Inherit the Wind uses the historical case of the Scopes Monkey Trial to discuss the contemporary McCarthyism, neither of which is particularly closely tied to white supremacy?
Ugh. I'm sorry, but could you please explain yourself? I also read Inherit the Wind in middle school, and my understanding is that it fictionalized the (true) story of the "Scopes/Monkey Trial", which was an ideological conflict between science and religion. It's been over 50 years, and maybe I'm so pure that I disregarded any racial context, but I don't remember any.
How does "White Supremacy" come into the story, or the denial of evolution as a whole?
White supremacists hate the idea that they could have had non-white ancestors. Belief in a white Adam & Eve is much more in line with their world view. Non-whites were created by "the Curse of Ham". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham
Surely you understand the difference between "Some X believe Y" and "Y is a form of X". Examples of the former pattern do not prove the latter.
Even if we correct the logic here, and change the conclusion to something like "All people who dismiss evolution are white supremacists", that would still be disproven by counterexamples, like the many non-white people who don't believe in evolution.
"Acceptance of evolution was lower [than in the US] in ... Singapore (59%), India (56%), Brazil (54%), and Malaysia (43%)"
I just gave a connection white supremacy and evolution denial, not trying to prove any absolutes. Everything you are saying seemed kinda obvious and thus I didn't mention it.
I apologize if I misunderstood. I thought your comment was related to the statement being discussed in this chain. ("Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy")
Biological evolution was butting heads with the dying concept of social evolution at the time, and that conflict provides illuminating subtext to the trial and book.
Which is another interesting aspect of the political use of science: that people will cherry-pick and bend all they can in ways that support their policies.
Pretty sure "scientific racism" owes more to pop versions of evolutionary theory than it does to a near-Eastern religion that endows all people with immortal souls, spreads the faith in all languages following Pentacost, tells parables about Samaritans, and makes a point of adding Galatians to its sacred book.
Trust in institutions is at an all time low. The last thing we need is for these institutions to veer away from their goals to push a political agenda. Good riddance to her.
I used to love Popular Science but these magazines all died 20 years ago. Science reporting was the first type of journalism to go, much easier to write clickbait about current events. Remember Scientific American already endorsed Biden last election which was a wtf moment.
> Remember Scientific American already endorsed Biden last election which was a wtf moment.
In his first term the Trump administration tried to massively cut scientific and medical research, tried to change the rules for the board of outside scientists that review EPA decisions for scientific soundness to not allow academic scientists so that it would only consist of scientists working for the industries that the EPA regulates, tried to make it so that most peer reviewed medical research that showed products causing health problems could not be considered by the EPA when deciding if a chemical should be banned, tried to massively increase taxes on graduate students in STEM fields, wanted to stop NASA from doing Earth science, and let's not forget repeatedly claiming climate change is a hoax. I'm sure I'm forgetting several more.
I don't expect my technical publications to have an opinion on things politicians do that have nothing to do with the fields they cover, but when politicians start doing things directly concerning those fields I don't see how it is a WTF moment for them to comment.
Why do you find it a "wtf moment" that a scientific magazine would endorse the opposition candidate to one threatening to all but destroy federal funding for most scientific research in the country?
It seems clear to me that this would be the most appropriate circumstance for such an endorsement.
Interestingly the only people who are not supposed to “push a political agenda” are usually accused of being “woke” in one of the next sentences.
“Keeping politics out” brought the US - and the world - Trump, two times. Most things in life are political.
>“Keeping politics out” brought the US - and the world - Trump, two times.
Given the degree to which Trump benefits from anti-establishment sentiment, I'd like you to ponder if putting politics absolutely everywhere might very well be what got Trump elected twice. I find the idea that there just isn't enough political message completely incompatible with current reality.
If you don‘t seriously talk about politics but consider it sports and entertainment and about “winning”, you get Dr. Oz and RFKjr to decide about your health and Matt Gaetz overseeing justice.
Politics is everywhere and it has to be everywhere but politics is not Joe Rogan or Fox news. That‘s propaganda.
I believe we are living in an interesting time (yeah, that kind of 'interesting time"). Decades from now, given a historical context, I suspect a lot of the headlines like this one will be viewed very differently.
There are no apolitical institutions. You would see that more clearly when visiting (or god forbid living in) a dictatorship or totalitarian regime, where all institutions are either brought in line with the regime or abolished. And I do mean all including gardening clubs.
Enjoy institutions having the freedom to express political opinions, it is not guaranteed to last.
"Everything is political" is such a boring tautology.
Everything exists within the political climate of modern society. Institutions are forced to navigate the political landscape in which they exist.
But that does not make the institutions political in nature. There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles or the composition of rocks.
When people say that SA is being political, they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism. That's very different from your definition of "political"
The word “political” is rife with confusion. Careful discussion requires slowing down long enough to make sure different people are talking about the same thing.
One of my favorite definitions of politics is the set of non-violent ways of resolving disagreements, whether interpersonal, organizational, or governmental.
Others may reserve the word politics to only apply to governmental issues, campaigning, elections, coalition building, etc.
P.S. Language is our primary method of communication. Ponder this: why are people so bad at it? Do people really not understand that symbols can have different meanings? Do they forget? Do they want to get peeved because they want to think that other people don’t know what words mean?
> "Everything is political" is such a boring tautology.
1. The comment above didn’t say “Everything is political”.
2. "Everything is political" isn’t true. One might say that many things are influenced by politics; that’s fine, but downstream influence is neither pure single-factor causality nor equality.
3. "Everything is political" isn’t a tautology either.
Support for #2 and #3: There are things in the universe that existed prior to (and independent of) politics, like the Earth. There are phenomena influenced by politics but not inherently political, such as the phenomena of global warming or measuring the level of inflation. What to do about global warming or inflation is political, if you are lucky, meaning you have some persuasive influence at all (not the case in a dictatorship) and/or don’t have to resort to violence.
I believe you're nit-picking instead of interacting with the content of my comment.
OP did not literally say "Everything is political", they said "There are no apolitical institutions". Which is functionally the same thing. "Everything is political" is a common phrase used to express a common school of thought, [1] for example. I was interacting with this school of thought directly in my comment.
I agree with you that "Everything is political" is not true. But tpm is arguing the opposite.
"Everything is political" is a trivially true statement when using tpm's definition of "political", which is the point I was trying to get across. tpm is claiming that any institution which interacts with the government in any way is political in nature. This means that even the rocks and trees and oceans are political, because they are at the mercy of government policy.
I am arguing against this definition of "political".
> tpm is claiming that any institution which interacts with the government in any way is political in nature
I am arguing that any institution is political by its very existence. Even if the true nature of the institutions is hidden by the current regime, as it is often the case in the West.
The funniest thing, of course, is that we are arguing under an article containing a political attack in the political magazine Reason, published by the political Reason Foundation. That's not the ideal starting point if you want to prove the possibility of apoliticalness of anything.
Can you define "institution" and "political" for me, then?
I would argue that there is nothing political about a local bakery, for example. Just a dude making some cakes. He may occasionally be forced to interact with the government, but his bakery as an institution has nothing at all to do with government organizations or political theory. By its nature, a bakery is apolitical.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution is as good as any. I would not consider a small (one person or family) bakery an institution. A large one (measured by number of employees etc) would be an institution, and defining the threshold is not important here.
Political - relating to the government or public affairs of a country
My argument is that every institution is political whether it wants or not.
Bakery is very obviously political because everyone tends to eat food and as such food is an evergreen political theme. Perhaps this is more visible in some countries than others, for example in a neighboring country the price of butter is a quite common item in TV news (really), and it's not a poor country.
But also other than that, a few years ago there were some articles about a bakery that refused to bake a wedding cake for gays, and it was a public affair for a few weeks. Is that political enough for you?
I just think we are talking about different things. I hear what you are saying, but I don't think that bakeries being tangentially related to politically charged topics make them a political institution.
Bakeries also handle and store money, but that doesn't make them a bank. etc. The nature of bakeries as an institution is not political - they are not concerned with the organization of government and policies. They may interact with the government but that doesn't make it a political institution.
This started as a discussion about whether not-primarily-political institutions (like Scientific American) should have and publish political opinions. It was started by an attack of a political institution (Reason) saying they should not. That attack itself makes the target politically relevant.
Bakeries are in a similar position. Once an owner declines to serve a customer based on his (owner or customer) political leaning, it's politically relevant. If a politican attack bakers because (he feels that) the bread price is too high, it's politically relevant.
I think there was an American civil rights movement in the 60's which was in a great part about equal access to services for all ethnicities. Was that not political?
> they are not concerned with the organization of government and policies
'or public affairs'. You wanted a definition and then you are ignoring it?
I read tpm's core points as (1) all institutions are downstream of politics (meaning government, whatever its form) and (2) Therefore, don't take institutions for granted; they rely on compatible upstream governance. I think tpm most wanted to impress the second point upon readers.
When reading dahfizz's comment ""Everything is political" is such a boring tautology."... (a) I didn't see how a point being boring has any bearing on tpm's second point; (b) So I couldn't tell if dahfizz agreed or disagreed with tpm's second point; (c) As a result, dahfizz's comment felt nit-picky to me.
Meta-commentary: It would seem that dahfizz and I both feel like the other is being nitpicky. It seems to me this is a signal that some kind of breakdown is happening on at the conversational level.
Here, I'm thinking out loud. Are "Everything is political" and "There are no apolitical institutions" are functionally the same thing?
When I read "everything is political", I interpret that as meaning "all human interactions involve power relations, competing interests, and/or resource allocation".
When I read "there are no apolitical institutions", I interpret that as meaning "all institutions are downstream of politics (meaning government, whatever its form)".
I think it is useful to differentiate between the two phrases and their meanings. But of course they are closely related. Beyond each of us understanding what the other means, I'm not sure we're making specific enough claims to warrant litigating if "they are functionally the same". It seems like a contextual and subjective choice of where to draw a line. Feel free to say more if I'm missing something.
> There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles or the composition of rocks.
Well, what about studying the mating patterns of humans, studying the decisions to abort, studying the decisions to change gender? Still not at all political in your country? Then, who decides if a study gets funding, who decides if it is ethical, who decides if the results can get published? It's all political decisions around the 'pure' science, which is why I mention different political regimes where stuff like this is often completely explicit unlike in more free societies where it may look like it's free of politics.
> they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism
And they should be glad, not complaining. Everyone is using their position for political activism, business owners, unions, all sorts of organisations, churches etc. There is no reason SA shouldn't do that.
Of course they only complain because they don't agree with SA.
Scientific research is apolitical. Even the act of studying abortion or transgenderism is not inherently political.
Just because scientists have to occasionally interact with political institutions does not make Science itself a political institution. Science is fundamentally apolitical.
I don't believe anyone here believes that scientific research is political. But how a society funds, publishes, and integrates scientific research is deeply political.
> When people say that SA is being political, they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism. That's very different from your definition of "political"
Could you provide some examples? TFA seems to link to opinion pieces at Scientific American and not actual research, so I'm a little unclear.
"There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles"
It will be used as an example of how we are wasting tax money by politicians. It will be used as an example of how homosexuality is natural by one side, and then it will be used as an example of how science is used to "groom" children by the other. There will be fights about whether it should be in school books, and then some states will ban all school books that mention that research, and then publishers will be forced to remove it to still have enough of a market for their books. The authors will be called out on Twitter and receive death threats, their university will cut their funding to avoid the controversy, some students will complain about it, and then that will be used to show how universities indoctrinate our kids.
And so on.
That's what "everything is political" means. When people say things like "get politics out of x," they really mean "make x match my politics", because there's no such thing as "no politics."
The important distinction is that it is possible, and should be the expectation, that you can study beetles and publish the results without any sort of political motivation or bias.
In that sense, it is perfectly possible and reasonable to "take the politics" out of scientific research. Simply do the research and publish the results. There absolutely is a thing as "no politics".
Once the results are out in the world, politicians and pundits are going to talk about it. That doesn't make the science itself a political act.
>> "Simply do the research and publish the results"
> And then you don't get any grants anymore.
This is exaggerated to make a point, which I interpret as: savvy researchers are mindful of how to conduct their work and communicate their results so they get more grants in the future. To what degree does this distort or corrupt an ideal research process? This is complicated. Political economists often frame this as a principal-agent problem. Organizational theorists discuss concepts such as resource dependence. (What other concepts would you include?)
Yes, neutrality is an important principle: we want a study to proceed without outside influence.
Yet, there is an additional point worth mentioning: to the extent public money is allocated to e.g. study beetles, it is downstream of a political process. Meaning, there was allocation of resources that allows the study to proceed.
Yikes, quite the scathing article and example of a the politicization of science.
“Trust the science” has always bothered me for two reasons: 1) science is frequently not black and white and anyone who has done hard science research knows there are plenty of competing opinions among scientists and 2) while scientific facts are facts, we still need to decide on how to act on those facts and that decision making process is most certainly political and subjective in nature.
"Trust the science" is the very antithesis of the scientific spirit. The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom. If you treat scientists as some sort of infallible priesthood then you've missed the whole point of science.
"The Royal Society's motto 'Nullius in verba' was adopted in its First Charter in 1662. is taken to mean 'take nobody's word for it'. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment."
It's highly consistent with the statement above and in many ways is consistent with science as it is practiced.
The Scientific Principle (hypothesis -> experiment -> conclusion and all that) does not pay any heed to authority and received wisdom. And it should not; the experiment results are all that matter.
Academia, the set of very human organisations that have grown to manage our implementation of the Scientfic Principle, are a long way from perfect and are heavily influenced by authority and received wisdom.
So yeah, I don't think it's the essence of science, but distrusting authority and received wisdom definitely required to practice good science.
One funeral at a time is true but “standing on the shoulders of giants” is also true and there is absolutely good science done without redoing all experiments since Newton, like there is a bad science standing on the sand hill of the other bad science. Having distrust by itself will not make one a good scientist and so it can’t be “the essence of science”.
Yes, therefore trusting or distrusting authorities is irrelevant. One can distrust authorities and do bad science, one can trust authorities and do good science, and other combinations.
It literally doesn't. Even Nobel Prize winners do not get a free pass to make baseless claims.
There's an entire realm of people who did great science, won a Nobel prize, and then went on to make absurd unfounded claims about shit they do not know.
> The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom
The essence of science is the use of scientific method which have specific meaning and way of doing things. It relies on evidence based knowledge not on any distrust. It does not have to do with authority but you would question if your tools you are using is good (calibrated and not interfering with measurements in an unaccounted way ..etc) or if your methodology is flawed.
So when someone says "trust the science!" they mean "define your null hypothesis, design an experiment to test it, run said experiment, analyze the data for statistical significance and submit for peer review"?
I think when someone say something you are confused or have doubts about what they mean, then you ask them what they mean. This sentence can be used to mean many things (including mocking up scientists ot trolling). So please next time you see or hear someone says that please ask them that.
If I would use it personally I will probably use it to mean trust the evidence based knowledge that the scientific community is using.
> If I would use it personally I will probably use it to mean trust the evidence based knowledge that the scientific community is using.
Where can one find this knowledge? Are you suggesting regular folk go out and review the literature themselves (most of which is paywalled)?
And even if they did and were able to understand the contents, they'd still lack the required context to weigh contradicting results, dismiss old studies now known to be wrong, etc etc.
And that's why "trust the science" ends up being an appeal to authority.
I'm not saying I have a better alternative than the scientific method, I'm just pointing out that the "scientific consensus" isn't some magical spark that is immediately obvious when one reads the literature, it's something that evolves over many decades of research, conferences, etc.
And that's assuming there is a consensus for a given topic at a given time.
And I'm not even going to get into why reasonably questioning the scientific consensus is a good thing (otherwise it stops being science).
Unfortunately science is full of academic authorities with vested interests (grants, acclaim, stature), conflicts of interest, narcissism, and other problems. To do real science you need to be able to distrust the authorities of the day.
Somewhat disagree. Science requires trust. In fact, it's the process for building that trust up from nothing. Are you friend or foe? I'm going to assume one but watch you closely until I have enough evidence to trust you. Hurray, that's science!
I totally agree that the phrase is often misused to mean "trust my favorite authority figure" or "trust the status quo," which is distinctly unscientific. Good news though, if we're willing to actually do the work (the hard part) trust in science is what allows us to change the status quo!
No, the antithesis of the scientific spirit is to believe anything joe nobody posts on facebook or twitter that fits your worldview, regardless of (or perhaps especially due to) the presence of contradictory facts.
The essence of science, and what is meant by "trust the science", is to accept theories that fit the existing data until such time as new data contradicts them, while encouraging people to ruthlessly search for just such data which would falsify them.
Sadly, there are a lot of people whose only standard of proof for conspiracy theories is that it contradicts what experts claim.
Just like there's people whose only standard of proof is the word of "experts", regardless of (or perhaps especially due to) the presence of contradictory facts.
Maybe you saw “trust the science” used in different ways, but the way I saw it used was:
- to shut down any debate as the science was “settled”
- to argue for censorship as any discussion that went outside the approved borders of “settled science” was by default false and dangerous to expose people to
- to argue that the “flavor of the month” study was the final word no matter how rigorous the research study was
Science is built on trust because in reality it’s not practical to check every single result in a paper. Often it’s literally impossible (e.g the result from a one of a kind, billion dollar machine).
The process involves collecting data or performing analysis. Simply saying "ugh, why should we listen to received wisdom" and declaring that the experts are idiots is not the scientific spirit.
> “If you’re a public-health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is.” “So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.”
While I agree with the fundamental point, I find that a kind of ironic choice of examples. I wonder what kind of person attaches so much value to keeping kids in school whether it's good for them or not.
It was well established before COVID that missing in-school days has a major adverse effect on learning. Keeping kids out of school had exactly the predicted effect—reading and math scores fell significantly: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/news/24/01/despite-progres....
We also knew early on that COVID posed little risk to kids themselves. So it was entirely rational for parents, especially of young children, to value keeping those kids in school over the negligible health risks (to the kids) of COVID exposure.
Fewer days in school reducing test scores is very much expected. Going from that to claiming an adverse effect on learning, much less an overall harm, is quite a leap.
Test scores accurately measure learning. That’s one of the most robustly supported facts in all of education, and something virtually nobody in Asia or Europe disagrees with.
I think you claim to much here. Or are using odd definitions, to me at least.
Sure you can extract something about what has been learned with properly made tests administered correctly. It is the tool that is used because it is the tool we have, not because it 'measures learning' in all the ways we want to measure.
Which is why reorganizing all school systems around teaching the standardized test and judging teachers by these results has been such an overwhelming success that "virtually nobody [..] disagrees with".
The US has probably the least test-focused education system in the developed world (you don’t need to take any exam to graduate high school except in some cases an extremely easy one as a formality). Would you claim the US education system is better than the UK, France or Germany?
The fact that we even have year-by-year, grade-by-grade test figures for the US implies it's significantly more test-focused than the UK, where those tests simply don't exist for most grades.
Whether you get any qualification at all in the UK is entirely determined by high-stakes standardized tests, at least on the main academic track (GCSE and A levels)
Sure. But students have very little influence on the system. How test-focused a schooling system is isn't going to depend on how much test results affect the students, it's going to depend on how much test results affect the teachers and especially the administrators.
Are you talking about finals or standardized tests? Because from my experience at least, the latter has minimal impact on the track that kids follow (could put on you advanced math or reading track but there is opportunity for mobility regardless) and only the SAT/ACT (highest score of however many times on chooses to take them) is used to determine where someone can go to college. But test scores (even MCAT/LSAT) will never determine what someone can study, just where, which is not the case in the UK per my understanding.
There is no "US" education system in reality. There is a "Maine" education system, and a "Colorado" education system, and a "Florida" education system.
They have wildly different rules, designs, systems, and results.
> The US has probably the least test-focused education system in the developed world
And there I was, in American schools being told test scores were 80% of my grade with homework accounting for 10% and class projects another 10%. Both high school and university. Fucking liars.
The point (as I understand it) was not to protect the kids themselves from covid, but that kids are active vectors of illness: they get sick easily and rapidly spread it to everyone around them. Sending kids to school during a pandemic is basically asking to fast-track that sickness to everyone in the community.
There was never any scientific basis for that belief. It was just made up without conducting experiments. And if fact we saw that some countries like Sweden kept primary schools open throughout the pandemic (without mask mandates) and it was fine.
And COVID and the Spanish Flu essentially targeted opposite populations, the former being dangerous to those with compromised immune function while the latter turned strong immune systems against the body in a “cytokine storm”.
That’s why you focus resources on protecting those who you don’t want kids to spread it to, the sick and the elderly, a la the suppressed Great Barrington Declaration.
It wasn't 'suppressed'; it was announced to wide acclaim, others took issue with its premises, and there were significantly more of the latter than the former. There was considerable skepticism of the sponsorship of the libtertarian AEIR, and the fact that hundreds of thousands of people had already died in the US by the time of its publication probably had a lot to do with its lack of popularity.
I'm sure the brain damage that COVID still causes (there are 3x more cases this year than in 2020, fun fact) is more of a danger to kids than staying home.
I'm pretty happy Collins came to that conclusion and learned from it.
I don't expect public health officials to have a utilitarian function that maximizes global health considering second order effects. This should have been stated more clearly at the beginning of the epidemic.
Some people were saying we should consider second order effects from the very beginning. I believe the term used for these people was "grandma killers."
Those were the same people causing the second order effects. And the second order effects they caused killed my grandma. So I don't see the problem with referring to them as such.
>I don't expect public health officials to have a utilitarian function that maximizes global health considering second order effects.
Why not? It sounds to me that is the ideal scenario. If I go to the doctor I want them to maximize for health, it's up to me to make health concessions
In the same way, we have an entire political class who should be able to look at the health of the population and gauge which measures are worth taking and which aren't, no?
Ideally, i guess, in some mental models, we'd love to have some sort of super powerful system that can compute a global utility function that considers second (and third, etc) order effects accurately enough to plan out actions that maximize the global utility (without violating ethical norms) until we are immortal and have unlimited energy resources and ability to manipulate matter.
In practice, we instead have centers that focus on first-order effects and who advocate for their position (from an authority based on scientific knowledge, and preparation for emergencies) which are then evaluated and mixed with other centers by political leaders to incorporate the best attempt at considering second and further effects.
Everybody has a different utilitarian model and we don't have enough data or algorithms to predict second or third order effects (we usually fall back on "wisdom" from prior experience).
I am taking a graduate level public health course and this trade off is literally covered in the first lecture its something they call prevention paradox. It's surprising to see that the head of the NIH would say something like this when it's literally part of the curriculum for public health. I'm so tired of political opinions masqueraded as we know better than the experts or we know better than the scientist.
I don't think anyone attached zero value to everything else. The legit question is how do you weigh all of the factors. How do you weigh making things slightly worse for a bunch of people and way worse for some, etc...
It reminds me of a comedian snippet I saw recently who was asking the crowd... "Has life gotten back to how it was before Covid", and one person in the audience yells out, "No"... and the comedian says, "OK, tell me one thing you had before Covid that you don't have now"? And the person says, "My family". The comedian goes -- "Oh yeah, I guess that was the point of it all wasn't it..."
> I trust that most research is done in good faith and at least some of it is useful. Saying 'Trust the science' might as well be saying 'Trust in God'
Hopefully this is hyperbole. Any faith I have is separate from, for example, if I cancer, I am going to trust the science on the next steps of treatment.
Medicine is extremely complex and medical errors are the 4th leading cause of death in the US. The science on the next steps of treatment is often incomplete, variable, and dependent on the practitioners' experience. You shouldn't simply trust your doctor, but instead get a second opinion at minimum, and probably a third and fourth if you're able. It's best to triangulate on the problem, searching out varying perspectives from subject matter experts, listening to how they disagree, in order to better understand reality.
I would describe what you said here as a procedure for how to gather and apply the science/knowledge you are going to use for your treatment. So trusting the science, just more details on how to go about doing that.
> Medicine is extremely complex and medical errors are the 4th leading cause of death in the US.
Do you have the source for this? I have never seen it on the list of leading causes of death. For example:
Preventable medical errors are one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality. This was well documented in the Institute of Medicine report "To Err Is Human" in 2000.
Since then there have been positive system changes in terms of things like quantitative care quality measures and use of checklists. But it's still a huge problem. Whether it's the 4th leading cause of death is unclear, it depends on how you analyze the data and what assumptions you make.
Still reading digging in. In particular one reference in the second link[1]
Still not clear to me how they are generating the numbers for putting it at 3rd or 4th. I might have to read the paper rather than listen the author interview in my link above.
That said 98,000 dead from medical error in 2000, from the first link, would put it at 9th in the list that I linked:
from 2020. So even with that lower estimate it would put it in the top ten.
The definition of a death caused by medical error from [1] seem too board from the likely simplified explanation at least:
"Medical error has been defined as an unintended act (either of omission or commission) or one that does not achieve its intended outcome,"
That "or does not achieve its intended outcome" seems like it would count cases I would not want in a statistic like this. For example surgery to remove cancer to save the patients life did not achieve the intended outcome of saving the patients life so it is counted as death via medical error.
Probably have to look at the full paper to see how they applied the standard, but the pdf is not free on the site I linked. I might come back later and look for a free copy or another source.
The point is more that "the science" is too broad and vague and uncertain. The science for cancer might be that the currently best known treatment acknowledged in country X is to follow a particular treatment process. That changes across time and countries. And often the studies have assumptions baked in. So there isn't a blind belief in "the science"
> Saying 'Trust the science' might as well be saying 'Trust in God'
In the past, many cultures had priests doing most of the science as well.
Ultimately it all boils down to trust. The common man doesn’t have time nor intellect to evaluate “the science”. When scientists display obvious bias, they lose trust, since they claim to be impartial. It’d be better if they didn’t claim to be impartial.
It's better that scientists be clear about context when communicating. There's nothing wrong with a single person being both a scientist and a political advocate. But they ought to be clear which hat they're wearing at any given time. Science is a process that can never give definitive guidance on public policy.
The other issue is that science has nothing to say about livelihoods and personal freedom - there's no "Lockdown Science". Those were political decisions, ie. opinions disguised as science to shutdown dissent.
ideally, science would be the best available information on "is". When the science is i.e. funded by a tobacco company and regarding the safety of tobacco, we should be skeptical. How much of current science falls in a similar class?
Scientific facts aren’t facts. Empiricism only tells you when you are wrong or have enough data to believe something for now. At any point, something we believe can be proven wrong.
To even get there requires independent, skeptical, peer review. That often doesn’t happen. It’s questionable how many scientific facts are even science. Much less factual.
I don't think people who say "Trust the science" are saying that science has it all figured out. It's telling people that they should weigh scientific data into their thought process. In reality many people make all of their decisions based on emotions and "feels".
"Trust the science" really came into its full form during the pandemic and was a veiled line in appealing to authority. The CDC, Dr. Fauci, NIH, or any governing body issuing mandates during the pandemic would tell you to trust the science, when in reality they just didn't want people to question their decisions. As it turns out, some of the people questioning school closures or masks were correct! Questioning vaccine safety for young men was and is correct, as long as there were not comorbidities. The people or institutions that were yelling "trust the science" the loudest were indeed saying that they had it all figured out and that anyone that questioned them was wrong.
"Trust the science" became a campaign slogan during the pandemic, and fell into the same realm as "defund the police" or "trust all women".
So yes, "trust the science" does mean what you said that it is a process that should take data new and old into account. However, the sad thing is it was co-opted by people who used it as a cudgel to silence anyone that didn't toe the line.
I and everyone around me questioned their statements and came to the conclusion they were in fact true. That is what "trust the science" means. It does not mean "do whatever I say" - it means "I am right and you can verify that, so you should probably take what I'm saying into consideration lest we all suffer."
The right wing somehow took "science" to mean "Anthony Fauci"...
It's true that some of the people who questioned the science were right, but not because they knew something scientists didn't. A broken clock is right twice a day. If something like that happens again we may need to be more cautious than we were last time. It certainly makes sense to be as cautious as possible until we know for sure how deadly some new disease is. Another side effect is that people took sides and trenched in. When it started becoming clear that masks weren't as useful as once thought (at least for sure cloth masks), the other side refused to admit it. What we should do (but are incapable of) is make the best decision based on the current information and change practices as new information comes in or conditions change.
There is a pure form of science which are basically just methods and principles. Then there is stuff around that like institutions. Some further the core methods and principles. And sometimes it's quite literally a religion.
There is also a weird thing where people will attribute simple natural phenomena to science. Conflating the subject matter with science itself. I recall seeing a post with these colored ants and a caption like "Isnt Science Cool?" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-rainbow-...
Thats not science. Those are ants being colored by food coloring... that would be true with or without the scientific method and you don't even need it to observe the effect. And when you do need science to discover some phenomena (say the nature of black holes) its not science that is amazing if you are simply talking about how amazing black holes are. Its the method applied to understand them that can show how amazing science is. Black holes arent science.
all of the "Trust/Believe X" statements would be profoundly improved by substituting "Take X seriously". It makes the same point without posing the obvious problems with trust and believe
But that wouldn't capture how it tends to be meant -- an instruction to take things on faith without any questioning, even if it contradicts other known facts or your direct experience.
To be honest, even 18 years ago, long before this editor in chief, I found Scientific American rather ideological. Maybe it got more obvious over time, but I don’t see its recent tone categorically different.
I agree. This editor may well have been a current-day culmination of a trend that started some time ago. I stopped my own print subscription to SciAm once the articles started to ostensibly push certain sociopolitical viewpoints in the guise of science journalism. This was well before the editor being discussed was editor enough so I never knew this person existed.
While this editor may have crossed some redlines, I am doubtful this change in represents a genuine philosophical shift at the magazine.
From my own impression back then, it was less political but more subtly ideological. Truth be told, I have my own ideology as well. Some things that I remember were an article that used a trolley problem of throwing someone in the way to save five as the “obvious rational” choice; and how the covers would often try to link entanglement or dark matter to consciousness. It was numerous little things like that.
Bias might emerge as much in choice of topics to cover as in the tone of the coverage. On X, someone mentioned that Wired’s coverage in the past 5-10 years is striking for how little it discusses SpaceX, for example.
SciAm was transformative to my life, I think. My father brought home a stack of them, maybe a couple year's worth, for me when I was twelve or so. I read them over and over again during my teens, slowly puzzling understanding out of the articles that were initially so far beyond me. Learned more from that stack of magazines than some years of high school.
But that was in the 80s. For the last couple of decades, Scientific American just makes me sad. Crap I wouldn't bother reading.
In the early 70's I loved The Amateur Scientist, "conducted" by C. L. Stong. Great articles, with real technical details, giving you a real chance to build real equipment. To pick one article at random, from February 1972: "A Simple Laser Interferometer, an Inexpensive Infrared Viewer and Simulated Chromatograms". Very, very cool.
Back when I was 11 or 12, in the early '70s, one of my father's friends who was training for medical school left a box of Scientific Americans in our loft. I discovered them and would spent hours and hours poring over them trying to understand the articles and soaking up the air of unbounded optimism which I now realise was derived from the Moon landings. This was a major factor in pulling me towards science and maths. Later, at university, I came to realise that all SciAm articles are to some extent oversimplifications and that you should really go to original sources for true understanding. However, at that age they were just what I needed.
The problem is >40 years old. I was a subscriber in the early 1980's (when SciAm was still quite good), and recall them publishing one of Carl Sagan's articles on the dangers of nuclear winter.
Whatever the correctness of Carl's science, he was an astronomer. Not a subject-matter expert. And the the article was very clearly ideological. In an era when the political winds in Washington were blowing hard in the other direction.
I was rather younger then, but still recall thinking that SciAm's approach had thrown away any chance of appealing to the Washington decision-makers, controlling the nuclear weapons, for the feel-good (& maybe profit) of appealing to the left. Which seemed hard to reconcile with them actually believing the results they published, saying that humanity could be wiped out.
Yup, I don't like the trend of publishing more and more articles written by journalists instead of by the very researchers working on the subject. There is a huge difference in quality between the two type of articles. Ones can be quickly skimmed, the others must be read.
SciAm's approach had thrown away any chance of appealing to the Washington decision-makers, controlling the nuclear weapons
It seems to have worked, though - the biggest nuclear war skeptic in that administration was Ronald Reagan and he's one of the world's most successful nuclear arms controllers and disarmers, whatever one may think of the rest of his politics and policies.
Did it? Or did Reagan have clear memories of WWII - when he was 30-ish years old - and the horrific level of death and devastation which even conventional bombing had inflicted upon Europe and Japan? "I don't want any American city to end up like Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, or Hiroshima" was a perfectly acceptable right-wing value.
My read is that Reagan understood the difference between talking big & tough, and actually starting a war. He obviously had a taste for proxy wars, but conflicts with direct US involvement were very few and small on his watch.
Did it? Or did Reagan have clear memories of WWII - when he was 30-ish years old - and the horrific level of death and devastation which even conventional bombing had inflicted upon Europe and Japan?
Yes it did. The influence of media and popular depictions of nuclear war on Reagan is very well documented. His experience of WWII was working on propaganda materials, not exposure to the devastation of war. He was convinced nuclear war was likely civilization-ending, an actual Armageddon. In this he was at odds with the bulk of his administration and US nuclear doctrine. His attitudes and interactions with Gorbachov on these issues are also surprisingly well documented.
I grew up believing that science was the search for truth and fact, and that it should be constantly challenged to further that. What has happened I think, is that there has been a great polarization of science as government and groups have used and twisted it to fit a political agenda. Which essentially stops that search for truth. Challenging scientific conclusions should be encouraged not cancelled.
But only to a point, correct? Otherwise we end up in the current dialogue where flat earthers, moon landing deniers, and a large percentage of religious believers feel more platformed than ever. It's far too easy for the uninformed to challenge science simply because it challenges their non-scientific beliefs.
Scientist 1: If we put a sugar cube into water whose temperature is exactly 74.7373 degrees centigrade, the water will likely turn pink. here is our evidence for this.
Scientist 2: we tried this and found that if the water is cooling that it doesn’t work, it has to remain at a constant temperature.
Scientist 3: we tried it with refined and unrefined sugar. unrefined sugar did not work.
scientist 1: we took another look - it seems there was some weird additive in the refined sugar, when this additive added to water at 74.7373 degrees centigrade the water turns pink.
that’s a very silly and stupid example of “challenging” other scientist’s work. you precisely explain what you tried and how it differed, in the hope it leads to a more specific and accurate picture down the line.
flat earthers et. al just “say stuff” they think is right, where the evidence does not actually challenge any hypothesis or existing evidence because the claims are just … bad.
this is not “challenging” science. it is stubborn ignorance. pure and simple.
most of it is so easy to refute any random youtuber with a spare hour can do it (read: 6-12 months [0])
however, your point about platforming is important, because people who wouldn’t have had a soapbox 15 years ago, now have a soapbox anyone in the world can find them on.
if you’re looking for something to confirm your world view, there’s something on the internet for you.
rule 1 of the internet should be spammed in front of everyone’s eyes for seven minutes before anyone is allowed to use a web browser — don’t believe anything you read on the internet.
[0]: there’s a running joke about how long this person takes to make new videos.
He takes a couple of their claims seriously about what one will see when attempting particular experiments involving a very large lake, attempts them, sees the results one would expect if the Earth were curved, and reports this to some flat earth community forum, refining the experiment as they suggest ways he may have screwed it up, and continuing to find curvature (obviously).
The real story is how they react to contrary evidence delivered entirely on their terms, and where that community was heading four years ago (beware—I guess—that part also becomes necessarily "political").
[EDIT] I guess I buried the lede for this site's interest, which is that the video devotes a fair bit of time to how the Youtube "algorithm" took a little success for Flat Earth videos as a cue to aggressively promote them to people it identified as maybe liking them (those inclined to fall down that particular rabbit hole—which involves a lot more than just the specific belief that the earth is flat), but now flat earth is in decline, because that and other "algorithms" started sending the same folks to... Q-anon content instead.
Incidentally, there was a somewhat-big documentary on Flat Earth some years ago that included some folks from a flat earth convention trying some experiments very similar to the ones depicted in this video (involving visibility of objects across a large lake), with predictable outcomes.
That's many years beyond usefulness now that governments and companies communicate official information through the internet. You might as well say "don't believe anything ever" which makes the advice useless.
It's fine that people believe false things like flat earth. Why so much pressure to stop that? False beliefs are the default for most people, and they actually serve a purpose. We're mostly not emotionless truth-seeking Spocks. We can have religion and other beliefs that improve our quality of life by providing a sense of belonging or importance, an identity, or a community. You wouldn't go around telling Jews that no, God didn't give the 10 commandments to Moses, stop believing unscientific rubbish just because you read about it in some scroll.
I don't think it helps to cancel them, probably hurts. It's not as if you have to either censor or send your highest-status scientists to debate them, and that exhausts the finite menu. In a diverse info ecosystem someone will have their comparative advantage on engaging with cranks. The important thing about overall ecosystem health is, is it reasonable in what it amplifies?
Scientific American hasn't seemed very healthy after the 80s. In the decades before, it was an unusual labor of love by one or two chief editors (I don't remember specifically).
> I don't think it helps to cancel them, probably hurts.
Who is actually being cancelled and for saying what?
This is what I find a little frustrating. There's very little censorship and when it does happen it's usually not against those that most loudly cry about censorship.
For example, did you know you can no longer use the Futurama Farnsworth quote on Facebook "we did in fact evolve from filthy monkey men"? Meanwhile, I've reported and had the report rejected nutters I know literally calling for the stoning of gay people using Bible quotes. (Lev 20;13).
I was answering a comment opposing a comment opposing cancelation.
FWIW the moment I started wondering if we were losing liberal norms actually was reading Dawkins in the 00s calling for scientists to coordinate against debating creationists. Like I was with him in being convinced even "scientific" creationism is powered by Christianity and not any good evidence from nature, and I guess I need to say I had absolutely no problem with any scientist choosing not to engage with any creationist. But there's something anti-science in a campaign to expel a belief from public debate, by a means other than better arguments. That can conceivably be a good thing in some case; but it's the opposite of science.
Relying on Facebook is a bad idea because it's a corporation operating under different pressures than healthy discourse, further trying to direct your attention in its own interest, applying resources it gains this way to modeling you. You can try to improve its moderation but besides the trouble you bring up, probably any success you can get that way will just seed a competing platform. I prefer to give my energy to an open protocol such as Bluesky's (admittedly I haven't looked at its protocol spec) -- unless you can take away everyone's personal computers, everyone's not going to live under your favorite monitor. An open protocol is compatible with choosing among competing moderators. (BTW the pre-web Xanadu vision included open-ended moderator choice, and how different system designs could have different social effects, and the importance of getting it right.)
> What has happened I think, is that there has been a great polarization of science as government and groups have used and twisted it to fit a political agenda.
Exactly. "In this house we believe ... science is real." is about the most unscientific sentiment possible. There, the word "science" exists to give the air of authority to a set of ideological and policy positions.
I always found that quote kind of funny. So the scientists who have views on political issues that are the extreme opposite of yours (because there are many such people)... what then exactly?
I assume you're implying that people who advocate for cultural support of science are hyper liberal and would be hostile to any science conducted by a hyper conservative. I reject this assertion.
"Trust the science" means that peer reviewed science and scientific consensus should carry weight, and too many people are anti-intellectual.
Science is a search for truth and fact but it is performed and funded by humans and institutions.
We could spin up a theorem generator that just starts from mathematical axioms and exhaustively recombines them to create theorem after theorem. This would create facts, but the process would be almost entirely useless. A pure undirected "search for truth and fact" does very little for us.
Researchers decide what problems to tackle. Funding organizations decide what research to fund. Researchers make choices about how to tackle these problems. Research labs are staffed depending on things like admission decisions and immigration decisions. Journals decide what papers to publish, not just on validity but on impact and novelty. Journals then charge money to access this research as part of a profit-driven business model.
All of these human elements bend the "search for truth" and a failure to recognize these institutions and their many historical analogues just means that you miss out on some rather important understanding when interacting with the literature.
I still feel the ideal should be a search for truth, even if human institutions do the work. I'm a fan of Feynman's stuff:
>...As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, "Science teaches such and such," he is using the word incorrectly.
>Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, "Science has shown such and such," you might ask, "How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?"
>It should not be "science has shown" but "this experiment, this effect, has shown." And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments--but be patient and listen to all the evidence--to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at. https://feynman.com/science/what-is-science/
I always took that for granted but seems some don't.
> > It should not be "science has shown" but "this experiment, this effect, has shown." And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments--but be patient and listen to all the evidence--to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at. https://feynman.com/science/what-is-science/
There are so many cases in which the interpretation of the data is difficult. There are many cases in which there are either experiments with seemingly conflicting data, and two different plausible interpretations of existing data. I consider myself highly intelligent and reasonably well informed and yet, were I the one setting policy, I would still need to rely on the opinions of experts in various fields to interpret what data we have on various issues.
1. Science has always been political, this isn't new. Some of the first major experiments were performed in Nazi camps. Cancer treatment began with torturing Black Americans. The entire idea of ethics is political in nature.
2. Science is still the search of truth. If it doesn't match your truth, then that doesn't mean the science is wrong.
3. Challenging scientific conclusions IS encouraged, but there is also a danger to it. Look at Covid. In the US alone, 500,000 Americans died from Covid. Challenging social distancing, masks, and vaccinations costs lives. I mean literally costs lives. The people challenging this were doing it for political purposes, i.e. most of them had absolutely no idea what the science said or how it might be wrong.
We have overpopulation anyway. And we don't have shortage of normies by any measure. In fact some social problems like monopolies are due to overabundance of normies.
> that there has been a great polarization of science as government and groups have used and twisted it to fit a political agenda
This does match any reality I know of. What political agenda has government twisted science to?
The government is quite responsive to the science, and generates science, but the NCI and other bodies have little partisan politics, thigh of course the arguments in science get political just like any other group of people. It's just not Republican/Democrat politics.
> Challenging scientific conclusions should be encouraged not cancelled.
Scientific conclusions are challenged all the time. It is highly encouraged. Entire research programs get challenged to justify their existence. Should we really be running all these SNP chips for GWAS? Turns out that it wasn't a great investment, but it seemed promising at the time...
Too often people are doing two things, one good such as challenging science conclusions, and one bad such as lying or being dishonest or arguing in bad faith. And when they get critiqued for the bad one, they retreat to treating it as criticism of the good thing they were doing. I see it all the time.
> Challenging scientific conclusions should be encouraged not cancelled.
Vaccines are on the docket for cancellation, which to be fair, will last only as long as a swath of the population sees their kids incapacitated by some completely preventable virus infection. But do we really have to go through an epidemic (again!) to understand that the science of vaccines is solid?
There is such a thing as settled science.
There is also such a thing as people too uneducated and non-expert to understand what science is settled.
There should be such a thing as not listening to non-experts about settled science.
The science on vaccines is solid, but there are potential side effects (that's also solid science). So when it comes to, for example, giving kids the vaccines, we have to balance the likelihood of serious side effects with the necessity of preventing the disease. In the case of COVID, the disease's risk to kids is extremely low, but they are still vaccinated. That is a political decision, and it is perfectly reasonable to dispute it.
That's a particularly clear cut example. There are many more complex scenarios where "trust the scientific experts" is dubious because science has a limited domain of applicability. When you pretend that non-scientific decisions must be made on a scientific basis, people see through it and become sceptical.
> That is a political decision, and it is perfectly reasonable to dispute it.
"Political decision" as a euphemism for allowing non-experts to decide how to minimize deaths? The same non-experts who couldn't even get the Monty Hall problem right, let alone the complexity of medical probability and statistics of [false | true] [positives | negatives] in Bayesian scenarios?
There's the problem with naive utilitarianism. The experts want to minimize deaths across the population. I want to minimize the risk to my otherwise healthy children (hypothetically. I don't have children and I am vaccinated). These legitimate desires can and do conflict. Who has precedence is entirely political, not scientific.
And plenty of medical experts get the Monty Hall problem wrong.
> And plenty of medical experts get the Monty Hall problem wrong.
Then they're not experts on prob and stats in medicine, and you shouldn't choose them to guide policy making when prob and stats in medicine are relevant. The alternative is to choose those who aren't experts in prob and stats in medicine, which results in policy bred from ignorance of the relevant math and science.
Choosing people who are ignorant of the relevant math and science over those who are knowledgeable is certainly one way to make policy, and it seems that is what folks want, so I guess we'll see how well that it works out.
Not just search for truth and fact, but use these truths and facts to develop ways that benefit people. The meaning of "benefit" is a philosophical/political consideration.
> Not just search for truth and fact, but use these truths and facts to develop ways that benefit people.
Wait, when did "how to use these truths" become part of science?? How you use science to develop things that benefit people (or organizations) is normally called engineering! Science is normally concerned only with finding useful facts about the world. There are some exceptions, like when you're using the scientific method exactly to figure out what benefits people (or any living organism), for example, using pharmacology to develop drugs that help people. But I would argue that even then, the main concern of pharmacology is to figure out what kinds of drugs have what effects on humans in certain conditions - i.e. it fits perfectly into the definition of "searching for truth and facts".
How you apply that knowledge science gives you to solve problems that affect society is called policy - and policy, while can be analysed using the scientific method, is normally not itself science. It's hard to use the scientific method to study policy, though, because there are far too many factors involved in anything to do with large groups of people, and far too little room to do experiments on them.
"useful" should be replaced with "interesting" because we never know what will turn out to be useful, but by definition, we only look for things that interest us. And I disagree that's a philosophical or political consideration in most cases. It may be in some institutions, but I am sure most scientists will circumvent any restrictions imposed by their institutions in order to actually study what they themselves find interesting, even if under the covers of what their institutions want them to.
As a tangent: even if you're correct that what scientists decide or are allowed to research is mostly political, the facts they find are not, at least if the scientific method is being used properly. Facts are never racist. Facts do not have opinions. And science should look for true facts, not opinions. Hence, even if your focus is on things you find political, the scientific facts and hypothesis you end up with must not be.
>> I am sure most scientists will circumvent any restrictions imposed by their institutions in order to actually study what they themselves find interesting
Please explain to me the Marxism angle. Seriously, show me. Demonstrate for me. Apparently the prime minister of my country is a Marxist but as far as I can tell we're living in a neoliberal paradise where capital gets to freely influence government policy. Nobody has had their property confiscated by the government, nobody had been sent to a gulag, free enterprise is still a thing, where is the Marxism? Where is it? Under your pillow?
Marxism started spreading in universities decades ago. It was rooted in conflict theory. It put the class (group) before the individual. It divided them up into oppressors and the oppressed. Its notion of “justice” was taking power from the “oppressors” to redistribute to the “oppressed.”
Over time, people developed identity politics which put your group first but with race, gender, etc. That got merged with Marxist concepts into a new form of it with a new name: intersectionality, or critical race theory.
Those people build on conflict theory. They make decisions about your group before you as an individual. They divide them up as oppressors vs oppressed with a goal to redistribute power/wealth from one to the other. They play games with words like saying “privileged” instead of power or oppressor to get more support.
As implemented in the Soviet Union and China, the Marxists were mostly atheist, dogmatists, and no dissent was allowed. They wanted their ideology forced on everyone in every institution. You’d get canceled with no job or rations, often starving, if disagreeing. They’d go after peaceful dissenters. They also used labels to dehumanize their opponents which, combined with their rhetoric, justified harsh treatment in their minds.
Those pushing intersectionality, critical race theory, etc. are just like that. Cancel culture with mobs hounding dissenters. Labels like Nazi’s, TERF’s, extortionists, etc. They use these claims to frame it like war is justified. People are just disagreeing with them peacefully, though.
So, their ideology is similar to Marxism, started in hotbeds of Marxism, has goals similar to Marxism, and works like it as implemented. So, conservatives noticing this call them modern Marxist’s. They’re also using it to say it’s too close to Marxism, not exact equivalence.
They also note that the philosophy that wrecked many countries, even killing millions, will likewise devastate our country. It already is driving division up so much. That’s why non-Progressives are pushing back so hard.
Well, also since the Marxist/DEI/woke folks are forcing it on everyone from business to criteria for movie awards. We can’t even enjoy movies anymore since they prioritize indoctrination over film quality!
It’s not. It’s just a label they give the recent ideologies. That’s why my original comment talked about a large group of people pushing “Marxism, intersectionality, and hardcore feminism.” I treated them distinctly since some, but not all, are actual Marxists.
The nice thing about the TERF label is that it ended up being taken as a badge of honour by feminists fighting to reclaim their sex-based rights, and backronymed into bold quips like "Tired of Explaining Reality to Fuckwits".
It backfired so hard on the genderists that they've taken to using insults like "FARTs" instead, which just makes them look childish and unserious.
The funniest part was when she claimed the posts "do not reflect my beliefs". Her allies seem to know that isn't true. On BS there are plenty of congratulations for her willingness to say what so many others are thinking, etc.
Every piece called out here is clearly labeled "opinion" - did they even read the normal news and analysis sections? Countless newspapers and outlets and actual scientific journals have opinion/editorial sections that are generally very well firewalled from the factual content. You could collect the worst hot takes from a few years of nearly any site with a dedicated opinion page and pretend that it has gone downhill. But that this the whole point of having a separate opinion section — so opinions have a place to go, and are not slipped into factual reporting. And many opinion pieces are submitted by others or solicited as a way to show a view that the newsroom doesn't or can't espouse.
Whether the EIC of SciAm overstepped with her own editorializing is probably not something we as outsiders can really say, given the complexities of running a newsroom. I would caution people against taking this superficial judgment too seriously.
Reason does interesting stuff, sure, but no mistake it has a bias and that is a right centre libertarian view that loads factual content toward a predetermined conconclusion that individual free thinkers trump all.
As such they take part in a current conservative habit of demonising "Science" to undermine results that bear on, say, environmental health, climate change, on so on that might result in slowing down a libertarian vision of industry.
I still read their copy, I'm a broad ingestor of content, but no one should be blind to their lean either.
I agree people should be aware of the bias of their sources (all of them), but there's no reason for anyone to be mistaken about Reason. (Please forgive the wording, I couldn't think of better.)
Unlike many other sources, Reason doesn't pretend to be neutral. They admit:
"Reason is the nation's leading libertarian magazine."
Does libertarianism take a position on transgender issues? (This seems to be one focus area of the article.) I can see the author has a strong view but I don't know how libertarianism informs it.
Libertarianism theoretically could go either way. Theoretically, do what you want with your bodies.
However, libertarianias as they exist tend to be socially conservative - somehow they end up agreeing with GOP position on social issues. In this case, convervatives hate trans people, so libertarians too.
> exist tend to be socially conservative - somehow they end up agreeing with GOP position on social issues. In this case, convervatives hate trans people, so libertarians too
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I think you're conflating a few groups that I see as distinct:
Republicans vs. conservatives, and
(Holding various views about the best public policies regarding transgender issues) vs. (hating transgender persons)
The anti-trans outrage was rather major aspect of public life in last two years or so. Manufactured from the conservative groups that set politicizes for GOP, the ones that set the agenda. As far as public political life goes, these things are quite related and quite large source of votes for republican party. And it is very consistent - range goes somewhere between "not talking about it at all" to "being vocal in the outrage". However, I have yet to see politicians or public intellectuals on that side of spectrum to defend trans people or defend policies that makes life easier for trans people.
And just about last thing that is productive is to play again the euphemism game where we pretend that side of political spectrum does not mean what they say when it sounds ugly. We played it with abortions and it turned out, yep, they wanted to make them illegal and actually succeeded.
I hope this view is "people are free to do whatever they want", because if libertarianism is only about ownership freedom, it would be the less consistent ideology ever.
Any serious libertarian would say it (like most things) is absolutely none of the government's concern, at least with regards to consenting adults. There's probably a range of views when it comes to kids, though. Conversely, they wouldn't be interested in having the government policing the treatment of trans people between private parties, so they'd oppose things like legislation that protects them (or anyone) from discrimination in hiring, as an example.
FWIW, the author - Jesse Singal - is a writer I've followed for a while. I like him a lot - I find him level-headed and intellectually honest. I don't think he'd characterize himself as a libertarian rather than a liberal, despite being published by Reason here. He's just a science writer who ended up on the "trans kids healthcare" beat and has written about it extensively. I think he'd characterize his position as just "a lot of medical treatments for kids are being pushed on [in his opinion] flimsy science for [in his opinion] ideological reasons"; and he'd say that this is a scientific position rather than a political one. Of course he takes a lot of crap for this, and of course he's also attracted a fanbase of bozos for this. But his writing, generally, deserves better than either.
I don't really identify as a libertarian myself, but I'm friends with several people who do and sympathetic enough to the idea that I find your accusation of paedophilia pretty distasteful.
Libertarians have a "my body my choice" position for things like raw milk and vaccines, and a "no you shouldn't be allowed that" position for abortion and hormones, because they've ended up on the rightwing side of the culture war.
Are you saying the linked is meant to demonize science? The impression I got was that he was doing the exact opposite: saying that SciAm's editorial direction was harming the public perception of science, which could have far-reaching effects. I don't see that as an anti-science stance.
I can't find where the author writes "I'm something of a medical expert". But for myself, I'm not up to date on the research. Does this article misrepresent the current state of scientific understanding?
> Most importantly, [the article] falsely claimed that there is solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates adolescent suicidality, when we absolutely do not know that to any degree of certainty.
There's solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates suicidality. Cherry picking from a single study is dishonest.
To be clear - the accusation isn't SciAm was politicised, but that it was politicised in an ideologically unacceptable way.
I doubt we'd hear a squeak of complaint if a new editor started promoting crackpot opinion pieces about how all research should be funded by markets instead of governments (because governments shouldn't exist), or that libertarianism is the highest form of rationality.
I'll take its deeply-felt concern for science and reason seriously when it starts calling out RFK Jr for being unscientific. (Prediction: this will never happen.)
Did we read the same article? It literally has a section calling out RFK Jr, as follows:
> If experts aren't to be trusted, charlatans and cranks will step into the vacuum. To mangle a line from Archer, "Do you want a world where RFK Jr. is the head of HHS? That's how you get a world where RFK Jr. is appointed head of HHS."
What is this, if not an explicit call-out? I don't agree with or see a need to defend Reason very often, but what more do you want from them, here?
Perhaps, especially in a dialogue specifically about scientific, reasoning and factual quality, we should avoid arguments based on counterfactual conjectures. A type of argument so weak it facilitates any viewpoint.
If you have even weak evidence, better to reference that.
> There's solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates suicidality.
Not at all true, there is no solid evidence of this. That's why it's so controversial, because ideologues are pushing for these pharmaceutical and surgical interventions on children despite the paucity of evidence.
> ideologues are pushing for these pharmaceutical and surgical interventions on children despite the paucity of evidence.
And you're pushing anti-trans propaganda that surgical interventions are happening on children despite paucity of evidence that it's happening. Not to mention lumping together puberty blockers with surgery, which you should not.
That's not propaganda, it's data from medical insurance claims. There is other evidence too, including peer-reviewed research published in medical journals, and recordings of clinicians discussing this.
It’s become something of a cliche to see this exchange: “it never happens”, followed by clear evidence of it happening. One wonders if it ever leads to the person questioning what other misconceptions they’ve been fed.
It's mainly the parents pushing for medical intervention. Keep in mind that the impetus is generally a suicide attempt or self-mutilation by their 10 year old.
There's nothing fun or trendy or exciting about this for child or family. Deeply embarrassing, far worse than getting your first hernia check if your memory goes back that far.
The one thing we absolutely did. not. need. through all of this were politicians and the peanut gallery weighing in on a private medical situation while ignoring the point of our effort.
Nothing in this article, and none of the comments here mention the life of the child in question. Too busy scoring points to think about reality or humanity in any way. What do you think that looks like from my perspective?
The Cass Review mentioned was composed by a group of authors who are well-known to be opposed to trans healthcare, its methodology and conclusions are heavily criticized by subject experts (basically, "there is no evidence if you ignore all the evidence"), and even Cass herself has stated after publication that it is flawed. It does not represent the current scientific understanding of trans healthcare, so criticizing SciAm and even calling it "dangerous" for pointing this out is rather dubious.
The Cass Review was written primarily for political reasons. It isn't a peer-reviewed article written by neutral subject experts, and it should not be treated as such. The fact that Reason treats it as ground truth and ignores all the subject experts opposing it should say enough about their view on science.
I don't think what you're saying is true. I'm unaware of any indication that Hilary Cass for example is opposed to trans healthcare, and indeed she's explicitly stated that she agrees some young people benefit from it.
That provides lots of valuable context that Cass ignores, such as from organizations like The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and every other major medical organization in the US.
I've skimmed the video previously but thanks for the transcript. It just confirms that her message is basically that she doesn't understand it, couldn't be bothered to read it and think about it herself, so here are some people who disagree with it. Plus the usual ranting about transphobes, i.e. people who disagree with her beliefs.
She even acknowledges that she waited to be told what to think about it. Yet she still styles herself as a "skeptic". Ridiculous, but quite amusing.
Well, if she'd bothered to read Chapter 9 of the Review then she might have had some inkling as to why deferring to the AMA and the AAP isn't such a great idea. Fortunately, the researchers commissioned by the Cass Review took a genuinely skeptical approach to assessing other medical organizations' treatment guidelines, unlike the author of this video.
Also maybe you should read it yourself instead of relying on videos like this to misinform your opinions.
She said she read the Review. You're not arguing in good faith. Throughout our entire discussion.
And tell me what basis I should judge their excluding other research? How do I know they're not just rationalizing it? That they disagreed with the conclusions and worked backwards to exclude the sources?
It comes down to trust, and frankly, you're making me less likely to trust it, with the way you've communicated. I shouldn't blame them for how people talk about them, but you're certainly not doing them any favors.
If you genuinely want to be more persuasive, I'd be glad to walk you through the list of mistakes I think you made.
Also, I won't ask you to come to your own conclusions, but feel free to read this:
> Also, not for nothing but this thing is 388 pages. I do not have the attention span to be sure I wasn't missing something. So I cooled my heels and waited for the people who do have that expertise to weigh in.
She clearly did not do any sort of deep reading of the Review herself but instead just parroted what people who already ideologically agree with her have to say about it.
If she had read it herself, maybe she could have attempted a skeptical analysis. But she didn't.
Thanks for the link to that article by McNamara et al. I've already previously seen it and I would recommend you also read this peer-reviewed paper published in the British Medical Journal, which carefully eviscerates its claims: https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2024/10/15/archdischild-20...
But again, you are not arguing in good faith, and it severely weakens your arguments. If you wish to convince people, please make a stronger attempt to stick to the facts.
You've repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that she did not even read the paper.
"If she had read it herself, maybe she could have attempted a skeptical analysis. But she didn't."
Quoting her, "So then I read the report myself."
Your obstinance on this point is remarkably fruitless. Feel free to argue that she didn't understand it, especially if you can point to statements she made that you can claim are false - and especially if you can cite references that prove your point.
I'll also note you didn't respond at all when I suggested you should ask your trans friends what they think.
At this point, we're done. I've made repeated attempts to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you have demonstrated your unwillingness to change.
You're nitpicking over the connotation of "read" and missing the broader point that she is by her own admission just parroting the critiques of others without much thought.
> At this point, we're done. I've made repeated attempts to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you have demonstrated your unwillingness to change.
That's fine. To be honest, your condescending attitude was starting to irritate me so I'm pleased not to proceed with this discussion any further.
This video correctly states that the Cass Review explicitly supported trans healthcare in general. It does not seem to describe any particular author of the review who is opposed to trans healthcare. The host notes that Cass met with people who do oppose trans healthcare - but wouldn't it be problematic for a review of a new field of medical science to categorically exclude people who think it's bunk?
Not quite "medical expert" but the author does establish (or attempt to) as a leading figure on this topic in paragraph 11:
"This is one of the few scientific subjects on which I've established a modicum of expertise"
Long way from medical expert but it does imply a higher-level understanding of the science here. Whether writing a few articles makes someone an expert is up to the individual to decide.
It doesn't make it clear that the author's issue appears to be solely with the editorial opinion pieces and thus feeds into trending mythology that "(modern) science is bad", has replication, DEI, woke, etc. crisis.
This is the "old science" good, "new science" bad leaning that lends itself to ignoring climate costs and anything else that libertarians of various shades might object to.
You have to understand the current US culture context to understand the answer to that question.
Right wing propaganda outlets will often link topic like these with farcical statements similar to “from the people that brought you men in women’s’ bathrooms (trans) comes a demand that you get rid of your gas stove (climate change, indoor air health).”
You'd honestly have to ask the people that dislike modern science for it's acceptance of diversity, discussion of intersex genetics, publishing of climate science papers, and so forth.
They're vocal enough in forums about the place, near as I can tell these things are all harbingers of the decline and death of science as they know it.
The examples given in the article are quite egregious, and the authors of those pieces are not notable.
SciAm nonetheless made the decision that those particular opinions should be published under their banner, and it’s not clear on what basis that decision was made other than editorial discretion.
If an editor of a science magazine chose to publish op-eds about how 5G causes cancer and then went on a Twitter rant along those lines that impugns her credibility and judgment as a whole. Similarly here.
I'm unsure that helps things? Maybe if some of the excerpts were jokes? The criticism of JEDI is particularly laughable. If sad. I say that as someone that finds the acronym cringe worthy.
So, yeah, I agree that the standards are lower in these sections. I question if they are non existent.
Well, that sounds like a very interesting theme to study scientifically indeed: what makes astrology such a resilient and widespread cultural practice in contemporary citizens?
Statistically there are absolutely robust correlations between month of birth and certain traits, but because of stuff like age-at-starting-school not voodoo about the stars. So it's not surprising people keep noticing such patterns, they're just incorrect at identifying the root causes.
The opinion pieces in pretty much every major newspaper are mixed in with the “factual” content, so for the average person reading, there is no difference. See for example “top links” sections, which include both.
One part that isn’t factual is the statement on safety of GnRHs which cites their use in treating precocious puberty, which is a completely different indication and treatment (age of treatment, length of treatment, purpose of treatment), and does not consider the impact on psychosexual development, nor consider the impact on desistance of non-trans kids. The “safe and reversible” narrative originates in medical consensus amongst doctors and activists, not evidence from scientific enquiry. The difference between consensus-based medicine and evidence-based medicine eludes most participants in this debate.
The statement regarding precocious puberty is entirely factual, and the statement linking that claim to supplying the same hormones to trans kids is linked to an article containing more detail (including a discussion of possible downsides and links to actual papers). I'd agree wholeheartedly that the difference between consensus and evidence-based medicine eludes most participants in the debate, but frankly that seems to apply far more to the side of the debate whose higher quality analysis is of the form of "it appears the systematic studies the other side have done might exhibit researcher bias, so rather than do our own retrospective on the same research subjects we'll just move for speedy consensus to ban the practice altogether"
It is certainly not factual to claim that a drug which is safe in treatment X (precocious puberty) is also safe in treatment Y (gender dysphoria). The article conflates both as “puberty delaying treatments”, as if the learning from one is completely transferable to the other. It is not. The differences I mentioned are material.
The “side” (scare quotes, for there are multiple positions available, not just those that come through the lens of US politics) with the higher quality analysis is that expressed in the Cass Review, which does not call for a ban, but rather for clinical trials and a data linkage study (for which data linking adult outcomes to pediatric gender interventions has so far been withheld by the relevant clinics - draw your own conclusions about why they would not want that to be surfaced).
The differences may well be material, but as I mentioned in the post above it's simply false to claim SA conflate the two when they link (multiple times) to an article looking at trans people specifically and also mention that they are healthy and safe when prescribed to other young people for other reasons. An article which links to an article discussing outcomes of a drug in young people that also mentions below that it's routinely and uncontroversially prescribed in old people would not be factually inaccurate, even though young people and old people are evidently not identical and it is not impossible the two have different outcomes.
The Cass Review itself offers no evidence the blockers are dangerous or inevitably irreversible (or if one takes a less cautious approach, cause patients more problems with irreversibility than not using them), merely finding that only two papers providing evidence for the treatment being safe and optimal were of "high quality" with others being of "moderate" quality or "low" quality and calling for another trial. It did not find higher quality papers drawing opposing conclusions. People more knowledgeable and cynical than me have suggested that treatments for other, less politically-charged but complex conditions may also suffer from the literature that supports clinicians preferred approach being of "moderate" quality but seldom face shutdown as a result. The side that trumpeted this conclusion (because it very much is political, even in the UK) delightedly concluded that as the favourably-disposed evidence mostly fell short of excellence, all gender affirming care must be shut down permanently. Perhaps you view things differently and would very much like to see the new clinics opened and a clinical trial designed to Ms Cass' liking devised, but it's safe to say most of the people trumpeting it as the last word in the debate would not.
When reading the article I do get the impression they try to downplay the potential risks.
quote 1: “These puberty-pausing medications are widely used in many different populations and safely so,” McNamara says.
quote 2: “From an ethical and a legal perspective, this is a benign medication,” Giordano says. She is puzzled by the extra scrutiny these treatments receive, considering their benefits and limited risks. “There are no sound clinical, ethical or legal reasons for denying them to those in need,” she says.
quote 3: Like any medication, GnRHas carry the potential for adverse effects.
quote: "Arguments against the use of GnRHa that have been raised include possible long-term adverse effects on health, psychological, and sexual functioning (Laidlaw, Cretella, & Donovan, 2019; Richards, Maxwell, & McCune, 2019; Vrouenraets et al., 2015)."
I really feel like they overstate the strength of their positions with the articles they cite. All of them show clear limitations of the results which clearly show we need more data.
I don't think Scientific American are exactly hiding that they hold a position on the issue. But I don't think that they've misrepresented that study, which is an observational study looking for evidence of whether there's any truth to those sorts of arguments (the citations appears to be two letters to the editor and an ethics paper...) which didn't find them, mainly because there weren't many dropouts to study.
It absolutely does offer that evidence. Blockers are indeed irreversible, they can lead to infertility and inability to orgasm depending on the length of time they're taken. Even shorter periods of puberty blockers will change height, muscle, and skeletal development.
Evidence based medicine doesn't mean that we simply give people treatments unless they're proven to be harmful. It means we don't give treatments unless we know that the effects are positive.
The UK is far from alone in pausing medicalization of gender dysphoric children. This is the case throughout pretty much all of the European continent at this point, prescription of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones is either banned or exclusively permitted as part of clinical trials - which means patients are explicitly told that this is experimental treatment, and the outcomes of patients needs to be tracked and published.
> Even shorter periods of puberty blockers will change height, muscle, and skeletal development.
All of which are desired outcomes from the point of view of the patient at the time they request the puberty blockers, and for the duration of the time they keep taking them[1]. You don't conclude an otoplasty is harmful because the patient has less ear afterwards, but you might conclude the practice of otoplasty in minors was harmful if regret was a common outcome. And we know that the proportion of children who choose to cease gender-related treatment, like the proportion of children regretting elective otoplasties, is non-zero[2]. But what Cass absolutely didn't find was evidence to support opponents' presumption that the regret was somehow disproportionate. It just concluded the existing papers on the topic lacked the evidential qualities of some other areas of medical research.
So sure, I'm going to agree there's a good case for raising the quality bar of the existing body of scientific research and doing so carefully, there absolutely is. But that's quite different from concluding that the evidence that is there points to frequency of unwanted side effects seldom found in treatments deemed safe and reversible.
[1]or more specifically, the desired outcome is to prevent more rapid and less reversible physiological changes the patient expressly doesn't want to happen.
[2]and in some respects elective otoplasty on minors is more complex: your ears don't rapidly and irreversibly grow if a clinic suggests putting body image aside and deferring the decision until adulthood, and the effects of the surgery are instant, rather than the result of a sustained process where the default is your ear reverting back to roughly the way it would have been was unless you commit to it for an extended period of time.
No, I don't think patients want to have brittle bones that are much more likely to break. I don't think patients wanted to never experience an orgasm. These are not desired outcomes. These are unintended negative side effects of preventing natural puberty.
Again, the claim is that puberty blockers are reversible. A natal male patient that is unsure of their identity and takes puberty blockers for some time then ceases treatment will on average be shorter than if he had never taken blockers. They are not reversible. The effects of puberty blockers are permanent.
The Cass Review found that rates into regretted transition were very limited because they didn't follow up with patients for long periods of time. In particular, the youth gender clinics in the UK didn't follow up with any patients after the age of 18. So when they say that they measured an incredibly low rate of regret, understand that this is a low percentage of patients that reported regret by the age of 18. Someone who started to regret it at 19 or in their 20s is not counted. What the Cass Review found was that bodies like WPATH and AAP were claiming low rates of regret when the evidence base for that claim was extremely weak.
Evidence based medicine doesn't mean we just adopt any anything goes stance until it's been proven that treatment is harmful. Evidence based medicine means we don't give treatment until we have evidence that treat confers good outcomes - at least not outside of a research setting.
I don't think patients who want to be addressed as a women particularly wish to end up 6'4" tall with broad shoulders, but those are unintended side effects of unwanted puberty for a significant number of people currently requesting blockers.
So being smaller is literally an intended effect of choosing blockers. And the relatively small proportion of natal male patients that cease treatment go through puberty, hence the primary effect is not irreversible. Being statistically slightly smaller in stature wouldn't typically be classed as a harmful side effect of any other course of treatment, particularly where the purpose of the treatment was to ensure those choosing to continue successfully avoid more drastic and completely irreversible changes in stature before making a decision on hormones which actually are extremely difficult to reverse. Since we're insisting that WPATH and the AAP's evidence base is a bit thin, I'm sure I'm going to be wowed by the list of citations you produce for puberty blockers causing significant harm in the form of "brittle bones that are much likely to break"...
The Cass Review found that a children's clinic didn't conduct followup exercises with adults and didn't regard other followup studies involving adult cohorts as conclusive. I haven't disputed that, or that medicine is typically more cautious than other sciences. What I am disputing is that the Cass Report concluded that puberty blockers were dangerous and irreversible when prescribed to people with gender dysphoria. I mean, if she actually believed that had been established, she wouldn't be recommending trials, right...
> I don't think patients who want to be addressed as a women particularly wish to end up 6'4" tall with broad shoulders, but those are unintended side effects of unwanted puberty for a significant number of people currently requesting blockers.
For the third time your claim was that puberty blockers are reversible. This is false. If this hypothetical child decided to stop taking puberty blockers, the impact on height would not be reversed. He would not reach the same height if he took blockers and stopped than if he never took blockers at all. Puberty blockers are not reversible.
And again, impacts on bone density and inability to achieve orgasm are most certainly not desired and these side effects go entirely unmentioned in your response. I don't know why you imply there's no research on these side effects:
> Results consistently indicate a negative impact of long-term puberty suppression on bone mineral density, especially at the lumbar spine, which is only partially restored after sex steroid administration. Trans girls are more vulnerable than trans boys for compromised bone health.
> Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and genital surgery also pose risks to sexual function, particularly the physiological capacity for arousal and orgasm. It is important to be aware there is a dearth of research studying the impact of GAT on GD youth’s sexual function, but I provide a brief discussion of this important topic. Estrogen use in transwomen is associated with decreased sexual desire and erectile dysfunction and testosterone for transmen may lead to vaginal atrophy and dyspareunia
I'm not sure why you think that bringing up a survey showing moderately reduced bone density following long term puberty suppression and transition
(sonething actually referenced by Scientific American, along with a note the cause/effect wasn't settled given that gender dysphoria sufferers also tend to have smaller bone structure than average before starting treatment, plausibly due due exercise effects) is evidence of "brittle bones that break more often" being a significant risk factor, which is your actual claim. For the third time, my point is that the Cass Report concluded that the evidence base that found the treatment safe and regret rates low didn't meet the highest possible bar for quality and coverage, and did not offer supporting evidence of the greater merit of claims made to promote the idea that puberty blockers were unsafe when used for gender dysphoria, relative to other treatments or other use of the same treatment, such as wild insinuations about bone-breaking being a common side effect of their temporary use...
For similar reasons, studies which shows erectile dysfunction is not uncommon in patients who have chosen to continue treatment using oestrogen, (universally agreed to have irreversible consequences; it's literally the point of using puberty blockers rather than going straight to sex hormones) is not a high standard of evidence that using puberty blockers for a few months aged 11 is significantly less reversible than using for a year or two aged nine. The actual claim being made: that the treatment is reversible in the sense that children are able to come off it and go through puberty, isn't really being contested here either.
> The actual claim being made: that the treatment is reversible in the sense that children are able to come off it and go through puberty, isn't really being contested here either.
By this logic cross sex hormones are reversible too: someone can stop taking artificial estrogen and stop taking anti-androgens and their body will resume production of natural hormones. You can come off cross sex hormones just like you can come off puberty blockers, under your interpretation of the word "reversible". But that's obviously not what people are talking about when they describe treatment and reversible.
Puberty blockers do indeed leave permanent effects. Yes, you can go off puberty blockers. But years of skipped puberty will have permanent effects. Puberty blockers are as reversible as cross sex hormones: yes, you can stop taking them and resume your body's normal hormone production but the time spent altering hormones will have permanent effects.
> The watchdog asked Mermaids to review its position on puberty blockers, particularly a section on its website stating that the effects of the treatment were reversible. The Cass review found that the evidence base on puberty blockers was “weak”; puberty blockers will now only be prescribed as part of a NHS clinical trial. Mermaids has removed text stating that puberty blockers are an “internationally recognised safe, reversible healthcare option”.
Parents were told for over a decade that puberty blockers were just like a pause button on puberty. Unpause, and puberty would play out and leave their child just like if they had never gone on blockers. This is not the case, and the unfortunate reality is that many parents consented to treatment on account of misinformation.
Why do opinions need a place to go? Why can't we just demonize professionals who lack the ability to report factual content without mixing in their opinions as unfit to be writing?
You can't make people rational after their education, that's the whole insanity of all this: education is the key, critical thought, not creating gullible fools. But religion and many political ideologies depend upon gullible people or they would not exist, so the powerful members of those tribes impel society (for the children!) to denigrate education to produce morons. The United States is filled with them, they may have graduate degrees but they can't logically identify a con man.
Simple advertising too. It is a constant reinforcer of subconscious anti-rational thought.
Even if you imagine you never buy anything due to exposure to advertising, advertising is still hammering away, with its manipulative motivated based impressions on our minds.
If some source of information is worth consuming, at least for me it is worth paying to consume without advertisements if that is an option.
The fact that YouTube video advertising isn’t scratching the chalkboard level unacceptable to many people is all the evidence I need to know they have been deeply impacted by ad programming.
I agree that there seems to be, on the whole, a downward trend of educated, critically thinking populace. The statistics and anecdotes align to make this clear. But I struggle to pick the cause. Certainly I don’t buy into the idea that there are rooms of politicians and school board members discussing how to keep the population uneducated.
Behind every outcome is an incentive. So what do you think is the incentive that’s behind the decline?
Realize first that there is no single incentive, there is a diversity of incentives to "let others do it", "let others worry about it" and various other variations of "let others...". A nearly helpless person is good for business, a frightened with money person is also good for business, and a reasoned careful, informed consumer is not good for business. These basic truths end up running nearly all of society, which creates the drive to prevent consumers from ever becoming discriminating informed and critically aware in virtually all things they are not paid to be "the expert".
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Or maybe that cycle of the inferior by circumstance work hard to become the superior and displace the complacent superior. “history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.”.
Did you vote for or do you support the "opposite team"? Because if your standard is "easy to accuse of 'ism' based on association", you might be in for a rude shock.
I'm not American nor do I live in the US. The mere fact that there are only two teams, and everything has to be the opposite (oh, you don't support X? you must be from party Z because they hate X, and if they hate it, I love it!) even if it's basic scientific facts is infuriating.
And one of the teams is actively racist and sexist, has shown a blatant disregard for rules, norms laws and ethics, and now has full power over all branches of government. There's no scenario this ends well in the long term, and it's sad to look at from across the pond.
> For example, you call (presumably Trump) “sexist.”
"Grab ’em by the pussy."
Convicted of sexual assault. Friends with famous pedophile ringleader.
When asked about what he has in common with his teenage daughter, he said sex.
Yeah, I'm calling him sexist.
Trump's position on abortion was obvious from his actions in the past, regardless of what he actually blabbed.
> Not a single EU country recognizes a judicially-imposed constitutional right to abortion. The only constitutional abortion decision runs the other way: the German constitutional court has declared that abortion violates the Basic Law’s right to life. France is the only country with a constitutional right to abortion, and it adopted that right by amending the constitution.
What is this weird strawman? Most EU countries have laws in place that allow abortions up to a certain point. It doesn't have to be a constitutional right for it to be a right. No EU countries have a constitutional right to get emergency medical treatment or to be allowed to be vaccinated either, so this is aggressively irrelevant. Exact healthcare procedures are between a patient, their medical professional(s), and potentially family in some cases.
On Roe, the US legal system is weird and broken. Courts effectively legislate by trying to pretend to understand what vague words from centuries ago mean and how they could relate to today and things that sometimes they couldn't even imagine back then (not abortion of course, there is plenty of written advice from centuries ago about them). In normal law countries, legislators legislate. And thus abortions are legal because legislators decides so, based on popular demand.
Trump getting away with literal treason is also symptomatic of the broken American legal system, where judges and prosecutors are political entities more interested in their careers and ideology than the actual law they should be upholding.
How could the article “contradict” my statement when I didn’t say anything about where the rant appeared? I didn’t reproduce the content of the rant either. The article provided both the content and context of her parting rant; my post simply referred back to it.
You seem to be assuming my point somehow turns on Helmuth’a statements appearing in SciAm. It does not. Her words are ipso facto indicative of religious and moral fervor, not rationality.
Because expert opinions are sometimes the only data available. "What will computer architecture look like in 20 years?" Clearly there's no factual content to answer that question, but I would argue that it's still an interesting question to ask an expert.
Warp Drive is impossible? So never ever write about it or you are an evil person spreading false information?
Speculation is also about looking to the future, 'what might be possible'. These are opinions.
And. 'A Lot' of people confuse raw data with 'facts'. Every single paper or news report is taking 'raw data' and 'figuring out what it means'.
So, there is always bias, but also it is impossible to report anything without trying to 'infer' information out of the raw data. There is no such thing as 'just report the facts'.
We also maybe have to deal with the common misconception that a fact proceeds somehow from an absolute objective perspective. But as far as humans are concerned, there are only human points of views grounded in human cognition and human interests. Some human points of views might try to encompass more than the direct individual own experience might otherwise limit to, sure, but that is still human endeavor.
Fact and factitious have a common Latin root for a reason.
Even the carefully engineered autonomous probe will only gather data according to some human conceptions of what matter to be recorded or dismissed, what should be considered signal rather than noise.
> there are only human points of views grounded in human cognition and human interests.
“Only”? No.
The entire point of having a scientific approach, an ever longer list of ways to weed out mistakes and misperceptions, is that raw human cognition can be improved upon.
Repeatable results, independently reproduced results, peer review, control elements, effect isolation, … the list is actually very long.
Not every one of the methods we have collected applies to every step in knowledge, but every step we take can be validated by as many of them as apply.
And new ways of falsifying false conclusions continue to accumulate.
Informed opinion, clearly labeled so, on interesting but non-controversial non-ideological topics can be great instigators of curiosity.
What might have come before the Big Bang?
Do quantum superpositions really collapse somehow based on some as yet uncharacterized law, or does our universe produce a web of alternate futures, still connected but where straightforward links are quickly statistically and irreversible obscured?
There is a science friendly basis for interesting opinions of particular experts, in areas of disagreement or inconclusive answers, when clearly labeled as opinion, whose opinion, and why that experts opinion is of special interest.
Also, opinion on the state of science education, funding or other science relevant non-scientific topics, with all due modesty of certainty makes good sense.
But injecting ideological opinions, and poorly or selectively reasoned ones, or unestablished conjectures falsely posed as scientific truth, into a format that claims to be representative of science based information, is a tragedy level disservice.
Not to mention, with respect to Scientific American in particular, a betrayal of many decades of higher standards, work and reputation.
> Not to mention, with respect to Scientific American in particular, a betrayal of many decades of higher standards, work and reputation.
It's hard to deny science itself is under attack by the same people who try to establish alternative facts and truths based on what's politically convenient to them, even if nothing of that is backed by objective reality. Science will always be a force pushing against such agendas.
How is the best way to serve the higher standards of SciAm? Would it be ignoring the elephant in the room, this new shiny fake reality where vaccines cause autism, the Earth is flat, that scientists have been hiding perpetual motion machines from the public? Or would it be to risk being labeled "biased" or "political" and actively label and fight against these anti-science movements?
Science is politics. It is the strong belief that there is one single objective reality, that anyone with the proper tools can observe and verify, and that going against these cornerstones for political expediency is wrong and, ultimately, against the interests of our species.
Science can touch on politics, but that doesn’t mean science is coextensive with politics. You selected examples where science bears on politics, but Helmuth’s fixation wasn’t on how many people believe vaccines cause autism. As demonstrated by her closing screed, it was about non-falsifiable moral assertions (“sexism,” “racism,” and the “moral arc of the universe”).
Indeed, the point of the Reason article is that if scientists want to have credibility on questions where their expertise applies, they should avoid opining in their official capacity on political questions where their expertise doesn’t apply.
Science has much to say about politically important issues like climate change and vaccines! But people will blow off those assertions if scientists lend the imprimatur of their authority to advance social causes, for example by opining that it’s “racist” to vote to deport illegal immigrants.
It may not have all properties you want, but it can have properties appropriate to its state, makes perfect sense to me, why not. Also it's not infinite density, it's zero size, infinities don't exist. Mass is a property of inertial motion, singularity doesn't have inertial motion, thus no mass.
If taking infinite density and an infinitesimal point seriously resulted in a clear and consistent ability to model it, then it would be as you say.
But that isn't what happens. Division by zero and other mathematical breakdowns occur, meaning that whatever actually happens is not in fact the same laws operating in an extreme situation. The laws don't actually work.
This is further backed up by the fact that we have two models with which to model the "singularity". Quantum mechanics and general relativity. They both break down, but in inconsistent ways. So clearly our equations don't work in that situation.
In addition, both from theory and experiment, there is strong evidence that space and time have a minimal length, the Planck unit of space and time. You can't get mass on a point if that understanding is true, because it will always involve unit distance connections.
Finally, uncooperative singularities like these have been found in scientific models many times, and the result has always been that the addition or adjustment of our models resolved mathematical mayhem. The mayhem just indicated the models were incomplete for the situation.
A toy example is Newton's force of gravity between two masses, F = Gm1m2/d^2. The force being a constant times the product of masses divided by the square of their distances.
This model implies that at a distance of zero the force is infinite. Yet that creates mathematical problems, modeling problems, and we never see it happen.
That mess is easily cleaned up with the realization that as the distance between the centers of a mass of m1 and m2 falls under the radius of one or both, r1 and r2, the forces of any mass of m1 and m2 outside distance d now cancel out. So as the position of two masses converge, the force of gravity actually goes to zero, not infinity. Newton's Law was still a good model for non-relativistic gravity forces, but needed to take account of more information to work in that particular case without blowing in a "singularity".
TLDR; where math blows up you can't just accept the model as operating in an extreme situation, because the model generates incoherent, inconclusive, undefined and inconsistent results. But the problem isn't magical, mysterious, or evidence of something unknowable. It is just evidence that our math and models don't yet capture everthing relevant to the breakdown case. It is a clue pointing toward something more for us to learn.
>interesting but non-controversial non-ideological topics
this category is itself hopelessly controversial and ideologically delineated, as you have demonstrated. not to mention this is type of "stay in your lane" or argument is generally deployed by defenders of the status quo against dissenters.
>falsely posed as scientific truth, into a format that claims to be representative of science based information
but this didn't happen.
look, scientific american is a general-audience science magazine, not a journal for serious scientific inquiry. it has an editorial remit for commentary and exploration of themes and trends related or adjacent to science. you may not like the opinions or ideologies expressed in the opinion pieces they published, but they are clearly labeled opinion and in the opinion section. it is completely appropriate and dare i say non-controversial. it really seems like you just disagree with their selection of opinion pieces.
You re making it sound as if every opinion is valid to go in there. For the same reason why they wouldn't publish eugenicist opinions, they should shy away from obvious cringebait.
Afaik science has not yet ran out of much more interesting opinions than the ones mentioned
I loved Scientific American as it was in the 1970s-80s, and was saddened to see what happened to it after around 2000(?), but I can see how having an editor like Helmuth would be a rational choice for the owners. The purpose of a commercial magazine is to generate income, and as Fox/CNN/NYT/Guardian realized, being objectively informative is a sub-optimal approach. I do wonder how we can ever again have something like the old Scientific American.
Relish the memory, it is gone and the civilization that supports such things is gone too. What we have today is a sad, sensationalist farce. We're entering a new Dark Age, and it is riding in on fascism.
My mom had subscribed to Scientific American for more than twenty years (maybe 30), but for this very reason stopped her subscription a few years ago. It had turned from informing its readers about science to political posturing. She was sad that she's lost a previously intellectually valuable resource.
I suspect we'll eventually get something like a Substack for Science author (editor) on a subscription model that will do long form pieces and invite SMEs to talk about their stuff.
I clicked on the links of the articles linked to by the author as "egregious" examples of Helmuth's editorial bias, and they're both clearly labeled _OPINION_. (Opinion articles are not scientific articles because they are __opinion__.)
May need to choose some better examples if the author wants to support his point.
Why does a scientific magazine have an Opinion section in the first place? Has it always? I would guess the number of Opinion pieces has gone up dramatically in the last decade.
It provides a valuable path to outside perspective? Generally you would expect some credentials and vetting in what opinion you post. But the idea seems fine? Good, even.
Probably because opinions are interesting to most people and people who read pop sci magazines want to read opinions that have more of a science/evidence bent then what they can get out of other magazines and/or newspapers.
> Did you do any research on this or just throwing out random guesses?
As I said, I said it was a guess. I tried chatgpt, but no help there. I was hoping that people here who are more regular SA readers than me would have a sense of this.
It is well-known that people do not discern reporting and opinion coverage. IMO this barrier is exacerbated in scientific publications, where science-like language is used throughout. It gives the sense that "science" is behind the opinion.
This may not sway science-savvy readers of the magazine, but when it is reported elsewhere ("Scientific American magazine says XYZ"), it surely misleads people. I'd rather science magazines stick to science, but that's just me.
If that was the point the original article was trying to make then they should have provided evidence of that, rather than selecting a couple opinion articles to try to build a case for their own very clear ideological leanings.
There may or may not be editorial bias at SciAm -- no idea since I don't read it, and not really interested either way -- but that article was a shoddy piece.
I really don't care if she went on a political rant on BlueSky. What I do care about is that SA has become a click-baity site without much depth. I don't know if she's responsible for that, though (I doubt that she alone made that happen).
I want to be sympathetic to Singal, whose writing always seems to generate shitstorms disproportionate to anything he's actually saying, and whose premise in this piece I tend to agree with (as someone whose politics largely line up with those of the outgoing editor in chief, I've found a lot of what SciAm has posted to be cringe-worthy and destructive).
But what is he on about here?
Or that the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, SciAm published a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented "his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior."
(a) The (marked!) editorial is in no way a refutation of the concept of the normal distribution.
(b) It's written by a currently-publishing tenured life sciences professor (though, clearly, not one of the ones Singal would have chosen --- or, to be fair, me, though it's not hard for me to get over that and confirm that she's familiar with basic statistics).
(c) There's absolutely nothing "surreal" about taking Wilson to task for his support of scientific racism; multiple headline stories have been written about it, in particular his relationship with John Philippe Rushton, the discredited late head of the Pioneer Fund.
It's one thing for Singal to have culturally heterodox† views on unsettled trans science and policy issues††, another for him to dip his toes into HBD-ism. Sorry, dude, there's a dark stain on Wilson's career. Trying to sneak that past the reader, as if it was knee-jerk wokeism, sabotages the credibility of your own piece.
Again, the rest of this piece, sure. Maybe he's right. The Jedi thing in particular: major ugh. But I don't want to have to check all of his references, and it appears that one needs to.
Agreed fully on the JEDI stuff. I was somewhat hoping it was from an April first issue. That was bad.
And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse.
I thought the complaint on the normal distribution was supposed to be claims that many things are not normally distributed? Which, isn't wrong, but is a misguided reason to not use the distribution?
> And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse.
Much of it is pushback against widespread ideological capture, and in particular the authoritarian idea that everyone else has to change and restrict their behavior to accommodate increasingly absurd and harmful requests from an overly demanding identity group.
What is the group demanding that is "over" what you would consider appropriate? How do their demands restrict your behavior?
Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever. And I say this as a devout member of a rigorous and conservative religious tradition.
Many demands, but probably the most egregious is the insistence that males be incarcerated in women's prisons if they say they are women. Several states now have policy that enables this, and female prisoners have been sexually assaulted, raped and even impregnated as a result of this.
Is sexual assault in prison otherwise a particular concern of yours? I understand it's a massive issue affecting hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people, is activism on that broader issue how you came to be aware of this? Do you have a connection to any prisoner advocacy groups that have policy recommendations on this? I assume the sexual violence outcomes for trans women in mens prisons isn't very wonderful either.
I can't relate to the comic. like I said I have not really felt personally affected by trans people at all on any level ever.
That's a potential option, but a lot of anti-trans folks wouldn't be happy with that either. It also doesn't solve the theoretical problem of fairness, since trans men on testosterone (who presumably compete in the 'open' category in your model?) might have significant physical advantages over cis women in some sports. I don't think there are any glib solutions to the issue of gender in sport. The current moral panic about trans people certainly won't go any way to help with solving it.
Another layer of complexity to consider. Some of those rules may need to change to enable full participation of trans athletes. I do not have a fixed view on what the rules should be. I'm just saying it's complicated.
Or maybe those that take performance-enhancing drugs will just have to accept that their body modification choices preclude participation in competitive sport.
There are trans-identifying female athletes who don't take testosterone and compete in women's sports, recent example in the last Olympics being Hergie Bacyadan in women's boxing. There's no exclusion on participation as long as the same rules as for everyone else are followed.
Again, you’re just highlighting the fact that trans people’s bodies are very variable and that this is a complex issue. There isn’t a simple, obvious solution that everyone (currently) agrees is fair. The current rules around trans athletes receiving testosterone as part of gender affirming care are quite complex and variable. I don’t have a take on exactly what the rules should be. I’m just making the point that there are no easy solutions.
But what is "female"? The Algerian boxer was born female, but has high testosterone due to whatever medical condition, which ruled her out of some previous competitions that had conditions around that. Do you want sports governing bodies to inspect genitalia? Do blood tests? Especially when it gets into kids' sports territory, this gets very iffy very fast.
“Female” is well-defined for 99.99%+ of the population (and for most non-human species too, in fact). For those with DSDs, a judgement call can be made. For example, a person with XY chromosomes and the 5-ARD DSD (who was raised as a female due to the appearance of their external genitalia) has testosterone in the normal male range and thus is likely to have an advantage over females, and thus should not compete in the female category.
Cases of genuinely ambiguous sex are vanishingly rare, and are nothing to do with trans identities which are differences of social gender that do not change the underlying biology.
The available evidence indicates that Khelif is actually male: two blood tests from two independent labs revealing an XY karyotype, a member of Khelif's training team describing problems with hormones and chromosomes and that Khelif has been on medication to adjust testosterone to within the female range, and a leaked medical report which describes Khelif as having the male-specific disorder of sexual development 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD).
This implies that Khelif is not female but is male, and went through male puberty, therefore having the male physical advantage in sport caused by male sexual development.
No, just erroneously assumed to be female and issued with identity documents stating this.
Same as has happened previously with other male athletes in women's sports, such as Caster Semenya who also has 5-ARD and also competed in the Olympics, back in 2016 in the women's 800m track event, winning gold. The silver and bronze medals were taken by males too.
Khelif does not identify as trans, and described such accusations as "a big shame for my family, for the honor of my family, for the honor of Algeria, for the women of Algeria and especially the Arab world."
> The Algerian boxer was born female, but has high testosterone due to whatever medical condition,
Imane Khelif has an X and a Y chromosome. She has 5-alpha reductase deficiency, which leads to the development of a pseudo-vagina and internal testicles. Crucially, though, the hormone levels are the same as typical males. In terms of upper body strength, red blood cell count, bone density, etc. Khelif is the same as other males.
She wasn't disqualified due to hormone levels. She was disqualified because the International Boxing Association's criteria for participating in the women's category is having a female karyotype (no Y chromosome).
> Do you want sports governing bodies to inspect genitalia? Do blood tests?
Chromosomes can be checked with just a mouth swab.
> There probably have been more instances of furore over a _potential_ trans athlete who aren't trans
Actually, most of those "potential" trans turn out to be actual trans. That college volleyball athlete has even been sued by her own teammate.
> It's a "problem" way overblown by anti-trans activists.
I get that there are many loud voices on this topic right now. But I rather having this right now then later down the road, where the right has become wrong and the wrong has become right.
> That college volleyball athlete has even been sued by her own teammate.
And there has never been a shred of proof of her being trans. Exactly my point.
> et that there are many loud voices on this topic right now. But I rather having this right now then later down the road, where the right has become wrong and the wrong has become right.
Yes, better for women with high testosterone to get death threats now for winning in the Olympics instead of thinking if this is really a problem.
Her body has both male and female characteristics. If she'd been raised as a man, you could make an equally meanspirited comment about her body with reference to one of its female characteristics.
The fact that she was raised as a woman in Algeria (a notorious hotbed of wokeness) should tell you something.
Also, while it is gross to pick over people's bodies like this, I have to point out that you omit to note that her testicles are internal.
You made your account 51 days ago and literally the only thing you've commented on since then is the anatomical details of this woman's body. What a strange and distasteful obsession. She has always been a woman and meets the criteria to compete as one under current rules (which long predate any changes made in relation to trans people).
Still a male pummelling female competitors though. Who is being excused in this through the spread of a considerable amount of misinformation, your earlier comment being an example of such.
You can find a list of trans athletes in women's sports here. I can't vouch for the site's accuracy or completeness, just providing a source for those who want to do further research.
These are still examples of males imposing themselves on what are supposed to be women's competitions. Every single one of these cases highlights an unwanted male intrusion.
Also, given that biological males dominate even for non-physical sports and esports like chess (talented women like Judit Polgar notwithstanding) or Starcraft, a biological male playing in a woman's-only league is a probably an unfair advantage even then.
I don’t really have a strong opinion one way or the other about your overall point, but I just want to point out for clarity:
Examples like Judit Polgar (who was around the top 10 players in the world at her peak) do indeed prove that chess is nothing like (physical) sports in this way. In physical sports like basketball, soccer, etc. the best women in the world can’t compete against even moderately athletic amateur men. A famous example is the fact that the US women’s national soccer team practices against young teenage boys (and routinely loses). In chess it would be like if the best woman was rated 1800 or something.
This isn’t meant to disparage women in sports — they really do have a categorically different kind of body from men, and pushing those bodies to their limits is just as impressive as it is for men. But they don’t appear to have categorically different kinds of brain, at least insofar as it matters for chess skill.
So what do the prisoner advocate orgs you work with have as a statement or policy rec? The one I volunteer with has decided that it's not effective to have a specific policy about such a small group until meaningful measures addressing sexual violence in prisons generally (which again affects hundreds of thousands or millions per year) have been attempted.
There are a lot of other orgs though and especially if you're in an area with a lot of trans people and it's a more active issue, I'm interested in what other groups have had to come up with. Like I said if the goal is preventing sexual violence I can't imagine that moving trans women into the mens prison is going to be effective either.
Nah that isn’t the problem. If that happened to my kid they would get back up and shove the other kid over.
The problem is maintaining the integrity of sports and competition. Only an uneducated person would ever try to argue that “the best women’s college basketball team would beat the best men’s college basketball team” even 1 out of 100 times.
as a parent of a child athlete this is always a silly argument. Kids in sports get knocked down all the time! Sometimes pretty hard! I feel like people who clutch their pearls on this stuff either don’t have kids, don’t have kids in sports, or aren’t the parent who actually shows up to the games.
Has yours? As far as I can tell there are no trans student athletes in my state at any age or competitiveness level. There are several active anti-trans organizations that consider this an issue but no specific cases of it locally for me to assess or be affected by.
Amusingly, in my experience, it was the girls in coed soccer that were doing the knocking down. For a few seasons, they were bigger than the boys, and they could more easily use their hips to check people off the ball without drawing fouls.
> Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever.
Do you have young children? I don’t live in the USA, I live in Europe, but I have a very small baby and I already did. The daycare, just this year announced they aren’t going to be celebrating Mother and Father’s Day anymore. Instead we will have to celebrate a Parents day.
This is just a small thing of course, there are many other situations where it’s clear an agenda is being pushed over the general population. The only way I can see you never felt it, is if you don’t have children.
Do you actually know that switching from "Mother's Day" and "Father's Day" to "Parents' Day" has anything to do with trans people? Without the context of your comment I would have guessed it was more about (1) trying not to upset children who have lost a parent, (2) trying not to upset or confuse children who've never had two parents around, and/or (3) trying not to upset or confuse children brought up by same-sex couples.
Of course you might consider any or all of those to be Stupid Woke Nonsense, but whether right or wrong, sensible or stupid, they're not about trans people.
And would you say that "everyone else has to change and restrict their behavior to accommodate increasingly absurd and harmful requests from an overly demanding identity group" and that a parents day has harmed you?
As a person entirely out of the "trans debate" it almost always seems to me like right wingers or anyone who is asked to change anything at all catastrophizes it beyond all sane response.
The mild "huh that slightly bothers me" and the "they are TRYING TO CHANGE MY CHILDREN!!!" seem to be conflated to the point of making no sense.
Going from "I noticed a trans person" to "this must be stopped!" makes no sense whatsoever.
What's the gender of someone born with XX chromosomes, two ovaries, a penis, and develops male secondary sex characteristics like a beard? Intersex variants are 1% of the population, it's as common as red hair. The strict gender binary is the anti-science view I'm sorry to say.
And again I say this as someone who is a member of a rigorous religious tradition that does not have any real flexibility about this. Nonetheless I've had to come to accept it because, as you say, the science.
> What's the gender of someone born with XX chromosomes, two ovaries, a penis, and develops male secondary sex characteristics like a beard?
Did you just make this up or did you have a specific disorder of sexual development in mind? Presence of two ovaries suggests it's a female DSD anyhow.
> Intersex variants are 1% of the population, it's as common as red hair.
This figure is controversial and includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. The true prevalence is more likely between 0.01% and 0.02%.
The trans discussion is separate to this anyway, as it involves individuals without any DSDs who demand that others treat them as if they were the opposite sex.
Yeah it's approximately as hypothetical as all the cases of trans athletes we're apparently taking seriously in this thread. Eg greater than zero known cases but likely no one commenting here has ever encountered either phenomenon in the course of life.
Intersex are not 1% of the population. That figure comes from a study that included women with Turner Syndrome and PCOS, as well as men with Klinefelter Syndrome as intersex. Even a layperson would have zero trouble classifying the sex of said people if they saw their body.
> Leonard Sax, in response to Fausto-Sterling, estimated that the prevalence of intersex was about 0.018% of the world's population,[4] discounting several conditions included in Fausto-Sterling's estimate that included LOCAH, Klinefelter syndrome (47,XXY), Turner syndrome (45,X), the chromosomal variants of 47,XYY and 47,XXX, and vaginal agenesis. Sax reasons that in these conditions chromosomal sex is consistent with phenotypic sex and phenotype is classifiable as either male or female.[4]
It highly depends on your definition of trans. Some estimates place the rate of trans people at ~1.2%. If 1 in 10 trans people are athletes, then that'd be about 6x more common than intersex.
On a personal level, linguistic imperialism. For all the rhetoric spewed regarding the impacts of colonialism and cultural imperialism and fervent calls to decolonize various aspects of society, the whites spewing that very same rhetoric have found a way to launder their own modern brand of imperialism into gender diversity and inclusivity by inventing and then imposing new language on that of other ethnic minorities: "Filipinx." This word shows a shocking ignorance of basic facts of Tagalog that it can't be construed in any way other than racist: there is no letter "x" in Tagalog, and the grammar of the language is already genderless. This point becomes readily apparent if you are conversing with a native Tagalog speaker who uses English as a second language, as they will readily confuse the pronouns "he" and "she" in everyday speech, the concept of gendered pronouns being, quite literally, foreign to them. Is this transphobic bigotry?
The Philippines has already undergone multiple rounds of colonization over centuries, leading to the slow-motion eradication of their native language as Spanish and especially English have overtaken it to the point where many Filipinos cannot even speak pure Tagalog any more [0]. Hasn't the western white already colonized the Philippines enough? First it was, "your pagan religion is immoral and barbaric; here, read this Bible." Now, it's, "your transphobic language is bigoted and uninclusive; here, take these pronouns." How about obeying Starfleet's Prime Directive by leaving other cultures the fuck alone?
If you don't find this top-down imposition and control of language disturbing, I suggest you review your Orwell.
On a more abstract level, "the group's" intolerance of dissenting opinion and academic inquiry, especially when such inquiry shows its positions to be internally contradictory. Take for instance Rebecca Tuvel's paper In Defense of Transracialism, published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, which argues that "considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism." [1] Rather than judge this assertion on its merits and attempt to defeat it rationally, the community demanded the paper be retracted, the author was pilloried for her hateful language and dangerous ideas, and there were multiple departures from Hypatia's editorial team.
I got banned from a leftist Discord that I'd spent years on discussing all sorts of topics, just because I dared to question some of the standard left-wing stances on trans issues.
I'd said something like, I don't think claiming an identity is enough, there has to be some sort of dysphoria. And then followed up with another comment like, if they want to keep the cock intact, then they're not actually trans women, as a genuine trans woman would want rid of it even if she couldn't afford the surgery.
This was enough to get me called bigoted and transphobic, and then permanently banned with no recourse, which surprised me because I'd disagreed with people there on the details of a few other topics in the past. Yet somehow this was too much.
It still baffles me how this is the one of the few issues that gets people on the left so riled up that they can't even bear to hear any dissent.
Well, in that case I guess they were lucky that their views were closer to reality than yours.
I know plenty of trans women who don't wish to have extensive bottom surgery. Given that you don't have expertise in the field and have basically invented your beliefs from whole cloth, I think you should revise them accordingly and take it as a learning experience about the value of study.
I did take the time to understand more after that, like learning that many trans people broadly agreed with the points I'd made but are now denounced as "truscum" by those who believe that gender identity and not gender dysphoria is fundamental to being trans.
Note also that these were the standard leftie views on trans back in the 1990s, which is when I first heard about it. My beliefs weren't invented from whole cloth as you state. At the time the common understanding was that gender dysphoria is such a debilitating medical condition that accommodating those rare individuals afflicted by this should be done to help them deal with it better. Sort of like how disabled people are provided ramps for access - it was the right thing to do to help a marginalized group.
Anyway my point was more about intolerance of dissenting views on this topic in particular. Being permanently banned from that Discord was an unpleasant surprise when I was just expressing a viewpoint that was previously how most on the left understood the issue.
On the plus side it did help me understand the perspectives on the other side better. I'd previously considered "terfs" to be nothing more than vicious bigots, but once I understood that the trans umbrella had been expanded to include those without gender dysphoria, including men that back in the day would have just been considered common transvestites and not transsexual at all, some of their arguments began to make sense.
Now I'm more middle-ground on the issue, which isn't a bad place to be. This also inspired me rethink other political stances that I had adopted without analyzing them too deeply. So overall I suppose being kicked out of this community was a good thing as it broadened my mind. It also helped me see first hand how political echo chambers are constructed.
No, it is a bad place to be! TERFs are wrong on the facts and wrong on the values.
You completely missed the reason transmedicalism fell out of favor. It's because doctors were given the power to judge if you were truly trans. The way it played out is that they had too much power and routinely abused it in horrifying ways. That is still the case in some medical systems like the adolescent care in Finland, where the doctors ask teenagers questions that if I were asked at that age I would be traumatized for life. It's sickening.
Modern informed-consent trans healthcare is patient-driven. It turns out that if you've put in the effort to seek it out, you almost certainly are trans. Cisgender people do not make a habit of seeking out trans care, because the act of doing so generally induces gender dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria manifests in several ways — anecdotally, distress at current hormone profile is by far the most common. A belief that bottom surgery must be required is not evidence-based, in the sense that it leads to worse outcomes. It is cis people's projection of their own internal insecurities about sex and gender.
(I do agree by the way that gender dysphoria and healthcare need to be recentered in these discussions. But we have a broader understanding of it than we used to, which is good.)
Anyway, you're welcome to find my GitHub and see all of the open source work I've done. It's work that is, among other things, saves several corporations 8+ figures in CI costs annually each. That only happened because I had a safe environment to transition in. If I hadn't been able to transition and be treated with respect, that wouldn't have happened. (More generally speaking, without trans people Rust wouldn't have happened either, and the IT world would be much worse off! In my experience, people in elite engineering teams fully understand this. TERFism is like Uncle Bob — it appeals mostly to mediocre minds.)
I believe both "Latinx" and "Filipinx" were introduced by queer people of the respective ethnicities, not white Anglos. Basically every culture on earth has deep seated views on gender that don't match reality, and a strong reactionary response when that's interrogated from within the community.
Philosophy as a field has very little to contribute to basic object-level facts -- this is the whole reason science ("natural philosophy") split from traditional philosophy back in the early Renaissance. This isn't something you can reason out within your brain, this is entirely evidence-driven. There is a tremendous amount of evidence for transgender people and next to none for "transracialism".
> I believe both "Latinx" and "Filipinx" were introduced by queer people of the respective ethnicities, not white Anglos.
This kind of cultural ignorance is highly insensitive. I would suggest that you refrain from making assertions, without corroborating evidence, about other cultures and matters that you have no experience with.
My lived experience, as a Pinoy, speaking with other Pinoys, both here in the west and in the Philippines, is that very few people, especially amongst the older generations, have ever heard of Filipinx; of those who have, nobody respects the term as valid, and indeed many regard it as colonialist.
From an opinion piece in The Philippines' newspaper of record, the centre-left [0] Philippine Daily Inquirer [1]:
The practice of gender-neutralizing all gendered words began in the 1960s with the purpose of supporting gender equality. Though we may see Filipinx as
something to be celebrated for its obvious acknowledgment of gender neutrality borrowed from the Latinx and Chicanx communities in the United States, we
must resist such adverse essentializing of our identity.
If we use Filipinx here in the Philippines, many people would probably react in shock at such a strange word, and would immediately resist such naming.
Absurd as it may seem, these Filipino-American digital natives prove once again the naming power of the American establishment to co-opt identities in their
own sense. Haven’t we learned from history? The Philippine revolutions, the massacres, the campaigns for sovereignty, our fight to wield the Philippine flag
and sing the national anthem? To legitimize Filipinx as gender-neutral is to efface and silence Filipino as gender-neutral.
What could be more gender-neutral than the Philippine languages themselves spoken by our fellow Filipinos?
We, the Filipino virtual community, have to resist this Western hype and instead empower our languages in the Philippines. We are all Filipinos. Our
concerns are deeply rooted in our social realities than in the post-postmodern neutralized revision implied by Filipinx.
The media is replete [2] with [3] other [4] examples of how poorly this term is received overseas, despite its adoption by a small subset of the western Filipino diaspora. Take this interview conducted by VICE with "Nanette Caspillo, a former University of the Philippines professor of European languages" [2]:
While it is intended to promote diversity, the word instead sparked arguments about identity, colonialism, and the power of language.
Right now, most people in the Philippines do not seem to recognize, understand, relate to, or assert Filipinx as their identity. Therefore, “the word
[‘Filipinx’] does not naturally evoke a meaning that reflects an entity in reality,” [...]
“Filipinx has not reached collective consciousness,” Caspillo said, perhaps because fewer people have heard of and relate to the new term.
> This isn't something you can reason out within your brain, this is entirely evidence-driven.
This just sounds like a justification for tolerating double standards and self-contradiction, to the tune of "rules for thee, and not for me."
> There is a tremendous amount of evidence for transgender people and next to none for "transracialism".
Beyond the question of Rachel Dolezal's transracial identity as discussed in Tuvel's paper, there is also the recent Canadian headline regarding a self-identifying Indigenous group that has received tens of millions in federal cash [5]. Is this group Inuit, or is it not? Who decides? Would you, in their words, "want to take food out of the mouths of our people? Why would you want to hurt our people and our communities?” All because you refuse to respect their self-identification and long-documented history as an Indigenous people?
I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away.
Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral. It is not an unreasonable stance from a purely descriptive standpoint, but the amount of sensitivity that comes if anyone tries to interrogate it indicates a deeper rot in the respective cultures.
Like — why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy.
(By the way, "Latine" is what the queer people of that ethnicity I know use. I think between Latine being a better grammatical fit and cishet feelings being damaged, Latinx mostly fell out of favor. And linguistic imperialism? Really? There is a far more fundamental and insidious reshaping of the territory to fit the map at play, which is to turn all of human gender and sexual diversity into a single male/female binary.)
> I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away.
Adoption of new language imposed by whites upon the diaspora of an ethnic minority is different from that minority introducing the term themselves. The neologism "Filipinx" appears to have originated on dictionary.com [0] [1], with no Filipino spokesperson, residing in the Philippines, North America, or otherwise, publicly endorsing the term (quite the opposite). I invite you to provide sources to substantiate the claim that it was in fact introduced by Filipino diaspora. All I can find is a statement by one "John Kelly" [0]:
“Among our many new entries are thousands of deeper, dictionary-wide revisions that touch us on our most personal levels: how we talk
about ourselves and our identities, from race to sexual orientation to mental health,” said John Kelly, senior editor at Dictionary.com.
Ethnic minorities overseas in western culture are subjugated to the cultural dominance of whites and expected to adopt their lexicon or risk severe social censure; this is the essence of the definition of "systemic racism" as proposed by DiAngelo.
> Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral.
Tagalog is already ungendered. "Filipino" is ungendered. It is you who presuppose, based on Eurocentric linguistic norms, that "Filipino" is a gendered term and is assigned the male gender, and then from that presupposition conclude that the word "Filipino" is gendered and therefore patriarchal. This is an instance of begging the question, where you presuppose the very matter under contention. This is cyclical reasoning based on a predominantly white cultural worldview and linguistic background.
Some — mostly those who grew up in the Philippines — argue that “Filipino” is already a gender-neutral term because the Filipino language
itself does not differentiate between genders. Meanwhile, others — mostly from the large Filipino diaspora — say it is sexist, a holdover from
the gendered Spanish that influenced the country’s languages. [1]
> And linguistic imperialism? Really? There is a far more fundamental and insidious reshaping of the territory to fit the map at play, which is to turn all of human gender and sexual diversity into a single male/female binary.
You again expose your ignorance of other cultures with this comment. Bakla culture [2] in the Philippines has a very long and well-established history that predates Western colonization, and is already considered a third gender, already escaping the male/female dichotomy.
Stop imposing your white framing upon other cultures. That is in fact the definition of cultural and linguistic imperialism.
I'm not white. I'm Indian, and I also happen to be a trans woman. I'm fully aware of cultures with three traditional genders like my own -- I'm also deeply suspicious of them. The third gender is virtually always constructed to be transmisogynistic, to exclude trans women from womanhood. That isn't true binary-smashing gender diversity, that is merely "men", "women", and "we don't believe you're really women".
Traditional third genders also typically only have room for straight trans people -- there is no room for a queer trans person like myself. Even today you have a lot of clueless people wondering how someone can be both bi/gay and trans -- something about it breaks the cishet brain in a way I've never really understood.
Modern western progressive ideas about gender diversity are far closer to reality than any traditional culture's, because they're grounded in science and humanism. (This is not to say that they're perfect -- I have several specific criticisms of queer theory authors like Judith Butler.) I am quite proudly a scientific humanist and I believe it is the most morally robust worldview in existence.
Obviously no two people are the same. But there isn't some magical gap between cis and trans women that's categorically bigger than the gap between, say, white and Indian cis women. Women raised in different cultures are different -- women that are a different sex at birth are different.
You don't have to say that apples and oranges are the same. What's based more in religious/patriarchal ideas than in rational evidence is the belief that men are like apples and women are like oranges (or that men are from Mars and women are from Venus). There are some differences that the patriarchy magnified into a monstrous set of institutions (coverture! implied consent! vomit). We're on the path to slowly undoing it, but progress isn't monotonic that's for sure.
(By the way, calling a trans woman, especially one who has medically transitioned, a "biological male" is both an HR violation and not rooted in evidence. It is really frustrating to hear your basic dignity being talked about by people who are as confident as they are ignorant. When I was still cis-presenting and didn't fully understand what my trans friends were going through, I didn't spout off my thoughts like a fool. I took the time to learn.)
> There “isn’t some magical gap” between cis and trans women? Absurd.
I know, right? Goes against literally every message either of us received growing up. And yet!
The idea that there is a magical gap between men/amab people and women/afab people is one of the deepest held beliefs of humanity. It's just... not true. Humans have fairly low sexual dimorphism among the great apes.
> And then you go on to say that there are no real differences between men and women
That is not what I said. Of course there are differences between men and women. For example, if you ask men what their gender is they'll say "I'm a man" and if you ask women what their gender is they'll say "I'm a woman". Most men have a generally higher testosterone and lower estrogen level than most women. Most men at any level of strength training can lift much more weight than most women at the same level of strength training.
I think you're arguing against the strawman you have of me in your head, probably formed from the composite of a bunch of people you've heard who might have been wrong on this subject while being right about how to treat trans people.
> oblivious to the glaring contradiction between this belief and the entire phenomenon of transgenderism.
This kind of argument is so strange to me. I've heard variations of this a bunch of times, including yours, and "if men can become women and women can become men, what's the point of transitioning?"
When I'm on a testosterone-dominant hormone profile I feel really bad and I hate my body. When I'm on an estrogen-dominant hormone profile I like my body.
When I'm treated as a man by others and have he/him used for me I have clinical levels of social anxiety and depression. When I'm treated as a woman by others I no longer have much anxiety, though I still have occasional depression.
(These are objective and measured by validated psychometric scales over a long period of time, so can I ask you for a kindness? Please don't try and question whether they're real.)
Trans people exist because cis people exist. Many (likely most) people have a sense in their head of what their hormones and other sex characteristics should be like, and how they would like to be treated by other people. For most people it aligns with what they already have or are. For some of us it doesn't. The rest, as they say, is an implementation detail.
---
I'm going to ask you a question, if you don't mind -- I want to understand the logical and rhetorical progression that happened during the time you read my post and decided to reply with what you did. Could you outline the series of steps you followed to go from what I said to your response?
> why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy.
It's easy to blame patriarchy, but is it the responsible? According to linguists, the answer resides in how gender was introduced in European languages from the Proto Indo European [1, 2]. The feminine genus, in grammatical sense, was introduced later as a specialization of the general "animated" category. Therefore, what later became masculine was used for all "general humans", and was left the default form when gender was not indicated. Example even in English (and other proto-German languages) where nouns are (mostly) not gendered: you have the word of "woman" as a specialization of "man", which does not indicate the male, but it originally indicated the "human being" [3]. We are talking about the dawn of European languages, so take these as educated hypotheses, but blaming patriarchy is a very modern (and unsubstantiated) view.
The need to use a gender (either masculine or feminine) as the default gender is a need in the lack of a neutral gender for humans. Other languages in the world, like Maasai, use the feminine as the "default" gender, others have a proper neutral-animated gender.
Having a neutral gender in Spanish would be great, because it removes ambiguity in many cases where the sex is unknown, but introducing it, especially in languages like Spanish or Italian where all nouns are gendered, is a _massive_ undertaking, which would shake the foundations of those languages and would require a lot of energy by all its speakers. Theoretically possible, sure (we can make up any language we like), but I don't see a minority of agendered people being able to move so much inertia.
So how to go about it? The "x" or other non-standard symbols are pointless because unpronounceable. The "e" can work in Spanish (won't in Italian), and only for some cases, example above all: "españoles" is masculine. Choosing masculine and feminine randomly doesn't work either, it causes confusion and can even sound sexist in certain contexts (I've tried it and found myself in that situation).
My personal take is to stick to the rule: "default" gender is masculine. It's just a choice, as it would have been if we chose feminine (also remembering that the grammatical gender has -in most cases- nothing to do with sex). However, I also try to avoid ambiguities, even at the cost of redundancy, and try to introduce variation as much as possible, still within the constraints of the rules.
Patriarchy is ancient! Yes it's quite fucked up that "woman" literally means "of man" — learning that in school was one of the things that radicalized me.
More than the actual policy prescriptions I'm interested in the reactions various cultures have when challenged on this. You get to see a rather extreme amount of emotional fragility, certainly a lot more than would be justified by a mindset of curiosity and openness. To me that is a pretty strong sign that something is deeply rotten in the culture (and I include my own culture here).
As I said elsewhere, I believe that scientific humanism is the most morally robust worldview in existence. I don't want to tell other people what to do, but I am going to live my life with moral conviction, and that includes saying what I believe to be true about other cultures.
The word “woman” never meant “of man”. It comes from the old English “wif mann” which means female person. Of course “mann” evolved to “man” but at the time it applied to either sex. “Wif” never meant “of”.
I just need to remind that (very) often languages evolve in ways that have nothing to do with the underlying societal structure.
This is my issue with lots of things being said about politics and language. Language is a tool. There is nothing patriarchal in "woman", nor in the use of the default "unmarked masculine" (this is the technical term) that is present in many languages. The unmarked masculine may even be interpreted in a matriarcal sense: the feminine has detached from the "general human" as someone "special", "more important" than the man. But these are all speculations that are all valid and all silly at the same time.
How we _use_ language is another story though. For example, using the masculine with the consequence (intentional or not) to exclude women from a job ad is definitely not acceptable. The unmarked masculine has the problem of being ambiguous, but the ambiguity can be solved (with the added cost of redundancy) by repeating the same words with the feminine or simply by specifying who the message is referring to (example: "madame et monsieur"). This is common sense, but it's worth reminding people to be careful about it. What is not common sense (IMHO) is to ask all speakers of a certain language to change a thousands years old morphology because someone misuses it, and not even providing valid alternatives.
Other examples of politicised language can be found in the words that are used to signal virtue, or to offend, often completely changing the original meaning of the word to the point that it becomes a political slogan with no meaning at all. I have dozens of examples, including the same word "patriarchy", but I can also mention "fascist", "communist", "feminist", "violent" etc.
Some people enjoy this show, some use it as a very convenient way to bring attention to some topics (or themselves), others, like me, find it confusing and extremely tiring and a reason for disconnecting from politics rather than embracing it.
I want to live my way outside of superficial constructs like gender. I do not want to be forced to accommodate people who think that gender identity is something relevant.
The current political climate sucks for agender people.
I want to live my life outside of superficial constructs like religions. I do not want to be forced to accommodate people who believe religion is relevant. The current political climate is challenging for areligious people.
I don't get to have this opinion because conservatives are censoring me and are always shoving religion down my throat.
Imitating conservative argument style is fun, you get to tell how you feel but then still get defensive when people say you hate other people based on their identity.
However. Cultural attitudes are propagated by people who's livelihood is frequent publishing. In that scenario, I think teams "what's to talk about?" and "it's not that complicated" are always going to lose to team "I've got a lot to say about this."
Some percentage of people do not strongly identify with any particular gender. I was assigned male at birth, I look stereotypically male, everyone assume I'm male and addresses me as such, but honestly, I don't care one way or the other and if I was female instead I doubt I would care. Let's say 50% fall here.
Another group of people strongly identified with one gender or the other, and can't imagine it being any other way. These people care deeply about gender because it is an important part of their identity. Let's say the other 50% fall here. Most of them are happy because they present as the gender they feel they are, and everyone treats them as such. In a small percentage, there is a mismatch and it makes their life hell.
I suspect the typical mind fallacy makes it very hard for most people to understand those that fall into the other group. And for those that are in the "happy with their gender" group to understand those in the "unhappy with their gender" group.
I noticed that too, and not only that. I and my peers in school had words for it: "girl" for people that were just female, and "girl girl" for people who were female plus "extra ideas". Same for boys.
> Some percentage of people do not strongly identify with any particular gender.
I’m the same. But, and this is a huge but: it’s my privilege to be able to think this way. I know that there are people who simply isn’t allowed to do this.
The same thing with skin color. I don’t care. However, my brother has a darker skin tone, he simply cannot have that luxury to not care, because other people force him. For example, when he wasn’t allowed to buy stuff at the nearby bakery because of his skin. He had to move to a country where people care less, because he didn’t want to put up his kids to the same. (Btw our country of origin is Hungary)
This is not an argument. That your brothers rights are not respected does not say anything about your rights and whether you are morally right to enforce them.
Judges are not infallible, and the judge being a woman is irrelevant since she does not represent all women.
I think it is reasonable for a woman to want a shared nude space to be free of people with penises, regardless of what that person identifies as, for simple logistics reasons of not being able to be sure if someone is being deceptive.
Speaking for myself, in terms of policy this issue wouldn't even crack my top 100. But in terms of electoral politics? I think the evidence is pretty good that it had a lot of salience in the last election. Many swing voters who broke for Trump have said that gender and/or trans issues were a big factor for them. Something like a third of Trump's closing ads were about this topic and Kamala's campaign checking a box that they were in favor of sex change operations for criminals became a huge talking point.
As someone who cares deeply about a lot of separate issues that Trump will be terrible on, I wish progressives would STFU on this topic and stop stabbing their party in the back. Treating trans people with dignity and respect should go without saying, but some of the left wing rhetoric on this issues goes too far like when they deny that there is any biological difference between men and women. A lot of the efforts on the left look more like virtue signaling and fighting for the sake of it, rather than trying to achieve better real world outcomes.
To address "over", here's my perspective. The invisible force is much stronger than any explicit demands. Would you agree sociopolitically trans transformed from the underdogs to a politically correct blessed identity group at least in the western world in the last 10 years or so?
I was more supportive of their rights when they were the underdogs. Being on the side of the eggs instead of the high wall is second nature for lots of people so I'd guess there are significant number of people going through the same transition.
Ultimately they're the minority though. A specific example is pronouns. Majority of the population is perfectly happy with gender based pronouns, making it sociopolitically disadvantaged or uncomfortable to use them freely is not in the best interest of the majority.
It's always about compromise when we're talking about not stepping on each others feet, and number dictates the power, that's fundamental to democracy. Their demand in general turned from having dignity and freedom to love - say legal marriage, slowly into not being offended - say pronouns. Not being offended is a privilege not a right, particularly so when it makes overwhelmingly majority of the population feel like walking on egg shells, can't say it is what it is, aka censorship.
IMHO, being a minority in the western society myself, it's much smarter and considerate for others to stop focusing on identiy politics when you have comparable sociopolitical rights and status to everyone else, which is a spectrum not a line. The problem is they (or a vocal minority within that minority) keep pushing when they're well pass that spectrum. IMO stop the pride parade in western society because they are just one of us, the differences have already been well acknowledged and accepted, so instead of sexual preferences or gender identity which they differ from the majority, how about holding a parade that is about some common grounds. Just stop talking about it, when or if systemic unjust creeps back in, find evidence and fight for it again.
" I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse."
It is a wedge issue, simply. It benefits entrenched interests because it allows them to anger and control people, just like they do with the War on Christmas, the War on Guns, Welfare Queens, Baby Killers, Wokeism, DEI, and so many other catchphrases that collapse nuanced issues to a sports slogan.
This entire discussion is grossly disappointing. So many otherwise intelligent people thinking they are debating issues, when they are being played like a fiddle.
You can't "defuse" a wedge issue, you can only decline to be manipulated. That is an individual act. There is no "side" to a wedge issue, it is a false dichotomy crafted to create maximal division. They are focus group tested and refined to do so.
The "War on Christmas" effects a greater sense of persecution while framing it as a nonexistent conflict. There is no War on Christmas. I can say Merry Christmas or not, and it will not effect the wedge issue because it is and never was about saying Merry Christmas to others.
I agree with most of what you're saying except for the contention that the dichotomy is false. It's a good wedge issue precisely because it's a true dichotomy. Even when attempting to dismiss the debate as fabricated and pointless, you end up taking a side on accident, flatly stating that there's no War on Christmas and that it doesn't really matter whether you say Merry Christmas to others. On the other side of the wedge, people believe that Christmas is quite literally the second most important day in the world, and fear that we might put our immortal souls at risk if we don't properly commemorate it.
I don't say Happy Holidays in a negative way, and I've always been happy to hear a sincere Merry Christmas. The idea of "war" has no business being anywhere near that day. Choose to be the peace on Earth that we all want and need.
Everybody likes to think their religion is more important than everybody else's, I get it. But there are a lot of holidays around mid-winter, and I wouldn't try to guess which ones another person might celebrate. People maybe should worry about their own immortal souls rather than mine, if that is their concern.
>Would you be willing to defuse it by instituting a policy of always saying "merry Christmas" instead of "happy holidays"?
This is nonsensical. This isn't "defusing" it, this is authoritarianism and literal capitulation to the absurd demands that are meaningless
People say "Happy holidays" now because they know some people don't celebrate Christmas and they want to be nice, friendly, and pleasant to them as well.
If you have a problem with people saying "Happy holidays" in place of "Merry Christmas" you are a fucking baby.
Don't get mad about it. That is the definition of victory for the groups creating these issues. Just ignore it and go about your day as much as possible. Don't comment about it online.
They are only industrial strength memes to create anger and distrust, thereby placing people in more manipulable mental states. You starve them by ignoring them, regardless of the merits. Most of all, don't react with anger.
> Would you be willing to defuse it by instituting a policy of always saying "merry Christmas" instead of "happy holidays"?
I'm an atheist and this is my approach. I think their religion is complete nonsense but Christmas is a wholly inoffensive Holiday, which is celebrated in a fashion by many secular people anyway. I think the "Happy Holidays" thing is needlessly antagonist. In principle it should be fine but a lot of people take it the wrong way, it is known that many people take it the wrong way, and therefore if I said it then I would be saying it with the knowledge and acceptance that it's going to bother a lot of people (hence, antagonistic.)
You aren't worried about folks of other religions that don't celebrate Christmas? Only about those that do? Is this some sort of Christian privilege thing?
I've never had members of other religions get upset about me wishing them a Merry Christmas, so no I'm not worried about it. If Jewish people started whining to me about it or something then the equation might change, but in fact those that I know are usually more perfunctory about wishing me a Merry Christmas than I am to them.
As to privilege.. whatever man. The simple fact is that Christians are the predominant religion where I live and they are touchy about this matter in a way other people aren't, so why should I go against the flow? Just to spite people I feel no real animosity against? To undermine a holiday I enjoy? Literally why.
I read it as a contrarian think-piece, what people used to call a "Slate pitch" when Slate was still relevant. It lands with a big wet gross "thud" in the context of a lot of the rest of what SciAm has been running.
I think most of the concern over "woke" themes in entertainment are straw men arguments. Such that it is frustrating to see opinions like this given credence.
I still feel the discourse is overblown. Would have preferred to see those lines as jokes, though. That said, will look into "slate pitches." Strong chance I am just ignorant in a new way here.
Red tribe orthodoxy has a lot of disdain for people with trans identities. Blue tribe orthodoxy has maximal dain for those people. But both tribes are willing to promote pseudoscience to achieve their goals. Singal occupies a narrow sliver of the political possibility space where sympathy for those identities can exist at the same time as supporting evidence-based medicine.
Before I started transition I read through the available literature (this would be back in 2010-2015 ish, before it was quite so hot button) and the general consensus wasn't with Singals position then. I don't think skepticism ought to be ruled out or anything, but hormone therapy is better studied than the use of most antidepressants at this point. (although it could still use better study on particular dosage and effects - no one seems to have done anything comprehensive on progestin treatment, for instance, even though it's clearly associated with the rest.)
While a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.
The strengths and weaknesses of the evidence base on the care of children and young people are often misrepresented and overstated, both in scientific publications and social debate.
The controversy surrounding the use of medical treatments has taken focus away from what the individualised care and treatment is intended to achieve for individuals seeking support from NHS gender services.
The rationale for early puberty suppression remains unclear, with weak evidence regarding the impact on gender dysphoria, mental or psychosocial health. The effect on cognitive and psychosexual development remains unknown.
The use of masculinising / feminising hormones in those under the age of 18 also presents many unknowns, despite their longstanding use in the adult transgender population. The lack of long-term follow-up data on those commencing treatment at an earlier age means we have inadequate information about the range of outcomes for this group.
The report basically said that there wasn't a lot of evidence that the treatments in question make people happy in the long run, which is an unusual standard to apply. Usually we look for evidence that medical treatments achieve their medical goals, and leave judgments about what will or won't make someone happy to doctors or patients. (For example, it's questionable whether certain cancer treatments that extend life by only a few months will be a net benefit for patients, but we generally let patients and doctors decide for themselves whether or not to go ahead with them.)
Given that the treatments are meant to address gender dysphoria which is unhappiness caused by a sense of misalignment with one's sexual characteristics I struggle to think of a better measure of success than long-term happiness.
It's a good measure of success, but if we applied the same standard consistently, then all kinds of treatments for all kinds of partially psychological conditions would have to be thrown out.
Also, it's taking a particular position to characterise gender dysphoria as merely a subjective feeling of unhappiness. I do not have any fixed position on what exactly gender dysphoria is, but I believe many trans people see it as far more than just that.
The Cass report is pretty questionable quality wise - it was written with political goals pretty directly in mind and it rules out a lot of studies for not being double blind. (Which is necessarily a hard ask here, medical ethics boards aren't going to let you give hormones to the control group children or anything.)
And that criticism has come from medical boards in the UK and globally, I believe?
Anyway, that's also only for children, which feels politically like a wedge issue. The NHS is very slow at providing HRT and I rather doubt they're treating more than a hundred children for gender dysphoria in any way rn.
> Dr Hilary Cass, 66, told The Times last week that one activist had begun posting falsehoods about her landmark review of the treatment of trans children before it was even published.
> She was referring to Alejandra Caraballo, an American attorney, transgender woman and instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic.
> On April 9 — the day before the Cass review was published — Caraballo claimed it had “disregarded nearly all studies” because they were not double-blind controlled ones.
> Double-blind studies see patients randomly given either medicine or a placebo, with neither the patient or doctor knowing which.
> In a post on Twitter/X, Caraballo accused Cass and the review team of holding trans healthcare to an “impossible standard”. This was because, she said, transgender patients could not take hormones “blind”, as the effects of any hormones would fairly quickly become obvious.
> Her tweets were contradicted by the publication of the Cass review hours later.
> During a systematic review, researchers looking at studies on transgender healthcare found no blind control ones — so used another system altogether to determine study quality. Cass told The Times last week how difficult it would be to use blind control studies in relation to trans patients, for the same reasons identified by Caraballo.
> As for Caraballo’s claim that the review team “disregarded nearly all studies”, Cass pointed out that 60 out of 103 studies reviewed were used for the conclusions. They were studies deemed to be of moderate and high quality on the effects of puberty blockers and hormone treatment.
> Despite this, Caraballo’s post has been viewed 871,000 times and has not been deleted.
This is unfortunately quite a typical tactic of activists like Caraballo. They will deliberately lie to further their aims, relying on people who are unaware that their lies are lies to spread this disinformation.
This is a common misconception about the review. It is true that none of the studies they looked at were double-blinded but they were still included if they were designed and conducted well enough. In a Q&A shortly after the review's release Cass demonstrates that she is well aware that exclusion based on this would be silly.
The amount of myths circulating about the review prompted the publishing of an FAQ page which deals with some of the more egregious examples (e.g. the claim that 98% of studies were rejected).
What's the basis for the claim that the Cass Review was written with political goals directly in mind? Is this just based on the conclusion of the report, or is there actual substance for this statement?
Most of the criticism of the Cass Review comes from the US. Most of Europe has either stopped prescribing puberty blockers and cross sex hormones for minors or never did in the first place. The UK is joining the consensus among the majority of developed countries regarding treatment of gender dysphoric youth, now the US and Canada stand as the sole outliers.
> What's the basis for the claim that the Cass Review was written with political goals directly in mind? Is this just based on the conclusion of the report, or is there actual substance for this statement?
> Notably, Hilary Cass met with Patrick Hunter, a member of the anti-trans Catholic Medical Association who played a significant role in the development of the Florida Review and Standards of Care under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis.
This meeting was held after the Cass Review was published, so it's odd to try and use it to discredit the review itself. Furthermore, Hilary Cass met with hundreds of people to discuss the findings of the review. Is any researcher who ever speaks with Ron DeSantis simply disqualified in your view? Including research published before meeting him?
> A followup email from Hunter indicates that he met with Cass on September 22, 2022 (ECF 184-1). Even as Paul Vazquez wanted to invite Cass to the Board of Medicine hearing as a subject matter expert, Hunter felt that would put her “in a difficult position”:
Why downplay this link in a discussion about the politicization of science?
The interim report - which had the same findings that gender affirming care in minors had scant evidence - was published in March 2022.
Also, that quote is not appearing anywhere in the linked article. Did you post the wrong link?
Again, is the mere fact that Cass - whose job is to advise governments on healthcare - met with someone in government supposed to disqualify the review as politically motivated? What, specifically, did this DeSantis staffer change in the Cass Review?
This is just straightforward attempts at guilt by association. Given that Cass' job is to advise government on healthcare, meeting with government staffers is hardly surprising.
Again, can you point out how the report was influenced. We have the interim report published before Cass met with this staffer. We have the final report published after this meeting. Can you elaborate on how it was changed at the behest of this staffer?
Yes, I think there is a middle ground. Trans people are clearly going through something, and I think a bit more sympathy from the Right, particularly for adolescents wouldn't go amiss. Puberty in the age of social media, anxiety and other mental health challenges is rough. You can hate the policies/movement and still have sympathy for the individuals.
However, I'm not sure that encouraging young people to make one-way decisions (or decisions where we are not yet sure whether they are one way or not) is the correct approach.
> You can hate the policies/movement and still have sympathy for the individuals.
I think people on the right (outright bigots excepted) would say they do have sympathy, and it's for kids who have been influenced by the media or whatever to think that they are the opposite gender.
> However, I'm not sure that encouraging young people to make one-way decisions (or decisions where we are not yet sure whether they are one way or not) is the correct approach.
And I think the response here is that not taking action is also one-way, causing irreversible changes, like to the bone structure.
> (c) There's absolutely nothing "surreal" about taking Wilson to task for his support of scientific racism; multiple headline stories have been written about it, in particular his relationship with John Philippe Rushton, the discredited late head of the Pioneer Fund.
The reason it's not surreal is because it's so banal.
Wilson viewed Rushton as a case of scientific freedom. I.e. research shouldn't be suppressed for socio-political reasons.
You're allowed to disagree with that. But you should understand that the scientifc freedom side isn't racist, even if ends up on the same side as racists.
I don't know what to make of you accusing Singal of "dipping his toes into HBD-ism". Maybe you just phrased that wrong. But it sounds like you're saying "Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he's a racist, Singal defended Wilson so he's a racist". Is that how racism works?
It's one thing to say: "In my view, EO Wilson's association with Rushton is defensible and should not be considered a stain on his career".
It's quite another to say: "That, and I believe it so much that I cannot take seriously anybody who disagrees with me on this, I shall call them and their viewpoints names such as 'surreal' and make grandiose claims that their opinion is so ridiculous, it requires a cultural change at this magazine".
The latter is what was said.
I see no conflict between holding both of these ideas:
* EO Wilson's association with Rushton isn't a problem, and it wasn't about him supporting those ideas themselves, it was about supporting the idea of 'let ideas be, do not censor them'.
* Singal is wildly inappropriate with this, and the plan as stated is cancel culture/crazy politication of a magazine.
In:
> "Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he's a racist, Singal defended Wilson so he's a racist"
You've made an evident mistake. It's instead:
> Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he might also be and we should look into that, Singal called that very thought of questioning Wilson's association with Rushton as ridiculous - and THAT means he's a racist'.
Maybe still wrong but not nearly as crazy as you seem to think it is.
I think your post is very reasonable. Singal may be exaggerating how bad SciAm is. Though my view is that the Wilson article is part of a pattern.
I responded to this because I read a biography of EO Wilson recently. It's strange to say his association with Rushton was a stain on his career because his career was massive. He published an absurd number of papers, did lots of field work, discovered many new species, wrote many popular science books, and was influential as an early conservationist. He was, by all accounts, an incredibly kind person. His link to some racist is a footnote, not a stain.
It's worth asking why it's even coming up. Here are a few possible reasons:
1. A number of left-wingers attacked Wilson following Sociobiology and it's been open-season on him ever since
2. It's trendy to call famous white scientists racist
3. Highly accomplished people cause envy in others which leads to tendentious attacks
For what it's worth: I'm not saying Singal is exaggerating how bad SciAm is. I think I agree with him, and have complained about it elsewhere.
I do have a problem with him dipping his toes into defenses of scientific racism (which is what he's doing when he implicitly imputes wokeism to an editorial calling E.O. Wilson out for dabbling in scientific racism). This is a problem with the reflexive contrarian rationalist sphere Singal has allowed himself to be relegated to (listen to his podcast, it's even more obvious there).
A lot of stuff SciAm has written is real dumb and even destructive. But not everything that anti-woke people object to in SciAm is wrong; if you adopt that stance, you can launder all sorts of crazy things into the discourse. He did that here.
> First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.
That’s at best sloppily written, regardless of what one thinks about Wilson. The normal distribution is a mathematical tool; it doesn’t “assume” anything about some particular concrete topic like measuring humans.
The normal distribution does indeed make some assumptions. Certain natural qualities tend to be notmally distributed like height, but other things like net worth are NOT normally distributed because of feedback loops. The choice of distribution either makes an assumption or validates some other prior assumptions.
Thr choice of using a normal distribution vs another mathematical distribution is not purely a mathematical device, the choice either reflects some assumptions (which one would quickly see if they're valid or not generally).
An interesting case in point for me is when a lot of mathematics assume bell curve distribution in stock market price distributions, like the black scholes option equation does, and it turns out to not really be the best fit. It sort off almost works, but systematically underprices extreme events.
This is what can happen when your assumed distribution turns out to be wrong.
So far though, I haven't heard of refutations that height or IQ (as measured on standardised tests and processed in prescribed ways) are indeed bell curve distributions.
What a minute, this sentence was literally in the SA piece: “First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.”
Is that not a denunciation of the normal distribution?
I don't think so -- the comment in context was not about the "normal distribution of statistics" per se, because when we're talking about Bernoulli trials and the law of large numbers, it clearly is not necessary to assume anything about "default humans".
Rather the article is critiquing the specific use of the normal distribution in assessing population and sub-population statistics. I do think that this critique is kind of nonsensical because the normal distribution assumes nothing of the kind -- a person who is of average height, a "default height" human, is a concept utterly distinct from the concept of a person who is of average weight, a "default weight" human.
Much of the piece leans on the right's habit of "refuting" leftist academia by merely repeating its summed-up headline form in a sneering voice, without offering a real counterargument.
This is not to say that I don't think there should be a rebuttal of any social sciencey claim, but that it should - and can - be done socratically.
it's like any topic you think is simple until you research even a bit of it and go 'oh'
Science has _always_ been political. On the front page a few days ago was the story of a bunch of physicists bitching at each other over what happened in WWI
I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act.
But, seeing as how administrations of various colours have differing approaches to funding science, its pretty hard for "science" to be a-political. Trump has expressed "policy" for completely removing NOAA, which provides massive datasets for wider research. His track record isn't great on funding wider science either. So its probably legitimate to lobby for more funding, no? (did the editor actually lobby effectively, is a different question)
Now, should the editor of SA also take on other causes, probably not. But "science" has been doing that for year (just look at psychology)
>I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act.
I think you'd need a bit more evidence for that being "political". A far more plausible reason for the removal is that Britain doesn't have bears to any degree (there have been isolated sightings but most think they've been extinct there for over 1000 years).
In all seriousness, no, it shows that there were at least two cases of political science in the last 400 years, not that all science is.
I think there have been more, and it plays a role, but I don't buy that you can just dismiss the criticism of political science with the claim that it always is.
There are matters of degrees, and it's almost universally acknowledged to be bad, because it usually means results and emphasis have been distorted because of the politics.
I just chose one example from the early years of science, and one modern case. Anyone can fill in countless cases of science being highly politicized in the intervening centuries.
> There are matters of degrees, and it's almost universally acknowledged to be bad, because it usually means results and emphasis have been distorted because of the politics.
No, science is generally objective, but its results have political implications. To take the pandemic as an example. Virology and epidemiology came to a clear, objective, true conclusion: social distancing and vaccination would drastically reduce the death toll of the pandemic. However, because there are people who reject social distancing (e.g., people who run businesses) and vaccination (anti-vaxxers and opportunistic politicians who see that as an issue they can push), virology and epidemiology have become politically controversial. It's also politically convenient in the United States to distract from the government's own failure to effectively respond to the pandemic by pushing conspiracy theories about the virus coming from a lab in a scary foreign country (and if you don't accept that this is a conspiracy theory, I'm sorry, but you've fallen victim to the widespread propaganda on this issue in American media over the last few years, which is 100% at odds with the conclusions that the scientific community has reached). The problem isn't with virology or epidemiology themselves. The problem is with how the society and political system respond to science.
Yeah, scanning through the recently published articles it seems "Reason" has no problem with the politicisation of science if it means the slashing of govenment funding.
I sympathize with her. There's a big movement in this country that defines itself largely by opposing what its perceived enemies support. When science (or culture) makes a reasonably sound assertion, and it's met with an opposition that wields rhetoric like a weapon with no regard for rationality, it's tempting to fight fire with fire. And when the victims of that opposition are among the most marginalized in society, it's easy to feel like you have the moral high ground.
Maybe in culture it's ok to fight dirty and stretch some truths in order to force newer perspectives into the zeitgeist. Maybe it's even neccesary when the opposition is willing to lie outright, and loudly, as a first resort. But that doesn't work with science. Even if the motivations are pure, it's destined to backfire. It should backfire. Science itself is under assault and losing its ability to hold together some semblance of a shared reality. If people start to believe that science is just as corruptible as journalism because of shitty science journalists, we're fucked.
It’s misguided and toxic to center your worldview around the “most marginalized” or to think that focusing on them somehow gives you the moral high ground or frees you from the obligation to play by the meta-rules of society and its institutions. Or to think that your worldview somehow has a monopoly on helping marginalized people. You invoke “rationality” but as Spock would say, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
I trust you’ll maintain that view if and/or when you become a marginalized group, and the dominant group shifts the meta-rules of society and its institutions in ways you don’t like?
This view usually strikes me as hypocritical because it’s almost always paired with a paranoia of becoming a marginalized group and a belief that maintaining majority status for their group is “right” in some way.
It’s easy to quote Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”.
"Marginalized" groups have not been helped in any way by any of this. Lumping everyone together into a group who is not a white straight man diminishes everyone's individual material problems into a generic "marginalization," and unfairly centralizes white straight men. It's something that wealthy powerful people do in order not to have to discuss their wealth and power, and the fact that they all grew up in sundown towns.
This wave of wealthy white people screaming "bigot" at other white people without health care hasn't raised the condition of the descendants of slaves at all. Instead it's been an expansion of welfare for well-off white women and affluent immigrants. Everybody has been oppressed like black people except for the descendants of slaves, and everybody has been stuck in a caste system except for Dalits.
"Marginalized" people want to be addressed as individual humans with material problems like other humans. Instead a bunch of people so wealthy and comfortable that they are almost completely detached from the material world and have never missed a meal treat everyone like symbols and try to read the world like literary critics.
> It’s easy to quote Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”.
Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to.
Refusing to address the shared material hardships diffuses responsibility to the point where the hardships can be dismissed. There are too many branches on that tree to address, which makes it very easy to just do nothing. No one but celebrities get their individual hardships addressed, it just doesn’t scale to this size of a country.
> Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to.
I don’t think it’s a wild presumption that most people in the few aren’t terribly excited about being asked to pay the cost for the many again. “Please lock us in another generation of poverty” is not a political slogan I hear very often. If that’s what you want to stand on, go ahead I suppose, it’s a free country.
Not to mention the fact that heterosexual, cis-gendered, christian, male is about a quarter of the US population[1], so categorizing it broadly as "many" vs "few" is already over-simplifying.
Intersectionality was intended to add nuance to discussions of discrimination (e.g. a black woman's experience is not reduced to "sexism" plus "racism"), but it seems to have popularly had the opposite effect of reducing everybody to a demographic venn-diagram.
1: If you exclude "male" and "christian" from the criteria, you do end up with a majority. If you switch "christian" to "protestant" then you make the minority even more stark, but anti-Catholic sentiment among protestants has significantly declined over the past few decades, so I don't think that historical division of categories makes sense anymore.
That’s an invitation to think emotionally rather than rationally. (And not that it matters, but I recall white people literally crying back in 2016 that a certain president would put me and my kids in an internment camp. I’m glad I kept thinking rationally rather than emoting.)
Not to mention that Spock is consenting to his fate in taking on the role of "the few... or even the one." He's clearly rationalizing, not stating a universal constant.
Agreed and also it's rarely the case that the "most marginalized" who are elevated in public discourse genuinely are the most marginalized. More often it's just invoked to make some untrue political point. Kind of like how accusations of genocide are thrown around so freely these days. Typically it's rhetoric with very little substance.
>“the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
The brewer, the baker and the candle stick maker need a new kidney, liver and heart. Thank you for volunteering to be killed so we can harvest your organs and keep the many alive.
Alternatively don't base your world view on a TV show from the 1960s.
Even in the movie's own terms, that's an ethical aphorism spoken by a character to justify his act of self sacrifice, and to comfort a great friend that he's coming to his unfortunate end on his own terms and for his own reasons and, in Spock's way, as an act of love, in a sense.
It's not, like, "go shit on minorities if it makes the majority's utility-units increase".
There was a story in Analog a few years ago called "Dibs" if I recall the title correctly about a world that worked like that.
Whenever someone could be saved by a transplant they would find possible donors and send them a notification that one of their organs could save someone. Usually after a few weeks the potential donor would get notification that the person who needed the organ has died. During the time between those two notifications the dying person was said to have dibs on the organ.
Occasionally someone would get a second notification about someone having dibs on another one of the organs while someone already had dibs on one of their organs. Again what usually is that those people would die soon and the person would go back to nobody having dibs on any of their organs.
Sometimes though a person with people having dibs on two of their organs would get notified that a third person now had dibs on one of their organs. That was enough that the needs of the many thing kicked in and they were required to give up those organs, which would usually be fatal.
That Spock quote is from Star Trek II, Wrath of Khan. Later, in Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home Chekov is in grave danger but to rescue him would put their mission at risk which would endanger many more people. This conversation occurs:
UHURA'S VOICE
They report his condition as critical;
he is not expected to survive.
BONES
Jim, you've got to let me go in there!
Don't leave him in the hands of
Twentieth Century medicine.
KIRK
(already decided, but:)
What do you think, Spock?
SPOCK
Admiral, may I suggest that Dr.
McCoy is correct. We must help
Chekov.
KIRK
(testing)
Is that the logical thing to do,
Spock...?
SPOCK
No, Admiral... But is the human
thing to do.
KIRK
(takes a beat)
Right.
Spock's entire character was the marriage of purely logical Vulcans and emotional humans and the necessity of having both. You fundamentally don't understand Star Trek's themes.
> Maybe in culture it's ok to fight dirty and stretch some truths in order to force newer perspectives into the zeitgeist. Maybe it's even neccesary when the opposition is willing to lie outright, and loudly, as a first resort. But that doesn't work with science. Even if the motivations are pure, it's destined to backfire. It should backfire. Science itself is under assault and losing its ability to hold together some semblance of a shared reality.
The number of times one contradicts oneself in just a few words here, with such a lack of self-awareness, is amazing.
The magazine in question is a science-aligned publication. Given the current public discourse, it's no surprise that science-aligned opinions will be attacked. The current public discourse is (gleefully, tribalistically) misinformed, misguided, and hell-bent on social fragmentation.
Watch the bonds between citizens and reality dissolve in real time.
The problem, to me, is that today at least in the US there are a lot of areas where there are truths to criticisms, but then the response to it is gratuitous and equally problematic.
This article struck me sort of similarly. Reason is an outlet I have a certain amount of respect for in general, but this article came across to me as more politically over the top in a way that the outgoing EIC's writing ever did. They would have done more good by simply highlighting the actual state of medical gender intervention research and leaving at that (it sounds like they have done this in fact, but they would have been better off as such). Even then it's complicated — I have friends who work in the field, and when faced with things like the Cass report basically point out that evidence of intervention effect or absence of an effect isn't the same thing as what decision will reduce harm the most in individual cases, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what's actually involved in gender-focused interventions. What's lost in these discussions is that medical care is not the same as science per se, it's about optimizing utility functions or something for individuals.
At some level this sort of critique over the Scientific American editor covering political topics seems a little precious and disingenuous. As others have pointed out, science has and always will be political, whether people want to admit those leanings or not. Pretending that it's somehow "above" politics is disingenuous and narcissistic, and leads to exactly the sorts of problems the author claims to care about. These more political topics have also become mainstream in science in general, and it would be a bit weird for an EIC at someplace like Scientific American to just pretend the discussions aren't happening. Is she guilty of bad writing? Maybe, but it is meant to be a popular science publication, and rants like this hardly seem like an appropriate response to bad writing.
> movement in this country that defines itself largely by opposing what its perceived enemies support
I think that some of the more devious politicians realized that a "partitioning" of beliefs creates populations of in-groups and out-groups which are then manipulated against each other. Many "basic" facts are getting challenged just to create the controversy. Controversy reinforces tribalism, which in turn makes people more controllable.
If anyone is interested, there's some discussion of this piece on the subreddit of the Blocked and Reported podcast (which is co-hosted by Jesse Singal, the author of this article):
It's similar to how if you think heterosexuality or homosexuality are choices due to your own experience, that's not everyone's experience, and you're probably bisexual...congratulations.
Even though there are only two sex chromosomes, issues with them can cause people who are physically intersex.
Then there's all the complexity of the sense of self. Some people could feel they have the 'wrong' body and be fine with that. Some can't.
Affirming a delusion was never the correct response to treating mental illness. We should stop pretending their delusions are real, if we really want to help them.
It is completely different if it is a physical disorder, but this is not the case in vast majority of cases.
It's quite informative to read the forums where trans-identifying people discuss this, to see how these false beliefs develop. One can observe the trajectory of, say, a male who wants to be a woman. He'll start out with desire to be a woman, move onto the idea that he "feels like a woman" despite having no insight whatsoever into what being embodied as female is actually like, and then slowly, within the echo chamber of like-minded males, he'll start to believe he actually is a woman.
Sometimes this will be through believing he has a "female brain" in a male body. Or perhaps he might think he's "born in the wrong body". Or maybe he'll start to believe that being a woman or a man is based on some internal "gender identity" of which he has the female type. Sometimes this is given a spiritual aspect, like a female soul.
If he takes drugs to suppress testosterone and boost estrogen, he may start to believe that he is no longer of the male sex but is becoming female. Even more so if he elects to have surgery to remove his testicles and fashion his penis and scrotum into a non-functional cosmetic simulacrum of the female external sex organs. Some of these males even start to believe they're having a menstrual cycle, despite lacking any anatomy involved in this process.
However he reaches these conclusions about himself, every single one of these beliefs is false. These are delusions.
Your argument builds upon two assumptions:
1. There is a finite number of pre-defined gender-identities which are not interchangeable.
2. Identity is bound to biological organs
I see no proof of these assumptions. How humans see each other and themselves is not primarily chosen by their unchangeable (save medical interventions) organs but by how we are read by our peers. We are not talking about a purely biological problem, but a social one. Humanity has, for the longest time being, assigned fixed profiles to these readings, which luckily has started to break up in the last decades. Now of course each individual is free to base parts of their own identity on their unchangeable biological traits, and you also are free to do so, but that does no generalize to the whole population. Humans should be free to base their identity to their own liking.
This can lead to some cases which do not make sense like your "male menstrual cycle" example, granted. These anecdotes however as well do not generalize towards the initial claim of the other user and the first assumption.
But denial of evolution is linked to white supremacy. A rejection of the biological links between white people and colored people helps to justify discrimination based on skin color. And non-believers in evolution often share other backwards views.
As for the the bell curve, I'd encourage you to read her article first, befire forming an opinion from disingenuous caricature of what was said in it. She doesn't deny the usefulness of the concept, just points to some harmful and pseudoscientific ways it is/was used. Think phrenology for example.
Reason is a heavily biased right-wing website, as you can see on the articles on the front page. This doesn't necessarily invalidate everything coming from them, but take it with a grain of salt at least, and go form your own opinion based on her articles, instead of the mockery they wrote to make a point about "the woke political agenda controlling academia".
I've always understood denial of evolution's primary reason is that it contradicts scripture. I've never heard it associated with white supremacy until today.
>But denial of evolution is linked to white supremacy. A rejection of the biological links between white people and colored people helps to justify discrimination based on skin color. And non-believers in evolution often share other backwards views.
What an odd study to support the idea of white sumrpemacy when 2/3rds of the population sampled isn't Western or white according to white supremacists.
White supremacy and other kinds of racisms. Non-whites can be racist too, you know?
I feel like I'm wasting my time. What do you want to convince me of? That disbelief in evolution is not correlated to white supremacy? What a weird hill to die on. Minds infected with weird ideas tend to believe in multiple ones at the same time, it's not hard to accept.
It's the name of a character in a book, it's got nothing to do with it. I'm cis.
You're insane, I gave you a giant study that proves my point, and you engage in baseless attack to refuse the outcome, are you a white supremacist?
I could also give you a meta-study that proves transition is the only real cure to gender dysphoria, but I'm afraid you're too far gone. Come back when you have decided to live in reality.
And the invention of the keyboard is linked to online bullying.
There is a point in which the relation is so far-fetched and non-causal that it doesn't make any sense to mention it, and the link between evolution denial and white supremacy absolutely crosses that line.
White supremacy is also linked to the sun rising up each morning, detergent and open borders. None of them relevant.
This is a large meta-study finding a link between white supremacy and disbelief in evolution.
The link isn't hard to see either, white supremacists are primarily found in qanon and other right wing conspiracy bubbles. They are more susceptible to believe in bullshit than tolerant people, like creationism.
Both can be causes of an underlying problem, not necessarily origin and consequence.
Is not a surprise that stupid people is generally stupid in more than one field. Somebody believing white supremacy has a previous mental condition that makes him/her blind to obvious contradictions in that speech. Thus, will be probably less capable to grasp complex concepts like evolution (or will choose to ignore it by a different motivation, like greed).
There are 2 sets of male-female pairs of the species which have different chromosomes. I am not sure what about her characterization is complete nonsense.
In white-striped males,
tan-striped males, white-striped females and tan-striped females a less enlightened person would see two sexes (male and female) and two color forms (white and tan).
> It's almost as if the White-throated Sparrow has four sexes.
From the actual paper [0]:
"Our long-term genotypic analysis builds on previous work [6, 7] and, through extensive genotyping of thousands of individuals over more than two decades, confirms that white morphs are almost always heterozygous for alternative chromosome 2 alleles (2m/2). We find that 99.7% of white morphs are heterozygous (n = 1,014; Table S1) ... As a consequence of obligate disassortative mating the species effectively has four sexes, wherein any individual can mate with only 1/4 of the individuals in the population."
The actual sex chromosomes of the birds, and hence they're gametes, have significant differences between the two colours.
You can quibble over if this technically fits the current definition, but the original characterization is pretty far from "complete nonsense".
>The actual sex chromosomes of the birds, and hence they're gametes, have significant differences between the two colours.
This is an incorrect understanding of gametes and supergenes [0]. There are still only two gametes (only two sexes), but the two morphs (white and tan supergenes[0]) can only effectively reproduce with the same morph of the opposite sex (again, only two sexes, only two gametes between the four morphs). This means each morph only effectively breeds with 1/4 of the population, which gives the aberration of "four sexes", even though there is a small amount (around 1%) of cross-morph breeding.
The claim that this species truly has four sexes (four gametes) is unscientific nonsense.
The paper literally says that "...the species effectively has four sexes..." I don't know if that's true or not, but Helmuth was just reporting a claim made in a peer-reviewed journal article.
Yes, it literally states "effectively has", and later states: "Indeed, because of disassortative mating based on both chromosomes 2 and 2m and the W and Z sex chromosomes, the species operates as though there are four sexes."
Only two sex chromosomes, and acts "as though" there are four sexes, which means there aren't four sexes.
The paper does not make the claim that there are four independent sexes. Helmuth incorrectly reported a claim that the paper does not make.
"Squirrels fly through the air as though they are birds" Squirrels are not birds and the previous statement does not support that claim.
I looked up Helmuth’s original tweet and it seems like a reasonable one sentence summary of the paper to me. I think the problems here are (i) twitter being twitter (not a great venue for detail and nuance) and (ii) a paper reporting its results in an overly sensational way. If there absolutely definitely aren’t more than two sexes in a given species, don’t say that there “effectively” are.
It's how she reacted to scientists who responded to her tweet politely challenging her assertion that this species has four sexes that is more the issue: doubling down, blocking anyone who disagreed.
An editor of a science magazine should be willing and open to discuss science with scientists. Particularly if they're trying to help correct a misconception.
That doesn't sound good, but I haven't managed to find the record of those interactions, as I think the original tweet has been deleted. I don't tend to trust second-hand summaries in this sort of case.
I looked up Helmuth’s original tweet and it does not seem like a reasonable one sentence summary of the paper to me. That's why numerous biologist and scientists rejected her summary.
If you're only complaining now, it's just because you don't like the culture SA is promulgating today.
I don't disagree that SA has a lot of nonsense in it, but that's a long trailing symptom. We've been in a time for a while now where easily observable facts are untrue and manufactured fictions are true, as long as it follows a self-serving narrative.
Helmuth became editor in chief of SA in 2020 -- well after reality stopped mattering pretty much anywhere.
No doubt a publisher trying to keep a traditional publication afloat in the internet age noticed. (And no doubt the publisher has noticed it's now time to flip the politics the other way, hence Helmuth is out.)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 373 ms ] threadYes, because I read Inherit the Wind in middle school.
How does "White Supremacy" come into the story, or the denial of evolution as a whole?
White supremacists hate the idea that they could have had non-white ancestors. Belief in a white Adam & Eve is much more in line with their world view. Non-whites were created by "the Curse of Ham". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham
Even if we correct the logic here, and change the conclusion to something like "All people who dismiss evolution are white supremacists", that would still be disproven by counterexamples, like the many non-white people who don't believe in evolution.
"Acceptance of evolution was lower [than in the US] in ... Singapore (59%), India (56%), Brazil (54%), and Malaysia (43%)"
https://ncse.ngo/acceptance-evolution-twenty-countries
In his first term the Trump administration tried to massively cut scientific and medical research, tried to change the rules for the board of outside scientists that review EPA decisions for scientific soundness to not allow academic scientists so that it would only consist of scientists working for the industries that the EPA regulates, tried to make it so that most peer reviewed medical research that showed products causing health problems could not be considered by the EPA when deciding if a chemical should be banned, tried to massively increase taxes on graduate students in STEM fields, wanted to stop NASA from doing Earth science, and let's not forget repeatedly claiming climate change is a hoax. I'm sure I'm forgetting several more.
I don't expect my technical publications to have an opinion on things politicians do that have nothing to do with the fields they cover, but when politicians start doing things directly concerning those fields I don't see how it is a WTF moment for them to comment.
Like putting a climate science denier in charge of NOAA as he was reluctantly heading out the door.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/12/912301325/longtime-climate-sc...
So he could publish a piece under the official NOAA logo to try and gain legitimacy.
Looking at all the latest insane picks, can't wait to see what toon he install this go around.
It seems clear to me that this would be the most appropriate circumstance for such an endorsement.
Given the degree to which Trump benefits from anti-establishment sentiment, I'd like you to ponder if putting politics absolutely everywhere might very well be what got Trump elected twice. I find the idea that there just isn't enough political message completely incompatible with current reality.
Politics is everywhere and it has to be everywhere but politics is not Joe Rogan or Fox news. That‘s propaganda.
Enjoy institutions having the freedom to express political opinions, it is not guaranteed to last.
Everything exists within the political climate of modern society. Institutions are forced to navigate the political landscape in which they exist.
But that does not make the institutions political in nature. There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles or the composition of rocks.
When people say that SA is being political, they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism. That's very different from your definition of "political"
One of my favorite definitions of politics is the set of non-violent ways of resolving disagreements, whether interpersonal, organizational, or governmental.
Others may reserve the word politics to only apply to governmental issues, campaigning, elections, coalition building, etc.
P.S. Language is our primary method of communication. Ponder this: why are people so bad at it? Do people really not understand that symbols can have different meanings? Do they forget? Do they want to get peeved because they want to think that other people don’t know what words mean?
1. The comment above didn’t say “Everything is political”.
2. "Everything is political" isn’t true. One might say that many things are influenced by politics; that’s fine, but downstream influence is neither pure single-factor causality nor equality.
3. "Everything is political" isn’t a tautology either.
Support for #2 and #3: There are things in the universe that existed prior to (and independent of) politics, like the Earth. There are phenomena influenced by politics but not inherently political, such as the phenomena of global warming or measuring the level of inflation. What to do about global warming or inflation is political, if you are lucky, meaning you have some persuasive influence at all (not the case in a dictatorship) and/or don’t have to resort to violence.
OP did not literally say "Everything is political", they said "There are no apolitical institutions". Which is functionally the same thing. "Everything is political" is a common phrase used to express a common school of thought, [1] for example. I was interacting with this school of thought directly in my comment.
I agree with you that "Everything is political" is not true. But tpm is arguing the opposite.
"Everything is political" is a trivially true statement when using tpm's definition of "political", which is the point I was trying to get across. tpm is claiming that any institution which interacts with the government in any way is political in nature. This means that even the rocks and trees and oceans are political, because they are at the mercy of government policy.
I am arguing against this definition of "political".
[1] https://daily.jstor.org/paul-krugman-everything-is-political...
I am arguing that any institution is political by its very existence. Even if the true nature of the institutions is hidden by the current regime, as it is often the case in the West.
The funniest thing, of course, is that we are arguing under an article containing a political attack in the political magazine Reason, published by the political Reason Foundation. That's not the ideal starting point if you want to prove the possibility of apoliticalness of anything.
I would argue that there is nothing political about a local bakery, for example. Just a dude making some cakes. He may occasionally be forced to interact with the government, but his bakery as an institution has nothing at all to do with government organizations or political theory. By its nature, a bakery is apolitical.
Political - relating to the government or public affairs of a country
But also other than that, a few years ago there were some articles about a bakery that refused to bake a wedding cake for gays, and it was a public affair for a few weeks. Is that political enough for you?
Bakeries are in a similar position. Once an owner declines to serve a customer based on his (owner or customer) political leaning, it's politically relevant. If a politican attack bakers because (he feels that) the bread price is too high, it's politically relevant. I think there was an American civil rights movement in the 60's which was in a great part about equal access to services for all ethnicities. Was that not political?
> they are not concerned with the organization of government and policies
'or public affairs'. You wanted a definition and then you are ignoring it?
When reading dahfizz's comment ""Everything is political" is such a boring tautology."... (a) I didn't see how a point being boring has any bearing on tpm's second point; (b) So I couldn't tell if dahfizz agreed or disagreed with tpm's second point; (c) As a result, dahfizz's comment felt nit-picky to me.
Meta-commentary: It would seem that dahfizz and I both feel like the other is being nitpicky. It seems to me this is a signal that some kind of breakdown is happening on at the conversational level.
When I read "everything is political", I interpret that as meaning "all human interactions involve power relations, competing interests, and/or resource allocation".
When I read "there are no apolitical institutions", I interpret that as meaning "all institutions are downstream of politics (meaning government, whatever its form)".
I think it is useful to differentiate between the two phrases and their meanings. But of course they are closely related. Beyond each of us understanding what the other means, I'm not sure we're making specific enough claims to warrant litigating if "they are functionally the same". It seems like a contextual and subjective choice of where to draw a line. Feel free to say more if I'm missing something.
Well, what about studying the mating patterns of humans, studying the decisions to abort, studying the decisions to change gender? Still not at all political in your country? Then, who decides if a study gets funding, who decides if it is ethical, who decides if the results can get published? It's all political decisions around the 'pure' science, which is why I mention different political regimes where stuff like this is often completely explicit unlike in more free societies where it may look like it's free of politics.
> they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism
And they should be glad, not complaining. Everyone is using their position for political activism, business owners, unions, all sorts of organisations, churches etc. There is no reason SA shouldn't do that. Of course they only complain because they don't agree with SA.
Just because scientists have to occasionally interact with political institutions does not make Science itself a political institution. Science is fundamentally apolitical.
Could you provide some examples? TFA seems to link to opinion pieces at Scientific American and not actual research, so I'm a little unclear.
It will be used as an example of how we are wasting tax money by politicians. It will be used as an example of how homosexuality is natural by one side, and then it will be used as an example of how science is used to "groom" children by the other. There will be fights about whether it should be in school books, and then some states will ban all school books that mention that research, and then publishers will be forced to remove it to still have enough of a market for their books. The authors will be called out on Twitter and receive death threats, their university will cut their funding to avoid the controversy, some students will complain about it, and then that will be used to show how universities indoctrinate our kids.
And so on.
That's what "everything is political" means. When people say things like "get politics out of x," they really mean "make x match my politics", because there's no such thing as "no politics."
In that sense, it is perfectly possible and reasonable to "take the politics" out of scientific research. Simply do the research and publish the results. There absolutely is a thing as "no politics".
Once the results are out in the world, politicians and pundits are going to talk about it. That doesn't make the science itself a political act.
And then you don't get any grants anymore.
> And then you don't get any grants anymore.
This is exaggerated to make a point, which I interpret as: savvy researchers are mindful of how to conduct their work and communicate their results so they get more grants in the future. To what degree does this distort or corrupt an ideal research process? This is complicated. Political economists often frame this as a principal-agent problem. Organizational theorists discuss concepts such as resource dependence. (What other concepts would you include?)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_dependence_theory
Yet, there is an additional point worth mentioning: to the extent public money is allocated to e.g. study beetles, it is downstream of a political process. Meaning, there was allocation of resources that allows the study to proceed.
“Trust the science” has always bothered me for two reasons: 1) science is frequently not black and white and anyone who has done hard science research knows there are plenty of competing opinions among scientists and 2) while scientific facts are facts, we still need to decide on how to act on those facts and that decision making process is most certainly political and subjective in nature.
This is not "the essence of science" by any means.
"The Royal Society's motto 'Nullius in verba' was adopted in its First Charter in 1662. is taken to mean 'take nobody's word for it'. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment."
It's highly consistent with the statement above and in many ways is consistent with science as it is practiced.
(sorry, couldn't resist)
https://royalsociety.org/about-us/who-we-are/history
> The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom
"take nobody's word for it" -> anyone can say anything, that is just a claim, things other than that matter like data, replication, etc.
That is different and superior than a simple, broad, statement to 'distrust'.
The Scientific Principle (hypothesis -> experiment -> conclusion and all that) does not pay any heed to authority and received wisdom. And it should not; the experiment results are all that matter.
Academia, the set of very human organisations that have grown to manage our implementation of the Scientfic Principle, are a long way from perfect and are heavily influenced by authority and received wisdom.
So yeah, I don't think it's the essence of science, but distrusting authority and received wisdom definitely required to practice good science.
[0] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/science-really-does-adva...
There's an entire realm of people who did great science, won a Nobel prize, and then went on to make absurd unfounded claims about shit they do not know.
Why do you suppose he said that? Do you really think it's different now? It's not.
The essence of science is the use of scientific method which have specific meaning and way of doing things. It relies on evidence based knowledge not on any distrust. It does not have to do with authority but you would question if your tools you are using is good (calibrated and not interfering with measurements in an unaccounted way ..etc) or if your methodology is flawed.
Or do they really mean "trust the scientists"?
If I would use it personally I will probably use it to mean trust the evidence based knowledge that the scientific community is using.
Where can one find this knowledge? Are you suggesting regular folk go out and review the literature themselves (most of which is paywalled)? And even if they did and were able to understand the contents, they'd still lack the required context to weigh contradicting results, dismiss old studies now known to be wrong, etc etc.
And that's why "trust the science" ends up being an appeal to authority.
I'm not saying I have a better alternative than the scientific method, I'm just pointing out that the "scientific consensus" isn't some magical spark that is immediately obvious when one reads the literature, it's something that evolves over many decades of research, conferences, etc. And that's assuming there is a consensus for a given topic at a given time. And I'm not even going to get into why reasonably questioning the scientific consensus is a good thing (otherwise it stops being science).
I totally agree that the phrase is often misused to mean "trust my favorite authority figure" or "trust the status quo," which is distinctly unscientific. Good news though, if we're willing to actually do the work (the hard part) trust in science is what allows us to change the status quo!
The essence of science, and what is meant by "trust the science", is to accept theories that fit the existing data until such time as new data contradicts them, while encouraging people to ruthlessly search for just such data which would falsify them.
Sadly, there are a lot of people whose only standard of proof for conspiracy theories is that it contradicts what experts claim.
- to shut down any debate as the science was “settled”
- to argue for censorship as any discussion that went outside the approved borders of “settled science” was by default false and dangerous to expose people to
- to argue that the “flavor of the month” study was the final word no matter how rigorous the research study was
> “If you’re a public-health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is.” “So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.”
When the actual science was suggesting we take care of the medically vulnerable and elderly. But hey, there’s an election to win!
We also knew early on that COVID posed little risk to kids themselves. So it was entirely rational for parents, especially of young children, to value keeping those kids in school over the negligible health risks (to the kids) of COVID exposure.
I think you claim to much here. Or are using odd definitions, to me at least.
Sure you can extract something about what has been learned with properly made tests administered correctly. It is the tool that is used because it is the tool we have, not because it 'measures learning' in all the ways we want to measure.
They have wildly different rules, designs, systems, and results.
And there I was, in American schools being told test scores were 80% of my grade with homework accounting for 10% and class projects another 10%. Both high school and university. Fucking liars.
This is an incorrect statement that can be fixed with minutes of research.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0610941104 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00916...
One might argue about the quality of the research or point out contradicting studies, but saying there was zero basis is flat-out false.
Adding that the idea was "made up" is a great example of bending the idea of science to prop up a point.
I don't expect public health officials to have a utilitarian function that maximizes global health considering second order effects. This should have been stated more clearly at the beginning of the epidemic.
Why not? It sounds to me that is the ideal scenario. If I go to the doctor I want them to maximize for health, it's up to me to make health concessions
In the same way, we have an entire political class who should be able to look at the health of the population and gauge which measures are worth taking and which aren't, no?
In practice, we instead have centers that focus on first-order effects and who advocate for their position (from an authority based on scientific knowledge, and preparation for emergencies) which are then evaluated and mixed with other centers by political leaders to incorporate the best attempt at considering second and further effects.
Everybody has a different utilitarian model and we don't have enough data or algorithms to predict second or third order effects (we usually fall back on "wisdom" from prior experience).
It reminds me of a comedian snippet I saw recently who was asking the crowd... "Has life gotten back to how it was before Covid", and one person in the audience yells out, "No"... and the comedian says, "OK, tell me one thing you had before Covid that you don't have now"? And the person says, "My family". The comedian goes -- "Oh yeah, I guess that was the point of it all wasn't it..."
I trust that most research is done in good faith and at least some of it is useful. Saying 'Trust the science' might as well be saying 'Trust in God'
Hopefully this is hyperbole. Any faith I have is separate from, for example, if I cancer, I am going to trust the science on the next steps of treatment.
> Medicine is extremely complex and medical errors are the 4th leading cause of death in the US.
Do you have the source for this? I have never seen it on the list of leading causes of death. For example:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db492-tables.pdf#4
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/9728/to-err-is-hum...
Since then there have been positive system changes in terms of things like quantitative care quality measures and use of checklists. But it's still a huge problem. Whether it's the 4th leading cause of death is unclear, it depends on how you analyze the data and what assumptions you make.
https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2018.0738
Still not clear to me how they are generating the numbers for putting it at 3rd or 4th. I might have to read the paper rather than listen the author interview in my link above.
That said 98,000 dead from medical error in 2000, from the first link, would put it at 9th in the list that I linked:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db492-tables.pdf#4
from 2020. So even with that lower estimate it would put it in the top ten.
The definition of a death caused by medical error from [1] seem too board from the likely simplified explanation at least:
"Medical error has been defined as an unintended act (either of omission or commission) or one that does not achieve its intended outcome,"
That "or does not achieve its intended outcome" seems like it would count cases I would not want in a statistic like this. For example surgery to remove cancer to save the patients life did not achieve the intended outcome of saving the patients life so it is counted as death via medical error.
Probably have to look at the full paper to see how they applied the standard, but the pdf is not free on the site I linked. I might come back later and look for a free copy or another source.
[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139/
In the past, many cultures had priests doing most of the science as well.
Ultimately it all boils down to trust. The common man doesn’t have time nor intellect to evaluate “the science”. When scientists display obvious bias, they lose trust, since they claim to be impartial. It’d be better if they didn’t claim to be impartial.
To even get there requires independent, skeptical, peer review. That often doesn’t happen. It’s questionable how many scientific facts are even science. Much less factual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge
"Trust the science" became a campaign slogan during the pandemic, and fell into the same realm as "defund the police" or "trust all women".
So yes, "trust the science" does mean what you said that it is a process that should take data new and old into account. However, the sad thing is it was co-opted by people who used it as a cudgel to silence anyone that didn't toe the line.
The right wing somehow took "science" to mean "Anthony Fauci"...
There is also a weird thing where people will attribute simple natural phenomena to science. Conflating the subject matter with science itself. I recall seeing a post with these colored ants and a caption like "Isnt Science Cool?" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-rainbow-...
Thats not science. Those are ants being colored by food coloring... that would be true with or without the scientific method and you don't even need it to observe the effect. And when you do need science to discover some phenomena (say the nature of black holes) its not science that is amazing if you are simply talking about how amazing black holes are. Its the method applied to understand them that can show how amazing science is. Black holes arent science.
While this editor may have crossed some redlines, I am doubtful this change in represents a genuine philosophical shift at the magazine.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/denial-of-evoluti...
https://archive.is/H8hJw
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-term-jedi...
https://archive.is/oMzz7
But that was in the 80s. For the last couple of decades, Scientific American just makes me sad. Crap I wouldn't bother reading.
There's nothing like that out there now.
Whatever the correctness of Carl's science, he was an astronomer. Not a subject-matter expert. And the the article was very clearly ideological. In an era when the political winds in Washington were blowing hard in the other direction.
I was rather younger then, but still recall thinking that SciAm's approach had thrown away any chance of appealing to the Washington decision-makers, controlling the nuclear weapons, for the feel-good (& maybe profit) of appealing to the left. Which seemed hard to reconcile with them actually believing the results they published, saying that humanity could be wiped out.
It seems to have worked, though - the biggest nuclear war skeptic in that administration was Ronald Reagan and he's one of the world's most successful nuclear arms controllers and disarmers, whatever one may think of the rest of his politics and policies.
Did it? Or did Reagan have clear memories of WWII - when he was 30-ish years old - and the horrific level of death and devastation which even conventional bombing had inflicted upon Europe and Japan? "I don't want any American city to end up like Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, or Hiroshima" was a perfectly acceptable right-wing value.
My read is that Reagan understood the difference between talking big & tough, and actually starting a war. He obviously had a taste for proxy wars, but conflicts with direct US involvement were very few and small on his watch.
Yes it did. The influence of media and popular depictions of nuclear war on Reagan is very well documented. His experience of WWII was working on propaganda materials, not exposure to the devastation of war. He was convinced nuclear war was likely civilization-ending, an actual Armageddon. In this he was at odds with the bulk of his administration and US nuclear doctrine. His attitudes and interactions with Gorbachov on these issues are also surprisingly well documented.
Scientist 2: we tried this and found that if the water is cooling that it doesn’t work, it has to remain at a constant temperature.
Scientist 3: we tried it with refined and unrefined sugar. unrefined sugar did not work.
scientist 1: we took another look - it seems there was some weird additive in the refined sugar, when this additive added to water at 74.7373 degrees centigrade the water turns pink.
that’s a very silly and stupid example of “challenging” other scientist’s work. you precisely explain what you tried and how it differed, in the hope it leads to a more specific and accurate picture down the line.
flat earthers et. al just “say stuff” they think is right, where the evidence does not actually challenge any hypothesis or existing evidence because the claims are just … bad.
this is not “challenging” science. it is stubborn ignorance. pure and simple.
most of it is so easy to refute any random youtuber with a spare hour can do it (read: 6-12 months [0])
- https://youtu.be/2gFsOoKAHZg
however, your point about platforming is important, because people who wouldn’t have had a soapbox 15 years ago, now have a soapbox anyone in the world can find them on.
if you’re looking for something to confirm your world view, there’s something on the internet for you.
rule 1 of the internet should be spammed in front of everyone’s eyes for seven minutes before anyone is allowed to use a web browser — don’t believe anything you read on the internet.
[0]: there’s a running joke about how long this person takes to make new videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
(Folding Ideas, "In Search of a Flat Earth")
He takes a couple of their claims seriously about what one will see when attempting particular experiments involving a very large lake, attempts them, sees the results one would expect if the Earth were curved, and reports this to some flat earth community forum, refining the experiment as they suggest ways he may have screwed it up, and continuing to find curvature (obviously).
The real story is how they react to contrary evidence delivered entirely on their terms, and where that community was heading four years ago (beware—I guess—that part also becomes necessarily "political").
[EDIT] I guess I buried the lede for this site's interest, which is that the video devotes a fair bit of time to how the Youtube "algorithm" took a little success for Flat Earth videos as a cue to aggressively promote them to people it identified as maybe liking them (those inclined to fall down that particular rabbit hole—which involves a lot more than just the specific belief that the earth is flat), but now flat earth is in decline, because that and other "algorithms" started sending the same folks to... Q-anon content instead.
Incidentally, there was a somewhat-big documentary on Flat Earth some years ago that included some folks from a flat earth convention trying some experiments very similar to the ones depicted in this video (involving visibility of objects across a large lake), with predictable outcomes.
That's many years beyond usefulness now that governments and companies communicate official information through the internet. You might as well say "don't believe anything ever" which makes the advice useless.
It's fine that people believe false things like flat earth. Why so much pressure to stop that? False beliefs are the default for most people, and they actually serve a purpose. We're mostly not emotionless truth-seeking Spocks. We can have religion and other beliefs that improve our quality of life by providing a sense of belonging or importance, an identity, or a community. You wouldn't go around telling Jews that no, God didn't give the 10 commandments to Moses, stop believing unscientific rubbish just because you read about it in some scroll.
Scientific American hasn't seemed very healthy after the 80s. In the decades before, it was an unusual labor of love by one or two chief editors (I don't remember specifically).
Who is actually being cancelled and for saying what?
This is what I find a little frustrating. There's very little censorship and when it does happen it's usually not against those that most loudly cry about censorship.
For example, did you know you can no longer use the Futurama Farnsworth quote on Facebook "we did in fact evolve from filthy monkey men"? Meanwhile, I've reported and had the report rejected nutters I know literally calling for the stoning of gay people using Bible quotes. (Lev 20;13).
FWIW the moment I started wondering if we were losing liberal norms actually was reading Dawkins in the 00s calling for scientists to coordinate against debating creationists. Like I was with him in being convinced even "scientific" creationism is powered by Christianity and not any good evidence from nature, and I guess I need to say I had absolutely no problem with any scientist choosing not to engage with any creationist. But there's something anti-science in a campaign to expel a belief from public debate, by a means other than better arguments. That can conceivably be a good thing in some case; but it's the opposite of science.
Relying on Facebook is a bad idea because it's a corporation operating under different pressures than healthy discourse, further trying to direct your attention in its own interest, applying resources it gains this way to modeling you. You can try to improve its moderation but besides the trouble you bring up, probably any success you can get that way will just seed a competing platform. I prefer to give my energy to an open protocol such as Bluesky's (admittedly I haven't looked at its protocol spec) -- unless you can take away everyone's personal computers, everyone's not going to live under your favorite monitor. An open protocol is compatible with choosing among competing moderators. (BTW the pre-web Xanadu vision included open-ended moderator choice, and how different system designs could have different social effects, and the importance of getting it right.)
There has been something of a sea change.
Exactly. "In this house we believe ... science is real." is about the most unscientific sentiment possible. There, the word "science" exists to give the air of authority to a set of ideological and policy positions.
I assume you're implying that people who advocate for cultural support of science are hyper liberal and would be hostile to any science conducted by a hyper conservative. I reject this assertion.
"Trust the science" means that peer reviewed science and scientific consensus should carry weight, and too many people are anti-intellectual.
Nope.
We could spin up a theorem generator that just starts from mathematical axioms and exhaustively recombines them to create theorem after theorem. This would create facts, but the process would be almost entirely useless. A pure undirected "search for truth and fact" does very little for us.
Researchers decide what problems to tackle. Funding organizations decide what research to fund. Researchers make choices about how to tackle these problems. Research labs are staffed depending on things like admission decisions and immigration decisions. Journals decide what papers to publish, not just on validity but on impact and novelty. Journals then charge money to access this research as part of a profit-driven business model.
All of these human elements bend the "search for truth" and a failure to recognize these institutions and their many historical analogues just means that you miss out on some rather important understanding when interacting with the literature.
>...As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, "Science teaches such and such," he is using the word incorrectly.
>Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, "Science has shown such and such," you might ask, "How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?"
>It should not be "science has shown" but "this experiment, this effect, has shown." And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments--but be patient and listen to all the evidence--to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at. https://feynman.com/science/what-is-science/
I always took that for granted but seems some don't.
There are so many cases in which the interpretation of the data is difficult. There are many cases in which there are either experiments with seemingly conflicting data, and two different plausible interpretations of existing data. I consider myself highly intelligent and reasonably well informed and yet, were I the one setting policy, I would still need to rely on the opinions of experts in various fields to interpret what data we have on various issues.
1. Science has always been political, this isn't new. Some of the first major experiments were performed in Nazi camps. Cancer treatment began with torturing Black Americans. The entire idea of ethics is political in nature.
2. Science is still the search of truth. If it doesn't match your truth, then that doesn't mean the science is wrong.
3. Challenging scientific conclusions IS encouraged, but there is also a danger to it. Look at Covid. In the US alone, 500,000 Americans died from Covid. Challenging social distancing, masks, and vaccinations costs lives. I mean literally costs lives. The people challenging this were doing it for political purposes, i.e. most of them had absolutely no idea what the science said or how it might be wrong.
We have overpopulation anyway. And we don't have shortage of normies by any measure. In fact some social problems like monopolies are due to overabundance of normies.
This does match any reality I know of. What political agenda has government twisted science to?
The government is quite responsive to the science, and generates science, but the NCI and other bodies have little partisan politics, thigh of course the arguments in science get political just like any other group of people. It's just not Republican/Democrat politics.
> Challenging scientific conclusions should be encouraged not cancelled.
Scientific conclusions are challenged all the time. It is highly encouraged. Entire research programs get challenged to justify their existence. Should we really be running all these SNP chips for GWAS? Turns out that it wasn't a great investment, but it seemed promising at the time...
Too often people are doing two things, one good such as challenging science conclusions, and one bad such as lying or being dishonest or arguing in bad faith. And when they get critiqued for the bad one, they retreat to treating it as criticism of the good thing they were doing. I see it all the time.
Vaccines are on the docket for cancellation, which to be fair, will last only as long as a swath of the population sees their kids incapacitated by some completely preventable virus infection. But do we really have to go through an epidemic (again!) to understand that the science of vaccines is solid?
There is such a thing as settled science.
There is also such a thing as people too uneducated and non-expert to understand what science is settled.
There should be such a thing as not listening to non-experts about settled science.
That's a particularly clear cut example. There are many more complex scenarios where "trust the scientific experts" is dubious because science has a limited domain of applicability. When you pretend that non-scientific decisions must be made on a scientific basis, people see through it and become sceptical.
"Political decision" as a euphemism for allowing non-experts to decide how to minimize deaths? The same non-experts who couldn't even get the Monty Hall problem right, let alone the complexity of medical probability and statistics of [false | true] [positives | negatives] in Bayesian scenarios?
Good luck with that.
And plenty of medical experts get the Monty Hall problem wrong.
Then they're not experts on prob and stats in medicine, and you shouldn't choose them to guide policy making when prob and stats in medicine are relevant. The alternative is to choose those who aren't experts in prob and stats in medicine, which results in policy bred from ignorance of the relevant math and science.
Choosing people who are ignorant of the relevant math and science over those who are knowledgeable is certainly one way to make policy, and it seems that is what folks want, so I guess we'll see how well that it works out.
Wait, when did "how to use these truths" become part of science?? How you use science to develop things that benefit people (or organizations) is normally called engineering! Science is normally concerned only with finding useful facts about the world. There are some exceptions, like when you're using the scientific method exactly to figure out what benefits people (or any living organism), for example, using pharmacology to develop drugs that help people. But I would argue that even then, the main concern of pharmacology is to figure out what kinds of drugs have what effects on humans in certain conditions - i.e. it fits perfectly into the definition of "searching for truth and facts".
How you apply that knowledge science gives you to solve problems that affect society is called policy - and policy, while can be analysed using the scientific method, is normally not itself science. It's hard to use the scientific method to study policy, though, because there are far too many factors involved in anything to do with large groups of people, and far too little room to do experiments on them.
As a tangent: even if you're correct that what scientists decide or are allowed to research is mostly political, the facts they find are not, at least if the scientific method is being used properly. Facts are never racist. Facts do not have opinions. And science should look for true facts, not opinions. Hence, even if your focus is on things you find political, the scientific facts and hypothesis you end up with must not be.
All I can say is (－‸ლ)
Over time, people developed identity politics which put your group first but with race, gender, etc. That got merged with Marxist concepts into a new form of it with a new name: intersectionality, or critical race theory.
Those people build on conflict theory. They make decisions about your group before you as an individual. They divide them up as oppressors vs oppressed with a goal to redistribute power/wealth from one to the other. They play games with words like saying “privileged” instead of power or oppressor to get more support.
As implemented in the Soviet Union and China, the Marxists were mostly atheist, dogmatists, and no dissent was allowed. They wanted their ideology forced on everyone in every institution. You’d get canceled with no job or rations, often starving, if disagreeing. They’d go after peaceful dissenters. They also used labels to dehumanize their opponents which, combined with their rhetoric, justified harsh treatment in their minds.
Those pushing intersectionality, critical race theory, etc. are just like that. Cancel culture with mobs hounding dissenters. Labels like Nazi’s, TERF’s, extortionists, etc. They use these claims to frame it like war is justified. People are just disagreeing with them peacefully, though.
So, their ideology is similar to Marxism, started in hotbeds of Marxism, has goals similar to Marxism, and works like it as implemented. So, conservatives noticing this call them modern Marxist’s. They’re also using it to say it’s too close to Marxism, not exact equivalence.
They also note that the philosophy that wrecked many countries, even killing millions, will likewise devastate our country. It already is driving division up so much. That’s why non-Progressives are pushing back so hard.
Well, also since the Marxist/DEI/woke folks are forcing it on everyone from business to criteria for movie awards. We can’t even enjoy movies anymore since they prioritize indoctrination over film quality!
so… it’s not marxism then?
something similar to is not the same as.
It backfired so hard on the genderists that they've taken to using insults like "FARTs" instead, which just makes them look childish and unserious.
1: https://www.npr.org/2024/11/15/nx-s1-5193258/scientific-amer...
Whether the EIC of SciAm overstepped with her own editorializing is probably not something we as outsiders can really say, given the complexities of running a newsroom. I would caution people against taking this superficial judgment too seriously.
Reason does interesting stuff, sure, but no mistake it has a bias and that is a right centre libertarian view that loads factual content toward a predetermined conconclusion that individual free thinkers trump all.
As such they take part in a current conservative habit of demonising "Science" to undermine results that bear on, say, environmental health, climate change, on so on that might result in slowing down a libertarian vision of industry.
I still read their copy, I'm a broad ingestor of content, but no one should be blind to their lean either.
Unlike many other sources, Reason doesn't pretend to be neutral. They admit:
"Reason is the nation's leading libertarian magazine."
https://reason.com/about/
However, libertarianias as they exist tend to be socially conservative - somehow they end up agreeing with GOP position on social issues. In this case, convervatives hate trans people, so libertarians too.
The 2024 Libertarian Party Presidential candidate was a pro-trans gay man.
And is pro-choice (but anti-government funding for abortion). And Reason seems positive about him: https://reason.com/2024/11/06/chase-oliver-calls-libertarian...
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I think you're conflating a few groups that I see as distinct:
Republicans vs. conservatives, and
(Holding various views about the best public policies regarding transgender issues) vs. (hating transgender persons)
And just about last thing that is productive is to play again the euphemism game where we pretend that side of political spectrum does not mean what they say when it sounds ugly. We played it with abortions and it turned out, yep, they wanted to make them illegal and actually succeeded.
FWIW, the author - Jesse Singal - is a writer I've followed for a while. I like him a lot - I find him level-headed and intellectually honest. I don't think he'd characterize himself as a libertarian rather than a liberal, despite being published by Reason here. He's just a science writer who ended up on the "trans kids healthcare" beat and has written about it extensively. I think he'd characterize his position as just "a lot of medical treatments for kids are being pushed on [in his opinion] flimsy science for [in his opinion] ideological reasons"; and he'd say that this is a scientific position rather than a political one. Of course he takes a lot of crap for this, and of course he's also attracted a fanbase of bozos for this. But his writing, generally, deserves better than either.
There's solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates suicidality. Cherry picking from a single study is dishonest.
To be clear - the accusation isn't SciAm was politicised, but that it was politicised in an ideologically unacceptable way.
I doubt we'd hear a squeak of complaint if a new editor started promoting crackpot opinion pieces about how all research should be funded by markets instead of governments (because governments shouldn't exist), or that libertarianism is the highest form of rationality.
I'll take its deeply-felt concern for science and reason seriously when it starts calling out RFK Jr for being unscientific. (Prediction: this will never happen.)
> If experts aren't to be trusted, charlatans and cranks will step into the vacuum. To mangle a line from Archer, "Do you want a world where RFK Jr. is the head of HHS? That's how you get a world where RFK Jr. is appointed head of HHS."
What is this, if not an explicit call-out? I don't agree with or see a need to defend Reason very often, but what more do you want from them, here?
Perhaps, especially in a dialogue specifically about scientific, reasoning and factual quality, we should avoid arguments based on counterfactual conjectures. A type of argument so weak it facilitates any viewpoint.
If you have even weak evidence, better to reference that.
Not at all true, there is no solid evidence of this. That's why it's so controversial, because ideologues are pushing for these pharmaceutical and surgical interventions on children despite the paucity of evidence.
And you're pushing anti-trans propaganda that surgical interventions are happening on children despite paucity of evidence that it's happening. Not to mention lumping together puberty blockers with surgery, which you should not.
It is well documented that it's happening.
See for example https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-tran..., specifically the section titled "U.S. patients ages 13-17 undergoing mastectomy with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis".
That's not propaganda, it's data from medical insurance claims. There is other evidence too, including peer-reviewed research published in medical journals, and recordings of clinicians discussing this.
There's nothing fun or trendy or exciting about this for child or family. Deeply embarrassing, far worse than getting your first hernia check if your memory goes back that far.
The one thing we absolutely did. not. need. through all of this were politicians and the peanut gallery weighing in on a private medical situation while ignoring the point of our effort.
Nothing in this article, and none of the comments here mention the life of the child in question. Too busy scoring points to think about reality or humanity in any way. What do you think that looks like from my perspective?
The Cass Review mentioned was composed by a group of authors who are well-known to be opposed to trans healthcare, its methodology and conclusions are heavily criticized by subject experts (basically, "there is no evidence if you ignore all the evidence"), and even Cass herself has stated after publication that it is flawed. It does not represent the current scientific understanding of trans healthcare, so criticizing SciAm and even calling it "dangerous" for pointing this out is rather dubious.
The Cass Review was written primarily for political reasons. It isn't a peer-reviewed article written by neutral subject experts, and it should not be treated as such. The fact that Reason treats it as ground truth and ignores all the subject experts opposing it should say enough about their view on science.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI57lFn_vWk
If you prefer reading (and again, references), here ya go:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/106206585
That provides lots of valuable context that Cass ignores, such as from organizations like The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and every other major medical organization in the US.
She even acknowledges that she waited to be told what to think about it. Yet she still styles herself as a "skeptic". Ridiculous, but quite amusing.
That's how you describe the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and every other major medical organization in the US?
If you're not convinced by the preponderance of peer-reviewed evidence, then I don't know how to help you make good decisions in life.
Maybe talk to some of your trans friends about their life experiences?
Also maybe you should read it yourself instead of relying on videos like this to misinform your opinions.
And tell me what basis I should judge their excluding other research? How do I know they're not just rationalizing it? That they disagreed with the conclusions and worked backwards to exclude the sources?
It comes down to trust, and frankly, you're making me less likely to trust it, with the way you've communicated. I shouldn't blame them for how people talk about them, but you're certainly not doing them any favors.
If you genuinely want to be more persuasive, I'd be glad to walk you through the list of mistakes I think you made.
Also, I won't ask you to come to your own conclusions, but feel free to read this:
https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/integrity...
> Also, not for nothing but this thing is 388 pages. I do not have the attention span to be sure I wasn't missing something. So I cooled my heels and waited for the people who do have that expertise to weigh in.
She clearly did not do any sort of deep reading of the Review herself but instead just parroted what people who already ideologically agree with her have to say about it.
If she had read it herself, maybe she could have attempted a skeptical analysis. But she didn't.
Thanks for the link to that article by McNamara et al. I've already previously seen it and I would recommend you also read this peer-reviewed paper published in the British Medical Journal, which carefully eviscerates its claims: https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2024/10/15/archdischild-20...
But again, you are not arguing in good faith, and it severely weakens your arguments. If you wish to convince people, please make a stronger attempt to stick to the facts.
You've repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that she did not even read the paper.
"If she had read it herself, maybe she could have attempted a skeptical analysis. But she didn't."
Quoting her, "So then I read the report myself."
Your obstinance on this point is remarkably fruitless. Feel free to argue that she didn't understand it, especially if you can point to statements she made that you can claim are false - and especially if you can cite references that prove your point.
I'll also note you didn't respond at all when I suggested you should ask your trans friends what they think.
At this point, we're done. I've made repeated attempts to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you have demonstrated your unwillingness to change.
> At this point, we're done. I've made repeated attempts to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you have demonstrated your unwillingness to change.
That's fine. To be honest, your condescending attitude was starting to irritate me so I'm pleased not to proceed with this discussion any further.
"This is one of the few scientific subjects on which I've established a modicum of expertise"
Long way from medical expert but it does imply a higher-level understanding of the science here. Whether writing a few articles makes someone an expert is up to the individual to decide.
This is the "old science" good, "new science" bad leaning that lends itself to ignoring climate costs and anything else that libertarians of various shades might object to.
Right wing propaganda outlets will often link topic like these with farcical statements similar to “from the people that brought you men in women’s’ bathrooms (trans) comes a demand that you get rid of your gas stove (climate change, indoor air health).”
They're vocal enough in forums about the place, near as I can tell these things are all harbingers of the decline and death of science as they know it.
SciAm nonetheless made the decision that those particular opinions should be published under their banner, and it’s not clear on what basis that decision was made other than editorial discretion.
So, yeah, I agree that the standards are lower in these sections. I question if they are non existent.
True if one stopped reading half-way through.
That label doesn't give carte blanche to publish non-scientific nonsense. Does it?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-are-puberty-...
So it's a counterexample to the claim "Every piece called out here is clearly labeled 'opinion'"
The “side” (scare quotes, for there are multiple positions available, not just those that come through the lens of US politics) with the higher quality analysis is that expressed in the Cass Review, which does not call for a ban, but rather for clinical trials and a data linkage study (for which data linking adult outcomes to pediatric gender interventions has so far been withheld by the relevant clinics - draw your own conclusions about why they would not want that to be surfaced).
The Cass Review itself offers no evidence the blockers are dangerous or inevitably irreversible (or if one takes a less cautious approach, cause patients more problems with irreversibility than not using them), merely finding that only two papers providing evidence for the treatment being safe and optimal were of "high quality" with others being of "moderate" quality or "low" quality and calling for another trial. It did not find higher quality papers drawing opposing conclusions. People more knowledgeable and cynical than me have suggested that treatments for other, less politically-charged but complex conditions may also suffer from the literature that supports clinicians preferred approach being of "moderate" quality but seldom face shutdown as a result. The side that trumpeted this conclusion (because it very much is political, even in the UK) delightedly concluded that as the favourably-disposed evidence mostly fell short of excellence, all gender affirming care must be shut down permanently. Perhaps you view things differently and would very much like to see the new clinics opened and a clinical trial designed to Ms Cass' liking devised, but it's safe to say most of the people trumpeting it as the last word in the debate would not.
quote 1: “These puberty-pausing medications are widely used in many different populations and safely so,” McNamara says.
quote 2: “From an ethical and a legal perspective, this is a benign medication,” Giordano says. She is puzzled by the extra scrutiny these treatments receive, considering their benefits and limited risks. “There are no sound clinical, ethical or legal reasons for denying them to those in need,” she says.
quote 3: Like any medication, GnRHas carry the potential for adverse effects.
Now if you read one of the studies they link (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7497424/).
quote: "Arguments against the use of GnRHa that have been raised include possible long-term adverse effects on health, psychological, and sexual functioning (Laidlaw, Cretella, & Donovan, 2019; Richards, Maxwell, & McCune, 2019; Vrouenraets et al., 2015)."
I really feel like they overstate the strength of their positions with the articles they cite. All of them show clear limitations of the results which clearly show we need more data.
Evidence based medicine doesn't mean that we simply give people treatments unless they're proven to be harmful. It means we don't give treatments unless we know that the effects are positive.
The UK is far from alone in pausing medicalization of gender dysphoric children. This is the case throughout pretty much all of the European continent at this point, prescription of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones is either banned or exclusively permitted as part of clinical trials - which means patients are explicitly told that this is experimental treatment, and the outcomes of patients needs to be tracked and published.
All of which are desired outcomes from the point of view of the patient at the time they request the puberty blockers, and for the duration of the time they keep taking them[1]. You don't conclude an otoplasty is harmful because the patient has less ear afterwards, but you might conclude the practice of otoplasty in minors was harmful if regret was a common outcome. And we know that the proportion of children who choose to cease gender-related treatment, like the proportion of children regretting elective otoplasties, is non-zero[2]. But what Cass absolutely didn't find was evidence to support opponents' presumption that the regret was somehow disproportionate. It just concluded the existing papers on the topic lacked the evidential qualities of some other areas of medical research.
So sure, I'm going to agree there's a good case for raising the quality bar of the existing body of scientific research and doing so carefully, there absolutely is. But that's quite different from concluding that the evidence that is there points to frequency of unwanted side effects seldom found in treatments deemed safe and reversible.
[1]or more specifically, the desired outcome is to prevent more rapid and less reversible physiological changes the patient expressly doesn't want to happen. [2]and in some respects elective otoplasty on minors is more complex: your ears don't rapidly and irreversibly grow if a clinic suggests putting body image aside and deferring the decision until adulthood, and the effects of the surgery are instant, rather than the result of a sustained process where the default is your ear reverting back to roughly the way it would have been was unless you commit to it for an extended period of time.
Again, the claim is that puberty blockers are reversible. A natal male patient that is unsure of their identity and takes puberty blockers for some time then ceases treatment will on average be shorter than if he had never taken blockers. They are not reversible. The effects of puberty blockers are permanent.
The Cass Review found that rates into regretted transition were very limited because they didn't follow up with patients for long periods of time. In particular, the youth gender clinics in the UK didn't follow up with any patients after the age of 18. So when they say that they measured an incredibly low rate of regret, understand that this is a low percentage of patients that reported regret by the age of 18. Someone who started to regret it at 19 or in their 20s is not counted. What the Cass Review found was that bodies like WPATH and AAP were claiming low rates of regret when the evidence base for that claim was extremely weak.
Evidence based medicine doesn't mean we just adopt any anything goes stance until it's been proven that treatment is harmful. Evidence based medicine means we don't give treatment until we have evidence that treat confers good outcomes - at least not outside of a research setting.
So being smaller is literally an intended effect of choosing blockers. And the relatively small proportion of natal male patients that cease treatment go through puberty, hence the primary effect is not irreversible. Being statistically slightly smaller in stature wouldn't typically be classed as a harmful side effect of any other course of treatment, particularly where the purpose of the treatment was to ensure those choosing to continue successfully avoid more drastic and completely irreversible changes in stature before making a decision on hormones which actually are extremely difficult to reverse. Since we're insisting that WPATH and the AAP's evidence base is a bit thin, I'm sure I'm going to be wowed by the list of citations you produce for puberty blockers causing significant harm in the form of "brittle bones that are much likely to break"...
The Cass Review found that a children's clinic didn't conduct followup exercises with adults and didn't regard other followup studies involving adult cohorts as conclusive. I haven't disputed that, or that medicine is typically more cautious than other sciences. What I am disputing is that the Cass Report concluded that puberty blockers were dangerous and irreversible when prescribed to people with gender dysphoria. I mean, if she actually believed that had been established, she wouldn't be recommending trials, right...
For the third time your claim was that puberty blockers are reversible. This is false. If this hypothetical child decided to stop taking puberty blockers, the impact on height would not be reversed. He would not reach the same height if he took blockers and stopped than if he never took blockers at all. Puberty blockers are not reversible.
And again, impacts on bone density and inability to achieve orgasm are most certainly not desired and these side effects go entirely unmentioned in your response. I don't know why you imply there's no research on these side effects:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9578106/#:~:text=Re....
> Results consistently indicate a negative impact of long-term puberty suppression on bone mineral density, especially at the lumbar spine, which is only partially restored after sex steroid administration. Trans girls are more vulnerable than trans boys for compromised bone health.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9886596/#:~:text=Pu....
> Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and genital surgery also pose risks to sexual function, particularly the physiological capacity for arousal and orgasm. It is important to be aware there is a dearth of research studying the impact of GAT on GD youth’s sexual function, but I provide a brief discussion of this important topic. Estrogen use in transwomen is associated with decreased sexual desire and erectile dysfunction and testosterone for transmen may lead to vaginal atrophy and dyspareunia
For similar reasons, studies which shows erectile dysfunction is not uncommon in patients who have chosen to continue treatment using oestrogen, (universally agreed to have irreversible consequences; it's literally the point of using puberty blockers rather than going straight to sex hormones) is not a high standard of evidence that using puberty blockers for a few months aged 11 is significantly less reversible than using for a year or two aged nine. The actual claim being made: that the treatment is reversible in the sense that children are able to come off it and go through puberty, isn't really being contested here either.
By this logic cross sex hormones are reversible too: someone can stop taking artificial estrogen and stop taking anti-androgens and their body will resume production of natural hormones. You can come off cross sex hormones just like you can come off puberty blockers, under your interpretation of the word "reversible". But that's obviously not what people are talking about when they describe treatment and reversible.
Puberty blockers do indeed leave permanent effects. Yes, you can go off puberty blockers. But years of skipped puberty will have permanent effects. Puberty blockers are as reversible as cross sex hormones: yes, you can stop taking them and resume your body's normal hormone production but the time spent altering hormones will have permanent effects.
The descriptions of puberty blockers promulgated by activist groups like mermaids were so misinformed that the UK government has to force them to change their language: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/oct/24/trans-childr...
> The watchdog asked Mermaids to review its position on puberty blockers, particularly a section on its website stating that the effects of the treatment were reversible. The Cass review found that the evidence base on puberty blockers was “weak”; puberty blockers will now only be prescribed as part of a NHS clinical trial. Mermaids has removed text stating that puberty blockers are an “internationally recognised safe, reversible healthcare option”.
Parents were told for over a decade that puberty blockers were just like a pause button on puberty. Unpause, and puberty would play out and leave their child just like if they had never gone on blockers. This is not the case, and the unfortunate reality is that many parents consented to treatment on account of misinformation.
Now that I'm in my 30s, I think we need a nanny police state making sure everyone is rational.
Even if you imagine you never buy anything due to exposure to advertising, advertising is still hammering away, with its manipulative motivated based impressions on our minds.
If some source of information is worth consuming, at least for me it is worth paying to consume without advertisements if that is an option.
The fact that YouTube video advertising isn’t scratching the chalkboard level unacceptable to many people is all the evidence I need to know they have been deeply impacted by ad programming.
Behind every outcome is an incentive. So what do you think is the incentive that’s behind the decline?
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Or maybe that cycle of the inferior by circumstance work hard to become the superior and displace the complacent superior. “history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.”.
And one of the teams is actively racist and sexist, has shown a blatant disregard for rules, norms laws and ethics, and now has full power over all branches of government. There's no scenario this ends well in the long term, and it's sad to look at from across the pond.
"Grab ’em by the pussy."
Convicted of sexual assault. Friends with famous pedophile ringleader.
When asked about what he has in common with his teenage daughter, he said sex.
Yeah, I'm calling him sexist.
Trump's position on abortion was obvious from his actions in the past, regardless of what he actually blabbed.
> Not a single EU country recognizes a judicially-imposed constitutional right to abortion. The only constitutional abortion decision runs the other way: the German constitutional court has declared that abortion violates the Basic Law’s right to life. France is the only country with a constitutional right to abortion, and it adopted that right by amending the constitution.
What is this weird strawman? Most EU countries have laws in place that allow abortions up to a certain point. It doesn't have to be a constitutional right for it to be a right. No EU countries have a constitutional right to get emergency medical treatment or to be allowed to be vaccinated either, so this is aggressively irrelevant. Exact healthcare procedures are between a patient, their medical professional(s), and potentially family in some cases.
On Roe, the US legal system is weird and broken. Courts effectively legislate by trying to pretend to understand what vague words from centuries ago mean and how they could relate to today and things that sometimes they couldn't even imagine back then (not abortion of course, there is plenty of written advice from centuries ago about them). In normal law countries, legislators legislate. And thus abortions are legal because legislators decides so, based on popular demand.
Trump getting away with literal treason is also symptomatic of the broken American legal system, where judges and prosecutors are political entities more interested in their careers and ideology than the actual law they should be upholding.
You seem to be assuming my point somehow turns on Helmuth’a statements appearing in SciAm. It does not. Her words are ipso facto indicative of religious and moral fervor, not rationality.
Speculation is also about looking to the future, 'what might be possible'. These are opinions.
And. 'A Lot' of people confuse raw data with 'facts'. Every single paper or news report is taking 'raw data' and 'figuring out what it means'.
So, there is always bias, but also it is impossible to report anything without trying to 'infer' information out of the raw data. There is no such thing as 'just report the facts'.
Fact and factitious have a common Latin root for a reason.
Even the carefully engineered autonomous probe will only gather data according to some human conceptions of what matter to be recorded or dismissed, what should be considered signal rather than noise.
“Only”? No.
The entire point of having a scientific approach, an ever longer list of ways to weed out mistakes and misperceptions, is that raw human cognition can be improved upon.
Repeatable results, independently reproduced results, peer review, control elements, effect isolation, … the list is actually very long.
Not every one of the methods we have collected applies to every step in knowledge, but every step we take can be validated by as many of them as apply.
And new ways of falsifying false conclusions continue to accumulate.
What might have come before the Big Bang?
Do quantum superpositions really collapse somehow based on some as yet uncharacterized law, or does our universe produce a web of alternate futures, still connected but where straightforward links are quickly statistically and irreversible obscured?
There is a science friendly basis for interesting opinions of particular experts, in areas of disagreement or inconclusive answers, when clearly labeled as opinion, whose opinion, and why that experts opinion is of special interest.
Also, opinion on the state of science education, funding or other science relevant non-scientific topics, with all due modesty of certainty makes good sense.
But injecting ideological opinions, and poorly or selectively reasoned ones, or unestablished conjectures falsely posed as scientific truth, into a format that claims to be representative of science based information, is a tragedy level disservice.
Not to mention, with respect to Scientific American in particular, a betrayal of many decades of higher standards, work and reputation.
It's hard to deny science itself is under attack by the same people who try to establish alternative facts and truths based on what's politically convenient to them, even if nothing of that is backed by objective reality. Science will always be a force pushing against such agendas.
How is the best way to serve the higher standards of SciAm? Would it be ignoring the elephant in the room, this new shiny fake reality where vaccines cause autism, the Earth is flat, that scientists have been hiding perpetual motion machines from the public? Or would it be to risk being labeled "biased" or "political" and actively label and fight against these anti-science movements?
Science is politics. It is the strong belief that there is one single objective reality, that anyone with the proper tools can observe and verify, and that going against these cornerstones for political expediency is wrong and, ultimately, against the interests of our species.
Indeed, the point of the Reason article is that if scientists want to have credibility on questions where their expertise applies, they should avoid opining in their official capacity on political questions where their expertise doesn’t apply.
Science has much to say about politically important issues like climate change and vaccines! But people will blow off those assertions if scientists lend the imprimatur of their authority to advance social causes, for example by opining that it’s “racist” to vote to deport illegal immigrants.
Singularity.
But that isn't what happens. Division by zero and other mathematical breakdowns occur, meaning that whatever actually happens is not in fact the same laws operating in an extreme situation. The laws don't actually work.
This is further backed up by the fact that we have two models with which to model the "singularity". Quantum mechanics and general relativity. They both break down, but in inconsistent ways. So clearly our equations don't work in that situation.
In addition, both from theory and experiment, there is strong evidence that space and time have a minimal length, the Planck unit of space and time. You can't get mass on a point if that understanding is true, because it will always involve unit distance connections.
Finally, uncooperative singularities like these have been found in scientific models many times, and the result has always been that the addition or adjustment of our models resolved mathematical mayhem. The mayhem just indicated the models were incomplete for the situation.
A toy example is Newton's force of gravity between two masses, F = Gm1m2/d^2. The force being a constant times the product of masses divided by the square of their distances.
This model implies that at a distance of zero the force is infinite. Yet that creates mathematical problems, modeling problems, and we never see it happen.
That mess is easily cleaned up with the realization that as the distance between the centers of a mass of m1 and m2 falls under the radius of one or both, r1 and r2, the forces of any mass of m1 and m2 outside distance d now cancel out. So as the position of two masses converge, the force of gravity actually goes to zero, not infinity. Newton's Law was still a good model for non-relativistic gravity forces, but needed to take account of more information to work in that particular case without blowing in a "singularity".
TLDR; where math blows up you can't just accept the model as operating in an extreme situation, because the model generates incoherent, inconclusive, undefined and inconsistent results. But the problem isn't magical, mysterious, or evidence of something unknowable. It is just evidence that our math and models don't yet capture everthing relevant to the breakdown case. It is a clue pointing toward something more for us to learn.
this category is itself hopelessly controversial and ideologically delineated, as you have demonstrated. not to mention this is type of "stay in your lane" or argument is generally deployed by defenders of the status quo against dissenters.
>falsely posed as scientific truth, into a format that claims to be representative of science based information
but this didn't happen.
look, scientific american is a general-audience science magazine, not a journal for serious scientific inquiry. it has an editorial remit for commentary and exploration of themes and trends related or adjacent to science. you may not like the opinions or ideologies expressed in the opinion pieces they published, but they are clearly labeled opinion and in the opinion section. it is completely appropriate and dare i say non-controversial. it really seems like you just disagree with their selection of opinion pieces.
When we see opinions leaning very consistently one way at a publication it invariably turns out their non opinion pieces have some of that bias.
That bias always includes ignoring scientific accuracy in favor of political ideals.
Afaik science has not yet ran out of much more interesting opinions than the ones mentioned
I suspect we'll eventually get something like a Substack for Science author (editor) on a subscription model that will do long form pieces and invite SMEs to talk about their stuff.
May need to choose some better examples if the author wants to support his point.
Nature has an Opinion section. New Scientist does too. Most magazines do.
> I would guess the number of Opinion pieces has gone up dramatically in the last decade
Did you do any research on this or just throwing out random guesses?
As I said, I said it was a guess. I tried chatgpt, but no help there. I was hoping that people here who are more regular SA readers than me would have a sense of this.
It is well-known that people do not discern reporting and opinion coverage. IMO this barrier is exacerbated in scientific publications, where science-like language is used throughout. It gives the sense that "science" is behind the opinion.
This may not sway science-savvy readers of the magazine, but when it is reported elsewhere ("Scientific American magazine says XYZ"), it surely misleads people. I'd rather science magazines stick to science, but that's just me.
"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas"
Is there bias in what opinions SciAm chooses to print?
There may or may not be editorial bias at SciAm -- no idea since I don't read it, and not really interested either way -- but that article was a shoddy piece.
People who supported Fox News during it's heyday used the same argument.
But what is he on about here?
Or that the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, SciAm published a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented "his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior."
(a) The (marked!) editorial is in no way a refutation of the concept of the normal distribution.
(b) It's written by a currently-publishing tenured life sciences professor (though, clearly, not one of the ones Singal would have chosen --- or, to be fair, me, though it's not hard for me to get over that and confirm that she's familiar with basic statistics).
(c) There's absolutely nothing "surreal" about taking Wilson to task for his support of scientific racism; multiple headline stories have been written about it, in particular his relationship with John Philippe Rushton, the discredited late head of the Pioneer Fund.
It's one thing for Singal to have culturally heterodox† views on unsettled trans science and policy issues††, another for him to dip his toes into HBD-ism. Sorry, dude, there's a dark stain on Wilson's career. Trying to sneak that past the reader, as if it was knee-jerk wokeism, sabotages the credibility of your own piece.
Again, the rest of this piece, sure. Maybe he's right. The Jedi thing in particular: major ugh. But I don't want to have to check all of his references, and it appears that one needs to.
† term used advisedly
†† this is what Singal is principally known for
And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse.
I thought the complaint on the normal distribution was supposed to be claims that many things are not normally distributed? Which, isn't wrong, but is a misguided reason to not use the distribution?
Much of it is pushback against widespread ideological capture, and in particular the authoritarian idea that everyone else has to change and restrict their behavior to accommodate increasingly absurd and harmful requests from an overly demanding identity group.
Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever. And I say this as a devout member of a rigorous and conservative religious tradition.
More generally, this graphic has an astute depiction of the problem: https://i.ibb.co/ZcMWLvM/no.jpg
I can't relate to the comic. like I said I have not really felt personally affected by trans people at all on any level ever.
If it’s a small number, then presumably it’s not worth fighting over and sport can just have Open and Female categories?
There are trans-identifying female athletes who don't take testosterone and compete in women's sports, recent example in the last Olympics being Hergie Bacyadan in women's boxing. There's no exclusion on participation as long as the same rules as for everyone else are followed.
But what is "female"? The Algerian boxer was born female, but has high testosterone due to whatever medical condition, which ruled her out of some previous competitions that had conditions around that. Do you want sports governing bodies to inspect genitalia? Do blood tests? Especially when it gets into kids' sports territory, this gets very iffy very fast.
Cases of genuinely ambiguous sex are vanishingly rare, and are nothing to do with trans identities which are differences of social gender that do not change the underlying biology.
This implies that Khelif is not female but is male, and went through male puberty, therefore having the male physical advantage in sport caused by male sexual development.
Same as has happened previously with other male athletes in women's sports, such as Caster Semenya who also has 5-ARD and also competed in the Olympics, back in 2016 in the women's 800m track event, winning gold. The silver and bronze medals were taken by males too.
Khelif does not identify as trans, and described such accusations as "a big shame for my family, for the honor of my family, for the honor of Algeria, for the women of Algeria and especially the Arab world."
Imane Khelif has an X and a Y chromosome. She has 5-alpha reductase deficiency, which leads to the development of a pseudo-vagina and internal testicles. Crucially, though, the hormone levels are the same as typical males. In terms of upper body strength, red blood cell count, bone density, etc. Khelif is the same as other males.
She wasn't disqualified due to hormone levels. She was disqualified because the International Boxing Association's criteria for participating in the women's category is having a female karyotype (no Y chromosome).
> Do you want sports governing bodies to inspect genitalia? Do blood tests?
Chromosomes can be checked with just a mouth swab.
Actually, most of those "potential" trans turn out to be actual trans. That college volleyball athlete has even been sued by her own teammate.
> It's a "problem" way overblown by anti-trans activists.
I get that there are many loud voices on this topic right now. But I rather having this right now then later down the road, where the right has become wrong and the wrong has become right.
And there has never been a shred of proof of her being trans. Exactly my point.
> et that there are many loud voices on this topic right now. But I rather having this right now then later down the road, where the right has become wrong and the wrong has become right.
Yes, better for women with high testosterone to get death threats now for winning in the Olympics instead of thinking if this is really a problem.
The fact that she was raised as a woman in Algeria (a notorious hotbed of wokeness) should tell you something.
Also, while it is gross to pick over people's bodies like this, I have to point out that you omit to note that her testicles are internal.
https://www.shewon.org/
Examples like Judit Polgar (who was around the top 10 players in the world at her peak) do indeed prove that chess is nothing like (physical) sports in this way. In physical sports like basketball, soccer, etc. the best women in the world can’t compete against even moderately athletic amateur men. A famous example is the fact that the US women’s national soccer team practices against young teenage boys (and routinely loses). In chess it would be like if the best woman was rated 1800 or something.
This isn’t meant to disparage women in sports — they really do have a categorically different kind of body from men, and pushing those bodies to their limits is just as impressive as it is for men. But they don’t appear to have categorically different kinds of brain, at least insofar as it matters for chess skill.
There are a lot of other orgs though and especially if you're in an area with a lot of trans people and it's a more active issue, I'm interested in what other groups have had to come up with. Like I said if the goal is preventing sexual violence I can't imagine that moving trans women into the mens prison is going to be effective either.
The actual graphic:
"Lesbians must have sex with me!"
Get the fuck out of here. This is nonsense.
The problem is maintaining the integrity of sports and competition. Only an uneducated person would ever try to argue that “the best women’s college basketball team would beat the best men’s college basketball team” even 1 out of 100 times.
Therein lies the rub. Some sure do, but most 13 year old girls don’t.
Do you have young children? I don’t live in the USA, I live in Europe, but I have a very small baby and I already did. The daycare, just this year announced they aren’t going to be celebrating Mother and Father’s Day anymore. Instead we will have to celebrate a Parents day.
This is just a small thing of course, there are many other situations where it’s clear an agenda is being pushed over the general population. The only way I can see you never felt it, is if you don’t have children.
Of course you might consider any or all of those to be Stupid Woke Nonsense, but whether right or wrong, sensible or stupid, they're not about trans people.
As a person entirely out of the "trans debate" it almost always seems to me like right wingers or anyone who is asked to change anything at all catastrophizes it beyond all sane response.
The mild "huh that slightly bothers me" and the "they are TRYING TO CHANGE MY CHILDREN!!!" seem to be conflated to the point of making no sense.
Going from "I noticed a trans person" to "this must be stopped!" makes no sense whatsoever.
PS- Blame Bill Clinton.
And again I say this as someone who is a member of a rigorous religious tradition that does not have any real flexibility about this. Nonetheless I've had to come to accept it because, as you say, the science.
Only if you use some definition of “intersex” that has nothing to do with the “two ovaries and a penis” you mentioned before.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022449020955213...
Did you just make this up or did you have a specific disorder of sexual development in mind? Presence of two ovaries suggests it's a female DSD anyhow.
> Intersex variants are 1% of the population, it's as common as red hair.
This figure is controversial and includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. The true prevalence is more likely between 0.01% and 0.02%.
The trans discussion is separate to this anyway, as it involves individuals without any DSDs who demand that others treat them as if they were the opposite sex.
Intersex as defined by genuine ambiguity of someone's sex is around 0.02% of the population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
> Leonard Sax, in response to Fausto-Sterling, estimated that the prevalence of intersex was about 0.018% of the world's population,[4] discounting several conditions included in Fausto-Sterling's estimate that included LOCAH, Klinefelter syndrome (47,XXY), Turner syndrome (45,X), the chromosomal variants of 47,XYY and 47,XXX, and vaginal agenesis. Sax reasons that in these conditions chromosomal sex is consistent with phenotypic sex and phenotype is classifiable as either male or female.[4]
https://usafacts.org/articles/what-percentage-of-the-us-popu...
The Philippines has already undergone multiple rounds of colonization over centuries, leading to the slow-motion eradication of their native language as Spanish and especially English have overtaken it to the point where many Filipinos cannot even speak pure Tagalog any more [0]. Hasn't the western white already colonized the Philippines enough? First it was, "your pagan religion is immoral and barbaric; here, read this Bible." Now, it's, "your transphobic language is bigoted and uninclusive; here, take these pronouns." How about obeying Starfleet's Prime Directive by leaving other cultures the fuck alone?
If you don't find this top-down imposition and control of language disturbing, I suggest you review your Orwell.
On a more abstract level, "the group's" intolerance of dissenting opinion and academic inquiry, especially when such inquiry shows its positions to be internally contradictory. Take for instance Rebecca Tuvel's paper In Defense of Transracialism, published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, which argues that "considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism." [1] Rather than judge this assertion on its merits and attempt to defeat it rationally, the community demanded the paper be retracted, the author was pilloried for her hateful language and dangerous ideas, and there were multiple departures from Hypatia's editorial team.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLFoUTJuGU
[1] https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/hypa.12327
I'd said something like, I don't think claiming an identity is enough, there has to be some sort of dysphoria. And then followed up with another comment like, if they want to keep the cock intact, then they're not actually trans women, as a genuine trans woman would want rid of it even if she couldn't afford the surgery.
This was enough to get me called bigoted and transphobic, and then permanently banned with no recourse, which surprised me because I'd disagreed with people there on the details of a few other topics in the past. Yet somehow this was too much.
It still baffles me how this is the one of the few issues that gets people on the left so riled up that they can't even bear to hear any dissent.
I know plenty of trans women who don't wish to have extensive bottom surgery. Given that you don't have expertise in the field and have basically invented your beliefs from whole cloth, I think you should revise them accordingly and take it as a learning experience about the value of study.
Note also that these were the standard leftie views on trans back in the 1990s, which is when I first heard about it. My beliefs weren't invented from whole cloth as you state. At the time the common understanding was that gender dysphoria is such a debilitating medical condition that accommodating those rare individuals afflicted by this should be done to help them deal with it better. Sort of like how disabled people are provided ramps for access - it was the right thing to do to help a marginalized group.
Anyway my point was more about intolerance of dissenting views on this topic in particular. Being permanently banned from that Discord was an unpleasant surprise when I was just expressing a viewpoint that was previously how most on the left understood the issue.
On the plus side it did help me understand the perspectives on the other side better. I'd previously considered "terfs" to be nothing more than vicious bigots, but once I understood that the trans umbrella had been expanded to include those without gender dysphoria, including men that back in the day would have just been considered common transvestites and not transsexual at all, some of their arguments began to make sense.
Now I'm more middle-ground on the issue, which isn't a bad place to be. This also inspired me rethink other political stances that I had adopted without analyzing them too deeply. So overall I suppose being kicked out of this community was a good thing as it broadened my mind. It also helped me see first hand how political echo chambers are constructed.
You completely missed the reason transmedicalism fell out of favor. It's because doctors were given the power to judge if you were truly trans. The way it played out is that they had too much power and routinely abused it in horrifying ways. That is still the case in some medical systems like the adolescent care in Finland, where the doctors ask teenagers questions that if I were asked at that age I would be traumatized for life. It's sickening.
Modern informed-consent trans healthcare is patient-driven. It turns out that if you've put in the effort to seek it out, you almost certainly are trans. Cisgender people do not make a habit of seeking out trans care, because the act of doing so generally induces gender dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria manifests in several ways — anecdotally, distress at current hormone profile is by far the most common. A belief that bottom surgery must be required is not evidence-based, in the sense that it leads to worse outcomes. It is cis people's projection of their own internal insecurities about sex and gender.
(I do agree by the way that gender dysphoria and healthcare need to be recentered in these discussions. But we have a broader understanding of it than we used to, which is good.)
Anyway, you're welcome to find my GitHub and see all of the open source work I've done. It's work that is, among other things, saves several corporations 8+ figures in CI costs annually each. That only happened because I had a safe environment to transition in. If I hadn't been able to transition and be treated with respect, that wouldn't have happened. (More generally speaking, without trans people Rust wouldn't have happened either, and the IT world would be much worse off! In my experience, people in elite engineering teams fully understand this. TERFism is like Uncle Bob — it appeals mostly to mediocre minds.)
Philosophy as a field has very little to contribute to basic object-level facts -- this is the whole reason science ("natural philosophy") split from traditional philosophy back in the early Renaissance. This isn't something you can reason out within your brain, this is entirely evidence-driven. There is a tremendous amount of evidence for transgender people and next to none for "transracialism".
This kind of cultural ignorance is highly insensitive. I would suggest that you refrain from making assertions, without corroborating evidence, about other cultures and matters that you have no experience with.
My lived experience, as a Pinoy, speaking with other Pinoys, both here in the west and in the Philippines, is that very few people, especially amongst the older generations, have ever heard of Filipinx; of those who have, nobody respects the term as valid, and indeed many regard it as colonialist.
From an opinion piece in The Philippines' newspaper of record, the centre-left [0] Philippine Daily Inquirer [1]:
The media is replete [2] with [3] other [4] examples of how poorly this term is received overseas, despite its adoption by a small subset of the western Filipino diaspora. Take this interview conducted by VICE with "Nanette Caspillo, a former University of the Philippines professor of European languages" [2]: > This isn't something you can reason out within your brain, this is entirely evidence-driven.This just sounds like a justification for tolerating double standards and self-contradiction, to the tune of "rules for thee, and not for me."
> There is a tremendous amount of evidence for transgender people and next to none for "transracialism".
Beyond the question of Rachel Dolezal's transracial identity as discussed in Tuvel's paper, there is also the recent Canadian headline regarding a self-identifying Indigenous group that has received tens of millions in federal cash [5]. Is this group Inuit, or is it not? Who decides? Would you, in their words, "want to take food out of the mouths of our people? Why would you want to hurt our people and our communities?” All because you refuse to respect their self-identification and long-documented history as an Indigenous people?
[0] sunshowers ↗ I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away. ryandv ↗ > I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away. sunshowers ↗ I'm not white. I'm Indian, and I also happen to be a trans woman. I'm fully aware of cultures with three traditional genders like my own -- I'm also deeply suspicious of them. The third gender is virtually always constructed to be transmisogynistic, to exclude trans women from womanhood. That isn't true binary-smashing gender diversity, that is merely "men", "women", and "we don't believe you're really women". [dead] ConspiracyFact ↗ [flagged] [dead] sunshowers ↗ [flagged] ConspiracyFact ↗ Huh? [dead] sunshowers ↗ [flagged] ConspiracyFact ↗ [flagged] [deleted] ↗ (comment deleted) sunshowers ↗ Obviously no two people are the same. But there isn't some magical gap between cis and trans women that's categorically bigger than the gap between, say, white and Indian cis women. Women raised in different cultures are different -- women that are a different sex at birth are different. ConspiracyFact ↗ [flagged] sunshowers ↗ > There “isn’t some magical gap” between cis and trans women? Absurd. seethedeaduu ↗ Militant trans activists? That's the vast majority of trans people, not some fringe view. dariosalvi78 ↗ > why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy. sunshowers ↗ Patriarchy is ancient! Yes it's quite fucked up that "woman" literally means "of man" — learning that in school was one of the things that radicalized me. umanwizard ↗ The word “woman” never meant “of man”. It comes from the old English “wif mann” which means female person. Of course “mann” evolved to “man” but at the time it applied to either sex. “Wif” never meant “of”. sunshowers ↗ Thank you, TIL! https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman dariosalvi78 ↗ I just need to remind that (very) often languages evolve in ways that have nothing to do with the underlying societal structure.
Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral. It is not an unreasonable stance from a purely descriptive standpoint, but the amount of sensitivity that comes if anyone tries to interrogate it indicates a deeper rot in the respective cultures.
Like — why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy.
(By the way, "Latine" is what the queer people of that ethnicity I know use. I think between Latine being a better grammatical fit and cishet feelings being damaged, Latinx mostly fell out of favor. And linguistic imperialism? Really? There is a far more fundamental and insidious reshaping of the territory to fit the map at play, which is to turn all of human gender and sexual diversity into a single male/female binary.)
Adoption of new language imposed by whites upon the diaspora of an ethnic minority is different from that minority introducing the term themselves. The neologism "Filipinx" appears to have originated on dictionary.com [0] [1], with no Filipino spokesperson, residing in the Philippines, North America, or otherwise, publicly endorsing the term (quite the opposite). I invite you to provide sources to substantiate the claim that it was in fact introduced by Filipino diaspora. All I can find is a statement by one "John Kelly" [0]:
Ethnic minorities overseas in western culture are subjugated to the cultural dominance of whites and expected to adopt their lexicon or risk severe social censure; this is the essence of the definition of "systemic racism" as proposed by DiAngelo.> Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral.
Tagalog is already ungendered. "Filipino" is ungendered. It is you who presuppose, based on Eurocentric linguistic norms, that "Filipino" is a gendered term and is assigned the male gender, and then from that presupposition conclude that the word "Filipino" is gendered and therefore patriarchal. This is an instance of begging the question, where you presuppose the very matter under contention. This is cyclical reasoning based on a predominantly white cultural worldview and linguistic background.
> And linguistic imperialism? Really? There is a far more fundamental and insidious reshaping of the territory to fit the map at play, which is to turn all of human gender and sexual diversity into a single male/female binary.You again expose your ignorance of other cultures with this comment. Bakla culture [2] in the Philippines has a very long and well-established history that predates Western colonization, and is already considered a third gender, already escaping the male/female dichotomy.
Stop imposing your white framing upon other cultures. That is in fact the definition of cultural and linguistic imperialism.
[0] https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1332278/filipinx-pinxy-among-n...
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/filipino-vs-filipinx-debate-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakla
Traditional third genders also typically only have room for straight trans people -- there is no room for a queer trans person like myself. Even today you have a lot of clueless people wondering how someone can be both bi/gay and trans -- something about it breaks the cishet brain in a way I've never really understood.
Modern western progressive ideas about gender diversity are far closer to reality than any traditional culture's, because they're grounded in science and humanism. (This is not to say that they're perfect -- I have several specific criticisms of queer theory authors like Judith Butler.) I am quite proudly a scientific humanist and I believe it is the most morally robust worldview in existence.
You don't have to say that apples and oranges are the same. What's based more in religious/patriarchal ideas than in rational evidence is the belief that men are like apples and women are like oranges (or that men are from Mars and women are from Venus). There are some differences that the patriarchy magnified into a monstrous set of institutions (coverture! implied consent! vomit). We're on the path to slowly undoing it, but progress isn't monotonic that's for sure.
(By the way, calling a trans woman, especially one who has medically transitioned, a "biological male" is both an HR violation and not rooted in evidence. It is really frustrating to hear your basic dignity being talked about by people who are as confident as they are ignorant. When I was still cis-presenting and didn't fully understand what my trans friends were going through, I didn't spout off my thoughts like a fool. I took the time to learn.)
I know, right? Goes against literally every message either of us received growing up. And yet!
The idea that there is a magical gap between men/amab people and women/afab people is one of the deepest held beliefs of humanity. It's just... not true. Humans have fairly low sexual dimorphism among the great apes.
> And then you go on to say that there are no real differences between men and women
That is not what I said. Of course there are differences between men and women. For example, if you ask men what their gender is they'll say "I'm a man" and if you ask women what their gender is they'll say "I'm a woman". Most men have a generally higher testosterone and lower estrogen level than most women. Most men at any level of strength training can lift much more weight than most women at the same level of strength training.
I think you're arguing against the strawman you have of me in your head, probably formed from the composite of a bunch of people you've heard who might have been wrong on this subject while being right about how to treat trans people.
> oblivious to the glaring contradiction between this belief and the entire phenomenon of transgenderism.
This kind of argument is so strange to me. I've heard variations of this a bunch of times, including yours, and "if men can become women and women can become men, what's the point of transitioning?"
When I'm on a testosterone-dominant hormone profile I feel really bad and I hate my body. When I'm on an estrogen-dominant hormone profile I like my body.
When I'm treated as a man by others and have he/him used for me I have clinical levels of social anxiety and depression. When I'm treated as a woman by others I no longer have much anxiety, though I still have occasional depression.
(These are objective and measured by validated psychometric scales over a long period of time, so can I ask you for a kindness? Please don't try and question whether they're real.)
Trans people exist because cis people exist. Many (likely most) people have a sense in their head of what their hormones and other sex characteristics should be like, and how they would like to be treated by other people. For most people it aligns with what they already have or are. For some of us it doesn't. The rest, as they say, is an implementation detail.
---
I'm going to ask you a question, if you don't mind -- I want to understand the logical and rhetorical progression that happened during the time you read my post and decided to reply with what you did. Could you outline the series of steps you followed to go from what I said to your response?
It's easy to blame patriarchy, but is it the responsible? According to linguists, the answer resides in how gender was introduced in European languages from the Proto Indo European [1, 2]. The feminine genus, in grammatical sense, was introduced later as a specialization of the general "animated" category. Therefore, what later became masculine was used for all "general humans", and was left the default form when gender was not indicated. Example even in English (and other proto-German languages) where nouns are (mostly) not gendered: you have the word of "woman" as a specialization of "man", which does not indicate the male, but it originally indicated the "human being" [3]. We are talking about the dawn of European languages, so take these as educated hypotheses, but blaming patriarchy is a very modern (and unsubstantiated) view.
The need to use a gender (either masculine or feminine) as the default gender is a need in the lack of a neutral gender for humans. Other languages in the world, like Maasai, use the feminine as the "default" gender, others have a proper neutral-animated gender.
Having a neutral gender in Spanish would be great, because it removes ambiguity in many cases where the sex is unknown, but introducing it, especially in languages like Spanish or Italian where all nouns are gendered, is a _massive_ undertaking, which would shake the foundations of those languages and would require a lot of energy by all its speakers. Theoretically possible, sure (we can make up any language we like), but I don't see a minority of agendered people being able to move so much inertia.
So how to go about it? The "x" or other non-standard symbols are pointless because unpronounceable. The "e" can work in Spanish (won't in Italian), and only for some cases, example above all: "españoles" is masculine. Choosing masculine and feminine randomly doesn't work either, it causes confusion and can even sound sexist in certain contexts (I've tried it and found myself in that situation).
My personal take is to stick to the rule: "default" gender is masculine. It's just a choice, as it would have been if we chose feminine (also remembering that the grammatical gender has -in most cases- nothing to do with sex). However, I also try to avoid ambiguities, even at the cost of redundancy, and try to introduce variation as much as possible, still within the constraints of the rules.
[1] https://allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf [2] https://benjamins.com/catalog/cilt.305.04lur [3] https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman
More than the actual policy prescriptions I'm interested in the reactions various cultures have when challenged on this. You get to see a rather extreme amount of emotional fragility, certainly a lot more than would be justified by a mindset of curiosity and openness. To me that is a pretty strong sign that something is deeply rotten in the culture (and I include my own culture here).
As I said elsewhere, I believe that scientific humanism is the most morally robust worldview in existence. I don't want to tell other people what to do, but I am going to live my life with moral conviction, and that includes saying what I believe to be true about other cultures.
In hindsight, I'm not surprised my horribly misogynistic English teacher lied about this.
This is my issue with lots of things being said about politics and language. Language is a tool. There is nothing patriarchal in "woman", nor in the use of the default "unmarked masculine" (this is the technical term) that is present in many languages. The unmarked masculine may even be interpreted in a matriarcal sense: the feminine has detached from the "general human" as someone "special", "more important" than the man. But these are all speculations that are all valid and all silly at the same time.
How we _use_ language is another story though. For example, using the masculine with the consequence (intentional or not) to exclude women from a job ad is definitely not acceptable. The unmarked masculine has the problem of being ambiguous, but the ambiguity can be solved (with the added cost of redundancy) by repeating the same words with the feminine or simply by specifying who the message is referring to (example: "madame et monsieur"). This is common sense, but it's worth reminding people to be careful about it. What is not common sense (IMHO) is to ask all speakers of a certain language to change a thousands years old morphology because someone misuses it, and not even providing valid alternatives.
Other examples of politicised language can be found in the words that are used to signal virtue, or to offend, often completely changing the original meaning of the word to the point that it becomes a political slogan with no meaning at all. I have dozens of examples, including the same word "patriarchy", but I can also mention "fascist", "communist", "feminist", "violent" etc.
Some people enjoy this show, some use it as a very convenient way to bring attention to some topics (or themselves), others, like me, find it confusing and extremely tiring and a reason for disconnecting from politics rather than embracing it.
The current political climate sucks for agender people.
I don't get to have this opinion because conservatives are censoring me and are always shoving religion down my throat.
Imitating conservative argument style is fun, you get to tell how you feel but then still get defensive when people say you hate other people based on their identity.
However. Cultural attitudes are propagated by people who's livelihood is frequent publishing. In that scenario, I think teams "what's to talk about?" and "it's not that complicated" are always going to lose to team "I've got a lot to say about this."
Some percentage of people do not strongly identify with any particular gender. I was assigned male at birth, I look stereotypically male, everyone assume I'm male and addresses me as such, but honestly, I don't care one way or the other and if I was female instead I doubt I would care. Let's say 50% fall here.
Another group of people strongly identified with one gender or the other, and can't imagine it being any other way. These people care deeply about gender because it is an important part of their identity. Let's say the other 50% fall here. Most of them are happy because they present as the gender they feel they are, and everyone treats them as such. In a small percentage, there is a mismatch and it makes their life hell.
I suspect the typical mind fallacy makes it very hard for most people to understand those that fall into the other group. And for those that are in the "happy with their gender" group to understand those in the "unhappy with their gender" group.
I’m the same. But, and this is a huge but: it’s my privilege to be able to think this way. I know that there are people who simply isn’t allowed to do this.
The same thing with skin color. I don’t care. However, my brother has a darker skin tone, he simply cannot have that luxury to not care, because other people force him. For example, when he wasn’t allowed to buy stuff at the nearby bakery because of his skin. He had to move to a country where people care less, because he didn’t want to put up his kids to the same. (Btw our country of origin is Hungary)
https://x.com/KatieDaviscourt/status/1858611351901663550
https://x.com/ItsYonder/status/1858673181315506307
I think it is reasonable for a woman to want a shared nude space to be free of people with penises, regardless of what that person identifies as, for simple logistics reasons of not being able to be sure if someone is being deceptive.
As someone who cares deeply about a lot of separate issues that Trump will be terrible on, I wish progressives would STFU on this topic and stop stabbing their party in the back. Treating trans people with dignity and respect should go without saying, but some of the left wing rhetoric on this issues goes too far like when they deny that there is any biological difference between men and women. A lot of the efforts on the left look more like virtue signaling and fighting for the sake of it, rather than trying to achieve better real world outcomes.
I was more supportive of their rights when they were the underdogs. Being on the side of the eggs instead of the high wall is second nature for lots of people so I'd guess there are significant number of people going through the same transition.
Ultimately they're the minority though. A specific example is pronouns. Majority of the population is perfectly happy with gender based pronouns, making it sociopolitically disadvantaged or uncomfortable to use them freely is not in the best interest of the majority.
It's always about compromise when we're talking about not stepping on each others feet, and number dictates the power, that's fundamental to democracy. Their demand in general turned from having dignity and freedom to love - say legal marriage, slowly into not being offended - say pronouns. Not being offended is a privilege not a right, particularly so when it makes overwhelmingly majority of the population feel like walking on egg shells, can't say it is what it is, aka censorship.
IMHO, being a minority in the western society myself, it's much smarter and considerate for others to stop focusing on identiy politics when you have comparable sociopolitical rights and status to everyone else, which is a spectrum not a line. The problem is they (or a vocal minority within that minority) keep pushing when they're well pass that spectrum. IMO stop the pride parade in western society because they are just one of us, the differences have already been well acknowledged and accepted, so instead of sexual preferences or gender identity which they differ from the majority, how about holding a parade that is about some common grounds. Just stop talking about it, when or if systemic unjust creeps back in, find evidence and fight for it again.
It is a wedge issue, simply. It benefits entrenched interests because it allows them to anger and control people, just like they do with the War on Christmas, the War on Guns, Welfare Queens, Baby Killers, Wokeism, DEI, and so many other catchphrases that collapse nuanced issues to a sports slogan.
This entire discussion is grossly disappointing. So many otherwise intelligent people thinking they are debating issues, when they are being played like a fiddle.
The "War on Christmas" effects a greater sense of persecution while framing it as a nonexistent conflict. There is no War on Christmas. I can say Merry Christmas or not, and it will not effect the wedge issue because it is and never was about saying Merry Christmas to others.
Merry Christmas to you.
This is nonsensical. This isn't "defusing" it, this is authoritarianism and literal capitulation to the absurd demands that are meaningless
People say "Happy holidays" now because they know some people don't celebrate Christmas and they want to be nice, friendly, and pleasant to them as well.
If you have a problem with people saying "Happy holidays" in place of "Merry Christmas" you are a fucking baby.
They are only industrial strength memes to create anger and distrust, thereby placing people in more manipulable mental states. You starve them by ignoring them, regardless of the merits. Most of all, don't react with anger.
I'm an atheist and this is my approach. I think their religion is complete nonsense but Christmas is a wholly inoffensive Holiday, which is celebrated in a fashion by many secular people anyway. I think the "Happy Holidays" thing is needlessly antagonist. In principle it should be fine but a lot of people take it the wrong way, it is known that many people take it the wrong way, and therefore if I said it then I would be saying it with the knowledge and acceptance that it's going to bother a lot of people (hence, antagonistic.)
As to privilege.. whatever man. The simple fact is that Christians are the predominant religion where I live and they are touchy about this matter in a way other people aren't, so why should I go against the flow? Just to spite people I feel no real animosity against? To undermine a holiday I enjoy? Literally why.
I still feel the discourse is overblown. Would have preferred to see those lines as jokes, though. That said, will look into "slate pitches." Strong chance I am just ignorant in a new way here.
I think his views are culturally orthodox, outside of liberal-left members of the laptop class.
>>>
While a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.
The strengths and weaknesses of the evidence base on the care of children and young people are often misrepresented and overstated, both in scientific publications and social debate.
The controversy surrounding the use of medical treatments has taken focus away from what the individualised care and treatment is intended to achieve for individuals seeking support from NHS gender services.
The rationale for early puberty suppression remains unclear, with weak evidence regarding the impact on gender dysphoria, mental or psychosocial health. The effect on cognitive and psychosexual development remains unknown.
The use of masculinising / feminising hormones in those under the age of 18 also presents many unknowns, despite their longstanding use in the adult transgender population. The lack of long-term follow-up data on those commencing treatment at an earlier age means we have inadequate information about the range of outcomes for this group.
Also, it's taking a particular position to characterise gender dysphoria as merely a subjective feeling of unhappiness. I do not have any fixed position on what exactly gender dysphoria is, but I believe many trans people see it as far more than just that.
And that criticism has come from medical boards in the UK and globally, I believe?
Anyway, that's also only for children, which feels politically like a wedge issue. The NHS is very slow at providing HRT and I rather doubt they're treating more than a hundred children for gender dysphoria in any way rn.
Sorry but you're repeating disinformation that has already been refuted by the lead author, and is obviously incorrect if you read the Review itself.
http://archive.today/ea0Vi
> Dr Hilary Cass, 66, told The Times last week that one activist had begun posting falsehoods about her landmark review of the treatment of trans children before it was even published.
> She was referring to Alejandra Caraballo, an American attorney, transgender woman and instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic.
> On April 9 — the day before the Cass review was published — Caraballo claimed it had “disregarded nearly all studies” because they were not double-blind controlled ones.
> Double-blind studies see patients randomly given either medicine or a placebo, with neither the patient or doctor knowing which.
> In a post on Twitter/X, Caraballo accused Cass and the review team of holding trans healthcare to an “impossible standard”. This was because, she said, transgender patients could not take hormones “blind”, as the effects of any hormones would fairly quickly become obvious.
> Her tweets were contradicted by the publication of the Cass review hours later.
> During a systematic review, researchers looking at studies on transgender healthcare found no blind control ones — so used another system altogether to determine study quality. Cass told The Times last week how difficult it would be to use blind control studies in relation to trans patients, for the same reasons identified by Caraballo.
> As for Caraballo’s claim that the review team “disregarded nearly all studies”, Cass pointed out that 60 out of 103 studies reviewed were used for the conclusions. They were studies deemed to be of moderate and high quality on the effects of puberty blockers and hormone treatment.
> Despite this, Caraballo’s post has been viewed 871,000 times and has not been deleted.
This is unfortunately quite a typical tactic of activists like Caraballo. They will deliberately lie to further their aims, relying on people who are unaware that their lies are lies to spread this disinformation.
https://thekitetrust.org.uk/our-statement-in-response-to-the...
The amount of myths circulating about the review prompted the publishing of an FAQ page which deals with some of the more egregious examples (e.g. the claim that 98% of studies were rejected).
https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-r...
There was a (successful) effort to push misinformation regarding the report.
Most of the criticism of the Cass Review comes from the US. Most of Europe has either stopped prescribing puberty blockers and cross sex hormones for minors or never did in the first place. The UK is joining the consensus among the majority of developed countries regarding treatment of gender dysphoric youth, now the US and Canada stand as the sole outliers.
Cass meeting with DeSantis staffers [1], for one
[1] https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/cass-met-with-desantis-pi...
> Notably, Hilary Cass met with Patrick Hunter, a member of the anti-trans Catholic Medical Association who played a significant role in the development of the Florida Review and Standards of Care under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis.
> A followup email from Hunter indicates that he met with Cass on September 22, 2022 (ECF 184-1). Even as Paul Vazquez wanted to invite Cass to the Board of Medicine hearing as a subject matter expert, Hunter felt that would put her “in a difficult position”:
Why downplay this link in a discussion about the politicization of science?
Also, that quote is not appearing anywhere in the linked article. Did you post the wrong link?
Again, is the mere fact that Cass - whose job is to advise governments on healthcare - met with someone in government supposed to disqualify the review as politically motivated? What, specifically, did this DeSantis staffer change in the Cass Review?
This is just straightforward attempts at guilt by association. Given that Cass' job is to advise government on healthcare, meeting with government staffers is hardly surprising.
Linked in the article, about her meeting with Hunter
https://genderanalysis.net/2023/11/new-trial-exhibits-in-doe...
> This is just straightforward attempts at guilt by association.
Call him a "government staffer" all you like, let's call it what it is: her meeting with an explicitly religious interest group
However, I'm not sure that encouraging young people to make one-way decisions (or decisions where we are not yet sure whether they are one way or not) is the correct approach.
I think people on the right (outright bigots excepted) would say they do have sympathy, and it's for kids who have been influenced by the media or whatever to think that they are the opposite gender.
> However, I'm not sure that encouraging young people to make one-way decisions (or decisions where we are not yet sure whether they are one way or not) is the correct approach.
And I think the response here is that not taking action is also one-way, causing irreversible changes, like to the bone structure.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29990427
The reason it's not surreal is because it's so banal.
Wilson viewed Rushton as a case of scientific freedom. I.e. research shouldn't be suppressed for socio-political reasons.
You're allowed to disagree with that. But you should understand that the scientifc freedom side isn't racist, even if ends up on the same side as racists.
I don't know what to make of you accusing Singal of "dipping his toes into HBD-ism". Maybe you just phrased that wrong. But it sounds like you're saying "Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he's a racist, Singal defended Wilson so he's a racist". Is that how racism works?
It's one thing to say: "In my view, EO Wilson's association with Rushton is defensible and should not be considered a stain on his career".
It's quite another to say: "That, and I believe it so much that I cannot take seriously anybody who disagrees with me on this, I shall call them and their viewpoints names such as 'surreal' and make grandiose claims that their opinion is so ridiculous, it requires a cultural change at this magazine".
The latter is what was said.
I see no conflict between holding both of these ideas:
* EO Wilson's association with Rushton isn't a problem, and it wasn't about him supporting those ideas themselves, it was about supporting the idea of 'let ideas be, do not censor them'.
* Singal is wildly inappropriate with this, and the plan as stated is cancel culture/crazy politication of a magazine.
In:
> "Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he's a racist, Singal defended Wilson so he's a racist"
You've made an evident mistake. It's instead:
> Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he might also be and we should look into that, Singal called that very thought of questioning Wilson's association with Rushton as ridiculous - and THAT means he's a racist'.
Maybe still wrong but not nearly as crazy as you seem to think it is.
I responded to this because I read a biography of EO Wilson recently. It's strange to say his association with Rushton was a stain on his career because his career was massive. He published an absurd number of papers, did lots of field work, discovered many new species, wrote many popular science books, and was influential as an early conservationist. He was, by all accounts, an incredibly kind person. His link to some racist is a footnote, not a stain.
It's worth asking why it's even coming up. Here are a few possible reasons:
1. A number of left-wingers attacked Wilson following Sociobiology and it's been open-season on him ever since
2. It's trendy to call famous white scientists racist
3. Highly accomplished people cause envy in others which leads to tendentious attacks
I do have a problem with him dipping his toes into defenses of scientific racism (which is what he's doing when he implicitly imputes wokeism to an editorial calling E.O. Wilson out for dabbling in scientific racism). This is a problem with the reflexive contrarian rationalist sphere Singal has allowed himself to be relegated to (listen to his podcast, it's even more obvious there).
A lot of stuff SciAm has written is real dumb and even destructive. But not everything that anti-woke people object to in SciAm is wrong; if you adopt that stance, you can launder all sorts of crazy things into the discourse. He did that here.
> First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.
That’s at best sloppily written, regardless of what one thinks about Wilson. The normal distribution is a mathematical tool; it doesn’t “assume” anything about some particular concrete topic like measuring humans.
Thr choice of using a normal distribution vs another mathematical distribution is not purely a mathematical device, the choice either reflects some assumptions (which one would quickly see if they're valid or not generally).
An interesting case in point for me is when a lot of mathematics assume bell curve distribution in stock market price distributions, like the black scholes option equation does, and it turns out to not really be the best fit. It sort off almost works, but systematically underprices extreme events.
This is what can happen when your assumed distribution turns out to be wrong.
So far though, I haven't heard of refutations that height or IQ (as measured on standardised tests and processed in prescribed ways) are indeed bell curve distributions.
Is that not a denunciation of the normal distribution?
Rather the article is critiquing the specific use of the normal distribution in assessing population and sub-population statistics. I do think that this critique is kind of nonsensical because the normal distribution assumes nothing of the kind -- a person who is of average height, a "default height" human, is a concept utterly distinct from the concept of a person who is of average weight, a "default weight" human.
This is not to say that I don't think there should be a rebuttal of any social sciencey claim, but that it should - and can - be done socratically.
it's like any topic you think is simple until you research even a bit of it and go 'oh'
I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act.
But, seeing as how administrations of various colours have differing approaches to funding science, its pretty hard for "science" to be a-political. Trump has expressed "policy" for completely removing NOAA, which provides massive datasets for wider research. His track record isn't great on funding wider science either. So its probably legitimate to lobby for more funding, no? (did the editor actually lobby effectively, is a different question)
Now, should the editor of SA also take on other causes, probably not. But "science" has been doing that for year (just look at psychology)
I think you'd need a bit more evidence for that being "political". A far more plausible reason for the removal is that Britain doesn't have bears to any degree (there have been isolated sightings but most think they've been extinct there for over 1000 years).
(Monty Python reference)
"this chapter has been removed as it describes experimentation on live bears."
it then goes on to apologise and has a lovely passive aggressive:
"we would hope that British readers would not like to carry out such experiments on live animals"
I think those two examples are already enough to show that science has been political for 400 years.
I think there have been more, and it plays a role, but I don't buy that you can just dismiss the criticism of political science with the claim that it always is.
There are matters of degrees, and it's almost universally acknowledged to be bad, because it usually means results and emphasis have been distorted because of the politics.
> There are matters of degrees, and it's almost universally acknowledged to be bad, because it usually means results and emphasis have been distorted because of the politics.
No, science is generally objective, but its results have political implications. To take the pandemic as an example. Virology and epidemiology came to a clear, objective, true conclusion: social distancing and vaccination would drastically reduce the death toll of the pandemic. However, because there are people who reject social distancing (e.g., people who run businesses) and vaccination (anti-vaxxers and opportunistic politicians who see that as an issue they can push), virology and epidemiology have become politically controversial. It's also politically convenient in the United States to distract from the government's own failure to effectively respond to the pandemic by pushing conspiracy theories about the virus coming from a lab in a scary foreign country (and if you don't accept that this is a conspiracy theory, I'm sorry, but you've fallen victim to the widespread propaganda on this issue in American media over the last few years, which is 100% at odds with the conclusions that the scientific community has reached). The problem isn't with virology or epidemiology themselves. The problem is with how the society and political system respond to science.
Maybe in culture it's ok to fight dirty and stretch some truths in order to force newer perspectives into the zeitgeist. Maybe it's even neccesary when the opposition is willing to lie outright, and loudly, as a first resort. But that doesn't work with science. Even if the motivations are pure, it's destined to backfire. It should backfire. Science itself is under assault and losing its ability to hold together some semblance of a shared reality. If people start to believe that science is just as corruptible as journalism because of shitty science journalists, we're fucked.
This view usually strikes me as hypocritical because it’s almost always paired with a paranoia of becoming a marginalized group and a belief that maintaining majority status for their group is “right” in some way.
It’s easy to quote Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”.
This wave of wealthy white people screaming "bigot" at other white people without health care hasn't raised the condition of the descendants of slaves at all. Instead it's been an expansion of welfare for well-off white women and affluent immigrants. Everybody has been oppressed like black people except for the descendants of slaves, and everybody has been stuck in a caste system except for Dalits.
"Marginalized" people want to be addressed as individual humans with material problems like other humans. Instead a bunch of people so wealthy and comfortable that they are almost completely detached from the material world and have never missed a meal treat everyone like symbols and try to read the world like literary critics.
> It’s easy to quote Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”.
Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to.
> Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to.
I don’t think it’s a wild presumption that most people in the few aren’t terribly excited about being asked to pay the cost for the many again. “Please lock us in another generation of poverty” is not a political slogan I hear very often. If that’s what you want to stand on, go ahead I suppose, it’s a free country.
Intersectionality was intended to add nuance to discussions of discrimination (e.g. a black woman's experience is not reduced to "sexism" plus "racism"), but it seems to have popularly had the opposite effect of reducing everybody to a demographic venn-diagram.
1: If you exclude "male" and "christian" from the criteria, you do end up with a majority. If you switch "christian" to "protestant" then you make the minority even more stark, but anti-Catholic sentiment among protestants has significantly declined over the past few decades, so I don't think that historical division of categories makes sense anymore.
The brewer, the baker and the candle stick maker need a new kidney, liver and heart. Thank you for volunteering to be killed so we can harvest your organs and keep the many alive.
Alternatively don't base your world view on a TV show from the 1960s.
It's not, like, "go shit on minorities if it makes the majority's utility-units increase".
Whenever someone could be saved by a transplant they would find possible donors and send them a notification that one of their organs could save someone. Usually after a few weeks the potential donor would get notification that the person who needed the organ has died. During the time between those two notifications the dying person was said to have dibs on the organ.
Occasionally someone would get a second notification about someone having dibs on another one of the organs while someone already had dibs on one of their organs. Again what usually is that those people would die soon and the person would go back to nobody having dibs on any of their organs.
Sometimes though a person with people having dibs on two of their organs would get notified that a third person now had dibs on one of their organs. That was enough that the needs of the many thing kicked in and they were required to give up those organs, which would usually be fatal.
The number of times one contradicts oneself in just a few words here, with such a lack of self-awareness, is amazing.
Watch the bonds between citizens and reality dissolve in real time.
I've never thought our generations would need to fight this war again... Big brain and opposable thumbs are overrated.
This article struck me sort of similarly. Reason is an outlet I have a certain amount of respect for in general, but this article came across to me as more politically over the top in a way that the outgoing EIC's writing ever did. They would have done more good by simply highlighting the actual state of medical gender intervention research and leaving at that (it sounds like they have done this in fact, but they would have been better off as such). Even then it's complicated — I have friends who work in the field, and when faced with things like the Cass report basically point out that evidence of intervention effect or absence of an effect isn't the same thing as what decision will reduce harm the most in individual cases, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what's actually involved in gender-focused interventions. What's lost in these discussions is that medical care is not the same as science per se, it's about optimizing utility functions or something for individuals.
At some level this sort of critique over the Scientific American editor covering political topics seems a little precious and disingenuous. As others have pointed out, science has and always will be political, whether people want to admit those leanings or not. Pretending that it's somehow "above" politics is disingenuous and narcissistic, and leads to exactly the sorts of problems the author claims to care about. These more political topics have also become mainstream in science in general, and it would be a bit weird for an EIC at someplace like Scientific American to just pretend the discussions aren't happening. Is she guilty of bad writing? Maybe, but it is meant to be a popular science publication, and rants like this hardly seem like an appropriate response to bad writing.
I think that some of the more devious politicians realized that a "partitioning" of beliefs creates populations of in-groups and out-groups which are then manipulated against each other. Many "basic" facts are getting challenged just to create the controversy. Controversy reinforces tribalism, which in turn makes people more controllable.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1gult0b...
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1gult0b...
Even though there are only two sex chromosomes, issues with them can cause people who are physically intersex.
Then there's all the complexity of the sense of self. Some people could feel they have the 'wrong' body and be fine with that. Some can't.
-Heterosexual male tired of oversimplifications
It is completely different if it is a physical disorder, but this is not the case in vast majority of cases.
Also: if a identity or an emotion is real to me, does it not become real through that act itself?
Sometimes this will be through believing he has a "female brain" in a male body. Or perhaps he might think he's "born in the wrong body". Or maybe he'll start to believe that being a woman or a man is based on some internal "gender identity" of which he has the female type. Sometimes this is given a spiritual aspect, like a female soul.
If he takes drugs to suppress testosterone and boost estrogen, he may start to believe that he is no longer of the male sex but is becoming female. Even more so if he elects to have surgery to remove his testicles and fashion his penis and scrotum into a non-functional cosmetic simulacrum of the female external sex organs. Some of these males even start to believe they're having a menstrual cycle, despite lacking any anatomy involved in this process.
However he reaches these conclusions about himself, every single one of these beliefs is false. These are delusions.
I see no proof of these assumptions. How humans see each other and themselves is not primarily chosen by their unchangeable (save medical interventions) organs but by how we are read by our peers. We are not talking about a purely biological problem, but a social one. Humanity has, for the longest time being, assigned fixed profiles to these readings, which luckily has started to break up in the last decades. Now of course each individual is free to base parts of their own identity on their unchangeable biological traits, and you also are free to do so, but that does no generalize to the whole population. Humans should be free to base their identity to their own liking.
This can lead to some cases which do not make sense like your "male menstrual cycle" example, granted. These anecdotes however as well do not generalize towards the initial claim of the other user and the first assumption.
As for the the bell curve, I'd encourage you to read her article first, befire forming an opinion from disingenuous caricature of what was said in it. She doesn't deny the usefulness of the concept, just points to some harmful and pseudoscientific ways it is/was used. Think phrenology for example.
Reason is a heavily biased right-wing website, as you can see on the articles on the front page. This doesn't necessarily invalidate everything coming from them, but take it with a grain of salt at least, and go form your own opinion based on her articles, instead of the mockery they wrote to make a point about "the woke political agenda controlling academia".
>But denial of evolution is linked to white supremacy. A rejection of the biological links between white people and colored people helps to justify discrimination based on skin color. And non-believers in evolution often share other backwards views.
How do you know this?
White supremacy, at least in the United States, finds many of its members (not all, of course) in evangelical circles.
Acceptance of evolution also leads to white supremacy. One only need to read what Victorian Eugenicists had to say about colored people.
So if both accepting and rejecting evolution are linked to white supremacy it stands to reason that neither is the causal factor.
Here is a big, international meta-analysis that finds a link between both views: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspi0000391
I feel like I'm wasting my time. What do you want to convince me of? That disbelief in evolution is not correlated to white supremacy? What a weird hill to die on. Minds infected with weird ideas tend to believe in multiple ones at the same time, it's not hard to accept.
Irony thy name is thrance.
You're insane, I gave you a giant study that proves my point, and you engage in baseless attack to refuse the outcome, are you a white supremacist?
I could also give you a meta-study that proves transition is the only real cure to gender dysphoria, but I'm afraid you're too far gone. Come back when you have decided to live in reality.
There is a point in which the relation is so far-fetched and non-causal that it doesn't make any sense to mention it, and the link between evolution denial and white supremacy absolutely crosses that line.
White supremacy is also linked to the sun rising up each morning, detergent and open borders. None of them relevant.
This is a large meta-study finding a link between white supremacy and disbelief in evolution.
The link isn't hard to see either, white supremacists are primarily found in qanon and other right wing conspiracy bubbles. They are more susceptible to believe in bullshit than tolerant people, like creationism.
Is not a surprise that stupid people is generally stupid in more than one field. Somebody believing white supremacy has a previous mental condition that makes him/her blind to obvious contradictions in that speech. Thus, will be probably less capable to grasp complex concepts like evolution (or will choose to ignore it by a different motivation, like greed).
https://www.audubon.org/news/the-fascinating-and-complicated...
> It's almost as if the White-throated Sparrow has four sexes.
Ok, whatever.
The actual sex chromosomes of the birds, and hence they're gametes, have significant differences between the two colours.
You can quibble over if this technically fits the current definition, but the original characterization is pretty far from "complete nonsense".
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...
This is an incorrect understanding of gametes and supergenes [0]. There are still only two gametes (only two sexes), but the two morphs (white and tan supergenes[0]) can only effectively reproduce with the same morph of the opposite sex (again, only two sexes, only two gametes between the four morphs). This means each morph only effectively breeds with 1/4 of the population, which gives the aberration of "four sexes", even though there is a small amount (around 1%) of cross-morph breeding.
The claim that this species truly has four sexes (four gametes) is unscientific nonsense.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergene
Only two sex chromosomes, and acts "as though" there are four sexes, which means there aren't four sexes.
The paper does not make the claim that there are four independent sexes. Helmuth incorrectly reported a claim that the paper does not make.
"Squirrels fly through the air as though they are birds" Squirrels are not birds and the previous statement does not support that claim.
An editor of a science magazine should be willing and open to discuss science with scientists. Particularly if they're trying to help correct a misconception.
If you're only complaining now, it's just because you don't like the culture SA is promulgating today.
I don't disagree that SA has a lot of nonsense in it, but that's a long trailing symptom. We've been in a time for a while now where easily observable facts are untrue and manufactured fictions are true, as long as it follows a self-serving narrative.
Helmuth became editor in chief of SA in 2020 -- well after reality stopped mattering pretty much anywhere.
No doubt a publisher trying to keep a traditional publication afloat in the internet age noticed. (And no doubt the publisher has noticed it's now time to flip the politics the other way, hence Helmuth is out.)