NYT Finally Covers a Story that Many School Districts Hide “Gender Transitions” from Parents

Many school districts are assisting students to "transition to a different gender" and hiding it from the student's parents. I've been telling people this for more than a year, and many people I talk to are refusing to believe that this happens, even though I have drafted letters of concern to districts on this topic. People refuse to believe this because the legacy media has consciously refused to cover these stories . . . until now. The NYT has finally decided that it's OK to write about this outrageous practice. From the NYT today:

Jessica Bradshaw found out that her 15-year-old identified as transgender at school after she glimpsed a homework assignment with an unfamiliar name scrawled at the top.

When she asked about the name, the teenager acknowledged that, at his request, teachers and administrators at his high school in Southern California had for six months been letting him use the boy’s bathroom and calling him by male pronouns.

Mrs. Bradshaw was confused: Didn’t the school need her permission, or at least need to tell her?

It did not, a counselor later explained, because the student did not want his parents to know. District and state policies instructed the school to respect his wishes.

Note: In this article, the NYT claims that "conservative" parents who are upset by this practice, but this is intentionally misleading. If you doubt this, just go ask your Democrat-voting neighbors what they would think if their child's school district hid this information, secretly conducting what amounts to unlicensed therapy conducted by classroom teachers, which often leads to dangerous lifetime drugs and permanent surgery.

Continue ReadingNYT Finally Covers a Story that Many School Districts Hide “Gender Transitions” from Parents

On Confusing Correlation for Causation

Matt Stoller offers this excellent presentation of the commonly used fallacy of confusing correlation for causation:

For years, we’ve been told that while drinking too much is bad for your health, having just a glass of wine with dinner, as the French do, can be good for your heart. And many studies do indeed show such an association. But what we’re discovering is that this correlation is an illusion. In fact people who drink a small amount of wine every night are healthier, but only because it means they aren’t drinking soda. Even small amounts of alcohol are bad for you, but as academics are coming to understand, if you drink a glass of wine every evening, you also tend to exercise, eat fruits and vegetables, and refrain from smoking. And it is those habits, not the wine, that improve health.

This logical fallacy is known as confusing correlation with causation, or assuming that because A happened and then B happened, that A caused B. The media loves these kinds of associations, because they seem correct, but they are often just coincidence, or a result of a variable that’s not being observed. Sometimes correlations are silly, like saying that “there are more sick people at hospitals, therefore hospitals cause sickness.” They can even be ridiculous; one famous study found that shark attacks are common on beaches with more ice cream sales, the theory being that sharks like to eat people full of ice cream.

Every aspiring law student encounters this fallacy; it’s fundamental in law to understand when something is causal vs coincidental or associative. It’s such a commonly taught error to avoid that it was the basis for one of the first episodes of the famous show The West Wing, an episode named “Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc” after the latin phrase describing this fallacy. Lawyers understand the difference between correlation and causation. So do academics. An entire generation of would-be lawyers who watched the West Wing understand it. It’s not a mystery.

Continue ReadingOn Confusing Correlation for Causation

Bret Weinstein Offers an Explanation for his COVID Disagreements with Sam Harris

As I see it, Sam Harris, who I have much admired over the years, has somewhat fallen off the rails on COVID, Free Speech and Trump. It happens to all of us, some of the time. I hope he can settle himself and get back in the game. In the meantime, Harris and Bret Weinstein have been struggling to figure out why they have had recent pointed disagreements. Bret's Tweet offers a reason for their disagreements:

Jimmy Dore dissects Sam Harris' recent strange discussion about COVID (starting at hr./min. 2:51). This is about a strange as Sam Harris' recent discussion regarding Hunter Biden's laptop. Glenn Greenwald links to the video clip of Harris and offers this commentary:

All of this stems from the classic mentality of all would-be tyrants: our enemies are so dangerous, their views so threatening, that everything we do – lying, repression, censorship – is noble. That's what made the Sam Harris confession so vital: that's how liberal elites think.

Continue ReadingBret Weinstein Offers an Explanation for his COVID Disagreements with Sam Harris

FIRE Comments on the Forbidden Words of Stanford University

Excerpt from an Article by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression):

By now, much has been written about the words and phrases Stanford removed from its website for their potential to cause harm. “That was insane!” isn’t palatable, because “This term trivializes the experiences of people living with mental health conditions.” What to do when referring to a whitelisted or blacklisted IP address? Try “allowlist/denylist,” because the former terms “[a]ssign value connotations based on color (white = good and black = bad), an act which is subconsciously racialized.” You get the idea. “American,” “dumb,” and “lame” are out, too . . . .

Last week, after the list became public and backlash mounted, Stanford announced it would conduct a review of the guide. The statement from Chief Information Officer Steve Gallagher clarified the website does not represent Stanford University policy. “It also does not represent mandates or requirements,” Gallagher wrote. The list simply provides “suggested alternatives.” “But, we clearly missed the mark,” Gallagher concedes. “We value the input we have been hearing, from a variety of perspectives, and will be reviewing it thoroughly and making adjustments to the guide.”

While FIRE is, of course, relieved to hear these alternatives are not required, the inherent infantilization of steering adults away from words and phrases like “tone deaf” and “mailman” is troubling. By prematurely wading into conversations and deeming words and phrases offensive on behalf of its adult students, Stanford deprives its community members the chance to build resilience and talk through the issues of the day without having to constantly worry about stepping on rakes.

We think institutions of higher education better serve students by not inserting themselves in language debates that are almost certain to produce a “Streisand effect,” occurring when more attention is brought to forbidden words and phrases in the effort to silence them. FIRE recommends a culture of trust, not coddling....

In 2016, Nick Haslam coined the term “concept creep” to describe the tendency for the semantic range of harm-related concepts to expand over time. In other words, the meaning of concepts such as “trauma,” “bullying,” and “violence” has broadened to include ever milder, subtler phenomena.

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingFIRE Comments on the Forbidden Words of Stanford University