I'm pretty sure if I submitted this as an assignment for my intro to statistics class it would get an F. It's as if the author has no idea what "confounding variable" or "controlling for a variable" means. Total garbage.
Both the mainstream right and the mainstream left are *obviously* stuck in internalized postmodern epistemic death spirals. One of the few forces holding the country together is that more people will buy subscriptions to newspapers and news sites if those newspapers or news sites have more rational analysis based on objective and factual information.
"Something" is causing suburban swing voters to abandon democrats in record numbers. gee, i wonder what that is? could it be schools teaching suburban school kids they can be any gender they want? and that if they do want to be a different gender kids shouldnt tell their parents? and kids also probably shouldnt tell their parents about taking the magic pills that solve every problem, but most who take them go on to sterilizing meds? And if parents object to this fraud, courts will remove the child from the home and place them with a foster family?
even if this isnt the reason voters are fleeing democrats, how will suburban voters react when they find out about this? think they will ever vote for another democrat ever again?
AP: More than 1 million voters switch to GOP in warning for Dems
One conclusion one might draw from this analysis and the dearth of coherent data is that the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones is unguided medical experimentation.
correlated liabilities. Stuff like this gets published all the time, like a minor reduction in event X happened after medical marijuana was legalized, and then voila, medical marijuana legalization is correlated with event X. There are loads of those articles out there. An increase of 1-2 suicides per 100,000 would be significant because the base-rate is 14, right? It's impossible to assign this to the puberty blocker/testosterone access, even if the trend holds, it will be due to correlated liabilities, and not simple cause-and-effect. now, try telling the medical marijuana people that. Another way around this is to do a "difference within differences" analysis, where you look at rate of change within states pre and post hormone availability, and see if the rate of change was altered. peace!
Greene does a good job of shifting the focus away from narrow misleading propaganda used in support of affirming "care" to a broad perspective that includes those severly harmed by gender care, the very ppl activists claim dont exist. if anyone doubts greene's results, one only has to look at amsterdam, which has good records of persons getting gender "care" and says those getting the care have 50% reduced life expectancy and suicide rates 20X greater than ave. Long term outcomes as a result of gender "care" should always be the focus. Unfortunately, most of the information provided by the gender industry is based on 12 months of data or meaningless online polls.
in my opinion, republicans have been wrong about almost every issue for the past 20 years. what a joke trump is, yet many still support him. theyre right about gender care tho. democrats have swallowed a fraud pushed by big biz and activists. gender ideology erases the rights of a half a dozen groups. its extreemly unpopular. its been implemented without participation of public and based on fraudulant slogans and bogus studys. UK finland sweden all say gender meds dont help anything. full stop. when the general public realizes whats going on they will blame democrats. the sooner this happens the better. gop is hoping dems double down on gender care like mao led the japanese army into the jungles of china to be slaughtered. wouldnt it be funny if dems pushing gender ideology caused the end of democracy in the US as ppl turn away from democrats and republicans wont certify any future democratic president? Not that funny when you think about it.
I'm getting into commenting on this post fairly late in the game, but whatcha gonna do?
Jesse's analysis is good; Greene's causal conclusion is vastly overstated.
However.
Greene's piece, and the conservative-media take-up of it, isn't really a "new low." It is more of the same-old, same-old, no worse that some of the material foisted (and I use that word advisedly) by those on the other side of the culture wars, who publish their research and stand for multiple interviews with reporters from the mainstream media (Jesse has covered this stuff elsewhere; I believe I first encountered the Tordoff et al people on PBS Newshour). It may be "less low" in that it hasn't been peer reviewed and published elsewhere, making it easier for the opposition to denounce.
And the thing is--purely as social science research goes--it's /not/ a terrible study until the author makes his strident, causal claims. The data seem to actually show a relative increase in youth suicide rates in states with more -- say -- "liberal" youth access laws, over a small number of years. But he can't go much further than that because, first, there are real, well-known problems with spurious correlational associations (extends to regression) in time-series data, especially with short series. And two, the study nowhere identifies the characteristics of the youth who are taking their lives. We don't know that they are trans people, now, do we? Conclusions on such points are heavily speculative. The most Greene could legitimately conclude on the bases of these findings would be something along the lines of "my findings are not congruent with those of other researchers." If I were reviewing the paper, I'd reject it with a comment to come up with clearer data on the matter of interest.
And it should end there. But no, the culture wars grind on,. This is just one more missile and I fear for our civilization.
Does this really need to be this complicated? Why not just do a test for statistical significance to determine how meaningful these results are? Any student in a statistics class could do this easily.
Good grief. That’s awful, awful reasoning. As someone who’s completely against puberty blocker treatment… thanks for keeping us honest.
Thanks for being one of the very few objective, good-faith actors in this shitshow of a debate.
It's extremely frustrating to see so much idiocy on both sides.
The more I learn about ideological contamination of scientific or statistical endeavour the more concerned I become about AI.
I'm pretty sure if I submitted this as an assignment for my intro to statistics class it would get an F. It's as if the author has no idea what "confounding variable" or "controlling for a variable" means. Total garbage.
Both the mainstream right and the mainstream left are *obviously* stuck in internalized postmodern epistemic death spirals. One of the few forces holding the country together is that more people will buy subscriptions to newspapers and news sites if those newspapers or news sites have more rational analysis based on objective and factual information.
"Something" is causing suburban swing voters to abandon democrats in record numbers. gee, i wonder what that is? could it be schools teaching suburban school kids they can be any gender they want? and that if they do want to be a different gender kids shouldnt tell their parents? and kids also probably shouldnt tell their parents about taking the magic pills that solve every problem, but most who take them go on to sterilizing meds? And if parents object to this fraud, courts will remove the child from the home and place them with a foster family?
even if this isnt the reason voters are fleeing democrats, how will suburban voters react when they find out about this? think they will ever vote for another democrat ever again?
AP: More than 1 million voters switch to GOP in warning for Dems
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-biden-covid-health-presidential-e50db07385831e67f866ec45402be8b9
One conclusion one might draw from this analysis and the dearth of coherent data is that the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones is unguided medical experimentation.
And if it is that, woe is us.
How do I cancel my subscription?
correlated liabilities. Stuff like this gets published all the time, like a minor reduction in event X happened after medical marijuana was legalized, and then voila, medical marijuana legalization is correlated with event X. There are loads of those articles out there. An increase of 1-2 suicides per 100,000 would be significant because the base-rate is 14, right? It's impossible to assign this to the puberty blocker/testosterone access, even if the trend holds, it will be due to correlated liabilities, and not simple cause-and-effect. now, try telling the medical marijuana people that. Another way around this is to do a "difference within differences" analysis, where you look at rate of change within states pre and post hormone availability, and see if the rate of change was altered. peace!
Greene does a good job of shifting the focus away from narrow misleading propaganda used in support of affirming "care" to a broad perspective that includes those severly harmed by gender care, the very ppl activists claim dont exist. if anyone doubts greene's results, one only has to look at amsterdam, which has good records of persons getting gender "care" and says those getting the care have 50% reduced life expectancy and suicide rates 20X greater than ave. Long term outcomes as a result of gender "care" should always be the focus. Unfortunately, most of the information provided by the gender industry is based on 12 months of data or meaningless online polls.
in my opinion, republicans have been wrong about almost every issue for the past 20 years. what a joke trump is, yet many still support him. theyre right about gender care tho. democrats have swallowed a fraud pushed by big biz and activists. gender ideology erases the rights of a half a dozen groups. its extreemly unpopular. its been implemented without participation of public and based on fraudulant slogans and bogus studys. UK finland sweden all say gender meds dont help anything. full stop. when the general public realizes whats going on they will blame democrats. the sooner this happens the better. gop is hoping dems double down on gender care like mao led the japanese army into the jungles of china to be slaughtered. wouldnt it be funny if dems pushing gender ideology caused the end of democracy in the US as ppl turn away from democrats and republicans wont certify any future democratic president? Not that funny when you think about it.
I'm getting into commenting on this post fairly late in the game, but whatcha gonna do?
Jesse's analysis is good; Greene's causal conclusion is vastly overstated.
However.
Greene's piece, and the conservative-media take-up of it, isn't really a "new low." It is more of the same-old, same-old, no worse that some of the material foisted (and I use that word advisedly) by those on the other side of the culture wars, who publish their research and stand for multiple interviews with reporters from the mainstream media (Jesse has covered this stuff elsewhere; I believe I first encountered the Tordoff et al people on PBS Newshour). It may be "less low" in that it hasn't been peer reviewed and published elsewhere, making it easier for the opposition to denounce.
And the thing is--purely as social science research goes--it's /not/ a terrible study until the author makes his strident, causal claims. The data seem to actually show a relative increase in youth suicide rates in states with more -- say -- "liberal" youth access laws, over a small number of years. But he can't go much further than that because, first, there are real, well-known problems with spurious correlational associations (extends to regression) in time-series data, especially with short series. And two, the study nowhere identifies the characteristics of the youth who are taking their lives. We don't know that they are trans people, now, do we? Conclusions on such points are heavily speculative. The most Greene could legitimately conclude on the bases of these findings would be something along the lines of "my findings are not congruent with those of other researchers." If I were reviewing the paper, I'd reject it with a comment to come up with clearer data on the matter of interest.
And it should end there. But no, the culture wars grind on,. This is just one more missile and I fear for our civilization.
Does this really need to be this complicated? Why not just do a test for statistical significance to determine how meaningful these results are? Any student in a statistics class could do this easily.
Great job on fisking this report, Jesse.