I Met Paul Graham Once

This doesn't really work because social networks are designed to amplify the most "engaging" things, which often means "controversial". Reasoned debate is often drowned out - this happens even here on HN for particularly controversial topics.

If social media was just people following their friends and interacting with them (I remember when FB was basically like that), we maybe wouldn't be in this horrible polarised mess.

So we have you on record saying that traditional Native American societies like the Zuni were "in their late stages of decadence and decline"?

You say:

> we as a community don't support, encourage, or permit people to throw slurs

then you say:

>We don't, though. We have moderators (hi dang) who get rid of those people.

In the first you consider moderators as part of the community. In the second you don't it seems. And the people who can downvote I think are probably so high enough in number as to be seen as normal users and not moderators.

The perception of the moderation in larger communities is that it is way more heavy handed and less accountable than the moderation that dang does. For example, in HN, I can see messages from dang warning a user they are repeating offences they have committed and I can easily see their past posts to verify whether that's true or not. And dang at least gives more than one-worded defenses or explanations about certain cases of moderation in the public forum itself and not restricted to private messages. HN even says you can email them regarding certain cases you feel strongly about. With Twitter, when an account is suspended you can't see the paper trail between the moderators and the user, or the past posts. And you need to get a hold of some hotshot acquaintence with a decent amount of followers to publically make your case to get the company big-wigs to notice.

In HN, even in cases of shadow-banning, though newbies might not be aware, you can even toggle the shadow-banning off and see all the posts unfiltered. In Twitter, that option does not exist I think.

It doesn't scale people say? Well, no one said it's easy...

It's not just me who is conflating them, the official medical establishment doesn't treat children much differently these days. Zucker was canceled, "watchful waiting" or "reparative therapy" is officially condemned by the APA. "Intractable gender dysphoria" is not something that can be reliably or objectively diagnosed a priori. A relative of mine who has transitioned their son, partly based on medical advice, partly on the advice of adult trans friends, seems to repeating arguments about it being a fixed property and affirmative care being the only approach. Now, I personally do not think this boy has dysphoria at all, he sees a perfectly normal boy to me, he just liked Elsa and princess dresses as a kid because Elsa is a super-stimuli character. But that's not what the medical people say.

You can't separate the kids and adults issue because the most powerful activists who are making policy and getting people canceled are not making a proper distinction themselves.

You can't separate the kids and adults issue because there was a direct road from redefining the words "man" and "woman" to the medical "experts" like Diane Ehrensaft, cited by NPR and NY Times telling parents to not tell their four-year-old things like: "you have a penis, you can never grow up to be a woman or get pregnant, you will grow up to be a man, you are a boy."

It's not the sensationalist headlines that is making me freak about this, it's seeing my own relatives sending a little boy down the path where "continuity of care" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0V0PXrezHM ) will lead to having his penis cut off like Jazz Jennings -- https://malcolmrichardclark.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-j... https://x.com/SJWilliams123/status/1654534161015635973

I don't know the best way to accomplish that - maybe do some research and read some stories of transgender people published prior to 2015 before it became the political fight du jour.

I have, but you need to re-calibrate your understand for the recent situation. The people who transitioning now are not exhibiting the same types of life stories as those who did thirty years ago. It seems like a different phenomena, and I am much more concerned with the phenomena now, when if afflicts so many people, including parents I know who are transitioning their kids, than I am about the phenomena 30 years ago.

You've gone from demanding randomized controlled trials to referring to random comments from anonymous users on Reddit about how lifting weights cures gender dysphoria?

Yes, once you have anecdotal evidence of something working on a n=1 approach, the thing to do is expand it to an n=many RCT. That hasn't been done. It should have been done. Also, comments on niche subreddits inhabited by relatively normal people are some of the best anecdotal evidence you can find. Anecdotes from friend groups are limited in their own way. Popular memoirs and newspaper stories are both highly selected and filtered by publishers for preferred narratives, and the person writing them understands that a lot is at stake and they have to be careful about how they narrate their story. Random commenters on niche forums have much less incentive to lie (this doesn't apply to big forums where people will lie to get rise out of people, and the comments that reach visibility are selected).

But this isn't about a work environment. There are many issues where LGBTQ identities and desires overlap with concerns society has about them. Religion is the same way. American society has chosen to give religions more leeway than most societies do. We are currently choosing that for LGBTQ rights, but it's often predicated on the idea that sexuality and gender identity are innate and immutable. Science doesn't actually back this up, and so the pendulum for us as a society to decide where the boundary between personal rights and societal wants / needs lie is up for debate, except we tend to avoid the topic. That's what I meant.