This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
You can say the same thing about transgender healthcare, that doesn't mean it rests on sound assumptions. Everything you said here only reinforces my impression that this is more of an art than a science, and the whole thing is based on trust, which I don't have a lot to spare at the moment.
This in particular sounds like the whole thing rests on "the experts" having 20-30 IQ points on the people they're investigating, and being reasonably confident they'll be doing the manipulating, rather than being manipulated. I don't think that's a reasonable assumption here, and I'm really not seeing anything that's supposed to catch this case in particular.
I tend to agree with this, but I would worry there's another issue in play, which is that some of these "experts" may have political beliefs and/or tribal alliances which color their judgment. For example, a lot of women with advanced degrees in the social sciences are feminists, i.e. they subscribe to an ideology with a strong tendency to see men as the source of all evil and women as innocent victims. If she were evaluating another woman accused of wrongdoing, I would not trust such a woman to act in an unbiased way.
More options
Context Copy link
Come on now, for forensic evaluations to exist in court without being torn about by the defense they need to have paid attention to things like inter-rater reliability. Check out the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) as an example.
Also, as I've said elsewhere - I am not an expert on postpartum psychosis, but I've seen phsyciains who have seen a bunch of PPP go "yes that this is what it looks like sometimes, thank god my patient didn't do anything this bad." Having exposure to the actual patient population with these disease should mean something.
I wrote elsewhere in one of the chains on the transgender thing, but it's more driven into medicine than out of and from medicine.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link