"Mass Sociogenic illness spread by social media"

[WarriorN]

Interesting paper.
As Oliver Burkeman describes:

"a culturebound stress reaction of our postmodern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals & valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours & aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man" is an amazing sentence in an abstract

twitter.com/oliverburkeman/status/1430505037806153731?s=21

academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article/doi/10.1093/brain/awab316/6356504

And as Will Malone tweets in response to this paper:

Outbreak: On Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics
Lisa Marchiano

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00332925.2017.1350804

twitter.com/will_malone/status/1430393567831154688?s=21

Interesting.

The question for me has always going to be when are the academics going to start recognising this for what it is.

I’ve been reading Oliver Burkeman’s books. He comes across as someone with an inquiring mind, a healthy degree of scepticism and rigorous in his approach. I am not at surprised to read the tweet in the OP. It makes me admire him even more that he is prepared to stand up for the science when many of his peers have taken cover.

I haven’t heard anything from Ben Goldacre in years. Does anyone know if he’s put gender ideology through its paces?

@BettyFilous I follow Ben Goldacre on Twitter. He's not particularly active and I haven't seen anything on the trans debate. I've read Bad Science and would hope he's GC.

Oliver Burkeman has been supportive for a while. He's also got a book coming out (not about this!) which I have pre-ordered as I want to support people who are speaking out (though I also actually want to read the book anyway!)

I have all of Ben Goldacre's books. But I am so, so, so disappointed in him for keeping his head down on the gender ideology issue.

Yes I'm disappointed by him too.

Burkeman has said some v to the point stuff over the years. He sees it completely.

It's been blindingly obvious to me that this is social media driven contagion from the start.

Seen to recall Goldacre's said something to the effect that it's all very complicated and he doesn't want to get involved.

Suspected translation: I know what the truth is but I'm a Guardian reader and so are my mates.

Hugely disappointing, I loved his books.

I’m disappointed with Goldacre too.

Thought he was exposing lazy or uninformed science, was clearly just looking for soft targets.

Easy to laugh at homeopathy, harder to rock the Graun boat I guess.

@Deliriumoftheendless

I’m disappointed with Goldacre too.

Thought he was exposing lazy or uninformed science, was clearly just looking for soft targets.

Easy to laugh at homeopathy, harder to rock the Graun boat I guess.

Other matters aside, I think he's a bit busy, running DataLab EBM which has delivered analyses of nearly 60million healthcare records to assist with COVID–19. Before that, he's behind AllTrials and other amazing initiatives.

He stopped his weekly piece for Guardian in 2014.

I should think he's keeping his eye on what he wants to achieve in re: timely reporting of clinical trials, cost-effective prescribing in primary care and other useful data tools to transform practice, plus Covid (as above).

I was in a 'bad science'-type group on FB and had to leave because the American mods are balls-deep in gender ideology. They were doing great work calling out vaccine denying memes, then in the next post they'd berate users for using science and facts to question gender woo. It drove off most of the sensible posters.

@MattDamon

I was in a 'bad science'-type group on FB and had to leave because the American mods are balls-deep in gender ideology. They were doing great work calling out vaccine denying memes, then in the next post they'd berate users for using science and facts to question gender woo. It drove off most of the sensible posters.

And there's that. Andy Lewis has been ostracised by most of the headline skeptics for rejecting gender ideology - it's been a disgrace to see.

@Deliriumoftheendless

I’m disappointed with Goldacre too.

Thought he was exposing lazy or uninformed science, was clearly just looking for soft targets.

Easy to laugh at homeopathy, harder to rock the Graun boat I guess.

I'm disappointed that Goldacre hasn't spoken up on the sex & gender debate, but I think this is a bit unfair.

In Bad Pharma, he set his sights on the entire pharmaceutical industry - not really sure that can be called a soft target.

Several years ago, nurologist Prof Susan Greenfield said that the internet was rewiring our brains as we outsource our long-term memory. It is possible that those who have never known a world without the WWW really do think differently.

Suspected translation: I know what the truth is but I'm a Guardian reader and so are my mates.

Yes, exactly this.

Fair points, people.

I'm a longtime reader of Ben Goldacre but can understand why this isn't an area he has any responsibility to speak about.

Anyway, the faux-Tourettes described in the paper (you can download it free) is really interesting. As someone on the Twitter thread notes, there may be parallels with the "plural system" identity that's been popular for a few years.

I'm disappointed that Goldacre hasn't spoken up on the sex & gender debate, but I think this is a bit unfair.

In Bad Pharma, he set his sights on the entire pharmaceutical industry - not really sure that can be called a soft target.

I'd agree if he'd said nothing at all, but just muttering 'it's complicated' is a cop-out - it's only complicated if you don't want to say something unpopular. If you're going to present yourself as a fearless advocate for scientific truth, the optics are poor.

And Big Pharma is a large target, but one on 'the right side of history'.

I agree, teawamutu

Where has he made the "it's complicated" comment? Would rather see in context.

Back to the op, has anyone come across this tourettes thing before? Must admit it was new to me- wonder if it's mainly German viewers or if there are similar ones in other countries?

Yes Helen Lewis wrote an article about it being a trending thing on Tiktok quite recently.