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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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Afraid I don't remember the specifics (last looked at the evidence years ago, in the spirit of "honest reassessment of all widely-mocked right wing conspiracy theories"), but iirc there were Sailer Confounders on the IQ loss, and I wasn't convinced.

But yeah, I think putting literally any medication in the water supply is foolish. We try not to do it with livestock these days because you have no idea what dosage is actually being given. The same people who don't brush their teeth are likely to drink nothing but cola rather than tap water. And if you up the concentration to dose those people, you will absolutely give Water-Chugging Georg skeletal fluorisis.

When I was little kids got bottles of fluoride tablets from the county health department, which seems like a better option.

But yeah, I think putting literally any medication in the water supply is foolish.

You have to count the hits and the misses. Lets just concede that fluoride in drinking water was or is now a mistake. There is still chlorine/chloramine. Also gov't mandates and/or influence in the food supply: iodine, vit D, niacin, folate, iron, thiamine, riboflavin etc.

Interestingly, the gov't got I think niacin temporarily wrong, assuming the cause of pellagra was a corn heavy diet, delaying the addition of niacin. Which is fine I guess as extreme caution with the food supply is probably a good idea.

That sounds more dangerous to me, but it really depends on the amount in the bottles. AFAIK, the only known death from fluoride poisoning was a 3-year-old chugging a bottle of fluoride solution, but it was a bigger one at a dentist's office.

The main thing is that swallowing fluoride is fairly useless, and where the risks are. You want it to stay in your mouth.

Yeah in retrospect it actually doesn't seem great vs "literally just brush your teeth", but at least it was better for getting a measured dose.

What's a "sailer confounder"?

(and @jeroboam) I was using it in the general sense of "uncorrected for demographics because everyone knows you're only supposed to use proxies". It's not specifically blacks because the studies come from all over the world. Rural/urban demographics in every country are a unique complicated mess to untangle and don't respond well to a simple "correcting for income." The kitchen-sink "self-sufficiency index" in that one paper is a good example.

The exciting parts of these studies were the natural experiments with existing ppm differences with (ideally) no correlation to demographics. Unless Sweden banished all retards to the Speckle-Tooth Mountains sometime in the 1700s.

Presumably he is referring to Steve Sailer, who has written about the accuracy of stereotypes and is known for his Sailer's Law of Mass Shootings, and Sailer's Law of Female Journalists.

The implication, presumably, is that there are somehow more black people in the fluoridated group, and, furthermore that this is not being measured since the researchers falsely believe that all races have the same IQ. I don't know what the evidence for this claim would be though.

Surely the researchers would correct for income which would probably be good enough for fixing these problems.