671–680 of 1001 posts
I usually think woke/antiwoke complaints go too far, but that was such a failure.
I feel like rational communication requires an overlap in perspective - not the same point of view, but some amount of overlap. Science relies on rational communication between people who disagree, because we can fool ourselves, and we can fool our in-group. The narrative fallacy doesn't just affect weak minds; by yourself, you won't outsmart your own filters. To learn about the world, you have to accept the world, a…
It is 100% virtue signaling because it is used as a means to feel and show moral superiority to others that do not hold those views or 'virtues'. It is also a loyalty and comfort signal, but as we saw with Helmuth's reaction - it is impossible that Gen X saw fault with Harris' policies. It is only that they are bigoted, narrow minded, fascist loving, misogynist. If a 'virtue' is questioned, you are excommunicated fro…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 th…
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.
Don't be mistaken, Science and politics are intertwined and have been for a long time. Talk to any lead scientist who has to secure funding for their project and they ll tell you how its all political. So I dont see a problem with science magazine editors taking a political stance. The Right tends to harp on this purist view from time to time while ignoring their own house of glass. For them, it's ok for for example,…
To the "everything is political" crowd: The complaint is not that SciAm writes about politics. It's that they write SCIENTIFIC NONSENSE when arguing for political causes. Exhibit A: "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."
If you read the whole paragraph, it's obvious what the writer intended to convey: that health research often assumes that there is one average, representative person, and everybody else is clustered around that person in a normal distribution. The author asserts that this is wrong, because people are dissimilar in more complex ways, and instead often fall into different clusters, rather than one bell curve. In my opi…
But complex clustering isn’t more or less true than the normal distribution in general, it just depends what you’re talking about.
That’s why railing against “the so-called normal distribution” comes across as inappropriate for a serious publication, it is suspiciously lacking nuance. Then one wonders how/why the nuance has gone missing. Politics masquerading as empiricism is an especially gross bait and switch.
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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.
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…
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.
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There are few slogans I hate more than "trust the science", primarily because it aligns scientific results with faith, which is exactly what science is not about. Science is fundamentally about skepticism , not trust. Now, obviously that skepticism can be misused by some rando with no qualifications or even time spent researching telling you to be "skeptical" of people who have spent decades trying to figure shit out…
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There are not "a few (orders of) magnitude" in probability between these hypotheses.
That would at least need to be 1% vs. 99% and that's being charitable.
What we need is an education system that teaches people to simultaneously entertain conflicting hypotheses and update the belief in them as information becomes available.
Your post is the perfect example of what that doesn't look like.
(Footnote: There are a number of examples in history for pathogens leaking from labs, and for zoonotic origins, so having such strongly biased priors under poor evidence in either direction really just shows that you want to believe something.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are few slogans I hate more than "trust the science", primarily because it aligns scientific results with faith, which is exactly what science is not about. Science is fundamentally about skepticism , not trust. Now, obviously that skepticism can be misused by some rando with no qualifications or even time spent researching telling you to be "skeptical" of people who have spent decades trying to figure shit out…
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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 proces…
To the "everything is political" crowd: The complaint is not that SciAm writes about politics. It's that they write SCIENTIFIC NONSENSE when arguing for political causes. Exhibit A: "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."
If you read the whole paragraph, it's obvious what the writer intended to convey: that health research often assumes that there is one average, representative person, and everybody else is clustered around that person in a normal distribution. The author asserts that this is wrong, because people are dissimilar in more complex ways, and instead often fall into different clusters, rather than one bell curve. In my opi…
Honestly, just to protect the author who clearly did not have the background to be expected to get that statement entirely correct, which is truly fine. But not fine for the publication.