sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
I harp on RCTs because most of the time I read non-RCTs (in fields like healthcare and sociology with complicated and frequently opaque mechanisms) they end up utterly failing to adequately compensate for their disadvantages. Though of course this is a biased sample, I'm generally not reading studies on obvious and non-controversial subjects. It's always stuff like "we controlled for X" where X is whatever arbitrary handful of factors the authors thought of (leaving whatever residue is left as the "effect", or conversely erasing the effect with Everest controls), or "we matched with a non-random pseudo control group" (like the puberty blockers study I discussed) where we're supposed to trust how well matched they really are and there's often obvious differences between the groups. It is with good reason that in applications like clinical trials where RCTs are possible, they are considered the "gold standard" and are often required for approval by organizations like the FDA.
It's bad enough that I think anyone trying to argue the contrary needs to very specifically justify why the non-RCTs in the case in question actually work, not vaguely gesture at the fact that sometimes we can gather adequate evidence without RCTs. Otherwise I think it is very easy for people, including medical professionals, to assume that (for instance) just because 50 studies on puberty blockers have been conducted and they have become established clinical practice we now know whether they are better or worse than nothing. Sorry, 5-HTTLPR and depression had 450 studies and turned out to be completely fake, you need the very highest quality of studies to know whether the thing you're talking about is even real. There are of course plenty of ways to mess up RCTs too, the replication crisis is filled with them, but my impression whenever I see RCTs on a subject compared with non-RCTs (as in Scott's posts I linked in the prior post) is of a huge and often unbridgeable difference in baseline reliability. Sometimes conducting RCTs really is impossible (and in those cases I expect our understanding of the issue to be much worse) but if they're possible then conducting a high-quality RCT is going to be my go-to recommendation for both understanding the issue and creating evidence compelling enough that it can potentially convince others.
Less facetiously, we have no RCTs demonstrating that HIV causes AIDs, but we can still be pretty confident about the link between the virus and the disease.
What do HIV and parachutes have in common? A much clearer mechanism of action. With gender dysphoria what we instead have is the murky waters of people creating narratives about their own subjective experiences based on whatever memes their culture has lying around, something people are terrible at doing accurately. Such introspection provides a wide range of insights: miracle supplements or faith-healing producing amazing boosts in well-being, subconscious reasons for your problems accessible through dream-analysis, neurasthensia, suppressed memories, etc. So yes, I'm sure you can make the case for HIV without a RCT, but that case would have to focus specifically on evidence particular to that case, my default without such evidence is to be skeptical of non-RCTs and look for the many ways they can go wrong.
All I'm trying to say is that your original post overemphasized the importance of RCTs in medicine.
By the way, based on you posting this in reply to someone else I think you mistook his posts for mine.
In my opinion, there is definitely enough research out there by now that you can confidently release something like a Cass Report without anything new.
The CASS report predominantly based its conclusions on the lack of high-quality research, a point it reiterates often, not on high-quality affirmative evidence against treatment. There is some such evidence - for instance see this Reddit comment I wrote about puberty blockers and the indications that they both lock children onto the transgender pathway and permanently damage brain development - but like all evidence on the issue it isn't very good. In the absence of evidence that a treatment is safe and effective, the burden is traditionally on those advocating for the treatment to prove that it is. However, even aside from new studies actually providing information, "gender-affirming care" now has both established practice and a political ideology behind it, so abolishing it in any sort of permanent and widespread way seems likely to require more evidence. Without new evidence you might see some governments abolish or discourage it specifically for children, but others will continue to feed a fraction of every new generation into the trans pipeline and even places that get rid of it could easily flip back in a generation. The medical consensus turning against it would be a much more effective and stable solution, and something like a high-quality randomized control trial showing gender transition failing to outperform the control group would be a big step in that direction.
If anything "lack of high-quality research" understates the case. There is not a single randomized control study of gender transition, in either children or adults. It's incredibly easy for non-RCTs to give false results even if you do a reasonably good job, and most don't do even that. Read through something like Scott's Alcoholics Anonymous post or his ivermectin post and imagine how much worse it would be if only the non-RCT subset of the studies he looks at were available. That's why fields like nutrition, where long-term randomized control trials are impractical, are so terrible despite far more quantity and quality of research than a small field like gender dysphoria.
As an example, here's an excerpt from the Cass Report I've looked into previously:
The systematic review on interventions to suppress puberty (Taylor et al: Puberty suppression) provides an update to the NICE review (2020a). It identified 50 studies looking at different aspects of gender-related, psychosocial, physiological and cognitive outcomes of puberty suppression. Quality was assessed on a standardised scale. There was one high quality study, 25 moderate quality studies and 24 low quality studies. The low quality studies were excluded from the synthesis of results.
Here is the meta-study being cited, the classification into high/moderate/low quality was not done by the Cass Report but by the meta-study. Note that many of the studies only looked at physical outcomes like "is puberty suppressed". At the time trans activists complained about the CASS report excluding a lot of studies, but among other things that includes studies that only investigated whether puberty blockers stop puberty and made no attempt to investigate whether stopping puberty provided any psychological benefit. This is the single supposed "high-quality" study. It isn't a randomized control study, it compares patients who have been given puberty blockers to ones who just started the assessment process. (It also compares to a "cisgender comparison group", such comparisons tend to be even more worthless.) Among other potential problems, this means the results are very plausibly just regression to the mean or benefits from the other mental-health care provided. If you think the parents of children with worse self-reported "internalizing, suicidality, and peer relations" are more likely to seek treatment than the parents of children who are currently doing fine, which the study itself shows, then improvement over time is the expected result even if you don't do anything. Plus they did do other things, it specifically mentions "the care provided in the present study also involved the offering of appropriate mental health care". It also mentions that the "control" group has an average age of 14.5 years and the treatment group 16.8 years. And that's the only "high-quality" study the meta-study could find on puberty blockers, here are the reasons given for why it considered the other studies to be even worse.
sodiummuffin
28d ago
Well, the fact that is the one quote always cited to make that argument certainly makes it seem like an outlier. And even it only says that they are not "purely white" since they are supposedly darker in complexion. That doesn't seem like a quote from a society where "French people aren't members of the white race" was a mainstream view, and indeed that wouldn't make sense with how people interpreted laws and rules explicitly referring to "White" people. It seems like him drawing a novel distinction between the different white races based on skin-tone to argue some of them are more white.
sodiummuffin
28d ago
As I said:
The main trick they pull is to define "whiteness" as not being discriminated against or "othered", point out that the Irish were discriminated against, and thus define them as not white. But the actual historical people who did the discriminating did not define white people that way, they both considered Irish to be a subcategory of white people and also discriminated against them.
sodiummuffin
29d ago
The Irish and the Lithuanians and the Jews were definitely not white when they first got off the boats.
The Irish/Jews/etc. were considered white, the idea that they weren't is a psuedo-historical myth advanced by certain activist historians like Noel Ignatiev. The main trick they pull is to define "whiteness" as not being discriminated against or "othered", point out that the Irish were discriminated against, and thus define them as not white. But the actual historical people who did the discriminating did not define white people that way, they both considered Irish to be a subcategory of white people and also discriminated against them. Being white was of real legal and social relevance, and groups such as the Irish were unquestionably included in that category.
The Volokh Conspiracy: Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)
Here are some objective tests as to whether a group was historically considered “white” in the United States: Were members of the group allowed to go to “whites-only” schools in the South, or otherwise partake of the advantages that accrued to whites under Jim Crow? Were they ever segregated in schools by law, anywhere in the United States, such that “whites” went to one school, and the group in question was relegated to another? When laws banned interracial marriage in many states (not just in the South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?
If you use such objective tests, you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom (as in the case of labor unions). Indeed, some lighter-skinned African Americans of mixed heritage “passed” as white by claiming they were of Arab descent and that explained their relative swarthiness, showing that Arab Americans, another group whose “whiteness” has been questioned, were considered white. By contrast, persons of African, Asian, Mexican and Native American descent faced various degrees of exclusion from public schools and labor unions, bans on marriage and direct restrictions on immigration and citizenship.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
The second frames Zelensky as a conduit for his people's will. ... The average age of the fighting man is over 40.
What's with the way people use this point? Ukraine is engaging in a deliberate policy of recruiting older people because they don't want to kill off their younger generation. The minimum age for conscription was 27 until they lowered it to 25 in 2024. This is bad enough when people are using it make some "Ukraine is running out of manpower" point, which true or false is not supported by them recruiting people of the ages they are deliberately trying to recruit. However it seems even more ill-suited to make your current argument: if it's a mistaken policy, then it is one that if anything panders too hard towards the will of the people.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
the developers deny its authenticity
By "don't believe everything you read on the internet" they were presumably referring to the false rumors not the true ones. Like the "unskippable gay sex scene" rumor started by Saudi Arabian sites based on it being rejected by the government of Saudi Arabia. Of course in reality the scene is both part of a very optional romance and is (like every cutscene) skippable even if you've chosen that romance route. I'm not sure if the "unskippable" part was from bad machine translation of the Saudi sites or something else.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
Because it was a plan created by a group of non-Trump Republicans and contained elements that he disagreed with, some of which were mined for political attacks by those claiming it was his plan. That doesn't mean that he disagrees with everything in it - both Trump and the authors are Republicans, so naturally they have overlap in policy. Nor does it mean that Trump considers people radioactive and unhireable for contributing to it, once again they are Republicans and agree on many things. It just means that people quoting from it as "Trump's plan" were being dishonest, an honest critic could have either quoted Agenda 47 instead or made predictions about his actions without claiming they were from Trump's published plan. I don't think this is ordinarily a concept people have difficulty with, activist groups and think-tanks publish proposals that have partial overlap with politician's actual plans all the time.
I'm guessing the very fact that it wasn't his plan contributed to the focus on it. For anything in Agenda 47 he could just say "yeah that's my plan, it's great!". Whereas the fact that Project 2025 wasn't actually his plan meant that he denied it, which looks weaker and like he has something to hide.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
"Six million people were killed in Nazi concentration camps during the second world war, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".
"Millions of others" - other than what? Other than the 6 million jews referrred to in the first part of the sentence. This is a statement that only makes sense precicely because the speaker is not a holocaust denier and thinks it goes without saying that the 6 million refers to the jewish victims and then on top of that there were "millions of others" who were instead killed for being "Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".
That's just how people talk. It doesn't reflect anything besides the fact that the sensitive nature of the subject matter means some people on Twitter are combing through statements like these in order to complain because someone said "six million" instead of "six million jews". Similarly with the others, when someone says "all those who were murdered just for being who they were" it's because she wants to emphasize that aspect of the motive, not because she doesn't think jews were targeted.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
Scott knew the truth about HBD all along, but his public position was still in compliance with HBD denial.
No it wasn't. In 2017 he wrote The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project, as well as this post that was probably the most explicit pre-AstralCodexTen:
Learning To Love Scientific Consensus:
Even things about genetic psychological differences between population groups are less bold and maverick-y than their proponents like to think. The relevant surveys I know trying to elicit scientific consensus (1, 2, 3) all find that, when asked anonymously, most scientists think these differences explain about 25% – 50% of variance.
I hate to bring that up, because it’ll probably start a flame war in the comments, but I think it’s important as a sign of exactly how hard it is to politicize science. Global warming skeptics talk about how maybe the scientific consensus on global warming is false because climatologists face political pressure to bias their results in favor of the theory. But scientists studying these areas face much more political pressure, and as long as you give the surveys anonymously they’re happy to express horrendously taboo opinions. This is about the strongest evidence in favor of the consensus on global warming – and scientific consensus in general – that I could imagine.
Coincidentally that post also addresses your point. Even with something as taboo and suprressed as HBD, you can anonymously survey experts in the field and get overwhelming support. That doesn't translate into "institutions" being automatically trustworthy, something like a public statement by a university or an article in the New York Times has little in common with an anonymous survey of experts. But I don't think he ever said otherwise. He's posted about how media outlets rarely outright lie and prefer misleading people in other ways, but that isn't the same as saying they're generally trustworthy.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
By contacting more journalists, including more prominent ones. By providing evidence such as documentation (sure it's plausible that he didn't manage to copy any - but if someone like him knew about it there should be a huge number of people in a position to leak it). By providing specifics about how exactly he learned about it, some of which could lead to collaborating evidence. Not by combining it with other grievances ranging from war crimes to personal issues and generic stuff about how the country is "headed towards collapse". That's a common tendency with delusions/lies/exaggerations, where something that should be a huge deal is treated as a side note because the chain of causation doesn't begin with learning about it but with his general state of mind manufacturing it. (See also: MeToo accusations that treat claims like "committed rape" as secondary to "was a bad boyfriend who hurt my feelings".) Not by committing suicide at all: mentally healthy people rarely commit suicide and it's a bad way to leak information compared to just staying alive and telling people all the specifics of what he learned and when/why he learned it.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
Reading the first half of your post it seemed like a message from a mentally ill person. Learning that he later killed himself in a car bomb did not increase my assessment of his sanity.
I tend to find schizophrenic or similarly disordered modes of thinking very recognizable, so it's always weird to me when other people see them and don't immediately realize what's going on. You also have to consider the base rates here: mental illness is much more common than the number of people who know about "secret physics-revolutionizing propulsion systems" level information, or indeed information considerably less earth-shattering than that. And what percentage of people who know about the latter would react by messaging an obscure Instagram account, mixing in unrelated stuff about war crimes, and then bombing themselves in front of Trump Tower?
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
The issue I'm having is that the current H-1B system is does not stop at importing the top ~0.1% of engineering talent, and originally he was talking about expanding it even more.
It's a lottery system, it rejects "0.1% engineers" even as it lets in lower-skill immigrants so long as the lower-skill immigrants are above the minimum threshold. It could instead do something like auction off the slots to the highest bidder or hand them out in order to the highest wages offered and it would become dramatically more selective even if it expanded. I don't know what reforms if any the Trump administration will actually pursue, but they're not incompatible goals.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
If Musk believes all humans are fungible economic units, how does he turn right?
Even setting aside every issue besides immigration, it is possible to believe importing "top 0.1%" skilled engineers is a net-positive without believing that importing masses of economic 'refugees' and illegal immigrants is. Masses of migrants (and their descendants) are a tremendous net-drain on the government budget and societal resources, commit more crime, etc. while small groups of elite immigrants would not be. "People who want to immigrate" is a category that selects for people living in bad countries, and since one of the most common reasons for countries to be bad is the average intelligence/etc. of the people who live there this selects for bad immigrants, but "people who are allowed to immigrate" can be selective in the opposite direction. This just doesn't seem difficult to understand if you actually read him describing his own beliefs and don't strawman it as him supporting the current H-1B system.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873187030785769964
?? I don’t support an open immigration policy at all. I support a highly selective immigration policy.
Immigration should be limited to those who will obviously contribute far more than they take.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872374103983759835
Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873191959441084531
Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.
I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
2024 study critiquing the many methodological errors in that study:
We have outlined several conceptual and methodological concerns with the analysis of Anderson et al. (2023). Specifically, the Anderson et al. (2023) analysis is not reproducible because their sampling criteria are not clear and 35% of the societies in their sample do not come from D-PLACE, the database they claim was the source of all the societies in their sample. Moreover, these 35% were heavily biased toward societies that they coded as ones in which women hunt. Many other societies with extensive information on hunting are also not in D-PLACE yet were not included in their analysis, and authoritative sources on hunting in the societies in the Anderson et al. (2023) sample were not consulted. Additionally, there are at least 18 societies in D-PLACE with information on hunting that were inexplicably omitted from their analysis, none of which provide evidence for women hunters.
Finally, there were numerous coding errors. Of the 50/63 (79%) societies that Anderson et al. (2023) coded as ones in which women hunt, for example, our recoding found that women rarely or never hunted in 16/50 (32%); we also found 2 false negatives. Overall, we found evidence in the biased Anderson et al. (2023) data set that in 35/63 (56%) societies, women hunt “Sometimes” or “Frequently”. Moreover, compared to the 17/63 (27%) socie- ties in which women were claimed to hunt big game regularly, our recoding found that this was true for only 9/63 (14%). A precise estimate of women’s hunting in foraging societies must await a future thorough and unbiased analysis of the ethnographic record (see, e.g., Hoffman, Farquharson, & Venkataraman, 2024), but it is certainly far less than the Anderson et al. (2023) estimate and is very unlikely to overturn the current view that it is relatively uncommon.
The fundamental issue is that women’s hunting is not a binary phenomenon, and treating it as such, especially with a very low threshold for classifying a society as one in which women hunt, obfuscates gendered divisions of labor within groups.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
Back in 2015 he had a fictional op-ed exploring some of the questions about "voluntary" here:
Everything Not Obligatory Is Forbidden
In 2064 there were almost 200 murders nationwide, up from a low of fewer than 50 in 2060. Why is this killer, long believed to be almost eradicated, making a comeback? Criminologists are unanimous in laying the blame on unenhanced children, who lack the improved impulse-control and anger-management genes included in every modern super-enhancement designer baby gene therapy package.
I see in the comments of the post he also established his position more explicitly:
I mean, I am pro voluntary designer babies, although I’m only confident about this in cases where it’s clear enhancement (eg giving kids genes that make them healthier) and not control (eg giving kids genes that make them want to always do what their parents say).
I don’t think I’m pro mandatory designer babies. You might be able to convince me depending on the exact details of the situation. But it probably wouldn’t be through an argument like this.
That “transhumanism is simplified humanism” post at the bottom explains where I’m coming from pretty well.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
Relevant post on his Tumblr from 2017 when he was doing child psychiatry:
Public service announcement: if you have a kid with some kind of horrifying predatory criminal, and now your kid is a horrifying predatory criminal, and you have no idea how this happened because the father left before he was even born and your new husband is a great guy and you’ve both always done your best to raise your kid well and give him a good home, your kid’s psychiatrist will listen empathetically to your story, and then empathetically give you a copy of The Nurture Assumption.
…maybe not actually. But it will definitely be on his mind. And maybe it would get people to stop having so many kids with horrifying predatory criminals. Seriously, I’m doing inpatient child psychiatry now and I get multiple cases like this every day.
This part of the followup post also seems relevant:
2 Did you know there are whole institutions for dealing with kids who sexually molest other kids? And these institutions are always full? The world is much worse than anybody thinks and I cannot finish up my child psychiatry rotation quickly enough.
I don't think the tweet Spookykou quoted is nessesarily saying "putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children", he was just comparing IQ and self-restraint as he said. But note that some of the people who need to be locked up are children. (This also brings to mind the bit in his post Against Against Autism Cures regarding those who are locked in personal sensory hells regardless of whether they also need to be physically restrained or not.)
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
In real life female peach-fuzz/vellus hair is normally very short, very fine, and barely-noticeable. Videogames generally do not depict details that tiny, so if a videogame model tries to depict something like that there's a good chance of it ending up being bigger and more prominent than it almost always is in real life. Compare to something like the left side of this stock photo. The real face has an incredibly subtle fuzz, with 3 tiny strands of longer hair, while Aloy's face seems covered in hair as long as those 3 strands. Or this set of 279 photos of women without makeup.
There is of course a range of exceptions (all the way up to women with full beards), and either those are the target audience for peach-fuzz removal products or they use them as examples while expecting the actual audience to be women with a more normal amount. But it's pretty far from typical. Now, I don't think the developers outright planned to have her be an outlier, I think it was probably "we have graphics so good we can have this incredibly fine detail", and then when that wasn't actually true and it was too prominent they were woke enough that nobody was willing to point that out.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
That screenshot is from Horizon Zero Dawn in 2017, the one people complained about/mocked was her changed model from Horizon Forbidden West in 2022. Here is her 2017 model compared to her face-model Hannah Hoekstra, while here is a comparison with her 2022 model. Also here is her early Zero Dawn concept art and here is the famous comparison with mukbang Youtuber Nikocado Avocado.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
So CEO decisions are so consequential that they can ruin a company worth tens of billions of dollars. That makes it seem very sensible to pay a couple hundred million if it increases the chances those decisions are good. Sometimes CEOs are paid those hundreds of millions and make bad decisions anyway, but generally people believe that being willing to pay more improves those odds, that's why they do it.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
The four leaked ones I was referring to were Gimbal (included in the FOIA release of the briefing), Flir/Tic-tac (included), GoFast (not included) and a fourth one that hasn't been declassified. However checking the Wikipedia page footage of the Pyramid one was actually recorded and leaked by Navy personnel as well, though I think that footage was different from the official footage of the same incident that was later officially released. So it turns out all 3 that are uncensored in that PDF were leaked and then later declassified years later.
My point, even before knowing that all 3 of those were leaked, was that internal pressures like people wanting to declassify the more compelling footage or people outright leaking it makes it pretty difficult for the government to deliberately only declassify unconvincing footage if they have anything dramatically better. So I think the declassified stuff is probably pretty representative, if not the cream of the crop that there was more pressure to declassify and more reason to leak.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
Okay, the images on page 9 of the briefing are from the declassified Tic Tac video, the ones on page 12 are from the declassified Gimbal video, and the one on page 13 is from the declassified Pyramid video released in 2021. So they censored every image that hasn't been specifically declassified and released previously. Note that 4 videos including Gimbal were leaked before being declassified, so it doesn't seem like they're cherrypicking the least convincing videos to release.
If you follow those links there's plausible non-alien explanations for each of those videos. For example, in the Pyramid one (the only one I hadn't seen before), the shapes are because of the bokeh effect on an out-of-focus light combined with the triangular shape of the aperture (which the Navy already knew when they talked about it in the Congressional hearing). However only one of the triangles was an actual plane/drone, the rest were clearly stars belonging to the constellation Sagitta. The flashing of the non-star also matches the timing of a plane's collision lights, and the USS Russell was directly under a flight path at the time. Which seems like a good reminder for anyone who puts a lot of weight on evidence just because the government is taking it seriously. Their job is to fight wars, not figure out all the weird-looking things that might seem alien-like, and classified information is going to be viewed by a lot less people than information released to the public. Naval Intelligence isn't nessesarily going to be very good at things like "checking if the UFO drone swarm happens to be the exact shape of a constellation plus one actual plane".
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
So my question is... why? If they're not hiding anything then why not just let us see for ourselves?
I don't know the specific briefing or photos you're referring to, but I'd assume it's because footage taken by military aircraft/etc. can reveal military capabilities or activity and is thus classified by default. You don't want to give away information about the capabilities of your cameras, for example. Meanwhile the footage which has been declassified is consistent with alternative explanations such as glare from a distant jet.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
instead of leave this funding open
Because most of the time the Disaster Relief Fund doesn't need that much money and Congress can just pass a bill giving them more funding if they actually need it, like they did in 2017 and last month. Would you prefer if they were deliberately given excess money and it was up to FEMA officials to decide how to save or spend it? Because that doesn't seem like a good idea to me. If the Disaster Relief Fund got an extra $20 billion every year they could probably find a way to spend it during mild hurricane seasons to increase preparedness or something, but that doesn't mean that would actually be better than spending the money on some other part of government or lower taxes.
Why did Congress earmark these funds for non-citizen migrants
If you're going to allow non-citizen migrants in the first place, such as allowing refugees under humanitarian justifications, the same humanitarian justification can be used to argue for helping them in other ways so they aren't left homeless on the street. More to the point, this is fundamentally a policy question that doesn't relate to the Disaster Relief Fund any more than any other government program. Regardless of whether it's a good idea to have the Shelter and Services program, that doesn't change whether it's a good idea to provide the Disaster Relief Fund with additional funds on an as-needed basis.
The opposite, it was institutional investors selling and retail investors trying to "buy the dip". To a record degree during the first big selloff on Thursday.
Individual investors made a record $4.7 billion in stock purchases Thursday as new tariffs pummeled markets
Which makes sense. For one because retail investors have more of a gambling mentality where they aren't obligated to avoid risk and can bet that Trump will back down or get overridden by Congress. For another they aren't necessarily knowledgeable about markets or economics, when 50% of the population voted for Trump I'm sure there's plenty of people who default to partisanship and assume he knows what he's doing. And even in left-wing communities a surprisingly common line I saw was that "Trump is deliberately crashing the market so that billionaires can buy it up cheap", people tend to assume that it must be to someone's benefit.
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