The Chinese Communist Revolution consolidated its power by taking land from the elite. In the following generation, the previous elite once again reclaimed their social advantage.

This is not an isolated phenomenon: A Thread on the persistence of status 🧵 The Cultural Revolution is one of the most extreme efforts of wealth equalization in all of human history, over 43% of all land assets were transferred to others. The goal was explicit: to eliminate income and wealth differences between the rich and poor in perpetuity.

Vision is expensive. One bit of information in a photo receptor costs 100x to 1000x more energy than in a synapse.

This adds up to ~4% of the entire body's energy budget.

A Story of Energy, Information, and Evolution (Thread 🧵) This is the base reality: The number of ATP molecules used to power transmission is much greater in photoreceptors and LMCs (A type of photocell in flies) than for a regular synapse.

In doing so each photoreceptor can make use of about 10^6 photons per second!

People with better childhood health are more Conservative; those with the best health were 16 percentage points more likely to be conservative than those with the worst.

This study also measured other attributes, academics.... Academics had the opposite effect in the attribute pathway model, with Adolescent Vigor being most strongly associated with conservatism and academics being most strongly associated with liberalism.

Mackenzie Scott has donated over 17.3 billion dollars of her and Bezos' divorce settlement. She just released a 2024 update.

So, where is the money going?

Top focus area: Race and ethnicity (39%)
Bottom focus area: Art (1-2%)

Here's the giving by focus area:

Thread 🧵 First, she got her wealth in early 2019 after her and Bezos' divorce. The value fluctuates with the stock price of Amazon, she, even now is worth more than 30 billion. (Forbes)

This is the SEED school, a 100% Black public boarding school in DC.

These disadvantaged students here enjoy a rigorous study schedule and a spending per student of 63000$ per year, comparable to some of the best schools in the country.

So, how and what do they do? Thread🧵 First SEED takes its unique place as being the first school of its kind, SEED was chartered almost 30 years ago and has been serving mostly Black kids in Washington DC.

It's difficult to compare the ability of a high schooler and a grade-schooler. Fortunately, the NWEA, a massive testing non-profit allows for fair comparisons between students of all ages.

Here are each grade's Math scores:

A thread on student ability and growth 🧵 Here are the distributions for Reading scores:

As you can see, there is slightly less reading growth overall, this is true for all grades.

Some dog breeds are smarter than others!

This data was compiled from a battery of dog-tailored cognitive tasks such as self-control, communication, and memory.

Let’s take a look at the genetic and evolutionary basis of dog intelligence 🧵 Smaller dogs have smaller brains; weight and brain size correlate very well.

Brain size and intelligence correlate at r=0.45. Correcting for measurement error and averaging among breeds we can infer a correlation of nearly 0.65.