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In most people, intelligence and rationality are unevenly distributed. One might be brilliant in some ways and a dunce in others. I think that this is typical for humans and people who are rational consistently are very rare, that is if any of them even exist to begin with. We tend to call people intelligent when they demonstrate signs of high intelligence in any area, even if in other areas they are stupid. So, for example, if there was a brilliant mathematician who knew nothing about history or literature or biology or physics or politics or any other topic of knowledge, and had extremely low social intelligence, we would usually call that person brilliant even if the average of all their mental abilities was actually no higher than that of the average person.
In light of this, it's not surprising that there are many people who seem a bit smarter than average and work in mentally demanding fields and yet have a number of nonsensical, incoherent views about political and other issues. We see it here on TheMotte all the time.
If the trans kid thing is a social contagion or social panic, though, to me it seems like a pretty minor one. The number of kids who actually might begin to transition is a tiny fraction of the overall kid population. So I am not surprised that most people don't care. If the number of transitioning kids was significant, I think society's overall attitude toward it might be very different.
I don't think the number being relatively rare is especially relevant to the ethics of it. Even under a consequentialist frame, it's better to have fewer people having unnecessary surgeries. Are you arguing that rare things should be dealt with any old how because more people die in other ways?
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In 1950, the population of the United States was about 150 million. Between the late 30's and early 50's about 60,000 lobotomies were performed. So an incredibly small percentage. Even so, despite the very small number spread out over 20 years, there eventually was a moral outrage at the horrific nature of the procedure and the aftermath.
Crimes against humanity don't need to be widespread to inspire a backlash against them. In fact, it's probably the opposite relationship. If everyone had a lobotomized family member whom they were deeply invested in believing had the right and proper thing done to them, it's possible people would have had too much buy in to have effectively banned the practice.
Weren't there more pharmaceutical options for this use case available as lobotomies declined?
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