Links 7/16: Grad, Div, and URL
I’ve previously disagreed with the restrictions on suboxone prescribing. Now the Obama administration has relaxed some of those restrictions, almost tripling the number of suboxone patients doctors can treat from 100 to 275.
Very big (n = 15,000) Romanian study on sex differences in intelligence finds not only no mean difference, but no difference in variance.
Operation Cherry Blossoms At Night was an Imperial Japanese plan to release biological warfare agents in Southern California during World War II. There were actually lots of these plans, but a series of coincidences and setbacks prevented any of them from getting off the ground. Also, I feel like the name of that operation is another example of World War II’s hamhanded writing.
A previously unknown kind of low-grade inflammation might explain why anti-inflammatories like aspirin help prevent cancer. This is important because there are a lot of things which seem vaguely inflammatory but don’t work off the normal inflammatory systems we know about and the discovery of new forms of inflammation offers a lot of promise for understanding these.
It’s hard to lower my faith in humanity after – well, after 2016 – but the Twitter comments on this @dril tweet about the Keebler Elves might have managed. Warning: kind of high-context.
A political science journal experiments with triple-blind studies – ie those where peer reviewers judge the methodology before knowing the results and finds that it “encourages much greater attention to theory and research design, but raises thorny problems about how to anticipate and interpret null findings.”
The Paradox Of Disclosure – when surgeons disclose to their patients that their professional incentives may bias their recommendation to pursue surgery, this makes patients more likely to accept those recommendations. Linking to the Marginal Revolution commentary rather than the original for the spectacular pun at the end.
The National Holocaust Museum and Auschwitz Museum would like to remind you that it is insensitive to catch Pokemon on the premises.
The Big Question In Global Education is apparently why Vietnam breaks the trend of test scores tracking national development levels – Vietnamese students outperform their relatively weak economy. But this seems pretty easy to explain if we take a Hive Mind style approach where national intelligence levels determine national economic development levels, then adjust for the fact that Vietnam has been communist for a long time and so will economically underperform its IQ. China probably would have been the same kind of outlier twenty years ago.
Psychiatrist and psychodynamic therapist Nat Kuhn reviews my review of Unlearn Your Pain.
First evidence that genetically engineered mosquitoes can decrease disease from an experiment in Brazil where they helped reduce dengue fever > 90%.
How Not To Name Your Child: Five Golden Rules by Phoenicia Hebebe Dobson-Mouawad. I keep trying to convince my friends that giving your child a “unique” “meaningful” name might seem cool today, but that the kid may not share your aesthetics and will have to live with the results for the rest of their lives (or until they’re old enough to pay legal fees).
Reddit: one of Republican VP candidate Mike Pence’s many interesting characteristics is that his daughter has no reflection in mirrors.
Kentucky counties that ban alcohol see increased methamphetamine use, possible substitution effect.
Putting this one in the “no long-term effect of education” folder – whether you took high school courses in a subject has minimal effect on your grade in college courses on the same subject.
A Mormon multimillionaire wants to build a utopian planned city based on a sketch of Joseph Smith’s in the middle of Vermont.
Ethnic groups in Africa seem to have done about as well regardless of which side of artificial national borders they were on, suggesting that it’s ethnicity-specific factors rather than national institutionals which contributes more to success in Africa.
A randomized controlled trial in The Lancet finds that behavioral activation therapy is as good as cognitive behavioral therapy for depression, even though it’s a simpler subset of the latter. Some discussion on Reddit, including worries that it might solve the immediate issue but not give people the skills they need for later.
The deepest cave in the world, in Abkhazia, goes over a mile below the surface.
For some sort of tribal reason the hard left really hates the musical “Hamilton”. Also on the subject of the left being anthropologically interesting: Joan Walsh Is Not A Feminist.
David Chapman continues his long effort to convince us that there is a thing called meta-rationality and that it is very important.
Barack Obama’s half-brother will be voting for Donald Trump. Key quote: “Obama believes strongly in the institution of marriage — so strongly that he has at least three current wives, although press reports have put the number as high as 12.”
Racial dot map of the United States.
Population aging will decrease annual economic growth rates 1.2 percentage points this decade – note that this implies our economy is otherwise much stronger than we would think by comparing it to past years’ statistics. I’ve lost the study now, but I also remember seeing people claim that almost all of Japan’s recent stagnation is due to an aging population rather than more purely economic factors.
Related: Anonymous Mugwump does the literature review on immigration and open borders that so many of you have been wanting. Conclusion: economic effects of immigration relatively unequivocally good, main possible problem is that more open immigration decreases remittances that immigrants send to their home country.
Weird Sun Twitter now has a blog.