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Cremieux Recueil
Personal blog · cremieux.xyzeconomicspolitics
Cremieux Recueil's personal blog at cremieux.xyz covers economics and politics. Since 2023, 56 different Hacker News readers have linked it 105 times, most often “Ranking Fields by p-Value Suspiciousness”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Cremieux Recueil's Substack posts for data-driven critiques of research on lead, IQ, the Flynn effect, p-values, social science studies and health statistics. Commenters often cite them as evidence against claims.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Suggested as a post to read on p-value suspiciousness, called an "even better post" on the Flynn effect, and "good starting points" on a difficult topic.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I discuss papers that ought to be discussed. Click to read Cremieux Recueil, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- Ranking Fields by p-Value Suspiciousness5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-09-23
- From Caveman to Chinaman: Why China Fell Behind Europe4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-08-18
- The rise and impending fall of the dental cavity4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-04-10
- The Demise of the Flynn Effect3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-04-14
- Nonhuman Intelligence3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-03-07
- Nutrition Beliefs Are Just-So Stories3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-04-05
- The Blue Zone Distraction3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-08-26
- From Pollution to Solution3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-25
- Focusing on Healthcare's Administrative Costs Is Misguided3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-12-08
- The Myth of the Sommelier2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-10-09
What Hacker News says?
And there's claim that lead is maybe overrated after all https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead
Comment linking /p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead
on “Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get the lead out of everything”Submitted The rise and impending fall of the dental cavity as a story · 104 points
HN discussion> or rather the byproducts of the digestion of sugar by bacteria in your mouth) ...for now. There may be a "vaccine" for dental caries if this recently HN'd article is to be believed and isn't sponsored content: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-rise-and-impending-fall-of-th... Though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caries_vaccine suggests it may not be that simple.
Comment linking /p/the-rise-and-impending-fall-of-the
on “How Nestlé gets children hooked on sugar in lower-income countries”Submitted How smart do you have to be to get a degree? as a story · 74 points
HN discussionHave you read this post about p-value suspiciousness as a means of testing for widespread non-replicable results? https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/ranking-fields-by-p-value-suspici... And that's not to speak of things like biotech which is full of photoshopped images of fluorescence and whatnot.
Comment linking /p/ranking-fields-by-p-value-suspiciousness
on “NIH hit with freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring”Submitted What's the deal with autism rates? as a story · 72 points
HN discussionThere’s sort of no point in discussing this article since the full text is paywalled. The Gizmodo summary seems to suggest that it’s mostly just a meta review plus some extrapolation: they averaged some studies to find the typical effect on mental health and then multiplied it by all the lead exposure in the country. I’ll suggest an interesting article to read instead. I don’t have the expertise to evaluate if it’s…
Comment linking /p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead
on “Contribution of childhood lead exposure to psychopathology in the US”Submitted Did the HHS Just Explain Autism? as a story · 38 points
HN discussion> IQ only weakly correlates to the intelligence […] it tests a bunch of stuff completely unrelated to intelligence (e.g. cultural trivia). These are unfortunate myths. See the following on IQ testing, relationship of various tests to general intelligence, and the absence of cultural bias in testing: - Standardized exams measure intrinsic ability, not racial or socioeconomic privilege https://milkyeggs.com/society/st…
Comment linking /cp/140810182
on “Intelligence is not like height”Submitted Just Pay Them Off as a story · 25 points
HN discussionThat finding is probably not reliable because of the way they do binning: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/brief-data-post?open=false#%C2%A7...
Comment linking /p/brief-data-post?open=false
on “How long before superintelligence? (1997)”Submitted The Invention of Islamic Invention as a story · 18 points
HN discussionLike many things where what constitutes base data changes and hence graphs change pretty radically, this can be cleanly explained by diagnostic drift. Here's a detailed breakdown: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/how-to-end-the-autism-epidemic
Comment linking /p/how-to-end-the-autism-epidemic
on “FDA takes action to make a treatment available for autism symptoms”Submitted Low-quality studies mean meta-analyses are frequently worse than single studies as a story · 17 points
HN discussionDifficult topic, too much for a HN comment. Some good starting points: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/brief-notes-on-scientific-critiqu...
Comment linking /p/brief-notes-on-scientific-critique/comment/192179939
on “Malaysia enforces ban on social media accounts for children younger than 16”Submitted Ranking Fields by p-Value Suspiciousness as a story · 16 points
HN discussionI'd be very careful about studies that show a result favourable to the current zeitgeist's moral panic: " A recent study claimed to show that social media use was hurting kids' cognitive development. But I had access to their data, so I was able to show that they were completely wrong. " https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/social-scientists-are-lazy
Comment linking /p/social-scientists-are-lazy
on “Malaysia enforces ban on social media accounts for children younger than 16”Submitted The Demise of the Flynn Effect as a story · 15 points
HN discussionThe author discusses this in footnote 3: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/ranking-fields-by-p-value-suspici... > Alternative explanation I: Nonsignificant results may not be reported at all and thus they won’t appear in the dataset. > This cannot explain the results. Remember that when results should be significant because you have adequate power to detect a real effect, only a small percentage of p-values will be in the…
Comment linking /p/ranking-fields-by-p-value-suspiciousness
on “Ranking Fields by p-Value Suspiciousness”Submitted The Deep Roots of Intelligence Differences as a story · 13 points
HN discussion> He's trying really hard to disprove Haidt's post by poking holes in many of the studies. Because this is how evidence based reasoning works. If the evidence that is supposed to support the hypothesis is fundamentally flawed, then our hypothesis doesn't actually have any support. The fact that we can apparently so easily find flaws in what is supposed to be empirical evidence should make us more cautious about draw…
Comment linking /p/beware-the-man-of-many-studies
on “Meta Designed Products to Capitalize on Teen Vulnerabilities, States Allege”Submitted Nonhuman Intelligence as a story · 13 points
HN discussionAgainst Attribution Studies > An “attribution study” is the name I’ve given to studies that purport to provide estimates of important real-world quantities through extrapolations from estimates in other, uninformative studies. There are a lot of these papers and they often come with conclusions like ‘Gas stoves responsible for 13% of American asthma’, ‘68,000 die each year due to health insurer denials’, ‘DOGE kille…
Comment linking /p/against-attribution-studies
on “Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1T and 114,000 Lives a Year, Yale Study”Submitted Nutrition Beliefs Are Just-So Stories as a story · 8 points
HN discussionAn even better post here on how the Flynn Effect and Reverse Flynn Effect was never real in the first place: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-demise-of-the-flynn-effect
Comment linking /p/the-demise-of-the-flynn-effect
on “The Reverse Flynn Effect”Submitted National IQs Are Valid as a story · 8 points
HN discussionIn the past decade, research suggests that testosterone levels have actually gone up[1]. [1] https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/why-are-testosterone-levels-risin...
Comment linking /p/why-are-testosterone-levels-rising
on “Men's average testosterone levels have halved in last 50 years”Submitted The Blue Zone Distraction as a story · 8 points
HN discussionLink to the related blog post by the author: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/food-deserts-are-not-real The paper referenced in the x-tweet is "Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality", which can be found eg here[1]. [1]: https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/FoodDeserts.pdf
Comment linking /p/food-deserts-are-not-real
on “Why do low-income households eat so much garbage?”Submitted The Vast Emptiness of Social Psychology as a story · 8 points
HN discussion
