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.

How well-known is this?

A lot of the major pieces of civil rights legislation were passed by White elites who were upset at the violence generated by the Great Migration and the riots.

Because of his association with this violence, most people at the time came to dislike MLK. It's only *after* his death, and with his public beatification that he's come to enjoy a good reputation.

This comic from 1967 is a much better summation of how the public viewed him than what people are generally taught today.

The Pope, like his recent predecessors, is good to take this position: anti-Semitism is manifestly idiotic!

On that note, did you know that the Catholic Church was actually one of the biggest forces in stopping the rise of the Nazis?

It's true!🧵

https://twitter.com/Pontifex/status/2016111445478670685

You might say that the Catholics didn't vote for the Nazis because they had their own party: Zentrum.

This isn't the explanation.

Note: the Catholic Church opposed both forms of totalitarianism in Germany, but it had an asymmetric effect against the Nazis, not the Communists.

The researcher who put together these numbers was investigated and almost charged with a crime for bringing these numbers to light when she hadn't received permission.

Now we have an update that goes through 2020!

First: Where are Sweden's rapists from?

Mostly not Sweden.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1689720962466340866

What countries were those foreign rapists from?

We only got information on the top five origins, constituting roughly half of the foreign-born samples, and thus about a quarter of all the rapists.

There's an essentially fake talking point that medical advances are masking a substantial increase in the homicide rate.

But this talking point runs into the fact that all violent crime is down, not just homicides. You could say the assault rate decline would be greater and the homicide rate would be higher were it not for medical advances, but this is actually something that requires evidence beyond the supposition generated in the original paper making that case.

And it is supposition:

Greater Male Variability rarely makes for an adequate explanation of sex differences in performance.

One exception may be the number of papers published by academics.

If you remove the top 7.5% of men, there's no longer a gap! The disciplines covered here were ones with relatively equal sex ratios: Education, Nursing & Caring Science, Psychology, Public Health, Sociology, and Social Work.

Because these are stats on professors, this means that if there's greater male variability, it's mostly right-tail

One of the issues with understanding Greater Male Variability on IQ tests is that groups that perform better tend to show greater variance

Therefore, to estimate the 'correct' male-female gap, you need to estimate it when the difference is 0

In the CogAT, that looks like this: In Project Talent, that looks like this:

About a decade ago, a theory emerged:

If men do more of the housework and child care, fertility rates will rise!

Men have been doing increasingly large shares of the housework and child care.

Fertility is lower than ever. In fact, they're doing more in each generation, but fertility has continued to fall.

American military veterans have a suicide problem.

Some have theorized the reason is deployment-related trauma.

Leveraging the random assignment of new soldiers to units with different deployment cycles, Bruhn et al. found that was wrong.

Deployment did not increase suicides. Looking only at violent deployments (ones with peer casualties), there aren't noncombat mortality effects either.

What explains veteran suicide rates?

That aspect is probably not that unrealistic, unfortunately.

Across the OECD, on average, just 55% of 15-to-16-year-olds got this question right, and no country saw 80% get it.

Most people globally *do* struggle even reading simple tables. What else?

Thread.🧵

https://twitter.com/SakakiIsCute/status/2010615328674644233

That table-reading question is "Level 3", which, amazingly, corresponds to an already-high level of ability, by global standards.

This is a simpler Level 1 question, but with this, 92% of the OECD got it, including just 65% of Brazilians and 53% of Peruvians.

Credit card rewards are a great way to redistribute billions of dollars from people who are bad with money to people who are good with it.

With the advent of rewards cards (red), there's lots of cross-subsidization of people with high credit scores by people with low scores. Curiously, the degree of cross-subsidization is not just an income thing.

People with high incomes (green) and moderate incomes (yellow) take fewer rewards at low credit scores, although they take more at high credit scores.

The host of NPR's This American Life once tried to raise a pit bull with his now ex-wife.

He let the dog ruin his life🧵

He ended up getting it on Prozac and Valium, feeding it kangaroo and ostrich, and making excuses for the many times it would attack people. Ira Glass' wife had a dog before they got married, but it died right before the ceremony.

That dog was a pit bull and it was a rescue, so they decided it would be good to rescue another one.

Per him, it originally came with the "slave name" Marley, which he changed to Piney.

Pit bulls were bred to fight.

Animals in nature are not like that. Tigers and lions? They don't seek out combat. Nature doesn't seem to want to breed them into unrelenting killers.

This is why Britain banned the sport of "lion baiting"🧵

https://twitter.com/contiarchive/status/2006861245631312133

The nature of "baiting" is torment.

The idea is to put large, powerful animals like bulls or lions in the ring with several dogs, and the winner lives.

The sport has existed for thousands of years. One of our first records is of Indians showing it to Alexander the Great.