New Pangram validation!

You know how most books on Amazon are AI slop now? If you didn't, look at the publication numbers.

Compare those to the proportion Pangram flags as AI-generated. It's fully aligned with the implied numbers based on the rise over 2022 publication levels! Similarly, the rise of pro se litigants has come with a rise in case filings detected as being AI-generated, and with virtually zero false-positives before AI was around.

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2047026277064831016

Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play argued that France's early fertility decline was driven by its inheritance reforms, where estates had to be split up equally to all of the kids, including the girls.

There's likely something to this!🧵 For reference, the French Revolution ushered in a number of egalitarian laws.

A major example of these had to do with inheritance, and in particular with partibility.

In some areas of France, there was partible inheritance, and in others, it was impartible.

In terms of their employment, religion, and sex, people who joined the Nazi party started off incredibly distinct from the people in their communities.

It's only near the end of WWII when they started resembling everyday Germans. Early on, a lot of this dissimilarity is due to hysteresis.

Even as the party was growing, people were selectively recruited because they were often recruited by their out-of-place friends, and they were themselves out-of-place.

It took huge growth to break that.

I simulated 100,000 people to show how often people are "thrice-exceptional": Smart, stable, and exceptionally hard-working.

I've highlighted these people in red in this chart: If you reorient the chart to a bird's eye view, it looks like this:

I would like to live in a high-trust society.

The decline of trust is something worth caring about, and reversing it is something worth doing.

We should not have to live constantly wondering if we're being lied to or scammed. Trust should be possible again. I don't know how we go about regaining trust and promoting trustworthiness in society.

It feels like there's an immense level of toleration of untrustworthy behavior from everyone: scams are openly funded; academics congratulate their fraudster peers; all content is now slop.

British fertility abruptly fell after one important court case: the Bradlaugh-Besant trial🧵

You can see its impact very visibly on this chart: The trial involved Annie Besant (left) and Charles Bradlaugh (right).

These two were atheists—a scandalous position at the time!—and they wanted to promote free-thinking about practically everything that upset the puritanical society of their time.

One of the really interesting studies on the psychiatric effects of maltreatment is Danese and Widom's from Nat. Hum. Behavior a few years ago.

They found that only subjective (S), rather than objective (O) maltreatment predicted actually having a mental disorder. Phrased differently, if people subjectively believed they were abused, that predicted poor mental health, but objectively recorded maltreatment only predicted it if there was also a subjective report.

Some people might 'simply' be more resilient than others.

Nature finally published it!

The Reich Lab article on genetic selection in Europe over the last 10,000 years is finally online, and it includes such interesting results as:

- Intelligence has increased
- People got lighter
- Mental disorders became less common

And more! They've added some interesting simulation results that show that these changes are unlikely to have happened without directional selection, under a variety of different model assumptions.

I still think this is one of the most important recent papers on AI in the job market🧵

The website Freelancer added an option to generate cover letters with AI, and suddenly the quality associated with cover letters stopped predicting the odds of people getting hired! LLMs do a few things to cover letters.

Firstly, they increase the quality, as measured by how well tailored they are to a given job listing.

The authors of this work now have a newer study with a nine-times larger sample!🧵

The overall result is that the rich are:

- More risk-tolerant, open to experiences, extraverted, and conscientious
- Less neurotic
- No more agreeable than normal, non-rich people

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2040901759661384056

Now, we have a breakdown of different types of rich people!

Among those who could be classified, the majority of the rich (79%; >=€1m net worth) were self-made, with a smaller, 21% share whose wealth came primarily from inheritances.

My latest article asks and answers the question:

When did being fat become a thing for poor people?🧵

We should start with the observation that, as countries get richer, they tend to get fatter. This might seem contradictory to the whole thesis, but it's not.

Countries become obese with wealth because poorer people within them are able to get fatter as they become richer.

The ecological and individual relationships differ.

Look internationally:

Why have testosterone levels been rising over time?

The testosterone levels of American men are up compared to what they used to be, but no one has a good explanation.

Let's look through some possibilities🧵 Is it perhaps because of a racial composition change?

No.

Different races tend to have similar testosterone levels and trends within groups are similar.

Today's deregulatory news is pretty big.

The White House is taking aim at the housing shortage by deregulating housing construction🧵 A big part of the American Dream was created by a massive housing boom when the troops came home

Since the Great Financial Crisis, practically everywhere has reduced the number of permits they issue for new housing

This has resulted in housing cost growth outpacing wage growth:

In my latest article, I documented that the only RCT for functional medicine methods appears fraudulent🧵

Before getting into it, what's functional medicine?

It's a pseudoscience used to bilk patients by getting them on an unending cycle of tests, supplements, and more tests. Functional medicine's practitioners claim that they can reveal and treat so-called "root causes" of people's health problems

These are proposed to be things like gut health, toxin burdens, and various chemical and hormonal imbalances

They find these things with unproven tests

What you see here is called "lying"

It's what happens when someone's anti-competitive protections are under attack

CON laws are insane. Basically:

If you want to open a new medical practice somewhere, you have to get your potential competitors to sign off, saying you're needed

https://twitter.com/WVHospitals/status/2032101811058880759

If you want to add beds to a hospital, build facilities, purchase diagnostic scanners, but you live somewhere with CON laws, then you have to prove you're not creating competition for other medical facilities in the area, which is often the whole state.

No. Competition. Allowed.

Nutrition science is the area of science that's suffered the most in the replication crisis. It is a graveyard of theories and pseudoscientific bullshit.

Now:

The HHS is going to make doctors to sit through 40 hours of classes where they'll have to take that bullshit seriously.

https://twitter.com/KCKlatt/status/2031529247123321333

This reads like a list of the things that fared the worst in all of nutrition science and stuff with NO EVIDENCE.

When I read through this, my mouth was agape.

Whoever wrote this trash needs fired for incompetence. Mentally retarded people should not hold keep government posts.

You should be flexible and you should be strong.

Strength training is a highly effective way to improve your flexibility, and I've made a graphic to put this into understandable terms: This is from a meta-analysis of strength training trials.

What makes that so useful is that there's major publication bias for strength outcomes (pictured).

But, since authors weren't looking at it, there's no publication bias for flexibility outcomes.

State IQ maps are interesting because they mostly reflect racial demographic mix.

The much more interesting maps are the race-specific ones🧵

Here's a thread of county-level IQ maps by race. First up? Whites:

https://twitter.com/BecomingCritter/status/2031100071912038852

The next-biggest group? Hispanics:

"Without Mohammed, Charlemagne would have been inconceivable."

This quote summarizes Pirenne's thesis that the European Dark Ages began with the rise of Islam because it destroyed the flow of trade across the Mediterranean, ending Antiquity. The decline in trade that resulted from differences in faith had profound consequences for the economic geography of Europe.

Byzantine economic activity depended on trade, and it collapsed, whereas the Frankish economy, which was never trade-dependent, transformed.

In the effort to pull out ALL the stops against GLP-1RAs, we've gotten to...

'GLP-1s cause scurvy'

On a tangentially related note, do you know why scurvy and the Sicilian Mafia are related to why British are called "Limeys"?🧵

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/2020978601198321809

Do you know this man?

Some of you who are familiar with medicine no doubt do, but if you don't, no worries: This is James Lind, the man most often credited with finding the cure for scurvy.

Indeed!

This research directly militates against modern blood libel.

If people knew, for example, that Black and White men earned the same amounts on average at the same IQs, they would likely be a lot less convinced by basically-false discrimination narratives blaming Whites.

https://twitter.com/Mark___Taylor/status/2018515731277832342

Add in that the intelligence differences cannot be explained by discrimination—because there *is* measurement invariance—and these sorts of findings are incredibly damning for discrimination-based narratives of racial inequality.

So, said findings must be condemned, proscribed.