Mathematicians in Renaissance Europe partook in academic duels to win one another's respect, students, assets, and academic positions.

A duel like this is how the cubic equation became known—the first real algebraic discovery since the Babylonians.

Let's talk angry Italians🧵

https://twitter.com/Jabaluck/status/1909751769711640615

The cubic equation was sought after by numerous ancient civilizations, from India to Greece, and despite attempts, a solution was never found

You're probably familiar with these equations, but they're of the form x^3 + cx = d

Without a squared term, we have a "depressed cubic"

I've written two articles on this topic.

I think I have a via negativa answer—one based on what does not cause the effect.

Firstly, the birth order effect shows up from the first surviving child. If a previous sibling died young, the "social firstborn" has the advantage Second, even in large samples, there's cross-cultural inconsistency.

In this case, researchers looked at immigrants to Norway and found that in some cases, their birth order effects were null or went the opposite direction.

Researchers put together an incredible workplace wellness program that provided thousands of workers with paid time off to receive biometric health screening, health risk assessments, smoking cessation help, stress management, exercise, etc.

What did this do for their health?🧵 So, for starters, this program had a large sample and ran over multiple years.

Because of it, we have evidence on what people do with clinical health info, with exercise encouragement and advice, with nutritional knowledge, through peer effects, and so on.

If the Trump administration wants to reshore economic activity, they need to increase the throughput of American ports or America will end up bottlenecked there.

They should subsidize port automation and crush the longshoremen union to make this happen.

Think about the effects: Another thing to keep in mind: knock-on effects!

If ports become more efficient, horrid arrangements like going to more distant ports to avoid waiting would come to an end, or at least be reduced in their extent:

India and China were both poorer than Sub-Saharan Africa in 1990, but they liberalized their economies and pulled away.

Sub-Saharan Africa seemingly refuses to grow and has gained less than $1,000 in GDP PPP per capita over the past three decades. Sub-Saharan Africa is the world's worst basket-case.

A very large share of the economies in the region are built on foreign aid, and even in relatively-prosperous South Africa, all growth from the 20th to 85th percentiles is due to redistribution!

The dual-use side of industrialization isn't just about the ability to convert one factory to another type of factory, but also about having the types of workers who know how to do that, and who know how to set up more factories.

Knowledge really does decay. Remember tritium? With everything nuclear-associated, China has a positive learning curve, meaning that they get better at producing the same things, with the same materials, once they've done it once, twice, thrice, etc.

But in the U.S., nuclear has been neglected; all nuclear knowledge decays.

The state of Louisiana has managed to reduce its Hepatitis C death rate by nearly a sixth in just a few years through a clever public health program🧵 Louisiana's success has to do with the recent development of a miraculous change in how Hepatitis C (HCV) is treated.

Prior to 2013, HCV was primarily treated with drugs like interferon and ribavirin, but the drugs were not consistently effective at clearing the virus.

We finally have large-scale cross-sectional functional connectome scans for people aged young and old.

The finding that was most interesting to me in all this is that the brain's functional connectome seems to grow until about age 38, whereafter it starts shrinking. Ignore the tails, because they're impacted by variance.

But speaking of, it seems that the global variance in the form of the connectome also grows until about age 28, whereafter it starts becoming less variable.

Pirenne's thesis holds that Antiquity—the period when economic activity concentrated in the Mediterranean—ended because the rise of Islam destroyed the flow of trade across it. 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.

Does sugar make people fat?

That's the thesis of tons of books, articles, and bits of popular writing, but is it true?

The answer seems to be "no", but the cross-sectional evidence suggests it's "yes". Why? Because people believe the answer is "yes"!🧵

Consider this data: In 2000, the U.S. government began warning people against consuming foods containing added sugars.

In 2011-12, Gary Taubes started promoting his view that sugar "sets the stage for epidemic levels of obesity and diabetes".

When people heard this, they changed habits.

Here's a fun question to start the thread🧵

What differentiates the countries in orange from the countries in blue?

Why did the orange countries plunge into ultra-low fertility, while the blue ones have maintained themselves better? The countries in the first set are "Group 1 Nations". In the second set, they're "Group 2 Nations".

Notice anything about their growth rates? One thing is that they've all grown to similar enough levels.

Another is the acceleration of the pace of growth.

Timeline's feeling down. Thread of good news.

At every age, the incidence of dementia is down. As a society, people are no longer suffering dementia nearly as often! The world over, child mortality is way down. It's unusual for parents to experience the death of a child these days, where even a century ago, it was the global norm.

Which is more impressive for China, its

GDP Per Capita, or its

Actual Individual Consumption Per Capita (AIC is a superior measure of how rich its people actually are. It's based on how much they really consume)

Answer is below. Here's the GDP Per Capita data.

There's a common type of misunderstanding that sounds like this:

"If taller people tend to be more educated, and women tend to be shorter than men, how do you explain women tending to be more educated?"

The issue has to do with intercepts. Consider this plot: You can see that, among Whites, women tend to be shorter than men, and they tend to have lower earnings.

But at the same time, to similar degrees in both sexes, taller people tend to have higher earnings.

Perplexed? You shouldn't be.

Debate about the value of essays in college admissions missed a key point:

Essays are biased, so should not be used.

Here's an example: High-income people know 'what to write' to look good to raters, so they outperform on essays relative to their other qualifications. This shows up by race, too, and that's why admissions departments use essays to infer race for the express purpose of discriminating.

Write that you're Black; that you grew up as a poor immigrant; that you're gay or a cripple.

They love that!

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1831462361049526685

A new meta-analysis and systematic review on the effects of social media abstinence interventions on mental health has been published.

First result: No effect on positive affect: Second result: No effect on negative affect.

Happy Autism Awareness Day! I think too many people are 'aware' of autism.

Have you ever met someone who claims to be autistic, but they've never been diagnosed?

Self-reported autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is practically uncorrelated with real, clinician-diagnosed autism🧵 Sort self-reporters into those with high and low ASD scores, and you get the bars on the left. The "high-trait" self-reporters look like people with diagnosed autism (ASD column).

But they're more socially anxious (middle) and avoidant (right).

Someone asked me why Singapore is so poor relative to its high GDP, and I realized she was only familiar with European and Caribbean tax havens.

But if you have an eye on Asia, you'll realize that Singapore is often among the top three tax havens!

2015-19, it was #2! That means it suffers the same problems countries like Ireland, Luxembourg, and Switzerland do.

They're well-off, sure. But they are much less well-off than their GDP levels indicate.

Contrarily, the U.S., U.K., Germany, and China? They're victims!

Ending Credentialism could mark the beginning of an era of American rebirth, with benefits for everyone🧵

For starters, it could mean young people get to enjoy more of their adult lives being adults:

https://twitter.com/sailaunderscore/status/1906555993758048554

Ending credentialism means affirmative action will become less harmful, and you can be more confident that your doctor is qualified rather than someone who replaced a qualified person in the pipeline.

I just updated one of my articles a second time.

It has to do with Justice Jackson's comments that when Black newborns are delivered by Black doctors, they're much more likely to survive, justifying racially discriminatory admissions.

We now know the study contained fraud🧵 The original article claimed that, when Black babies are attended to by Black physicians, their infant mortality rates decline substantially relative to when they have a White physician.

Justice Jackson cited this in the Supreme Court, even though it was implausible.

Thread of natural sources of different medications.

We can thank the Gila Monster for modern GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic
Ziconotide is a powerful non-opioid painkiller used by people who have severe chronic pain that's resistant to other forms of treatment.

It was discovered in the venom of killer Cone Snails.