Michael Kaemingk

Behavioral science. Deputy Director of Research Partnerships at @VoteRevHQ. Pathological curiosity. Epistemological modesty. Views my own.

[Stuart Buck @stuartbuck1]

@TECleveland @cremieuxrecueil Despite some bogus grants, a lot of government is like this cartoon. I bet this "small team" would find a line item for "screwworm sterilization" and delete it, not knowing that they just devastated American farming: https://t.co/OAnAkxDSEK

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

This is actually insane.

97% of people taking the standard of care for metastatic solid tumor got worse by seven years.

But with lorlatinib, that number was only 45% in the same time!

This is an ENORMOUS jump in the quality of cancer care.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

There is a hypothesis that birth order effects (on things like income and educational attainment) are in part respiratory pathogen effects: younger kids get more of them from their older siblings. This cool recent paper uses Danish administrative data to argue that this is true and a pretty large part of the story. (They claim 70% of the birth order effect on long-run wages.)

Other work has previously shown that severe infections matter for long-run outcomes, and it's well-established that birth order matters, but I haven't until now seen anyone convincingly show that standard respiratory pathogens impose long-term costs on infant siblings.

https://t.co/jpVYsAczQ7

[Rob Wiblin @robertwiblin]

This tweet got over 1M views so we made it a video:

How much money does Meta make by enabling crimes?

"Internal docs leaked to Reuters show:

• 10% of all Meta revenue comes from ads for scams & banned goods ($16B/year)
• Meta estimates it's involved in 1/3 of all successful scams in the US
• That suggests they drive $50B in scam losses for US consumers alone each year
• Meta earns ~$3B annually from scam/banned goods ads run by Chinese operations alone..."

[John B. Holbein @JohnHolbein1]

Homeless individuals face 3.5 times the mortality risk of the housed.

This difference survives a lot of observable controls.

What else do you notice in this figure?

[Michael Kaemingk @mkaemingk]

@aarmlovi @NotebookLM Have you tried @elicitorg? I’ve found it very good on this front and they’ve built for legibility from the beginning

[Pod Save America @PodSaveAmerica]

Sen. @AlexPadilla4CA describes the events that led up to him being tackled and handcuffed by federal officers: “They escort us over to the press conference. They open the door for me. I’m standing in the back trying to listen... and, you know, just the rhetoric is too much, and not the first time, but the second time they claim that Donald Trump and Secretary Noem is here to liberate the people of Los Angeles... That’s when I spoke up.”

[Neale Mahoney @nealemahoney]

Fresh charts on Republicans' buyer's remorse based on today's UMich print (joint with @weakinstrument)

R consumer expectations was up +15 points between the election and inauguration

Down -14 points since Trump stepped foot in the Oval Office

[Steven Heine @StevenHeine4]

Two common findings from sleep research are that 1) short sleep durations predict worse health outcomes, and 2) people from some cultures sleep much less than those from others. Do people from cultures with short sleep durations have worse health outcomes? 🧵

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Taking government efficiency seriously means having an actual vision—a goal, a deliverable, a KPI, whatever you want to call it—and then figuring out the bottlenecks in your way.

Sometimes, that means cutting staff and rules. But sometimes, it means ADDING staff and rules. You actually need to articulate the vision in order to know what the bottleneck is!

When the bottleneck is—as it was for China in medical regulation—"we have a backlog of drug applications and our team doesn't have time to go thru it all," it's probably not a good idea to fix the problem by *firing* 100 people; that just makes the backlog worse.

Among my many frustrations with this administration's approach to governance is that a lot of the initial cuts have nothing to do with any clearly articulated vision. "Let's begin by decimating global health and epidemic tracing." What? "We're gonna start by firing probationary, upwardly mobile young staff in divisions overseeing high tech areas." Why? "We're slashing all longitudinal research on education outcomes for 4th and 8th graders." Because ... DEI? What?

[Jason Leopold @JasonLeopold]

🚨🚨BIG SCOOP: Musk’s DOGE Teen Was Fired By Cybersecurity Firm for Leaking Company Secrets

Edward Coristine posted online that he had retained access to the firm’s servers. Now he has access to sensitive government information.
https://t.co/I4Fimayk6V

[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC]

This is a five alarm fire.

The people elected Donald Trump to be President - not Elon Musk.

Having an unelected billionaire, with his own foreign debts and motives, raiding US classified information is a grave threat to national security.

This should not be a partisan issue.

[Yashar Ali 🐘 @yashar]

WASHINGTON, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.

The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department's data systems.

Officials affected by the move can still log on and access functions such as email but can no longer see the massive datasets that cover every facet of the federal workforce.

[Senator Ruben Gallego @SenRubenGallego]

Can we not?? @POTUS

[John B. Holbein @JohnHolbein1]

This new paper is so cool!

It shows that the media use language structures—such as passive voice, nominalizations, and intransitive verbs—that obscure responsibility more often in cases of police killings than in cases of civilian killings.

Then, in an experiment, it shows that these seemingly semantic differences have substantial downstream consequences.

Because the media uses passive voice, etc. in response to police killings, citizens are less likely to hold police officers morally responsible and demand penalties for bad police behavior.

"Our study underscores the importance of semantic structures in how media shape perceptions, extending beyond considerations of coverage volume and bias."

Cool!!

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

It's finally here: ABUNDANCE, the new book I wrote with @ezraklein, is out March 18.

I am so excited for people to read this book—and if you're in NYC, DC, Boston, SF, LA, Los Altos, Chicago (or Seattle, Atlanta, Raleigh, Portland...), I'm excited to talk to you this spring.

ABUNDANCE is a book of history, economics, political commentary, and even a dash of philosophy. It's a deep critique of how liberalism has gone wrong in the last 50 years—and a vision of an American future that prioritizes housing affordability, cheap clean energy supply, government that *actually works*, an invention agenda to accelerate scientific breakthroughs that save and improve our lives, and technology policy that allows those breakthroughs to be enjoyed by the most people.

Pre-order link below :)

[Molly White @molly0xFFF]

The people now in charge of the Office of Personnel Management apparently don’t know how to scrub PDF metadata, and have exposed the original authors of the guidance they’re publishing. Two, Noah Peters and James Sherk, have links to the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Understand that the constitutional crisis is the point.

Before the election, JD Vance said that his goal was for Trump to take illegal steps to seize power and then purposely ignore a court ruling telling him to stop.

Destruction of democracy IS THE PLAN.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

The freezing of federal grants, the firing of all inspector generals, the immunization of political violence - does everybody not see what’s happening?

In a blitzkrieg, Trump is trying to collapse our democracy - and probably our economy - and seize control.

Call it what it is.

[Yaneer Bar-Yam @yaneerbaryam]

Update: Canadian teenager who was in critical condition from H5N1 infection has recovered.

Genetic sequencing found mutations in HA gene, which plays key role in binding to sialic acids receptors in the lung. Similar to US severe case.

Article in NEJM https://t.co/Z5wDCIUtkK