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Crémieux Profile picture
Crémieux
@cremieuxrecueil
I write about genetics, 'metrics, and demographics. Read my long-form writing at https://t.co/8hgA4nNS2A.
42 subscribers
Jul 12 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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. Image This isn't even the most violent prehistoric society, it's one of the more peaceful ones known. Image
Jul 11 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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. Image 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

Jul 10 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
Though the policy is harmful, the overwhelming majority of Americans support capping rent increases.

Americans overwhelmingly support many bad policies🧵 Image Americans strongly support raising the minimum wage considerably. Image
Jul 9 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
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🧵Image "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. Image
Jul 2 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
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! Image 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. Image
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Jul 2 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
What happens when scholars get canceled?

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

In other words, scientific productivity falls🧵 Image 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." Image
Jun 28 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
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%:
Jun 27 • 35 tweets • 15 min read
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. Image 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. Image
Jun 25 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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. Image 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. Image
Jun 24 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
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🧵Image 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.Image
Jun 21 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
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. Image 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: Image
Jun 20 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
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. Image These states are very differently partisan.

Ohio is Republican-controlled, New York is a Democratic bastion, and Pennsylvania? They split the difference. Image
Jun 20 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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. Image 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.Image
Jun 18 • 22 tweets • 10 min read
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🧵 Image 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: Image
Jun 17 • 24 tweets • 9 min read
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: Image Phentermine, often as phentermine-topiramate, is an NDRA that suppresses appetite: Image
Jun 16 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Yet another grooming gang profile has been released.

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

Jun 16 • 26 tweets • 10 min read
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🧵 Image 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. Image
Jun 14 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
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. Image 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.

Jun 13 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
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 Image 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. Image
Jun 4 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
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. Image If you want to understand this error, I have material aplenty for you.

First, on the issue of rescaling differences, here's a post:
Jun 4 • 42 tweets • 14 min read
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!

🧵 Image 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. Image