A Navy Seal's Semester at Yale, at Age 52

Did you take the time to read any of the citations for this report, which, again, is supportive of puberty blockers and (strongly) supportive of early medical intervention for TGD patients? Or are you hanging your entire argument on "research on long-term risks is currently limited"? The report's citations are clearer, as are the other resources you'll find on puberty-blocking drugs. The medical research consensus appears to overwhelmingly support delayed puberty as a treatment strategy for TGD patients.

(The "irreversability" of effects from puberty blockers is itself contentious; TGD patients given puberty blockers apparently tend not to desist, and puberty delay is followed up with cross-sex hormone treatment that can theoretically reverse bone mineralization issues; the age at which the drugs are administered is also a major variable in these studies).

I've read something like 9-10 studies on this issue this afternoon and haven't found one that couldn't reasonably be described as "strong support" for GnRHa-type treatment. Can you find a credible study that isn't? All I found were things by people like Michael Laidlaw, a private practice doctor and tort expert witness who is cited more frequently in places like The Daily Wire and The Federalist than in medical journals. You can probably do better! And you need to do better than a single sentence from a long report that appears to straightforwardly and directly disagree with the thrust of your argument.

No, I'm not. I'm pointing out that science is evolving and contentious and that as convenient as it is for people to declare victory and claim that science has settled and, in turn, settled the arguments they've found themselves in, science tends not to make any such claims. If you think that's not the case, and that, for instance, science has conclusively shown something that TGD safe-space people don't want to hear, I think it's likely that it's you that misunderstands what science is and how it works, not me.

I did the Princeton version, and studied math before CS, but same idea. I spent the two years after graduation filling in gaps in my philosophy and history background. It provides a very useful intellectual framework insofar as it shows the history and interconnectedness of ideas from disparate cultures and time periods.

Tangentially related anecdote:

As an undergrad, I got to spend a semester in the ROTC capstone for second semester seniors called “Leadership and Ethics.” I remember walking in on my first day in cargo shorts and flip flops as the only civilian and non-senior student. Everyone else was in full uniform. The class was taught by a Marine Officer.

As a business student, I realized how similar the military and business can be. Most of the theory of leadership and management aims to address a fundamental goal: how do you get people to do something they may not necessarily want to do. Whether that’s making widgets or killing someone, the underlying theories are quite similar.

The main difference I noticed between the two fields was the military’s emphasis on trust. You were to respect a chain of command because you could trust your commanding officer. You were expected to perform your best because you could trust your teammates to do the same. The reason soldiers could rely on this trust was because their superiors had gone through the bullshit and could manage from a seat of positional and experiential authority.

In the business world, they taught management as if having positional authority would automatically create trust and inspire subordinates. MBA students graduate and come into supervisory roles without any prior experience in the underlying work and get mixed results. Part of me wonders whether this is due to ineptitude or simply inexperience.

I remember finishing that course and thinking I really should study engineering because I knew that wanted to play a role in managing and leading technical teams working on innovative problems.

Fast forward a few years and I left my role in public accounting to go into industry, but instead of going into finance or internal accounting I chose to learn development and spend a few years experiencing what it’s like to be a developer, so that one day when I’m managing a technical team I can actually know when they’re giving me a legitimate justification for something, and when they’re just bullshitting me.

Having been a developer for a couple years now, I don’t know how I could have managed a technical team without this experience. I think back to my “career plan” before I took that class and remember thinking that I’d not only be able to find a managerial position upon graduation, but that I’d be able to lead effectively as a 22 year old. What a foolish 20 year old I was!

Anyway, this is really just a roundabout way of saying I loved my class and have tremendous respect for military leadership. I would have loved to have more classes with officers and veterans, and hope my kids get that opportunity someday.

The degree to which they exist and successfully serve that function has been diminishing, at least in the United States, for decades.