.@onesarahjones reviews @LKrauss1's edited anthology The War on Science for @NYMag. Predictably, she doesn't like it. All the chapters are "pockmarked by omissions, misrepresentations, and, sometimes, obvious lies." Let's look at the one by me and Moti Gorin. /1 Regarding @LisaLittman1's 2018 paper, Jones quotes Moti and me as saying that it "immediately ignited an explosion of activist-driven controversy.” Well, that's true! Apparently our mistake was not to tell "the full story." /2

Straight is the new gay. The new van der Meulen study on puberty suppression has this table. 🧵 Here we see that only 4 of the 70 participants were "homosexual" -- 4 of the 50 females (FTMs) and 0 of the 20 males (MTFs). However, since they were from an early Dutch cohort (dominated by same-sex attracted patients), this can't be right.

A sign that critics don’t have much is a fixation on nitpicky trivialities. E.g.. the Cass Review’s use of 'exponential'. Lydia Polgreen in the NYT today: 'The report....bizarrely for a science-based document, confuses the definition of exponential growth.'🧵 Cass refers to 'the exponential increase in the numbers of children and young people presenting to the NHS for help', and says 'in 2014 the number of referrals started to grow exponentially' (etc.)
nytimes.com/2024/08/13/opi…

1/. Why has Harvard’s Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging website been memory-holed? November 2023, went to: edib.harvard.edu
2/. Now it redirects to harvard.edu/about/diversit…

Reading this post reminded me of yesterday’s email to the Harvard community called “Wellbeing during Finals and the Holidays”, from (among others) the “Associate Provost for Campus Health and Wellbeing” 1/n

https://twitter.com/stevestuwill/status/1733471561842397285

The Harvard email illustrates (quoting @SteveStuWill) “the pathologizing of everyday stresses and strains” and (perhaps) “the iatrogenic effects of school-based and online mental-health awareness programs”. 2/n

🧵 Biology textbooks move with the Zeitgeist. “The biochemical, physiological, and anatomical features associated with ‘males’ and ‘females’ are turning out to be more complicated than previously thought, with many genes involved in their development.” 👍. 2016, from: Moreover, “A newborn baby is assigned a ‘biological sex’ that typically reflects the genitals present at birth and the child’s chromosomes.” 🧐