I do think it's worth noting that about 80% of selection on intelligence occurred exactly between 10,000 BC and 6500 BC, with with much less occurring since, and virtually none since 2500 BC. The fact that Steppe ancestry Europeans actually had lower than Neolithic farmer Europeans is pretty striking, and the fact that PGS scores for income and schooling have been under ~66% less intense selection is also pretty striking!

Mutations at the MTHFR gene are a huge cause of miscarriage.

We can reduce miscarriage due to the most common MTHFR mutation (C677) by ~60% using a decades-old medication.

Doctors don't prescribe it until after recurrent miscarriage.

Even though we can TEST FOR MTHFR. MTHFR is an abbreviation for methofolate or something sciency like that.

But since it's a gene responsible for a huge amount of killed babies and wrecked pregnancies and sad moms, I think of it as standing for, uh, something else.

Abortions after 32 weeks are a very small share of total abortions-- perhaps 0.5%. Let's say half of those are not due to unsurvivable conditions, so 0.25% of abortions are very late + could have survived if born.

Given ~1 million abortions, that's 2500 such abortions.

There were about 23,000 homicides in the US in 2023.

If that teeny tiny share of abortions covering very late abortions of totally viable kids without lethal health issues were counted, those extremely rare abortions would compose fully 1-in-10 homicides in the United States. In 2023, there were only 11,000 deaths of all external causes (accidents, homicides, etc) of people under age 18.

Abortions of health viable children make up 18% of all non-natural-causes deaths of children.

People commonly think that poor people have big families, and rich people have small ones.

They're wrong: most of the supposed high fertility of low-income people is just because of omitted variable bias, and the omitted variable is culture.

🧵🧵🧵 To understand what my point is, imagine two people. One of them wants 6 kids, the other wants 0 kids. Both currently have 0 kids.

Imagine they both win the lottery and become millionaires.

What will happen to their fertility rates?

Continuing a recent theme: some people believe high-fertility groups will eventually create a genetic preponderance in society. This is unlikely, let's explore a basic model of why, using realistic dynamics for genetic heredity of fertility. Here's what we know:

1) In recent cohorts, parent fertility DOES predict child fertility somewhat, and closer-related people do have correlated fertility, suggesting there IS heredity

2) In recent cohorts, 90%+ of heredity is environment-specific

Yesterday I tweeted that heritability of fertility would never lead to sustained fertility increase.

My view is correct, all the people assuming a breeder's hypothesis for fertility are wrong: fertility decline further in the past does not cause high fertility.

🧵🧵🧵 Let's talk about what would need to be true for a given community of people to pass on elevated fertility rates on a time horizon long enough to demographically swamp modern populations. The math here is not terrible complex.

It's amazing the places journalists are credulous and where they are skeptical.

Skeptical: @FT journalists very doubtful Hungary's policies could have worked

Credulous: @FT believing Hungary's claims about what they're spending
ft.com/content/3ea257… OECD's 2019 figures (last for Hungary, alas) say Hungary was spending 2.4% of GDP on family supports. Maybe it's doubled 2019-2024, but most of the programs described were already in full swing in 2019.

What do you call a man who shares in the load of tasks at home, supports his wife's career and other aspirations, and also tries to hold down a stable job to provide for his family?

According to @zackbeauchamp , a "neopatriarch." vox.com/politics/36660… Goofy label that sounds like the name of an obscure gundamsuit from that one series where it's just a giant robot battle tournament aside, @zackbeauchamp 's article is a weird attempt to recast a well-trodden scholarly concept ("flexible egalitarianism") as sexist.

Conservative men are more complimentary of their wives' housework than liberal men are, and conservative women are less critical of their husbands' housework than liberal women are.

Conservatives share housework better. Flipside here shows less difference

Body blows keep coming for UBI fans. $1k/month transfers had no effect on net worth or credit access. All the money was ploughed straight into consumption, recipients actually went more into debt.
nber.org/papers/w32784 For reference: most spending categories rose by similar percents: UBI recipients did NOT necessarily prioritize immediate needs. In fact, they disproportionately gave their UBI away.

Recently I read an article about the "loneliness of parenting." It struck me as really weird: parenting is a lot of things, but lonely? Parenting has me surrounded by people. It may be exhausting, busy, or many things... but lonely?

I thought it was a case of doomerism.
🧵🧵🧵 For Ruth and me, parenting isn't lonely. It draws us into lots of activities together, it connects us to other people we would never otherwise have met, it fills our life with children (ours and other peoples'), and empirically parents really do report less loneliness.🧵

i guess my take on the ballerina farm thing is that conservatives will absolutely never come out looking good when they let hostile reporters wanderer around their house for a few hours and judge their family, because the reporters are liberals who hate them.
thetimes.com/magazines/the-… i have no idea what the marriage dynamic is between the Neelemans and i really, really dislike the whole "branded tradwife" aesthetic and i object to the whole "ah, we just do humble homesteading" by people who are in fact wildly rich

I have not independently confirmed the data here. But a quick scan of it vs. some partial public sources suggests this is about right.

There are nearly as many illegal immigrants arriving each month as there are babies born in the entire country.

It has to stop.

https://twitter.com/fentasyl/status/1817933892914991297

I have always been very pro-immigrant. I hate how absurd our system is for immigrants, and they are a vital part of our society. Living abroad, it's nuts how hard we make it for people I KNOW would make wonderful Americans even visit here, let alone live here.

Right, it's a pun on the Feast of Dionysus, which is why the dancers are on both sides of the table like in the Feast of Dionysus painting, instead of on one side of the table, like the Last Supper painting.

you absolute nincompoops who believe this cope Thesis: It's the Last Supper and intentional blasphemy

Antithesis: It's the Feast of Dionysus and not about Christianity at all

Synthesis: It's a mockery of the Last Supper by intentionally swapping in Dionysian imagery into the obvious Last Supper scene

Teaching "mindfulness" in schools made kids more depressed and anxious.

Folks, the "treatments" are causing the disease. mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/25/3/1… Nice lay-accessible review of some of the evidence on "mindfulness" here: theconversation.com/meditation-can…

I've been critical of the WPP numbers for many years, but I want to offer, not a defense (I think they remain too rosy), but an explanation of what's going on, as I see a lot of people truly befuddled by what they see.

https://twitter.com/davidbessis/status/1811865695896186951

take a graph like this for argentina. looks pretty crazy right? let's get an idea where it comes from.

https://x.com/davidbessis/status/1811862468224000009

wowow, what a paper!

early-to-mid-imperial Roman economy in Britain generate ~0.5% annual growth rates from productivity gains alone, suggesting that Romans were experiencing genuine economic growth, not just agglomeration effects. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… HT @MTabarrok saw it on his blog here, which is a nice read:

I will say though I think the revolution Y/N framing is actually the mistake here.maximum-progress.com/p/romae-indust…

norse paganism was invented in response to christianity

send tweet

https://twitter.com/potamopotos/status/1808441666316947747

this tweet isn't literally true but it's waaaaaay closer to true than the "ancient deep origins of norse religion" nonsense the neopagans promote

This thread unfortunately is a result of the muddy waters around CUAA caused by the fact that CUAA stopped making complete IPEDS reports after 2017-18, and in particular, stopped reporting aggregated united financials.

In the thread below, I will remedy this deficit.

https://twitter.com/concoschulz/status/1805723240205369709

First, what is IPEDS?

IPEDS is a central database of higher education statistics run by the Department of Education which schools are required/encouraged to report various data to if they want to be federal-aid eligible.

there are 9,083 pastors on the LCMS roster (inc. retired)

of which 5,372 have an active assignment

there are 6,330 recorded LCMS churches

of which 4,489 have any pastor assigned to them

of those, 3,510 have at least one pastor assigned only to them

979 share pastors (this is an improved version of a tweet from yesterday)

for the curious LCMS layperson wondering about CU-Ann Arbor's situation: they haven't reported financials to the Department of Education since 2017/18, but here's how things look generally. the 2021 deficit is reported to be either $2.5, $5, or $9 million. from this public data it does seem like the merger failed to improve fiscal position for the university.