recovering_rationaleist
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User ID: 1768
recovering_rationaleist
15d ago
Yup. Thank you.
recovering_rationaleist
15d ago
Thank you. Should be fixed, but might be paywalled. The title of the article is "If The New England Journal Of Medicine Doesn’t Correct This Error, You Cannot Trust Anything It Publishes", written on Mar 11, 2025.
recovering_rationaleist
16d ago
Ironically, reversibility was among the conditions that were being studied among the eight "transgender mouse" studies which the Trump administration cancelled funding for.
I certainly don't think that it's a given that they need puberty blockers.
The ultimate pro-puberty-blocker argument is that if treatment is not provided children will commit suicide. Last time I looked at this (mid-pandemic), there were no randomly controlled trials on suicide rates in trans children under different treatment regimens. If you looked at the effect sizes of the few existing small Scandinavian studies about the effectiveness of different transitioning methods on suicide rates, it looked like social transition had about the same effect size as medical transition.
I'm generally in favor of doing more RCTs on children whose parents consent (and on pregnant women). There are so many medical questions that we don't have answers to because medical ethics has raised the standards for informed consent higher than is reasonable.
then when I point out the responses to it
This response to the Cass review was particularly hilarious: a paper written by two lawyers attempting to dispute the "evidentiary standards" of the Cass review, which manages to misinterpret the Cass review as well as misquote two of the scientific meta-analyses used by the Cass review. If that's the highest quality of argument they can put forward (in NEJM of all places!), then I'm going to guess that the actual "evidentiary standards" in support of their position are quite weak.
(And indeed, the Cass review is up front about there being no RCTs available for use.)
recovering_rationaleist
2mo ago
For a middle-school student, I think one gay book in a blue moon would be kind of ideal. You want 99% of books to portray kids and adults in the world and how they live virtuously despite adversity, and 1% of books to provide a framework which the child can latch onto if they find themselves at puberty with no opposite-sex attractions. Where I have problems with the genderqueer books is when they tip over into pornography or into brainwashing. There's a fine line between having a gay character who is happy with their life and telling kids that it being nonbinary is a shortcut to being cool, special, or rebellious, or even worse, telling them that coming out as trans will solve their feelings of being lost in the world.
Of course, I also assume middle-school students are sufficiently exposed to portrayals of gay characters in other media, be it sitcoms or movies...
recovering_rationaleist
2mo ago
Another related datapoint is Project 100,000: generally people who are dysfunctional in society when given copious opportunities to be functional will not be net productive when press-ganged put into large work groups.
recovering_rationaleist
2mo ago
Do you have a source for this?
Perhaps ironically, $3M of the "transgender mice" studies Trump has cancelled were being used to study recovery of fertility following cross-sex hormone treatment.
recovering_rationaleist
2mo ago
Given the simplicity and elegance of the concept, rejection of evolution is a litmus test for capture of education by people who use motivated reasoning to ignore important truths about the world. This was a big deal back in the '90s and '00s, when the Christian right was a major force in education policy.
Now that the left is dominant, one might propose similar litmus tests for capture of educational institutions by people who use motivated reasoning on the left, but most of the "skeptic" associations that fought against evolution in schools have been captured by the left.
recovering_rationaleist
2mo ago
Mississippi jumped from the very bottom to top 10 over the last 10 years, entirely due to their state government taking the responsibility of educating their children into their own hands.
A big part of the Mississippi jump in scores was mandating (in 2013) that students in third grade repeat the year if they are not reading and mathing at grade level. The federal assessment tests are in fourth grade, so fourth grade reading and math scores go up 11~12% when illiterate third-graders are held back. The scores for the federal assessment test in eighth grade are only up 3% or so.
I think it's much better to hold back kids who can't read instead of passing them (like in DC, where students who miss the majority of classes get through high school), but you can't congratulate them when they put their thumb on the scale this heavily.
It looks like co-scientist is one of the new "tree searching agent" models: you give it a problem and it will spin off other LLMs to look into different aspects of the problem, then prune different decision trees and go further with subsequent spinoff LLMs based on what those initial report back, recursing until the original problem is solved. This is the strategy that was used by OpenAI in their "high-compute o3" model to rank #175 vs humans on Codeforce (competitive coding problems), pass the GPQA (Google-proof Graduate-level Q&A), and score 88% on ARC-AGI (vs. Human STEM graduate's 100%). The recursive thought process is expensive: the previous link cites a compute cost of $1000 to $2000 per problem for high-compute o3, so these are systems that compute on each problem for much longer than the 35 seconds available to consumer ($20/month) users of o1.
Someone's wrong on the Radio: Internal contradictions in the narratives on USAID
I was listening to NPR today. The main story seemed to be that Elon Musk's DOGE is seeking to shut down (or severely pare down) USAID, the US Agency for International Development. This would probably not be very interesting to me, except that the NPR narrative made two seemingly conflicting statements within a ten-minute time frame.
So on the one hand, USAID is described as an independent nonpolitical agency and should not be subsumed into Rubio's State Department. On the other hand, they have troves of classified materials that should not be accessed by staff of another agency. ... Why would an independent body for economic development have classified material? I recognize that I am confused...
So I looked at the Foreign Aid Act of 1961, as amended up to 2024. It looks like amendments are added several times per year, so this is not necessarily up to date, but such is the version of the law which is easy to read, "with amendments." It is 276 pages, so I didn't read more than the first five. Searching for "indep" turns of several uses of the term "independent," but they are for functions of USAID like "support for independent media" and "independent states of the former Soviet Union" (with four hits for "independent audit[or]). So the department isn't "independent" under the law, at least not in those terms.
Surprise surprise, on page 2 or 3 USAID is defined as "Under the policy guidance of the Secretary of State, the agency primarily responsible for administering this part should have the responsibility for coordinating all United States development-related activities," and is headed by an "Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development." There is no mention of whether this is a cabinet-level position. So Rubio taking over as the director of the agency and delegating actual responsibility to someone else appears totally legal, quotes from guests on NPR to the contrary notwithstanding.
Also, USAID is tasked with funding the International Atomic Energy Agency, for "civilian nuclear reactor safety" in former Soviet states, for limiting aid to countries engaged in nuclear weapons development, and for "nonproliferation and export control assistance." So that seems to explain why classified information may be found in its headquarters.
The claims of Elon Musk and NPR actually align on the topic of aid for LGBT causes, with NPR guests stating that the loss of USAID will be a disaster for gender nonbinary people. The MAGA narrative is also supported by the Act when compared to archives of the agency's website: there are only 12 mentions of "gender" in the law, and they are exclusively for "gender-responsive interventions" for HIV/AIDS, for "gender parity in basic education", "performance goals, on a gender disaggregated basis" and for statistics about who has received how much aid, again "disaggregated" by gender. In contrast, USAID's website used to contain pages with text like "USAID proudly joins this government-wide effort with its own commitment to advance the human rights of LGBTQI+ people around the world, including members of its own workforce, and supports efforts to protect them from violence, stigma, discrimination, and criminalization.". There is a Trans angle, with text like "In Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, and Nigeria, transgender-led CSOs delivered health services (including transgender-specific health and HIV services), emergency housing, and economic empowerment programs. In Burma and South Africa, the first transgender health center was organized, drawing upon best practice from Thailand." (ibid)
Then there is the pandemic angle, of which I am skeptical, but Musk did retweet that USAID provided $38M in funding to Ben Hu for "bat coronavirus emergence" research from 2014 to September, 2019, from a document which appears to have been obtained under FOIA by the White Coat Waste Project. Ben Hu was a PI with EcoHealth alliance and was previously alleged to be one of the first three Covid patients according to "sources within the government," although an intelligence community report mandated by Congress later denied that any Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists were known to have been among early Covid patients.
If the FOIA document about funding is true, that funding appears to have been outside of its mandate and potentially a misuse of public funds: the only mentions of "pandemic," "epidemic," or "virus" in the Foreign Aid Act concern HIV/AIDS.
I'm left with the impression that Musk and MAGA are being more truthful than NPR, and maybe the Agency does deserve to go into receivership.
recovering_rationaleist
6mo ago
30% of US health expenses are attributed to administration, which in the US context usually means the armies of secretaries hired by hospitals to not mess up billing and to argue with insurance providers, who have their own armies of secretaries hired to deny claims. If there were a public option in the US, it would (hopefully) make clear what is covered and what is not in an unambiguous way, which would make these armies of secretaries redundant.
But who am I kidding? Health care inefficiency is a jobs program for millions of white-collar PMC employees of extractive middlemen, and it will remain popular to kvech about high prices while doing nothing to bargain down prices as long as we rely on "employers" to pay for our medical expenses. Meanwhile kickbacks and bribes are legal as long as the people being bribed are responsible for buying health care equipment for us (hospital administrators) and buying drugs for us (group purchasing organizations). The corruption has been normalized.
Huh. I must have ignored that part of the original site. Thank you!
recovering_rationaleist
6mo ago
Thank you for this data! Hospitalizations look like a COVID dip, rather than random. I agree with you that deaths suddenly spike in 2021. Infections oddly high only in 2023, but as you said the data is only preliminary. Guess it is worth while keeping an eye on.
I suppose food borne disease is probably dominated more by kitchen errors rather than by food processing contamination issues: stuff like improperly washing hands between meats and vegetables, or cutting watermelon before washing it.
recovering_rationaleist
6mo ago
Oh. Thank you. Your link contains a much better (and more hopeful) figure. It appears this whole post was founded on a misunderstanding.
recovering_rationaleist
6mo ago
No, sorry, only data from 2017 onward is currently published at the FDA site link.
recovering_rationaleist
6mo ago
I've seen speculation that US food recalls are up. FDA provides all food recall information on their website, downloadable as an Excel file, dating back to 2017.
So I did a quick analysis by year, and it looks like recalls are indeed way up under Biden / since Covid:
| Year | Number of Recalls |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 3 |
| 2018 | 21 |
| 2019 | 43 |
| 2020 | 91 |
| 2021 | 119 |
| 2022 | 310 |
| 2023 | 308 |
| 2024 (YTD) | 290 |
| 2024*12/11 (extrapolate to full year) | 316.4 |
So what changed from 2021-2022? I've seen rumors on Reddit that Trump deregulated inspections, but can't find any mention of this on the FDA website. Has there been a drop in inspections, a drop in factory safety enforcement, or are recalls happening more aggressively?
recovering_rationaleist
6mo ago
The experts were just so wrong about peak oil, weren't they?
Kind of. The increasing and more volatile price of oil motivated the development of fracking technologies, which have a higher upfront cost but about the same marginal cost as previous wells, allow previously unexploitable fields to be made exploitable, and allow wells to be turned on and off with macroeconomic realities. So increasing prices signalled need, and the technology was developed to fill that need.
Which is probably a good estimate for the trend that will occur in other domains of resource exploitation, as long as we allow price signalling to work.
As a side note, it looks like gasoline prices are almost monotonically decreasing when adjusted for inflation. I suspect this is because the price of energy is basically what sets the value of the dollar. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/gasoline-prices-adjusted-for-inflation/
recovering_rationaleist
6mo ago
- Current existential threats: AI, pandemics, nuclear proliferation (and Lybia, Ukraine, NK, Iran show the incentives for/against a country pursuing nuclear weapons)
- The rise of global trade: semiconductor markets, shipping lanes (compare to Roman Roads), global financial markets / how and why the USD is the global currency
- Global telecom and instantaneous communication
- Geopolitical balance of power, the fall of Russia as a power and the rise of China (as economic powers). Since ~2017, chinese GDP has been higher (PPP) than US GDP.
- Chinese demographics (and the big question of economics in a shrinking population), China and Taiwan/Hong Kong (back to its origin in opium wars)
- Chinese dependency on the West: China imports fuel and food, exports manufactured goods.
- US military build-up in the Pacific vs. South China sea as a barrier to US containment
- Hybrid warfare
- Not current issue, but a fun thing for me to think about: "how to raise a country into an economic miracle" (Korea) vs. "how to destroy a country" (Venezuela, Gosplan). The relevant point I would emphasize is that you need some unit of value (money) which signals the amount of resources which go into a product, and which signals how many resources people are willing to give up for that product. This distributed computation cannot be efficiently centralized!
- Within the US, the financialization of corporations and rising power of private equity/monopolies: downfall of Boeing (funneling money into stock buybacks), PE firms buying real estate and setting up local dental monopolies, market power being abused to add junk fees and raise prices (Ticketmaster), etc.
recovering_rationaleist
7mo ago
I have a policy of not telling anyone who I actually voted for. That said, here are my notes for the rest of the third-party candidates:
Cladia De la Cruz (Party for Socialism and Liberation)
- Single-payer healthcare
- Pro-reparations (too left wing)
- "seize the forgive all student debt", "Fight for a socialist future" (going to destroy the economy)
- "cut military budget 90%" (going to destroy the Empire) and "lift sanctions" on "Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, North Korea and Iran" (going to lead to nuclear proliferation)
- Take over fossil fuel companies (might actually solve climate change, but good luck doing that without a military.)
- No mentions of freedom or freedom of speech, but I could get behind "disband the NSA"
- Claims on her website that US median income is $31,000, which is a good 50% lower than the actual number given by the US census bureau in 2022.
Cornel West (Justice For All party)
- '"Free Speech and Whistleblower Protections"
- Making voting day a national holiday is great, but vote by mail and nothing about voter ID means coercion is going to be more rampant.
- Nothing about nuclear or AI in platform
- Green new deal: nationalizing fossil fuel industry, end new oil drilling (would take a cut out of climate change, but doesn't address foreign emissions)
- Moratorium on False [climate] Solutions might address foreign emissions, but I doubt it.
- Nothing about monopolies on platform
- Streamlining legal pathways for immigration would help my family.
- Abolishing ICE, demilitarizing the border, upholding asylum laws, and demilitarizing the police/criminal justice reform would probably harm my family
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (We The People party)
- "dismantle the censorship-industrial complex"
- "We will return the intelligence agencies to their proper role as protectors not violators of liberty."
- "Install honest, competent leadership throughout the federal bureaucracy, agency by agency"
- "replace corporate-friendly agency leaders with reformers and whistleblowers"
- "Make the agencies transparent to public view"
- Removing corporate influence from government hits pretty much all my major issues.
- "Make student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy" (the only serious proposal that I have seen for student debt that makes any sense)
- universal public housing
- term limits in congress
- break up monopolies, end stock buybacks (good for national competitiveness)
- equalize school funding
- focus medical research on chronic disease prevention
- "Protect our Environment from Corporate Corruption and Contamination"
- "Dismantling US Imperialism", "unwinding empire" (would destroy international trade, probably send us into another dark age.)
recovering_rationaleist
7mo ago
To steelman Marn'i Washington's likely mindset, Marn'i was probably hopped up on Oct 14-ish news articles portraying "Trumpers" as "planning to shoot at FEMA workers." This is not Marn'i's fault: the journalists covering this were sensationalizing what looks like just a few claims of threats against aid workers. Marn'i was merely brainwashed by the information made available.
recovering_rationaleist
7mo ago
Yup. I figured the "Wisconsin Green" party made it obvious, but most responders didn't read that carefully.
Thank you so much for the good-faith tips!
I've been (slowly) going through the third-party candidates in Detail, scoring them by (freedom+transparency)*competence*weighted issues. Terry was indeed hard to find info on. Stein is out, because she's provided a laundry-list of "human rights" which she cannot possibly deliver on (Free Tuition, Free Housing, Free Medical, and no nuclear, but Declare a Climate Emergency....). And .. that's about as far as I've gotten.
I'm glad I researched her, though, because I came across an interesting story of how the Democratic secretary of State of Nevada colluded with the Democratic Party of Nevada to keep Stein off the ballot. It serves as an interesting counterpoint to the argument that Democrats only play dirty in response to Republicans playing dirty, since the Green party was victimized by Dems' dirty antics. (tl;ds: Secretary of State tells the Green Party to use an updated petition to put a candidate on the ballot, which petition doesn't collect information on signatories' eligibility to vote. The Democratic Party of Nevada sues to challenge the Green Party candidate's inclusion on the ballot under the argument that the law requires the petition to collect eligibility to vote information to be valid, and now Stein is not on the ballot in Nevada.)
recovering_rationaleist
7mo ago
Thank you. Haven't gotten involved in local politics yet. Will have to start attending meetings.
Dear Motte, please help me place my vote.
I really want to support the Democratic Party. Biden's FTC, EPA, and NLRB all seem to be working in economic directions which will make my life and the life of my children better: open markets, cleaner air, better working conditions. I can't help but notice that Trump's previous court picks tend to work against my goals of regulating business, increasing vacation time for my family, and limiting the EPA's attempts to regulate fossil fuels.
But voting blue has some tradeoffs. Some of these I'm aware of, but they are less relevant to me: Immigration is high and crime is up, but immigration and crime are intensely local, and my locality is pretty safe, with lots of rich donors and its own competent police force.
I'm going to have a family soon. I would like my child to be able to enjoy a carefree childhood, without needles in the parks and bullies in the schools, and without the chance that they are brainwashed into values that won't give me grandchildren.
But then things happen which force me to reevaluate and acknowledge that I cannot support the Democratic party. For example, this exchange during the VP debate (Transcript from Matt Taibbi):
VANCE: You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to use…
WALZ: Or threatening. Or hate speech.
VANCE: …the power of the government to use Big Tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this political moment… Let’s persuade one another. Let’s argue about ideas and come together afterwards.
WALZ: You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test!
Matt makes the argument that Walz got the crowded theater analogy backwards, but even more than that what rings alarm bells in my head is the phrase "Or hate speech."
What do you mean hate speech isn't protected by the first amendment? How do you think the market of ideas is going to work?
This exchange was the last straw for me, and convinced me that, however much it may harm my short-term personal interests, I cannot cast a ballot for Walz and the group of people who think like him. No matter how shitty life might get without the EPA or FTC working in my best interest, it will get much more shitty, much faster if donors to the Democratic party (NPR listeners?) get to define contrarian thought as "hate speech".
So here are my options for presidential tickets:
- Donald J. Trump / JD Vance (Republican)
- Randall Terry / Stephen Broden (Constitution)
- Chase Russell Oliver / Mike ter Maat (Libertarian)
- Jill Stein / Rudolph Ware (Wisconsin Green)
- Claudia De la Cruz / Karina Garcia (Party for Socialism and Liberation)
- Cornel West / Melina Abdullah (Justice For All)
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. / Nicole Shanahan (We The People)
Any ideas who has the most "Grey Tribe" values and best policies?
Important issues to me, in order of importance as far as I can tell:
- Freedom of expression
- Transparency in government
- Competence in government and making decisions without corruption
- Quantitative approaches to existential threats (climate change, nuclear proliferation, AI engineered viruses, ASI, etc.)
- Maintain international trade (i.e. maintain the empire)
- Increase economic competition (anti-monopoly)
- Labor rights (anti-monopoly)
- Reduce everyday mortality: healthy lifestyle, healthy food, healthcare access, traffic safety, crime, etc.
- Improve everyday quality of life: clean water, clean air, low prices, YIMBY
- YIMBY and environmental law (abolish zoning but enforce strict laws against pollutants).
- Immigration: let in those who follow the process, but stop allowing "refugees" and people who overstay visas (currently, overstaying a visa is the fastest path to a relative's green card.)
Edit: formatting of candidate list
Korean romance dramas aren't exactly realistic romances. If you watch just a few of them you can start to see the formula: Episode 1 introduces high-status guy and average girl who hates everything he stands for, Episode 2 we meet their friends, Episode 3 she befriends his best friend who has a crush on her, Episode 4 high-status guy has physical contact with main character in a plausibly deniable way, ... Episode 10 they kiss, Episode 11 something happens to estrange them, ... Episode 16 they marry and live happily ever after. I'm sure the writers and producers spend enough time watching dramas that they know the tropes, know the formula, and have an instinct for the progression of a good drama.
Also, I'm sure that there is a selection bias. We hear about every Marvel and Disney production even when it sucks because there is a large marketing budget targeted at English speakers; we only hear about the Korean dramas when they are actually good. (Counterexample which demonstrates the rule: Squid Game 2 sucked and had a large marketing budget, and I heard about it "organically" before it came out).
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