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.

I have a story to break.

Columbia is still practicing racially discriminatory admissions in defiance of the Supreme Court's ruling in SFFA v. Harvard.

Newly-leaked data shows they still prefer less-qualified Blacks and Hispanics over more-qualified Asians🧵 Columbia has made a big show of "complying" with SFFA v. Harvard by noting that their 2024 batch of admits involved slightly less discrimination:

Fewer Black and Hispanic students, more Asian students.

That's what should happen, because Asian students tend to perform better.

Today's big biotech win is that we might be on the verge of a cure for type-1 diabetes🧵

Twelve diabetics were injected with stem cell-derived pancreatic islets.

They started producing insulin again.

One year in, 10/12 participants no longer needed to inject insulin. In that chart, you can see the response to a meal.

At baseline, blood sugar levels go dangerously high (right) because participants don't produce insulin at all (proxied by C-peptide levels, left).

But notice the blood sugar and C-peptide levels after treatment:

About a year after this analysis came out, the Wall Street Journal published another one, with much clearer evidence🧵

It compares three adjacent counties located in three different states—Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1936091994079580200

These states are very differently partisan.

Ohio is Republican-controlled, New York is a Democratic bastion, and Pennsylvania? They split the difference.

When the ADL counts up extremist violence, they count too many "right wing" incidents due to a methodological error they still make today:

They count gang violence, in and outside of prisons, as right wing extremist violence. This includes stuff like drug deals gone wrong. When Business Insider reviewed the ADL's highlighted incidents, they found that few of the incidents were correctly classified.

When some Aryan Nation guy stabs another one, the ADL would include it, but reasonable people would not.

I think a major 'theme' of my account is that the world is rarely surprising or overwhelmingly complex, that most things are ordinary and not mysterious when you look at them closely.

A short review thread🧵 My latest article is about how major breaks in trends usually signal that the data changed rather than that the world changed.

There are few exceptions. One of them is vaccination, which genuinely does cause a massive break in disease incidence:

There are a few other drugs that have successfully and safely helped with weight loss. I'll post a few examples.

Here's Tesofensine, an SNDRI that suppresses appetite: Phentermine, often as phentermine-topiramate, is an NDRA that suppresses appetite:

Yet another grooming gang profile has been released.

The suspects were almost two-thirds Pakistani. This lines up with the findings of several earlier operations:

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1875007472316084692

Novo Nordisk failed to pay a small patent maintenance fee in Canada a few years ago.

As a result, a generic version of Ozempic will be available there soon.

The HHS can exploit this oversight to decisively end the chronic disease crisis, if it has the courage🧵 First, a bit of background.

Novo Nordisk is a pharmaceutical company that makes drugs for diabetes.

The blockbuster drug that turned them into a major pharma player is semaglutide, which they sell under the brand names Wegovy, Ozempic, and Rybelsus.

One of the reasons I'm bullish on Eli Lilly over Novo Nordisk is that I don't think Novo can hack it against a much more R&D-focused American company run by a shrewd corporate climber.

Novo seems like its leadership is much more naïve. Eli Lilly's investments just seem to be superior to Novo's, which have mostly been falling through recently.

The best Novo seems capable of doing now is mimicking Eli Lilly's next drug, retatrutide.

If they were smart, they would do some collaborations.

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1933647874895851605

Companies are rapidly improving on GLP-1 weight loss.

Regeneron just paired semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) with a myostatin inhibitor and the result was...

- More fat loss
- Less muscle loss The problem is that adding things to GLP-1RA treatment might lead to more side effects and worse adherence as a result.

But that seems to not be a concern with a low-dose myostatin inhibitor: added side effects only become concerning with more advanced treatment.

This 91 vs 103 thing is either ignorance or chicanery.

The issue has been explained to him multiple times, but TL;DR:

(1) The standardized difference is still the same 1 SD its always been, (2) IQ does not have a ratio scale, (3) the population hasn't gotten smarter.

https://twitter.com/wil_da_beast630/status/1930318540596551926

If you want to understand this error, I have material aplenty for you.

First, on the issue of rescaling differences, here's a post:

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1753491107680243873

The Wall Street Journal just published the FDA's Opinion piece-length rationale for banning talc.

I was happy to see they were citing studies, but after I read the studies, I was dismayed:

The FDA fell victim to bad science, and they might ban talcum powder because of it!

🧵 The evidence cited in the article is

- A 2019 meta-analysis
- A review by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)
- A 2019 cohort study from Taiwan

Let's go through each of these and see if the FDA's evidence holds water.

Let's make this even clearer.

The severity of COVID vaccine-related myocarditis was far lower than the severity of COVID-related myocarditis, which instead looked like regular viral myocarditis.

You can see this in many cohorts. For example, this was seen in France:

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1929670659291930707

This result replicates everywhere it's tested.

We knew this from the initial small studies...

A friend of mine won a bet about myocarditis and the COVID vaccines a few years ago.

He bet that the myocarditis side effect was real and sizable for young men.

While COVID was more likely to cause myocarditis in general, among the young, the Moderna vaccine was a bit worse. This still wasn't really something to worry about.

Look at the rates. They're incredibly small, at just about 15 per 1,000,000 under 40 years of age for the second dose of the Moderna vaccine and 3 per 1,000,000 for the Pfizer one.

Compare to whole-population COVID-myocarditis.

With so many people identifying themselves as having disorders that they're not diagnosed with, the U.K. will certainly have a glut of diagnoses in the near future.

People think it, and then make it so, and if the state honors those diagnoses, they'll end up paying out the nose. Similarly, in Minnesota, the state recognizes clearly fraudulent autism diagnoses.

Who's doing them? Normal parents, but also certain communities.

For example, Somali immigrants have figured out how to get more welfare funds by getting their kids fake diagnoses.

Obesity has immense costs, and not just direct, medical ones.

Obesity makes people miss work and increases the odds they're on disability. It also increases presenteeism and workers' compensation costs.

The total cost is in the hundred of billions to over a trillion per year. The costs of overweight and obesity are so extreme that making reducing the obesity rate can pay for itself if it can be done at prices achievable today.

And this number doesn't even consider all the costs. There are high costs from cardiovascular issues and cancer, too.