Error Corrective Culture

The review is a sober examination of what by any standards are drastic medical interventions for physically healthy minors. It deserves to be read by people of all political leanings. Whether its early critics bothered to do so is unclear.

Mere hours after publication, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Susan Kressly, claimed that the review was undermined by reliance on “a narrow set of data.” A glance at the evidence synthesis (or even just the separate appendix) by anyone familiar with evidence-based medicine would show that this complaint is preposterous. The hypocrisy is blatant: the AAP’s policy statement for the treatment of gender-dysphoric youth is unsupported by its own citations.

That’s disturbing, of course, if true. Hypocrisy is often employed by people who value position, current or desired, over a regard for substantive truth.

But I also wondered about the author of the article, Mr Byrne. Who is he? He’s an MIT professor of philosophy; a glance at Wikipedia shows a short entry, centered, as one might imagine, around transgender issues. Do I take Professor Byrne at face value, or is he after academic fame moreso than truth?

After all, this report was commissioned by the essence of tendentious, frail arrogance itself, the Trump Administration. How does this impact my understanding of this article?

Often, when writing blog posts, I take a position representative of my perceived audience: not an expert, only mildly arrogant, trying to apply common-sense while being aware that common-sense is often, well, wrong^[c.s.], especially in the governance arena. I know I don’t know many, many things; I believe reasoning skills in a generally well-meaning populace are deteriorating; I try to be a scientific skeptic (see Skeptical Inquirer subscription); I know I don’t have time to make myself an expert on the subject of any given blog post, but I believe I have something to contribute that is not being mentioned in the conversational circles through which I travel; and more.

This blog post is a quintessential example of much of my blog, then, which, in turn, is aware that the projected reaction to this article, by Byrne, is a quintessential example — yes, yes, I repeated myself purposefully — of much of what is wrong in our culture. From Byrne feeling it necessary to pronounce himself a member of the left …

I am hardly a fan of the current administration: I have never voted Republican, and as an academic from Cambridge, Massachusetts, I hold many of the liberal beliefs of my tribe. That includes support for the right of transgender people to live free from discrimination and prejudice.

… to the reaction of the left to the report, as noted earlier, to my own reaction of Do I trust what this guy is saying?

And this leads to this blog post’s title, Error Corrective Culture. The goal of society is survival; this is built on the resolution of literally billions, in our rather large society, of problems, large and small. We should desire solutions that advance the probability of survival of our society, and one would think that would imply the actors, us folks, who propose and sometimes implement solutions, would keep that increase in survival odds uppermost in our minds.

But arrogance, that infantilizing disease, leads many, even most, of us down the flaming path of fame, fortune, prestige, and when there is a threat to that path, our reactions are not truth-oriented, but self-oriented.

I think a lot of that is caused by a missing facet of our culture: the importance of self-correction in society. When society makes a mistake, is it considered a positive to recognize and correct it?

No. It’s considered a flaw in the individual or group that a mistake was made, societally speaking. Oh, when it’s in a technical field considered difficult, then mistakes are expected, and a well-designed field will accommodate the mistakes by allowing for correction. That’s why I have a Backspace key that lets me re-spell “accomodate”^[spelling].

Society doesn’t have it, though. Heels get dug in: homophobic attitudes, racism, communism, Soviets, homeopathic medicine … pro- pediatric gender medicine? We don’t value the admission of fault, re-examination, and self-correction. Our pride, our pursuit of fame, our arrogance, trips us up. All because the actors, not in the theatrical sense, are motivated by self-interest.

And makes society that much less stable, more likely to tear itself into bits, as we cling to mistaken positions, and impoverishing all of us, endangering all of us.

When will we return to the pursuit of truth?

^c.s. The words of H. L. Mencken ring true:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

And, for those who read far too closely, yes, I just plagiarized myself.