We are seeing something quite disturbing
More pathetic by the day.
“Evidence? Don’t come pestering me with your evidence – I’m SCIENCE-BASED MEDICINE.”
What is he on? Some kind of tribalism train is my guess. All the doors are locked, it blasts through all the stations, all it does is speed ahead until it runs out of track.
He knows he can keep up this refrain indefinitely because he has cachet from his cancer and vaccination posts. It’s a form of abuse of power.
What gender critical sources has he been reading? I’ve never once seen anyone critical of “gender theory” because, “eww, ick.” He can’t possibly have read JKR’s initial post, for example. There’s lots of empathy and support for trans in that post, no “eww” or “ick” at all. Certainly not “cranked up to 11.”
Hope he has fun watching the men compete against women in the Olympics, I sure won’t watch any of it. Anyone who claims to be a scientist, and has at the very least, requisite education in biology (required for an MD, last I heard) and doesn’t see what’s wrong with this picture, is either a liar, an idiot, or both.
Try thinking it out for yourself Mr. MD/PhD. Don’t be skeerd.
maddog – I think that claim is just a straight-up lie.
Of course, “boil down to” gives him a lot of leeway, like “in essence” and so on. It means that’s not what they literally say but it’s the subtext, the coded meaning, the veiled message, yadda yadda.
Miscellany Room 6 comments have closed, so I’ll leave this here as it’s (very) tangentially related.
Interesting written debate about free speech here…
https://reason.com/2020/08/04/whats-the-best-way-to-protect-free-speech-ken-white-and-greg-lukianoff-debate-cancel-culture/#comments
Not really a debate as such, since they are both staunch free speech advocates, but the discussion around the relative importance of law vs culture is valuable.
Also, he’s been eating lipstick.
And there might be another aspect to this, too; that of the existence of a principle either becoming more important than the thing it’s there to defend or being abused to defend something it was there to protect against. It isn’t always easy to tell which is which.
The idea behind science-based medicine is that while evidence-based medicine is great in principle, evidence can be misunderstood or misused. So, for example, a pharma company can keep doing trials of a drug until one gets the result they want and report that, conveniently forgetting all the failed trials. Science-based medicine is supposed to be about applying everything we’ve learned from science to evaluating the evidence. So while some homeopathy trials might be positive, we know it’s bullshit anyway because science tells us the world doesn’t work like that.
It’s a good and important goal. But the problem is, of course, that it’s a scalpel that has to be skilfully applied, under much scrutiny. There’s a lot subjectivity in which results from science ought to be applied in any particular case. This means that there are bloody great gaps for bias to drive in. This appears to be what’s happened here. Gorski is cherry-picking which scientific results are relevant and ignoring those he doesn’t like. He’s fallen into the trap science-based (as opposed to evidence-based) medicine was established to avoid.
Has he allowed the principle to become more important than the thing, or is he abusing the principle because he wants the thing to be true regardless?
Well, it’s the latter. That was quite apparent the moment he trashed Hall’s article and there can’t be the slightest doubt about it now that he’s blocking anyone who tries to show him evidence that he’s wrong.
(As I recall, another driving idea behind SBM was to bring back the Bayesian concept of prior probability that EBM had abandoned. Before EBM it was a real problem that scientist would get false positives by assigning too high priors to plausible treatments. To EBM the solution was to get rid of priors altogether and rely exclusively on randomized double-blind trials (I remember the SBM crowd describing this as “methodolatry”), but in doing so it ended up increasing the likelihood of false positives by removing any disadvantage for highly implausible treatments. EBM also didn’t distinguish between false positives and false negatives, but took for granted that if the former was a problem, the latter had to be as well, which didn’t really follow. As valuable as randomized double-blind trials are, they still involve human judgement, and even the best designed trials are not entirely immune to bias, certainly not enough to trump everything we know about physics, chemistry, biology etc.)
One of the very first posts Harriet Hall wrote — even before she was the “Skeptdoc” or on Science-Based Medicine — concerned what she called “Tooth Fairy Science.” We could do all sorts of studies and experiments concerning the Tooth Fairy. Does she come for every missing tooth? How much does she leave? Is it more for molars or front teeth? Where does she put the money, and can we predict when under the pillow will be more likely than on the nightstand? And thus we can build up what looks like an impressive body of research on the well-established phenomenon of the Tooth Fairy.
But if we don’t first ask “Is there a Tooth Fairy in the first place?” it means nothing.
From what I can make out, Gorski here seems to be dismissing Gender Critical views because they don’t assume the existence of “trans teens” at the outset. Instead, we’re still stuck on that issue — its nature, perimeters, causes and variations. Are there Trans Teens in the first place?
Maybe not — at least, not in the way Gorski assumes. Delving into the best ways to treat them may, in a sense, be Toothfairy Science. If so, it’s ironic that one of Harriet Hall’s earliest creations has come back with teeth to bite her.
Sastra @8, exactly. Gorski is a true believer in the theory that everyone has a gender identity — including cis people who have cisgender identity (which seems unfalsifiable to me) — and there are “trans teens” who have transgender identity that calls for medical and surgical treatments.
Gorski’s Twitter thread shows he is like some Christians — who are so surrounded by other Christians — who believe the existence of God is so self-evident — who believe that atheists are people who also believe God exists, but deny God’s existence only to express their anger at God.
1. As a Swede, I don’t say “ick.” I say “ish.”
2. I don’t reject trans people due to any perception that they are gross, or “ishy” for that matter. I do think that many of the AGP “transbians” are kind of “ishy” in the way that they present themselves as being hotter than real women. There are some serious mirror deceptions there.
3.I reject that gender non-conformity is due to a gendersoul, and especially that a gendersoul can be explained by biology, and further can be counter to sex.
I tweeted that to David before he blocked me. Except for the Swedish aside.