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ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
It has not been prescribed to that many kids for purposes other than delaying extremely precocious puberty.
I meant banning them for off-label use, like gender dysphoria. Though to be honest, precocious puberty was a bit dubious itself, the last time I checked, but I can let it fly.
What observations does the social contagion hypothesis exclude?
Analogous to the placebo effect: exposing a population to a foreign idea, and it not coinciding with a self-identification with that idea.
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.
I see no reason to grant that assumption. Do alien abductees look like normies?
That is fair and valid and also not a very good basis for making policy about what medical treatments should be forbidden.
Isn't it a good basis for reversing policies about medical treatments that have been approved, based on trust in the people who have been proven to lie?
imreallywondering
2d ago
This is more a function of time spent swiping than anything else. My stats are better than your TOP PROFILE and I'm telling you, from personal experienc
If they were, you wouldn't be having a breakdown over them. But feel free to post your stats so we can compare. I highly doubt you had any days with 300+ likes or 100+ matches.
that 30 likes in 24 hours is a totally unrealistic standard for "attractive."
Nah, you're just literally not attractive. No amount of snark or tantrum throwing is going to change that. Women made the determination to skip your profile because they just don't like you that much, and that's that.
Gaashk
2d ago
Hi!
As far as I can tell, the biggest thing is that some families do quirky homeschooling because they like that kind of thing, and then maybe their ideology guide what they do for it, what books they read and groups they join, but in general they're just into that kind of thing. Bryan Caplan and David Friedman's families sound like that, my mom was like that, and this generally goes well. If it turns out the child wants a lot more structure or interactions than the parents are providing, or the parents get super stressed over the whole thing, they can find a school and go there, or do some other arrangement. This is interesting and aesthetic. How well it goes depends on both the personalities of the parents, and also the kids. I liked it quite a lot, and especially liked doing a lot of 4-H clubs and reading a lot of books. Sewing club with Jane Austen film watching and tea was lovely. College was fine, but it might be worth having the child take a real math class at some point, most families aren't up to teaching math that well even when they know it, because it's a subject that benefits from extrinsic motivation.
Other families do it for strict religious or ideological reasons, but are not really suited to it, and years later their daughters write blogs about how awful the whole thing was, but they didn't say anything at the time for fear of getting into even worse trouble. Some of my childhood friends have done that. Aella has a lot to say about it. It mostly seems to come down to situations where some super intense ideologically opinionated parents believe that Public School is Bad, and the Homeschooling is more moral, and then go on to subscribe to very specific advice about child rearing that doesn't necessarily work out for the parents or children in question. The can go either way -- intense punishment focused child rearing, or negligent attachment parenting, but with no checks, and taking it too far. It seems to go especially poorly when the children in question were adopted, and do not share a bond from infancy and similar proclivities, though biological children sometimes inherit the same personalities that led to their parents rebelling against the mainstream. Anyway, I do feel quite suspicious when some mother says that they don't necessarily like the process of homeschooling, but are doing it because her husband read some super scary articles about Groomers in the Public Schools, so now it's the Only Moral Way.
We are not currently homeschooling, and don't have any plans to. We do use tablets, though I feel a bit bad about it. Here's an interesting post from Zvi this morning on a related topic. We are very heavily in the Everything is Childcare phase of parenting, even with the public schooling, and I might have different opinions in the future. The child in public school especially really likes organized activities, structure, friends, rainbows, unicorns, and Disney princesses at this point in her life, and I might have a very different experience with another child, or at a different stage.
aqouta
2d ago
And it remains a silly thing to believe while also demanding resources and concessions from the rest of society. If there is nothing to the claim but a preference, an extreme form of self crippling tattoo, then we are certainly not giving minors access to it, we are certainly not bending over backwards to allow people with a sports league preference, we are certainly not paying for this tattoo with a substantial amount of my tax dollars. I believe enough in freedom of form that people should be allowed to whatever they want to their own bodies but if what they're doing is for preference they owe it to the rest of us not to do harm in their pursuits.
cjet79
2d ago
This is a little wild of a prediction given that it already seems to be proven wrong.
Current gen AIs already seem poised to be pretty disruptive.
I think the main reason they are not as disruptive is because they aren't done cooking. Why try and squeeze out work from an AI right now when the AI will be better and cheaper in 6 months?
SnapDragon
2d ago
Let me join the chorus of voices enthusiastically agreeing with you about how jobs are already bullshit. I've never been quite sure whether this maximally cynical view is true, but it sure feels true. One white-collar worker has 10x more power to, well, do stuff than 100 years ago, but somehow we keep finding things for them to do. And so Elon can fire 80% of Twitter staff, and "somehow" Twitter continues to function normally.
With that said, I worry that this is a metastable state. Witness how thoroughly the zeitgeist of work changed after COVID - all of a sudden, in my (bullshit white-collar) industry, it's just the norm to WFH and maybe grudgingly come in to the office for a few hours 3 days a week. Prior to 2020, it was very hard to get a company to agree to let you WFH even one day a week, because they knew you'd probably spend the time much less productively. Again, "somehow" the real work that was out there still seems to get done.
If AI makes it more and more obvious that office work is now mostly just adult daycare, that lowers the transition energy even more. And we might just be waiting for another sudden societal shock to get us over that hump, and transition to a world where 95% of people are unemployed and this is considered normal. We're heading into uncharted waters.
Gaashk
2d ago
Also, people were bored. Nobody wanted to hear that we had solved everything and we just had to a) wait for laissez faire economic growth to solve all our problems and b) accept that anything which wasn't solving itself just had to be that way. They/we wanted change and adventure. I always think that was a big part of the response to Covid - people were longing for a Big Problem in which we could all Do Our Part.
Yeah, I think this is a big part of the Fourth Turning stuff.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I see it as the final death of the naive optimism that was abroad in the 1989s and 1990s. That was unsustainable becait frankly wasn’t true and couldn’t ever possibly be true. We were kind of faking it by kicking various cans down the road repeatedly. Once we ran out of road, pretending that we were simply going to win Civilization VI style was completely implausible, but this is what people literally believed. We ran out of road because is Islamic theocracy, because we developed a serious addiction to buying now and paying later, and various forms of laziness and gluttony and so on. That was sustainable for two reasons: we were the default currency and the world’s largest market, and we had hands down the best military that could not be seriously challenged. Those conditions could not last because those conditions never do. No nation or empire will ever stay on top forever. But we’d so structured our economy, or lifestyle, our government spending as if we were going to be The Rome that Never Falls.
Once 9/11 happened we slowly came to realize just how much we had let slip away. Arabs with box cutters could strike at will, and not only could we not stop them, we couldn’t even find those responsible. We can’t remain at the top of education when China and India were eating our lunch in STEM. Why buy from Americans when China can make it better and cheaper.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
But that’s not a gender identity. Literally it’s the opposite thereof.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Yeah, the revived battle star was a big deal for portraying suicide bombers in a sympathetic light on big-budget prime time TV. I picked Star Trek as an example because its whole brand is cheery, optimistic future where we can all settle our differences.
I’ll also point to the Catholic Church sex abuse crisis, hurricane katrina, Russo-Georgian war, and no child left behind just blatantly and obviously failing.
TowardsPanna
2d ago
So you'll make over half a million usd per year? :o
That's nuts. Congrats! What field, if I may ask?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2d ago
women gaining ever more status and wealth
And weight
jkf
2d ago
A heroin habit is also a fun thing to do, that imbues the junky with a sense of purpose and fulfillment -- I don't happen to agree that this should be illegal, but glorifying it is clearly not great for society. (or, objectively, the users)
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2d 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.
fmac
2d ago
The two recent top level CW posts about dating have been kinda demoralizing
They've also been so delusional. Do everything you say you're going to do in this post and you'll be fine.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2d ago
It's not unusual for foreign games to be funded by that government (one example that comes to mind is The Long Dark).
Tophattingson
2d ago
On the other hand there are other parts of the gaming industry where the big breakthrough came from taking something relatively niche and low-budget and dumping huge amounts of money into it. To name two examples, Monster Hunter was fairly sizable as a franchise but was ticking over on PS2-era budgets by developing primarily for handhelds, then decided to go AAA for World and massively succeeded. Genshin Impact arrived in what was previously a low-budget Gacha gaming landscape and singlehandedly reshaped it, with a pricetag of $100m upfront and estimated $200m more a year since.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
I'm sorry but "you don't need dysphoria to be trans" is an extremely mainstream position among leftists.
Corvos
2d ago
Also Battlestar Galactica. I think a number of events in the 00s combined to make it clear that we hadn't got answers to all of our problems - the 2008 financial crisis, 9/11 and the inability to turn a theocratic Islamic state into a liberal Western one. Environmentalism. These problems were huge but obviously totally unsolvable by ordinary people.
Also, people were bored. Nobody wanted to hear that we had solved everything and we just had to a) wait for laissez faire economic growth to solve all our problems and b) accept that anything which wasn't solving itself just had to be that way. They/we wanted change and adventure. I always think that was a big part of the response to Covid - people were longing for a Big Problem in which we could all Do Our Part.
PmMeClassicMemes
2d ago
I think it is worth noting that on all of this discussion about blockers, blockers are supposed to be the compromise position that was suggested to placate those concerned about youth gender medicine.
You could just let them take cross-sex hormones instead. Hormones are pretty good at what they do in relatively short order, I have seen many examples of people taking hormones for ~3yrs and along with a haircut, passing well. It works the other direction too, all of the physical changes can also be reversed in short order if you desist and let your gonads get back to work producing your natural sex hormones. When you take E or T, it makes your gonads stop, temporarily, producing hormones, because your body doesn't seem to care which hormone you have, as long as you have a sufficient amount of it coursing through you it's satisfied.
If a trans woman hasn't had an orchiectomy, she can get off hormones and father children within 3 months or so. Same goes for trans men getting off T and getting pregnant.
Kid still goes through puberty, won't have to worry about bone density, won't have to worry about IQ loss, etc. Can reverse it later by stopping them whenever.
aqouta
2d ago
That's an incredible cope and makes a mockery of the claims that trans people need recognition and support or will face risks of mental health and suicide. In the counterfactual world where they were cis they could have found meaning is better ways. You can justify practically any bad thing with this framing. Should we praise and no prevent child abuse because it allows one to overcome it? Cripple children so that they invent new modes of locomotion? Genuinely absurd.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
There are a lot of things I dislike about Pennsylvania law, but one thing I do like is that they got rid of the stupid redemption period nonsense. The idea is that after you lose property to tax sale you have a certain period of time to redeem the property by paying the back taxes on it. What this means in practice is that someone buying property at a tax sale has to cut a check now and then wait a year or years before they can actually take possession of the property. PA still technically has a redemption period, it just happens before the actual tax sale. In other words, if your property is put up for tax sale, it was already delinquent for several years and any possible redemption would have happened already. The New Jersey process appears to be even stupider, where you have to buy a certificate that then gives you the right to foreclose, which really means a right to spend even more money on a lawsuit at some point in the future when back taxes will only continue to accumulate. This just goes to show how a lot of aspects of property law exist as relics from the 1800s when everybody lived on farms and courts used complicated common law pleading procedure. And since none of this is a big enough deal for the state legislature to act on, it just keeps rolling along as a rather constipated discipline.
Other than that, I always find it remarkable when people do absolutely nothing for a decade and when something adverse happens they're suddenly motivated to not only file a separate suit but also appeal that suit. The guy doesn't open an estate for his father, doesn't see that the property taxes are paid, doesn't attempt to redeem the property after the auction is announced, doesn't respond to the foreclosure suit, yet immediately before the property is sold to a third party he files suit challenging the default judgment, and is motivated enough to appeal that judgment when he loses. The worst part of this is that he doesn't even attempt to claim some kind of hardship that may excuse him from not responding to the initial suit (other than that he wasn't on the best terms with his brother), but raises the cockamamie defense that service was improper because they served the brother instead of the estate, except they couldn't serve the estate because the estate didn't formally exist. If the court actually bought this argument, then anyone who inherited someone's house could avoid paying taxes on it indefinitely by simply not opening an estate and claiming improper service.
Beyond, that, though, and I don't think this was mentioned in the opinion, whether the estate was properly served is irrelevant, because the action technically isn't against the property owner but the property itself. Since they weren't seeking a judgment against the father but possession of the house, they only have to notify "the house", which they did by mailing notice to the owner of record and by personally serving notice to an adult at the residence, who happened to also be an heir and possible estate representative. It's hard for me to see what the defendant here thinks the reasonable course of action should have been.
You are ignoring the fact that for many, many trans people, transitioning is inextricably coupled with "dangerous medical procedures". That is, its impossible to decouple the dangerous medical procedures, from the sense of purpose and fulfillment that a completed gender transition gives; that sense of purpose is fulfilled by those dangerous medical procedures.
And here is the crux of the issue. What if I believe that transitioning is not a good thing, and people who transition actually feel worse than they would be in the counterfactual world where they didn't transition? How do we resolve this tension? The only way is to actually analyze the relative happiness levels of transitioners, how and when they transition, and the relative psychological profiles of transitioners and trans people (those who don't transition) in general; in other words, medicalize the issue. And if we do this type of analysis, at best the benefits of transitioning, both for minors and adults, become unclear and murky. At worst, gender transitioning actually seems to make the quality of life for people to be worse; it appears that it actually causes harm in the transitioner - the evidence for which the commentators in this forum have showed to you at length.
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