starts, and almost 40% wake up too late to get to class on time. People's internal rhythms aren't things they just choose, they're somewhat out of their control because they're synced up with day-night cycles.

Consider this, showing the amount of time 8AM class-takers sleep on school days vs weekends (gray), measured through logins at school.

If you're curious about the recent rise in autism diagnoses, go read this.

It details how much of the rise in diagnoses is down to diagnostic drift and increasing screening. You can see the impact of this on correlations between autism and other things in the published literature:

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1857871534402187325

The potential gains to port automation are so enormous that Trump is making a huge mistake if he goes along with wishes of the mobsters in the ILA.

The gains on the table are so large that increasing an average port's capacity by just one ship increases total trade by 0.67%.

https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1867356898561053159

Bulk freight carriers also hate waiting around. They want to take goods and get them delivered where they need to go.

But America's ports are so inefficient that bulk carriers opt to go to the wrong ports to save time.

America's roads get sacrificed to its lack of automation.

The COVID era Paycheck Protection Program was defrauded at an incredible scale. People received PPP loans for total nonsense at stunning rates.

Thread of funny claims.

Dodge Hellcat LLC Reparations for Indigenous People LLC

"A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy."

Brian Thompson's murderer wrote that in his manifesto.

Both claims are bad. The first one, because America spends the most on healthcare because it's rich: I don't mean Americans pay higher prices for the same amounts of care, but that Americans consume much higher volumes of care. They do more check-ups, get more screenings, take more tests, dose more drugs, get more surgeries... and so on!

You can predict spending from volumes:

In Medicare Advantage, the government encourages insurers to pursue perverse incentives.

These see them overdiagnosing patients for conditions they often do not have, and which they don't recommend treating, because it means they can send the government a bigger bill. Insurers have tried to claim that they don't do this, and that this data misrepresents the care they provide to patients they diagnose with particular conditions (like HIV!) because COVID disrupted care, but they're lying and it's too obvious.

Telling insurers they can't do denials is a surefire way to waste money on quack "cures" and to get millions of Americans devastatingly addicted to medications that end up killing them.

We know this is true because it's happened before.

Let's talk quacks. Thread about boobs. Breast cancer is an unfortunately common condition worldwide.

In 2021, more than 270,000 American women were diagnosed with it and some 42,000 died from it and it affects almost 1-in-8 American women in their lifetimes.

In short, it's bad.

Thread of some surprising things that are older than other things

Notre Dame predates the Maori settlement of New Zealand
Oxford is older than the Aztecs

Healthcare in the U.S. is more expensive than in peer countries primarily because Americans consume so much more care, not because the number of administrators is out of wack

One way we know this is through private equity

When PE firms buy hospitals, they drastically cut admin: PE acquisition leads to a momentary decline in the numbers of core workers (nurses, physicians, pharmacists, etc.), but this fizzles out in the long run.

Americans consume so much healthcare that they don't need.

As it turns out, this is true in a lot of places, and we have excellent evidence that's the case.

Thread. Britain has universal healthcare via their National Health Service.

In this system, the doctors are paid very poorly. Junior doctors—known as "resident doctors" since September of this year—have gone on strike about this several times in recent years.

Today the American Society of Anesthesiologists won a fight to continue defrauding Americans by overcharging them for care.

So let's talk anesthesiologists.

They are notorious for "surprise billing", where they charge an out-of-network rate at an in-network facility.

Thread.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1864532455853547934

Anesthesiology was one of the medical specialties that was the most likely to cause a surprise bill, because patients usually don't select their anesthesiologist.

This meant lots of patients got saddled with out-of-network care, even at an in-network facility.

When people report an excess of '5s' and '0s' for quantities like 'IQ', 'height', 'age', etc., it indicates error and lying

Anesthesiologists report an excess of anesthesia times ending in increments of 5. As it just so happens, the ones who do this the most profit the most too

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1726027476822888503

A given anesthesia case generates compensation units based on self-reported time providing patient care.

One unit is 15 minutes of care, and insurers like to pay to the exact minute, so they usually require unrounded time reporting.

And yet, some anesthesiologists round a lot.

The vast majority of crime is done by just a few individuals.

The vast majority of crime is also done in just a few locations.

For example, in New York City, 75% of the violent crime happens on less than 10% of the streets. When it comes to property crime, there's less concentration than there is for violent crimes.

This makes sense, because property to harm should be more spread out more than violent people are.

The results of a new large-scale international educational assessment just came out.

This one focuses on student mathematics and science achievement and, once again, America came in near the top of the chart!🧵

First up, here are mean scores for fourth-graders: Next, here are fourth-graders' mathematics scores.

This is, theoretically, the most trainable test, and we see that Americans do well, but Asian countries take the cake.

The Canadian healthcare system requires people to do a lot of waiting.

These units are not wait times in days, they're wait times in weeks.

For comparison, Americans seeking a gynecologist had average waits of about four weeks to get from a GP to a specialist in the same year. The picture in Canada is grim, and it gotten substantially worse over time. You might've been able to see a doctor in... 10 weeks in 1993, but now you'll probably wait, oh, 30+ weeks.

https://x.com/SebastianCaliri/status/1864165602962887124

Wordcels and Shape Rotators:

Spatial ability (perf IQ) doesn't predict civic participation and barely predicts anything about moral and political attitudes.

Verbal ability independent of spatial ability, on the other hand predicts, being more politically active and left-wing. These measures seem to be valid, too. For example, they're equally g-loaded and they predict the results of another IQ test (ICAR-16) and income about equally well, but verbal ability predicts being more educated, and spatial ability predicts majoring in engineering.

This is the comment that prompted me to look into the success of Nigerians in America, to change my beliefs on the matter, and to publicly admit I was wrong.

I then wrote a long article on the topic explaining how I was wrong and what I found🧵 It took me a few months to find the time to look into this, but eventually I did, and I found lots of interesting things, like that you cannot trust people's ethnic self-identification on surveys and that most people do not present adequately controlled group comparisons.

This is an important fact observed in maaaaany datasets:

Across different levels of education, test scores have been going down, even though scores for the whole population have stagnated.

Why? Because more people are getting educated! You see the same thing in this example, where it looks like IQs are dropping fast, but really, the whole-population IQ has remained the same.

Nigeria has actually been attempting to tackle its enormous fake education problem.

Earlier this year, they invalidated almost 23,000 fake degrees. But this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Nigeria is a third-world country, so of course it's riddled with corruption and fraud.

As an example, many people pay bribes to get good marks in school.

Q: How are we beating cervical cancer?

A combination of two things: more screening and vaccination. The vaccine is amazing🧵

First off, it reduces the rates of pre-cancerous growths from the most common cause of cervical cancer by 90-99%!

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1861805450771005916

Cervical cancer develops from HPV because the HP virus integrates itself into cells' DNA and then degrades proteins that keep cell growth in check, leading to precancerous growths and then cancer.

This man received a Nobel Prize for that discovery:

You support or oppose the death penalty for murder

Assume no false positives You support or oppose the death penalty for serial killing

Assume no false positives