Comment by phyzome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phyzome | Hacker News Reader

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Her non-physics videos tend to be a bit off, but not terrible; on the whole, they're still reasonably well-researched and educational.

Where she really gets into trouble is farther out into the social sciences. I think she should be much more careful there. I don't want her to stop, I just want her to be more careful!

An interesting example is one of her two videos on transgenderism. It had an absolutely appalling both-sidesing intro that literally called people who crazy who are just concerned about suicide rates among trans people. The contents of the video were actually pretty reasonable, although she messed up a few key interpretations so that some parts ended up being misleading. I don't think she's transphobic, but on an issue like this I think a bit more care needs to be taken.

More recently she had a piece on capitalism that was incredibly anemic. I think she tried to bite off more than she could chew (for a 20 minute video) and so she kind of missed the entire "what are the problems" side of the topic, even while laying out some reubttals to common statements. I feel like she'd have done better than that on a more close-to-home topic.

(Her physics videos are of course fantastic.)

> An interesting example is one of her two videos on transgenderism. It had an absolutely appalling both-sidesing intro that literally called people who crazy who are just concerned about suicide rates among trans people.

This was what she actually said in the introduction to that video:

"Should transgender teens transition? This rather personal question occupies a prominent place in the American culture war. One the one side you have people claiming that it’s a socially contagious fad among the brainwashed woke who want to mutilate your innocent children. On the other side there are those saying that it’s saving the lives of minorities who’ve been forced to stay in the closet for too long. And then there are normal people, like you and I, who think both sides are crazy and could someone please summarise the facts in simple words, which is what I’m here for. So what’s going on?"

What's objectionable about that? Sounds quite fair to me.

The only thing objectionable is the soi-disant left making a religion of erasing gender-nonconforming people with medical interventions that don't work.

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/new-randomized-trial-show...

N=31, okay.

By work, I mean the surgical procedures do not produce body parts that reliably perform the intended function. In one case, the hole closes. In the other, the arm-sausage rots off.

This comment section is full of people afraid of their HR departments, not people considering the actual outcome of the procedures.

Better to remain silent, etc.

If you are from very polarised place then just about everyone is called crazy because opinions are approaching boolean type.

"On the other side there are those saying that it’s saving the lives of minorities who’ve been forced to stay in the closet for too long. And then there are normal people, like you and I, who think both sides are crazy"

I think this fragment speaks for itself. It is not "crazy" to care about suicide rates or suicidal ideation. It is "crazy" to not care about that.

That first sentence is quite euphemistic though. There's a lot more to both sides that she quietly implies (by reference to "normal people" finding it "crazy") but doesn't outright mention.

The difference between the two sides is that one is correct and the other is not, and that what "normal" (uninformed lay) people think is not really relevant.

edit: Your response has no actual content in it.

Funnily enough, that's what those on the other side say too.

No matter what the topic, those at either end of strongly polarised collections of views do tend to believe that they are correct and everyone else is wrong and informed.

Thanks, Captain Obvious.

The fact that both sides think they're correct has absolutely no bearing on who is actually correct. For that we must turn to evidence. The evidence in favor of trans healthcare and identities is overwhelming, and the evidence presented by the other side is laced with non-evidenced religious beliefs like "someone being cis and unhappy is a better outcome for society than someone being trans and happy".

There are non-evidenced beliefs on both sides. The reason you think you are correct is because you assume that your beliefs are facts.

Indeed, your comments imply that you are fully immersed in this illusion and are unlikely to accept any suggestion to the contrary.

Which side cares about them? Those who are stigmatizing a population with high suicide rates? Or those who have successfully spearheaded a societal shift which has led more people to identify as trans, while trans people collectively still claim high rates of suicidal ideation.

I don’t see any evidence that mental health in the transgender or general population has actually improved, I’ve seen numbers suggesting societal wide mental health is on the decline, and I have seen a pretty large increase in the absolute numbers of people who say their gender dysphoria makes them suicidal. I can find research that suggests transgender people who receive more medical treatment and societal acceptance are less suicidal than those who do not, but that doesn’t actually demonstrate that trans acceptance will lead to less suicidality and better mental health at the societal level. Or even really at the individual level, since correlation is not causation.

On top of all that, most past research of this sort is potentially non-reproducible at this point because the trans population has expanded so rapidly. Three times as many trans men started visiting clinics in the course of a decade. So the research will have to be done all over again to discount this possibility but this has not been done.

So I don’t know, I’m with Hossenfelder and her radical centrism because I think nobody is actually acting scientifically re: trans people and they’re just playing it by ear. What I detest is the unwarranted certainty and lack of scepticism people have on this topic; People are just guessing and are acting like they are not.

You've strung a lot of words together that are not attached to reality. Plenty of people are acting very scientifically with regard to trans people—there are hundreds of studies in this regard. "Correlation is not causation" is the beginning of the conversation about the relationship between the two, not the end. (Observational data plus a solid theory is a very powerful way to establish causation.)

The idea that social acceptance of transness is causing more people to identify as trans is is not entirely without merit, but needs to be thought about critically. It is true that people who have low-key gender dysphoria would treat it with increased salience if they became more aware that trans people exist, but that is very clearly a good thing. Society should generally allow people to be true and happy to their selves.

Moreover, while the general direction of social progress has been encouraging, the magnitude of it has been relatively small. We have a very long way to go before we can even begin to control for social stigma as a factor in trans suicidality rates. This last point is evidenced by comments in this very thread.

« saving the lives of minorities who’ve been forced to stay in the closet for too long »

I mean, this is literally true, and doesn't sound crazy at all. Why is she saying that normal people think it's crazy? That's not the vibe I get from the general population, who are broadly in support of gender-affirming care. There's a relatively small, very loud contingent on the "mutilating the children" side of things and yeah, some of them sound a little crazy to me (although I suspect most are just uninformed or confused -- or using trans people as a political football, and know exactly what they're doing.) Most people either a) don't give a shit or b) have empathy for people who experience gender dysphoria.

This is classic both-sides-ism, equating two things as "equally wrong" or "equally right" that are pretty obviously on different footings.

If one scratches the surface of the "saving lives" claim to see what assumptions and beliefs this is based on, it very quickly gets just as crazy as the other side, if not more so.

I think it's important to increase our range on our knowledge. You aren't always going to have an expert's opinion to evaluate every piece of information coming at you, and there's only so much that an authoritative source can do for you.

Now, making videos on topics outside of your expertise? That's a dangerous minefield, but there are ways to approach it.

For example, there's whole youtube channels to taking on challenges and learning new stuff.

This is a plague among high-IQ people like physicists, quant people and engineers (speaking as someone who has consistently tested 2.5-3 standard deviations above the population average). They're good at pattern matching which is rewarding in those fields but think they can just think through areas outside their expertise without engaging with the literature.

Well, in terms of Covid-19, data scientists and programmers did a much better job than epidemiologists at predicting spread and infection rate.

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