TL;DR “getting a minimum-wage job” means different things to different people.

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Here is your go-to article for responding to anyone who says the SAT is useless and tests don’t measure real intelligence.

Personally, I think this article does a better job arguing for “No, intelligence tests are not bullshit”, but I guess Slate is, uh, a more respectable source…

(Or maybe I should just point people to the Wikipedia article on g, but it’s maybe not the most readable, and also it’s Wikipedia…)

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Then we’re left saying, OK, you’re free to have whatever part of the pie you want. The question then becomes, what do we mean by “you’re free to”? Because it’s not very meaningful to just say that you’re free to do X without also providing some protection against retaliation for doing X. And the question then becomes, what needs to be protected against, and what’s legitimate? Because depending on how expansive this protection is, it might start infringing on other people’s legitimate interests, and you have some actual negotiation that you need to do.

So where I start getting nervous is when I encounter the seemingly-common idea that any disapproval of someone’s choice of pie piece is unacceptable retaliation. I mean, maybe I think some parts of the pie really are better than others — either better morally, or better instrumentally for the person taking it, or just better aesthetically or whatever — and (so long as my standards are not of the double variety) I think I ought to be free to take the attitude of, “Really? You’re taking that part of the pie? Well, I guess that’s your right… loser.” (Or stronger forms of disapproval as appropriate.)

Maybe this idea is a lot less common than it seems. But, y’know, up until recently I generally felt obligated to obey all feminist dictates, so…

There are maybe some things I am leaving out but I think this caputres the essence of it.

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I tend to go with a “transness is characterized by discomfort with one’s primary or secondary sex characteristics” theory of transness rather than a gender identity theory of transness. I agree that the gender identity hypothesis combined with liberal feminism gives one weird fucking results.

I am glad to hear you say this! Sometimes I think I must be nuts because, like, this seems obvious but nobody says it.

It’s not really clear to me whether your proposed replacement can be made to work, but then, this is your field of study, not mine! So I’m not about to nitpick there.

I am still worried though because it still seems like strongly gendered people do exist and it seems like this would seriously interfere with the whole libfem program? (Which I do, after all, broadly support?)

That needs a bit of fine-tuning. I’ve talked with someone who seemed to be very uncomfortable with being biological– presumably not happy with their current sex characteristics, but wouldn’t be happier with a different biological set.

I’m not sure that really needs to be grouped in with this. We don’t consider body identity integrity disorder to be a gender issue. (But then, if Ozy is right, maybe we should consider transness to be a body identity issue, if not a “disorder”.)

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Start with the $4 trillion benefit claim. From the summary:

From 2000 to 2011, life expectancy increased by 0.182 years annually. Assuming that half that increase is due to new pharmaceuticals, the value of the increase in life expectancy created by the drugs is about $4 trillion a year.

Do you believe that half of all life expectancy gains in the US in recent years come from the pharmaceutical companies? I do not, and I have not seen any independent researchers make this claim. There are many aspects of public health and medicine that would improve life expectancy, like lower crime, better pollution control, better clinical practices, new surgical techniques, new medical devices, etc. I would guess that new pharmaceuticals are responsible for between 0.5% and 5% of the observed increase in life expectancy. This means that their benefit estimates are overstated by one to two orders of magnitude, even if the rest of the paper is sound.

Now, read their comparison of FDA divisions the way you would read an epidemiological study of different populations. Keep in mind that each FDA division is responsible for a different type of drug (Oncology, Psychiatry, etc.). There are many reasons to believe that reviewing the safety and efficacy of a cancer drug will (and should) involve a different type of analysis than reviewing the safety of an antidepressant.

One reason is that when dealing with drugs for life-threatening illnesses, you might worry about side effects a lot less. If a drug causes 0.01% of people who take it to commit suicide, this is basically irrelevant if it is a drug given to people with a rare late-stage cancer, but it is a huge problem for an antidepressant that gets pushed onto a significant fraction of the US population. So when you review a cancer drug, you spend a lot less time looking for problems like that.

Another reason is that for serious illnesses, the clinical endpoints are much clearer. The patient dies or lives. When dealing with psychiatric drugs, the clinical endpoints are much fuzzier and more subject to experimenter bias, which demands closer scrutiny of studies.

Also, the molecular pathways and effects might be much better known for some kinds of diseases and drugs than others, which makes it easier to evaluate claims about what exactly the drug is doing.

In short, the different type of drugs being reviewed will generate a lot of confounders when trying to compare the efficacy of different divisions. The authors claim that they correct for task complexity and safety, so let’s look at what they use to correct for these confounders:

Thus we … settled on the final set of workload factors as: INDs per staffer; NDAs per staffer; whether the compound received a priority review rating; whether the compound was designated for a special program (accelerated approval or fast track); whether an advisory committee was involved; whether a clinical hold was placed on development of the drug; whether a black box warning was included on the product label; the number of post-marketing requirements; and the clinical development time.

Do you, as a medical doctor, believe that this is a full and complete list of the factors that might influence the time it takes to determine the safety and efficacy of a new drug?

This paper shows that the FDA approves antiviral and cancer drugs significantly faster than neurological, cardio-renal, and psychiatric drugs. The authors claim that this is due to productivity differences in the different divisions involved. The alternate hypothesis is that some types of drugs do, and should, take longer to evaluate than others.

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I doubt that it’s possible to buy more than 10 years of hurricane or flood insurance, so global warming is irrelevant.

Alternative hypotheses: we are not good at long-term time-discounting

What does that mean? time-discounting as in NPV? By “we” do you mean the journalist? the intuition that global warming should show up in current prices? An alternate interpretation, which doesn’t seem to match the words much, is that nothing about future decades is priced into anything, so global warming isn’t special. I certainly endorse that claim.

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