Stats on the homeless population are abysmal.

One-in-two has a disability and/or a traumatic brain injury. One-in-five has psychosis. One-in-ten is schizophrenic. One-in-four is just straight-up mentally retarded.

These facts have major consequences. As I noted recently, the White House wants to bring back involuntary commitment.

They're probably in the right to call for that, since so many homeless are incapable of taking care of themselves, or at the very least, not hurting others.

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1948510583743283542

Does exercising make you smarter?

Lots of people definitely believe it does, but while it might clear your head, it doesn't boost cognitive ability in actual trials.

The appearance that it does is due to poorly-controlled studies and publication bias. So, this is what we have:

1. Exercise does not affect the level of cognitive ability, and

2. (Self-reported) exercise does not affect seem to relate to rates of cognitive decline.

Neat chart showing three important things:

1. The U.S. has negative learning in reactor construction.

2. France might have negative learning in reactor construction.

3. China has positive learning in reactor construction. The more they build, the cheaper reactors get. I say "might" for France, because—as I've noted previously—France's negative learning by doing is actually an example of Simpson's Paradox.

Within each reactor generation, France has positive learning; between them, it appears negative.

I don't think people realize just how wacky things have gotten.

First: The White TFR is ~1.55 and the Black TFR is ~1.53.

Second: Even the stereotypically extreme Hispanic TFR is now below-replacement, at ~1.98.

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1948438062414852583

It's hard to overstate just how much things do not stay the same.

It's not even just in the U.S. where fertility rates are now shocking.

This graph shows Saudi Arabia. They're Muslims, so they must be having kids, right? No, they're barely above-replacement.

Cervical cancer is being defeated thanks to two things:

Pap smears and the Gardasil vaccine.

HPV vaccination is so effective that many countries will have practically eliminated cervical cancer in the next two decades.

Here's why🧵 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:

The White House just released a really good executive order on cleaning up America's streets, re-institutionalizing insane people, and ending open air drug abuse and the problems it creates.

Here's a quick overview🧵 The first section is the one I'm most excited for. An alternative name for it could be "Bring Back The Asylums"

It instructs the administration to make it possible to involuntarily commit crazy people again

That crazy hobo pushing a cart full of urine bottles? He's going away!

What comes after GLP-1RAs make everyone skinny?

What comes after myostatin inhibitors make everyone buff?

One new candidate is:

Safe, cheap, and easily-administered injections that locally remove fat. A new drug that just passed through phase 2 seems to do just that🧵 The new drug is called CBL-514.

It has a counterpart on the market in the form of deoxycholic acid injections—brand name Kybella.

Kybella is FDA-approved, and it works: it helps people to get rid of their double chins. But there's a catch.

Pancreatitis is a commonly mention potential side effect of GLP-1RAs, but the evidence for it is poor.

In trials, it doesn't tend to show up more often than in placebo groups, and in high-quality comparisons, risk typically isn't notably elevated.

Risk might even be reduced! There's generally bupkes for pancreatic cancer risk and the evidence for increased pancreatitis risk is similarly poor.

Here's a summary of evidence from before the study whose result I plotted up there:

Many Founding Fathers wrote under pseudonyms

Pseudonyms afforded the protection needed to write things that were controversial, to engender debate over things they didn't themselves believe in, and to encourage focus on ideas over reputations

Thread of their known pseudonyms🧵 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay all wrote under the name Publius, after the Roman consul Publius Valerius Poplicola.

This shared authorship became known after Hamilton died, but the individual authors of the Federalist Papers Publius entries remain debated.

One of my favorite papers in recent years included this diagram.

It shows the impact of controlling for three different types of variables: confounders, colliders, and mediators.

With confounders, control is good. With the others, you ruin your result by controlling. If you have variables with measurement error, you can run into another problematic variable: the proxy.

Proxy variables can make all of these distortions much worse and much more difficult to deal with.

It's so good to see more gene therapies getting worked on.

This one is particularly amazing because it's effectively a one-shot, permanent Exenatide—making humans produce a version of the compound in Gila monster venom like lifelong Ozempic!

But is it safe?

Probably! Short🧵

https://twitter.com/kimmonismus/status/1945592299846516874

In the picture I posted above, you can see the effects of having variants that increase the effect of the gene GLP1R.

This was relevant when I was discussing compositional effects of GLP-1RAs. As you can see, bodyfat *percentage* declines with higher natural GLP-1R agonism.

Neanderthals might've been more capable, social, and inventive cooks than previously thought.

As it turns out, they were doing animal processing at scale in northern Europe some 125,000 years ago.

That's some 70-80,000 years before Homo sapiens got to the area🧵 This finding comes from a site in modern central Germany.

This site is a uniquely good spot for archaeology because of its suitability for sediment deposition due to the effects of the then-nearby glaciers.

This is not true, but remember:

Premodern society was hyper-violent by modern standards.

Almost half the fighting-aged males in late Neolithic Europe showed skeletal evidence of violence and at least 10% died from it.

For comparison, the 2022 U.S. homicide rate was 7.5/100k.

https://twitter.com/PamphletsY/status/1943776459241206042

This isn't even the most violent prehistoric society, it's one of the more peaceful ones known.

There is no reason to keep pit bull type dogs legal, but there is plenty of reason to ban them.

They are extremely disproportionately likely to bite and to kill. Keeping them around serves no purpose.

https://twitter.com/wanyeburkett/status/1943139472729686143

Pit bull owners are disproportionately likely to be mentally ill, to have criminal records, to be low-income and poorly-educated, etc.

But this doesn't explain the breed's issues. Even when they were not the premiere fighters, they dominated injury stats

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1937917277195931980

Though the policy is harmful, the overwhelming majority of Americans support capping rent increases.

Americans overwhelmingly support many bad policies🧵 Americans strongly support raising the minimum wage considerably.

The Atlantic was once a credible news outlet.

One of their best pieces came out 99 years ago, written by "A Woman Resident in Russia".

It describes the chaos that followed the Communists destroying the institution of marriage.

Let's read about the Soviets ruining marriage🧵 "To clear the family out of the accumulated dust of the ages we had to give it a good shakeup, and we did."

Russia boasted it had no illegitimate children. True. They eliminated the "illegitimate" category.

I've seen people mentioning that Europe's heat-related death issue is larger than American gun violence—true!

But people neglect saying how many heat-related deaths America has.

Approximately 1% of what Europe does even though America is hotter and Americans are less healthy! Those factors mean Americans are more at-risk for heat-related deaths, even after accounting for Europe being a little older than America.

So let's be clear:

Europeans die from heat at relatively high rates; Americans survive it with technology.

What happens when scholars get canceled?

They end up publishing fewer papers and they receive fewer citations.

In other words, scientific productivity falls🧵 Tons of scholars have been cancelled in recent years.

That is, they've received professional backlash for expressing views that people deem "controversial, unpopular, or misaligned with prevailing norms."

You must pick one:

Double the productivity of the bottom 20% or double the productivity of the top 1%: Double the productivity of the bottom 40% or double the productivity of the top 1%:

Phenotyping is the vast, minimally-explored frontier in genome-wide association studies.

Important thread🧵

Briefly, phenotyping is how you measure people's traits. Measure poorly, get bad results; measure well, get good results.

Example? Janky knees. The janky knee example refers to osteoarthritis, the most common form of arthritis, which occurs when the cartilage between bones is worn down, so bones start rubbing against each other.

This ends up being very painful.

ADHD is a condition that's suffered from diagnostic drift: it's been defined more leniently over time, so more people are getting diagnosed.

One way to see this is to look at the benefits of taking ADHD medication. As prescription rates increased, the benefits have declined. Another way to understand diagnostic drift is to look at the factors that promote it.

For example, school accountability laws lead to more diagnoses and, as a result, more psychoactive drug prescriptions.

Schools are pressured by law into making this happen.