Malmesbury
The Talk: a brief explanation of sexual dimorphism
There is way too much serendipity
Do bamboos set themselves on fire?
I only believe in the paranormal
Calibration proverbs
The two-headed bacterium
The average North Korean mathematician
It’s time to worry about online privacy again
Conspiracy-proof archeology
Experiments with a random clock
Second-order selection against the immortal
Reverse-correlation: how to summon the ghost of your mental imagery
I think this works well to describe the behavior of small, well-mixed groups, but as you look at larger societies, it gets more complicated because of the structure of social networks. You don’t get to see how many people overall are wearing face-masks in the whole country, only among the people you interact with in your life. So it’s totally possible that different equilibria will be reached in different locations/socio-economic classes/communities. That’s probably one reason why revolutions are more likely to fizzle out than it looks. Another problem arising from the structure of social networks is that the sample of people your interact with is not representative of your real surroundings: people with tons of friends are over-represented among your friends (I had a blog post about this statistical phenomenon a while ago). I’m not sure how one could expand the social behavior curve model to account for that, but it would be interesting.
The fingerprints of ideology in science
The computational complexity of progress
The film has a very clear target audience, and 100% of this target audience will self-identify as the group of nice fashionable reasonable science-believers. The other tribes will probably never see the film, or if they do, they’ll see themselves portrayed with such disdain that they’ll just end up distrusting scientists even more. Nobody will update. I’m afraid the main effect of this kind of film is to further entrench the [belief in X] ~ [cool/uncool] correlation, which is generally a bad thing.
My impression was that the comet was a metaphor for climate change specifically, rather than x-risk in general. It turns out that I agree climate change is a serious threat, so I’ll consider it a good thing if spectators take it more seriously after seeing DLU. But there is nothing in the film-making process that automatically steers the writers towards legitimate issues. It could have been a “GMOs cause cancer” plot line instead (there are scientists who say that in real life, but nobody takes them seriously – just like in the film!).
Most likely is not likely
2. The survey report you link to includes the following figures: (1) about half of all respondents in their survey who had experienced >= 4 instances of discrimination and violence in the last year attempted suicide in that year; (2) among all respondents in their survey, 7.3% attempted suicide in the last year. To me, that looks as if suicide rates among trans people are much more to do with actually being treated badly than with fearing they will be treated badly. (If so, I am cautiously optimistic that those terrible trans activists trying so hard to raise awareness of transness and reduce the extent to which trans people are regarded as strange and sinister are in fact making it less likely that any given trans person attempts suicide.)
Here is a possible counter-argument to this: if social pressure and discrimination cause suicides, we would expect the suicide rates of trans people to increase after hormonal treatment or surgery. After all, before transition, gender dysphoria is not particularly visible. From the point of view of most people who are not intimately familiar with the person, a pre-transition trans looks just like someone cis. After transition, however, they may or may not “pass”, and in many cases it is immediately obvious that they are trans (e.g. MtF still having a male voice unless they do the fancy vocal cords surgery). But we observe exactly the opposite: gender-affirming surgery greatly reduces the suicide rate of trans people.
Note that I don’t think that trans activists are causing the suicides either. My working hypothesis is that gender dysphoria (as in, not feeling at ease in your own body) is horrible by itself, and is the cause of suicides. Hormones and surgery might make the trans-ness more visible, but if it alleviates the mismatch between your body map and your actualy body, it might still be a net benefit.
Next year, we should give the Sneerclub reddit a big red button to destroy LW, and have a big red button here to destroy Sneerclub. Nuclear war is more fun when it’s not all like-minded people.