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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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My point was purely meta, I am absolutely fine with the argument "in the current political climate and given the replication crisis, it seems likely that the people who devote their lives to studying the outcome of gender interventions are more motivated by activism than by genuine scientific curiosity, and that a lot of them have already written the bottom line when the study starts. Then, they engage in cargo cult science to find the argument leading to their preferred conclusion. As the activists outnumber the scientists, they can use the mechanisms of peer review and grant-making to sideline authors with a lesser or opposite bias. Thus, all their studies are to considered unreliable and we should default to our priors regarding the benefits of gender interventions in minors."

I might have some disagreements with the argument (especially with its sibling being applied to climate science), but these would mostly boil down to object level questions about reality (including institutions) which are at least in principle fathomable by the scientific method.

It is the difference between Kelvin boldly stating:

I need scarcely say that the beginning and maintenance of life on earth is absolutely and infinitely beyond the range of sound speculation in dynamical science.

and a more modest:

Explaining life is currently very much beyond physics, and we lack a paradigm to even make progress on that question. It might be different in a hundred or a thousand years, or it might remain thus forever.