Maya Forstater has challenged Adam Rutherford and Ben Goldacre to set Bragg straight about Cass and systematic reviews

Joe Rogan seems like a weird choice?

Er... that's arrogant. "@ joerogan invite me". Has he any idea how big Joe Rogan is, compared to him (AR)?

Good grief, who's he trying to position himself with now. And I used to like him. Surely it's time for him to follow in Tim Harfords footsteps on more or less

@RethinkingLife Thank you, I'll have a read

(And I know nobody would ever accuse Jones of being a rationalist, but some things need to be shared 😆)

In other Owen Jones news

https://twitter.com/OzKaterji/status/1781088132919685606

He attributed a quote from Greenpeace to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee.

The Guardian have now issued a correction, but no acknowledgement that the two aren’t interchangeable and this rather changes the impact of the quote.

Apologies if this has been posted elsewhere as there are a lot of Cass threads but I saw a science reporter trying to set Owen Jones right
https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1780805791269666991

Hes also written a blogpost about the Cass report https://benryan.substack.com/p/the-cass-review-fact-check-its-clear

Alice Roberts is a gender woo believer.

Lots of threads on here, like this one:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3616759-Alice-Roberts-what-the-hell

And tweets like this:
https://twitter.com/theAliceRoberts/status/1141091857193156608

Thanks a lot for that link; I've come across the phenomenon before but did not have the vocabulary for it. Rational Man Syndrome it now is.

I find that these sentences capture their stance perfectly: "The intimation was that it was all a little bit mad and unseemly. Why would anyone get obsessed with that?" and "It’s the people who keep pointing it out who are the problem."

It's the brushing off and making it seem like those who like to investigate properly are the mad ones. Additonally it shows male priviledge, because they are not the ones who have the most to lose.

Having attended a very well presented talk by Professor Alice Roberts (mainly for fashion tips) her science seems spot on. But as I say, the word "gender" appears in DFB rather too much.

"What gender is this skeleton ?"

Oh do fuck off.

Alice Robert’s talking about a debate between an archeologist and Graham Hancock (pseudo archaeologist)
“ It involves the presentation of how science works & the importance of big data, on the one hand - vs personal conviction, ideology and cherry-picked cases, with a complete ignorance of how science works, on the other. At its heart it's a conversation between science and utter nonsense”

but somehow gender identity is real and people can change sex?? how does the cognitive dissonance not make her head spin??

But labour under a proBrexit Corbyn was neutral at best about the referendum

The ways that I learn whether I can trust someone or not. I have a few heuristics,

Don't we all ? I know I have.

MariedeGournay, duc
Quite right. We haven't rejected the parcelling up of left-ish beliefs only to pick up a different parcel.
We agree on this one thing. That's massive. Let's not push it.

Completely agree.

Similar thoughts have been occurring to me, @MarieDeGournay . It's almost like, having, rightly, criticised the TRSOH attitude, whereby people signed up to a 'parcel of good beliefs', for some it seems the gender issue is an opportunity to insist that all the other liberal nostrums must go by the board now. The left-leaning NS, for example, is full of articles telling us that the EU is a bit shit really, and facing trouble down the line (but who isn't). Likewise complaints about vaccines and lockdowns don't go away, and in fact seems to be espoused more widely. I suppose the conservative feminism of Mary Harrington could be said to be another example, but that's not my area of knowledge! 😀Another would be the notion that insistence on electric vehicles and other policies is imposing enormous costs on Californians, who are leaving the State in droves, it seems.

While I relished reading Mary Harrington's and Julie Burchill's take-downs of the reverse ferreting by former TRA 'allies', in each case there was a 'whaat?' moment: JB took a sideswipe at climate change, and MH at Covid lockdowns, as if they put these into the same basket as trans ideology.

Covid lockdowns may or may not have been necessary/the right idea/motivated by groupthink, but for heaven's sake, bodies were literally-literally piling up around the world because of the highly infectious nature of Covid, and keeping people away from each other as much as possible seemed at the time to be a plausible, and indeed the only way, to stop thousands of us from dying, until a vaccination could be found - uh-oh, vaccinations..🙄

It's interesting that 'public opinion' now seems to be split between blaming politicians for rushing irrationally to lockdowns because of 'a chaotic tangle of magical thinking, fear, and the threat of social ostracism'. [MH in UnHerd], and blaming politicians for not locking down soon enough for fear of political fallout, (also caused arguably by a different 'chaotic tangle of magical thinking, fear, and the threat of social ostracism') thereby causing the avoidable deaths of thousands of people.

Covid, climate change, trans ideology - forced teaming?

I can't agree hard enough with this. People tend to assume that academics these days all adhere to the fine Enlightenment traditions of empiricism and objectivity. Unfortunately, it's such a crabs-in-a-barrel milieu (especially in the social sciences but increasingly in the hard sciences too) that getting funding and jobs is now more about having the 'correct' views and being invited to the right bien pensant dinner parties. And for a certain type of straight male academic, using 'science to own the silly little women' is practically a life's calling.

Maths and physics are the last two holdouts and long may that continue.

But we GC reality-seers have never been able to rely on mainstream academia in this fight. Given that fact, the successes of our movement are all the more extraordinary.

I didn't think the name would fit tbh. Who knew? 🤷🏻‍♀️

It's a Halloween outfit apparently.

Link to additional image

@GrumpyMenopausalScathingWombWielder
Congratulations on the length of your username.

So is that a genuine picture of Adam Rutherford?