2024 productivity by the numbers

Steady as she goes, except for Twitter growth

I monitor my productivity to see how things change over time. The metrics are:

• Blog posts written

• Visitor statistics and subscriptions to blog

• Twitter/X

• Academic papers published

• Books read

The blog

My Wordpress site has a useful archive function at this page listing all posts by year. 2024 had 89 posts, compared to 108 in 2023 and 119 in 2022. So a decrease, probably coinciding with too much time spent managing and traveling last year.

In terms of readership, here's the growth chart for subscribers on Substack:

The chart is basically just a linear line go up over the years, ending at about 8700 by end of 2024. Since the growth is about linear, it is relatively easy to predict the end of year value, which should be about 12,000.

In terms of readership (views), Substack gives this figure:

Despite the increase in the subscribers, visits are relatively stable (except for the summer months of traveling). This is because the open rate of emails have decreased over time. I think this is because Twitter is giving fewer off-site links. Posts with links in them are reportedly suppressed ('deboosted') because Elon wants to keep traffic in-house for ad revenue reasons. Essentially, despite being ideologically aligned, Twitter and Substack are battling over viewership. Recall that earlier Twitter implemented a block of embedding images from any domain ending in substack.com, which is why you need to use a custom domain to evade this. In total, Substack for 2024 totaled 841k visits with another 245k on the Wordpress legacy site. Substack had 881k in 2023 for comparison, so a slight decline. Since the volume was relatively stable and I expect -- hope for -- less travel in 2025, we can probably predict another ~850k reads in 2025 on Substack.

Twitter/X

There doesn't seem to be a reasonable way to get statistics for year-periods, even with a paid account. However, using the archive websites, one can see that in late January I had about 27k followers, and it is now about 35k. In other words, a growth of about 8k, or about 30%. A nice increase, but of course not compared to the meteoric rise of accounts such as Cremieux (229k, all in 1 year 9 months), i/o (183k), and Rabbit Hole (941k). 2025 should go even better given Musk's new political focus, Trump's re-election, and the general vibe shift. Making a prediction here is more difficult, but we could go with another 30% growth, which is maybe optimistic, so I will settle for 25% growth (+8750).

Academic work

I count a total of 13 reviewed ('finished') publications:

1. Polygenic Selection and Environmental Influence on Adult Body Height: Genetic and Living Standard Contributions Across Diverse Populations. Twin Research and Human Genetics. Davide Piffer, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

2. A New, Open Source English Vocabulary Test. Mankind Quarterly. Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, Meng Hu, Jurij Fedorov

3. The Politics of the World Encyclopedia. A Study of Political Leanings of the Wikipedia User Base. Mankind Quarterly. N. P. Cohen, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

4. Does Cognitive Ability Mediate Black-White Income Disparities in the USA?. Mankind Quarterly. Simon Wright, Bryan Pesta, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

5. Predictive Accuracy of Polygenic Scores from European GWAS among Chinese Provinces. Mankind Quarterly. Davide Piffer, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

6. Can Intelligence Be Predicted from the MMPI? An Out-of-Sample Validation Study. Mankind Quarterly. Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

7. Do conservatives really have an advantage in mental health? An examination of measurement invariance. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. Edward Dutton, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

8. Intelligence is associated with being non-binary and unusual sexuality: Rare sexual orientation, gender non-conformism and intelligence in a large dating sample. Psychreg. Edward Dutton, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

9. International Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of Assortative Mating for Educational Attainment. Evolutionary Psychology. Sebastian Jensen

10. Is Research on the Genetics of Race / IQ Gaps “Mythically Taboo?”. OpenPsych. Pesta, Bryan J.; Kirkegaard, Emil O. W., Bronski, J.

11. Does Conservative Religiousness Promote Selection for Intelligence? An Analysis of the Vietnam Experience Study. Mankind Quarterly. Edward Dutton, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

12. Evolutionary Trends of Polygenic Scores in European Populations From the Paleolithic to Modern Times. Twin Research and Human Genetics. Davide Piffer, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

13. Diversity in STEM: Merit or Discrimination via Inaccurate Stereotype?. OpenPsych. Joseph Bronski, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

Overall, I am happy with our work across areas. We are making steady progress in the genomics of group differences, confirming that polygenic scores work to predict all sorts of differences, back in time, in China, worldwide. Much more will come in 2025 on this. Seb Jensen is a meta-analysis machine, and we have more exciting work coming out in 2025 on that front as well, including -- finally -- a new comprehensive meta-analysis of race IQ gaps in USA. I expect about 14 new papers in 2025.

Books read

I landed at 40 books, with a goal of 30. This is mainly because of excessive travel and sick time, which resulted in more books read than outward productivity. I hope to decrease this again towards 30, which is also the goal for 2025 (prediction = 35). As is custom, I will write a post shortly with my brief reviews of the 40 books. Stay tuned for that, but in the mean time, you can read Bronski's reviews of the books he read here.