faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
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User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11d ago
... and that's bad, right? You see how the "think of the children" argument shut down critical thinking in this case?
The happens every time. Saying "think of the children" to mandate certain medical treatments does not go well. Saying "think of the children" to ban those same medical treatments will also probably not go well. Most puberty blockers don't go to trans kids, and most trans kids don't use puberty blockers, so the second-order harms of a bad policy here are likely to be larger than the primary benefits.
That leaves the door open for a good policy of course. Ha ha ha.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
15d ago
Sorry, I might be missing something, but I honestly cannot grasp how I should shrug at the extremely poor quality of evidence for prescribing puberty blockers, because it hasn't been prescribed to that many kids, but shriek in horror at the suggestion of banning them, because the number is growing
It has not been prescribed to that many kids for purposes other than delaying extremely precocious puberty. Puberty blockers are in fact useful at blocking precocious puberty, which most people agree should be blocked, and that is the primary thing they're used for. The rate of precocious puberty happening is growing rapidly, and so banning the only effective means of mitigating the problem we have would be a moderately large problem today and a much larger problem in the future.
What is incoherent about [the social contagion hypothesis]? We do have other references for phenomena that are social contagion for sure, because no one has been abducted by aliens. Are these hypotheses incoherent too?
What observations does the social contagion hypothesis exclude? If there is some evidence that would lead you to think that "social contagion" is more likely to be the correct explanation, there must be some other evidence which would lead you to decrease your credence in that hypothesis. What specific evidence would that be, in your case?
The internet is a thing these days. People can read, watch Netflix shows with capital "D" diversity up the wazoo, etc. There's parasocial effects stemming from following influencers. Subreddits, Discords. Sorry, but this is pure cope.
The specific observations I make here about MTF people (I have many more MTF than FTM in my social circle, can't speak to FTM)
- Are interested in functional programming and also Rust
- Watch particular types of anime
- Are interested in mathematics, particularly category theory
- Listen to very particular obnoxious anime music (sped up electronic remixes with high pitched voices)
- Play the game touhou (specifically)
I suspect you can make a quite accurate FTM risk score with a linear score over how many of these descriptions apply to a particular person. Now it is possible that this just indicates social spread through this particular demographic, but it very much feels like there's a "type of person" who is into all of these things. Specifically, it feels like the type of person who was at risk of being a furry in the early 2000s or a ham radio operator in the 1980s.
If mere exposure to trans was the primary explanation, I would expect the normal FTM demographic to instead look like normies who happen to like stuff which portrays a lot of trans people, e.g. I'd expect them to
- Listen to lots of Kim Petras
- Watch Orange is the New Black and Euphoria
- Attend drag shows and musical theater
- etc
As such I don't think "this is a purely social phenomenon, and it is only by chance that it spread through this particular group of people" is a parsimonious hypothesis, at least for the MTF demographic (again, I don't really know much about the FTM demographic, maybe they do look like normies who were convinced to become trans by positive portrayals in mass media. I doubt it, but that doubt isn't really informed by anything).
I resent overriding my instincts for a lie, which is why I'm so invested in pointing out that the liars have, in fact, been lying.
That is fair and valid and also not a very good basis for making policy about what medical treatments should be forbidden. It is a good basis for deciding who to listen to in the future for general policy stuff - my objection is narrowly scoped to having policy people make uninformed broad sweeping decisions about medical treatment, because that does not have a history of going great.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
15d ago
Also, if blockers aren't such a big deal, then let's just ban them. After all very few people would be affected by the ban.
Argh no this is exactly the reaction I am worried about from the people who want to ban puberty blockers because trans. About 20k kids a year enter puberty extremely early (before 8 for girls, before 9 for boys, sometimes much before). This number is going up extremely rapidly over time. You could perhaps ban puberty blockers for kids over a certain age but I am not confident there wouldn't be substantial negative effects from that, and I bet you aren't either, because this is not our field of expertise. If I expected that, conditional on legislation existing here, the legislators would consult with pediatricians and write the legislation to actually be sane and minimally scoped, I wouldn't raise this objection, but I don't expect that legislation in this area (or any area really) would be sane and minimally scoped.
Just look at some of the other contagions - the Satanic Panic, alien abductions, recovered memories, anorexia - the incidence of these, and many other things, increase with coverage from the media, and there's no evidence they increase with the actual phenomenon increasing in frequency, or at least I'm yet to see evidence of an actual alien abduction. So I see no reason to assume that gender dysphoria is any different.
Calling both alien abductions and recovered memories "social contagion" is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say that "social contagion" is a non-explanation. Those had very different causes from each other. Effective interventions aimed at reducing the incidence of false recovered memories (e.g. "the APA stops endorsing dream interpretation therapy") would probably not help very much for the alien abduction craze.
With gender dysphoria we see that there is a particular personality (two personalities, actually: mtf and ftm seem like two pretty much non-overlapping personality groups) that is much, much more prone to it than others. My understanding is that, to the extent that "social contagion" is a coherent hypothesis at all, it predicts that trans hit these groups hardest just because it reached those social groups first and then spread within them, and if it had started in a different social group we would see a different distribution over trans frequencies by personality type. This strikes me as unlikely, especially since "antisocial and lonely" is a risk factor for the mtf group.
Social contagion is exactly one of the explanations offered for this. It says that what leads to discomfort with being embodied is talking about discomfort with being embodied, especially when you glamorize it during the conversation.
I agree it's not related to any discussion on gender affirming care. I'm quite puzzled why you'd think otherwise, actually.
Base rate. Lots of people care start caring about things when they become personally affected by them, and orders of magnitudes more people were personally affected by the pronoun craze and the corresponding threats to livelihood and job security than even know someone personally affected by puberty blockers.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
15d ago
Most of the 1.5 million trans people in the US are not minors, and the fraction of the trans minors who go on puberty blockers is about 3%, not "only 10%". Unless you're talking about what they do once they reach adulthood, but if you want to forbid adults from doing things they want to do with their bodies, trying to add regulations around what kids can do probably won't help.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
15d ago
I would say "more attention than puberty blockers", because the number of affected kids is much higher. Something caused a massive uptick in either the experience of dysphoria, the reaction to dysphoria, or some combination thereof. I think "social contagion" is a thought-terminating non-explanation here. To reduce the rate of trans identification, I think it would be worth looking into what generally leads to discomfort with being embodied (as that seems to correlate extremely strongly, and also seems to be much more common than it used to be).
Of course, if you don't actually care about that and your main objection is to "point deer say horse", that is perfectly valid. But in that event I also don't take statements of concern about puberty blockers at face value, and will discount your policy suggestions in that area accordingly.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
15d ago
... I don't think puberty blockers are as damaging as lobotomies, and also puberty blockers in the context of gender affirming care are like 10x less frequent than lobotomies were at the peak of that craze. I think people 50 years from now (assuming the world of 50 years from now substantially resembles the world of today) will probably think of it similar to how we think about high schoolers smoking or using tanning beds (i.e "basically not at all").
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
15d ago
Or loses a malpractice suit when they do malpractice, yeah. Again, 40k kids a year start "gender affirming care", only 1k of those 40k start puberty blockers. I really don't think puberty blockers warrant special attention here.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
16d ago
I don't think the once-ascendant ideology is particularly entrenched anymore. The anti-woke/anti-trans movement at this point feels very similar to the way the atheism community felt in the 2012 era, as they ran out of defensible causes and started to turn to indefensible causes and on each other. Had they packed up and gone home once their original goals were met (e.g. no prayer in schools) I think the world would be a happier place.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
16d ago
Lots of societies have had to deal with some folly of youth causing some number of kids to ruin their lives in one way or another in their quest for status and acceptance. In ancient Rome, kids seeking social status joined gladiatorial schools, and many of those kids ended up crippled or dying. In Victorian England, girls wore incredibly tight corsets which caused reduced lung capacity, skeletal deformations, and abdominal muscle weakness, which led to lots of health problems (including much higher chances of miscarriage or death in childbirth).
Just because something is a problem doesn't mean a political solution exists. The politician's fallacy ("We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this") is frequently cited as a fallacy due to the third line, but the first line is often also wrong - we don't actually have to try to solve every problem.
I think the use of puberty blockers is a problem of small enough scale and low enough severity that it's probably better to just let it ride.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
16d ago
Me personally? No. If the US government had given a single known sociopath a license to kill 5 people, though, trying to get them to change that decision would not be a very high priority for me.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
16d ago
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
16d ago
Rephrasing - is it a big enough problem that the disease of having ~1k kids/year go on puberty blockers is worse than the "cure" that would be implemented by the political apparatus would be? Being realistic about what historical political "solutions" have looked like.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
16d ago
I do see the difference, but moral panics over "think of the children" have a history of having the reactions be cures that are worse than the disease, and I see no particular reason to think that this time is different. Do you have a reason to think that this time is different?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
16d ago
Look like puberty blockers were prescribed for trans reasons to about 1400 kids in 2021, with that number increasing by about 200 kids / year. Puberty blockers were additionally prescribed to about 20,000 kids in 2021 for central precocious puberty (puberty starting before age 8 for girls or age 9 for boys).
As a point of comparison, about 3100 teens between the ages of 12 and 19 died in car crashes in 2021.
Is there a reason you think that puberty blockers, specifically, are a big problem?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
18d ago
At all. If you cared about corruption by anyone as much as you claim, you should already have investigated the claims against the previous administration, and you would have had no choice but to conclude that it at least looks fishy, and therefore you would have investigated it and you would now have bulletproof arguments that it wasn't corruption
Which specific claims are you talking about here? Hunter Biden? Stolen election? Biden's "fuck all y'all I'm pardoning everyone" end-of-term pardons? The congressional insider trading thing? Or is there some other specific, credible, and concrete accusation of corruption that you are referring to?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
21d ago
I'd say not as good as 2014 era commentariat but better than 2019 era commentariat.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
21d ago
To be "hundreds" there would have to be at least ~25 writers you like as much as Taibbi. Which is definitely plausible, especially if they're less prolific, but I bet that means you have good recommendations. Would you be up for sharing a list of 10 or so writers you like as much as Taibbi, with like a sentence about why you like them?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
22d ago
This year, get your parents the gift of Linux. Conventional wisdom says that for happiness, experiences are better than possessions. I hear Gentoo is an experience.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
22d ago
Ah, I missed the bit where the goal of this wasn't to wipe out the entire biosphere. In that case though, I don't particularly see how this is all that much scarier than vaccine resistant smallpox / airborne HIV / whatever your default human nightmare pathogen is (except if you're not a human, if you're not a human this is indeed much worse).
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
22d ago
I agree that shutting GoF down would be good, and also that COVID was very far from the upper end of the badness scale.
But I have to be contrary here.
an incompatible-biochemistry alga with reduced need for phosphate and a better carbon-fixer than RuBisCO Release this, it blooms like crazy across the whole face of the ocean (not limited to upwelling zones; natural algae need the dissolved phosphate in those, but CHON can be gotten from water + air), zooplankton don't bloom to eat it because of incompatible biochemistry, CO2 levels drop to near-zero because of better carbon fixation, all open-air crops fail + Snowball Earth. Humanity would probably survive for a bit, but >99% of humans die pretty quickly - and of course the AI that did it is possibly still out there, so focussing only on subsistence plausibly gets you knocked over by killer robots a few years later.
All of the algae in the world, combined, pull down a total of about 2e14 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. The atmosphere as a whole has 2e15 kg of CO2. All living things on Earth, combined, contain about 5e14 kg of carbon. So you're positing that there is a new species which rapidly becomes the largest source of biomass on Earth over the course of a decade or more (probably much more, carbon capture gets harder as co2 concentration decreases), and during that time, nothing natural or engineered figures out how to eat it.
I don't buy it. I think using a biological agent to permanently wipe out the biosphere is a much harder problem than either "kill all humans" or "wipe out the biosphere by any means possible, including but not limited to Very Large Rock Dropped From Very High Up™".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
24d ago
Talking about AI, especially with regards to capabilities advancement, feels kind of pointless right now because the battle lines have clearly been entrenched.
Unlike the other topics which usually come up in the CW thread :P
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
29d ago
Wait is Chili's not considered a full-service restaurant? Also that sounds about right for a Chili's (restaurant staff generally makes ~23-27/h here based on the help wanted signs I see in windows, probably on the upper end of that considering the selection effects, and $20pp sounds rightish for dinner out somewhere nonpretentious).
Don't container ships usually travel much, much faster than barges?
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