curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
23d ago
Despite thinking transitioning is in general bad no matter if you're TruTrans or not, this is a silly line of argument. If a treatment is genuinely good for a small minority of people, and bad for a larger number of copycats, just ... figure out a test that differentiates the two and only give it to the first group. One can do that. It's absurd to say "no" early to people who'd really benefit.
curious_straight_ca
23d ago
In this specific case I really doubt it's a fetish based on the description
“He hides his fingers, keeps them flexed, leading to impaired dexterity, localized pain, irritability and anger,” Dr. Nadia Nadeau, of the department of psychiatry at Université Laval wrote in the journal Clinical Case Reports. He grew more determined to find a way to get rid of fingers he considered “intrusive, foreign, unwanted.”
curious_straight_ca
23d ago
There's plenty of interest in and research being done into the causes of depression, from very many angles, both biological and psychological. I don't think any of it's been productive, but that's a separate issue.
curious_straight_ca
23d ago
Eh, I take the same argument I do for pharmaceuticals - most people are really stupid, even extremely intelligent people are often really stupid outside their areas of competence, and medicine is just really hard, and if medical treatment wasn't gated by experts and guidelines there'd be a ton of unnecessary and counterproductive treatment.
From the article UnHerd cites:
“He hides his fingers, keeps them flexed, leading to impaired dexterity, localized pain, irritability and anger,” Dr. Nadia Nadeau, of the department of psychiatry at Université Laval wrote in the journal Clinical Case Reports. He grew more determined to find a way to get rid of fingers he considered “intrusive, foreign, unwanted.”
“He had contemplated asking a friend to watch over him and be prepared to call emergency services in case his attempt led to a need for resuscitation,” Nadeau wrote.
After undergoing elective amputation, the nightmares and emotional distress immediately stopped, Nadeau said. The post-op pain resolved within a week, there was no “phantom pain” at one month follow-up and, without the two missing fingers, “he was able to pursue the life he envisioned as a complete human being without those two fingers bothering him.”
It’s not the first time amputation has been used as a treatment for BID. In the late 1990s, a surgeon in Scotland amputated one leg above the knee each in two men who’d felt a “desperate” need to be amputees, and who had been turned away by other doctors.
Despite the scandal that erupted, “At the end of the day I have no doubt that what I was doing was the correct thing for those patients,” the surgeon, Dr. Robert Smith, told a press conference.
The fact that there were only two fingers involved in the Quebec case, as opposed to a complete limb, made the decision to proceed easier for the medical team, Nadeau said.
If this now-amputee were me, I'd try to just get over it. Stop taking any action to either sate or resist the discomfort, meditate real hard, just feel it and let it burn out. I think it'd work for me.
But it's a mistake to not understand the other side's perspective. You have a guy who's constantly distressed, whose daily life is significantly impaired, who's begging for help, where many pharmaceutical and therapeutic interventions have failed, and a simple operation will fix his problem permanently. It makes a certain amount of sense, right? This guy's had this problem since he was a child, and it is a doctors' job to fix it, and nothing else is working.
It reminds me of
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work. Most of the time all the psychiatrists get along and have pretty much the same opinion about important things, but people were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.
Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.
It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.
So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”
And it worked.
She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.
And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?
But I think the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back. If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo, just to let everyone know where I stand on this issue.
Amputating a few fingers is somewhat more invasive than putting a hairdryer in your car. But it's the same principle, right?
That's from the categories are made for man, which Zack's spent a lot of time disagreeing with because, yes, it was about trans people and how to treat them. I didn't even remember that was why Scott told that story until I looked it up again today.
And, it's a good analogy, because this is what it feels like for a medical professional dealing with trans patients. You have adults who beg for hormone treatments, claim to be and appear to be in severe distress due to lacking them, and do indeed appear to improve after taking them. This is what it should look like! There are issues with kids, issues with surgery, but none of those undermine the obvious case for accepting trans people and treating them with hormones - it seems to make them happier and better. Again, yeah, edge cases, but the trans people I know are not perpetually depressed psychological wrecks like you'd expect from rw twitter memes, they're generally normal and happy.
Claiming otherwise requires some sophisticated reasoning, like one that claims happiness or sexual satisfaction are of little value themselves, and only matter when done for in line with a greater purpose - in this case, marriage and having children. And since trans individuals imitate the appearance of sexuality without the fertility backing it, it's bad. I agree with something like that.
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured
If A is evidence for B, B should be evidence for A, yes? "One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens?" If we took this case being a novel case of unnecessary amputation as evidence that trans ideology has thoroughly captured the medical system, or something like that, and then we observe that this isn't novel - I think we should doubt the reasoning that led to the claim of ideological capture.
edit: here is the paper about the case.
curious_straight_ca
24d ago
I agree that the ideology was bankrupt, but the fact remains that it was a rival superpower and did last quite a while. It could've collapsed within three years, and it didn't!
The USSR was flawed enough that after enough generational turnover for the revolutionary passion to wear off, the elites decided capitalism was better. I do think people overstate the extent to which communism doesn't work, that the arguments made about how bad communism and central planning and authoritarianism are prove way too much. But it's nice to have a wide variety of consumer goods, decentralized technology development, little state-backed political repression, few shortages, and for it to be very hard to expropriate a significant portion of the population or to cause a famine negligently or not. Cultural capital didn't produce the Randalls grocery store Yeltsin visited, it didn't produce America's global lead in technology, etc. "Communism doesn't work" is a reasonable way to say that.
curious_straight_ca
24d ago
Do you mean a technical clusterfuck or other kind of clusterfuck? If the former, you'd want to check that everything still worked first, but it'd probably be fine and if not fixing it is easy. If the latter ... how? That we have weekly threads at all instead of just toplevel posts is mostly a historical accident, and then i guess trying adapt to reddit's weaknesses.
curious_straight_ca
24d ago
I suggested that there were people (besides professional artists themselves) who cared about whether art was AI-generated or not
I think this is more of an oversocialized, cancel-culture-inflected anger at AI art for taking jobs away from (furry, in this case) artists and writers, and less a genuine aesthetic preference against AI art.
Uh, you might have been able to generate more discussion by waiting ~12 hours and posting this in the new week's thread?
We should just display the last thread's comments in the new thread, that should just be a bit of code I think.
curious_straight_ca
25d ago
I don't have much to add, other than some fun excerpts from the first article for those who won't read the whole thing
Three years later, a British former undercover cop, who now works as a private investigator and goes by Jon, was hired to work for a client who had set up temporary residency at the Dorchester hotel, in London. The client was well built, with close-cropped hair and an even stubble. He was of Libyan background, but had grown up in France, spoke flawless English, and tipped the hotel staff with high-denomination notes. “He wanted countersurveillance on himself when he was in the U.K., to make sure that no one was following him,” Jon told me.
Jon doesn’t like the term “private investigator,” because he thinks it diminishes the scope of what he does. On an average day, he collects the travel histories and police files of five to ten targets, through contacts in the public sector. They don’t know his full name—they just know not to ask questions, and that they will be paid in cash. His clients include businesses, government agencies, and billionaires, and his duties range from spying on philandering spouses to helping international criminal gangs insure that a stolen passport can be used to get a murderer across a border. “There’s a lot that is very questionable that I can do, that I have done,” he said. “In the police, you have to have morals—or you’re meant to. That’s the whole point of being a police officer. And then you come out into the private sector and—let’s be honest—it really doesn’t matter.” For almost four hours, he spoke candidly, on the condition that I neither publish his full name nor describe him physically.
...
In the following months, the attacks on short sellers grew increasingly personal, and even violent. Fahmi Quadir was punched in the head by a masked man with brass knuckles while walking her poodle on the Upper West Side; she was knocked unconscious, and the assailant, who stole nothing, was never found.
It also appeared as if operatives were collecting detailed information on Nick Gold’s trades; in the next few months, all his leveraged bets were liquidated, with losses into the tens of millions of pounds. “My name was tarnished. Banks were now shutting me off, overnight,” Gold recalled. “My wife left me.”
If I read all that on some random substack, I wouldn't think twice about disbelieving and ignoring it.
Speaking of disbelieving, the authors of the second article are the same as the authors of the havana syndrome piece from last week, one I was as skeptical of as some others here. I'm genuinely not sure if / how much I should discount the content of the second article as a result - the Havana article does lay out its evidence in a way that makes the faulty inferences clear, while this new article directly states the main points, idk.
curious_straight_ca
26d ago
I am confident in the core claim that there is a >=50% genetic component to general competence, or a 'general factor' of intelligence, ie IQ, and that potential caveats (gene environment interactions etc) are unimportant. That's also supported by mainstream science. The only remaining core claim is that various races have, on average, significantly different amounts of that. The science there is less strong, primarily I think because researching that topic head on with the millions of individual datapoints you need is something a big biobank might not want to happen. But nevertheless there is some science there, if you take polygenic scores for individual IQ and compare black and white individuals, the average black score is lower, and ... I struggle to think of alternative explanations for the patterns of racial differences in achievement across the world. Say the black/white gap is systemic racism, there remain many large, persistent, and universal-across-subject gaps with no clear environmental explanation.
curious_straight_ca
26d ago
That would be counterproductive
curious_straight_ca
26d ago
I am making an explicit and factual claim that the field of biology has established a very large number of undeniably true and useful complex claims. I'm also claiming that the scientific consensus on the heritability of IQ and other traits is strong enough that it's clearly true. Also that, while the scientific consensus isn't there on racial differences in the heritable parts of IQ, the evidence is strong enough that one should believe it. I think that most of the "HBD Cinematic Universe" as in the things people believe on twitter is shoddy and false, but the core results are independent from that!
curious_straight_ca
27d ago
Very strongly disagree here. IQ is correlated with performance in all complex intellectual tasks. If you dropped everyone into an every-monkey-for-himself anarchic pre-industrial hellscape, the warlord of the gang that eventually won would be high IQ. The best traders in financial markets are high IQ. People who win in politics are high IQ, whether that's democratic politics or authoritarian elite politics.
curious_straight_ca
27d ago
This kind of stuff is why, despite being too dumb and lazy (for genetic reasons, surely) to understand the dense statistics that underpin much of the HBD cinematic universe*, I'm pretty skeptical of the whole thing.
This is (a bit) like being skeptical of biology because you read one of the thousand papers about how cinnamon cures cancer or something. Every field had bad papers, and every field has cranks on social media that believe the bad papers, even if the ratio is more like psychology than physics for HBD. If you focus on the good arguments, I don't think this is an issue.
curious_straight_ca
27d ago
"Someone died of cholera" is very different from "my tribe is, essentially, fucked for the foreseeable future" and this difference matters
Most black people in america live perfectly fine lives by any standard, and would continue to do so under the policies suggested below because they're neither career criminals nor people who benefit from upper-class affirmative action. Nobody's "fucked".
There's a legitimate argument against the immigration that changed my life measurably based on HBD grounds
I think it's very likely you'd pass the IQ test / be able to buy your way in under a better immigration system. Also, if you're a strong HBD believer, remember to apply the policy uniformly - without such selection it's luck that you got to immigrate and your countrymen didn't, and would you want to live in America with another 400M Africans?
curious_straight_ca
27d ago
it does not present a clear course of action
-
cease race-based affirmative action (and affirmative action more generally)
-
smart people should have more kids
-
embryo selection (possible today), more direct genetic engineering (possible within a few decades)
curious_straight_ca
27d ago
Sperm is almost infinitely scalable, just use Clarence and a hundred other high-iq black people.
It's much harder to deny that individual genetic differences in IQ exist than that group differences exist - the science on the former is, in fact, settled. And if one views race as little more than different distributions of genes caused by ancestry, what's truly different about being low IQ because your two parents were vs being low IQ because you're of a certain race? In either case, an identifiable group of people is noticeably dumber. So, race HBD or not, the moral problem persists anyway, replace "race" with "class" in your post and little changes.
And "fruitless all along" - not at all, few hereditarians claim blacks didn't benefit significantly from desegregation and civil rights, few claim the IQ gap didn't close at all. And genetic enhancement is coming!
Also, just a guess, decent chance OP is a troll.
This person was not attempting to become weaker to gain status. They just have a rare psychological disorder, it's way more like someone with severe OCD than it is a transtrender. Read the article
It's still important to get the details right even if you're correctly diagnosing a broader trend.
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