MattY asks: Why didn't El Salvador's earlier gang crackdown work?

Two answers:

1. It ended and up to 91% were released without charges following a court decision.

2. It was never as large as the current crackdown.

🚨 New Paper

How do you track a novel epidemic when data & transmission dynamics are uncertain?

We design a Bayesian method (similar to election poll trackers!) that uses the info available in the early stages of COVID-19 to form robust priors.

(1/)

academic.oup.com/jrsssa/article…

ChatGPT shows signs of the same biases that arise in audit studies of human beings.

When you give ChatGPT resumes, it's biased in how it evaluates minorities.

When you ask ChatGPT to generate resumes for women & minorities, it generates systematically different types of resumes

Purely hypothetically, how could you sell a $150 million necklace?

I am so excited that xLSTM is out. LSTM is close to my heart - for more than 30 years now. With xLSTM we close the gap to existing state-of-the-art LLMs. With NXAI we have started to build our own European LLMs. I am very proud of my team. arxiv.org/abs/2405.04517

Greg Mitchell and @ptetlock are not mincing their words, exploring whether the Implicit-Racism debate was a “Bridge Too Far” for Social Psychology:

buff.ly/4aZqQAC

HT Rob

Immigrant inventors become more productive when they move to the United States and due to knowledge spillovers this ends up benefitting the countries they left on net.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Expanding our understanding of human development: Lethal Phenotypes Portal showcases a curated catalogue of human essential genes bit.ly/3wBeu2y #mendeliandisorders #lethalmouseknockouts #genediscovery

This is a very striking 'hockey stick' graph.

TV coverage starts rising when gas price hits around $3.50. briefingbook.info/p/bad-news-bia…

Our paper on whether PC adjustments in GWAS and PGI prediction are picking up direct genetic effects is out on bioarxiv!
biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

In countries with high homicide rates, the vast majority of homicide victims are male.

In countries with low homicide rates, the sex ratio of victims sometimes approaches 50/50.

Source: UNODC, Global Study on Homicide, 2023

The rebels in Myanmar are an interesting group.

They've accepted Tether as their official currency and they're making extensive use of 3D-printed guns.

That seems like a youthful insurgency.

Studies that failed replication are not subsequently cited less than studies that passed replication.

(From Ruben C. Arslan)

Interesting new paper out today by Amanda Agan and coauthors on criminal records+scarring. Punchline: erasing criminal record histories does not improve labor market outcomes! BUT gig work can be one way to alleviate barrier to reentry.

Check it out: nber.org/papers/w32394?…