Studies of European countries also pretty routinely have Finland as the highest-IQ nation in Europe. (Here is the first example that Google came up with, but there's more than one study showing this: https://jakubmarian.com/average-iq-in-europe-by-country-map/). However, note that a huge number of cross-country IQ comparison studies have been done by the notorious Northern Irish academic Richard Lynn -- very often accused of racism -- in collaboration with his lesser-known partner Tatu Vanhanen, who is Finnish.
(Note that by some measures of intelligence, like Nobel Prizes or mathematics prizes, Finns don't really stand out, though they're a much smaller country than you think. By prizes per capita they usually just show up as "normal Europe").
The World Happiness Report has shown Finland as the happiest country in the world for the past several years consecutively, and it's always been near the top: https://worldhappiness.report/
There are other weird anomalies associated with Finland -- for example, Finland is often the country in Europe with the largest percentage of its population willing to fight to defend it: https://brilliantmaps.com/europe-fight-war/
So, uh, maybe we should be eating licorice. Then again, maybe not.
~~
Are there a priori reasons to think Finns might be noticeably different from other white people? Finnish genetics (...and Estonian) is actually notably different from that of other European countries because of the presence of a large Paleosiberian component: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07483-5
Note that Finns are the product of a genetic bottleneck at some point in the last few millennia, such that there are a number of autosomal recessive diseases that are basically unique to Finns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_heritage_disease
So maybe they *are* different. Lastly, here's Twitter HBD theorizer crimkadid, who's been discussed here before, speculating that a possible evolutionary reason Finns might have higher IQs than their neighbors is that they're very weird as a northern people whose traditional diet is very low on fish, causing them (...per this theory) to be under especially heavy selection against schizophrenia-promoting alleles: https://twitter.com/crimkadid/status/1270554374801145856
As part of this theory crimkadid suggests that Finns have higher schizophrenia rates than other Europeans, which he has citations for and some studies show, but far from all -- ie, Wikipedia's page on relative schizophrenia risk by country suggests that Finland clocks in at basically "normal European" rates.
Another confounder with finnish cognitive ability is their excellent primary education system, considered by many to be the best in the world. This is somewhat problematic if you assess cognitive ability during school years, and highly problematic if you look at PISA scores.
An issue with nobel prizes is that variance matters much more than average for very high achievement. And second, the political history of Finland biases the results downward. For one thing, they couldn't win any prizes before 1918 when they become independent. By that time, their neighbor Sweden had already won 6 prizes. And of course it took some time for Finland to build up a strong independent intellectual community after independence.
Okay, where is your proof that it's excellent? Every time I see somebody praising their schooling system, it basically amounts to "their students get good scores, therefore their school system is good, and its good because [insert pet education policy here]".
AT BEST, you can say its difficult to know how much of their performance is due to inherent cognitive ability and how much is to do with schooling system, but even that's being charitable considering the lack of evidence for school differences having this much impact on performance after controlling for student factors.
And the people championing Finland's "great education system" are the sort of people who thinks america education system is terrible.....despite the fact that once you control for race, the US actually does BETTER on PISA than Finland does: https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/
I think one strong argument that their primary schooling system is great is that their PISA scores are much better than any other measures of intellectual performance, like number of triad patents, number of Nobel prizes per capita etc.
I did some work in the education research field when I was younger, and the consensus was quite strong that Finland had the best system for a variety of reasons. The strongest is the qualifications and training of their teachers, which is a prestigious job that requires a master's degree and where you are expected to follow the newest research on education, like a medical doctor would be.
And I think the race argument is weak. For one thing the proportion of western European ancestry is higher in African Americans and Finns, which underscores how problematic grouping by "race" is, especially when comparing the US to other countries. Second, it is always cheating to compare total scores from one country with selected scores from other countries. If you want to make the comparison fair, you should at a minimum exclude the underperfoming Sami and Swedish minorities from the Finnish samples as well.
My own personal experience is also that Americans arrive in college with a pitiful understanding of many subjects, including math, compared to Nordic universities. And I have only really had significant exposure to first-year students from MIT and Berkeley, who should be somewhat above average. American higher education is very high quality though.
There's also Canada, which is genetically very diverse, but has very high PISA rankings. While you might try to explain the success of CJK, Finland/Estonia and maybe even Poland by some sort of innate abilities of the predominant ethnic groups, this can't explain the success of Canada.
The predominant ethnic groups of Canada are northern Europeans, and following that is Asians, especially north-east asians. And Asian immigration has been highly selective, which means its heavily skewed towards high IQ asians (its not a representative sample of their ancestral population). It may be hard to explain fine-grained differences between Canada and other high scoring nations on this basis, but broadly speaking it would be very strange if Canada weren't consistently close to the top based on their population.
If you disaggregate by ethnic group, U.S. PISA rankings are some of the best in the world. If I recall, U.S. Asians score second only to cherry-picked Chinese students from the richest regions. And U.S. Asians include Southeast Asians.
If you took only U.S. whites and Asians, scores would be higher than Canada.
"However, note that a huge number of cross-country IQ comparison studies have been done by the notorious Northern Irish academic Richard Lynn -- very often accused of racism -- in collaboration with his lesser-known partner Tatu Vanhanen, who is Finnish."
Lynn is extremely sloppy in his methodology, and combine that with my suspicions that he's a Unionist/pining for the days of Empire type, that doesn't make for good results.
I've lambasted him elsewhere for his "the Paddies are dumber than the loyal Celts of the United Kingdom who are dumber than the pure Anglo-Saxons of London" results, which led to years of uncritical parroting of his "The Irish have a mean IQ of 93" even by Irish sources, until suddenly by some magic we rose up to normal mean of 100 during the boom years, but have someone else critiquing his work:
Lynn thinks we're dumb(er) in part because we're Catholic and in part because the smarter ones emigrated (and why was that, Richard? What country presided over our economic repression?):
"Previous studies have shown that the mean IQ in the Republic of Ireland is 93 in relation to 100 for Britain and the rest of central and northern Europe. New evidence is presented giving an IQ of 88.3 in Ireland and therefore confirming this estimate. It is proposed that the causes of this lower IQ lies principally in the selective emigration of those with higher IQs over the course of several generations, with a smaller contribution from the dysgenic effect of Roman Catholicism."
Alas! If only we had been good loyal subjects of the Crown and converted to Protestantism like they had tried and tried to make us do for centuries! Why, we could have been as smart as the Scots (overall mean IQ of 97) or the Welsh (overall mean IQ of 98)!
I *do* like how the more he (or rather, somebody else) tests us, the dumber we get - he estimated mean IQ of 93 on tests from the 70s, but "more recent" bring us down to 88. Rum, Romanism and Rebellion to blame, no doubt, the longer indulged in, the worse for us! 😈
Another researcher has said the gain in IQ is in line with the Flynn Effect worldwide:
"Using data from Gill and Byrt's 1972 standardization of the Ravens Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM) on a national sample of Irish primary school children, O'Connor & Ruddle's 1987 survey of a large sample of school children in Clare and Jeffer's and Fitzgerald's 1989 survey of 9-12 year olds in a Dublin suburb, we found that over the period from 1972-1989 the mean gain in IQ points on the RSPM was approximately 9 IQ points. This gain of about 0.6 standard deviations in IQ points has occurred in both a rural and an urban area. The 9 IQ point gain over about 16 years is comparable to the 18 IQ point gain that has been observed on culture reduced tests over the 30 year period between 1950-1980 in 14 of the world's advanced economies."
I do wonder how much of that is down to "culture reduced tests", i.e. difference in both tests and testing between 1972 and 1989, but that's a question for another time.
It's a good thing Lynn is old enough now that his career is basically over, because his "dumb Paddies" thesis comes closer to being refuted every day. A recent paper (https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-pokropek.pdf) showed that at least within Poland, PISA scores mostly reflect g. Granted, it's possible that this relationship doesn't hold in other countries, including Ireland. But steelmanning the case for: Ireland's math PISA scores are neck and neck with the UK's, their science scores aren't too far behind (and are ahead of several mostly Protestant countries considered to be bright, like Denmark), and their reading scores are higher than the UK's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#PISA_2018_ranking_summary), yet Irish people are somewhere between 7-12 IQ points below English people, just got harder. Not to mention that if Ireland's national IQ truly is somewhere between 88-93, other countries with comparable national IQs should be trying to copy their incredible educational success! They're punching so far above their IQ weight class that we should be figuring out what they're doing right and helping other middle-IQ countries copy it! As far as I know, Lynn has never advocated for this approach, which makes me question how much he really believes his own claims.
This is why I am very dubious about the HBD stuff; not that there are not differences between populations, but when we get the "Science proves that population are just naturally dumber than population B, sorry I don't make the rules" type of discussion around it.
I see well-intentioned people repeating the whole "The Irish went up a whole 10 points in IQ" and trying to puzzle out the effects of the Celtic Tiger and prosperity on this amazing progress, and it makes me grind my teeth (my dentist disapproves) because "You are basing this on results which, in any other discipline, would be taken as the sign of a quack".
Now, there's a couple of things going on. I'm not claiming we're neglected geniuses, I'm sure there are very stupid Irish people out there and plenty of 'em. But pedagogical styles, I submit, have changed vastly over the past few decades and this does make a difference. When I was a nipper, the New Maths (and the New Teaching in general) was coming into the schools, and it did make a big difference (not for my maths learning, I'm useless at that always no matter the instruction).
It was rather like the Benezet experiments, instead of learning by rote, now the *process* was being taught, of teaching how to think about the problems. I do think this made a big difference between testing kids in the 1970s and then testing again later in the 1980s. Also, the first tests may not have been as 'culture blind' as the testers imagined. And Lynn just took three separate tests (which he had not administered himself) and mashed the results together to get his 'mean figure of 93'.
Under the veneer of scientific objectivity, there are political biases and axes being ground, and every time I read Richard Lynn on the Irish, I hear in the background the faint strains of "The Sash My Father Wore"
It's just that little bit *too* convenient that the test results stack up so nicely with London on the top and the Paddies on the bottom, with the descending scale of "the further away from the big city, the dumber", you know?
I think we probably have better education, better pedagogy, more resources for kids with learning and other problems (when I was in primary school, dyslexia was not a thing; you were just stupid and that was it, for instance), and that of course prosperity helped with all this, including living conditions, and the improvement in test results is like other countries, with the Flynn Effect in full flow.
>Under the veneer of scientific objectivity, there are political biases and axes being ground, and every time I read Richard Lynn on the Irish, I hear in the background the faint strains of "The Sash My Father Wore"
Funny how you think that applies only to the likes of Lynn and not the millions of know-nothing liberals who are adamant that IQ isn't a valid thing and there are no population differences in intelligence, all without even being able to define what the g factor is
I remembered vaguely knowing Poland did well in PISA and checked the rankings, but #10-#11 (or #3-#4 excl Asia)?
Also, I was curious how this test looks like, and got this:
LANGUAGE POLICY
In the country of Armaz, the majority of citizens speak the official language, Ursk. A group of Ursk-speaking lawmakers have proposed a policy that would require all classes in the country’s public elementary and secondary schools to be taught only in Ursk. The only exception would be foreign language classes. A number of citizens in Armaz who speak a minority language, Jutanese, are concerned about the proposed policy.
A Jutanese-speaking student researched other countries that have similar policies regarding instruction in the official language. The following statements describe some of the information he found.
Do these statements support the proposed policy to teach all classes in the one official language of Ursk? Click on either Yes or No for each statement.
----
Does this statement support the proposed policy to teach all classes in one official language?
1. Students who receive instruction in two or more languages show higher levels of academic achievement than those who are taught in a single language.
2. Students who do not learn a country’s official language are less likely to finish school.
3. Students who learn a country’s official language are more likely to function well in society and find a good job.
4. Encouraging students to learn multiple languages helps support a more diverse society.
------
That #4 question... well, I guess it's still a proxy for IQ in a way; higher IQ probably correlates with realizing which answer is expected. Still, it seems like a pretty thoughtlessly prepared test.
>Lynn thinks we're dumb(er) in part because we're Catholic and in part because the smarter ones emigrated (and why was that, Richard? What country presided over our economic repression?):
You sound like a reasonable, level headed person making a sober judgement free from ideological axes to grind.
This is a bad-faith, non-argument. His science is either valid or it isn't. "Racist" is just a slur that has not place in these discussions. It's literally no better than accusing evolutionary biologists of hating Christianity or climate scientists of being motivated by a desire for socialism or something. The work is valid or it isn't, calling people "racist" is not helpful, especially considering that the majority of people on the left consider this kind of research to be *categorically* "racist" by its very definition. So "racism" becomes a bludgeon to silence people doing work that contradicts liberal narratives.
>Yes, the Finns are the European country that most consistently performs well on international PISA tests:
In most cases I'd agree, but when designing studies for testing national IQs racial bias (i.e. racism) is quite relevant. If you asked someone with a clear racial bias (say, a nationalist) to evaluate IQs from different countries, that racial bias is likely to show up in the science.
As an aside was surprised to learn above that Finland is one of the happiest countries. According to Wikipedia they have one of the highest suicide rates among developed countries - only south Korea is significantly worse (I can see why), and Belgium / USA are about same or sliver higher (kinda surprised by Belgium...).
Also, note that the *kind* of black licorice that Finns eat -- stereotypically in ridiculous quantities -- is a concoction called "salmiakki", which is licorice flavored with ammonium chloride, an old-timey cough medication, causing it to taste so excessively salty that it seems bitter to many who try it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salty_liquorice
(Regular black licorice is *extremely* sweet, since glycyrrhyzin is ~50 times as sweet as regular sugars per Wikipedia, but the Finns cover this up with ammonium chloride so that it does not taste sweet at all. Your tastes may vary.)
This BBC article mentions in passing that Finns who leave the country often take huge amounts of salmiakki with them -- while I doubt that it's literally addictive eating decently large amounts seems to be not that weird: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24303423
I met two patients in my career who had resistant hypertension, and when I asked if they ate a lot of licorice, indicated that they loved the stuff. BP problem resolved!
I know! I've had to give up *everything* with licorice in, and I love licorice 🙁
I have to be careful even with herbal teas, because many of them contain licorice as a flavouring, and I've found by experience that drinking them does make my blood pressure go "whoosh!"
Fun fact: if you're pregnant, and want to follow best practice, you can avoid drinking alcohol _and_ avoid consuming licorice at the same time by specifically not drinking salmiakki-infused vodka: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmiakki_Koskenkorva
(If you're not pregnant, and have no other risk factors, you owe it to yourself to try this dark nectar of the gods if you get the chance)
It would be a genius play, though, if it lined up! Shame it's too long. (I was thinking Hangman, myself, but word games definitely cam to mind immediately on seeing so few vowels.
For all that, it has a simple and reasonable etymology. "Glyco" or "glycy" is routinely used for words related to sweet tastes (e.g. glucose, glycolysis, hypoglycemia), from the Greek work for "sweet," and "rhiz" (root) also from the Greek is used for (many fewer) words related to roots (e.g. rhizome). So "Glycyrrhiza" = sweet-root as the name of the genus is pretty logical.
I'm surprised you're not giving air pollution higher billing. Alex Tabarrock made a 5 minute video about a difference-in-difference paper showing car exhaust having all sorts of bad outcomes. And when I looked at the cited study right now it claimed there exists a "somewhat smaller literature focusing specifically on the relationship between residential proximity to busy roadways and poor pregnancy outcomes". I have no idea how tractible this stuff is or whether it necessitates e.g. moving apartments during the pregnancy if you're near a freeway, or whether there are easier interventions.
Yeah I'm not a medical Dr but I've been working on PAH studies and like, yikes. Smoking is really really really bad for you. Living next to a busy road... exposes you to *similar* levels of lung pollutants as smoking. Not, usually, as bad, but still very bad and in some cases a shockingly high pollutant load. Also very hard to measure accurately what you're exposed to, because that depends on eg do you have any air filters in your house (and do they help much), how much time do you spend outside, etc.
But yeah air pollution is generally very bad for you. I wouldn't want to raise kids in LA.
If older kids does better in school, could not a nation improve the education of their entire population by delaying the age kids start in school? So instead of people going to school for example from age 6 to 18, they go to school from age 7 to 19.
Better educated people are better at lying to themselves and justifying whatever they want to do regardless of whether the thing they want to do is good or bad.
So, assuming you're calling trump a "fascist" here, does that mean Trump's voters were disproportionately black and hispanic? You've just shot yourself in the foot taking this absurd line.
White liberals and black liberals are at the opposite ends of the academic ability spectrum and broadly speaking they vote for the same people, so your hypothesis is completely, unequivocally false (even by whatever silly standards of "bad people" you're using here).
It is possible for there to be more than one factor that makes people less likely to vote for a fascist.
Better education makes a people less likely to vote for a fascists. Being black in USA makes a person less likely to vote for a fascist, as fascists in the USA tend to be white racists.
A bit facetious, but I do have to point out that fascism may be quite good indeed at building countries (in short term) , because total focus / efficiency etc. Mussolini making trains go on time (it's mostly myth I know I k ow), Hitler getting autobahn built, China catching up to us economically now (they may not technically be fascist I know I know)...
What you're really saying is you hate white people, and they need to be brainwashed at colleges to stop being so evil. Just so we're all 100% clear what's happening here.
That seems dubious. If that were true, better educated people would be much less likely to fall for scams and financial fraud, or lose money on complex investments that border on fraudulent -- and e.g. Enron and Bernie Madoff would argue quite the contrary, that quite often the more educated person is *more* susceptible to social psychological fraud, especially big and complex frauds, because his education persuades him (inaccurately) that he's too smart to be snookered.
It might be different if "education" meant some significant degree of instruction on, say, the history of frauds, on persuasive techniques and deception, propaganda and psychological warfare -- but it doesn't. And it's hard to see how a BA in French literature or a BS in computer science with a strong focus on Java programming can better equip you mentally to detect mind games.
When I was in school I learned about how the Nazis came to power in Germany, and the results of that. I believe such education makes a person less likely to vote for a Nazi or similar.
I find this intriguing because I also learned in school about how the Nazis came to power and one thing I clearly remember being taught was how many well educated upper echelon type Germans supported the Nazis. Same a little later for the well educated and their support for the USSR and other forms of authoritarian leftistsm. I wish education did inoculate against support for totalitarianism but history doesn't seem to demonstrate that it does.
I would expect the frequency of the well-educated falling victim to scams to be heavily confounded by them being more likely to have enough wealth to be worth scamming in the short term. There's certainly no shortage of scams that target the poorly educated.
One common (the standard?) explanation for the "older kids does better in school" effect is that at first they do better because they're on average half a year older than everyone else, this initial taste of winning make them like school/schoolwork/sports, which causes them to dedicate themselves more, which *then* causes them to legit be better.
That seems plausible for sports. But with schoolwork you don't necessarily know how well the other students are doing.
With math in particularly if you don't learn the easy stuff, it gets hard to learn the harder stuff. (This is a tangent, but I think math education for kids should be treated differently than other subjects. One should test the kids very thoroughly to see if they understand the math and not move them on to the next level if they don't.) Also being bad at reading makes it harder to learn almost anything.
I'd say most kids know. The ones that develop a model of themselves as "smart" typically really did perform well early on. There are presumably others who also performed well and didn't realize it, but they wouldn't contribute one way or the other to the average.
Speaking from personal anecdote: I wasn't oldest kid (actually was usually youngest as skipped couple grades) but can attest how doing well at school early on can easily become a self-reinforcing loop - getting praise from teachers / being known among other kids as the one with the good grades and who to go to to ask questions created both motivation and pressure to continue to perform well and hence redoubled efforts. I can totally see how if I was bottom of the class early on I could've concluded that studying wasn't for me and refocused my energy / hopes on being good at sports or something. Btw yeah conversely I was the smallest kid and hence sucked at sports and hence never even tried to do well there.
But then you have 1 less productive year from each human lifetime. Take it to the extreme, if people studied from 6 to 56, they would absolutely crush the high school algebra, but...
No, you have exactly the same amount of unemployment, but its moved to beginning of their schooling career instead of after it. You still have less stuff being produced, which means the country is poorer, which means unemployment may actually end up being higher overall.
That's more or less what California did when the Schwarzenegger administration pushed up the cutoff birthdate for school registration from December 1 to September 1. Kids with birthdays between the old and new cutoffs get a year of "Transitional Kindergarten" before starting regular Kindergarten the following year.
My father did this.. for n=1 I think it "worked" in that I always excelled in school, but perhaps led me to overconfidence of my IQ.. also if it does work its adversarial/0sum and definitionally couldn't work for everyone
Just a random point about licorice: perhaps it's a self-feeding cycle, but if you get a candy bag in Finland and it's not specifically "fruit candy only", "chocolates only", self-selected etc. it usually contains at least 1/2-1/3 black licorice candies. That might contribute to the high ratio of formally consumed licorice here.
> Most of these studies are small and weak - and did you know that Tylenol is a deadly poison to cats? Doesn’t really bode well for inter-animal transferability of results.
I’m sure Scott is aware of acetaminophen toxicity, but not sure if it is poisonous in the same way in humans and cats. In humans (and most mammals), it’s only poisonous once the main detox pathway gets filled up, like if your house’s plumbing is backed up so water decides to invade your bedroom instead. Similarly, Tylenol is safe until large doses are consumed. Idk much about cats but apparently they don’t have the normal “plumbing” at all (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340185/) so not quite a comparable situation.
Cats are notorious for not being able to metabolize toxins that other mammals can handle just fine in reasonable doses. Carnivores in general tend to be worse at metabolizing toxins than omnivores and herbivores, presumably because they didn't need to evolve to survive eating lots of plants that contain chemicals that need special metabolic handling (c.f. onions, chocolate, and grapes being toxic to dogs), but cats are a whole different level.
Most notably, pyrethin insecticides are mostly harmless to almost all land vertebrites. It's a respiratory irritant if inhaled in quantity which can trigger asthma attacks, one or two particular chemicals in the class are semi-common allergens, and large doses can overwhelm the metabolic pathways that deal with it, but it's safe enough to be a common active ingredient in flea & tick products for dogs, for lice shampoos for children, and residual spray insecticides for indoor use. But cats' ancestors somehow lost the metabolic pathway, so they're much more vulnerable to it than most other mammals, or birds, or reptiles.
This, incidentally, is why you should be very, very careful using "for dogs" flea treatments on or around cats: these usually contain pyrethins in doses that are perfectly safe for dogs but acutely toxic to cats.
Tylenol seems to be a bit from column A and a bit from column B: Tylenol is more toxic to dogs than to humans (adjusted for body weight) by a factor of 1.5x to 3x (100 mg/kg toxic dose in dogs, 150-300 mg/kg in humans), but it's about 10x as toxic to cats as to dogs (10 mg/kg toxic dose). It's occasionally used therapeutically for dogs, although other painkillers are generally preferred as safer relative to effectiveness and it's vitally important to consult with a vet to get the dosage right (normal human dosages being deadly to dogs due to combination of body weight and metabolic differences), but it should pretty much never be used for cats.
Mom of a college student here. My 1st thought upon browsing this, was "I wonder how many things I did wrong". Even so many years later, this instinct is strong! My son had many food allergies and asthma, all of which I squarely blamed myself for (things like peanuts and eggs that I ate in pregnancy, despite being from a family with food allergies - just didn't know better).
"Even though food allergies are influenced by a lack of exposure to certain foods, food allergies don’t develop as a result of foods mothers eat, or avoid, during pregnancy. So, rest assured that your food choices during pregnancy will not cause your baby to develop a food allergy. Rather, food allergies develop due to other genetic and environmental factors."
Plus, there are things like peanut oil in creams etc:
"Look out for arachis oil (refined peanut oil), groundnut or peanut oil. These can be found sometimes in baby massage oils, moisturisers, nappy rash creams, ear drops and shampoos designed to treat cradle cap."
So go easy on yourself, you can't know everything.
Thanks! I guess my point was guilt and motherhood seem closely intertwined somehow. Rationally, I agree with you that I couldn't have known everything. But emotionally, anything bad that happens to your child feels like your fault. It is not just me. Seems true almost universally in my medium sized sample space of mom friends.
I'm not sure why you would blame yourself for your son's allergies because you had peanuts while pregnant. The evidence suggests the opposite is the case: the kids born of women who avoid peanuts while pregnant tend to have a significantly higher chance of developing peanut allergies.
It's also true that eating oily fish reduces coronary heart disease, but we have not got such good evidence for fish oil capsules. So eating the real thing is likely best, but remember the bigger and longer-lived species will have more mercury - tuna and salmon. Best go with herring, mackerel, sardines and trout.
The one my mother always mentioned (and yes I realize that sounds like a totally random source, but in this case my mother has a doctorate in maternal & child health from Johns Hopkins and worked in the field for many years) was the benefit of a [healthy] high-calorie diet during pregnancy. The idea is that evolutionary factors would then 'teach' [is this epigenetics?] the fetus that it lived in times of plenty, leading to a higher metabolism, which is a good thing in the modern world. Anecdotally my siblings and myself are all thin without any real effort, although my mother (albeit not my father) is also like that so it could be purely genetic. Has anyone run across this idea elsewhere, preferably with some data?
Currently there's emphasis on not gaining too much weight during pregnancy, but Emily Oster argues there should be more concern about not gaining enough weight, since low birth weight is definitely linked with all kinds of health problems.
Thanks! - this all makes sense although I'd still love to see research on calories per se (rather than eg weight, since for instance one can also exercise more). But it does seem like the key aspect is not to deprive / limit oneself.
One thing that you might want to mention is the difference between the *dosage* of different types of choline -- i.e., 500 mg of choline bitartrate is not the same as 500 mg of "choline", and in particular is not the same as 500mg of choline chloride. Caudill et al uses Choline chloride, while Jacobson et al uses Choline bitartrate -- and therefore the dosages aren't directly comparable, so you probably shouldn't be directly comparing them.
It may seem like a no-brainer to do embryo selection via SNPs, if you're already going to do IVF. It's a much different story if you weren't planning on IVF in the first place. IVF is associated with higher de novo mutation counts above the rate expected based on parental age. It has an effect equivalent to roughly 6 years of paternal age or 12 years of maternal age in Wong et al. 2016.
We don't know why that is, but my pet hypothesis has to do with the uterus as a selection arena, as described by Stearns (1986). So, normally these embryos might have been weeded out, but not in vitro.
Re paternal age: Carslake et al. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45278/tables/3 is the biggest fairly properly done study of paternal age on IQ that I know and finds significant negative effects of around half an IQ point per year, so 10 IQ points more from 20-year-old you vs. 40-year-old you. But the same study found a positive effect on having secondary education and in these Swedish studies it's extremely important how they deal with intellectually disabled people (who will not have been conscripted and hence done the IQ test). There are very clear paternal age effects on many developmental disorders that include some form intellectual disability, see the graph here https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21062
You can freeze your sperm now and some people do. I haven't found literature that investigated whether offspring from frozen sperm have more mutations. Obviously, freezing might cause problems but then again not enough for sperm banks and cattle insemination not to work.
Also re natural experiments to study stress effects on offspring, see these couple of studies of Ramadan effects. But of course the much more plausible cause is nutrition. So, maybe don't fast during pregnancy. AFAICT it's not really required, but some do so anyway.
"We don't know why that is, but my pet hypothesis has to do with the uterus as a selection arena, as described by Stearns (1986). So, normally these embryos might have been weeded out, but not in vitro."
Also how they get the woman to produce so many eggs to be fertilised. If you're using your own ova (not donor ones) and you're going to carry to term yourself (not use a surrogate), you are put on medications to suppress your natural cycle, stimulate egg production, undergo a minor procedure to harvest the eggs, and then undergo another minor procedure to implant the embryo(s).
That's a lot different to the traditional way of doing it! And if you go messing around with the natural cycle, I suspect there is some strain and stress involved on the entire system which lingers.
Indeed, I recall reading some time ago that women who waited longer (4 months, IIRC) between the egg extraction and the egg implant had higher success rates with IVF than the standard. No chance I'd find the source, unfortunately.
I mean, I am an ignorant bog-monster, but I can't help feeling the body reacts differently (and defensively) to "the surgeon sticks a cathether up you" to how it happens between you and your snookums:
Granted, it was a fairly small trial, but they did whole-genome sequencing of both parents and children. So this seems to make the hypothesis that IVF increases denovo mutations less likely.
They cite Wong et al. and Wang et al. Both have much bigger samples, though this study did the most precise sequencing and included the reasons for IVF. All studies sequenced both parents and children.
Annoyingly, the study you mention does not report a confidence interval for their finding. I computed it
[-13.9;9.94]. Perfectly consistent with Wong's 4.25 DNMs more and Wang's 4.59 more.
If the latter, I calculated it myself. The method Wong use will, I think, bias down the absolute effect size (they have low coverage), but not the relationship between effect sizes.
I want to raise a methodological issue here. In the section on stress and confounds, Scott writes:
> only randomized controlled trials, or other studies that come up with clever ways around this problem, can be truly convincing
There's more than one way of reading that, depending on what you count as a 'clever way around a problem'. I want to talk about a worryingly common reading, which misrepresents how research actually works. And that's to throw away *any* study that's not causal.
That criterion certainly addresses a real problem: there's too much research there which finds a random correlation (or p-hacks one out) and leads to splashy, misleading headlines about causal effects. The problem is that it throws the baby out with the bathwater -- you'd end up rejecting, for example, continental drift.
What determines how strongly it's appropriate to apply the criterion? I'd argue that a key element is the presence/absence of background theory. In the case of child development, there are theories (attachment theory and life history theory) which have made remarkably good predictions to date. The other predictions of life history theory, including on how maternal stress affects children, then become highly plausible; when correlational studies fit those predictions, it's not appropriate to discard them. I make a more detailed argument on this with examples here: https://criticalscience.medium.com/against-parachute-skepticism-516414ee1815
More generally, my point is that science works with an interplay of theories and experiments, and later experiments always build on previously accepted theories. When we have findings that are divorced from theories, we should be very skeptical and apply that 'causal' criterion heavily. And vice versa. At the end of the day, the goal is always to find a parsimonious explanation of all the facts -- and deciding to ignore (replicated) definitely does not do that.
The reason I feel strongly about this is that in child development, it's just very hard to get causal data on children. Many commenters (not Scott, but certainly Emily Oster) will use 'correlation is not causation' to dismiss any evidence that doesn't fit their political preferences. But that ignores the associated theories and the wealth of evidence that supports them. [If you want to read about that evidence, see particularly The Development of the Person (Sroufe et al, 2005).]
I've been worrying over this issue for the last year, as I've been writing up topics in child development for a general audience.* In a few cases, we have some causal evidence and it's straightforward. Far more often, the state of the research depends on on a convergence of theory and multiple streams of research. For example, we might have evolutionary theories predicting that a phenomenon P will occur, biochemical evidence showing how P is actually 'implemented', psychological/psychiatric evidence that P occurs in the wild and studies that show P-ish correlations. That adds up to a very strong case; IMO often *more* convincing than an isolated causal study. But it's much harder to convey that case to a lay audience. If anyone has any thoughts on how to handle this, I'd be very grateful for them.
In the original edition of his Biodeterminist’s Guide To Parenting, Scott drew the opposite conclusion about the association between birth month and intelligence: "Study after study shows higher intelligence (2-4 points), more favorable personality traits (for example, 33% less extreme shyness) and greater height (0.6 cm) in winter/spring babies (1, 2, 3, 4)." Of these four cited studies, two links have broken since the original post was written, and the other two studies are not referenced in the current post. Why were the studies showing higher intelligence in winter/spring discarded in favor of those showing the effect in summer/fall?
Excellent post. I'm heartened to see some of the things we did after reading up for both our kids (delaying induction, reducing Tylenol, filtering water) be borne out as possibly useful. The hardest bit in pregnancy (and also in early childhood) is to have an actual evidence based conversaion with a doc - its either "don't worry here's Calpol" or "holy F let's intervene" with no gears in the middle. Also, not sure if its just the UK, but I find getting actual information from docs to be like running an interrogation chamber.
eg here the normal practice seems if you're above 37 weeks to induce if there's even the slightest question from the mother without much other analysis - we had to push back quite a bit on not doing this willy nilly and instead wait a week or two.
Here in Ireland too. I think it's a combination of a holdover from the old days when doctors were God and you, the lowly patient, dared not breathe a word of question or criticism because who were you to teach the doctor how to do his job, and the modern days now when doctors think "oh great, you looked that up on the Internet and now you think you have Serious Rare Disease when it's only a cough".
They seem not to like telling you out of concern you will panic (e.g. that gynaecologist who brushed it off when I asked him straight out "do you think it's cancer?") and also that you will assume you have Serious Rare Disease. It's the "hoofbeats mean horses, not zebras" mindset and any backchat from you is taken as questioning their knowledge and capability, and nobody likes that.
What that means is of course you go home and look it up on the Internet 😀
Thank you for the interesting review. It would be awesome to do something similar for the morning sickness too. Most of women have better or worse morning sickness during pregnancy, are there any interventions that plausibly impact its severity?
I don't know, we got rid of all the old Lenten and Advent fasting, and now the health and nutrition people are telling us we should be eating less red meat, eat more fish, cut back on sugar, etc. just like in the days of the Black Fast:
For the late 19th century/mid 20th century less intense version of this, the Black Fast was no sugar or milk in your tea, no butter on your bread, one full meal only but you can also take two collations, no meat, etc.
A collation is a small amount of food, not amounting to a full meal. The immediately pre-Vatican II laws defined it as "The evening collation came to be defined by the Catholic Church as being less than eight ounces of food. In the 19th century, the allowance of another collation, called a frustulum, was introduced by the Catholic Church and is permitted to be eaten in the morning."
So you can have one full meal (but omitting flesh meat) during the day, whenever you take it so long as it is after noon, and two collations which are not intended to be full meals, e.g. cup of tea or coffee and slice of toast in the morning.
From my 1964 Missal:
"The Law of Abstinence forbids the use of flesh-meat and of soup etc. made from it. Eggs, cheese, butter and seasonings of food are permitted. The Law of Fasting forbids more than one full meal a day, which must not be taken before noon.
All Catholics seven years and over are obliged to abstain. All Catholics from the completion of their twenty-first to the beginning of their sixtieth year, unless lawfully excused, are obliged to fast.
On Fasting Days only one full meal and a collation are allowed.
A Day of Partial Abstinence is one on which only one meat-meal is permitted, even to those not obliged to fast.
Days of Abstinence: Every Friday
Days of Fasting and Abstinence: Ash Wednesday, Fridays and Saturdays in Lent, Ember Days: the Vigil of Pentecost, All Saints, the Immaculate Conception and Christmas
Days of Fasting only: other days of Lent not already mentioned
In Ireland: Saturdays in Lent are days of Partial Abstinence
When St. Patrick's Day falls in Lent, the obligation of Abstinence is removed".
That last led in America to what is or was called the Corned Beef Indult; for the American church, St. Patrick's Day is not a Holiday of Obligation, but all the Irish immigrants natually wanted to celebrate their national saint's day, and this led to local bishops giving an exception to the law of fasting in Lent if St Patrick's Day fell on Lent so you could have your bacon and cabbage, or rather corned beef and cabbage.
As you can see, fasting in the history of the Western Church got a lot more relaxed over time. Nowadays, the Friday abstinence has been restored, but for a good while there it was purely voluntary (so of course people fell out of the habit).
The Orthodox are a lot stricter, stick to the old style, old school fasting, and have more fast days in the liturgical year (at least to my understanding).
Belated thanks for this information! I was an altar boy in the late 70s in country Queensland, but I don't recall my family or most of the other people in our congregation taking the dietary stuff too seriously. We mostly had fish (well, fish fingers and the like, not sure how much actual fish was involved) on Fridays, and mum didn't buy icecream during Lent, but that's about as much as I remember. I did not know that there was quite so much detail in the prescriptions.
Big difference between pre- and post-Vatican II church. I'm old enough that I came in on the very tail end of the older model (I was about two or three for the last 'priest says Mass with his back to the congregation and in Latin', and by the time I made my First Communion we were still learning about Limbo) and it took off a bit later in Ireland, so there was this big and visible divide between "sixth class in primary school: learn the tradtional stuff like 'the six laws of the church and the ten commandments'" and "first year in secondary school: right, drop all that, we're going to talk about niceness and social justice, but we're not going to use the term social justice".
There's a reason I say I get all my theology out of Dante, because I found the "Divine Comedy" when I was fifteen and in the various translations thereafter, there was usually some explanation of the theology behind the religious beliefs and practices expressed in the text, and I cetainly wasn't getting any explanations of doctrine in my actual religion classes 😀
The whole idea was "we don't teach the kids these basics in school anymore, because the parents will do so". However , the parents were accustomed to "you learn this stuff in Christian Doctrine class in school" and they didn't teach more beyond the bare basics, so those were the two stools religious education fell between. Also, most people had learned it off 'by rote' with little to no understanding or explanation, so they couldn't teach their kids 'why do we believe this, what is the reason behind doing this'.
Old practices like the stricter Lenten fasting being dumped was just one of the things that happened with the new, shiny, pared-down, Gospel-oriented Church that was sweeping away all the fusty old accretions of peasant piety. I'm not saying they were wrong, things like "x hundred thousand days off Purgatory for this indulgence" were next door to superstition if not superstition in actual practice, but a baby or two did get thrown out with the bathwater.
Small comment on the last table - you've marked the columns as "% True" and "% Relevant" but the numbers aren't percentages, right? (Otherwise you consider every single result true with less than 1% probability which seems unlikely)
I'm amused that you just give people the go-ahead to chow down on corn syrup derivatives with arbitrary (unspecified on the label) colorants and flavorants. (Unless I'm missing some sarcasm.)
It was unclear. There are a lot of people in the rationalist community who seem weirdly unconcerned with mystery ingredients, so I couldn't decide if it was sarcastic or not...
“ sinister foreign “black licorice”…. eaten by normal red-blooded Americans … per American tradition… corn syrup derivatives with no real licorice whatsoever”
Scott’s tongue is planted so firmly in his cheek that he’s bursting a blood vessel. I am sorry to say your sarcasm meter is completely kaput.
I recently wrote a blog about Expecting Better pointing out statistical problems with how Oster reaches her conclusions that light drinking during pregnancy is fine:
While I think there’s a lot of uncertainty, even the studies Oster prefers seem like mild evidence in favor of a negative effect of light drinking once you account for the known biases
Yes, if large amounts of a chemical have a bad effect, small amounts are likely to have a bad effect, too. If you don't drink, you shouldn't supplement alcohol in the hopes of positive effect. But we care about a bundle of things, not just the chemical effect, and certainly not just the sign of the chemical effect. She is very explicit about this and it's hard to describe your article as anything but deceit.
Perhaps I misread the tone on the receipt/cashier point, and this one is low certainty, but "it's only cashiers, so not a big deal" seems like the wrong reaction to me: there are many millions of people who are cashiers, many of whom are young women. This is a very large and relevant group of people, even at a population level!
I'm guessing the low relevance is to Scott's wife (I presume she's not a cashier) or perhaps to his audience (I presume also unlikely to contain many cashiers, though probably some former ones since this seems to be a relatively common high school gig). You'll notice the % relevant in Scott's summary table is actually quite high.
Why would Scotts’s audience be unlikely to contain many cashiers? This was the first Substack I ever subscribed to, back when I was working as a cashier.
Because reading blogs generally, and reading blogs about rationalism and science/philosophy specifically, are things that people of low socioeconomic status are much less likely to do than higher socioeconomic status people, yourself notwithstanding.
Despite being an Amazon warehouse worker, I try to keep up with ACX and a few other blogs (like FdB). Before I got a job, my socioeconomic status was even lower, and I had much more time to read blogs and books.
Isn't there like a comprehensive survey of readers of this blog to settle questions like this? Why debate something in a vacuum if you can get the data
This is a good idea! Unfortunately it looks like the 2021 ACX Reader Survey doesn't have a specific question on this topic, although we could assign an upper bound - all cashiers will be employed in 'For-profit work' and I think it is fair to say cashiers who read ACX would regard themselves as being in the profession of 'Other blue collar' rather than e.g. a special kind of 'Economist'.
With those restrictions on the data, 202 of the 6911 respondents could potentially be cashiers (around 3%). I looked at the 2020 SSC Reader Survey and saw a similar percentage, although the 2020 SSC Reader Survey allows you to restrict by annual income too - around 40% of 'For profit blue collar' workers in the 2020 Survey earn more than $30,000 / year (i.e. above California minimum wage) so I think those people are probably not cashiers, who I characterise as likely earning around minimum wage.
Best guess is that no more than 1.5% of SSC readers could possibly be cashiers, and in reality that 1.5% covers every low-paid blue-collar job you could think of (including e.g. fast food and remote service jobs) so the percentage who are actually cashiers will be vanishingly tiny. From what I can google, about 6% of the American workforce have enough cashier-like duties that they would be handling receipts regularly. So I think cashiers are indeed underrepresented amongst people who take the ACX Demographics Survey.
Indeed, I started reading SSC while working in fast food. Even if one accepts the argument that the proportion of workers in those fields may be less likely to read this kind of thing, base rates are very high (there are a lot of cashiers/fast food workers!)
I would suggest that we all aged out of being cashiers. Namely, new people develop new reading habits and find new blogs, but then get stuck in their ways (which is why most advertisers target 20 somethings).
Scott’s blog is old enough that many cashiers who started reading the blog now, some years later, have gotten better jobs. Basically retention would lead to more non-cashiers, regardless of base rates of blog-reading cashiers
This is an awful comment. Please reconsider your opinions on which essential parts of life people from a lower socioeconomic class should or shouldn't be partaking in...
is vitamin d deficiency really that rare? basically everyone in my family has had it and from what i heard it was more 'almost everyone who's not white will probably be deficient in the winter'.
Currently going through this with my wife and trying to imagine a doctor or other authority figure telling her she can't have any painkillers at all, lol.
Probably just a coincidence but it's odd that she's been taking Vitamin D supplements and eating a lot of (low mercury risk) fish "because it makes me feel better," and then I read this. For my part I am just letting her figure out how to manage her pregnancy because I think stress is our biggest concern and also I love her and trust her. Still very interesting stuff.
It's worth checking whether your prenatal vitamin actually has iodine in it - the first one I took didn't. Your provider won't get into specifics, they'll just tell you to take one with folic acid.
On water filters, if you want a pitcher rather than a sink type, the Zero Water pitcher filters out fluoride (and a lot of other stuff, if the dissolved solids reader that comes with it is correct). I sent our usual tap water and some filtered water to the Maine state lab that tests well water and such, and the tap water came back with a reasonable level and the filtered water had 0 measurable fluoride.
I also got my first cavity after switching to water without fluoride during pregnancy, so I now think it's worth doing some fluoride mouthwash or something you don't swallow to make up for not having it in the water.
My strong opinion is that it is an excellent resource. Some bias of course but the way they run through studies such as the ARRIVE trial mentioned above is very rigorous.
I was just scrolling through to see if anyone had posted this! It was an indispensable resource to me during my pregnancy - I was able to avoid a medical induction with confidence and have my son safely at home because of what I learned here. This website was recommended to me by a midwife -- it's pretty heavy on no/low intervention birth, but as I also lean that way it was extremely helpful.
I think you have a typo, 1/200 for CMV should be 0.005, not 0.0005 (as you have in your table). So your estimate is ten times too low. (Edit: unless you think only 1/10 of congenital CMV cases lose IQ?)
Also there may be some confusion if you write "%" in the top of the table but then give the numbers as a fraction from 0 to 1.
Finally, regarding Tylenol vs ibuprofen, my prior is on Tylenol being generally worse due to more toxic metabolites.
But really any cyclooxygenase inhibitor will mess up prostaglandin signaling to some extent, which will interfere with some developmental processes.
When traveling in Iceland I noticed almost all of their candy contains black licorice. It would be interesting to see if they have similar results as Finland.
I think the Tylenol studies that are not sibling-studies are very likely to be unreliable, for one reason: The ability to avoid pain medication during pregnancy is a clear indicator of social privilege.
There is a clear social norm that all pills should be avoided during pregnancy, as long as it is possible. Pregnant women in more privileged situations will be able to follow that norm a lot more than pregnant women in more pressed situations.
I'm an example of this myself. When I was pregnant last year I suffered from recurring pains during the last two months. Sometimes I couldn't even speak because of the pain. The doctor said I should take Tylenol. I didn't, because I didn't really need it: When I had my pain attacks, I was free to just deal with them. I didn't have to do anything else, really. My husband always said "I'll do it, you just rest" whatever had to be done.
If I were in a situation where I needed to work or take care of children alone, I would have taken the Tylenol. I don't even believe much in the studies that say it is risky, because sibling studies tend to be much more reliable. If my environment made life the least difficult for me, I would have taken the pills to cope. But life was easy anyway, so I stayed away from them. Whatever put me in this privileged situation, I hope my children will inherit it.
Your asumption that they are American and comparing themselves to Americans aside, I'd say that being in a situation where they don't need "to work or take care of children alone" is fairly privileged in any context - modern or ancient, America or civilisation.
But by that logic isn't basically almost everything else on Scott's list just due to privilege? Even prenatal supplements are pretty expensive so maybe benefits of taking them is just a selective effect. Doing anything slightly out of ordinary standards demonstrates better access to information / more spare willpower to go extra mile that single women working as hotel maids are just very unlikely to have, etc. etc.
Yup, indeed. There are confounders everywhere. But in the Tylenol case, I reacted specifically to this:
"ADHD is very genetic, so we should be alert for possible confounders like “ADHD moms get more stressed, have more headaches, and so use more Tylenol, and then their kids inherit their ADHD”. But we have two signs that this isn’t what’s going on here. First, a (relatively weak) finding that mothers who took the alternate headache medication ibuprofen did not have kids with more ADHD. And second, two studies (1, 2) finding that taking Tylenol immediately after or immediately before pregnancy has no effect - if it was just a proxy for class or ADHD you’d expect the same correlation regardless of the woman’s pregnancy status. All of this makes the effect look real."
I disagree that the last two studies make the effect look real, because using Tylenol during pregnancy is much more of an indicator of a negative life situation than using Tylenol while not pregnant. When people are not pregnant, they use painkillers because they are in pain. When people are pregnant, they use painkillers because they feel that there is no realistic way to avoid using painkillers. Then it is probably wrong to assume that people who used Tylenol just before or after pregnancy are the same kind of people as those who used it during pregnancy.
ok i think i get your point now. you may well be right. However am not sure your assumption that all pregnant moms would only ever take painkillers in a desperate breaking emergency glass type situation is correct - actually even assuming that is the case may just be another reflection of you being privileged. A lot of people that are less educated or lackadaisical about pregnancy (i mean - there are definitely still moms out there who smoke & drink during pregnancy and it's a bit of a stretch I think to argue that all of them absolutely need these drugs to get through their workday or something) or just very comfortable with popping pills at the slightest excuse (i remember vividly going to a friend's house back when i was a teenager, somebody had a headache and so the friend went to bathroom and came back with this huge bag of pills that i think but not 100% sure now were aspirin pills and apparently he would use them liberally at the slightest indisposition and i remember being amazed cause in our home the default attitude was always to avoid pills and tough things out if you can at all (because we thought most pills probably carry some kind of hidden risk/downside, your own body knows best and we shouldn't try to mask the signals it sends us etc. etc.). Made me realize how different people have completely different levels of comfort about taking meds. Btw that friend became a doctor later...) may well resort to tylenol just because it makes them feel better and not even think twice about it. Or they may be the type that trusts their doctor more than their own internet research (tendency maybe correlated with education level?) and if doctor tells them tylenol is safe they will trust that opinion. Am sure the type of mom who tortured herself over trade-off of using painkillers and potentially affecting her future child vs. not going to work and losing her income exists out there, but no idea whether that's 20% or 80% of the total.
I think it is mostly a bit drastic to say that we (occasionally pregnant) women "torture ourselves" over trade-offs between using drugs or not, but most of us think the trade-off exist and try to make the best of it. That trade-off will look a bit different for people on different levels of privilege. Few women will abstain completely from medicine during pregnancy, but some will be able to restrain themselves more than others.
I don't really trust sibling studies because each subsequent sibling has to deal with the damage the previous sibling(s) did to their mother, and that's an obvious confound.
On the subject of birth months and rates of schizophrenia, has there been any studies to see if the trend is reversed in, say, Australia which has the opposite flu season to the US / Europe?
Personally a bit skeptical that birth month has huge effects although the flu season is the most reasonable explanation.
Absolutely not qualified to endorse these studies (especially from a 'Berk'), but apparently yes, there have been studies which find maybe the same pattern in months but not seasons?
Please do not promote eugenics. Also, it is disturbing how carelessly you speak of "embryos," they are also people, with rights. Whatever their potential IQ may be.
If 'wanting your kids to be as smart and healthy as possible' is eugenics, then by definition you're arguing for dysgenics. There's no reason why this kind of "eugenics" would make the world a worse place (and plenty of reasons it would make it much better), whereas the dysgenics you're promoting would of course make the world less good.
It's great to want to have smart and healthy kids. But killing embryos, i.e. living human beings, because certain studies imply they will have lower IQs than others is the "bad eugenics," not the good eugenics you imagine.
So out of curiosity, are you opposed to IVF in general, absent any embryo selection? Because if more than one embryo is successfully fertilized, but there's only one prospective mother around to gestate an embryo, then the others are going to wind up dead anyway.
Am I going to open a can of worms with this? Ah, whatever, I probably will.
Most abortion laws kinda disagree with the notion of embryos having human rights, though. Different legislations place cutoffs at different points, but in general, when it is legal, we pretty much are saying "until gestational age X, this thing doesn't yet count as having a human right to life and killing it is OK if you want, after that no can do, it's a human now". Does that mean it is killing something that can become human even if you agree with the legal definition, and something that is effectively human if you don't? Yes, pretty much. But humans have killed humans since about forever and once we figured out how to rein that in by creating monopolies on violence, societies have not been falling apart too much.
"legislations place cutoffs" "until gestational age X"
Firstly, I for one think laws should be downstream of well-thought ethics, not the other way around. Many societies have managed to stay afloat got great lengths of time while committing things we probably consider atrocities.
To my main point. I think it is quite weird, principles-wise, in your quotes the rights appear only at some point and most countries can't find obvious consensus on which point it is. This suggests very strongly is not a decision based on any other principle than a compromise between a moral wrong that is sufficiently against commonly shared principles and convenience.
There have been societies where exposure of babies to elements was common, legal and considered okay way to get rid of unwanted children. Current Western countries in general won't consider this legal (nor morally good thing). *Yet abortion is awfully convenient for some people.* So it has to happen before the birth, preferably before it becomes obvious. Out of sight (of everyone not directly involved with the procedure), out of mind, and everybody can avoid thinking about it too much.
The weak won't have a voice if there is nobody to talk for them. That is the mean reason for making and championing a concept like *universal* human rights which should apply to everyone, the weak and otherwise defenseless included, and are considered sacred. To pick another example (related to why "human rights" got popular after WW2), consider civilian population in an country occupied an overwhelming hostile military: they have very little recourse to plead for fair and just treatment unless the occupiers believe the occupied, in fact, have sacrosanct rights.
Embryo is a specific term that refers to the earliest developmental stage in pregnancy, followed by fetus, then baby. Each developmental stage has unique characteristics, which is why there is a specific term for each. Are you actually arguing that we should use incorrect terminology (calling an embryo a baby) because that feels more emotionally right to you?
Re licorice: Does anyone know if licorice root tea also has the same problem? Because I'm pretty sure every tea that actually works to make your throat feel immediately better contains licorice root. Since I read your original article about pregnancy and licorice, I decided to wean myself off of all of them (I used to drink them because I was taking vocal lessons and sometimes you just want to soothe your throat) in case I decide to get pregnant...
I wasn’t aware of the reason given in the post for avoiding licorice- I thought it was because it raises your blood pressure. I used to live in the Netherlands, another licorice-loving country, and my husband and I both fell in love with Dutch “drop”. Our first year there we usually had a few pieces after dinner. But when we went in for physicals, we were both asked how much licorice we’d been eating. I realized it was the licorice that had been making my blood pressure spike at night. Guess we’re just sensitive to it. We had kids years later, and that feeling would have been really unpleasant if I had been pregnant.
Could Cytomegalovirus explain some of the birth order effects? Women are typically pretty careful with avoiding infecting when pregnant with their first, but once they have a toddler running around there is only so much they can do. So subsequent pregnancies are probably more likely to have CMV infections than first pregnancies, and the first born are less likely to be damaged than subsequent babies.
Birth order also matters. The second kid suffers the effects of the damage the first kid did to mom's body, and so on and so forth for any subsequent children.
So I was first in my class in AP chemistry which qualifies me to look up some molecular masses and check these papers' dose-math.
The "2g choline" study actually made a serious error in dose-conversion when they said "Each choline supplement dose consisted of 1.25g choline bitartrate, which contained 1g of bioavailable choline cation." It's actually around half that. So they were actually testing 1g of free choline.
choline bitartrate molecules weigh 1.81 times more than choline chloride and 2.53 times more than free choline. Each of these molecules contains only one choline. Convert doses accordingly.
I think it's fine to take 2g of choline bitartrate to get ~790mg of choline. But the largest pills on amazon are only 650mg choline bitartrate per pill.
In general a dose is meaningless without specifying which form the dose-mass refers to. Someone could be off by 30x if for example one number is free lithium and the other number is lithium citrate and they forget to convert.
This is really basic stuff that everyone learns in their first chemistry class so it's disappointing that a paper got past peer review while overstating its choline dose by 2x.
The nullification / "reversal" in the age advantage amongst elite athletes may be because if you are a really skilled athlete born in the end of the year and are the youngest on your team but still good enough, at some point, age stops mattering and your natural ability level shines through. Thus, we'd expect the elite not to see much of a difference because those who are good enough can still play; you're weeding out the merely really good but not quite superelite players.
I would be skeptical of a reversal, though one possibility would be that constantly playing at a disadvantage gives them a slight training advantage, so they end up a bit better than they would otherwise if they actually stick with it.
Wittgenstein said that by looking at language, he let the philosophical fly out of the bottle and thus ended the maddening work, and this post strikes me as doing the same for pregnancy optimization.
Whether or not that is your intention, it's a thought-provoking post (and makes me glad I'm well past the age to worry about any of it).
On the birth month thing and sports, one of the things that defined my socialization was being born on the cusp of our rec. league baseball program's cutoff date. I alternated year to year being a bench-sitting, error-prone right fielder, to being a star pitcher. I didn't play past high school, but I learned many life lessons about failure and success.
He actually had already confirmed this in the comments of his wedding announcement post, saying that considering having kids was one of the big reasons he even got married in the first place.
I would estimate that the birth month disparity would have some impact on IQ. Schizophrenia generally has far more of a detrimental effect on IQ than autism spectrum disorders. And theoretically, a child born up to ~11.9 months earlier than their peers would perform slightly better academically and moderately better athletically, thus receiving more encouragement from teachers. But this would obviously be very difficult -if not impossible- to quantify with currently available data.
The idea that fish oil is defective isn't a stretch at all. We know what we want from fish oil: omega-3 fatty acids, so we measure it and they usually don't have it. And that shouldn't be so surprising because this is specifically the kind of fat that oxidizes easily and so that's just what it does.
Aluminum itself is a neurotoxin although it has low solubility in water and low oral bioavailability. Should I be concerned about the quantity of aluminum that an activated alumina filter would put in the water?
The major biodeterminist parenting intervention is to have kids young. If that's not going to happen, freeze your eggs or sperm. Feels weird recommending something I didn't do, but I would do it if I were young now - especially for men, probably for women.
To clarify "avoid CMV", I think a solid piece of advice is "don't start a job in healthcare or at a school/daycare" right when you're trying to conceive, because newcomers tend to get sick quite often when they start working in these environments (with CMV & everything else--nearly all bedside nurses have had CMV)
Another confounder for birth month is whether or not your planning is effective. In practice, planning the birth month of your child is really pretty tricky, as a lot of people don't get pregnant on the first try (or even second, third, etc). One would assume that a better ability to plan this intentionally might be due to higher fertility in general, which could be correlated to a lot of things, including a healthier embryo/fetus and subsequently higher IQ.
I respect the dedication for exploring all these, to end up with 2 IQ points equivalent. What a journey. (Also, that Elon Musk decompression baby theory-not-theory is a gem!)
wait, arent the Finns doing really really well overall?
Yes, the Finns are the European country that most consistently performs well on international PISA tests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#Ranking_results
Studies of European countries also pretty routinely have Finland as the highest-IQ nation in Europe. (Here is the first example that Google came up with, but there's more than one study showing this: https://jakubmarian.com/average-iq-in-europe-by-country-map/). However, note that a huge number of cross-country IQ comparison studies have been done by the notorious Northern Irish academic Richard Lynn -- very often accused of racism -- in collaboration with his lesser-known partner Tatu Vanhanen, who is Finnish.
(Note that by some measures of intelligence, like Nobel Prizes or mathematics prizes, Finns don't really stand out, though they're a much smaller country than you think. By prizes per capita they usually just show up as "normal Europe").
The World Happiness Report has shown Finland as the happiest country in the world for the past several years consecutively, and it's always been near the top: https://worldhappiness.report/
There are other weird anomalies associated with Finland -- for example, Finland is often the country in Europe with the largest percentage of its population willing to fight to defend it: https://brilliantmaps.com/europe-fight-war/
So, uh, maybe we should be eating licorice. Then again, maybe not.
~~
Are there a priori reasons to think Finns might be noticeably different from other white people? Finnish genetics (...and Estonian) is actually notably different from that of other European countries because of the presence of a large Paleosiberian component: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07483-5
And here's a fascinating English-language podcast on Finnish genetics: https://insitome.libsyn.com/the-genetics-of-the-finns
Note that Finns are the product of a genetic bottleneck at some point in the last few millennia, such that there are a number of autosomal recessive diseases that are basically unique to Finns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_heritage_disease
So maybe they *are* different. Lastly, here's Twitter HBD theorizer crimkadid, who's been discussed here before, speculating that a possible evolutionary reason Finns might have higher IQs than their neighbors is that they're very weird as a northern people whose traditional diet is very low on fish, causing them (...per this theory) to be under especially heavy selection against schizophrenia-promoting alleles: https://twitter.com/crimkadid/status/1270554374801145856
As part of this theory crimkadid suggests that Finns have higher schizophrenia rates than other Europeans, which he has citations for and some studies show, but far from all -- ie, Wikipedia's page on relative schizophrenia risk by country suggests that Finland clocks in at basically "normal European" rates.
Another confounder with finnish cognitive ability is their excellent primary education system, considered by many to be the best in the world. This is somewhat problematic if you assess cognitive ability during school years, and highly problematic if you look at PISA scores.
An issue with nobel prizes is that variance matters much more than average for very high achievement. And second, the political history of Finland biases the results downward. For one thing, they couldn't win any prizes before 1918 when they become independent. By that time, their neighbor Sweden had already won 6 prizes. And of course it took some time for Finland to build up a strong independent intellectual community after independence.
Okay, where is your proof that it's excellent? Every time I see somebody praising their schooling system, it basically amounts to "their students get good scores, therefore their school system is good, and its good because [insert pet education policy here]".
AT BEST, you can say its difficult to know how much of their performance is due to inherent cognitive ability and how much is to do with schooling system, but even that's being charitable considering the lack of evidence for school differences having this much impact on performance after controlling for student factors.
And the people championing Finland's "great education system" are the sort of people who thinks america education system is terrible.....despite the fact that once you control for race, the US actually does BETTER on PISA than Finland does: https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/
I think one strong argument that their primary schooling system is great is that their PISA scores are much better than any other measures of intellectual performance, like number of triad patents, number of Nobel prizes per capita etc.
I did some work in the education research field when I was younger, and the consensus was quite strong that Finland had the best system for a variety of reasons. The strongest is the qualifications and training of their teachers, which is a prestigious job that requires a master's degree and where you are expected to follow the newest research on education, like a medical doctor would be.
And I think the race argument is weak. For one thing the proportion of western European ancestry is higher in African Americans and Finns, which underscores how problematic grouping by "race" is, especially when comparing the US to other countries. Second, it is always cheating to compare total scores from one country with selected scores from other countries. If you want to make the comparison fair, you should at a minimum exclude the underperfoming Sami and Swedish minorities from the Finnish samples as well.
My own personal experience is also that Americans arrive in college with a pitiful understanding of many subjects, including math, compared to Nordic universities. And I have only really had significant exposure to first-year students from MIT and Berkeley, who should be somewhat above average. American higher education is very high quality though.
Allow us to exclude our Russians and we'd break the scale.
There's also Canada, which is genetically very diverse, but has very high PISA rankings. While you might try to explain the success of CJK, Finland/Estonia and maybe even Poland by some sort of innate abilities of the predominant ethnic groups, this can't explain the success of Canada.
The predominant ethnic groups of Canada are northern Europeans, and following that is Asians, especially north-east asians. And Asian immigration has been highly selective, which means its heavily skewed towards high IQ asians (its not a representative sample of their ancestral population). It may be hard to explain fine-grained differences between Canada and other high scoring nations on this basis, but broadly speaking it would be very strange if Canada weren't consistently close to the top based on their population.
If you disaggregate by ethnic group, U.S. PISA rankings are some of the best in the world. If I recall, U.S. Asians score second only to cherry-picked Chinese students from the richest regions. And U.S. Asians include Southeast Asians.
If you took only U.S. whites and Asians, scores would be higher than Canada.
"However, note that a huge number of cross-country IQ comparison studies have been done by the notorious Northern Irish academic Richard Lynn -- very often accused of racism -- in collaboration with his lesser-known partner Tatu Vanhanen, who is Finnish."
Lynn is extremely sloppy in his methodology, and combine that with my suspicions that he's a Unionist/pining for the days of Empire type, that doesn't make for good results.
I've lambasted him elsewhere for his "the Paddies are dumber than the loyal Celts of the United Kingdom who are dumber than the pure Anglo-Saxons of London" results, which led to years of uncritical parroting of his "The Irish have a mean IQ of 93" even by Irish sources, until suddenly by some magic we rose up to normal mean of 100 during the boom years, but have someone else critiquing his work:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232468496_Ireland's_Low_IQ_A_Critique_of_the_Myth
Lynn thinks we're dumb(er) in part because we're Catholic and in part because the smarter ones emigrated (and why was that, Richard? What country presided over our economic repression?):
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281709234_Selective_intelligence_Roman_Catholicism_and_the_decline_of_intelligence_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland
"Previous studies have shown that the mean IQ in the Republic of Ireland is 93 in relation to 100 for Britain and the rest of central and northern Europe. New evidence is presented giving an IQ of 88.3 in Ireland and therefore confirming this estimate. It is proposed that the causes of this lower IQ lies principally in the selective emigration of those with higher IQs over the course of several generations, with a smaller contribution from the dysgenic effect of Roman Catholicism."
Alas! If only we had been good loyal subjects of the Crown and converted to Protestantism like they had tried and tried to make us do for centuries! Why, we could have been as smart as the Scots (overall mean IQ of 97) or the Welsh (overall mean IQ of 98)!
I *do* like how the more he (or rather, somebody else) tests us, the dumber we get - he estimated mean IQ of 93 on tests from the 70s, but "more recent" bring us down to 88. Rum, Romanism and Rebellion to blame, no doubt, the longer indulged in, the worse for us! 😈
Another researcher has said the gain in IQ is in line with the Flynn Effect worldwide:
https://researchrepository.ucd.ie/handle/10197/6437
"Using data from Gill and Byrt's 1972 standardization of the Ravens Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM) on a national sample of Irish primary school children, O'Connor & Ruddle's 1987 survey of a large sample of school children in Clare and Jeffer's and Fitzgerald's 1989 survey of 9-12 year olds in a Dublin suburb, we found that over the period from 1972-1989 the mean gain in IQ points on the RSPM was approximately 9 IQ points. This gain of about 0.6 standard deviations in IQ points has occurred in both a rural and an urban area. The 9 IQ point gain over about 16 years is comparable to the 18 IQ point gain that has been observed on culture reduced tests over the 30 year period between 1950-1980 in 14 of the world's advanced economies."
I do wonder how much of that is down to "culture reduced tests", i.e. difference in both tests and testing between 1972 and 1989, but that's a question for another time.
It's a good thing Lynn is old enough now that his career is basically over, because his "dumb Paddies" thesis comes closer to being refuted every day. A recent paper (https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-pokropek.pdf) showed that at least within Poland, PISA scores mostly reflect g. Granted, it's possible that this relationship doesn't hold in other countries, including Ireland. But steelmanning the case for: Ireland's math PISA scores are neck and neck with the UK's, their science scores aren't too far behind (and are ahead of several mostly Protestant countries considered to be bright, like Denmark), and their reading scores are higher than the UK's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#PISA_2018_ranking_summary), yet Irish people are somewhere between 7-12 IQ points below English people, just got harder. Not to mention that if Ireland's national IQ truly is somewhere between 88-93, other countries with comparable national IQs should be trying to copy their incredible educational success! They're punching so far above their IQ weight class that we should be figuring out what they're doing right and helping other middle-IQ countries copy it! As far as I know, Lynn has never advocated for this approach, which makes me question how much he really believes his own claims.
This is why I am very dubious about the HBD stuff; not that there are not differences between populations, but when we get the "Science proves that population are just naturally dumber than population B, sorry I don't make the rules" type of discussion around it.
I see well-intentioned people repeating the whole "The Irish went up a whole 10 points in IQ" and trying to puzzle out the effects of the Celtic Tiger and prosperity on this amazing progress, and it makes me grind my teeth (my dentist disapproves) because "You are basing this on results which, in any other discipline, would be taken as the sign of a quack".
Now, there's a couple of things going on. I'm not claiming we're neglected geniuses, I'm sure there are very stupid Irish people out there and plenty of 'em. But pedagogical styles, I submit, have changed vastly over the past few decades and this does make a difference. When I was a nipper, the New Maths (and the New Teaching in general) was coming into the schools, and it did make a big difference (not for my maths learning, I'm useless at that always no matter the instruction).
It was rather like the Benezet experiments, instead of learning by rote, now the *process* was being taught, of teaching how to think about the problems. I do think this made a big difference between testing kids in the 1970s and then testing again later in the 1980s. Also, the first tests may not have been as 'culture blind' as the testers imagined. And Lynn just took three separate tests (which he had not administered himself) and mashed the results together to get his 'mean figure of 93'.
Under the veneer of scientific objectivity, there are political biases and axes being ground, and every time I read Richard Lynn on the Irish, I hear in the background the faint strains of "The Sash My Father Wore"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCio7nDaKlQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fTusWA-K0U
It's just that little bit *too* convenient that the test results stack up so nicely with London on the top and the Paddies on the bottom, with the descending scale of "the further away from the big city, the dumber", you know?
I think we probably have better education, better pedagogy, more resources for kids with learning and other problems (when I was in primary school, dyslexia was not a thing; you were just stupid and that was it, for instance), and that of course prosperity helped with all this, including living conditions, and the improvement in test results is like other countries, with the Flynn Effect in full flow.
>Under the veneer of scientific objectivity, there are political biases and axes being ground, and every time I read Richard Lynn on the Irish, I hear in the background the faint strains of "The Sash My Father Wore"
Funny how you think that applies only to the likes of Lynn and not the millions of know-nothing liberals who are adamant that IQ isn't a valid thing and there are no population differences in intelligence, all without even being able to define what the g factor is
IQ is a valid measure of some things but it is not important in any moral sense.
"Their reading scores are higher than the UK's"
We are rather good at the oul' reading, right enough 😀 That's why our governments are always trying to drag up the maths and science scores for PISA.
I remembered vaguely knowing Poland did well in PISA and checked the rankings, but #10-#11 (or #3-#4 excl Asia)?
Also, I was curious how this test looks like, and got this:
LANGUAGE POLICY
In the country of Armaz, the majority of citizens speak the official language, Ursk. A group of Ursk-speaking lawmakers have proposed a policy that would require all classes in the country’s public elementary and secondary schools to be taught only in Ursk. The only exception would be foreign language classes. A number of citizens in Armaz who speak a minority language, Jutanese, are concerned about the proposed policy.
A Jutanese-speaking student researched other countries that have similar policies regarding instruction in the official language. The following statements describe some of the information he found.
Do these statements support the proposed policy to teach all classes in the one official language of Ursk? Click on either Yes or No for each statement.
----
Does this statement support the proposed policy to teach all classes in one official language?
1. Students who receive instruction in two or more languages show higher levels of academic achievement than those who are taught in a single language.
2. Students who do not learn a country’s official language are less likely to finish school.
3. Students who learn a country’s official language are more likely to function well in society and find a good job.
4. Encouraging students to learn multiple languages helps support a more diverse society.
------
That #4 question... well, I guess it's still a proxy for IQ in a way; higher IQ probably correlates with realizing which answer is expected. Still, it seems like a pretty thoughtlessly prepared test.
>Lynn thinks we're dumb(er) in part because we're Catholic and in part because the smarter ones emigrated (and why was that, Richard? What country presided over our economic repression?):
You sound like a reasonable, level headed person making a sober judgement free from ideological axes to grind.
This is not true, useful, or kind. Less of this, please.
Hello there, and welcome to the "Music To Compare National IQs To" selection!
Well, we've kicked off with "The Sash", and while "Rule, Britannia" is the obvious follow-up, let's continue with some Flanders and Swann:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vh-wEXvdW8
"Song of Patriotic Prejudice
The English, the English, the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest!"
Dang dude. This is some reply! Thank you!!!
>very often accused of racism
This is a bad-faith, non-argument. His science is either valid or it isn't. "Racist" is just a slur that has not place in these discussions. It's literally no better than accusing evolutionary biologists of hating Christianity or climate scientists of being motivated by a desire for socialism or something. The work is valid or it isn't, calling people "racist" is not helpful, especially considering that the majority of people on the left consider this kind of research to be *categorically* "racist" by its very definition. So "racism" becomes a bludgeon to silence people doing work that contradicts liberal narratives.
>Yes, the Finns are the European country that most consistently performs well on international PISA tests:
What almost nobody seems to realize is that they're not the European *population* that does the best. American whites do considerably better than Finns do: https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/
In most cases I'd agree, but when designing studies for testing national IQs racial bias (i.e. racism) is quite relevant. If you asked someone with a clear racial bias (say, a nationalist) to evaluate IQs from different countries, that racial bias is likely to show up in the science.
As an aside was surprised to learn above that Finland is one of the happiest countries. According to Wikipedia they have one of the highest suicide rates among developed countries - only south Korea is significantly worse (I can see why), and Belgium / USA are about same or sliver higher (kinda surprised by Belgium...).
Also, note that the *kind* of black licorice that Finns eat -- stereotypically in ridiculous quantities -- is a concoction called "salmiakki", which is licorice flavored with ammonium chloride, an old-timey cough medication, causing it to taste so excessively salty that it seems bitter to many who try it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salty_liquorice
(Regular black licorice is *extremely* sweet, since glycyrrhyzin is ~50 times as sweet as regular sugars per Wikipedia, but the Finns cover this up with ammonium chloride so that it does not taste sweet at all. Your tastes may vary.)
This BBC article mentions in passing that Finns who leave the country often take huge amounts of salmiakki with them -- while I doubt that it's literally addictive eating decently large amounts seems to be not that weird: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24303423
I met two patients in my career who had resistant hypertension, and when I asked if they ate a lot of licorice, indicated that they loved the stuff. BP problem resolved!
I know! I've had to give up *everything* with licorice in, and I love licorice 🙁
I have to be careful even with herbal teas, because many of them contain licorice as a flavouring, and I've found by experience that drinking them does make my blood pressure go "whoosh!"
i eat it regularly
Fun fact: if you're pregnant, and want to follow best practice, you can avoid drinking alcohol _and_ avoid consuming licorice at the same time by specifically not drinking salmiakki-infused vodka: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmiakki_Koskenkorva
(If you're not pregnant, and have no other risk factors, you owe it to yourself to try this dark nectar of the gods if you get the chance)
There's more to life than prenatal licorice
This is truly a quote for the ages
Glad to learn this. What's the epistemic status?
"Glycyrrhizin" sounds like a terrible Scrabble hand.
It would be a genius play, though, if it lined up! Shame it's too long. (I was thinking Hangman, myself, but word games definitely cam to mind immediately on seeing so few vowels.
I was a little sad the joke about it sounding like a name for a demon didn't make it into this revised version.
For all that, it has a simple and reasonable etymology. "Glyco" or "glycy" is routinely used for words related to sweet tastes (e.g. glucose, glycolysis, hypoglycemia), from the Greek work for "sweet," and "rhiz" (root) also from the Greek is used for (many fewer) words related to roots (e.g. rhizome). So "Glycyrrhiza" = sweet-root as the name of the genus is pretty logical.
Epistemic status: saw a video once.
I'm surprised you're not giving air pollution higher billing. Alex Tabarrock made a 5 minute video about a difference-in-difference paper showing car exhaust having all sorts of bad outcomes. And when I looked at the cited study right now it claimed there exists a "somewhat smaller literature focusing specifically on the relationship between residential proximity to busy roadways and poor pregnancy outcomes". I have no idea how tractible this stuff is or whether it necessitates e.g. moving apartments during the pregnancy if you're near a freeway, or whether there are easier interventions.
Here's the video: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/11/pollution-kills-and-more.html
Here's the paper: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15413/w15413.pdf
Yeah I'm not a medical Dr but I've been working on PAH studies and like, yikes. Smoking is really really really bad for you. Living next to a busy road... exposes you to *similar* levels of lung pollutants as smoking. Not, usually, as bad, but still very bad and in some cases a shockingly high pollutant load. Also very hard to measure accurately what you're exposed to, because that depends on eg do you have any air filters in your house (and do they help much), how much time do you spend outside, etc.
But yeah air pollution is generally very bad for you. I wouldn't want to raise kids in LA.
If older kids does better in school, could not a nation improve the education of their entire population by delaying the age kids start in school? So instead of people going to school for example from age 6 to 18, they go to school from age 7 to 19.
But then you have to see how this affects the working population. Being better at school just to be better at school is a bit pointless.
Better educated people are less likely to vote for bad people I think.
Better educated people are better at lying to themselves and justifying whatever they want to do regardless of whether the thing they want to do is good or bad.
This.
How are we defining "bad people"? If it's just people who the better-educated don't like, then it's close to being a tautology.
Fascists.
So, assuming you're calling trump a "fascist" here, does that mean Trump's voters were disproportionately black and hispanic? You've just shot yourself in the foot taking this absurd line.
White liberals and black liberals are at the opposite ends of the academic ability spectrum and broadly speaking they vote for the same people, so your hypothesis is completely, unequivocally false (even by whatever silly standards of "bad people" you're using here).
It is possible for there to be more than one factor that makes people less likely to vote for a fascist.
Better education makes a people less likely to vote for a fascists. Being black in USA makes a person less likely to vote for a fascist, as fascists in the USA tend to be white racists.
"Better education makes a people less likely to vote for a fascists. "
You have zero evidence for this, even going by your absurd definition of "fascist".
By your definition, the people who created the US were "fascists", so that means that "fascism" is pretty damn good at building countries.
A bit facetious, but I do have to point out that fascism may be quite good indeed at building countries (in short term) , because total focus / efficiency etc. Mussolini making trains go on time (it's mostly myth I know I k ow), Hitler getting autobahn built, China catching up to us economically now (they may not technically be fascist I know I know)...
What you're really saying is you hate white people, and they need to be brainwashed at colleges to stop being so evil. Just so we're all 100% clear what's happening here.
I don't think you're a person it is worth the time to argue with.
That seems dubious. If that were true, better educated people would be much less likely to fall for scams and financial fraud, or lose money on complex investments that border on fraudulent -- and e.g. Enron and Bernie Madoff would argue quite the contrary, that quite often the more educated person is *more* susceptible to social psychological fraud, especially big and complex frauds, because his education persuades him (inaccurately) that he's too smart to be snookered.
It might be different if "education" meant some significant degree of instruction on, say, the history of frauds, on persuasive techniques and deception, propaganda and psychological warfare -- but it doesn't. And it's hard to see how a BA in French literature or a BS in computer science with a strong focus on Java programming can better equip you mentally to detect mind games.
When I was in school I learned about how the Nazis came to power in Germany, and the results of that. I believe such education makes a person less likely to vote for a Nazi or similar.
I find this intriguing because I also learned in school about how the Nazis came to power and one thing I clearly remember being taught was how many well educated upper echelon type Germans supported the Nazis. Same a little later for the well educated and their support for the USSR and other forms of authoritarian leftistsm. I wish education did inoculate against support for totalitarianism but history doesn't seem to demonstrate that it does.
But those Germans hadn't learned about the Nazis in history class.
I would expect the frequency of the well-educated falling victim to scams to be heavily confounded by them being more likely to have enough wealth to be worth scamming in the short term. There's certainly no shortage of scams that target the poorly educated.
Agreed. Look at the number of "smart" people who are wild about crypto, for example.
One common (the standard?) explanation for the "older kids does better in school" effect is that at first they do better because they're on average half a year older than everyone else, this initial taste of winning make them like school/schoolwork/sports, which causes them to dedicate themselves more, which *then* causes them to legit be better.
If this is right, it can't be for everyone.
That seems plausible for sports. But with schoolwork you don't necessarily know how well the other students are doing.
With math in particularly if you don't learn the easy stuff, it gets hard to learn the harder stuff. (This is a tangent, but I think math education for kids should be treated differently than other subjects. One should test the kids very thoroughly to see if they understand the math and not move them on to the next level if they don't.) Also being bad at reading makes it harder to learn almost anything.
I'd say most kids know. The ones that develop a model of themselves as "smart" typically really did perform well early on. There are presumably others who also performed well and didn't realize it, but they wouldn't contribute one way or the other to the average.
Speaking from personal anecdote: I wasn't oldest kid (actually was usually youngest as skipped couple grades) but can attest how doing well at school early on can easily become a self-reinforcing loop - getting praise from teachers / being known among other kids as the one with the good grades and who to go to to ask questions created both motivation and pressure to continue to perform well and hence redoubled efforts. I can totally see how if I was bottom of the class early on I could've concluded that studying wasn't for me and refocused my energy / hopes on being good at sports or something. Btw yeah conversely I was the smallest kid and hence sucked at sports and hence never even tried to do well there.
But then you have 1 less productive year from each human lifetime. Take it to the extreme, if people studied from 6 to 56, they would absolutely crush the high school algebra, but...
But you have 1 more year of fun childhood. And less unemployment.
Or 1 more year of bullying.
This is such a retarded take on unemployment.
MOD DECISION: Major warning (50% of a ban)
No, you have exactly the same amount of unemployment, but its moved to beginning of their schooling career instead of after it. You still have less stuff being produced, which means the country is poorer, which means unemployment may actually end up being higher overall.
Parents riot
need free daycare
You could just have optional free daycare in addition to school.
That's more or less what California did when the Schwarzenegger administration pushed up the cutoff birthdate for school registration from December 1 to September 1. Kids with birthdays between the old and new cutoffs get a year of "Transitional Kindergarten" before starting regular Kindergarten the following year.
My father did this.. for n=1 I think it "worked" in that I always excelled in school, but perhaps led me to overconfidence of my IQ.. also if it does work its adversarial/0sum and definitionally couldn't work for everyone
Just a random point about licorice: perhaps it's a self-feeding cycle, but if you get a candy bag in Finland and it's not specifically "fruit candy only", "chocolates only", self-selected etc. it usually contains at least 1/2-1/3 black licorice candies. That might contribute to the high ratio of formally consumed licorice here.
> Most of these studies are small and weak - and did you know that Tylenol is a deadly poison to cats? Doesn’t really bode well for inter-animal transferability of results.
Given that Tylenol is also a notoriously deadly poison to humans (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol_poisoning ), I don't think this has the significance you think it does.
I’m sure Scott is aware of acetaminophen toxicity, but not sure if it is poisonous in the same way in humans and cats. In humans (and most mammals), it’s only poisonous once the main detox pathway gets filled up, like if your house’s plumbing is backed up so water decides to invade your bedroom instead. Similarly, Tylenol is safe until large doses are consumed. Idk much about cats but apparently they don’t have the normal “plumbing” at all (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340185/) so not quite a comparable situation.
Cats are notorious for not being able to metabolize toxins that other mammals can handle just fine in reasonable doses. Carnivores in general tend to be worse at metabolizing toxins than omnivores and herbivores, presumably because they didn't need to evolve to survive eating lots of plants that contain chemicals that need special metabolic handling (c.f. onions, chocolate, and grapes being toxic to dogs), but cats are a whole different level.
Most notably, pyrethin insecticides are mostly harmless to almost all land vertebrites. It's a respiratory irritant if inhaled in quantity which can trigger asthma attacks, one or two particular chemicals in the class are semi-common allergens, and large doses can overwhelm the metabolic pathways that deal with it, but it's safe enough to be a common active ingredient in flea & tick products for dogs, for lice shampoos for children, and residual spray insecticides for indoor use. But cats' ancestors somehow lost the metabolic pathway, so they're much more vulnerable to it than most other mammals, or birds, or reptiles.
This, incidentally, is why you should be very, very careful using "for dogs" flea treatments on or around cats: these usually contain pyrethins in doses that are perfectly safe for dogs but acutely toxic to cats.
Tylenol seems to be a bit from column A and a bit from column B: Tylenol is more toxic to dogs than to humans (adjusted for body weight) by a factor of 1.5x to 3x (100 mg/kg toxic dose in dogs, 150-300 mg/kg in humans), but it's about 10x as toxic to cats as to dogs (10 mg/kg toxic dose). It's occasionally used therapeutically for dogs, although other painkillers are generally preferred as safer relative to effectiveness and it's vitally important to consult with a vet to get the dosage right (normal human dosages being deadly to dogs due to combination of body weight and metabolic differences), but it should pretty much never be used for cats.
Thank you for this insight, never knew cats were so unusual.
Mom of a college student here. My 1st thought upon browsing this, was "I wonder how many things I did wrong". Even so many years later, this instinct is strong! My son had many food allergies and asthma, all of which I squarely blamed myself for (things like peanuts and eggs that I ate in pregnancy, despite being from a family with food allergies - just didn't know better).
Don't blame yourself. If your family has food allergies, then there's a genetic component to being more likely to develop food allergies:
https://preventallergies.org/are-food-allergies-genetic/
"Even though food allergies are influenced by a lack of exposure to certain foods, food allergies don’t develop as a result of foods mothers eat, or avoid, during pregnancy. So, rest assured that your food choices during pregnancy will not cause your baby to develop a food allergy. Rather, food allergies develop due to other genetic and environmental factors."
Plus, there are things like peanut oil in creams etc:
"Look out for arachis oil (refined peanut oil), groundnut or peanut oil. These can be found sometimes in baby massage oils, moisturisers, nappy rash creams, ear drops and shampoos designed to treat cradle cap."
So go easy on yourself, you can't know everything.
Thanks! I guess my point was guilt and motherhood seem closely intertwined somehow. Rationally, I agree with you that I couldn't have known everything. But emotionally, anything bad that happens to your child feels like your fault. It is not just me. Seems true almost universally in my medium sized sample space of mom friends.
I'm not sure why you would blame yourself for your son's allergies because you had peanuts while pregnant. The evidence suggests the opposite is the case: the kids born of women who avoid peanuts while pregnant tend to have a significantly higher chance of developing peanut allergies.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1995519/
Thyroid!
Both hypothyroid conditions and hyperthyroid conditions during pregnancy can be bad.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6209822/
Also, maybe in the fish vs. fish oil question, eating fish -> higher iodine intake -> better thyroid function. This is only a guess.
It's also true that eating oily fish reduces coronary heart disease, but we have not got such good evidence for fish oil capsules. So eating the real thing is likely best, but remember the bigger and longer-lived species will have more mercury - tuna and salmon. Best go with herring, mackerel, sardines and trout.
The one my mother always mentioned (and yes I realize that sounds like a totally random source, but in this case my mother has a doctorate in maternal & child health from Johns Hopkins and worked in the field for many years) was the benefit of a [healthy] high-calorie diet during pregnancy. The idea is that evolutionary factors would then 'teach' [is this epigenetics?] the fetus that it lived in times of plenty, leading to a higher metabolism, which is a good thing in the modern world. Anecdotally my siblings and myself are all thin without any real effort, although my mother (albeit not my father) is also like that so it could be purely genetic. Has anyone run across this idea elsewhere, preferably with some data?
I'd summarize it as "starvation during pregnancy is bad" more than high-calorie specifically.
The Dutch famine birth cohort has been studied a lot both for the effects on children who were in utero at the time (more obesity, etc) and possible epigenetic effects on the grandchildren. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944%E2%80%931945#Legacy
Currently there's emphasis on not gaining too much weight during pregnancy, but Emily Oster argues there should be more concern about not gaining enough weight, since low birth weight is definitely linked with all kinds of health problems.
There's also some data on timing of Ramadan and health problems in babies depending on when during pregnancies their mothers might have fasted. (Fasting is optional for pregnant women and I'd say should be avoided.) https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14428/revisions/w14428.rev0.pdf
Thanks! - this all makes sense although I'd still love to see research on calories per se (rather than eg weight, since for instance one can also exercise more). But it does seem like the key aspect is not to deprive / limit oneself.
An opposite effect would somewhat make sense too, though I've never heard any evidence of it.
Scott, did you see my Choline review?
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/96vs5d/choline_supplementation_during_pregnancy/
One thing that you might want to mention is the difference between the *dosage* of different types of choline -- i.e., 500 mg of choline bitartrate is not the same as 500 mg of "choline", and in particular is not the same as 500mg of choline chloride. Caudill et al uses Choline chloride, while Jacobson et al uses Choline bitartrate -- and therefore the dosages aren't directly comparable, so you probably shouldn't be directly comparing them.
Re IVF:
It may seem like a no-brainer to do embryo selection via SNPs, if you're already going to do IVF. It's a much different story if you weren't planning on IVF in the first place. IVF is associated with higher de novo mutation counts above the rate expected based on parental age. It has an effect equivalent to roughly 6 years of paternal age or 12 years of maternal age in Wong et al. 2016.
We don't know why that is, but my pet hypothesis has to do with the uterus as a selection arena, as described by Stearns (1986). So, normally these embryos might have been weeded out, but not in vitro.
Re paternal age: Carslake et al. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45278/tables/3 is the biggest fairly properly done study of paternal age on IQ that I know and finds significant negative effects of around half an IQ point per year, so 10 IQ points more from 20-year-old you vs. 40-year-old you. But the same study found a positive effect on having secondary education and in these Swedish studies it's extremely important how they deal with intellectually disabled people (who will not have been conscripted and hence done the IQ test). There are very clear paternal age effects on many developmental disorders that include some form intellectual disability, see the graph here https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21062
You can freeze your sperm now and some people do. I haven't found literature that investigated whether offspring from frozen sperm have more mutations. Obviously, freezing might cause problems but then again not enough for sperm banks and cattle insemination not to work.
Also re natural experiments to study stress effects on offspring, see these couple of studies of Ramadan effects. But of course the much more plausible cause is nutrition. So, maybe don't fast during pregnancy. AFAICT it's not really required, but some do so anyway.
https://gh.bmj.com/content/4/3/e001185.abstract
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X18300911?casa_token=elsnjf_iNcQAAAAA:42zOuGYKU4X7NHqogMbv1XqO6XzOXaeZXZeDbl4Dix7v7AsPUG_-NzV3Sr5bZUPmgOPq4nRfKw
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438781500067X?casa_token=ShzCnoJBtVUAAAAA:4lcMmOiNViEc795RQHNynyXHEcAP_HIJeAp5qe1Qe3Log5x5GXJOitw1BYKGX-ykqZr6TtAJlw
"We don't know why that is, but my pet hypothesis has to do with the uterus as a selection arena, as described by Stearns (1986). So, normally these embryos might have been weeded out, but not in vitro."
Also how they get the woman to produce so many eggs to be fertilised. If you're using your own ova (not donor ones) and you're going to carry to term yourself (not use a surrogate), you are put on medications to suppress your natural cycle, stimulate egg production, undergo a minor procedure to harvest the eggs, and then undergo another minor procedure to implant the embryo(s).
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ivf/what-happens/
That's a lot different to the traditional way of doing it! And if you go messing around with the natural cycle, I suspect there is some strain and stress involved on the entire system which lingers.
Indeed, I recall reading some time ago that women who waited longer (4 months, IIRC) between the egg extraction and the egg implant had higher success rates with IVF than the standard. No chance I'd find the source, unfortunately.
I mean, I am an ignorant bog-monster, but I can't help feeling the body reacts differently (and defensively) to "the surgeon sticks a cathether up you" to how it happens between you and your snookums:
https://advancedfertility.com/ivf-in-detail/embryo-transfer/
Here is at least one study that finds no effect of IVF on de-novo mutations: https://academic.oup.com/humrep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/humrep/deac068/6567571
Granted, it was a fairly small trial, but they did whole-genome sequencing of both parents and children. So this seems to make the hypothesis that IVF increases denovo mutations less likely.
They cite Wong et al. and Wang et al. Both have much bigger samples, though this study did the most precise sequencing and included the reasons for IVF. All studies sequenced both parents and children.
Annoyingly, the study you mention does not report a confidence interval for their finding. I computed it
[-13.9;9.94]. Perfectly consistent with Wong's 4.25 DNMs more and Wang's 4.59 more.
". It has an effect equivalent to roughly 6 years of paternal age or 12 years of maternal age in Wong et al. 2016."
can't find this citation, can you link?
You mean the Wong paper or this way to put the effect size? If the former: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10486
If the latter, I calculated it myself. The method Wong use will, I think, bias down the absolute effect size (they have low coverage), but not the relationship between effect sizes.
I want to raise a methodological issue here. In the section on stress and confounds, Scott writes:
> only randomized controlled trials, or other studies that come up with clever ways around this problem, can be truly convincing
There's more than one way of reading that, depending on what you count as a 'clever way around a problem'. I want to talk about a worryingly common reading, which misrepresents how research actually works. And that's to throw away *any* study that's not causal.
That criterion certainly addresses a real problem: there's too much research there which finds a random correlation (or p-hacks one out) and leads to splashy, misleading headlines about causal effects. The problem is that it throws the baby out with the bathwater -- you'd end up rejecting, for example, continental drift.
What determines how strongly it's appropriate to apply the criterion? I'd argue that a key element is the presence/absence of background theory. In the case of child development, there are theories (attachment theory and life history theory) which have made remarkably good predictions to date. The other predictions of life history theory, including on how maternal stress affects children, then become highly plausible; when correlational studies fit those predictions, it's not appropriate to discard them. I make a more detailed argument on this with examples here: https://criticalscience.medium.com/against-parachute-skepticism-516414ee1815
More generally, my point is that science works with an interplay of theories and experiments, and later experiments always build on previously accepted theories. When we have findings that are divorced from theories, we should be very skeptical and apply that 'causal' criterion heavily. And vice versa. At the end of the day, the goal is always to find a parsimonious explanation of all the facts -- and deciding to ignore (replicated) definitely does not do that.
The reason I feel strongly about this is that in child development, it's just very hard to get causal data on children. Many commenters (not Scott, but certainly Emily Oster) will use 'correlation is not causation' to dismiss any evidence that doesn't fit their political preferences. But that ignores the associated theories and the wealth of evidence that supports them. [If you want to read about that evidence, see particularly The Development of the Person (Sroufe et al, 2005).]
I've been worrying over this issue for the last year, as I've been writing up topics in child development for a general audience.* In a few cases, we have some causal evidence and it's straightforward. Far more often, the state of the research depends on on a convergence of theory and multiple streams of research. For example, we might have evolutionary theories predicting that a phenomenon P will occur, biochemical evidence showing how P is actually 'implemented', psychological/psychiatric evidence that P occurs in the wild and studies that show P-ish correlations. That adds up to a very strong case; IMO often *more* convincing than an isolated causal study. But it's much harder to convey that case to a lay audience. If anyone has any thoughts on how to handle this, I'd be very grateful for them.
* E.g. https://criticalscience.medium.com/on-the-science-of-daycare-4d1ab4c2efb4
-- in that case we happen to have good causal evidence, but the case was actually strong before that evidence came out.
What's an example of Emily Oster dismissing strong evidence that doesn't fit her political preferences?
I just read "expecting better", plus that's the topic being discussed in this post, so if you have an example from that book that would be ideal.
Thanks!
In the original edition of his Biodeterminist’s Guide To Parenting, Scott drew the opposite conclusion about the association between birth month and intelligence: "Study after study shows higher intelligence (2-4 points), more favorable personality traits (for example, 33% less extreme shyness) and greater height (0.6 cm) in winter/spring babies (1, 2, 3, 4)." Of these four cited studies, two links have broken since the original post was written, and the other two studies are not referenced in the current post. Why were the studies showing higher intelligence in winter/spring discarded in favor of those showing the effect in summer/fall?
Excellent post. I'm heartened to see some of the things we did after reading up for both our kids (delaying induction, reducing Tylenol, filtering water) be borne out as possibly useful. The hardest bit in pregnancy (and also in early childhood) is to have an actual evidence based conversaion with a doc - its either "don't worry here's Calpol" or "holy F let's intervene" with no gears in the middle. Also, not sure if its just the UK, but I find getting actual information from docs to be like running an interrogation chamber.
eg here the normal practice seems if you're above 37 weeks to induce if there's even the slightest question from the mother without much other analysis - we had to push back quite a bit on not doing this willy nilly and instead wait a week or two.
Here in Ireland too. I think it's a combination of a holdover from the old days when doctors were God and you, the lowly patient, dared not breathe a word of question or criticism because who were you to teach the doctor how to do his job, and the modern days now when doctors think "oh great, you looked that up on the Internet and now you think you have Serious Rare Disease when it's only a cough".
They seem not to like telling you out of concern you will panic (e.g. that gynaecologist who brushed it off when I asked him straight out "do you think it's cancer?") and also that you will assume you have Serious Rare Disease. It's the "hoofbeats mean horses, not zebras" mindset and any backchat from you is taken as questioning their knowledge and capability, and nobody likes that.
What that means is of course you go home and look it up on the Internet 😀
Thank you for the interesting review. It would be awesome to do something similar for the morning sickness too. Most of women have better or worse morning sickness during pregnancy, are there any interventions that plausibly impact its severity?
Vit B6 helped me
Thanks, what dosage?
Thanks, Scott. I'm going to start taking choline and finally plug in my air filters today.
So, back to fish on Fridays, make sure it's mackerel, cod and salmon. Trout if you can get it! 😀
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/in-depth/omega-3/art-20045614
I don't know, we got rid of all the old Lenten and Advent fasting, and now the health and nutrition people are telling us we should be eating less red meat, eat more fish, cut back on sugar, etc. just like in the days of the Black Fast:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Fast
For the late 19th century/mid 20th century less intense version of this, the Black Fast was no sugar or milk in your tea, no butter on your bread, one full meal only but you can also take two collations, no meat, etc.
What's a 'collation' in this context?
Thank you for asking! Here is a lot more information than you requested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation_(meal)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_and_abstinence_in_the_Catholic_Church
A collation is a small amount of food, not amounting to a full meal. The immediately pre-Vatican II laws defined it as "The evening collation came to be defined by the Catholic Church as being less than eight ounces of food. In the 19th century, the allowance of another collation, called a frustulum, was introduced by the Catholic Church and is permitted to be eaten in the morning."
So you can have one full meal (but omitting flesh meat) during the day, whenever you take it so long as it is after noon, and two collations which are not intended to be full meals, e.g. cup of tea or coffee and slice of toast in the morning.
From my 1964 Missal:
"The Law of Abstinence forbids the use of flesh-meat and of soup etc. made from it. Eggs, cheese, butter and seasonings of food are permitted. The Law of Fasting forbids more than one full meal a day, which must not be taken before noon.
All Catholics seven years and over are obliged to abstain. All Catholics from the completion of their twenty-first to the beginning of their sixtieth year, unless lawfully excused, are obliged to fast.
On Fasting Days only one full meal and a collation are allowed.
A Day of Partial Abstinence is one on which only one meat-meal is permitted, even to those not obliged to fast.
Days of Abstinence: Every Friday
Days of Fasting and Abstinence: Ash Wednesday, Fridays and Saturdays in Lent, Ember Days: the Vigil of Pentecost, All Saints, the Immaculate Conception and Christmas
Days of Fasting only: other days of Lent not already mentioned
In Ireland: Saturdays in Lent are days of Partial Abstinence
When St. Patrick's Day falls in Lent, the obligation of Abstinence is removed".
That last led in America to what is or was called the Corned Beef Indult; for the American church, St. Patrick's Day is not a Holiday of Obligation, but all the Irish immigrants natually wanted to celebrate their national saint's day, and this led to local bishops giving an exception to the law of fasting in Lent if St Patrick's Day fell on Lent so you could have your bacon and cabbage, or rather corned beef and cabbage.
http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-indult-desk-is-open.html
As you can see, fasting in the history of the Western Church got a lot more relaxed over time. Nowadays, the Friday abstinence has been restored, but for a good while there it was purely voluntary (so of course people fell out of the habit).
The Orthodox are a lot stricter, stick to the old style, old school fasting, and have more fast days in the liturgical year (at least to my understanding).
Belated thanks for this information! I was an altar boy in the late 70s in country Queensland, but I don't recall my family or most of the other people in our congregation taking the dietary stuff too seriously. We mostly had fish (well, fish fingers and the like, not sure how much actual fish was involved) on Fridays, and mum didn't buy icecream during Lent, but that's about as much as I remember. I did not know that there was quite so much detail in the prescriptions.
Big difference between pre- and post-Vatican II church. I'm old enough that I came in on the very tail end of the older model (I was about two or three for the last 'priest says Mass with his back to the congregation and in Latin', and by the time I made my First Communion we were still learning about Limbo) and it took off a bit later in Ireland, so there was this big and visible divide between "sixth class in primary school: learn the tradtional stuff like 'the six laws of the church and the ten commandments'" and "first year in secondary school: right, drop all that, we're going to talk about niceness and social justice, but we're not going to use the term social justice".
There's a reason I say I get all my theology out of Dante, because I found the "Divine Comedy" when I was fifteen and in the various translations thereafter, there was usually some explanation of the theology behind the religious beliefs and practices expressed in the text, and I cetainly wasn't getting any explanations of doctrine in my actual religion classes 😀
The whole idea was "we don't teach the kids these basics in school anymore, because the parents will do so". However , the parents were accustomed to "you learn this stuff in Christian Doctrine class in school" and they didn't teach more beyond the bare basics, so those were the two stools religious education fell between. Also, most people had learned it off 'by rote' with little to no understanding or explanation, so they couldn't teach their kids 'why do we believe this, what is the reason behind doing this'.
Old practices like the stricter Lenten fasting being dumped was just one of the things that happened with the new, shiny, pared-down, Gospel-oriented Church that was sweeping away all the fusty old accretions of peasant piety. I'm not saying they were wrong, things like "x hundred thousand days off Purgatory for this indulgence" were next door to superstition if not superstition in actual practice, but a baby or two did get thrown out with the bathwater.
Small comment on the last table - you've marked the columns as "% True" and "% Relevant" but the numbers aren't percentages, right? (Otherwise you consider every single result true with less than 1% probability which seems unlikely)
This threw me off too!
I'm amused that you just give people the go-ahead to chow down on corn syrup derivatives with arbitrary (unspecified on the label) colorants and flavorants. (Unless I'm missing some sarcasm.)
I found the sarcasm so obvious that your assertion that you don’t notice the sarcasm seems potentially sarcastic.
It was unclear. There are a lot of people in the rationalist community who seem weirdly unconcerned with mystery ingredients, so I couldn't decide if it was sarcastic or not...
“ sinister foreign “black licorice”…. eaten by normal red-blooded Americans … per American tradition… corn syrup derivatives with no real licorice whatsoever”
Scott’s tongue is planted so firmly in his cheek that he’s bursting a blood vessel. I am sorry to say your sarcasm meter is completely kaput.
Definitely missing the sarcasm.
I recently wrote a blog about Expecting Better pointing out statistical problems with how Oster reaches her conclusions that light drinking during pregnancy is fine:
https://www.filedrawer.blog/post/oster_pregnancy_alcohol/
While I think there’s a lot of uncertainty, even the studies Oster prefers seem like mild evidence in favor of a negative effect of light drinking once you account for the known biases
Thanks, I think this is a weak point of Oster! You should totally send it to her if you haven't
It's the whole reason why her book sells, the popularity is predicated on telling women "do whatever you want and it's fine lol"
Yes, if large amounts of a chemical have a bad effect, small amounts are likely to have a bad effect, too. If you don't drink, you shouldn't supplement alcohol in the hopes of positive effect. But we care about a bundle of things, not just the chemical effect, and certainly not just the sign of the chemical effect. She is very explicit about this and it's hard to describe your article as anything but deceit.
Very interesting, thank you.
Perhaps I misread the tone on the receipt/cashier point, and this one is low certainty, but "it's only cashiers, so not a big deal" seems like the wrong reaction to me: there are many millions of people who are cashiers, many of whom are young women. This is a very large and relevant group of people, even at a population level!
Yes; I wonder if anyone's done a study of cashier health WRT BPA-related ills.
I'm guessing the low relevance is to Scott's wife (I presume she's not a cashier) or perhaps to his audience (I presume also unlikely to contain many cashiers, though probably some former ones since this seems to be a relatively common high school gig). You'll notice the % relevant in Scott's summary table is actually quite high.
Why would Scotts’s audience be unlikely to contain many cashiers? This was the first Substack I ever subscribed to, back when I was working as a cashier.
Because reading blogs generally, and reading blogs about rationalism and science/philosophy specifically, are things that people of low socioeconomic status are much less likely to do than higher socioeconomic status people, yourself notwithstanding.
People of low socioeconomic status are less likely to read blogs? Really?
I presume he means Irish and the like, going on his contributions elsewhere.
Despite being an Amazon warehouse worker, I try to keep up with ACX and a few other blogs (like FdB). Before I got a job, my socioeconomic status was even lower, and I had much more time to read blogs and books.
Isn't there like a comprehensive survey of readers of this blog to settle questions like this? Why debate something in a vacuum if you can get the data
This is a good idea! Unfortunately it looks like the 2021 ACX Reader Survey doesn't have a specific question on this topic, although we could assign an upper bound - all cashiers will be employed in 'For-profit work' and I think it is fair to say cashiers who read ACX would regard themselves as being in the profession of 'Other blue collar' rather than e.g. a special kind of 'Economist'.
With those restrictions on the data, 202 of the 6911 respondents could potentially be cashiers (around 3%). I looked at the 2020 SSC Reader Survey and saw a similar percentage, although the 2020 SSC Reader Survey allows you to restrict by annual income too - around 40% of 'For profit blue collar' workers in the 2020 Survey earn more than $30,000 / year (i.e. above California minimum wage) so I think those people are probably not cashiers, who I characterise as likely earning around minimum wage.
Best guess is that no more than 1.5% of SSC readers could possibly be cashiers, and in reality that 1.5% covers every low-paid blue-collar job you could think of (including e.g. fast food and remote service jobs) so the percentage who are actually cashiers will be vanishingly tiny. From what I can google, about 6% of the American workforce have enough cashier-like duties that they would be handling receipts regularly. So I think cashiers are indeed underrepresented amongst people who take the ACX Demographics Survey.
thank you for looking up this data I was too lazy to go do!
Indeed, I started reading SSC while working in fast food. Even if one accepts the argument that the proportion of workers in those fields may be less likely to read this kind of thing, base rates are very high (there are a lot of cashiers/fast food workers!)
I would suggest that we all aged out of being cashiers. Namely, new people develop new reading habits and find new blogs, but then get stuck in their ways (which is why most advertisers target 20 somethings).
Scott’s blog is old enough that many cashiers who started reading the blog now, some years later, have gotten better jobs. Basically retention would lead to more non-cashiers, regardless of base rates of blog-reading cashiers
Cashiers really shouldn't be having children
This is an awful comment. Please reconsider your opinions on which essential parts of life people from a lower socioeconomic class should or shouldn't be partaking in...
Thank you for your insightful comment.
Bisphenol A (bpa) is forbidden in the EU, the UK and Canada. This should slightly lower the relevance too.
is vitamin d deficiency really that rare? basically everyone in my family has had it and from what i heard it was more 'almost everyone who's not white will probably be deficient in the winter'.
I think it's very unclear what "deficient" is - when I looked into this there were really widely varying definitions.
Currently going through this with my wife and trying to imagine a doctor or other authority figure telling her she can't have any painkillers at all, lol.
Probably just a coincidence but it's odd that she's been taking Vitamin D supplements and eating a lot of (low mercury risk) fish "because it makes me feel better," and then I read this. For my part I am just letting her figure out how to manage her pregnancy because I think stress is our biggest concern and also I love her and trust her. Still very interesting stuff.
I'm so excited for the return of this post!
It's worth checking whether your prenatal vitamin actually has iodine in it - the first one I took didn't. Your provider won't get into specifics, they'll just tell you to take one with folic acid.
On water filters, if you want a pitcher rather than a sink type, the Zero Water pitcher filters out fluoride (and a lot of other stuff, if the dissolved solids reader that comes with it is correct). I sent our usual tap water and some filtered water to the Maine state lab that tests well water and such, and the tap water came back with a reasonable level and the filtered water had 0 measurable fluoride.
I also got my first cavity after switching to water without fluoride during pregnancy, so I now think it's worth doing some fluoride mouthwash or something you don't swallow to make up for not having it in the water.
Breastmilk contains very little fluoride from mothers who drink fluoridated tap water, so it's not worth continuing to avoid after pregnancy. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2612944/
On the subject of pregnancy, does anyone here have strong opinions (medical or otherwise) about the site Evidence Based Birth?
https://evidencebasedbirth.com/
My strong opinion is that it is an excellent resource. Some bias of course but the way they run through studies such as the ARRIVE trial mentioned above is very rigorous.
I was just scrolling through to see if anyone had posted this! It was an indispensable resource to me during my pregnancy - I was able to avoid a medical induction with confidence and have my son safely at home because of what I learned here. This website was recommended to me by a midwife -- it's pretty heavy on no/low intervention birth, but as I also lean that way it was extremely helpful.
I think you have a typo, 1/200 for CMV should be 0.005, not 0.0005 (as you have in your table). So your estimate is ten times too low. (Edit: unless you think only 1/10 of congenital CMV cases lose IQ?)
Also there may be some confusion if you write "%" in the top of the table but then give the numbers as a fraction from 0 to 1.
Finally, regarding Tylenol vs ibuprofen, my prior is on Tylenol being generally worse due to more toxic metabolites.
But really any cyclooxygenase inhibitor will mess up prostaglandin signaling to some extent, which will interfere with some developmental processes.
Does this mean you and new wife are pregnant now or just trying?
If you're trying stop drinking totally and start taking pre-natals even though you ain't pregnant yet! :) that's my goofy advice.
I assume that would be advice for Scott's wife and not Scott? Or are there effects on sperm that I don't know about?
HA! True that. But in my head I was thinking of them as a single unit that has the goal of 'make baby'
Good and important content. Thank you!
When traveling in Iceland I noticed almost all of their candy contains black licorice. It would be interesting to see if they have similar results as Finland.
I wonder if there'll be an astralbaby.com in 30 years for people whose parents tried all of the above.
I think the Tylenol studies that are not sibling-studies are very likely to be unreliable, for one reason: The ability to avoid pain medication during pregnancy is a clear indicator of social privilege.
There is a clear social norm that all pills should be avoided during pregnancy, as long as it is possible. Pregnant women in more privileged situations will be able to follow that norm a lot more than pregnant women in more pressed situations.
I'm an example of this myself. When I was pregnant last year I suffered from recurring pains during the last two months. Sometimes I couldn't even speak because of the pain. The doctor said I should take Tylenol. I didn't, because I didn't really need it: When I had my pain attacks, I was free to just deal with them. I didn't have to do anything else, really. My husband always said "I'll do it, you just rest" whatever had to be done.
If I were in a situation where I needed to work or take care of children alone, I would have taken the Tylenol. I don't even believe much in the studies that say it is risky, because sibling studies tend to be much more reliable. If my environment made life the least difficult for me, I would have taken the pills to cope. But life was easy anyway, so I stayed away from them. Whatever put me in this privileged situation, I hope my children will inherit it.
Hilarious that 'literally having a husband while pregnant' is considered being "privileged" in modern America.
Your asumption that they are American and comparing themselves to Americans aside, I'd say that being in a situation where they don't need "to work or take care of children alone" is fairly privileged in any context - modern or ancient, America or civilisation.
But by that logic isn't basically almost everything else on Scott's list just due to privilege? Even prenatal supplements are pretty expensive so maybe benefits of taking them is just a selective effect. Doing anything slightly out of ordinary standards demonstrates better access to information / more spare willpower to go extra mile that single women working as hotel maids are just very unlikely to have, etc. etc.
Yup, indeed. There are confounders everywhere. But in the Tylenol case, I reacted specifically to this:
"ADHD is very genetic, so we should be alert for possible confounders like “ADHD moms get more stressed, have more headaches, and so use more Tylenol, and then their kids inherit their ADHD”. But we have two signs that this isn’t what’s going on here. First, a (relatively weak) finding that mothers who took the alternate headache medication ibuprofen did not have kids with more ADHD. And second, two studies (1, 2) finding that taking Tylenol immediately after or immediately before pregnancy has no effect - if it was just a proxy for class or ADHD you’d expect the same correlation regardless of the woman’s pregnancy status. All of this makes the effect look real."
I disagree that the last two studies make the effect look real, because using Tylenol during pregnancy is much more of an indicator of a negative life situation than using Tylenol while not pregnant. When people are not pregnant, they use painkillers because they are in pain. When people are pregnant, they use painkillers because they feel that there is no realistic way to avoid using painkillers. Then it is probably wrong to assume that people who used Tylenol just before or after pregnancy are the same kind of people as those who used it during pregnancy.
ok i think i get your point now. you may well be right. However am not sure your assumption that all pregnant moms would only ever take painkillers in a desperate breaking emergency glass type situation is correct - actually even assuming that is the case may just be another reflection of you being privileged. A lot of people that are less educated or lackadaisical about pregnancy (i mean - there are definitely still moms out there who smoke & drink during pregnancy and it's a bit of a stretch I think to argue that all of them absolutely need these drugs to get through their workday or something) or just very comfortable with popping pills at the slightest excuse (i remember vividly going to a friend's house back when i was a teenager, somebody had a headache and so the friend went to bathroom and came back with this huge bag of pills that i think but not 100% sure now were aspirin pills and apparently he would use them liberally at the slightest indisposition and i remember being amazed cause in our home the default attitude was always to avoid pills and tough things out if you can at all (because we thought most pills probably carry some kind of hidden risk/downside, your own body knows best and we shouldn't try to mask the signals it sends us etc. etc.). Made me realize how different people have completely different levels of comfort about taking meds. Btw that friend became a doctor later...) may well resort to tylenol just because it makes them feel better and not even think twice about it. Or they may be the type that trusts their doctor more than their own internet research (tendency maybe correlated with education level?) and if doctor tells them tylenol is safe they will trust that opinion. Am sure the type of mom who tortured herself over trade-off of using painkillers and potentially affecting her future child vs. not going to work and losing her income exists out there, but no idea whether that's 20% or 80% of the total.
I think it is mostly a bit drastic to say that we (occasionally pregnant) women "torture ourselves" over trade-offs between using drugs or not, but most of us think the trade-off exist and try to make the best of it. That trade-off will look a bit different for people on different levels of privilege. Few women will abstain completely from medicine during pregnancy, but some will be able to restrain themselves more than others.
I don't really trust sibling studies because each subsequent sibling has to deal with the damage the previous sibling(s) did to their mother, and that's an obvious confound.
On the subject of birth months and rates of schizophrenia, has there been any studies to see if the trend is reversed in, say, Australia which has the opposite flu season to the US / Europe?
Personally a bit skeptical that birth month has huge effects although the flu season is the most reasonable explanation.
Absolutely not qualified to endorse these studies (especially from a 'Berk'), but apparently yes, there have been studies which find maybe the same pattern in months but not seasons?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8811264/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11473508/
So where does listening to Mozart fall? Tier 5?
Tier wishful thinking. Ex aequo with playing audio books of du cote de chez Swann to your infant.
Wow great timing, my wife and I are starting trying for a baby this week.
test
Just as I'm starting to wrap my head around conceiving :) thanks for the intro, I now feel so prepared!
Please do not promote eugenics. Also, it is disturbing how carelessly you speak of "embryos," they are also people, with rights. Whatever their potential IQ may be.
Sigh....
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
I do chuckle when I see people post lesswrong links as if they were credible sources.
If 'wanting your kids to be as smart and healthy as possible' is eugenics, then by definition you're arguing for dysgenics. There's no reason why this kind of "eugenics" would make the world a worse place (and plenty of reasons it would make it much better), whereas the dysgenics you're promoting would of course make the world less good.
It's great to want to have smart and healthy kids. But killing embryos, i.e. living human beings, because certain studies imply they will have lower IQs than others is the "bad eugenics," not the good eugenics you imagine.
So out of curiosity, are you opposed to IVF in general, absent any embryo selection? Because if more than one embryo is successfully fertilized, but there's only one prospective mother around to gestate an embryo, then the others are going to wind up dead anyway.
Can't speak for the other poster, but it would be a consistent position.
Yeah, that's why I asked. It's the only conclusion I can see that's consistent with the stated reasoning.
IQ has absolutely no moral valence.
Am I going to open a can of worms with this? Ah, whatever, I probably will.
Most abortion laws kinda disagree with the notion of embryos having human rights, though. Different legislations place cutoffs at different points, but in general, when it is legal, we pretty much are saying "until gestational age X, this thing doesn't yet count as having a human right to life and killing it is OK if you want, after that no can do, it's a human now". Does that mean it is killing something that can become human even if you agree with the legal definition, and something that is effectively human if you don't? Yes, pretty much. But humans have killed humans since about forever and once we figured out how to rein that in by creating monopolies on violence, societies have not been falling apart too much.
"legislations place cutoffs" "until gestational age X"
Firstly, I for one think laws should be downstream of well-thought ethics, not the other way around. Many societies have managed to stay afloat got great lengths of time while committing things we probably consider atrocities.
To my main point. I think it is quite weird, principles-wise, in your quotes the rights appear only at some point and most countries can't find obvious consensus on which point it is. This suggests very strongly is not a decision based on any other principle than a compromise between a moral wrong that is sufficiently against commonly shared principles and convenience.
There have been societies where exposure of babies to elements was common, legal and considered okay way to get rid of unwanted children. Current Western countries in general won't consider this legal (nor morally good thing). *Yet abortion is awfully convenient for some people.* So it has to happen before the birth, preferably before it becomes obvious. Out of sight (of everyone not directly involved with the procedure), out of mind, and everybody can avoid thinking about it too much.
The weak won't have a voice if there is nobody to talk for them. That is the mean reason for making and championing a concept like *universal* human rights which should apply to everyone, the weak and otherwise defenseless included, and are considered sacred. To pick another example (related to why "human rights" got popular after WW2), consider civilian population in an country occupied an overwhelming hostile military: they have very little recourse to plead for fair and just treatment unless the occupiers believe the occupied, in fact, have sacrosanct rights.
Embryo is a specific term that refers to the earliest developmental stage in pregnancy, followed by fetus, then baby. Each developmental stage has unique characteristics, which is why there is a specific term for each. Are you actually arguing that we should use incorrect terminology (calling an embryo a baby) because that feels more emotionally right to you?
Re licorice: Does anyone know if licorice root tea also has the same problem? Because I'm pretty sure every tea that actually works to make your throat feel immediately better contains licorice root. Since I read your original article about pregnancy and licorice, I decided to wean myself off of all of them (I used to drink them because I was taking vocal lessons and sometimes you just want to soothe your throat) in case I decide to get pregnant...
I wasn’t aware of the reason given in the post for avoiding licorice- I thought it was because it raises your blood pressure. I used to live in the Netherlands, another licorice-loving country, and my husband and I both fell in love with Dutch “drop”. Our first year there we usually had a few pieces after dinner. But when we went in for physicals, we were both asked how much licorice we’d been eating. I realized it was the licorice that had been making my blood pressure spike at night. Guess we’re just sensitive to it. We had kids years later, and that feeling would have been really unpleasant if I had been pregnant.
It should have the same issue, unfortunately; glycyrrhizzin is present in licorice root itself, which is why it's present in black licorice.
Could Cytomegalovirus explain some of the birth order effects? Women are typically pretty careful with avoiding infecting when pregnant with their first, but once they have a toddler running around there is only so much they can do. So subsequent pregnancies are probably more likely to have CMV infections than first pregnancies, and the first born are less likely to be damaged than subsequent babies.
Birth order also matters. The second kid suffers the effects of the damage the first kid did to mom's body, and so on and so forth for any subsequent children.
So I was first in my class in AP chemistry which qualifies me to look up some molecular masses and check these papers' dose-math.
The "2g choline" study actually made a serious error in dose-conversion when they said "Each choline supplement dose consisted of 1.25g choline bitartrate, which contained 1g of bioavailable choline cation." It's actually around half that. So they were actually testing 1g of free choline.
choline bitartrate molecules weigh 1.81 times more than choline chloride and 2.53 times more than free choline. Each of these molecules contains only one choline. Convert doses accordingly.
I think it's fine to take 2g of choline bitartrate to get ~790mg of choline. But the largest pills on amazon are only 650mg choline bitartrate per pill.
In general a dose is meaningless without specifying which form the dose-mass refers to. Someone could be off by 30x if for example one number is free lithium and the other number is lithium citrate and they forget to convert.
This is really basic stuff that everyone learns in their first chemistry class so it's disappointing that a paper got past peer review while overstating its choline dose by 2x.
To get the right dose without a zillion pills I settled on the nutricost powder (500g for $16 is a much better deal than the pills, also) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01ASC6XS2?psc=1&smid=A2YD2H3KGK1F4L&ref_=chk_typ_imgToDp
To mix in 2g of choline bitartrate with 50g of whey protein powder and 7g of creatine for breakfast.
The nullification / "reversal" in the age advantage amongst elite athletes may be because if you are a really skilled athlete born in the end of the year and are the youngest on your team but still good enough, at some point, age stops mattering and your natural ability level shines through. Thus, we'd expect the elite not to see much of a difference because those who are good enough can still play; you're weeding out the merely really good but not quite superelite players.
I would be skeptical of a reversal, though one possibility would be that constantly playing at a disadvantage gives them a slight training advantage, so they end up a bit better than they would otherwise if they actually stick with it.
However, I suspect it is probably the former.
Wittgenstein said that by looking at language, he let the philosophical fly out of the bottle and thus ended the maddening work, and this post strikes me as doing the same for pregnancy optimization.
Whether or not that is your intention, it's a thought-provoking post (and makes me glad I'm well past the age to worry about any of it).
On the birth month thing and sports, one of the things that defined my socialization was being born on the cusp of our rec. league baseball program's cutoff date. I alternated year to year being a bench-sitting, error-prone right fielder, to being a star pitcher. I didn't play past high school, but I learned many life lessons about failure and success.
Scott - the timing of this redux makes me think that you are considering having kids. Congrats!
He actually had already confirmed this in the comments of his wedding announcement post, saying that considering having kids was one of the big reasons he even got married in the first place.
I would estimate that the birth month disparity would have some impact on IQ. Schizophrenia generally has far more of a detrimental effect on IQ than autism spectrum disorders. And theoretically, a child born up to ~11.9 months earlier than their peers would perform slightly better academically and moderately better athletically, thus receiving more encouragement from teachers. But this would obviously be very difficult -if not impossible- to quantify with currently available data.
So this market should resolve now, right? https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/which-of-these-interventions-will-i
The idea that fish oil is defective isn't a stretch at all. We know what we want from fish oil: omega-3 fatty acids, so we measure it and they usually don't have it. And that shouldn't be so surprising because this is specifically the kind of fat that oxidizes easily and so that's just what it does.
This is a pretty good piece! Thanks for doing all this work.
Aluminum itself is a neurotoxin although it has low solubility in water and low oral bioavailability. Should I be concerned about the quantity of aluminum that an activated alumina filter would put in the water?
The major biodeterminist parenting intervention is to have kids young. If that's not going to happen, freeze your eggs or sperm. Feels weird recommending something I didn't do, but I would do it if I were young now - especially for men, probably for women.
To clarify "avoid CMV", I think a solid piece of advice is "don't start a job in healthcare or at a school/daycare" right when you're trying to conceive, because newcomers tend to get sick quite often when they start working in these environments (with CMV & everything else--nearly all bedside nurses have had CMV)
Another confounder for birth month is whether or not your planning is effective. In practice, planning the birth month of your child is really pretty tricky, as a lot of people don't get pregnant on the first try (or even second, third, etc). One would assume that a better ability to plan this intentionally might be due to higher fertility in general, which could be correlated to a lot of things, including a healthier embryo/fetus and subsequently higher IQ.
I respect the dedication for exploring all these, to end up with 2 IQ points equivalent. What a journey. (Also, that Elon Musk decompression baby theory-not-theory is a gem!)