"If our government is going to fund science, it should be good science."

Who could disagree? But what are the chances of getting good science on transgender medical treatments for children? 

I'm reading "Trump’s Attack on Trans Youth Research Is a Tragic Error" by Jesse Singal (in the NYT).

Singal writes:

I’ve long been a critic of American youth gender medicine. Researchers in this field have often produced slipshod work and drawn premature conclusions about the benefits of blockers, hormones and surgery. There are serious unanswered questions about the safety and efficacy of these treatments, which have been banned or restricted in about half of American states and a number of European countries in the wake of several damning government-sponsored reports.

But cutting back on research about these treatments would be a tragic error. What this field needs — and what gender-questioning youth deserve — is reform, oversight and higher methodological standards. To cripple this field in its infancy would be to leave countless families in intolerable limbo.

Wasn't it the bad science that crippled the field in its infancy? If that hadn't been so ghoulish and awful you wouldn't have Trump's attack. You probably wouldn't even have Trump as President. 

I regularly hear from parents whose kids express severe distress about their biological sex.

That's a badly miswritten sentence, and I don't want to be lectured about "good science" by someone who lacks the critical awareness of why it's so wrong.

"If diversity trainings have no impact whatsoever, that would mean that perhaps billions of dollars are being wasted annually.... But there’s a darker possibility..."

"... Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them. That’s partly because any psychological intervention may turn out to do more harm than good. The late psychologist Scott Lilienfeld made this point in an influential 2007 article where he argued that certain interventions — including ones geared at fighting youth substance use, youth delinquency and PTSD — likely fell into that category. In the case of D.E.I., Dr. Dobbin and Dr. Kalev warn that diversity trainings that are mandatory, or that threaten dominant groups’ sense of belonging or make them feel blamed, may elicit negative backlash or exacerbate pre-existing biases.... The history of diversity trainings is, in a sense, a history of fads. Maybe the current crop will wither over time, new ones will sprout that are stunted by the same lack of evidence, and a decade from now someone else will write a version of this article. But it’s also possible that organizations will grow tired of throwing time and money at trainings where the upside is mostly theoretical...."

Writes Jesse Singal in "What if Diversity Trainings Are Doing More Harm Than Good?" (NYT).

No comments section over there. I'll just imagine the evisceration that would have taken place. Singal complains about the lack of science but offers no competing science other than the non-news that hearing about white supremacy hurts white people's feelings and might lead to more white supremacy. Every fix might backfire, so why try to fix anything? But how do you know that's not white supremacy talking?

"Late porn star"? I don't get Andy Ngo.

"Late porn star"

normal stuff! pic.twitter.com/umZBhGm3jY

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) October 15, 2020

I checked to see whether that screen shot is a real tweet by Ngo. It is: here. Something is very wrong.

Things that are not surprising! Those who get in are the most elite. They got in despite the discrimination. They have a mark of distinction.

I mean whatever you think of the case itself this is a fantastic scoop by the Times, that the Asian kids who did get in don't feel discriminated against pic.twitter.com/pzeM8KVNls

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) August 16, 2020

Here's the NYT article, "Justice Dept. Says Yale Discriminates. Here’s What Students Think."

ADDED: Immediately upon publishing this post, it became obvious to me that Singal is being sarcastic. So we're on the same page.

"Is a Portland Professor Being Railroaded by His University for Criticizing Social-Justice Research?"

Asks Jesse Singal (at NY Magazine). Excerpt:

Last fall, it was revealed that a trio of researchers, the philosopher Peter Boghossian, the mathematician James Lindsay, and the medieval-studies independent scholar Helen Pluckrose, had perpetrated what they viewed as a spiritual successor to the infamous 1996 Sokal hoax: They’d sent out a bunch of ridiculous articles to a number of journals within “grievance studies” fields.... Of the 20 articles the trio submitted, seven were accepted....

The research-ethics experts I spoke with expressed a similar degree of agreement on the question of whether what the “grievance studies” hoaxsters did constituted data fabrication: yes, it did....

Letters of support for Boghossian have been rolling in in large numbers since this story broke.... “This strikes me (and every colleague I’ve spoken with) as an attempt to weaponize an important [principle] of academic ethics in order to punish a scholar for expressing an unpopular opinion,” wrote Steven Pinker....

It’s impossible to say that PSU would have imposed the exact same investigation on an equivalent study with a different political valence. But it also seems, with the benefit of a bit of investigation into and knowledge of how [Institutional Review Boards] work, pretty obvious that Boghossian was asking for trouble by going ahead and performing this research without at least seeking an exemption. 

"Our Supreme Court confirmation process has been in steady decline for more than thirty years. One can only hope that the Kavanaugh nomination is where the process has finally hit rock bottom."

From the Susan Collins speech in the Senate yesterday.

I read that and thought, no, this is not rock bottom. There's more ahead, lower places to sink. Why wouldn't there be? Maybe the 2018 elections will punish the Democratic Party for what it did with the Kavanaugh nomination, and everyone will realize they'd better never do anything like that again. But to say that is to say, there is a lower depth, and they've got to get there before they'll see they've got to enter recovery.

Notice the connection between "rock bottom" and "hope": "One can only hope... the process has finally hit rock bottom." "Rock bottom" means more than just: at least we can't sink any lower. It means a confrontation with reality that shocks you into changing your ways.

On this notion of "hitting rock bottom" — no, don't go to Urban Dictionary! — I found an article (in NY Magazine) by Jesse Singal, "The Tragic, Pseudoscientific Practice of Forcing Addicts to 'Hit Rock Bottom'":

One of the many impressive things about Maia Szalavitz’s new book Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, is how effectively she debunks various myths about addiction and how to treat it. In fact, the book’s main argument is that many people are misreading what addiction is altogether: It should be seen not as a disease or a moral or personality shortcoming, but rather a learning disorder. “Addiction doesn’t just happen to people because they come across a particular chemical and begin taking it regularly,” she writes early on. Rather, “[i]t is learned and has a history rooted in their individual, social, and cultural developments.”

Or, as Szalavitz put it to the Daily Beast: “If you don’t learn that a drug helps you cope or make you feel good, you wouldn’t know what to crave. People fall in love with a substance or an activity, like gambling. Falling in love doesn’t harm your brain, but it does produce a unique type of learning that causes craving, alters choices and is really hard to forget.”...

As Szalavitz explains, the idea comes from “one of [Alcoholics Anonymous’s] foundational texts, 12 Steps and 12 Traditions.” She pulls this excerpt:

Why all this insistence that every A.A. must hit bottom first? The answer is that few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. For practicing A.A.’s, the remaining eleven Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking. Who wishes to be rigorously honest and tolerant? Who wants to confess his faults to another and make restitution for harm done? Who cares anything for a Higher Power, let alone meditation and prayer? Who wants to sacrifice time and energy in trying to carry A.A.’s message to the next sufferer? No, the average alcoholic, self centered in the extreme, doesn’t care for this prospect—unless he has to do these things in order to stay alive himself.

Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A. and there we discover the fatal nature of our situation.

Since the first of the 12 steps an A.A. member must work through is to admit to “admit their powerlessness” over their addiction, it makes sense that the program would embrace a device like “rock bottom.” It’s only when your alcoholism (or other addiction) has gotten so bad you’ve been kicked out of your house by your spouse, have alienated all your friends, and are down to the last $50 in your checking account, that you’ll finally be able to realize just how far you’ve fallen — or something. Fully buying into the program requires desperation, in other words, and to “help” addicts get to that desperate point is to help them recover: “From this perspective,” writes Szalavitz, “the more punitively addicts are treated, the more likely they will be to recover; the lower they are made to fall, the more likely they will be to wake up and quit.”

Szalavitz explains that this is a totally pseudoscientific concept.... For decades, Szalavitz writes, programs like Phoenix House and Daytop used “sleep deprivation, food deprivation, isolation, attack therapy, sexual humiliation like dressing people in drag or in diapers, and other abusive tactics in an attempt to get addicts to realize they’d ‘hit bottom’ and must surrender.”...

[W]hen it comes to “hitting bottom” and so many of the other pseudoscientific approaches to fighting addiction, the actual goal — or part of it, at least — has always been to marginalize the addict, to set them apart and humiliate them. There’s a deep impulse to draw a clear, bold line between us, the healthy people, and them, the addicts. What clearer way to emphasize that divide than to cast them down into a rock-bottom pit, away from the rest of us?

American politics is shot through with us/them rhetoric and emotion right now. I don't know the way out, other than to resist it myself, as I continue my daily scribblings here. I like hope as much as the next person, but I don't think hitting rock bottom is the beginning of a path of recovery, and if I did, I'd need to believe that the Senate can't go any lower, and I don't think the musings of Susan Collins are going to turn anyone back.

It was a great speech, but why did we hear this from her so late in the process she purports to decry? Why is she only willing or capable of saying these things when she's looking back on the wreckage?

"The idea that [Steven] Pinker, a liberal, Jewish psychology professor, is a fan of a racist, anti-Semitic online movement is absurd on its face..."

"... so it might be tempting to roll your eyes and dismiss this blowup as just another instance of social media doing what it does best: generating outrage. But it’s actually a worthwhile episode to unpack, because it highlights a disturbing, worsening tendency in social media in which tribal allegiances are replacing shared empirical understandings of the world. Or maybe 'subtribal' is the more precise, fitting term to use here. It’s one thing to say that left and right disagree on simple facts about the world — this sort of informational Balkanization has been going on for a while and long predates Twitter. What social media is doing is slicing the salami thinner and thinner, as it were, making it harder even for people who are otherwise in general ideological agreement to agree on basic facts about news events."

Writes Jesse Singal in "Social Media Is Making Us Dumber. Here’s Exhibit A" (NYT).

I think this is the 8 minute version of the talk from which the viral video clip was made:

" The psychiatric establishment should follow the American Psychoanalytic Association’s defiant lead and retire the Goldwater Rule altogether."

Argues Jesse Singal (at New York Magazine).

As Stat News reported yesterday,* earlier this month the executive committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association told its 3,500 members in an email that they should feel free to flout the Goldwater Rule... To be sure, this is a drop in the bucket in terms of the wider world of psychiatry, given that the American Psychiatric Association has more than 37,000 members...

[A] psychiatrist commenting on a public figure is simply making informed inferences based on the publicly available information, in much the same way an aviation expert might comment on a deadly plane crash without having direct access to the crash site or the details of the subsequent government investigation....

In reality, it is very unlikely that credible psychiatrists would make public statements of concern about public figures’ psychiatric well-being in all but the most urgent cases, given the potential hit to their professional reputations. Those who would take these claims too far, who would politicize vital questions of mental health, would be drowned out and ostracized by their more professionally responsible colleagues

In reality? Singal's grasp of reality is way different from mine. 76% of psychiatrists are Democrats. Their political beliefs are very likely to skew their assessment of when it's "urgent" to get the word out that a political candidate is disordered and when they should "ostracize" a fellow psychiatrist who's spoken out. What happened with Goldwater is what will happen again. Even if only 1% of psychiatrists jump into the public spotlight to opine on the craziness of Candidate X, that's still 370 psychiatrists. And how many of the rest of them — the "more professionally responsible colleagues" — will passively enjoy the damage done to the candidate they'd like to see taken down? Meanwhile, a profession that needs to be believed in is going to get its credibility undermined. And that self-interest is the driving force behind the Goldwater rule.
______________________

* I blogged that here.

"How the Self-Esteem Craze Took Over America."

By Jesse Singal in New York Magazine. Excerpt.

The self-esteem craze changed how countless organizations were run, how an entire generation — millen[n]ials — was educated, and how that generation went on to perceive itself (quite favorably). As it turned out, the central claim underlying the trend, that there’s a causal relationship between self-esteem and various positive outcomes, was almost certainly inaccurate. But that didn’t matter: For millions of people, this was just too good and satisfying a story to check, and that’s part of the reason the national focus on self-esteem never fully abated. Many people still believe that fostering a sense of self-esteem is just about the most important thing one can do, mental health–wise....

"It’s good to normalize evil, in the sense of showing how otherwise 'normal' people and institutions can perpetrate evil acts..."

"... and every attempt should be made to do so. That’s how you prevent more evil from happening in the future."

Ah! I chose to blog this before I noticed the author, Jesse Singal. He's good!

He's writing about the reaction to that Atlantic article "My Family's Slave" (by Alex Tizon). Some people said that article shouldn't have been published. Example of the objection: "I am filled with nothing but anger and hatred at the vileness of the attempt by Alex Tizon to whitewash a slaveholder. No. FUCK! NO!"

Singal says:

In fact, it’s a common reaction just about any time a journalistic account of evil people or evil acts includes nuance and texture. Back in 2013, for example, some people were furious at Rolling Stone for running a cover image of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in which the Boston Marathon bomber looked like… well, a normal kid. A handsome one, even. Some of the critics accused Rolling Stone of giving him the “rock star” treatment.

This “you’re normalizing evil!” critique didn’t make sense then, and it doesn’t make sense now.

"This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like."

By Jesse Singal (in New York Magazine). This is a remarkably detailed analysis of an attack on Rebecca Tuvel, a philosopher who published "In Defense of Transracialism" in the feminist-philosophy journal Hypatia. Excerpt from Singal's article:

There has simply been an explosive amount of misinformation circulating online about what is and isn’t in Tuvel’s article, which few of her most vociferous critics appear to have even skimmed, based on their inability to accurately describe its contents. Because the right has seized on Rachel Dolezal as a target of gleeful ridicule, and as a means of making opportunistic arguments against the reality of the trans identity, a bunch of academics who really should know better are attributing to Tuvel arguments she never made, simply because she connected those two subjects in an academic article.

Read the whole thing. It makes me want to read all these other things Jesse Singal has written. Like, "Here’s (More) Evidence Testosterone Makes Men Dumber."

As you can see [from the new study in Psychological Science], testosterone made the respondents significantly more likely to pick the answer that “felt” right but that wasn’t in fact correct. It didn’t seem to have an effect on their ability to solve arithmetic problems, which don’t have an answer that “feels” right and therefore don’t lend themselves to gut-impulse guessing.

Here's a Breitbart article about Jesse Singal: "Meet Precious Flower Jesse Singal: He Thinks You Are a ‘Hateful Idiot.’" It's really insanely intra-Breitbart:

[I]n response to Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos Tweeting out the article about Singal’s piece, Singal began to lose it. “Holy shit Breitbart responded to my beard blog post!!!!!!!!!!! These are some sensitive snowflakes,” Singal wrote....

That goes on and on about Singal going on and on.  Here's Singal's beard blog post (from 2015): "7 Breitbart Commenters Who Think Paul Ryan Might Be a Radical Muslim Because He Grew a Beard."