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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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1390 adolescents went on puberty blockers in the US in 2021, out of a population of about 42 million total teenagers

I reject this because I know of someone prepubescent who was put on puberty blockers in like 2008. And it has exploded since then. My life is interesting, but not so much that I'd be part of the initial cadre in-the-know if the numbers of adolescents were still so low.

My life is interesting, but not so much that I'd be part of the initial cadre in-the-know if the numbers of adolescents were still so low.

Depending on what particular social circles you ran in in 2008, it is entirely possible that your life is sufficiently interesting for you to be in the top 0.1% of people in terms of likelihood to run into this in your social circles (e.g. if you lived in a coastal state and knew this person from a state-level robotics or performing arts event).

1390 out of 42 million is way less than .1%

You know more than 1 person, and you know of a lot more people than you know personally. A typical American knows something on the order of 500 people, and knows of probably 20x that many. If there was exactly one person on puberty blockers out of 300 million Americans, you'd expect ~10k / 300M or 0.0033% of Americans to know of them. To get to "0.1% of people know of someone on puberty blockers" you'd only have to have 30 such people in the entire country.

And 1390 is supposed to be number for today, not 2008.