The story of peanut allergy is entering its final chapter.

Nowadays, we are beating back both peanut and other food allergies, and all it took was telling parents the right thing to do🧵 The story begins in 2000, when the American Academy of Pediatrics decided to issue some simple advice to parents: Have your kids avoid peanuts early in life. Don't expose them until they're at least three!

The CEOs managing Sweden's biggest companies tend to be smarter, taller, and to have better personalities. The highest-paid CEOs in Sweden also tend to be taller, smarter, and to have better personalities.

Individuals with higher genetically predicted intelligence tend to end up working more prestigious jobs. They tend to be more emotionally stable, healthier, satisfied with life, richer, and educated too.

Boobtech is amazing.

It's an area that the rest of medicine could look to as an example.

The professionals making bigger, more realistic breast implants are simultaneously improving affordability, safety, and quality at a rapid rate🧵 Consider one of the most recent improvements in boobtech: the Mia.

The Mia is the first successful "injectable" breast implant.

It cuts down scarring, complications, surgery time and cost, and it looks and feels more realistic than earlier implants.

This should be considered *far* more alarming than the polls about political violence.

Two-thirds positive views towards an evil ideology that has killed tens of millions and cannot work is *very* bad. It doesn't really matter if, at the end of the day, they're actually tepid towards socialism. This is like 66% of people saying Hitler was OK.

Source: news.gallup.com/poll/694835/im…

And an article qualifying how we understand support for political violence: cremieux.xyz/p/lets-not-ove…

This is not true and there has never been a reason to believe it.

When we do have raw data for anywhere, we see that there's consistent scoring over time, not massive intelligence gains.

If we do not take measurement invariance seriously, we will be seriously misled.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1979247423768965275

I actually think it is exactly Noah's sort of post that helps to keep the culture of scientific fraud in academia and elsewhere alive.

Noah is smart enough and has been told enough to know better, and he still wrote something that he can't support.

But it's a popular message.

Where did that human capital go?

After the Counter-Reformation began, Protestant Germany started producing more elites than Catholic Germany.

Protestant cities also attracted more of these elite individuals, but primarily to the places with the most progressive governments🧵 Q: What am I talking about?

A: Kirchenordnung, or Church Orders, otherwise known as Protestant Church Ordinances, a sort of governmental compact that started cropping up after the Reformation, in Protestant cities.

What predicts a successful educational intervention?

Unfortunately, the answer is not 'methodological propriety'; in fact, it's the opposite🧵

First up: home-made measures, a lack of randomization, and a study being published instead of unpublished predict larger effects. It is *far* easier to cook the books with an in-house measure, and it's far harder for other researchers to evaluate what's going on because they definitionally cannot be familiar with it.

Additionally, smaller studies tend to have larger effects—a hallmark of publication bias!

Across five different large samples, the same pattern emerged:

Trans people tended to have multiple times higher rates of autism. In addition to higher autism rates, when looking at non-autistic trans versus non-trans people, the trans people were consistently shifted towards showing more autistic traits.

Across 68,000 meta-analyses including over 700,000 effect size estimates, correcting for publication bias tended to:

- Markedly reduce effect sizes
- Markedly reduce the probability that there is an effect at all

Economics hardest hit: Even this is perhaps too generous.

Recall that correcting for publication bias often produces effects that are still larger than the effects attained in subsequent large-scale replication studies.

Neat new article from @Scientific_Bird.

It argues that one of the reasons there was an East Asian growth miracle but not a South Asian one is human capital.

For centuries, South Asia has lagged on average human capital, whereas East Asia has done very well in all our records. It's unsurprising when these things continue today.

We already know based on three separate instrumental variables strategies using quite old datapoints that human capital is causal for growth. That includes these numeracy measures from the distant past.

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1660778498896568322

The results are in and 58.3% of the almost 7,500 responses said...

Men tend to get more steps in a day!

Sources say...

Yes. Wherever we have large-scale, representatively sampled data, men tend to get a few more steps in compared to women.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1974232295998398587

Step counts tend to vary by area.

For example, New York—thanks to New York City—has the highest average step count.

Colorado—due in part to its selected active, athletic population—also manages a high step count.

You'll also notice that moderate temps mean more steps.

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 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

I really don't get the Mormon hate.

They are genuinely the nicest people I've ever met and a joy to be around.

You can insult their religion, call it weird, say it's made up, and they just tell you that everyone's entitled to an opinion and ask if you want to play board games. Every reddit atheist interaction with them is like

"You still believe in Joseph Smith even though he was a criminal?"

"Yeah! By the way what do you think of the ice cream? It's homemade. Picked the strawberries myself!"

These are really high figures across the board!

What makes them worse is that plenty of moderates and large numbers of people on the left think random non-Nazis are Nazis, and thus acceptable to punch. With a sizable minority who think political violence is acceptable generally and a much larger number who think it's acceptable conditional on the right target, it feels crucial to start castigating people who use slurs like "racist" or "Nazi".

It's effectively incitement.

We know the answer to this question already.

The AAP gave out bad advice: they told parents to avoid giving their kids peanuts.

But as the LEAP trial showed, parents giving their kids peanuts early in life reduces the rates of peanut allergy by about 70%.

https://twitter.com/DrMakaryFDA/status/1971574104844341503

Israel has the solution: Bamba!

Stop avoiding peanuts and there won't be much of a peanut allergy issue to speak of.

It's that simple. Bad advice to parents created a generation of people with an unnecessary allergy.

Details are scarce, but it appears Trump is about to double the price of...

80% of drugs?!

We have no idea if this applies to Bulk, APIs, or just finished drugs. It only says "Pharmaceutical Product", but just in case, I have simple advice: stock up now! Details:

Of the top 100 brand-name drugs by Part D spend, 67 are finished outside the U.S.: pharmacychecker.com/research/not-m…

FDA holds the U.S. did 28% of API manufacturing in 2019: fda.gov/news-events/co…

GAO, citing FDA, says 40% of finished drugs, 80% of API: gao.gov/assets/gao-20-…

About 78% of those arrested by ICE in Republican states are either criminals, have charges pending, or have committed some other violation.

In Democratic states, the number is about 60%. Another interesting thing is that, as the arrests have increased, the severity has fallen:

The people ICE is arresting aren't as seriously criminal as they used to be, but there are more of them.

It's interesting to see this common tradeoff crop up in deportations, too!

This replicates in many places.

For example, in Denmark, the broader the definition of autism (blue = broadest; red = narrowest), the more autism diagnoses have increased.

Crucially, this study also replicated the finding that symptoms are stable, while diagnoses are up. I've previously noted that this same thing was observed elsewhere.

For example, it was seen in Sweden: stable symptom scores (i.e., the things defining autism), but people kept getting diagnosed at higher rates.

On the left, you can see child autism diagnoses.

On the right, you can see states with policies that give schools more money when their students are diagnosed with autism.

When these policies pass, autism diagnoses increase by almost 25% in one year! Incentives matter for autism diagnosis.

For example, people on SSI receive larger payouts if they're diagnosed with autism.

After the economic downturn in 2008, the most heavily impacted age group started getting diagnosed with autism at an incredible rate:

The thing about anti-vaxxers is that they don't know things

They clamor to find ways to suggest vaccines are bad, but their arguments are silly because they don't know the basic institutional background that gave rise to today's "autism epidemic"

Thread on a ridiculous paper🧵 This paper is by David A. Geier.

He's had some papers retracted.

A lot of his work has to do with other people having conflicts of interest—like working at a public health agency—, which makes some of the retractions extra funny, because they've been about his COIs.