gjm

Karma: 25,637

Hi. I’m Gareth McCaughan. I’ve been a consistent reader and occasional commenter since the Overcoming Bias days. My LW username is “gjm” (not “Gjm” despite the wiki software’s preference for that capitalization). Elsewehere I generally go by one of “g”, “gjm”, or “gjm11”. The URL listed here is for my website and blog, neither of which has been substantially updated in about the last four years. I live near Cambridge (UK) and work for a small technology company in Cambridge. My business cards say “mathematician” but in practice my work is a mixture of simulation, data analysis, algorithm design, software development, problem-solving, and whatever random engineering no one else is doing. I am married and have a daughter born in mid-2006. The best way to contact me is by email: firstname dot lastname at pobox dot com. I am happy to be emailed out of the blue by interesting people. If you are an LW regular you are probably an interesting person in the relevant sense even if you think you aren’t.

If you’re wondering why some of my old posts and comments are at surprisingly negative scores, it’s because for some time I was the favourite target of old-LW’s resident neoreactionary troll, sockpuppeteer and mass-downvoter.

gjm 19 Apr 2021 13:58 UTC
7 points
on: D&D.Sci April 2021 Evaluation and Ruleset
I underestimated the crabmonsters and overestimated the (entirely out-of-sample) possibilities of super-water-elementals and super-pirates. Worst mistake was eyeballing the crabmonsters rather than making a serious attempt to model the distribution, which would have made it clear that they actually do quite a lot of sinking.

gjm 18 Apr 2021 15:04 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Thomas’s comment on: Open and Welcome Thread—April 2021
I searched for <<family of subsets closed under union “more than half”>> and the Wikipedia page about the conjecture was the first result :-).

gjm 18 Apr 2021 2:13 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Thomas’s comment on: Open and Welcome Thread—April 2021
I’m having trouble figuring out what the question actually is. On the face of it (taking, for now, only things that Martha and Marco and their computer actually affirm and ignoring one thing that seems at first like obvious hyperbole) it seems that what we’re told is: there’s a (presumably finite) set P of pizza-types and a set O of subsets of P (“orders”), whenever two sets are in O so is their union, and O contains no singleton sets. This obviously isn’t enough to tell us anything interesting.
But then there’s also this stuff about whether there’s an element of P that’s in more than half the elements of O. Marco thinks probably yes (are we supposed to infer something from this? it seems like we’d need to know a lot more than we’re told about exactly how much Marco knows and how good he is at reasoning) and he says “Today’s state of the art mathematics isn’t powerful enough to ascertain that this is actually the case!” (are we supposed to take this literally? not powerful to ascertain this given what information?)
Is the idea that given |P| or |O| or both along with the statements in the first paragraph, but no other information, present-day mathematics is not able to determine whether or not there is necessarily an element of P in more than half the elements of O?
If so, then it seems like this is about the union-closed sets conjecture, which is apparently known to be true when |P| is at most 11 or |O| is at most 46 or when O contains either 1-element or 2-element sets. So I guess you are looking for the number 12? (For all I know, the conjecture might be known to hold whenever, say, |P|<=13 and |O|<=60, in which case having at least 12 types of pizza is not sufficient. But, across all possible states of Marco’s knowledge, assuming he knows nothing more than |P| and maybe |O|, the smallest |P| could be to make his statement true is 12.)

gjm 17 Apr 2021 21:45 UTC
2 points
in reply to: simon’s comment on: D&D.Sci April 2021: Voyages of the Gray Swan
Nice idea.

gjm 17 Apr 2021 1:03 UTC
7 points
on: What does vaccine effectiveness as a function of time look like?
There’s Figure 3 in this article in the NEJM. It’s only a single study, and it concerns only the Pfizer vaccine. You might have seen a crude version of it in this xkcd cartoon. Note that the y-axis is cumulative incidence of Covid-19; to get a measure of its effectiveness at a particular time you should really look at the gradients.

gjm 17 Apr 2021 0:59 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: The consequentialist case for social conservatism, or “Against Cultural Superstimuli”
Oh, for sure dysphoria is not the kind of thing that can specifically make someone need to be called “xe”. I think it can specifically make someone find it upsetting to be referred to with specifically-male or specifically-female pronouns, though, and my sense is that Jordan Peterson isn’t any happier being asked to refer to someone as “they” than as “xe”.
If both “he” and “she” give someone feelings of dysphoria, then I think it’s rude to require that they pick one of those. Singular “they” works pretty well, it has a long history of use in English[1], and it seems churlish to insist on giving a particular gender to someone who doesn’t feel like either is right for them.
(In some quarters it is claimed that calling someone “they” whose chosen pronoun is “xe” or vice versa is misgendering them, which seems to me just plain wrong. I can imagine a world where we have different standardized neopronouns for different nontraditional gender identities, and in that world maybe it would be so, but we are not in that world. If someone picks a particular set of neopronouns and considers it abusive to be referred to by other pronouns that have essentially the same meaning as theirs, I think that’s mostly their problem. I don’t think that’s at all common, though.)
[1] This is sometimes overstated. There aren’t a lot of examples until very recently of “they” being used to refer to a known person of known gender. But there are plenty of examples, including plenty from prestigious authors, of “they” being used when a single person is meant.

gjm 16 Apr 2021 12:55 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Elmer of Malmesbury’s comment on: The consequentialist case for social conservatism, or “Against Cultural Superstimuli”
I agree that almost certainly a lot of suicides among trans people are neither the result of being treated badly nor the result of expecting to be treated badly: as you say, gender dysphoria is apparently extremely horrible for many who suffer it. (My guess is that a substantial part of the distress comes specifically from being treated by other people as being of a gender that feels wrong to you, in which case much of it is “being treated badly” in an extended sense, though not necessarily one that involves any element of malice or anything from the people doing it.)
But I think there’s something amiss in your model. Suppose you’re (let’s say MtF) trans. There are commonly (at least) three phases, not two. Phase 1: you are living as a man but inwardly feel that this is terribly wrong. Main source of misery: gender dysphoria. Phase 2: you are living as a woman but haven’t made any drastic physical changes via hormones or surgery. Sources of misery: gender dysphoria (hopefully less than in phase 1), obnoxiousness from other people. Phase 3: you are living as a woman and have made substantial physical changes. Hopefully not much gender dysphoria now (though I’d guess many trans people remain less than fully satisfied with the state of their body). Hopefully less obnoxiousness from people who read you as male rather than female. Maybe more obnoxiousness from people who discover you’re trans and feel like you’re trying to deceive them.
As far as possible causes of misery goes, the 1->2 transition makes some things better (less gender dysphoria) and some things worse (more opportunities for people to discriminate, be deliberately offensive, etc.) The 2->3 transition, though, seems like it makes them all better. Your body is nearer to how you feel it should be, and your transness is less likely to be immediately obvious to people who might respond badly to it.
I think it’s quite common to spend a non-negligible amount of time in phase 2. So even if a lot of trans suicides are the result of social pressure and discrimination, we shouldn’t be surprised to see that hormonal and surgical treatment greatly reduce the suicide rate.

gjm 16 Apr 2021 2:12 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Cesare’s comment on: Covid 4/15: Are We Seriously Doing This Again
I think you’re answering a different question from the one agc is asking. Unless I misunderstood, agc was asking why the UK isn’t yet vaccinating people younger than 45. Being able to relax restrictions more in the US wouldn’t explain that.
I think the actual answer is that the UK very promptly secured a pretty decent quantity of vaccines (mostly AstraZeneca), enough to vaccinate quite a lot of its population, but that while the US was slower it then got hold of more relative to population size, and now the US has more plentiful supply than the UK.

gjm 16 Apr 2021 0:29 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: The consequentialist case for social conservatism, or “Against Cultural Superstimuli”
I concede that it’s possible that Jordan Peterson’s objections were purely 100% about compelled speech, and didn’t arise from any particular wish to behave in ways that trans people find unpleasant. My own impression is that other things he’s said—e.g., that people wanting to be referred to with neopronouns like “xe” are usually making a “narcissistic power grab”—make that a bit difficult to believe.
I do, in fact, share Peterson’s objections to compelled speech, and if I thought he was right that the bill he was complaining about proposed to make it a crime not to use the pronouns someone says you should use for them, then I would agree that he was right to complain about that. My impression—though I am neither a Canadian nor a lawyer—is that in fact that isn’t true, and I would bet heavily that since the bill passed the number of people convicted of a crime on account of their pronoun use is zero.

gjm 16 Apr 2021 0:25 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Pattern’s comment on: Monastery and Throne
Oh, whoops. I meant to delete that.
(It had been going to be about Andrew Sabisky, who was one of Cummings’s “weirdos and misfits” and resigned after it turned out that he had said a lot of politically very unpalatable things about race, eugenics, and the like. I’d thought I remembered that a lot of the complaints about Sabisky were attacking his weirdness and geekiness as much as his controversial opinions. But when I went back and checked the discussions I was thinking of, that didn’t after all seem to be so, so I cut that bit out. Except that I somehow failed to cut all of it out.)

gjm 16 Apr 2021 0:14 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: The consequentialist case for social conservatism, or “Against Cultural Superstimuli”
(Separate reply for last paragraph, which is about something entirely different from the rest of your comment.)
If you declare that you’re a trans woman and demand to be called “she”, then I expect I’ll call you “she”. If (as I think is actually the case) you’re a cis man, I don’t see that you’re going to get much satisfaction from being referred to that way.
I am not generally in favour of laws that would require me to do that, even if you are in fact not a troll or an asshole but simply a trans woman. Or indeed a cis woman. In my view, misgendering someone is an asshole move of roughly the same magnitude as saying “fuck you” to them or repeatedly calling them stupid. Those things are not generally illegal, and I think misgendering generally shouldn’t be either. My (outsider’s) understanding of C-16 in Canada is that despite Jordan Peterson’s complaints it does not in fact make misgendering people generally illegal.
(“Generally” because I’m not certain there aren’t any situations in which misgendering someone might be, or contribute to, either “fighting words” (considered in law a deliberate provocation of violence) or slander.)

gjm 16 Apr 2021 0:05 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: The consequentialist case for social conservatism, or “Against Cultural Superstimuli”
I have not claimed that “allowing bathroom bills” are a good thing on balance, or that “forbidding bathroom bills” are a bad thing on balance; only that the former are good for trans people and the latter are bad for trans people.
However, I do on the whole think that FBBs are a bad thing overall and (less confidently) that ABBs are a good thing overall, so let me address your question. What I would actually prefer is for all public toilets to be unisex, and designed in such a way that no one using them need care much who else is using them. Failing that, I would not favour a bill allowing cis men to use female public toilets, for one thing because it doesn’t make any sense: if cis men are allowed to use them, then in what possible sense are they “female public toilets”?
So, shouldn’t I be concerned about male predators lurking in female public toilets and then defending themselves if challenged by saying “oh, but I’m a trans woman”? Not very concerned, I think, because if I try to imagine the actual concrete course of events I have trouble seeing genuinely-probable things to worry about.
(Content warning: anyone likely to be badly disturbed by thinking about male predators in women’s toilets might want to stop reading now.)
I mean, imagine a (cis male) predator wanting to lurk in women’s toilets for some nefarious purpose. What nefarious purpose, and what exactly is he doing? I don’t think it can just be for ogling, because there’s not much ogling to do in women’s toilets—the only undressing happens inside the cubicles. So presumably the idea is some kind of physical violence; the predator is waiting (let’s say) for the only other person there to be a vulnerable-looking woman, whom he will kidnap or rape or murder or whatever other appalling thing he has in mind. Now there are two cases. (1) Maybe he’s hiding in a cubicle so as not to be seen. In this case, I think things go exactly the same way whatever the law says about trans people and public toilets. (2) Maybe he’s hanging out by the washbasins—that way he gets a better view of the situation, but is more likely to be spotted. And now the case that matters is where someone sees him there and says “Oi, you’re not meant to be in here”.
If there is in force what I’ve been calling an “allowing bathroom bill”, then he can respond “Oh yes I am; I’m a trans woman”. OK, so far so good. But now he’s been spotted; he’s not going to get away with continuing to hang out by the washbasins; everyone’s going to be suspicious. Realistically, our predator’s best option at this point is to go and lurk in a different women’s toilet and hope not to get caught this time.
At the other extreme, if there is a “forbidding bathroom bill” in force, he definitely can’t say that and hope it’ll help. But he can still e.g. say “Oh shit, is this a women’s toilet? I must have misread the signs” and realistically no one is likely to be calling the police. So the actual outcome is the same either way.
Will an “allowing bathroom bill” make people more reluctant to confront our predator? It could. But there are already actual unambiguously cis women who look very male, and confronting one of them in a women’s toilet would be just as much a faux pas in the present world (or even one with a “forbidding bathroom bill”) as confronting a trans woman in a world with an “allowing bathroom bill”. I’m not convinced the social pressures are that much different either way.
Or suppose our predator, confronted by the washbasins in a world with a “forbidding bathroom bill”, doesn’t say “I’m a trans woman”; he just says “I’m a woman—it’s not my fault if I’m not feminine-enough looking for you”. Are his accusers really going to rip his clothes off and check his genitals, or take a blood sample and do some sort of genetic test? Of course not.
I think our hypothetical predator has, realistically, pretty much the same options available, with pretty much the same chances of success, regardless of what the law says about trans women in women’s toilets.
And now consider: there are trans men too. If you say that trans women have to use the men’s toilets, then it seems trans men have to use the women’s toilets. Guess what? Trans men tend to look like men. So, actually, our hypothetical predator has an extra defensive option when confronted. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m a trans man and the law says I have to use these bathrooms.”

gjm 15 Apr 2021 20:02 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Sophronius’s comment on: The consequentialist case for social conservatism, or “Against Cultural Superstimuli”
One other remark that’s separate from the object-level arguments elsewhere in this thread: I see that your comments here have been quite heavily downvoted, and would like to remark that I have not downvoted any of them.

gjm 15 Apr 2021 20:01 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Sophronius’s comment on: The consequentialist case for social conservatism, or “Against Cultural Superstimuli”
I wish you wouldn’t attribute things to me in freakin’ quotation marks that are not things I have actually said, or thought, or meant.
it’s weird to me that you’re reading e.g. Jordan Peterson asking people to please not attack him or make him say words that he doesn’t want to as “evil conservatives attack trans people for no reason.”
That would certainly be weird, if there were any truth to it. But literally nothing in those quotation marks is my opinion. I don’t think Jordan Peterson is evil, I don’t think that refusing to refer to trans people using the pronouns they find appropriate is “attacking” them (though I do think it’s bloody rude), and I don’t think he was doing it “for no reason” (though I don’t find his reasons at all convincing).
More to the point, regardless of what I think, I didn’t say any of that or anything like any of that. Here, by way of reminder, is everything I said about Jordan Peterson.
If you’re not Canadian (as I’m not), you are most likely to have heard of C-16 because of the opposition of Jordan Peterson, also a social conservative.
That’s it. And it’s a matter of readily verifiable fact that Jordan Peterson did express opposition to C-16. So how do you get from there to “evil conservatives attack trans people for no reason”? I guess it’s because I said that “progressives are trying to make life easier for trans people, and conservatives are opposing them at every turn” and I cited Jordan Peterson’s opposition to C-16 as one example. But, again, I never said “evil”, or “attack trans people”, or “for no reason”, and if you take those bits out you get something like “conservatives oppose progressives’ attempts to make life easier for trans people” … which, so far as I can see, is simply a plain statement of fact. Again, if you disagree, show me how the examples I gave aren’t representative.
I think you may have slightly misunderstood the Red Skull thing (but it’s also very possible that I have), but in any case I don’t know what it has to do with anything here. If Marvel Comics did something stupid or evil, is that supposed to have any implications at all for whether social conservatism is wise or foolish?
it’d make sense to not also use phrases like “TERFS” and “CIS SCUM”
Might well do (though TERF seems to me to be pretty much flatly descriptive; if it’s a slur, it’s only because many people don’t like the actual thing that it refers to), but what’s the relevance here? Is calling people all-caps CIS SCUM a thing that progressives commonly do? (Not that I’ve seen.) Is it a thing I’ve been doing? (Nope; I’m cis myself and have no interest in calling anyone scum.) I’ll gladly agree that some trans people have been extremely horrible to some cis people, and I think that’s very bad and I wish they wouldn’t do it. (The same is true if you replace “trans people” and “cis people” with pretty much any other two groups of people.) But what does that have to do with (a) whether social conservatism is a good thing or (b) any of the things you said in the OP?
Meanwhile, JP has said that he calls people by their preferred pronouns as long as they ask politely. What’s wrong with that?
Nothing’s wrong with that. But (1) it doesn’t seem to be exactly true and (2) obviously no one is saying “Jordan Peterson is terrible because he is willing to use people’s preferred pronouns if they ask nicely”. On 1, see e.g. this video clip where he’s asked what he would do in that situation; what he actually says is that (a) he will use pronouns that match “the persona that they’re projecting publicly” but (b) he will not in general use neopronouns like “xe” because “actually the most likely outcome” is that the request is “just a narcissistic power play”. On 2, all I actually said about him is that he opposed bill C-16, which (as I said above) is simply a matter of fact. Maybe his reasons are good, maybe not (I tend to think not, as you probably already guessed) but that he opposed it shouldn’t be controversial.
I strongly encourage you to at least entertain the idea that I mean exactly what I say, no more and no less.
I wasn’t trying to suggest otherwise. Having a pre-written bottom line isn’t a matter of secret agendas or not meaning what you say; it’s a matter of having already made your mind up about something and then making whatever argument seems like it leads to that conclusion. Dishonesty isn’t usually involved. And no, it’s not “the culture war” making me suspect a pre-written bottom line; I explained exactly what it was that made me suspect that, and you completely ignored what I said about that. (Which of course you’re fully entitled to do, but it’s a bit galling that you then make up a completely different explanation for my saying what I did.)
Also, when it comes to entertaining the idea that one’s interlocutor means only what they say, may I gently request that you extend me the same courtesy? Thank you.

gjm 15 Apr 2021 19:21 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: The consequentialist case for social conservatism, or “Against Cultural Superstimuli”
All noted. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not commenting here on whether any given “trans activism” is helpful or harmful (on net, or to any particular person). I just thought Sophronius made a really bad argument in the OP, and continued to make bad arguments in reply to me.

gjm 15 Apr 2021 15:46 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Sophronius’s comment on: The consequentialist case for social conservatism, or “Against Cultural Superstimuli”
“Are conservatives really going around making trans people’s lives harder?” Yup. Or, more precisely, progressives are going around trying to make trans people’s lives easier, and conservatives are opposing them at every turn. Whether that’s because they prefer trans people’s lives to be harder (perhaps because they think this will make there be fewer trans people and trans people’s lives are bad whatever they do), or because they oppose change as such, or just to stick it to the libs, I don’t know.
I’m honestly not sure how this could be in doubt, which suggests that at least one of us is badly mistaken about something. Here are a few examples of the sort of thing I have in mind; if you think they’re badly unrepresentative, could you explain why?
- “Bathroom bills”, explicitly either allowing or forbidding trans people to use public toilet facilities matching the gender they now identify as, appear to break down cleanly as follows: ones proposed and sponsored by conservatives forbid, ones proposed and sponsored by progressives permit. Here are the first few specific cases I found in the Wikipedia article on the topic. Ones in parentheses are ones less directly relevant, for one reason or another. There are many more and all the ones I looked at seem to fit the pattern. Many are closely modelled on something put out by the “Alliance Defending Freedom”, which is of course a conservative group.
  - (Anchorage, Alaska: couldn’t quickly find information about party affiliation of the various people involved, but of course Alaska Family Action, which proposed a forbidding BB, is a conservative group.)
  - (Alabama: this bill wasn’t exactly either of the “allowing” or the “forbidding” type, but does seem like maaaaybe it was designed to stoke fears about Scary Trans Impostors. It was proposed by a Republican.)
  - Arizona: forbidding BB, proposed by a Republican but later withdrawn.
  - (California: school-related allowing BB, proposed by Tom Ammiano; a quick look didn’t find an explicit party affiliation but he seems clearly progressive.)
  - (California: legislation requiring single-occupancy public toilets to be unisex. Not exactly a BB of either type.)
  - Colorado: forbidding BB proposed, died in committee. In that committee, 6 of 6 Democrats and 1 of 5 Republicans voted to kill it; 4 of 5 Republicans voted not to. Sponsor of the bill was a Republican.
  - Florida: forbidding BB proposed by a Republican. Died in committee. I couldn’t quickly find who voted for or against it.
  - Indiana: forbidding BB proposed by a Republican. Still at an early stage.
- Canada’s “Bill C-16”, made more famous by Jordan Peterson’s complaints about it, did two things relevant to trans people: (a) it added gender identity to the list of things people aren’t allowed to discriminate on the basis of, (b) it added gender identity to the list of things that can be considered possible targets for “hate speech” and “hate crimes”. Its sponsor was the Minister for Justice for Canada’s centre-left government. I think every one of the votes against in the Commons was by a member of the Conservative party, and the same goes for the votes against in the Senate. If you’re not Canadian (as I’m not), you are most likely to have heard of C-16 because of the opposition of Jordan Peterson, also a social conservative.
- Trans people commonly have (to put it as neutrally and weakly as possible) a strong preference for being referred to using pronouns that match their own gender identity. The cases I’ve encountered where people flatly refuse to do this have almost all been (at least according to my memory, which may be unreliable) social conservatives.
Of course it isn’t only social conservatives who do this. For instance, the people sometimes referred to as “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” are in most respects not social conservatives. But it’s mostly social conservatives, and I think it’s most social conservatives.
I’ve no idea why you’re talking about yelling “DEMOCRATS LOVE TRANS PEOPLE”. Is that a thing anyone’s doing? Is it a thing I’m doing? (For that matter, who was it who brought trans people into this particular discussion of social conservatism? I’m pretty sure it was you.) Does it have anything to do with the argument you started out making, namely that encouraging people to consider whether they might be trans is harmful to those people?
Scare quotes for “trans activists” because it looks to me as if most of the people encouraging those “impressionable young people” to consider the possibility of gender identification that doesn’t match their chromosomes or genitalia aren’t “activists” in any strong sense. Maybe it started with activists, but it’s in the air now and it survives not because activists are pushing for it but because it’s an idea that (for good or ill) a lot of people find plausible.
Also because it’s very unclear to me who you’re actually talking about. At some points it’s “progressives” generally (”… from my point of view, progressives are simply making impressionable young people more miserable by convincing them that their current reality is intolerable and evil …”). At some points it seems to be party activists trying to drum up support from trans people (”… if you yell DEMOCRATS LOVE TRANS PEOPLE …”). At some points it’s “trans activists”, and sometimes you’re at pains to suggest that they’re a small subset (“do you think most trans people are happy with how they’ve been represented?”). It seems like you aren’t really distinguishing between “progressives are bad because they say conservatives hate trans people, which makes trans people miserable” and “progressives are bad because they say conservatives hate trans people, which isn’t true” and “progressives are bad because they say progressives like trans people, which makes conservatives hate trans people, which makes trans people miserable” and “progressives are bad because they encourage people to be trans, which makes them miserable”, and those are all very different propositions and some are pretty difficult to reconcile with others, and I can’t help thinking that maybe you’ve already got ”… and therefore progressives are bad” written on your bottom line. (More specifically, my guess is that what you’re really upset about is that progressives keep saying that conservatives are making things worse for trans people, and you’ve got a whole batch of different arguments for why that might be a bad thing and haven’t entirely noticed that e.g. if saying “conservatives hate you” makes trans people more miserable then saying “progressives love you” probably makes them less miserable, or that if an important problem with saying “progressives love you” is that “people on the other side of the war might be tempted to take the opposite position” then it can’t be so very wrong to say “conservatives hate you”.)
I agree (of course!) that not all trans people—and for that matter not all cis people, not all progressives, not all conservatives, etc., etc., etc. -- are alike. I’m not sure what I said to make you think I don’t. I agree that the sides are not black and white. I’m not sure what I said to make you think I don’t. You complain about progressives “yelling” and “shouting” but at least in this discussion my (admittedly biased) impression is that you’ve been doing a lot more yelling and shouting than I have.

gjm 15 Apr 2021 1:37 UTC
7 points
on: The consequentialist case for social conservatism, or “Against Cultural Superstimuli”
I am unconvinced by this:
[trans people’s] suicide rates are still some factor ~18 higher than the rest of society, and you cannot possibly expect me to believe that this has nothing to do with them being constantly told by trans activists that the world hates them and that there is nothing they can do about it
… “Unconvinced” is too weak a word. There are so many things about the argument I think you’re making that seem badly wrong to me.
1. Haven’t trans people’s suicide rates been tremendously high since before there even were any trans activists to speak of?
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.)
There are a whole lot of other findings in that survey with the same sort of shape: it seems like every sort of mistreatment-by-others trans people might experience is associated with a substantial increase in suicide attempts.
(Of course, for obvious reasons the survey won’t find people who successfully committed suicide, which makes interpreting these figures trickier, but I think they still mean what they appear to: much of what makes trans people commit suicide more than not-trans people is that other people treat them in ways they find distressing.)
3. This survey was exclusively of adults and it is not at all obvious how well it generalizes to the “impressionable young people” you’re talking about; from your references to parents and teachers, I take it you’re thinking of people who are not yet adults. (I don’t mean to imply that this difference necessarily means that those people are less at risk of suicide; just that generalizing from one population to another is unreliable.)
4. So far as I can make out, “trans activists” are not telling those impressionable young people “that the world hates them and that there is nothing they can do about it”.
5. Let us suppose that those “trans activists” are finding impressionable young people who don’t think of themselves as trans and persuading them to think of themselves that way. It seems obvious to me that these people (1) are not typical of the not-trans population before this happens, because most not-trans people would not easily be persuaded that they are trans, and (2) are not typical of the trans population after it happens, because most trans people didn’t need to be persuaded by trans activists; they experienced years of miserable gender dysphoria and figured it out for themselves. (#2 might be becoming less true, if a large fraction of today’s young trans people were persuaded to be that way by “trans activists”, but to whatever extent that’s so the current young trans population is in turn not typical of the 2015 adult trans population studied by that survey.) In particular, wouldn’t you strongly expect these people to be more at risk of suicide than the general population even before starting to identify as trans, and less at risk of suicide than the trans population as a whole after starting to identify as trans?
Social-conservative arguments along the lines of “Trans people have bad lives, so it is irresponsible for progressives to try to normalize transness” ring false to me, because so much of the badness of those lives is because those same social-conservatives are working hard to make those lives bad, or at least to stop them being made less bad. (They used to say the exact same thing about gay people, and I’d say the same about that case as about this one.)

gjm 14 Apr 2021 23:37 UTC
3 points
in reply to: GuySrinivasan’s comment on: D&D.Sci April 2021: Voyages of the Gray Swan
Evidence against that theory is that
pirate attacks have changed somewhat in frequency, but ship-sinkings don’t seem to have.

gjm 14 Apr 2021 0:04 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Austin Chen’s comment on: Problem Solving with Mazes and Crayon
I know someone who successfully used that “handy exam trick” in the International Mathematical Olympiad.
(Of course this isn’t relevant to the actual discussion, but it might amuse you as it amuses me. Further details that I find pleasing: 1. He took care to make sure that the “seam” lay between the end of one page of working and the start of the next. 2. The people marking the script claimed to have found an entirely different error which was not in fact an error, but of course the country’s team leaders didn’t send it back and complain because they knew that if they did the much more serious error in logic was likely to be noticed. For the avoidance of doubt, the person in question was not me.)

gjm 12 Apr 2021 23:23 UTC
8 points
on: D&D.Sci April 2021: Voyages of the Gray Swan
Thoughts after poking at the data for a short while:
The most notable thing, to me, is that plausible extrapolation of the distribution of damage from the encounter types listed is far from being sufficient to explain how many ships are lost. Crabmonsters don’t usually do a lot of damage and it looks as if maybe 1% of crabmonster encounters are terminal. Demon whales are the most unclear—the PDF is still increasing at 100% damage—but it looks as if maybe 100% is approximately the peak, in which case we should expect about as many sinkings as we’ve seen non-sinkings. Harpies are never known to do >24% damage. Krakens are never known to do >78% damage. Merpeople seem like they have a bit of a right tail, but there’s no way to know how far it extends. It doesn’t look as if it’s likely to account for a huge numbre of sinkings. Nessie has what looks like a normal-ish distribution whose right tail extends a bit beyond 100% but I wouldn’t expect more than a few percent of encounters to result in sinking. Pirates are never known to do more than 64% damage. Sharks are never known to do more than 56% damage. Water elementals are always between 74% and 85%. These seem like we might have maybe 10-20 sinkings from crabmonsters, 330 from demon whales, a couple of hundred from merpeople, 25ish from Nessie, and none from anything else. But actually there are 2367 sinkings.

This suggests that most of the sinkings come either from encounters that are way beyond the known distribution of damage, or from entirely different types of encounters we don’t have a record of.

For the first option, maybe the demon whale distribution keeps growing rightward for a while longer. Not terribly implausible. Maybe the merpeople have a really long right tail. The water elemental distribution is pretty weird; maybe there are other types of water elemental with similarly narrow distributions living beyond 100%. For the second option, maybe sometimes the gods get angry and smite ships with lightning so that everyone dies, or maybe there’s some horribly dangerous geographical feature that isn’t on the maps because once you get close enough to see it you’re already doomed. Or maybe sometimes the captain or crew decides that they can sail far off course, sell the cargo, keep the proceeds, and live happily ever after.

What can we do about all these? We can completely stop merpeople attacking. Maybe merpeople are a lot of the mystery sinkings. Might be worth it. We can bring krakens and demon whales down by 2% per oar, and weirdly this stacks additively, so buying 50 oars might be worth it since demon whales are our leading “in-sample” candidate to explain the sinkings. Except that we top out at 20 extra oars. Better than nothing, probably worth it. Shark repellent is a terrible idea because sharks are among the nicer encounter options. Rifles for harpy protection seem dumb since harpies are never known to do much, but if we’re battling unknown unknowns something that offers to prevent all damage done by harpies is tempting. (Though it’s hard to know how we could actually know that they will prevent all damage even in hypothetical cases where the harpies do >4x more damage than they have ever done to any ship that’s returned to tell the tale.) Water elementals are pretty common and the foam swords will always save a lot of damage when they attack—and if indeed there are currently-unknown super-water-elementals doing >100% damage, they might save us.

As for the completely unknown unknowns, maybe we can bring a priest or institute big rewards for foiling mutinies, or something.

(Perhaps I should take the name of the ship as a hint that we’re facing the first kind of scenario rather than the second.)

Since my top priority is to survive, I buy off the merpeople (45gp) and fill up on extra oars (20gp). Now I could get rifles (35gp) just in case there are occasional super-harpies, but it’s not clear that that’s more likely than occasional super-elementals so I’ll get the foam swords instead (15gp) since that does much more to reduce damage in the non-fatal cases. I have 20gp left, with which I can halve crabmonster damage (saving, by eyeball, maybe 20% damage on average in the 4% of cases when they attack) or knock 20% off Nessie-and-pirate damage (saving, by eyeball, maybe 16% of damage in 4% of cases when Nessie attacks, plus maybe 12% of damage in 20% of cases when pirates attack); the latter is clearly better damage-wise and might be better sinking-wise too. So: tribute to the merpeople, max extra oars, foam swords, two cannons.

But I am still painfully aware that I don’t know where those sinkings are really coming from, and if there were some way to get more information about that (e.g., fit some ships with lifeboats) it would be a hell of a good idea to do it first.

I didn’t see any obvious sign of large seasonal or directional effects. There are some long-term drifts; e.g., pirates seem to be becoming less common, harpies, merpeople, sharks, and maybe krakens seem to be becoming more common. I don’t think these effects are large enough to change the decisions above. I haven’t looked for correlations (e.g., maybe when a ship has been attacked by pirates it becomes more or less likely that the next ship going the same way will be). I do have more detailed notes on what the damage-distributions look like for the various kinds of encounter, but the level of detail above seems sufficient. (They don’t appear to vary much with month, year, or direction.)

[EDITED to add:] Hmm, but buying off the merpeople might be risky? It would mean more attacks by other things that might turn out to be potentially ship-sinking. In particular, more demon whales, and our best demon whale countermeasure isn’t very good. I’m not terribly sure that paying the merpeople is actually wise.