Free Speech: A Shield Against Oppression

Historically speaking, free speech has primarily served as a shield against oppression. Jacob Mchangama, who has written Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, also wrote an article at the Heterodox Academy blog. Here is an excerpt that I will have ready the next time I hear the free speech is a "problem" or that it is a tool of "oppression" or "violence."

A global look at the history of free speech suggests that free speech is in fact a shield against oppression. White supremacy, whether in the shape of American slavery and segregation, British colonialism, or South African apartheid, relied heavily on censorship and repression. Conversely, advocates of human equality like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela all championed the principle and practice of free speech to great effect and at huge personal cost. In the words of the late Congressman John Lewis, “Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings.” Tragically, several countries, not least India, still use hate speech laws, with roots stretching back to the era of British colonialism, to silence dissenters as well as the minorities these laws were supposed to protect. Moreover, the current tsunami of Republican-sponsored bills aimed at censoring “divisive” teachings on issues such as race, gender, sexual orientation, and even American history, are often uncomfortably close to their anti-racist speech code counterparts when it comes to wording and the underlying philosophy that words constitute, or are comparable with, tangible physical harms. Far from serving as a remedy against “cancel culture,” such bills are likely to increase partisan and ideological policing of nonconformist speech to the detriment of free and open discourse without which higher education becomes stale and ultimately meaningless.

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Adversarial Collaboration: An Idea Whose Time has Come

I first heard of this phrase, adversarial collaboration, from this presentation by Daniel Kahneman at Edge.org.

This seems like an excellent idea with broad application in many fields.

I see that the University of Pennsylvania has an Adversarial Collaboration Project. Here is an excerpt from its description page:

As originally conceived by Economics Nobel Prize Laureate, Daniel Kahneman, adversarial collaborations call on scholars to: (1) make good faith efforts to articulate each other’s positions (so that each side feels fairly characterized, not caricatured); (2) work together to design methods that both sides agree constitute a fair test and that they agree, ex ante, have the potential to change their minds; (3) jointly publish the results, regardless of “who wins, loses or draws” on which topics. Each collaborator serves as a check on their adversary to confirm that the hypotheses are falsifiable, the scientific tests are fair, and the interpretations accurately characterize the findings. Because adversarial collaborations restrict scholars’ abilities to rig methods in favor of their own hypothesis and to dismiss unexpected results, adversarial collaborations are likely to advance debates faster and generate more reliable knowledge than traditional approaches.

Through this initiative, we hope to discover best practices for participating in adversarial collaborations and to normalize such practices in order to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the social sciences and its reputation among policy makers and the public.

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Jesse Singal: Transgender Puberty Blocker and Hormone Research Fails to Justify Their Use

Jesse Singal analyzes new research regarding puberty blockers and hormones used by researchers to promote their use. He concerned that the researchers have been dishonest. Here is an excerpt from his article: "Researchers Found Puberty Blockers And Hormones Didn’t Improve Trans Kids’ Mental Health At Their Clinic. Then They Published A Study Claiming The Opposite.". Here is an excerpt:

All the publicity materials the university released tell a very straightforward, exciting story: The kids in this study who accessed puberty blockers or hormones (henceforth GAM, for “gender-affirming medicine”) had better mental health outcomes at the end of the study than they did at its beginning.

The headline of the emailed version of the press release, for example, reads, “Gender-affirming care dramatically reduces depression for transgender teens, study finds.” The first sentence reads, “UW Medicine researchers recently found that gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary adolescents caused rates of depression to plummet.” All of this is straightforwardly causal language, with “dramatically reduces” and “caused rates… to plummet” clearly communicating improvement over time.

. . .

What’s surprising, in light of all these quotes, is that the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false.

It’s hard even to figure this out from reading the study, which omits some very basic statistics one would expect to find, but the non-result is pretty clear from eTable 3 in the supplementary materials, which shows what percentage of study participants met the researchers’ thresholds for depression, anxiety, and self-harm or suicidal thoughts during each of the four waves of the study:

Among the kids who went on hormones, there isn’t genuine statistical improvement here from baseline to the final wave of data collection. At baseline, 59% of the treatment-naive kids experienced moderate to severe depression. Twelve months later, 56% of the kids on GAM experienced moderate to severe depression. At baseline, 45% of the treatment-naive kids experienced self-harm or suicidal thoughts. Twelve months later, 37% of the kids on GAM did. These are not meaningful differences: The kids in the study arrived with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems, many of them went on blockers or hormones, and they exited the study with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems.

. . .

Despite the fact that two of the authors worked at Seattle Children’s Hospital, where the gender clinic is based, the paper doesn’t include a single word of even informed speculation attempting to explain why some kids accessed GAM and others did not. Nor do the authors seem to notice that by the end of the study, the no-GAM group has dwindled to a grand total of six kids who reported mental health data, as compared to 57 in the group receiving treatment.

Adding intrigue to this situation, the researchers are refusing to release their raw data. Singal does a deep-dive the substantiate his conclusion that the conclusions of the researchers are not substantiated by this research. The problems with this "research" are overwhelming and Jesse Singal offers line and verse on the many questions, lack of questions and holes. Too bad many legacy media outlets lap up unsubstantiated results on this topic produced by so many biased "researchers."

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Douglas Murray: Black Lives Matter Started with a Good Cause, Then Turned it Into a Racket

Douglas Murray, writing in the New York Post:, is concerned about the factually defective positions taken by Black Lives Matter as well as its highly questionable financials:

Like the most fraudulent pastors, the heads of BLM take advantage of good people. They present an undeniably good cause. They prey on people’s hopes and fears. After all, who in America does not believe that black lives matter? Who wouldn’t have sympathy with, or support, a group that claims to want to help people fight injustice? But BLM operates like all rackets do.

Firstly, they lie about reality. In the case of BLM, they pretend that black people in the United States in 2022 can be killed at any time by the police. They pretend that racism is a pandemic in this country and that everything and anything must be done to tackle it.

The effects of this work is there for all to see. The American public has been misled about the real state of race in this country. A poll in 2020 asked Americans how many unarmed black men they think are killed by the police in America the previous year. More than a fifth of people who described themselves as “very liberal” said they thought it was over 10,000 unarmed black people in America killed by police every year. Among self-described “liberals,” around 40% said they thought that the figure was somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000. The actual figure was around 10. Meaning that liberals in America were off by several orders of magnitude. They had a completely wrongheaded idea of what America is actually like.

But no wonder. For they had spent years hearing BLM pretend that black people are killed with impunity in this country.

Murray then turns to BLM's financial misdeeds, including recent revelations that BLM purchased a "purchase of a swanky new $5.8 million mansion in Southern California."

Other commentators have been highly critical of BLM, including Wilfried Riley:

Briahna Joy Gray's podcast featured Sean Campbell, who has taken flack for looking into BLM improprieties.

Here is a longer version of this same video:

Freddie DeBoer has written on the topic. His article is "White Journalists Are Terrified of Appearing to Criticize BlackLivesMatter, Obviously"

That pouring billions of dollars into an amorphous social movement could result in mismanagement and corruption is as obvious a thing as I can imagine, and so the need for a watchdog press that helps ensure that money isn’t misspent is also quite obvious. I would analogize the current moment and BLM to the Red Cross after 9/11, when a great deal of scrutiny was justly applied to that organization and its practices. But the media has spent the past year and a half saying almost nothing about BLM and where the money has gone, ceding the ground to conservative publications. It was the right-leaning New York Post that reported that one of the cofounders of the BLM Global Network Foundation had purchased four houses in a short time span, for example. The trouble is that many left-leaning people feel that they can safely disregard anything published in conservative media, and thus a badly-needed conversation hasn't happened. Anyone who has ever been part of a large protest movement understands how desperately such movements need external review for accountability, but if only Breitbart et al. are engaged in critical inquiry, the liberal donor class is not going to be moved.

Susan Woods sounded alarms about BLM's operation back in 2020:

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