Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Prior post: Rise and fall of empires: genetic version? (2017) I found this stuff a while ago, and tweeted it, but I wanted to save it properly so it doesn’t get forgotten again. Blogging is extended memory. I reckon my mortality risk at Twitter is about 30% each year. Accounts have been banned for less….
Continue ReadingBecause on this blog we love anything that has to do with calipers. The most obscure weapon in the HBD arsenal? Goes like this: Figure from this 2015 study. Alright, so we see that males have a lot bigger distance than women, so we figure this has something to do with sex differentiation and thus…
Continue ReadingI for one welcome our new vaccines. I think the transhumanist angle to this has not been properly spelled out, so let’s give it a shot. Humans come with two main parts of our immune system. You can watch the Kurzgesagt to get the basics. First is that there’s a passive part that uses heuristics…
Continue ReadingI know some people are who are into conspiratorial thinking about COVID vaccines. Bill Gates trying to decrease your fertility stuff. Anyway, so I did the science thing, that is, I used a neutral search on an academic search engine to locate actual data on the question. Specifically, Google Scholar with the query “Covid vaccine…
Continue ReadingSo why trust science? I would say I am a proud supporter of scientism, crude versions aside. Naomi Oreskes is a prominent science historian who mostly writes history books attacking climate skepticism and Big Capitalism. But now she has a new brief book defending science. Actually, some of the main content is about attacking how…
Continue ReadingThis is a pretty good book. It covers a lot of basics, and gets almost everything right. Twins, adoptees, genomics are given ample attention. Mitchell is very interesting in developmental randomness, so this point gets a lot of coverage. Good! Not many people accept this. The book is fine on sex differences too, and even…
Continue ReadingI wrote to the lead editor of the Danish Statistics Agency on mortality data (Dorthe Larsen) on the 14th April to ask why their public mortality database is not up to date (data ends in 2019). I told her I wanted to look for evidence of excess mortality from COVID-19, and sent her an example…
Continue ReadingEvery day, I post the updated Danish COVID-19 hospitalization data on Twitter and Facebook The latest version is always available at https://rpubs.com/EmilOWK/COVID19_Denmark. The raw data are here. The figures for March 26th look like this: Why track hospitalizations instead of cases? Because the number of true cases is practically unknown due to lack of large-scale…
Continue ReadingIt is by now obvious that there are some quite large differences in how much of an impact COVID-19 is having. As usual with social science, the evidence is a bit of a mess and there’s no good randomized controlled trials. With that caveat, here’s some factors that probably contribute to the variation. Measuring COVID-19…
Continue ReadingSee also previous 2017 post. I have been repeatedly asked about this topic, so here is a post that covers the basics. The argument goes like this: Affirmation action is used in admission to medical schools, i.e. they practice race quotas in favor of less intelligent races, in particular blacks and hispanics, and discriminate against…
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