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It didn’t take much prodding to make you show your entire hand. Might be time to look inwards.

A sizable chunk of “banned” books were sexually inappropriate for school, and some even promoted pedophilia, so I have some serious concerns if you disagree with their removal.

Conservatives also like pretending to be offended by the term "Happy Holidays" every year.

If you're going to name one person, it definitely should not be Fauci, it should be Peter Daszak and his Ecohealth Alliance.

For the curious reader, here's a short introduction, the tip of the iceberg.

> Daszak’s $3.7 million NIH grant first set off alarm bells in early May 2016, as it entered its third year. The NIH requires annual progress reports, but Daszak’s year-two report was late and the agency threatened to withhold funds until he filed it.

> The report he finally did submit worried the agency’s grant specialists. It stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research?

> But the 2015 research paper he cited was not particularly reassuring. In it, Shi Zhengli and a preeminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina, Ralph Baric, mixed components of SARS-like viruses from different species, and created a novel chimera that was able to directly infect human cells. (Baric did not respond to written questions seeking comment.)

> If anything, the MERS study Daszak proposed was even riskier. So he pitched a compromise to the NIH: that if any of the recombined strains showed 10 times greater growth than a natural virus, “we will immediately: i) stop all experiments with the mutant, ii) inform our NIAID Program Officer and the UNC [Institutional Biosafety Committee] of these results and iii) participate in decision making trees to decide appropriate paths forward.”

> This mention of UNC brought a puzzled response from an NIH program officer, who pointed out that the proposal had said the research would be performed at the WIV. “Can you clarify where the work with the chimeric viruses will actually be performed?” the officer wrote. Ten days later, with still no response from Daszak, the program officer emailed him again. On June 27, Daszak responded, buoyant as ever:

> “You are correct to identify a mistake in our letter. UNC has no oversight of the chimera work, all of which will be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology…. We will clarify tonight with Prof. Zhengli Shi exactly who will be notified if we see enhanced replication…my understanding is that I will be notified straight away, as [principal investigator], and that I can then notify you at NIAID. Apologies for the error!”

> Allowing such risky research to go forward at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was “simply crazy, in my opinion,” says Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center. “Reasons are lack of oversight, lack of regulation, the environment in China,” where scientists who publish in prestigious journals get rewarded by the government, creating dangerous incentives. “So that is what really elevates it to the realm of, ‘No, this shouldn’t happen.’”

The idea that the lab was in Wuhan due to the prevalence of bat coronaviruses in the region was one of the most frequent, yet almost universally unreferenced claims, that was made to explain away why the virus coincidentally showed up first in the same city as the lab. Hubei, where Wuhan is located, is not a central hot spot of bat coronaviruses in China. The available information points toward bat coronaviruses being much more common in the Southern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and in particular Guangdong. This can be seen in Figure 1 ("Geographical distribution of bat coronaviruses") in the below referenced Chinese study on bat coronaviruses from 2019, published by members of the Wuhan Institute of Virology less than a year before the sars-cov-2 outbreak.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6466186/

Do you know where you got this idea? It's completely wrong and incredibly prevalent; so I'm wondering if particular sources are misleading people, or if it just "feels right" and people come to it independently unprompted.

Beyond the general background already linked, Dr. Shi specifically did not expect that natural spillover of SARS-CoV-2 occurred near Wuhan:

> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.scien...

She could be wrong, but the idea that she chose her work location based on the natural abundance of sarbecoviruses is unequivocally false.

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The initial cases of covid 19 cluster around the wet market. The lab is in another part of the city.

If it were a lab leak then we’d expect the initial cases to cluster around the lab, and to show up in those who had contact with lab workers.

Nobody considered the lab as a source because the basic epidemiological evidence doesn’t support it.

I agree with #1 and #3, but in trying to be overly fair, you're leaving out some important details in #2.

people went to a lab leak (intentional or not) theory very quickly with no evidence

It was known at the time that the Wuhan lab was studying coronavirus, and known they had both safety and security lapses. That is far from proof, but it is evidence.

Also, the incentive was to blame China was mixed. At the time, Xi had recently the US, and both sides were advancing a trade deal. It was a moment the US govt was trying to improve relations, and particularly get US agricultural sales to China boosted. The lab leak talk was tamped down for months. It wasn't until March that you had US officials really start to talk about it.

I think you're right about this. The appearance of conspiracy can easily occur among people who aren't covertly communicating with each other when they have aligned values and incentives.

This. You might argue given only the information that the pandemic exists and the city of origin of the first cases, it's reasonable to prefer the lab leak hypothesis, but there's a lot more evidence around than that, and most of it favors the zoonotic origin. Lab leak isn't completely ruled out (especially versions of the theory where it was a zoonotic virus that was released, as opposed to a modified one), but it's far from the obvious favourite given the evidence.

If you don't die of something else first, cancer is what will get you. Increased cancer rates are merely a side effect of improvements in other aspects of health and longevity.

just jump on the two examples instead of actually considering the point being made, i guess.

Think "leaded gasoline" if you need a concrete example

Divorce lawyers are generally the most profitable. $750/hr if you’re good.

> trial lawyers would rapidly become the wealthiest people on Earth if genuine, reproducible evidence of harm from non-ionizing radiation could be found.

Probably not, as electronics manufacturers would quikly take that into consideration. Liability comes from both knowing and continuing.

>If you publish new evidence in favour of a popular theory, your paper gets published – sometimes in a prestigious journal. Whereas if you demonstrate compelling evidence overturning a high-profile scientific dogma of international import, you… checks notes win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Hm.

The last time a Nobel Prize was awarded to someone overturning a long-held charged dogma was in 2005 when Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They demonstrated that Helicobacter pylori bacteria, not stress or excess stomach acid, were the primary cause of peptic ulcers.

Whereas the inverse--suppression of findings that invalidated long-held scientific dogmas--are numerous throughout the last 150 years. Stegener faced ridicule and suppression for continental drift. So did Semmelweiss for germ theory. And Mendelian inheritance. And Lemaître's expanding universe. And Prusiner's prion theory. And Margulis's endosymbiotic theory. And horizontal gene transfer.

Beyond Marshall and Warren, Prusiner was the only one to receive a Nobel for their findings and that was fifteen years after consensus had emerged from below.

And in the case of Marshall and Warren, the findings of a bacterial origin of ulcers had been published in 1906, 1913, 1919, 1925, 1939, 1951, 1955, 1958, 1964, 1971, 1982, and 1983. With this 1983 paper being authored by... Marshall and Warren. They will not receive a Nobel Prize for their findings for another 22 years.

Science is moved forward in spite of dogmatic consensus, not because of it.

That's completely correct and valid but also in order to see this as a problem one has to presume that that the belief in it, or anything else you might care to put in it's place, is itself flawed. I don't believe in climate change because it's beneficial or not beneficial: I have read numerous things on the subject, all of which paint a consistent, reproducible, and relatable-to-my-life situation which happens to be about a decades-long propaganda campaign on the part of the fossil fuel industry to downplay the harms their products were doing to our atmosphere since the goddamn 1950's, one that, as the parent says, happens to make them shitloads of money. Just like leaded gasoline did. Just like cigarettes did, which led the tobacco industry to do similar things previously until they were outlawed in the developed world, which has caused them to simply shift focus to developing countries where they're now poisoning a whole new generation of people.

I'm highly skeptical of folks who take issue with something like "trust the science" because, while I fully cosign that as a slogan it's lacking and one doesn't "trust" science so much as learn about it and see if it holds up, the sort of people who say things like that invariably follow up with something like questioning climate change, or questioning the handling of the COVID pandemic. And that's not to say that there weren't mistakes made, we made a shitload of them, but too many bad actors in that space will take legitimate problems with the response to COVID and use that to launch into things like saying vaccines cause autism or are a plot on the part of China to kill all the white people, or other such ridiculous fuckin nonsense.

And maybe that's wrong of me to assume, but also if you consistently find yourself on the same side of a debate as the worst people imaginable, maybe that's something you should sit with and figure out how you feel about it, and if it points to you possibly being skeptical about the wrong things.

I would also put forward that something I've observed as we've gotten further and further into the social media age is the conflation between skepticism and ignorance, which are different things, and people who are doing the second thing will reliably say they are doing the former. To be skeptical is not a bad thing, even an uninformed skeptic like a member of the general public is fully capable of being at least somewhat informed, vetting sources, and coming to reasonably accurate conclusions without a formal education, however, it is also extremely, trivially easy for a layman to find stuff that corroborates whatever they think is already the truth, stated in professional-looking formats, that looks like science but just isn't credible or worthy of being taken seriously, and then go "look, see, I found this thing. I'm right!" If you find one, single academic, who has an entire rest-of-their-discipline shouting at them about how wrong they are, which is more likely: that you found one truth teller in a sea of liars, or that you found one liar?

Science done well is distrustful of its own results. The key is to trust science practiced by trustworthy institutions and individuals and reported on in an accurate and informative way. Similar to good journalism, trust should be earned and verified at every level. Not every time, that isn't reasonable, but enough that you aren't surprised at what you find when you do additional checking. Check sources. Look for conflicts of interest. Survey the field. These are all basic things that people think they do but often don't.

I'll also say that that 'I don't trust science' implies that the scientific method is somehow corrupt. The scientific method is a thing that can be used well or badly. 'I don't trust science' is like saying 'I don't trust statistics'. The wrong person can use out of context science, done well, to imply totally absurd things.

okay, and whats your point? The point is "97%" or "99%" of "climate scientists agree" that "anthropogenic causes" are the reason for climate change. But this study questions the foundations (and i mentioned i am only linking one, that i downloaded a few weeks ago to save, there are of course other papers that each chip away at the political and media narrative about the whole field). Please refer to the GP:

> I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change?

"climate science" is all models, this paper (among others) implies that the data fed in to the models may be influencing the output of the models in a way that isn't conducive to actually understanding the "climate". How can i make this assertion? I read the IPCC reports. both the pre-release and the official releases. I don't recommend it, unless you feel like being Cassandra.

all the models that they use as evidence use the temperature sensor data so i am not sure what you're trying to convince me of. Also: Judd et al., Science 385, 1316 (2024)

you mean the sea ice, that had the highest extent in 20 years this year? Or a different sea ice, perhaps the one they always trot out around January? you know, when it's summer in the southern hemisphere?

The sea ice data isn't 1:1 with the seasons, so "data scientists" and "climate scientists" pick the cutoff date that makes the best headline. Even this year they were saying the ice was lower than average, but they cutoff 3+ weeks early, the ice was above average a few weeks later.

https://usicecenter.gov/PressRelease/ArcticMaximum2024

Besides all this, i am unsure if you're supportive or not of what i said.

For what it's worth: I'm not saying Singal is exaggerating how bad SciAm is. I think I agree with him, and have complained about it elsewhere.

I do have a problem with him dipping his toes into defenses of scientific racism (which is what he's doing when he implicitly imputes wokeism to an editorial calling E.O. Wilson out for dabbling in scientific racism). This is a problem with the reflexive contrarian rationalist sphere Singal has allowed himself to be relegated to (listen to his podcast, it's even more obvious there).

A lot of stuff SciAm has written is real dumb and even destructive. But not everything that anti-woke people object to in SciAm is wrong; if you adopt that stance, you can launder all sorts of crazy things into the discourse. He did that here.

Many demands, but probably the most egregious is the insistence that males be incarcerated in women's prisons if they say they are women. Several states now have policy that enables this, and female prisoners have been sexually assaulted, raped and even impregnated as a result of this.

More generally, this graphic has an astute depiction of the problem: https://i.ibb.co/ZcMWLvM/no.jpg

> Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever.

Do you have young children? I don’t live in the USA, I live in Europe, but I have a very small baby and I already did. The daycare, just this year announced they aren’t going to be celebrating Mother and Father’s Day anymore. Instead we will have to celebrate a Parents day.

This is just a small thing of course, there are many other situations where it’s clear an agenda is being pushed over the general population. The only way I can see you never felt it, is if you don’t have children.

I want to live my way outside of superficial constructs like gender. I do not want to be forced to accommodate people who think that gender identity is something relevant.

The current political climate sucks for agender people.

I think people should be left to do whatever they want.

But my son at age 5 asked me “Daddy do you think I’m a boy just because I have a penis?” This is because his woke kindergarten teachers started teaching this gender nonsense and that’s where I had to start teaching my kid about how all this was nonsense.

Where I draw the line is when I am told to lie to myself and my children that there is more than 2 genders and that a man is actually a woman if he thinks he is a woman. I refuse to do that and the fact that the activists have crossed the line into absurdity is where I fight back. I will not let my children grow up in an anti-science world like that.

Speaking for myself, in terms of policy this issue wouldn't even crack my top 100. But in terms of electoral politics? I think the evidence is pretty good that it had a lot of salience in the last election. Many swing voters who broke for Trump have said that gender and/or trans issues were a big factor for them. Something like a third of Trump's closing ads were about this topic and Kamala's campaign checking a box that they were in favor of sex change operations for criminals became a huge talking point.

As someone who cares deeply about a lot of separate issues that Trump will be terrible on, I wish progressives would STFU on this topic and stop stabbing their party in the back. Treating trans people with dignity and respect should go without saying, but some of the left wing rhetoric on this issues goes too far like when they deny that there is any biological difference between men and women. A lot of the efforts on the left look more like virtue signaling and fighting for the sake of it, rather than trying to achieve better real world outcomes.

The operators and customers of this spa noticed:

https://x.com/KatieDaviscourt/status/1858611351901663550

https://x.com/ItsYonder/status/1858673181315506307

Does your daughter play competitive sports? Has she been knocked down by a boy playing on a girl’s team?

On a personal level, linguistic imperialism. For all the rhetoric spewed regarding the impacts of colonialism and cultural imperialism and fervent calls to decolonize various aspects of society, the whites spewing that very same rhetoric have found a way to launder their own modern brand of imperialism into gender diversity and inclusivity by inventing and then imposing new language on that of other ethnic minorities: "Filipinx." This word shows a shocking ignorance of basic facts of Tagalog that it can't be construed in any way other than racist: there is no letter "x" in Tagalog, and the grammar of the language is already genderless. This point becomes readily apparent if you are conversing with a native Tagalog speaker who uses English as a second language, as they will readily confuse the pronouns "he" and "she" in everyday speech, the concept of gendered pronouns being, quite literally, foreign to them. Is this transphobic bigotry?

The Philippines has already undergone multiple rounds of colonization over centuries, leading to the slow-motion eradication of their native language as Spanish and especially English have overtaken it to the point where many Filipinos cannot even speak pure Tagalog any more [0]. Hasn't the western white already colonized the Philippines enough? First it was, "your pagan religion is immoral and barbaric; here, read this Bible." Now, it's, "your transphobic language is bigoted and uninclusive; here, take these pronouns." How about obeying Starfleet's Prime Directive by leaving other cultures the fuck alone?

If you don't find this top-down imposition and control of language disturbing, I suggest you review your Orwell.

On a more abstract level, "the group's" intolerance of dissenting opinion and academic inquiry, especially when such inquiry shows its positions to be internally contradictory. Take for instance Rebecca Tuvel's paper In Defense of Transracialism, published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, which argues that "considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism." [1] Rather than judge this assertion on its merits and attempt to defeat it rationally, the community demanded the paper be retracted, the author was pilloried for her hateful language and dangerous ideas, and there were multiple departures from Hypatia's editorial team.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLFoUTJuGU

[1] https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/hypa.12327

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>Would you be willing to defuse it by instituting a policy of always saying "merry Christmas" instead of "happy holidays"?

This is nonsensical. This isn't "defusing" it, this is authoritarianism and literal capitulation to the absurd demands that are meaningless

People say "Happy holidays" now because they know some people don't celebrate Christmas and they want to be nice, friendly, and pleasant to them as well.

If you have a problem with people saying "Happy holidays" in place of "Merry Christmas" you are a fucking baby.

You can't "defuse" a wedge issue, you can only decline to be manipulated. That is an individual act. There is no "side" to a wedge issue, it is a false dichotomy crafted to create maximal division. They are focus group tested and refined to do so.

The "War on Christmas" effects a greater sense of persecution while framing it as a nonexistent conflict. There is no War on Christmas. I can say Merry Christmas or not, and it will not effect the wedge issue because it is and never was about saying Merry Christmas to others.

> Would you be willing to defuse it by instituting a policy of always saying "merry Christmas" instead of "happy holidays"?

I'm an atheist and this is my approach. I think their religion is complete nonsense but Christmas is a wholly inoffensive Holiday, which is celebrated in a fashion by many secular people anyway. I think the "Happy Holidays" thing is needlessly antagonist. In principle it should be fine but a lot of people take it the wrong way, it is known that many people take it the wrong way, and therefore if I said it then I would be saying it with the knowledge and acceptance that it's going to bother a lot of people (hence, antagonistic.)

> You can hate the policies/movement and still have sympathy for the individuals.

I think people on the right (outright bigots excepted) would say they do have sympathy, and it's for kids who have been influenced by the media or whatever to think that they are the opposite gender.

> However, I'm not sure that encouraging young people to make one-way decisions (or decisions where we are not yet sure whether they are one way or not) is the correct approach.

And I think the response here is that not taking action is also one-way, causing irreversible changes, like to the bone structure.

Yes, this is the kind of nuanced take that has been squeezed out by ideological snap-to-grid from the warring tribes.

The Cass report in the UK was pretty clear that there isn't enough evidence to base decisions on https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-r...

>>>

While a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.

The strengths and weaknesses of the evidence base on the care of children and young people are often misrepresented and overstated, both in scientific publications and social debate.

The controversy surrounding the use of medical treatments has taken focus away from what the individualised care and treatment is intended to achieve for individuals seeking support from NHS gender services.

The rationale for early puberty suppression remains unclear, with weak evidence regarding the impact on gender dysphoria, mental or psychosocial health. The effect on cognitive and psychosexual development remains unknown.

The use of masculinising / feminising hormones in those under the age of 18 also presents many unknowns, despite their longstanding use in the adult transgender population. The lack of long-term follow-up data on those commencing treatment at an earlier age means we have inadequate information about the range of outcomes for this group.

Ideally, i guess, in some mental models, we'd love to have some sort of super powerful system that can compute a global utility function that considers second (and third, etc) order effects accurately enough to plan out actions that maximize the global utility (without violating ethical norms) until we are immortal and have unlimited energy resources and ability to manipulate matter.

In practice, we instead have centers that focus on first-order effects and who advocate for their position (from an authority based on scientific knowledge, and preparation for emergencies) which are then evaluated and mixed with other centers by political leaders to incorporate the best attempt at considering second and further effects.

Everybody has a different utilitarian model and we don't have enough data or algorithms to predict second or third order effects (we usually fall back on "wisdom" from prior experience).

Those were the same people causing the second order effects. And the second order effects they caused killed my grandma. So I don't see the problem with referring to them as such.

The point (as I understand it) was not to protect the kids themselves from covid, but that kids are active vectors of illness: they get sick easily and rapidly spread it to everyone around them. Sending kids to school during a pandemic is basically asking to fast-track that sickness to everyone in the community.

Fewer days in school reducing test scores is very much expected. Going from that to claiming an adverse effect on learning, much less an overall harm, is quite a leap.

I'm sure the brain damage that COVID still causes (there are 3x more cases this year than in 2020, fun fact) is more of a danger to kids than staying home.

Who do you think closed schools in order to try to get an electoral advantage?

I would describe what you said here as a procedure for how to gather and apply the science/knowledge you are going to use for your treatment. So trusting the science, just more details on how to go about doing that.

> Medicine is extremely complex and medical errors are the 4th leading cause of death in the US.

Do you have the source for this? I have never seen it on the list of leading causes of death. For example:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db492-tables.pdf#4

I think when someone say something you are confused or have doubts about what they mean, then you ask them what they mean. This sentence can be used to mean many things (including mocking up scientists ot trolling). So please next time you see or hear someone says that please ask them that.

If I would use it personally I will probably use it to mean trust the evidence based knowledge that the scientific community is using.

I have never once in my life heard the phrase "Trust the science" from anyone other than someone fighting a strawman

The motto here does not align with how I read it compared to:

> The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom

"take nobody's word for it" -> anyone can say anything, that is just a claim, things other than that matter like data, replication, etc.

That is different and superior than a simple, broad, statement to 'distrust'.

... source?

(sorry, couldn't resist)

https://royalsociety.org/about-us/who-we-are/history

Yes, therefore trusting or distrusting authorities is irrelevant. One can distrust authorities and do bad science, one can trust authorities and do good science, and other combinations.

The scientific method has no authorities, but science does.

One funeral at a time is true but “standing on the shoulders of giants” is also true and there is absolutely good science done without redoing all experiments since Newton, like there is a bad science standing on the sand hill of the other bad science. Having distrust by itself will not make one a good scientist and so it can’t be “the essence of science”.

I think that's a good addition. My main point is that it's not just one signal, and that 'virtue' carries too much emotional and moral freight. Maybe call them Signals of Virtues.

You are misunderstanding their point. They are not saying that anybody is denying the election results.

A "bare fact", as they put it, is a statement exclusively of fact. Adding the qualifier to the fact makes it no longer a "bare fact". To use their example, "Snoop won the election," is a bare fact and, "Snoop won the election and that's bad," is not a bare fact.

What they are saying is that some people cannot accept "bare fact" statements as such; they tend to add or expect some qualifier to the effect of "that's good" or "that's bad".

I also am not denying that Trump won.

I am saying that acceptance is complicated.

Yes people have strong opinions.

Denying that strong opinions exist harms communication.

Which makes him ineligible to be the president next year, but his side doesn't care about consistency

I didn't say otherwise.

Lysenkoism persisted in the Soviet Union because people who pointed out the inconsistencies too straightforwardly would find themselves in hot water. Anyone who wanted to discuss the issue had to approach it somewhat obliquely. Most people were unable to comprehend this discourse - a necessary precondition to avoid trouble.

You could try looking very closely at your middle paragraph and looking for analogies with contemporary bio-politics.

Merriam-Webster changed their definition of "vaccine" in 2021. They did this so the COVID shots could still be called "vaccines" despite not preventing infection, not preventing transmission, and providing only a moderate therapeutic benefit. In doing so they cannibalized and damaged public trust in "vaccines" which the medical community had built for so many years, and at such great expense.

As is often the case, the problem was not a dumb public "losing trust in [thing]" but managers playing sleight-of-hand with the meanings of words. See also: racism.

> He also pushed ivermectin which studies show has no statistically significant effect on COVID.

Studies showed that it had a statistically significant effect on COVID. The problem is that with hindsight it is obvious any sufficiently powerful study will show it has a statistically significant effect so the existence of that effect isn't particularly interesting evidence.

There will be people who have both COVID and parasites. If you give them Ivermectin around the time they catch COVID, they will get better outcomes. Statistics will pick that up, it is a real effect. AND it has real world policy implications, there are a lot of people in the world who should immediately be given Ivermectin if they catch COVID (or, indeed, any disease). The more important political issue was when people noticed that (very real) effect without understanding the cause they were attacked rather than someone explaining what was happening.

It is a good case study of evidence being misleading, but the statistical significance of that evidence is indisputable. Any study that doesn't find that effect is just underpowered - it is there. In fact as a baseline it turns out we would expect any effective drug will have a statistically significant positive effect on COVID outcomes.

> He also pushed raw milk when prior to pasteurization, milk was the cause of 25% of all communicable diseases (it’s a great medium for bacteria, it has avian flu viruses, parasites, etc). We invented pasteurization for a reason.

Raw milk is legal to sell in most of Europe and they still have overall better health outcomes, so at the very least it’s a triviality.

> the real reason for US health decline is too much sugars/carbs, too little exercise, and addiction to opioids and nicotine.

I think a more fundamental root cause is that US regulation has failed to adequately keep up with the playbooks of large companies that stand to profit from various products that result in compromised health.

Take a look at what's being heavily advertised/marketed. If it contains ingredients people haven't been consuming for thousands of years, I think it's suspect and should be subject to intense scrutiny. (Same goes for widely used B2B products that affect what people consume.)

Unfortunately, there's too much "we only test in prod" going on, so it's hard to isolate widespread problems to a single source. That's why (in my opinion) the FDA should require clinical trials and use an allowlist-based approach to food additives. Currently it's a denylist, which amounts to testing in prod.

I'll also say that this is not unique to him, it's how conspiracy minded people operate.

You'll see exactly this playbook playout with flat earthers. "We can't know the earth is round because it's not been tested." or "It's actually industry captured" or "The US government prevents people from doing real tests to see if the earth is flat".

You see, if you asked them "what would it take for you to abandon this theory" their honest answer is "nothing" because any counter evidence to the theory will just get wrapped up in more conspiracy.

What would it take for me to abandon my belief in evolution? Evidence that explains why things appear to evolve and shows what actually happens instead.

What will make me abandon my support of vaccination? Evidence that shows vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they protect against.

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle. That's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for, regardless of which side of whatever battle you're on.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The fact that you think we can just engineer our way out of climate change is half of the problem - to say nothing of the fact that, as far as I'm aware, the Republican party does not really accept the threat of climate change.

> I assume you're implying that people who [...]

Nope.

I was answering a comment opposing a comment opposing cancelation.

FWIW the moment I started wondering if we were losing liberal norms actually was reading Dawkins in the 00s calling for scientists to coordinate against debating creationists. Like I was with him in being convinced even "scientific" creationism is powered by Christianity and not any good evidence from nature, and I guess I need to say I had absolutely no problem with any scientist choosing not to engage with any creationist. But there's something anti-science in a campaign to expel a belief from public debate, by a means other than better arguments. That can conceivably be a good thing in some case; but it's the opposite of science.

Relying on Facebook is a bad idea because it's a corporation operating under different pressures than healthy discourse, further trying to direct your attention in its own interest, applying resources it gains this way to modeling you. You can try to improve its moderation but besides the trouble you bring up, probably any success you can get that way will just seed a competing platform. I prefer to give my energy to an open protocol such as Bluesky's (admittedly I haven't looked at its protocol spec) -- unless you can take away everyone's personal computers, everyone's not going to live under your favorite monitor. An open protocol is compatible with choosing among competing moderators. (BTW the pre-web Xanadu vision included open-ended moderator choice, and how different system designs could have different social effects, and the importance of getting it right.)

"useful" should be replaced with "interesting" because we never know what will turn out to be useful, but by definition, we only look for things that interest us. And I disagree that's a philosophical or political consideration in most cases. It may be in some institutions, but I am sure most scientists will circumvent any restrictions imposed by their institutions in order to actually study what they themselves find interesting, even if under the covers of what their institutions want them to.

As a tangent: even if you're correct that what scientists decide or are allowed to research is mostly political, the facts they find are not, at least if the scientific method is being used properly. Facts are never racist. Facts do not have opinions. And science should look for true facts, not opinions. Hence, even if your focus is on things you find political, the scientific facts and hypothesis you end up with must not be.

There's the problem with naive utilitarianism. The experts want to minimize deaths across the population. I want to minimize the risk to my otherwise healthy children (hypothetically. I don't have children and I am vaccinated). These legitimate desires can and do conflict. Who has precedence is entirely political, not scientific.

And plenty of medical experts get the Monty Hall problem wrong.

I think his credentials speak for themselves. He cites, as expertise, two articles (in popular magazines mind you, not scientific journals) and a book he wrote. That makes him an expert on gender health issues?

He has no medical degree, no published research to speak of.

GLAAD reviewed one of the articles and catalogued it: https://glaad.org/gap/jesse-singal/

The conclusion and many points in the article hinge on his self-claimed expertise. There is no expertise.

But that's a Peruvian bear.

And a book on trees that doesn't have the larch in it.

I just chose one example from the early years of science, and one modern case. Anyone can fill in countless cases of science being highly politicized in the intervening centuries.

> There are matters of degrees, and it's almost universally acknowledged to be bad, because it usually means results and emphasis have been distorted because of the politics.

No, science is generally objective, but its results have political implications. To take the pandemic as an example. Virology and epidemiology came to a clear, objective, true conclusion: social distancing and vaccination would drastically reduce the death toll of the pandemic. However, because there are people who reject social distancing (e.g., people who run businesses) and vaccination (anti-vaxxers and opportunistic politicians who see that as an issue they can push), virology and epidemiology have become politically controversial. It's also politically convenient in the United States to distract from the government's own failure to effectively respond to the pandemic by pushing conspiracy theories about the virus coming from a lab in a scary foreign country (and if you don't accept that this is a conspiracy theory, I'm sorry, but you've fallen victim to the widespread propaganda on this issue in American media over the last few years, which is 100% at odds with the conclusions that the scientific community has reached). The problem isn't with virology or epidemiology themselves. The problem is with how the society and political system respond to science.

You can read Singal's response to these criticisms here: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/a-sorta-quick-response-to...

The criticisms of Singal's piece are pretty weak, and often resort to refuting things he never actually wrote. He explicitly notes that data is sparse - this is one of the most controversial research subjects - but it does indeed suggest a desistance rate of 50-60% absent medical intervention. Contrast that with the common claim that desistance in gender dysphoric children is a myth which is just totally contradicted by the available evidence.

> Singal has argued repeatedly that Zucker was fired without cause due to a witch hunt by trans activists (this will come up again)

And Singal was right in that regard. Zucker was awarded over half a million dollars in a defamation suit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Zucker#Settlement

A lot of awful men on that list.

Andrea James the obsessive stalker and harrasser, Julia Serrano the abusive misogynist who thinks lesbians should be shamed for not wanting dick, Ana Valens the creep who openly fantasizes about raping women in breeding farms.

If these horrible males are angry at Singal then I can only assume he's doing something right.

> I think it is fair to say that through the nomination process, whoever is voted to run as the Republican nominee for president is considered to be the best representative for the party.

It is not fair to say that at all. The primary system is highly undemocratic, and what’s more, the people who participate in it aren’t statistically representative of Republican voters as a whole.

That's a naive way to see it. People vote _against_ the other candidate, against what they fear is worse. And, if the theory that the frontrunner is the best representation of the party holds true, it speaks quite poorly for the Democrats appointing Harris despite Biden winning the vote of his party, no?

And, again, tu quoque; even if the GOP was exhaustively comprised of reality-evading lunatics, voters and all, it wouldn't excuse stooping to their level -- the DNC's _explicit_ support of racial identitarianism, benevolent racism, and biological denialism run in direct opposition to this supposed moral high ground they tacitly hold.

So biological denialism is a morally superior position to hold, then? Democratic leaders can't ever seem to acknowledge biological differences between the sexes, certainly not with regards to competitive advantages.

As for it being "core policy", I'd need to a see a citation, otherwise it's conjecture. The 2024 GOP platform [1] doesn't mention climate change, global warming, IPCC, et al. once, whereas the DNC's platform [2] discusses it at length.

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2024 [2] https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...

Many adults desist and detransition so why wouldn't children, if left to develop normally? The problem with blocking these dysphoric childrens' puberty, putting them on cross-sex hormones and, in some cases, surgically removing body parts, is that they're never given a chance to explore how they would feel as fully developed adults.

Even referring to them as "trans children" comes with the assumption that this is some inherent and unchanging quality rather than a temporary state. Why assume this without evidence?

It doesn't reject scientific method completely, but you also can't trivially ignore social dynamics, because scientific method routinely deals with issue simply by waiting for the old generation to go extinct, then consensus can be naturally reached.

> It seems to me like a lot of historical context would go into that discovery […] it's silly to pretend that people can somehow operate in a way that's entirely removed from history and culture.

Certainly in terms of who was able to participate in the discovery, but I doubt the actual discovered structure was shaped much by the discoverers. Put another way, I would be absolutely fascinated to see other accurate greenfield formulations of an atomic model that do not resemble our current one which could have been invented by another set of possible discoverers enabled by fortune to pursue them. I think that the ideas defining the model comprise the “shape” of the discovery more than the discoverers themselves, who merely stumbled upon them and investigated.

How about insisting that puberty blockers are an effective treatment for gender dysphoria despite international reviews that fail to show a benefit? [0] And despite virtually every other first world nation no longer recommending the treatment? And refusing to publish NIH funded studies on puberty blockers when they fail to show they effectiveness you thought they would? Does that count as denying science and reason?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/health/hilary-cass-transg...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/science/puberty-blockers-...

Can you tell me what the Department of Education has measurably accomplished since its establishment in 1979? Inflation adjusted spending per student has increased by about 3X since then, and test scores have not improved, even falling in recent years. Financial aid for college has perversely led to vastly overinflated tuitions, while subsidizing many useless degrees.

These problems are not a simple matter of funding. One need only at California's High Speed Rail project. Costs have soared from early estimates of $15B to now more than $130B+, despite almost no track being laid over the last 15 years. This is in a one party state with complete Democrat control, so you can't blame Republicans.

Bureaucratic mismanagement and inefficiency are the overwhelming problems now.

As it should. Those were examples, point was repeated exposure to something doesn't make it more true, just makes you more brainwashed.