Osteoporosis is not harm?
Sigh.
I’m astonished at the profound ignorance on display at the SCOTUS today. Sotomajor and Jackson- you think giving T to a boy is the same as giving it to a girl? You believe a girl can go through “typical male puberty”? I am dumbfounded.
— Miriam Grossman MD (@Miriam_Grossman) December 4, 2024
And strangio — “blockers do not harm”, are you kidding me? The reason Sweden rejected them is because “Leo” developed spinal fractures from blocker-induced osteoporosis. Don’t you know ANYTHING?
— Miriam Grossman MD (@Miriam_Grossman) December 4, 2024
For some wishful thinkers, science works in a manner opposite to that established from the time of Archimedes through the thinkers of the post-Mediaeval Enlightenment and on up to the present.
Procedure: 1. Put your head inside a thick black bag. 2. Find within that said head the conclusion you want. 3. Reject any facts that do not fit that conclusion, particularly if vested and/or religious interests are involved. 4. Remove the bag from over your head. 5. Repeat procedure for next investigation.
It works well for some, eg anti-vaxxers, flat-Earth theorists, climatology denialists, and men who want to believe themselves to be women. One could put it under the rubric ‘Freedom of Opinion.’
People know how to think about magical things. It’s the same as with matters of religion: just have faith. For most people, science is just another sort of esoteric, magical knowledge to be regarded in the same way as religion. Even educated people apprehend things outside their fields of expertise in this way. Trans is part of the faith of the Democratic party. Just as they might with any religious dogma, the faithful see their credulous acceptance as ironclad deduction, because the cognitive load is entirely outsourced. The religious, just like the people of Oceania, are practiced in not seeing and not understanding evidence and arguments that oppose doctrine.
Indeed. Susceptibility to crazy beliefs has very little to do with education, let alone general brain power. Things like intelligence, logical and analytical skills etc. are tools for achieving goals. Bringing our beliefs into alignment with reality is one such goal, but far from the only one. Other examples might include psychological comfort, “winning” [1] arguments, “virtue signaling”, rooting for our team, booing the other team, and, above all, protecting our self-image as intelligent, rational, autonomous, moral agents who would never come to believe anything like that unless it were true. Very often, beliefs that seem crazy to us are “crazy” only in so far as and to the extent that factual accuracy is even the goal. Those same beliefs may be perfectly adaptive with respect to other goals like, say, signaling tribal loyalty. As I have previously said, I think highly educated and intelligent people are often the most vulnerable to self-deception (or, for that matter, deception by others), in part precisely because they think they’re too clever to be deluded, but also because their intelligence makes them even better at rationalizing their beliefs. Self-identified “intellectual” types also tend to be more heavily invested in their self-image as too clever to be deceived and hence more motivated to justify their mistakes. It’s the motivation that’s lacking, not the brain power.
It is tempting to think that people believe crazy shit because they’re too “trusty”, “credulous”, “naive”, “gullible” etc., and that everyone just needs to “think for themselves”. There is, of course, no shortage of naivety or gullibility out there, but there are also plenty of people who hold crazy beliefs because they trust their own thinking too much and vastly overestimate the depth of their understanding (practically the definition of the Dunning Kruger Effect). Nor is there any shortage of distrust, suspicion, cynicism, or even outright paranoia going on. Indeed, in my experience most true believers are into all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories [2] and often see themselves as the only people on the planet who have not been “brainwashed”, “drunk the Kool-Aid”, “swallowed the blue pill” etc. It’s everybody else who is living in the Matrix and sleepwalking through life oblivious to the forces that are actually driving world events, while the true believers are the ones who have taken the red pill, had their eyes opened, and “see the world as it really is”. Apparently extreme distrust, suspicion, and cynicism (especially of the selective kind!), can be manipulated as easily as trust, credulousness, naivety, or gullibility.
Despite what many Movement Skeptics might like to think, just “following the facts” or “letting the evidence speak for itself” is not a solution. Even the smartest, most educated person who ever lived is only personally familiar with >> 1 % of all the scientific knowledge that’s out there, and of that tiny fraction >> 1 % is first-hand knowledge. There simply isn’t time to derive all the answers we need to get through life the “right” way. Hence we can’t do without some degree of trust, if not in individual scientists, then at least in the scientific process. And this is where the kind of cancellation campaigns we have seen against people like Kathleen Stock and Carol Hooven, the ideological capture of Scientific American and even Nature (!) etv. are having such a disastrous effect. As people like Greg Lukianoff have pointed out, even if a claim is in fact based on sound research, people are understandably thinking:
They are right to think so.
[1] In terms of public perception if not in terms of actual merit.
[2] Postmodern radical skepticism serves much of the same same function: For desirable conclusions it’s an excuse to believe (“There is no objective truth anyway, therefore my unjustified beliefs are no less ‘true’ than anything else!”), for undesirable conclusion it’s a permanent blank check to dismiss inconvenient evidence or arguments (“Any talk of ‘evidence’ and ‘logic’ is just a naked exercise of power to justify the existing dominance hierarchies anyway!”)
They’re not right to think so though; that kind of reflexive cynicism just isn’t particularly smart (and is no way to go through life; if you want certainty reach for religion). Instead Bayesian epistemology is the solution; weight the truthfulness of your sources.
BKiSA
I don’t think the cynicism is entirely “reflexive” in this case, though: More like a perfectly understandable response to a real and very serious problem of ideological capture. I also think there’s a relevant difference between worrying about basic scientific integrity and demanding certainty. It’s all very well to advocate for Bayesian epistemology and weighting the the truthfulness of your sources, but just like “just following the facts” or “letting the evidence speak for itself”, that’s hardly a straightforward matter, but something that requires a great deal of experience and accumulated pre-knowledge in its own right. I am not making myself difficult for the sake of being difficult. I honestly don’t know the answer.
This is a counterintuitive lesson. Epistemology and even logic itself are normative, because our relationship to truth is fundamentally a root, brute assignment of value. It might as well be an article of faith:
You shall love the truth with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.
It’s first, because it’s an axiom. You don’t derive and deduce axioms, because they define the systems in which derivations and deductions exist.
I think Simon and Garfunkel said it best: A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.
@Bjarte
I’ve seen too much of the prattlings of various alt-something loons to find any attractions in the command to “just think for yourselves” let alone that perennial favourite “do your own research”. I was arguing earlier that “doxological outsourcing” is actually a good thing, but we skeptics have done our job only too well and the old sort of trust in institutions is simply no longer tenable. And I have absolutely no idea what could replace it. It’s just a pity that those who should be finding a replacement* are so mired in post-modern blancmange that they are writing papers on queering the last remaining thing that hasn’t been queered. (It’s probably one of those pareidolic rocks on Mars – you’d need to go that far to finds something that fits the bill).
*I mean as a class. The individuals are beyond redemption and just need to be replaced.
Bjarte @ #3:
One of the most amazing developments in my lifetime was the number of academic types who swallowed postmodernism, hook, line and sinker, and then when all that crap went out of fashion, went straight into the market for something else. Vide the Sokal Hoax.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
Francis #9
I have long been an advocate of the “go with the scientific consensus” approach myself. But in light of everything that’s happened in the last decade or so, I’m far from confident that the best supported view on things like biological sex is still the consensus view, at least as measured by what the experts are prepared to defend it in public.
Omar #11
Of course, as it turns out, Postmodernism never really went out of fashion, but mutated into what we now know as “Critical Social Justice” ideology or “wokeism”.
Anyway, after so many disappointments, it’s been a relief to see that Alan Sokal remains one of the clearest voices and one the staunchest critics of this nonsense out there.
My experience as a scientist is that most scientists actually don’t buy into the nonsense. Most of us are just doing our thing, teaching college students, and find we are being shut out of the conversation. I never met one biological scientist who believed it, except P.Z. (I met him at a conference in Omaha). It’s a situation where the loudest voices get amplified, and many of them have large followings on their blogs or feeds; a few, like Dawkins or Jerry Coyne, are on the side of reason on gender issues, but too many have either drunk the kool-aid, or have made a pragmatic decision to be on the side of not losing their job.
Hopefully one of these days, the noise of the nonsense will die down enough for these more numerous, but quieter, voices to be heard, sort of like JoJo in Horton Hears a Who. (For those unfamiliar with Dr. Seuss, JoJo is the Who that finally is heard by the ones trying to destroy the dust speck).
iknklast
I’m glad to hear that. What is your impression of the younger generation? I seem to remember Colin Wright saying that many of them now enter into the field already fully committed to the idea that sex is, if not a social construct, then at least a spectrum, and that many of these same ideas have already begun making their way into biology textbooks and even the “scientific” literature.