pro_sprond
1yr ago
There seems to be some tension between this idea and the fact that the increase in reported gender dysphoria cases has been driven more by gender dysphoria in biological females rather than biological males.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
This is something I'd be really interested to learn more about. I had trouble quickly finding data about sexual development disorders, especially of the sort that cause opposite gender anatomical features. You do seem to be correct that there has been an increase in cases of precocious puberty and that fact does seem relevant (and I appreciate you mentioning it). On the other hand, precocious puberty is almost the opposite of changing gender. On the other other hand, it seems at least plausible to think that endocrine disrupters would just cause an increase in all kinds of disorders including disorders that increase sexual differentiation and those that decrease it. So I think overall I take this as mild evidence for the endocrine disrupters -> gender dysphoria theory but I'm also way out of my depth on the biology knowledge needed to know how plausible all this is and what would be good supporting or contradicting evidence.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
I think most of your points are spot-on. However, I think I don't quite agree with this:
The likelihood that West gathers the requisite support that doing anything to oppose him is necessary is remote.
There is a small-but-not-vanishingly-small chance that West could play spoiler in the general election. In 2016 and 2020, the election outcome could have been flipped by changing a relatively small number of votes in a few key states, such as Wisconsin. Here "relatively small" means something like 30,000, which, for reference, is about 1% of the Wisconsin electorate. It doesn't seem impossible that West, if he really ends up participating in the general election, would be able to get 1% of the vote in key states. I think it's not too likely and it's also likely that in a close election between Trump and Biden, West would exit the race rather than play spoiler. But I don't think it's impossible.
Also recall that when another West ran for president in 2020, the Democratic party took active steps to try to prevent him from appearing on the ballot in Wisconsin for fear that he would hurt Biden's chances there.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
Yes, but doesn't this imply that if endocrine disrupters are the main cause of the explosion in gender dysphoria cases then we should also see an explosion in sexual development disorders (with e.g. changes to anatomy) that are also linked to endocrine disrupters? I'm open to being convinced that either (1) this is wrong or (2) such an explosion is occurring. Absent such an explanation, it at least seems like a potential inconsistency in the story.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
I'm not sure why you keep insisting on specifying "cloth or surgical masks" when the OP just said "masks." Also, there is a major societal dispute about whether masks (including N95 and the like) are effective. It seems reasonable to expect someone who claims they are "entirely ineffective" to have decent supporting evidence.
Let me just ask you directly: do you think it's true that N95 masks are entirely ineffective at reducing the spread of covid? If so, do you think the evidence for this is so obvious that no reasonable person should question it? If not, then I'm not sure what we're arguing about.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
Thanks for digging up a plausible source for RFK Jr's claim. I agree with you that drugs are likely overused (though in part for cost-benefit reasons rather than because I think the drugs themselves are super harmful). Having said that, I don't think RFK Jr's claim is really justified. Most deaths are multi-causal, especially when you consider second and third order effects and counting every death where over-medication was plausibly involved as a "drug death" while not doing so for other causes of deaths is dishonest.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
It may be that the classic "insane Jones belief" was "chemicals in the water are turning the frogs gay" however I don't think that's close to his actual craziest (publicly stated) belief. In general, it is possible that someone is known for being crazy and is crazy, but is not crazy for the reasons for which they are generally believed to be crazy.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
My point was basically that Alex Jones's peaks of "bat shit crazy" are much more extreme than RFK Jr's. I agree that Alex Jones is entertaining, but that's very distinct from the question of his level of craziness.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
I never said 50% of his claims were right and I'm not sure why you think I did. In fact, I said "some of his claims are at least arguably correct" which I think is true and "I think you should be very skeptical of him." I don't think RFK Jr is a good source of information nor do I think most of his most extreme claims are correct. I do think that some of his claims are correct or partly correct, but that's a much weaker statement.
Also, I don't really understand what you mean by "unexceptional idea, therefore absurd idea."
pro_sprond
1yr ago
What you say seems plausible. However, for Hulu I think ads are targeted based on demographics. For example, I have never seen a drug ad on Hulu. It does seem plausible that RFK Jr sees a large number of drug ads online because he's relatively old and the ad targeting software has identified him as a possible major customer for pharmaceuticals.
In any case, I stand by my original comment that this claim of RFK Jr's feels very unlikely but I'm also still open to evidence that I'm wrong.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
It seems to me there are two different claims here. First, did the evidence for the effectiveness of masks in reducing spread of covid warrant government mandated masking? Second, is the evidence against the effectiveness of masks strong enough to warrant the claim that they are "entirely ineffective"? I am not interested in arguing about the first claim. For the second claim, which is specifically the claim OP reported RFK Jr making and therefore the claim that is relevant to this discussion, I do not think you have provided strong evidence. For example, you only mention cloth and surgical masks and do not discuss other masks such as N95. I realize that the efficacy of cloth and surgical masks is relevant to the policy question, but leaving out N95 and the like is unconvincing if you want to argue that masks are "entirely ineffective" (and note that in my original comment I specifically mentioned that cloth masks are not very effective). Also, citing a single study that claims surgical masks reduce covid spread by 10% in the old and then vaguely hand-waving about people being skeptical of that study does not convince me that masks are entirely ineffective. It might convince me that surgical masks are not very effective or that the costs of requiring masks are not worth the benefits, but that was not the question at hand.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
I don't agree with the claim that RFK Jr is "essentially a left-wing version of Alex Jones." While both seem prone to spreading conspiracy theories and to hold many false beliefs, Jones has much crazier beliefs (at least comparing the beliefs that both have expressed in public). For example, Jones has claimed that globalists built the LHC to create a portal to let in evil elves/demons to ensalve humans. That's a whole different disconnection from reality compared to anything I've heard RFK Jr claim.
Also see my comment above for my attempt to briefly fact check the claims that the OP mentions RFK Jr making. While overall they don't inspire great confidence in RFK Jr's accuracy, at least a couple of the claims are correct or arguably correct and also fairly surprising.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
While I believe that RFK Jr has many inaccurate beliefs, some of his claims that you mention in your post are at least arguably correct, including a couple that may sound outlandish at first. However, after briefly going through all the claims you mention, I have concluded that RFK Jr makes a number of claims that are either false or hard to believe without a lot of strong supporting evidence. Also, his most explosive claims seem the most fishy. I don't think he is someone who is rigorously seeking truth, but rather someone who is prone to believe shocking claims and occasional conspiracy theories but for this reason also occasionally entertains plausible ideas that are somewhat verboten in polite discourse. Overall, I think you should be very skeptical of him but remain open to the possibility that some of his hard-to-believe claims are correct.
Let me now go through his claims one by one.
-
Endocrine disruptors are "everywhere to be found" in our daily lives. This is hard to evaluate since the phrase "everywhere to be found is vague, but it's at least arguably true. Endocrine disrupters are found in a number of products which it is possible to encounter in everyday life, such as pesticides (though note that some products containing endocrine disrupters have been banned, e.g. DDT was banned in the US in the 1970s). I wasn't able to quickly find information about the precise prevalence of endocrine disrupters in human environments, but see here for a very long report commissioned by the EU which claims (among other things) that current tests for the presence of endocrine disrupters are insufficiently sensitive. See here for some basic information about endocrine disrupters from the NIH.
-
[Endocrine disrupters] can sexually feminize frogs. This seems to be true. See here for one study claiming this. Tyrone Hayes at UC Berkeley has studied this extensively and claims to have subsequently been harassed by the pesticide company Syngenta who (he claims) are trying to cover up the negative effects of their products. He was recently inducted to the National Academy of Sciences, so he seems to be well respected. Here's another study claiming that exposure to endocrine disrupters present in some paint can cause masculinization in mollusks.
-
[Endocrine disrupters] must be responsible for the apparent explosion of gender dysphoria and transgender identity that has taken place over the last 5-10 years. This claim is hard for me to evaluate. I was not able to quickly find any strong evidence in support of it. On the one hand, it does not seem totally implausible. On the other hand, some things don't quite fit. Endocrine disrupters have been around for many decades and perhaps were even more prevalent in the past (before things like DDT were banned), but the explosion in the number of cases of gender dysphoria is very recent. Also, the feminization/masculinization effects of endocrine disrupters observed in frogs and mollusks were at the level of gross anatomy whereas gender dysphoria is a (purely?) psychological phenomenon. There may have been an increase in sexual developmental disorders caused by endocrine disrupters in the environment but I'm not sure to what extent this has occurred nor to what extent this can be connected with increases in gender dysphoria. I'd be happy for someone more knowledgeable about any of this to weigh in. Also, the number of exclusively homosexual men does not seem to have seen a significant increase from the Kinsey report until today (the number of bisexual men has increased a lot, but this seems much more contingent on social facts: it is easy to imagine mildly bisexual men opting to identify as purely straight in a homophobic environment but as bisexual in a homophilic environment). At the very least, this seems like a very bold claim for someone like RFK Jr to make without strong supporting evidence.
-
A Cochraine [sic] collaboration report has declared Pharma drugs are the third leading cause of death in the US after cancer and heart attacks. There are really two claims here: first that a Cochrane review has made this claim and second, that the claim is true. I am unable to find any Cochrane review claiming this, but I didn't look very hard and I'm open to being proved wrong. The second claim seems straightforwardly incorrect. This page from the CDC claims that the third leading cause of death in the US is covid, with about 400,000 deaths per year. Excluding covid, the third leading cause of death is accidents, with about 225,000 per year. I don't really see how drugs could be the third leading cause of death unless you split up several other causes in unnatural ways (e.g. splitting "accidents" into several smaller categories). By the way, I'm not sure why the CDC page I linked to leaves out drug-related causes, but this document claims that in 2019, there were 75,000 drug related deaths. However, about 95% of these were deaths from drug overdose, mostly illegal opiods. So even if RFK Jr's claim is true, it's only by breaking down several categories in unnatural ways and lumping all drug overdose deaths together into a single "Pharma drugs" category, which seems unreasonable.
-
Masks are entirely ineffective in preventing the transmission of COVID-19. I'm going to skip this one because it has been written about a lot already, both on this forum and elsewhere. My personal opinion is that saying masks are "entirely ineffective" is much too strong a claim, though I'm on board with a more limited claim that their effectiveness was exaggerated in popular media, especially the effectiveness of cloth masks.
-
70% of advertising on the news is from pharmaceutical companies. I'm highly skeptical of this, but had trouble finding concrete data. Also it's a bit vague: what does "news" entail? Does it include news websites? Newspapers like the NYT? Weighted by viewers, spending or something else? In any case, it just defies my own personal experience. I agree there are a lot of drug ads, but I don't feel like I've ever watched TV and seen almost 3 out of every 4 ads be about drugs.
-
Big Pharma gives twice as much as the next biggest industry to congress in lobbying efforts. This seems to not be literally true, but close enough that it's not worth the quibble. This chart by Statista shows that the pharmaceuticals/health products industry spends about $370,000,000 on lobbying in the US per year and the next leading industry, Electronics manufacturing and equipment, spends about $220,000,000. Now 370 is not quite twice 220 and I'm sure "health products" includes a number of non-pharmaceutical companies, but the claim was reasonably close to correct and violated my intuition so I'll give it to him.
pro_sprond
2yr ago
First, I don't think it's a poor use of evidence. Prop 209 is supposed to mean that public universities cannot decide admissions based on race. The fact that when the school has an incentive to suddenly admit more people of a certain race it is able to quickly do so shows that they likely do have the ability to at least let race have some influence on admission. The fact that this happened 25 years after Prop 209 passed doesn't matter much since the relevant change in incentives happened in 2020 and the change in admissions happened in 2021.
Second, I agree that it is a problem for 2rafa's argument if the change took place in 2020. Looking at the links you sent, it looks like there was a change in 2021, but you are also right that, especially for Berkeley in particular, there was a bigger change in 2020.
Third, saying "impossible" was too strong on my part and I apologize. Also it is reasonable to critique 2rafa for overstating the magnitude of the change. However, I don't buy your second argument here. If you want to explain a change in overall admission rate using the fact that different colleges have different admission rates, you have to explain why black people suddenly started applying to the various colleges at different rates than they had previously. Of course there are many possible explanations for a sudden change in admission rate but the one you propose does not seem plausible on the time scale of one year. A better counterargument, in my opinion, would be to cite changes in admissions policies (such as waiving SAT requirements) brought on by covid. Although this counterargument no longer works if the change happened in 2020 rather than 2021. Your argument about massaging public statistics by including waitlisted students is reasonable too, although again there is the question of why the university wouldn't have done this in previous years (more relevant if the change was in 2020 than in 2021).
EDIT: I should clarify that when I say "I don't think it's a poor use of evidence" I mean when 2rafa's claims are taken at face value. If 2rafa had the year of change or magnitude of change wrong then it may be poor evidence.
pro_sprond
2yr ago
I didn't claim that the UC system made no attempts to circumvent Prop 209, only that these attempts, at least for the first decade after Prop 209, did not manage to bring admissions numbers close to where they were before Prop 209. That seemed to contradict the phrase "comprehensively violating Prop 209" but perhaps we interpret the word "comprehensively" differently.
pro_sprond
2yr ago
I objected to the phrase "comprehensively violating" which to me seems to imply that Prop 209 had little to no effect on admissions numbers. I was simply pointing out that it did have a large effect on admissions even if this effect may not have been as large as in a scenario with no attempts to circumvent Prop 209.
pro_sprond
2yr ago
I think a lot of discussions about AA focus on the effect on black enrollment and try to depict it as a kind of "black vs. asian" conflict. Perhaps this is partly because those are the racial groups for whom the differences between standardized test scores and admission chances are most dramatic, but I think it somewhat misreads the issue. Black people are a relatively small percent of the US population (~13%) and are not increasing especially fast. Hispanic people, on the other hand, are an increasingly large share of the population because of immigration, high birth rate and changing fashion in racial identification among people of mixed race or ambiguous race (e.g. an ethnic white person who was born in Mexico). Even if no black people were admitted to elite universities (an unlikely outcome even if admissions were based entirely on test scores), this would only allow an increase of about 12% in asian admission. However, to some extent now and perhaps much more in the future, the rate at which hispanic people are admitted to elite universities could have a large impact on asian admission rates (as could white admission rates, of course).
pro_sprond
2yr ago
Due to increasing education polarization and affinity of liberals for AA, I actually wonder if, somewhat perversely, states that don't implement AA would have to worry about talented students and workers leaving to go to other states.
pro_sprond
2yr ago
I disagree with you. Based on historical precedent, it seems relatively likely that enrollment of URM students at elite universities will fall, at least in the short term. For example, as you can see here, when prop 209 passed in California, the number of black freshmen students at Berkeley fell by about 50% (from 6-7% of new freshmen to 3-4%). The social atmosphere is of course substantially different now than it was then and perhaps the UC system's experience with Prop 209 will give other universities a leg up on circumventing a possible AA ban, but I think the default hypothesis here should be that it will effect enrollment somewhat.
By the way, according to the numbers I linked to above, when Prop 209 passed, the number of black and hispanic students at Berkeley fell a lot but the number of white and asian students rose only slightly (at least in percentage terms). One reason is that there were many more white and asian students than hispanic and black students to begin with, so the same change in absolute terms looks much smaller in relative terms. Another reason seems to be an increase in percentage of "not given" as a response to demographic questions. It's not clear to me why this is and what the demographic breakdown of "not given" was at the time. I doubt that it was mostly black and hispanic students, but I'm not sure.
pro_sprond
2yr ago
I think you are overstating your case here. It is clear that Prop 209 did have a major effect on admissions in the UC system. For example, you can see here that the number of black freshmen students at Berkeley fell by about 50% from 1997 to 1998 (the first year the new rules were in effect) from 6-7% of new freshmen to 3-4%. I believe that the UC system did try to circumvent Prop 209 in various ways and may have become more effective at this over time, but claiming that "UCs were comprehensively violating Prop 209 since shortly after it was passed" doesn't seem correct.
pro_sprond
2yr ago
In my opinion it is valid evidence. "What took them so long?" In 2020, many major institutions suddenly became much more concerned about avoiding the appearance of discriminating against black people. This gave universities like Berkeley the motivation to try to admit more black students. The fact that they were able to do so in such a short time shows that they do have some ability to change admission decisions based on the race of applicants (either they were previously discriminating against black students or they started discriminating in favor of black students or both). If admissions were truly race-blind this would very likely have been impossible. Admittedly, university admissions in 2021 were also effected by covid (e.g. that was part of the justification for many universities to drop SAT requirements) and this makes the argument weaker than it would be otherwise. However, it seems obvious to me that 2rafa's point is evidence in favor of "covert AA" at schools like Berkeley and that "what took them so long" is not a convincing rebuttal.
pro_sprond
2yr ago
My observation is that wokeness proceeds in waves. Imagine you are standing on a beach watching the tide come in. The water level appears to rise each time a wave hits the shore and then fall again as the wave recedes. If you have never seen the ocean before then it is easy to think that the crest of each wave marks the highest level that the water will ever achieve. But in truth, each wave crests a little higher than the one before and gradually the water level rises until much of the beach is under water.
Wokeness has not advanced in a straightforward manner, increasing a little each day. Instead, wokeness advances and recedes in waves but each wave leaves a somewhat higher baseline level of wokeness than came before.
I remember thinking in late 2019 that wokeness seemed to have abated. The worst excesses of #metoo had already come and gone. BLM, Ferguson, etc seemed to be a long time in the past. It felt like there was a little more space to speak openly. And as bad as covid was, I remember feeling like it had led to even less focus on woke issues, at least for the first few months of 2020. Then George Floyd was killed and within a few days, wokeness had become more popular and more intense than I had thought possible.
Eventually I realized that this pattern has played out many times in much the same way. Wokeness seems to be declining until some new event ignites the public's passion, re-energizes the woke and facilitates new achievements for wokeness. Gradually the fervor dies down and some people start to question the worst excesses of the moment. For a time it seems that wokeness is in decline until the cycle repeats again. There are the major ones: Ferguson, #metoo, George Floyd. But there are also many minor incidents that follow the same pattern: JK Rowling, the Atlanta spa shootings, each new Dave Chappelle show, and so on.
But even though each of these waves eventually subsided, most of them left wokeness at a higher level than it was before. Presumably wokeness will not increase forever. Eventually the waves will cease or diminish so much that they don't matter. I am genuinely unsure if that will take closer to 2 years or 200. But it is a mistake to think that just because wokeness seems to be receding now it has truly peaked.
pro_sprond
2yr ago
Computers are much better at chess than humans so you can cheat by asking a computer what to do.
pro_sprond
2yr ago
I agree with you in a literal sense but I'm not sure I agree with the connotations of your comment. In particular, I think discrimination plays a relatively small role in explaining the variation in racial diversity in the US. And in the cases where discrimination does matter it is often the case that areas with more historical discrimination have more racial diversity (e.g. areas with a history of slavery tend to have more Black people today).
I think that latitude explains a fairly large portion of the variation in racial diversity in America and degree of urbanization accounts for much of the rest. First, latitude: slaves were originally highly concentrated in the south and so Black people today are still concentrated there. Also Latino immigrants are naturally concentrated in the South. Second, degree of urbanization: it is much easier for immigrants to find jobs in big urban centers rather than rural areas, both because there are more types of jobs and higher turnover. Also jobs in rural areas are more likely to be seasonal and thus less likely to lead to permanent residence. Also it is easier for immigrant communities to form in urban areas due to higher population density and this has a snowball effect.
There is at least one way in which historical discrimination played a big role in the low levels of racial diversity in some parts of the US: the collapse of Native American populations caused by war, disease, etc. But given that no state has a very large population of Native Americans today, I don't think this explains much of the variation in racial diversity.
The Virtue Theory of Money
Recently, Freddie deBoer published an essay called "What Would a Functioning System of Equal Opportunity Look Like for the Losers" complaining about how unfair "equality of opportunity" is. The main point is that since talent is partially heritable, if we reward people based on their abilities then people who have been unlucky in the genetic lottery will be left worse off. It's a little hard to tell exactly what way of distributing resources Freddie would prefer instead, but he seems to have the opinion that it is unjust for luck to play a significant role. In Freddie's words: "it’s hard to see how rewarding talent falls under a rubric of distributing resources to people based on that which they can control."
I think Freddie's essay is a good example of a misunderstanding about the benefits of equality of opportunity—a misunderstanding I've come to think of as the Virtue Theory of Money. Basically, this is my name for the belief that the main purpose of money is to reward people for being good.
In my experience, many people seem to have some sort of implicit belief that people should be rewarded by society according to how virtuous they are. This takes different forms: some people emphasize hard-work, conscientiousness and so on. Others emphasize the difficulty or social value of the job that someone is doing. For example, some people argue that affirmitive action is bad because it prevents talented, hardworking people from getting the jobs/university spots that they deserve. As another example, some people argue that teachers should be paid more because of how important their jobs are. The labor theory of value also seems to be partially motivated by this idea.
Read in this light, Freddie is basically complaining that talent is not a virtue and so we should not reward people for being talented. (He also seems to believe that the reason talent is not a virtue is because it is influenced by genetics, which is outside our control. I find that idea somewhat incoherent—all sorts of other apparent virtues like generosity or open-mindedness are also influenced by genetics, but that's irrelevant to my main point.)
However, I think this idea is almost totally wrong. In my view, the main reason to reward some people more than others is if doing so leads to better social outcomes. The point is not to provide personal benefit to the people rewarded but to incentivize behavior that benefits the entire society.
As an example, I believe that the best argument against affirmitive action is not that it personally hurts the individual people denied positions because of it (though I do feel sympathy for them) but because it deprives society of having the most capable people in the most important jobs. The reason that we want to select the most talented people to become doctors is because it's good to have good doctors not because being a doctor is a nice reward for being a top student. Likewise, the best argument for paying teachers more is if doing so would lead to better educational outcomes of enough magnitude to be worth the extra cost. I agree that plenty of teachers (though far from all) are nice, hard-working people who do a demanding job. But again, a job is not supposed to be a reward for being a good person, it's supposed to be a way to get something useful done.
I also think this is a serious issue. Basing hiring decisions and salaries on how virtuous people seem can cause resources to be poorly allocated in a way that hurts everybody. If we followed the Virtue Theory of Money then too many people would want to be teachers (it's already a popular job even without a major salary boost) and not enough would want to be middle managers or accountants. We would have worse doctors, engineers and scientists.
So my main response to Freddie complaining about "equality of opportunity" leading to talented people being rewarded more is: that's exactly the point! We want talented people to be incentivized to apply their talents instead of doing some routine job that almost anyone else can do. Stop trying to use the virtue theory of money and think about the long-term conseuqences of policy decisions.
Now, I do want to add a couple caveats to this. First, I think it's bad to let people suffer a lot when society has sufficient resources to help them. So I think it's reasonable for the government to give some help to people who don't have the ability to get high quality jobs. But I think we should be aware that the government is only able to do this because of how rich our society is and that this wealth depends on incentivizing talented people to use their talents. Second, I do think that there is some value in rewarding people purely for their virtue. I want to live in a society of virtuous people and so I would like virtue to be incentivized even if the economic benefits are not always easy to measure. However, I think this should usually be a secondary concern.
More options
Context Copy link