sodiummuffin
No bio...
User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
11mo ago
It's makeup, and while more associated with old or non-western forms of makeup (often containing lead) a quick search finds some modern eyeliner using it as a label as well. It was one of the few I recognized on the female side when I first saw it (along with taffeta and jacquard) due to its use in fantasy fiction. I think more would recognize it from makeup or the history of makeup rather than from the name of the department store.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
That's why I suggest doing them in one of the countries that no longer recommends puberty-blockers - the choice would be between a 50% shot at blockers as part of the study or a ~0% shot as part of the general public. Theoretically some could go doctor-shopping internationally, but hopefully not enough to ruin the study. An unblinded RCT would still be a huge step up from the evidence we have now.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Or did hundreds of people read the headline and drop a snarky comment, and not a single one bothered to read the article?
I remember some years back someone posted a fake article headline to /r/politics with a link that just went to a 404 Not Found page on a news website (I think Salon?). It got hundreds of upvotes before people noticed, though it did get voted back down to 0 once the top comments were pointing out the article didn't exist.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
The issue I'm having is that the current H-1B system is does not stop at importing the top ~0.1% of engineering talent, and originally he was talking about expanding it even more.
It's a lottery system, it rejects "0.1% engineers" even as it lets in lower-skill immigrants so long as the lower-skill immigrants are above the minimum threshold. It could instead do something like auction off the slots to the highest bidder or hand them out in order to the highest wages offered and it would become dramatically more selective even if it expanded. I don't know what reforms if any the Trump administration will actually pursue, but they're not incompatible goals.
sodiummuffin
11mo ago
I guess the closest thing to an example I can think of after a few minutes of thought is Brianna Wu; I never followed Gamergate all that closely, but I get the general impression that she publicly presented herself as an at-least-implicitly cisgender woman but was eventually outed by her enemies.
There wasn't really any investigation or outing needed, Wu was on MSNBC very early on and people watching recognized Wu was transgender immediately. You can actually go back and read an archive of the GG thread at the time:
Damn, Briana's avatar had me fooled.
I would never guessed that she was a transsexual person.
Incidentally while looking up that thread I also found the original /gg/ thread regarding Wu. It shows most of the ultra-compressed process of how Wu became a media-recognized "Gamergate harassment victim", in case you're curious about the details of how that sort of thing went down from the perspective of those involved.
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September 18, Wu creates a "sock puppet" parody pro-GG twitter account named brololz. There is a small KIA thread about it but it doesn't attract much attention.
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October 9th, Wu creates the "Oppressed Gamergater" image macro on MemeGenerator.net and tweets about it. GG notices the image macro and makes a lot of meme/shitpost ones, flooding the memegenerator page in the process.
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October 10th, Wu cherrypicks a few of the more hostile ones (assuming Wu didn't create them) and tweets that "8chan/#gamergate generated 60 pages of this today attacking me. I'm going on a Twitter break until I feel more safe."
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Someone makes the aforementioned /gg/ thread about the above tweet, the first GG thread about Wu other than the KIA thread about brololz. Some people mock the tweet, and someone finds Wu's game Revolution 60 and people mock it as well.
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Someone posts Wu's phone number and address to the /gg/ thread. Every single response condemns it, with most assuming it is a false-flag, especially because of nobody in GG giving a shit about Wu. (It is deleted when a mod comes online 45 minutes later.)
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14 minutes after the post, Wu tweets that "8chan/gamergate just doxxed me".
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7 minutes after that, a new twitter account named chatterwhiteman tweets the same address and begins tweeting threats at Wu.
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45 minutes after chatterwhiteman begins tweeting, Wu posts a screencap of it and tweets "The police just came by. Husband and I are going somewhere safe. Remember, #gamergate isn't about attacking women."
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40 minutes later, an article on Gameranx by Ian Miles Cheong reports that "Game Developer Brianna Wu Driven From Home After Death Threats and Doxxing". (This is before Cheong flipped from anti-GG to pro-GG and from left-wing to right-wing.) Other coverage from game journalists follows.
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October 13th, 3 days later, Wu appears on MSNBC to talk about being a gamergate harassment victim.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
If Musk believes all humans are fungible economic units, how does he turn right?
Even setting aside every issue besides immigration, it is possible to believe importing "top 0.1%" skilled engineers is a net-positive without believing that importing masses of economic 'refugees' and illegal immigrants is. Masses of migrants (and their descendants) are a tremendous net-drain on the government budget and societal resources, commit more crime, etc. while small groups of elite immigrants would not be. "People who want to immigrate" is a category that selects for people living in bad countries, and since one of the most common reasons for countries to be bad is the average intelligence/etc. of the people who live there this selects for bad immigrants, but "people who are allowed to immigrate" can be selective in the opposite direction. This just doesn't seem difficult to understand if you actually read him describing his own beliefs and don't strawman it as him supporting the current H-1B system.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873187030785769964
?? I don’t support an open immigration policy at all. I support a highly selective immigration policy.
Immigration should be limited to those who will obviously contribute far more than they take.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872374103983759835
Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873191959441084531
Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.
I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
I think he's talking about stuff like acting in accordance with game-theory precommitments (even without the actual precommitment), which isn't irrational according to LessWrong people (depending on the specific circumstance) but might be called that by some subsets of groups like decision-theorists.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/superrationality
Superrationality is a concept invented by Douglas Hofstadter. He thought that agents should cooperate in Prisoner's Dilemma, but the primary notion of "rationality" which had been deeply developed by economists, decision-theorists, and game-theorists disagreed. Rather than fighting over the definition of rational, Douglas Hofstadter coined the term superrational for the kind of rationality he was interested in.
Eliezer Yudkowsky shared the same core intuition with Douglas Hofstadter, but took the path of trying to reclaim the word rational for what he meant, in Functional Decision Theory. As a result, LessWrong does not consistently use superrational/superrationality.
I think the relevance to morality he's implying is that some moral commitments are to do things that actually just make the world worse for everyone (at least in terms of immediate impact), but that are nonetheless moral. Not because you've abandoned consequentialism, but because being the sort of agent willing to make the world worse for everyone can have better outcomes than not being that sort of agent. E.g. for countries, lets say peace with another country is 0 utils, that country seizing a small amount of your territory without a major war is -1000 utils, and actually having a drawn-out war is -100,000 utils. A shortsighted version of consequentialist morality might say it's better to give up territory in exchange for peace, but if you're the sort of country that would do that it actually greatly increases the risk of war. And it's hard to convince other countries that you're willing to go to war without actually being the sort of country willing to go to war. For one, because foreign relations is an iterated game. For another, because the whole nature of countries makes it very hard for them to be systematically deceptive about something like this, the enemy is listening to your politician's speeches and public debates and potentially even spying on your secret plans. The more reliably they can predict how you'll act, the more the situation potentially resembles Parfit's Hitchhiker or Newcomb's Problem where it can be better to choose the "worse" option because being the sort of agent that will choose that option has better results. Of course it's usually also an iterated decision, making it fully compatible with even causal decision theory.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
By contacting more journalists, including more prominent ones. By providing evidence such as documentation (sure it's plausible that he didn't manage to copy any - but if someone like him knew about it there should be a huge number of people in a position to leak it). By providing specifics about how exactly he learned about it, some of which could lead to collaborating evidence. Not by combining it with other grievances ranging from war crimes to personal issues and generic stuff about how the country is "headed towards collapse". That's a common tendency with delusions/lies/exaggerations, where something that should be a huge deal is treated as a side note because the chain of causation doesn't begin with learning about it but with his general state of mind manufacturing it. (See also: MeToo accusations that treat claims like "committed rape" as secondary to "was a bad boyfriend who hurt my feelings".) Not by committing suicide at all: mentally healthy people rarely commit suicide and it's a bad way to leak information compared to just staying alive and telling people all the specifics of what he learned and when/why he learned it.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
It's a basic observation of cause-and-effect: they spent money on illegals and now are out of money for Americans.
But those are separate earmarked categories of funds. The FEMA Disaster Relief Fund was down to $1 billion dollars on hand and moved to "Immediate Needs Funding" until Congress passed a bill providing an additional $20 billion at the end of last month. But the FEMA Shelter and Services program spending money on migrants ($650 million in 2024) was never part of that. Both are under FEMA but my understanding is that there's not some unified pool of FEMA funds, you might as well blame NASA. And obviously "FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund is about to run out of money" stories are generally overblown in the first place, since Congress is going to provide it additional funds as needed.
I harp on RCTs because most of the time I read non-RCTs (in fields like healthcare and sociology with complicated and frequently opaque mechanisms) they end up utterly failing to adequately compensate for their disadvantages. Though of course this is a biased sample, I'm generally not reading studies on obvious and non-controversial subjects. It's always stuff like "we controlled for X" where X is whatever arbitrary handful of factors the authors thought of (leaving whatever residue is left as the "effect", or conversely erasing the effect with Everest controls), or "we matched with a non-random pseudo control group" (like the puberty blockers study I discussed) where we're supposed to trust how well matched they really are and there's often obvious differences between the groups. It is with good reason that in applications like clinical trials where RCTs are possible, they are considered the "gold standard" and are often required for approval by organizations like the FDA.
It's bad enough that I think anyone trying to argue the contrary needs to very specifically justify why the non-RCTs in the case in question actually work, not vaguely gesture at the fact that sometimes we can gather adequate evidence without RCTs. Otherwise I think it is very easy for people, including medical professionals, to assume that (for instance) just because 50 studies on puberty blockers have been conducted and they have become established clinical practice we now know whether they are better or worse than nothing. Sorry, 5-HTTLPR and depression had 450 studies and turned out to be completely fake, you need the very highest quality of studies to know whether the thing you're talking about is even real. There are of course plenty of ways to mess up RCTs too, the replication crisis is filled with them, but my impression whenever I see RCTs on a subject compared with non-RCTs (as in Scott's posts I linked in the prior post) is of a huge and often unbridgeable difference in baseline reliability. Sometimes conducting RCTs really is impossible (and in those cases I expect our understanding of the issue to be much worse) but if they're possible then conducting a high-quality RCT is going to be my go-to recommendation for both understanding the issue and creating evidence compelling enough that it can potentially convince others.
Less facetiously, we have no RCTs demonstrating that HIV causes AIDs, but we can still be pretty confident about the link between the virus and the disease.
What do HIV and parachutes have in common? A much clearer mechanism of action. With gender dysphoria what we instead have is the murky waters of people creating narratives about their own subjective experiences based on whatever memes their culture has lying around, something people are terrible at doing accurately. Such introspection provides a wide range of insights: miracle supplements or faith-healing producing amazing boosts in well-being, subconscious reasons for your problems accessible through dream-analysis, neurasthensia, suppressed memories, etc. So yes, I'm sure you can make the case for HIV without a RCT, but that case would have to focus specifically on evidence particular to that case, my default without such evidence is to be skeptical of non-RCTs and look for the many ways they can go wrong.
All I'm trying to say is that your original post overemphasized the importance of RCTs in medicine.
By the way, based on you posting this in reply to someone else I think you mistook his posts for mine.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
"Six million people were killed in Nazi concentration camps during the second world war, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".
"Millions of others" - other than what? Other than the 6 million jews referrred to in the first part of the sentence. This is a statement that only makes sense precicely because the speaker is not a holocaust denier and thinks it goes without saying that the 6 million refers to the jewish victims and then on top of that there were "millions of others" who were instead killed for being "Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".
That's just how people talk. It doesn't reflect anything besides the fact that the sensitive nature of the subject matter means some people on Twitter are combing through statements like these in order to complain because someone said "six million" instead of "six million jews". Similarly with the others, when someone says "all those who were murdered just for being who they were" it's because she wants to emphasize that aspect of the motive, not because she doesn't think jews were targeted.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
Relevant post on his Tumblr from 2017 when he was doing child psychiatry:
Public service announcement: if you have a kid with some kind of horrifying predatory criminal, and now your kid is a horrifying predatory criminal, and you have no idea how this happened because the father left before he was even born and your new husband is a great guy and you’ve both always done your best to raise your kid well and give him a good home, your kid’s psychiatrist will listen empathetically to your story, and then empathetically give you a copy of The Nurture Assumption.
…maybe not actually. But it will definitely be on his mind. And maybe it would get people to stop having so many kids with horrifying predatory criminals. Seriously, I’m doing inpatient child psychiatry now and I get multiple cases like this every day.
This part of the followup post also seems relevant:
2 Did you know there are whole institutions for dealing with kids who sexually molest other kids? And these institutions are always full? The world is much worse than anybody thinks and I cannot finish up my child psychiatry rotation quickly enough.
I don't think the tweet Spookykou quoted is nessesarily saying "putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children", he was just comparing IQ and self-restraint as he said. But note that some of the people who need to be locked up are children. (This also brings to mind the bit in his post Against Against Autism Cures regarding those who are locked in personal sensory hells regardless of whether they also need to be physically restrained or not.)
sodiummuffin
11mo ago
CNN on forensic analysis showing reports from 3 weapons
CBS news on the USSS saying their counter-snipers fired a single shot.
After shootings there's confusion about details like this all the time, including from official sources, it's very weak evidence of anything.
If there was an organized effort involving multiple assassins, let alone any sort of infiltration of the Secret Service, how is Trump alive? It's not that hard to kill people, Crooks came incredibly close, but we're to believe that another assassin who unlike Crooks apparently wasn't immediately shot couldn't manage it? This incident should if anything illustrate that no competent organized force is trying to kill him, because if they did he would be dead. The main thing that protects U.S. presidents and candidates isn't the Secret Service, it's that politicians in democracies are replaceable so neither foreign adversaries nor political opponents have sufficiently strong incentive to risk it.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
2024 study critiquing the many methodological errors in that study:
We have outlined several conceptual and methodological concerns with the analysis of Anderson et al. (2023). Specifically, the Anderson et al. (2023) analysis is not reproducible because their sampling criteria are not clear and 35% of the societies in their sample do not come from D-PLACE, the database they claim was the source of all the societies in their sample. Moreover, these 35% were heavily biased toward societies that they coded as ones in which women hunt. Many other societies with extensive information on hunting are also not in D-PLACE yet were not included in their analysis, and authoritative sources on hunting in the societies in the Anderson et al. (2023) sample were not consulted. Additionally, there are at least 18 societies in D-PLACE with information on hunting that were inexplicably omitted from their analysis, none of which provide evidence for women hunters.
Finally, there were numerous coding errors. Of the 50/63 (79%) societies that Anderson et al. (2023) coded as ones in which women hunt, for example, our recoding found that women rarely or never hunted in 16/50 (32%); we also found 2 false negatives. Overall, we found evidence in the biased Anderson et al. (2023) data set that in 35/63 (56%) societies, women hunt “Sometimes” or “Frequently”. Moreover, compared to the 17/63 (27%) socie- ties in which women were claimed to hunt big game regularly, our recoding found that this was true for only 9/63 (14%). A precise estimate of women’s hunting in foraging societies must await a future thorough and unbiased analysis of the ethnographic record (see, e.g., Hoffman, Farquharson, & Venkataraman, 2024), but it is certainly far less than the Anderson et al. (2023) estimate and is very unlikely to overturn the current view that it is relatively uncommon.
The fundamental issue is that women’s hunting is not a binary phenomenon, and treating it as such, especially with a very low threshold for classifying a society as one in which women hunt, obfuscates gendered divisions of labor within groups.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
Because it was a plan created by a group of non-Trump Republicans and contained elements that he disagreed with, some of which were mined for political attacks by those claiming it was his plan. That doesn't mean that he disagrees with everything in it - both Trump and the authors are Republicans, so naturally they have overlap in policy. Nor does it mean that Trump considers people radioactive and unhireable for contributing to it, once again they are Republicans and agree on many things. It just means that people quoting from it as "Trump's plan" were being dishonest, an honest critic could have either quoted Agenda 47 instead or made predictions about his actions without claiming they were from Trump's published plan. I don't think this is ordinarily a concept people have difficulty with, activist groups and think-tanks publish proposals that have partial overlap with politician's actual plans all the time.
I'm guessing the very fact that it wasn't his plan contributed to the focus on it. For anything in Agenda 47 he could just say "yeah that's my plan, it's great!". Whereas the fact that Project 2025 wasn't actually his plan meant that he denied it, which looks weaker and like he has something to hide.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
Scott knew the truth about HBD all along, but his public position was still in compliance with HBD denial.
No it wasn't. In 2017 he wrote The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project, as well as this post that was probably the most explicit pre-AstralCodexTen:
Learning To Love Scientific Consensus:
Even things about genetic psychological differences between population groups are less bold and maverick-y than their proponents like to think. The relevant surveys I know trying to elicit scientific consensus (1, 2, 3) all find that, when asked anonymously, most scientists think these differences explain about 25% – 50% of variance.
I hate to bring that up, because it’ll probably start a flame war in the comments, but I think it’s important as a sign of exactly how hard it is to politicize science. Global warming skeptics talk about how maybe the scientific consensus on global warming is false because climatologists face political pressure to bias their results in favor of the theory. But scientists studying these areas face much more political pressure, and as long as you give the surveys anonymously they’re happy to express horrendously taboo opinions. This is about the strongest evidence in favor of the consensus on global warming – and scientific consensus in general – that I could imagine.
Coincidentally that post also addresses your point. Even with something as taboo and suprressed as HBD, you can anonymously survey experts in the field and get overwhelming support. That doesn't translate into "institutions" being automatically trustworthy, something like a public statement by a university or an article in the New York Times has little in common with an anonymous survey of experts. But I don't think he ever said otherwise. He's posted about how media outlets rarely outright lie and prefer misleading people in other ways, but that isn't the same as saying they're generally trustworthy.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
In real life female peach-fuzz/vellus hair is normally very short, very fine, and barely-noticeable. Videogames generally do not depict details that tiny, so if a videogame model tries to depict something like that there's a good chance of it ending up being bigger and more prominent than it almost always is in real life. Compare to something like the left side of this stock photo. The real face has an incredibly subtle fuzz, with 3 tiny strands of longer hair, while Aloy's face seems covered in hair as long as those 3 strands. Or this set of 279 photos of women without makeup.
There is of course a range of exceptions (all the way up to women with full beards), and either those are the target audience for peach-fuzz removal products or they use them as examples while expecting the actual audience to be women with a more normal amount. But it's pretty far from typical. Now, I don't think the developers outright planned to have her be an outlier, I think it was probably "we have graphics so good we can have this incredibly fine detail", and then when that wasn't actually true and it was too prominent they were woke enough that nobody was willing to point that out.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
The second frames Zelensky as a conduit for his people's will. ... The average age of the fighting man is over 40.
What's with the way people use this point? Ukraine is engaging in a deliberate policy of recruiting older people because they don't want to kill off their younger generation. The minimum age for conscription was 27 until they lowered it to 25 in 2024. This is bad enough when people are using it make some "Ukraine is running out of manpower" point, which true or false is not supported by them recruiting people of the ages they are deliberately trying to recruit. However it seems even more ill-suited to make your current argument: if it's a mistaken policy, then it is one that if anything panders too hard towards the will of the people.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
That screenshot is from Horizon Zero Dawn in 2017, the one people complained about/mocked was her changed model from Horizon Forbidden West in 2022. Here is her 2017 model compared to her face-model Hannah Hoekstra, while here is a comparison with her 2022 model. Also here is her early Zero Dawn concept art and here is the famous comparison with mukbang Youtuber Nikocado Avocado.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
The Irish and the Lithuanians and the Jews were definitely not white when they first got off the boats.
The Irish/Jews/etc. were considered white, the idea that they weren't is a psuedo-historical myth advanced by certain activist historians like Noel Ignatiev. The main trick they pull is to define "whiteness" as not being discriminated against or "othered", point out that the Irish were discriminated against, and thus define them as not white. But the actual historical people who did the discriminating did not define white people that way, they both considered Irish to be a subcategory of white people and also discriminated against them. Being white was of real legal and social relevance, and groups such as the Irish were unquestionably included in that category.
The Volokh Conspiracy: Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)
Here are some objective tests as to whether a group was historically considered “white” in the United States: Were members of the group allowed to go to “whites-only” schools in the South, or otherwise partake of the advantages that accrued to whites under Jim Crow? Were they ever segregated in schools by law, anywhere in the United States, such that “whites” went to one school, and the group in question was relegated to another? When laws banned interracial marriage in many states (not just in the South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?
If you use such objective tests, you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom (as in the case of labor unions). Indeed, some lighter-skinned African Americans of mixed heritage “passed” as white by claiming they were of Arab descent and that explained their relative swarthiness, showing that Arab Americans, another group whose “whiteness” has been questioned, were considered white. By contrast, persons of African, Asian, Mexican and Native American descent faced various degrees of exclusion from public schools and labor unions, bans on marriage and direct restrictions on immigration and citizenship.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
A majority reject the following: DEI discriminates against white people: 33% - 41%
It's hard to interpret survey answers like this, presumably the 41% are expressing support by picking the more positive-sounding answer but how durable is that support? How they would respond to additional information or a different context? How much of this is pure partisan affiliation that doesn't translate into supporting specific policies at all?
Lets say they were working as recruiters and their managers said "The DEI report indicates our numbers aren't good enough, please trash all applications in the hiring pipeline from candidates that aren't female, black or Hispanic." What percent would respond with "Sure! Some bigots would call it discrimination to throw out the white/asian male candidates, but DEI isn't discrimination against white people."? What percentage would say "I thought DEI didn't entail discrimination! This is wrong and I won't do it."? What percentage would be somewhere in between? And of course most aren't going to be personally involved in implementing DEI policies, so how would they respond to more distant narratives, like a political debate about a discriminatory policy that has more specifics than just the DEI label?
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
What are the actual requirements for getting prescribed puberty blockers?
I think there's a lot of clinical discretion so it varies. I remember reading news articles about some prescribing them after a single appointment that you could try to look up, and here's an extreme example in Canada from a couple years back, where the "Gender Pathways Service" advises family doctors on prescribing them before a single appointment with a specialist:
“Given the distress that can be associated with Gender Dysphoria, we have also included information on puberty blockers that can be started prior to their initial appointment. We have included a Lupron Depot® Information sheet.”
Children’s Hospital, London, Ontario.
If they're willing to do that presumably they are also willing to hand them out readily themselves.
What are the probabilities of serious consequences from puberty blockers?
Copy-pasting the last comment I wrote regarding the state of the evidence for puberty blockers:
Puberty blockers both lock children onto the transgender pathway (making them largely equivalent to prescribing HRT in actual outcome) and have very serious and poorly-studied medical consequences of their own, including potential damage to brain development. In children the "watchful waiting" approach used to be standard, meaning the children were not given any "gender-affirming" medical or social intervention, just treatment for whatever other psychological issues they had. Did they continue to want to transition into adulthood or did their gender dysphoria desist on its own? Some studies on this were conducted, and according to this meta-study and this blog post the desistence rates they found ranged from 61% to 98%. If you just add the figures from the studies listed in the linked study it would be an overall desistence rate of 85%, or 80% for the studies listed in the linked blog post. By contrast 97% of children put on puberty blockers go on to take hormones (page 38). The lack of any randomized control study makes it difficult to be sure, but this seems indicative of a very strong "lock-in" effect.
The lock-in from social transition also seems very strong even for children not on puberty blockers (and may be a large part of the lock-in associated with puberty blockers), with this study finding the persistence rate of "binary transgender identity" to be 94% 5 years after social transition. The study mentions that persistence was less common for children that were transitioned before the age of 6, which significantly affects the results because they were 124 of the 317 children in their study, but still 90.3% compared to 96.4% for those 6 or older. 5 years isn't really long enough to know long-term desistence of course, but the explosion in rates is recent enough that it would be difficult to do much longer.
Meanwhile regarding the side-effects of puberty-blockers themselves there is very little high-quality evidence (e.g. randomized control trials in humans that track the things you want them to track), and essentially none for using them to avert puberty entirely rather than stop precocious-puberty for a few years. But this randomized study in sheep seems to indicate permanent damage to brain development:
The long-term spatial memory performance of GnRHa-Recovery rams remained reduced (P < 0.05, 1.5-fold slower) after discontinuation of GnRHa, compared to Controls. This result suggests that the time at which puberty normally occurs may represent a critical period of hippocampal plasticity. Perturbing normal hippocampal formation in this peripubertal period may also have long lasting effects on other brain areas and aspects of cognitive function.
In humans the best we have seems to be this study in which a 3-year course of puberty blockers in girls with precocious puberty is associated with a 7-point reduction in IQ from what they scored before beginning the puberty blockers. However without a randomized control trial and/or a longer-term followup it is difficult to know if this is meaningful, which is why I mentioned the sheep study first.
The NHS's independent review mentions a similar concern:
A further concern is that adolescent sex hormone surges may trigger the opening of a critical period for experience-dependent rewiring of neural circuits underlying executive function (i.e. maturation of the part of the brain concerned with planning, decision making and judgement). If this is the case, brain maturation may be temporarily or permanently disrupted by puberty blockers, which could have significant impact on the ability to make complex risk-laden decisions, as well as possible longer-term neuropsychological consequences. To date, there has been very limited research on the short-, medium- or longer-term impact of puberty blockers on neurocognitive development.
This all seems completely backwards and the opposite of the precautionary principle. A treatment as far-reaching and poorly-understood as preventing puberty should not be adopted as standard practice without conducting the research required to know if it is safe and effective. It should not be critics of the treatment looking through sheep studies and comparing desistence rates between different studies to find indications that it causes brain damage and treats gender dysphoria worse than doing nothing. It should be advocates having to do randomized control trials showing it actually improves outcomes relative to no treatment and that the damage to brain/bones/etc. is minor enough to be worth it. (In the U.S. it doesn't have to pass FDA approval because it's an off-label usage of drugs approved for precocious puberty. Unsurprisingly the trials conducted for that have little relevance to the way it is used for gender dysphoria, and frankly seem pretty questionable even for precocious puberty.) Instead it might be difficult or impossible to get ethics approval for such a study, since you're denying a now-standard treatment, particularly if you actually do it properly by advising your control group to not socially transition either. Since Sweden, Finland, Norway and the UK have in recent years advised against most or all usage of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, hopefully someone in one of those countries will be able to conduct a proper randomized control trial?
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
A recent development I just found about while writing is, the man who made the video had the rape charges against him dismissed 'in the interest of justice'.(local news link).
The charges were dismissed 2 months ago, March 14th 2025. The reason listed is "Dismissal by Prosecuting Attorney". Per a quick internet search, "Dismissed in the interest of Justice" is a catch-all term whenever they dismiss a charge for whatever reason. The news article was only updated yesterday though, presumably related to the attention it was getting.
Found by inputting the case number from your link 55-CR-22-817 here:
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
Reading the first half of your post it seemed like a message from a mentally ill person. Learning that he later killed himself in a car bomb did not increase my assessment of his sanity.
I tend to find schizophrenic or similarly disordered modes of thinking very recognizable, so it's always weird to me when other people see them and don't immediately realize what's going on. You also have to consider the base rates here: mental illness is much more common than the number of people who know about "secret physics-revolutionizing propulsion systems" level information, or indeed information considerably less earth-shattering than that. And what percentage of people who know about the latter would react by messaging an obscure Instagram account, mixing in unrelated stuff about war crimes, and then bombing themselves in front of Trump Tower?
As I said:
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