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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3876 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

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Any more accounts on twitter like @crimkadid? I think the technical term for him and his ilk is a schizoposter (if not please correct me). But he seems to randomly tweet about topics such as autism, IQ, sociology and history. Kinda hard to summarise but it is one of those accounts that likes to post various in depth threads of a topic matter they are (supposedly) well versed in.

I'd like to see more of these accounts. I like the fact that there are minimal jokes and pop culture references and has what feels like an extremely high information density. If you know of anything similar, let me know.

He's not exactly a schizoposter, schizoposters are more openly crazy, but he's def related. I haven't read his most recent thread - but his output before that was uniformly just nonsense, and there wasn't any truth or value in it whatsoever, not even in an 'adjacent to truth' sense. Not that there aren't 'edgy dissident' claims/accounts that are valuable, but they're outnumbered by nonsense by several orders of magnitude, and telling the difference takes effort. A similar account is @realhumanschwab, whose output is similarly nonsense and without value.

I haven't read his most recent thread - but his output before that was uniformly just nonsense, and there wasn't any truth or value in it whatsoever, not even in an 'adjacent to truth' sense.

On that basis are you saying this? His inferences are straining credulity, but he cites genuine data.

I wrote something here but I lost it to browser issue, so shorter:

tl;dr my issue isn't with non-expert science, my issue is specifically with this guy's results and conclusions. It's really easy to 'cite data', there are piles of bad studies everywhere, and you can draw ridiculous conclusions from reasonable studies easily. Tweet threads or better blogposts with strong conclusions are fine, but the results need to be correct, and this guy (and a lot of other vaguely right-wing posters) are not putting out correct stuff.

this is what I was thinking of when I wrote OP. Lots of data is cited, but it's not useful data. Japan high EPA+DHA (sure), "There’s a national correlation -0.63 (strong) between seafood consumption and homicide rate." is uncited (nation-level correlations like thisare totally useless, horrifically confounded), cited "The effect of omega-3s on aggression is powerful enough that it has also been noticed in dogs" n=36, in dogs is not evidence for anything in humans. He quotes "The mood profile was improved after Omega-3 with increased vigour and reduced anger, anxiety and depression states. This was associated with an effect on reactivity with a reduction of reaction time in the Go/ No-Go and Sustained Attention tests" without citing it, which is from this - a n=33 psych study that finds a large number of effects of omega-3! It improves scores on the sustained attention (p<.01, p<.0003 for physical reaction time and EMG latency) and go/no-go (p<.0005, p<.0001) tests, improves vigour (p<.0001), reduces anger (p<.001), anxiety (p<.01), depression (p<.01), fatigue (p<.04), confusion (p<.04). Ofc, the systematic review i could find on one of those topics (depression), found no significant result despite a pooled N of 3000. So I just don't believe that paper, tbh.

This is what I mean - yeah, he cites data, but not in a 'literature review to find out what's accurate post replication crisis' sense, but a 'here's a paper that agrees with me!' sense. It's really easy to get papers that agree with you! There are some 'meta-analysis of 4000 RCTs of traditional chinese medicine finds that it works' papers, but that doesn't mean that TCM works!

His most recent tweet thread (which I still haven't read, just saw when i clicked his profile and it was relevant) ends with

The important question: do omega-3 fatty acids, protective against inflammation, depression, and schizophrenia, also protect against TB? At bare minimum they do boost serum Vitamin D, which is closely linked to disease risk.

With a link to the paper ... is this supposed to be evidence that omega-3 helps with inflammation? "Omega 3 helps with vitamin d/inflammation/depression/schizophrenia -> it helps with TB" is not a conclusion you can make if you've even had a HS biology course. Benadryl+SSRIs+antipsychotics+IV vitamin D won't treat TB.

Even his non-sourced assertions are just weird

For much of my life I've thought it obvious that the mental differences between generations are so large that they have a biological origin. As far as I can gather though, I am the only person in the known universe to think this.

huh?

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