Links for 2021-08-30
Psychiatrists report an outbreak of a new mass sociogenic illness spread by social media. Affected adolescents exhibit Tourette's-like behaviour which they "caught" from a popular YouTube creator. https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article/doi/10.1093/brain/awab316/6356504
Autistics are less subject to sunk cost fallacy https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167487021000647
Are diet sodas much worse for you than regular sodas? https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01965/full
Large Danish population sample finds that parental education is only very weakly positively associated with child educational performance among adoptees. https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspp0000314
How Nike ads have evolved the ongoing feminization of American society https://houseofstrauss.substack.com/p/nikes-end-of-men
"Virgin boy eggs are a traditional chinese dish in which eggs are boiled in the urine of young boys who were presumably peasants, preferably under the age of ten." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_boy_egg
"We may have found a solid hypothesis to explain why extreme overparametrization is so helpful in Deep Learning" youtu.be/OzGguadEHOU
These stats from Papua New Guinea remind us that civilization is a thin veneer over barbarism: 41% of men on Bougainville Island admit to coercing a non-partner into sex (2013); approximately 60% of men interviewed reported to have participated in gang rape (1994); nearly half of reported rape victims are under 15 years of age and 13% are under seven (UNICEF); 50% of those seeking medical help after rape are under 16, 25% are under 12 and 10% are under eight (ChildFund Australia); 50 percent of girls are at risk of becoming involved in sex work, or being internally trafficked;; 7.7% of men have sexually assaulted another male (2013) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_violence_in_Papua_New_Guinea (this is typical among hunter-gatherer societies: https://quillette.com/2019/05/09/a-girls-place-in-the-world/ and https://quillette.com/2019/10/05/the-dangerous-life-of-an-anthropologist/)
After 1,500 years of Jewish history in Afghanistan, Zablon Simantov is the last one who remains. https://www.jta.org/2021/08/18/global/what-we-know-about-zebulun-simantov-afghanistans-last-jew-who-still-wont-leave-the-country-or-divorce-his-wife/amp
Ukrainian troops rescue Canada-bound Afghans in daring operation: "The Ukrainian operation succeeded where others had collapsed because the Ukrainian military deployed special forces troops into the city on foot to conduct the rescue. The evacuees said they were stunned that Ukrainian troops had taken risks to save them that Canadian and U.S. forces had not." https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-ukraine-leads-daring-rescue-of-canada-bound-afghans/