ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
Because the Finnish youth on treatment were also being monitored every 3-6 months during checkups, there's also going to be a higher rate of any possible flags being noticed and referred compared to a group who doesn't get monitored by doctors 4x a year.
Where are you getting the 3-6 month number from? I see no indication of it in the paper. I can imagine this being a problem if the relevant comparison was to the controls only, but you're comparing two subgroups of people already interacting with the medical system due to gender dysphoria.
The effect size is pretty massive sure, but that doesn't mean much. Why should I assume the selection effect of "people likely to utilize healthcare are likely to utilize healthcare" is itself small?
Because both groups are already utilizing healthcare, for one. Also, when you criticize a study as "lazy or retarded" the possible bias should be big enough to wipe away or invert the finding, and I think it's reasonable to ask for some backing on how likely that is given the numbers at hand.
It's actually pretty popular that parents, not government, makes the choices about parenting.
Not really. Even on the trans issue itself, the very same people who defend these treatments as being "between the child, parents, and their doctor" will routinely defend institutions hiding a child's transition from their parents.
Parents can even do things like get their children permanently circumcised, there's a growing movement against requiring childhood vaccines, and in general parents can refuse medical care for their children unless it's directly and immediately endangering the life of the child for US laws.
The US has medical licensing bodies, that take away licences from doctors that prescribe or carry out unproven treatments. It also has a system in place that prevents people (adults!) from voluntarily buying the drugs for themselves that they want. I'm not sure about what the US laws say on the matter, but I don't think they would take kindly for parents getting a hold of prescription drugs, and giving them to their children, on the basis of nothing more than their personal belief it will make them better. I'm not proposing anything different here.
The implication of your idea would be that we'd get rid of this system, or at least make it entirely voluntary, which would be hugely controversial. I'm pretty sure it would be only popular with hardcore libertarians.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
This is just a reading problem, I said that they are selected for being the types to use healthcare. People who engage in voluntary healthcare for years are the types of people who engage in voluntary healthcare.
But the comparison in the study takes two groups who, by your argument, are likely to engage in voluntary healthcare. The only difference you can potentially point to is how likely they are to stick to a treatment. Also keep in mind that the effect size you're trying to explain away this way is pretty big. Big enough that I'd think the idea should be backed by evidence itself
Yep, that's why I said "unfortunately like basically every pro and anti trans study, it wasn't really a good one.". Social science being low quality is basically the default.
This isn't a social science paper, and these issues are pretty common in other fields as well.
This makes the assumption that the default should be that government bans people's choices unless it's "proven" to help. Why can't the default be that government stays out of what people, including children and their parents, want to do with their lives?
It's an extremely unpopular idea. There's a reason why trans activists don't even bring it up.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
12hr ago
Their model for psychiatric health is, I'm not even kidding, how much you see a mental health professional. It might be a decent proxy in some ways, but it has very obvious issues. A schizophrenic living on the streets untouched is considered more mentally sound than a middle class student going to a therapist because of "anxiety".
This doesn't necessarily show how mentally healthy you are, it shows how willing you are to engage with the healthcare industry.
This would be a reasonable-ish criticism in the US (and even there "yeah, I know it's not perfect, but it's not bad enough to dismiss the findings"), but in a country with a robust public healthcare and welfare system, the dynamics are completely different. The homeless schizophrenic is far more likely to get treatment than the middle class student trying to get treatment for "anxiety", because the state doesn't have unlimited money, and will triage people.
No treatment/after treatment comparisons can't get away from this selection effect, people who stick with treatments are the types of people who stick with treatments and use medical care.
It definitely lowers it. You can't claim they don't engage with the healthcare system, if they already signed up for gender dysphoria treatment, and are just waiting for it.
Social science sucks. At best this obvious flaw in study design not being cared about is lazy, at worst it's because they're retarded and didn't even think about possible selection effects like most social scientists don't.
We've been allowing an exponential increase in transgender medical interventions, including for children, on the basis of even poorer quality studies claiming they improve mental health outcomes. This study, at the very least, serves as evidence against the pro-trans studies who use similarly flawed methods, except they have no controls, and use way smaller sample sizes. If you want to reject it, there's no reason to take any pro-trans study seriously, and we'd have to admit we're performing massive, dangerous, interventions on children, with absolutely no evidence they help at all.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14hr ago
Fair enough, I disagree with his premise.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15hr ago
they found that psychiatric morbidity worsens significantly post-surgery
Not just surgery, hormonal treatment as well:
Medical GR interventions included masculinising/feminising hormonal treatments, chest masculinisation, and/or genital surgery (vaginoplasty/phalloplasty/metoidioplasty).
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15hr ago
You could say the question was rhetorical (because I already know the answer to it), but in no way is it sarcastic. It means exactly what it's straightforward, literal interpretation would imply.
I disagree with your claim, because I think it reverses causality. America isn't great because of all the skilled immigrants, skilled immigrants want to go there, because it gives them better opportunities than they have in other places.
The vast majority of the indian immigrant influx to Canada during the early 2020s went in on study permits and not an H-1B analog that's a lot more rigorous
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't have the impression that H-1B is particularly rigorous, and I've seen Canadians swear up and down that their system is more restrictive.
The US didn't curb skilled immigration during that time, so at best they were getting second-rate talent even if they had rigorous screening
Even if this is true, there's a few implications to it. One is that no one should even try to compete for immigrants, because they're all going to go to the top country anyway, and then ones you will get, will only cause economic stagnation. Another is that even for America this would probably mean mass deportations are a good idea, as you can just keep the absolute best performence, and get rid of everyone else.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
and are about to be wiped out any second if only USA stops helping.
The only people saying this are Jewish, or sympathetic to them. Otherwise, the suggestion to stop helping them would be met with a shrug, not all the drama we see in reaponse to it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
I'm not sure if I understand you right, but it sounds that you think I'd have something against jailing Rhodes, Podesta, or Clinton, which is far from the case.
"Rules for Thee but not for Me", and "These types of people have not been going to prison for a while and there in lies the rub" are exactly the points I was trying to raise.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Did all the talent going to Canada somehow make it catch up to America, or did the opposite happen?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
We can't?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
I got back to working on handling of the background textures, and a lot of the time was spent debugging... which with shaders is tricky. No debugger, no text output, so you're left with translating variables into something visual, and playing divide-and-conquer games with your own code. The issue was that the texture immediately under the player worked fine, and the dying bugs got rendered to it, but the ones surrounding couldn't properly calculate the relative coordinates of the bug, and in the end everything was always rendered out of bounds (i.e. not rendered). It turned out to be a stupid copy-paste error where I was using the wrong variable, but the good news is that it works now.
Now I'm trying to handle the player moving around. If you go leftward and leave the background texture immediately behind you, the textures to the right should unload, and new ones to the left should be created (and if you come back, the old textures should be reloaded). Related to this, I'm wondering how to manage memory issues. If the background textures are small, it's easy to zoom out far enough that no background is visible. If they're big they eat up quite a bit of memory (and still don't necessarily cover the whole screen). I found out it's possible to create a compressed Rendering Device texture, and that the compression is quite good on them, but these are read-only. So the current plan is to read the background texture being unloaded from the GPU, create a compressed texture from it, and keep it on the more distant background sprites. After that I might add a second layer of storage, where they get saved to the hard drive, and reloaded as needed.
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
...and just to drive the point home...
EU ties €35bn fund release to Hungary’s break with Orbán era
To unlock the funds, Hungary would need to meet 27 conditions, including anti-corruption checks and a rollback of Orbán-era decisions deemed in breach of EU rules, from the treatment of asylum seekers to ensuring academic freedom.
Which would include the anti-LGBTQ+++ law I brought up with @Stefferi.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
No, it's not. It's only purpose was to antagonize Christians, and that story was invented for gaslighting purposes.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Yeah, but other Republican candidates weren't necessarily better than Kamala, or were perceived as worse than Trump at winning the general election. There's tonnes of these kind of strategic concerns people have when making their choice. Everybody knows this when they're talking about their own side (why do you think the Dems picked a shambling corpse for a candidate that they later had to eject in the las minute?), but conveniently forgets it when talking about their enemies.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
This comment is my external motivator to finish the scene.
Would you like a weekly ping like I do for Southkraut?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
In my defense, it's literally impossible for me to do so. I don't live in America, and even if I moved there and got citizenship, I would not be eligable to run.
That said, he's the one that made the argument that these type of people go to prison, I think it's reasonable to ask if this is indeed the case, no?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
That's hardly the same policy.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
How did that turn out?
The US has just like every other country and organization in the history of the world done bad shit at times. In the US when this has been discovered it has usually resulted in scandal, firings, and at times jail.
First of all, who went to prison for sponsoring the FSA or Afghan kiddie-diddlers? Secondly, which part of "I don't care" don't you understand? I think various states, including the US , have done a lot worse things than sponsoring terrorism, so I don't fret over you doing it, and I won't over Iran doing it either.
Generally speaking the really bad stuff has been an accident or orthogonal to the goal.
Literally everybody says that.
Iran's explicit foreign policy is terrorism.
Do you happen to have a link the an official Iranian policy statement that explicitly promotes terrorism?
They do this to such an extent that it seems that stopping their terrorists was an existential threat, and is how we got the current awful situation.
To who does it seem this way? Iran didn't start bombing people until you attacked them, so I don't see how it would be existential to them. It's definitely not existential to the US, and even calling it this for Israel seems like a massive stretch.
Support of these things is....bad. It has eroded international norms, changed our relationship with unacceptable tactics like using hospitals as military bases.
Again, I see no reason to attribute it directly to Iran. The US or Israel do not answer for the crimes of every proxy they sponsor.
Somehow they've run a highly successful pro-terrorism PR campaign that has dramatically damaged the Western coalition.
Do you want to know what the PR campaign was? It was your little "global war on terror", that promised to bring peace and stability to the region if only you topple Saddam Hussein, and only brought death, misery, and more terrorism, immediately lined up Iran as the next "final boss" who's fall is supposed to bring peace, and is already prepping to set up the next one after that. All Iran had to do was sit back, and let you do you work.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
Sort of... I guess this is where the "long" part of the long march comes in. Sure, you can still see conservative influence on these institutions, but it's still seems pretty obviously being chipped away at.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
I don't quite see the point of the exclusivity, though, be it geographic or ethnic.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
Some of the things he's done, notably on migration, necessarily involved picking fights with Brussels.
The EU institutions have never been committed to unlimited immigration
Hungary asylum policies 'failed' to fulfill EU obligations.
The claims from the pro-EU people here are bizarre, it's like we can't admit the EU made a mistake, let alone that they tried forcing it on others, so when the wind starts blowing in a different direction we have to do the "we have always been at war wit Eastasia" bit.
A deal where Hungary lets in a small number of vetted refugees (who are already settled in Italy) in exchange for a large amount of cash and promises not to close its intra-EU borders works for both sides.
Hungary has never closed it's borders to EU citizens, and as for the rest, what if they don't want large amounts of cash for a """small number""" of """vetted""" """refugees"""? Is it perhaps the case that "some of the things he's done, notably on migration, necessarily involved picking fights with Brussels"?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
- i don't really care much for the "US has done bad things argument". "All is fair in love and war" (well, within reason), so supporting some shady guys doesn't really faze me. However, this is why I don't understand the moral outrage about Iran and it's proxies.
- You did a bit more then "send some guns" in Afghanistan, these guys were joined to you at the hip.
- I'll need more than your sayso to believe the "effectively the same as an additional military arm of the state" bit. Exaggerating the enemies' transgressions and downplaying your own is basic human nature, and something that every human collective has done since the dawn of time. The US military, intelligence, and foreign policy apparatus is also no different from that of other states, in that it lies all the time to promote it's goels. All in all you might sell me on the difference of scale (show me the numbers, though), but I don't know if I can buy the difference in kind, unless it's argued by a neutral observer (and I don't know if one even exists right now).
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
In Afghanistan you supported literal Bacha Bazi enjoyers. In Syria you supported the Free Syrian Army.
I find the question bizarre and naive in general. You think there are many militias in the Middle East that don't engage in rape, murder, and torture, that the US can pick and choose from? The only reason you haven't heard about this is that Israel can blast their own cries through a friendly megaphone, while everybody else gets a shrug.
Ok, but this isn't based on your knowledge of the Finnish system, and you don't know for a fact that the pre-intervention group isn't also getting checked up regularly, right?
Yeah, I know. But the finding is based on the raw comparison to the controls, it's based on comparing each of the subgroups (pre- and post-intervention) to the controls. For your objection to be valid, the pre- group would have to be as unlikely to interact with the medical system as the general population. Which would be weird, given that they already entered the system asking for help with dysphoria.
Ok, fair enough, there are apperently similar results for the other side of my question as well. That said, there's also the rest of my argument. For this to be indicative of a general principle being applied, we'd need to see similar support for changing the medical licensing and prescription systems to being purely advisory at most. I doubt that's a very popular idea.
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