After math (2)

In which everyone is horrified again

Three years ago, while writing the course described and linked in After math (1), I learned how to critically examine the quality of data and the extent to which it supports a researcher’s assertions about that data. It is my hope that, if you have read that course, you have picked up those skills as well.

If you haven’t read through that course yet, please do so before continuing, because it is critical context for what follows. Also, if you haven’t read the Bennett et al. dead salmon fMRI poster linked in that course, you’re missing the best piece of comedy in the sciences in this century.

𓆰 𓆰 𓆰

After writing that course, unaware that I stood on the lip of a deep pit, I blithely took the methods I had learned and applied them to various popular claims I was hearing around me. As I investigated, I discovered that in no case did the data support the popular assertions. In some cases, the data did not even support the claims of the researchers.

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Exercises, set 1

• Read Harper 2015, the single study on which IOC policy is based, and “N=8,” a 2023 commentary on that study. Compare with Hilton and Lundberg 2020.¹

• Read Cantor 2019, a fact-check of the American Association of Pediatrics 2018 position paper by Rafferty et. al. Extra credit: read Ayala v. AAP (2023).

• Read an anonymous medical professional’s commentary on Chen et. al 2023.

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From what I’ve seen over the years, journalists covering science in the mainstream media often rely on a university press release rather than examining the actual paper and data. This happens because their past degrees and training are often in journalism² rather than in the sciences. But even the most breathless university press release can be expected to contain a kernel of truth, however badly misapprehended. I wasn’t seeing even that.

I kept digging, trying to prove my initial observations wrong, because the alternative—that a significant number of people were blatantly lying and misrepresenting data, being believed, and having their lies drive policy—was very, very bad. I read paper after paper, to the point of doing a small literature review over the course of 2022. Perhaps ten of the papers I read overlapped with the large set eventually cited in Affirmation Generation (2022),³ but I read other papers not mentioned in that documentary as well.⁴

I had read Feynman years ago and remembered his remark on how long it took for measurements of the electron charge to shift away from the landmark Millikan oil drop experiment toward a more accurate value, likely due to a subconscious reluctance to deviate from such famous results. I was aware of Barry Marshall, the Australian doctor who discovered that ulcers were caused not by stress but by H. pylori bacteria, but couldn’t get anyone to believe him for years, even after drinking a soup of the bacteria, giving himself an ulcer, and curing it.⁵ I read The Misinformation Age, by O’Connor and Weatherall, which discusses how paid propagandists⁶ masquerading as scientists can block the spread of real findings, such as when scientists who received grants from the tobacco industry published results suggesting tobacco use was safe. The authors also mention Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis, who famously tried to convince his colleagues to wash and disinfect their hands with chlorine solution after conducting autopsies and before assisting with childbirth, in order to reduce the number of women dying from infection in childbirth. Semmelweis was laughed at, ignored, and eventually committed to a mental asylum, where he died in 1865 at the age of 47.

Knowledge of historical hiccups in the sciences does not, however, reduce the unpleasantness of finding oneself in the middle of one.

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Exercises, set 2

• Using FBI homicide statistics from 2019 or earlier and U.S. Census population estimates for the same year (first and second tables), calculate murder rates, expressed per 100,000, for (1) men, (2) women, (3) black people.⁷ Using HRC non-natural death counts and UCLA Williams Institute population estimates, calculate non-natural death rates for trans-identifying people in the U.S., expressed per 100,000. What kinds of deaths are included or excluded from FBI UCR Program reporting and HRC data? If identical screening criteria are applied to both datasets, how do prior calculations change?

• What is the percentage of sex offenders among male inmates who identify as women in (1) Canada, (2) California, (3) U.S. federal prison, (4) England and Wales? How does this compare to the percentage of sex offenders among the general male prison population in each location?

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I considered keeping my mouth shut about what I was seeing. I had become aware of the severe and often violent consequences experienced by women and a few men who spoke up against this particular group of falsehoods.

In the end, like many others, I couldn’t.⁸

As Miłosz said in his 1980 Nobel lecture: “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn’t allow one to think of anything else.” Three decades prior, in The Captive Mind, Miłosz compared his attempts to go along with a totalitarian ideology to swallowing live frogs, one after another. However finely reasoned, after a certain number of frogs, the stomach revolts, and it is no longer possible to continue.⁹

Or as Solzhenitsyn said in 1976 to the BBC: “To fight against untruth and falsehood, to fight against myths, or to fight against an ideology which is hostile to mankind, to fight for our memory, for our memory of what things were like—that is the task of the artist.”¹⁰

More drily, referring to Mary Wortley Montagu’s successful campaign for smallpox vaccination using the Princess of Wales and her children, O’Connor and Weatherall write: “The implication is that finding, targeting, and publicizing the views of a few individuals who are willing to go against the political and social consensus to spread true beliefs can have an outsized social effect.”¹¹

I started bringing up what I was noticing privately with different people, citing statements from 2020 onward from the national health authorities in France, Sweden, and Finland. (The U.K. and Denmark recently joined them.) After reviewing the existing research, those countries found little evidence in support of medical interventions for dysphoric minors, and rolled back or restricted those interventions.

I was berated, told to shut up, sneered at, or ignored. People I had considered intelligent stuck their fingers in their ears and refused to listen, or lied to me and then defended lying. When I brought up concerns about female inmates being placed in the same cells and communal showers as male murderers and rapists, people I had considered decent said to me with broad smiles and laughter: “Well, they were going to get raped anyway!” and “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll get them out when we abolish prisons.”

In February 2023, in the tradition of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary” and Flaubert’s “Dictionary of Accepted Ideas,” I wrote and sent “A Heretic’s Phrasebook” to the small number of paid subscribers of this newsletter.¹² (Smaller after.) Reactions were predictable. One informer reported me to my first publisher with the clear hope that I would be punished.¹³ I am grateful to my publisher for declining to do so.

(To the single person who said a kind thing to me at the library—I hope you’re well.)

These decisions have cost me, but what I have paid to date has not been as high as I was afraid it would be, nor as high as what others have paid.

Here is the insignificant feather in my cap: while I was certainly not the first, tenth, or twentieth person to see and describe what was happening,¹⁴ when I sent the phrasebook in February 2023, mentioning the growing wave of scientific reviews of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors in Europe and the unanimous verdict that the evidence did not support these treatments, no major American news outlet left of center had yet reported on these developments.

The Atlantic broke this long and curious silence in April 2023, three years after France imposed restrictions.¹⁵ The New York Times followed in August 2023. Apart from a tiny syndicated A.P. or Reuters item that was promptly buried, the Washington Post suppressed coverage for another year, until April 2024, when the long-awaited Cass Review was released in the U.K. (Like the rest, the Cass Review concluded that there is no good evidence for these treatments. Puberty blockers for gender dysphoric minors are now banned in England and Scotland, a decision made by the Tories and upheld by Labour.) NPR affiliate WBUR interviewed Dr. Cass in May 2024, but otherwise NPR was entirely silent. Anyone who relied on major left-of-center publications for coverage of this issue over the past several years would have known less than nothing prior to these very recent reversals.¹⁶

Meanwhile, the National Review had been discussing the situation in Europe as early as April 2022, a full year before the Atlantic. The National Review is the only mainstream outlet I know of to consistently report on the male inmates placed in Washington State women’s prisons who are sexually assaulting the female inmates there. Seattle Times has primly turned its back. Unlike the other periodicals I mentioned, coverage of this issue advances the National Review’s political aims. Unlike the other periodicals, I have never subscribed to the National Review.

Watching this near-total blackout by half the U.S. media of a growing European scientific consensus was instructive. In the preface to Manufacturing Consent, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky suggest that even a free-market media in a democracy like the U.S. can function as a propaganda machine due to the incentives and punishments inherent to the system.

[T]he democratic postulate is that the media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, and that they do not merely reflect the world as powerful groups wish it to be perceived…. If, however, the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear, and think about, and to “manage” public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns, the standard view of how the system works is at serious odds with reality….

Most biased choices in the media arise from the preselection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market, and political power. Censorship is largely self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who adjust to the realities of source and media organizational requirements, and by people at higher levels within media organizations who are chosen to implement, and have usually internalized, the constraints imposed by proprietary and other market and governmental centers of power.¹⁷

In the rest of the book, they quantify news coverage of several international events during the Carter and Reagan administrations to show how, even in the absence of top-down coordination and deliberate intent, the American news media wind up serving the interests of those in power, rather than their readers or the truth. Mainstream publications like the New York Times, Time, Reader’s Digest, and so on (they call Dan Rather a “good lap dog”) will frequently repeat information beneficial to one or another powerful group’s agenda, with appropriately emotional verbiage, while suppressing unflattering information, opinions, or authors, or presenting that information with little emotional valence. Should prior stories be proven false, or a controlling narrative fall apart, the news organizations quietly move on without acknowledgment of their errors or falsehoods.

As with knowledge of blind spots in the sciences, a better understanding of the propagandistic function of American news media, from yellow journalism onward, is no comfort at all.

Ultimately one finds oneself thrown back on the responsibility of the individual to examine matters for oneself, weigh the evidence, think clearly, and judge and act rightly, no matter how many people are crying, jeering, or shouting. This too is a moment that has recurred throughout history, and it may be the only moment in history that truly matters.

It is also exhausting. As Herman and Chomsky conclude, sounding fairly exhausted themselves:

If one chooses to denounce Qaddafi, or the Sandinistas, or the PLO, or the Soviet Union, no credible evidence is required. The same is true if one repeats conventional doctrines about our own society and its behavior... But a critical analysis of American institutions, the way they function domestically and their international operations, must meet far higher standards; in fact, standards are often imposed that can barely be met in the natural sciences. One has to work hard, to produce evidence that is credible, to construct serious arguments, to present extensive documentation—all tasks that are superfluous as long as one remains within the presuppositional framework of the doctrinal consensus. It is small wonder that few are willing to undertake the effort, quite apart from the rewards that accrue to conformity and the costs of honest dissidence.¹⁸

They note that the effortful struggle for a real understanding of a particular issue often cannot be transferred to other issues, or continuously upheld.¹⁹ Someone who wishes to understand matters obscured by poor science or poor journalism must fight anew each time, and persist in each investigation, to be confident of the solidness of her understanding over long periods of time. This is almost impossible given the other demands of life. That said, I do think it is possible to understand something well up to a given point in time, with considerable effort, and that it is worth striving to do so.

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Exercises, set 3

• Read the U.K.’s Cass Report (2024).

• Read the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare’s summary of findings from their systematic review and change in recommendations (2022; the first link has been run through Google Translate).

• Read PALKO’s recommendations for Finland (2020; SEGM translation).

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I have no doubt that a large number of readers, probably the majority, will not work through the exercises I have set, not because the math is difficult, but because they are accustomed to comfort, and the discomfort caused by cognitive dissonance will feel threatening and unbearable. This is a pity, because learning to endure cognitive dissonance for as long as it takes to examine the evidence closely and revise one’s beliefs and worldview toward the truth was once the goal—perhaps ideal and rarely realized—of education. If you can say to yourself, “What is in front of me? What am I looking at—not what I have been told to see, not what I have been primed and coached to believe or reject—but what, in reality, is here? What am I able to determine for myself? What is knowable by me? And how do I know?” then you become resistant to many kinds of deception and manipulation.

It is easier, however, to try to destroy or suppress the source of cognitive dissonance than to work through it toward a new and more adequate understanding of the self and the world, which is often experienced as a kind of death. The choice may not be conscious, but it is made all the same.

As a consequence, over the past two years I have finally come to accept, without any gladness, that the deepest form of love is indeed that which is willing to be despised, oppressed, afflicted, to be one from whom others turn their faces, while doing no violence and refusing to deceive, for the sake of those who despise, afflict, oppress, and turn away from you.²⁰ This is not to suggest that I live up to that standard—I doubt I ever will. But I had had the model before me for years and had not comprehended it.

Now I do.

1. After reading the 2020 paper, see the cut and parry of the two Letters to the Editor linked at the top.

2. A moot point when jobs are vanishing and pay is low, but I am beginning to wonder if introductory statistics should have been a prerequisite for journalism degrees.

3. Renamed and paywalled now that they have a distributor, but useful links can still be found on their site.

4. If I were to shorten the path I took to the minimum of points, in addition to the other papers linked, those points would include:

• Dhejne et al. 2011, notable for the extraordinary completeness and thoroughness of its data.

• Saunders and Bass 2011, which is dry and descriptive up until the end of a sentence that, once comprehended, boggles the mind.

• Singh et al. 2021, which summarizes persistence and, by implication, desistence rates found by multiple studies.

In terms of falsifiability of beliefs, I would need to see the disappearance of the patterns of criminality described by Dhejne, using data of equal quality, to modify my positions—not that anyone listens to me. The trouble is that people who disagree don’t bring me data of equal or even reasonable quality; they resort to emotional manipulation, cognitive distortions, name-calling, silencing, lying, and retaliation. If I were to be generous, it could be the case that these methods are how they were cowed into their present beliefs, and they are only doing to me what was done to them. If I were to be less generous, it is because they know that data does not exist.

5. “I had this discovery that could undermine a $3 billion industry, not just the drugs but the entire field of endoscopy. Every gastroenterologist was doing 20 or 30 patients a week who might have ulcers, and 25 percent of them would. Because it was a recurring disease that you could never cure, the patients kept coming back. And here I was handing it on a platter to the infectious-disease guys.” Barry Marshall, interview with Pamela Weintraub, Discover Magazine (2010).

Note Marshall’s remark later in the interview that it took his research being profitable to Proctor & Gamble (the bismuth in Pepto-Bismol kills H. pylori) for Proctor & Gamble to fund a PR campaign that changed medical consensus. Only when a major corporation’s profit motive came into conflict with the profit motive of the gastroenterologists, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies did the truth come out.

Marshall and Warren finally won the Nobel Prize for their discovery in 2005.

6. Without knowing about his funding sources, I read Turban et. al 2022 in the AAP’s Pediatrics while fact-checking another person’s claims, wondered how Turban could use the YRBS data in a way that the UCLA Williams Institute had said it could not be used due to the design of the survey, then spotted the statistically invalid hand-waving and wondered how in the world this had gotten through peer review.

7. This is a blunt-force approach using the most public, neutral data available. Combinations of race and sex of victim are not available in the 2019 FBI table, but Waller et al. 2024 in the Lancet calculates homicide rates for black women 25-44 in 30 states, 1999-2020, using cause-of-death codes, as 11.6 per 100,000.

8. Most of the credit for the exercises in this post goes to the many, many anonymous and non-anonymous women and several men who aggregated data, collated information, and persisted in asking inconvenient questions, not least WDI and KPSS for data from FOIA and FOI requests and SEGM (see ft. 14).

9. Czeslaw Milosz, preface to The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage, 1981) xii-xiii.

10. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1976), 111-112.

11. Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread (New Haven: Yale UP, 2019) 179. If you’re not familiar with Lady Montagu, or Firth’s immortal painting of Montagu and Pope, visit the link for the painting, which is a delight.

12. “ ‘All our trouble,’ writes Flaubert to George Sand in the wretched year 1871, ‘comes from our gigantic ignorance… When shall we get over empty speculation and accepted ideas? What should be studied is believed without discussion. Instead of examining, people pontificate.’

“In so saying, Flaubert states Theme 2 of the Dictionary—the attack on misinformation, prejudice, and incoherence as regards matters of fact. Flaubert has an infallible ear for the contradictions that everybody absent-mindedly repeats: ‘ABSINTHE—Violent poison: one glass and you’re dead. Newspapermen drink it as they write their copy.’ He plumbs with equal sureness the depths of well-bred ignorance…. Here too, in culture, art, history, science, and social thought, some things are to be thundered against, others are very swank. The bourgeois mind in this department of life is a compound of error, pedantry, misplaced scorn, fatuous levity and ignorance of its ignorance.”

Jacques Barzun, “Introduction,” in Gustave Flaubert, “The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas,” trans. Jacques Barzun (NY: New Directions, 1984).

13. I would put money on this person being loudly and publicly opposed to book bans.

14. SEGM was assiduously documenting the independent reviews as they were released, in multiple languages in multiple countries, while being severely censored by the AAP in the U.S. (Aug 2021, WSJ). May they someday receive the honor they are due.

15. But then, the Atlantic had published “Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses” in 2002 and Jesse Singal’s “When Children Say They’re Trans” in 2018.

16. GLAAD was one of the major suppressive forces, or what Herman and Chomsky call a source of “flak.” It has been interesting to observe GLAAD’s open and repeated attacks on the NYT over the course of several years, followed by the NYT’s carefully researched August 2024 riposte.

17. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (NY: Pantheon Books, 2002) lix-lx.

18. Herman and Chomsky 304. They heap up massive quantities of evidence in the book, exhaustive and exhausting, with the desperation of those who know they won’t be believed, who are begging people to look and think for themselves but who know how unlikely that is. I can hardly blame them.

19. Herman and Chomsky 172.

20. Isaiah 53.