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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22295 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Common sense is a poor guide because both sides think they have the common sense. Personally I will accept either outcome as to its usefulness, but I use the cheat of "we actively have zero idea because of poor research quality." However when most people talk about this they let question two bleed in, and that includes "what just makes the most sense?" The idea of gender identity problems is very poorly understood, including its natural history and pathophysiology (in large part because of willful blindness by advocates). It should be weird enough and unknown enough that "what makes sense" rarely applies.

I mean, if we have zero idea then it's still a scandal anyway.

Yes!

100% going to be a situation where we think of modern gender affirming care as being similar to lobotomy (with the same ignoring the positive side of lobotomies) at some point in the future (could be soon could be later).

I directionally agree with most posters here on this topic.

BUT.

Common sense isn't the right tree to be barking up.

I would say the heuristic understanding common sense is applying the same standards used for non-political or non-controversial interventions to the interventions that are most controversial and politically entwined.

To be direct about it, that seems to be the literal meaning behind the phrase “common sense”; it is the sense making applied most commonly.

That seems to be the heuristic that cjet79 is applying so I’m confused as to why you’d disagree. Am I misunderstanding something?

My point is that the average person's understanding of common sense (or intuition) is generally a poor choice for application to medical topics. This is hurt even more by the fact that it actually works some of the time, so it is common for people to get the impression that common sense works well enough.

I do agree with some of cnet's conclusions, but I'm saying that he's right (when he is, by my reckoning) by essentially accident. While I don't think cjet does this, you see a lot of people overestimating on the topic of medicine with similar thinking.

I understand your point, but common sense isn’t meant to be categorical, but rather a heuristic or a kind of null hypothesis.

We go with the common sense approach until there’s good evidence to the contrary.

Whilst I appreciate your point that some people may allow bias to bleed into what they deem common sense, if you use the heuristic laid out my cjet79 common sense is a valid approach and we should be sceptical of people or institutions that caste it aside without proper evidence.

Tbh, I don’t think we’re disagreeing here; maybe just talking past each other a little.

I guess my point is that common sense as it applies to most people's thinking does not apply to medicine.

We can be annoyed at people for (potentially) getting things wrong, but if your take away is to replace expert opinion with common sense (as has been the case for many, especially here) then you will end up being more wrong.

The better approach is to trust the expert opinion except for the things where they are going to be reliably unreliable, which are easy to guess. COVID medications? Yeah expert opinion got that right. COVID policy? Well yeah doctors got that wrong, they aren't policy people.

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