nico

in war, there is no sanctity in sanctuary. an oath to god is but empty words to deaf ears

[atropos-iphigenia]

changes sure are changing around here

[weaver-z]

This satire article resonated with me so much

[gudetama-tamad]

[sapropel]

Sometimes your bad coworker will be like "I can't do anything right & I ruin everything I touch :(" and you can't even comfort them because like damn. Yeah. You really can't do anything right and you do ruin everything you touch☝️

[sapropel]

HE'S GETTING FIRED. NEVER GIVE UP ON YOUR DREAMS!!!!!!!!!!

[thatdisasterauthor]

I think the thing that annoys me most about AI on a personal, day to day, level is what it has done to grammar checkers. If you've never done a lot of editing, or used to 5+ years ago but haven't really in the last couple years, I can't even begin to describe how fucking BAD this shit has gotten. And as an author it is EXHAUSTING.

I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.

And yeah, I can ignore all the times it's trying to get me to cut out any semblance of my own voice, or shove things into the wrong tense, or make the most random suggestions on comma usage. But if it's getting all that WRONG, what is it just straight up missing that I SHOULD be correcting? What real spelling and grammar errors are still lurking in there?

[thatdisasterauthor]

"Use Libre Office."

I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.

Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.

Industry standards are industry standards FOR A REASON. Having everyone on the same workflow can be crucial to getting things done effectively and correctly without creating a lot of extra work. And those things are not going to change overnight, as much as we might want them to.

[thatdisasterauthor]

:| :| :|

Yeah, Word, let me just leave this whole chunk of dialogue without the closing quotation marks. That's the thing to do. How dare I have two punctuation marks in a row. It's not like that's how closing quotation marks fucking work.

[thatdisasterauthor]

I am going to light something on fire.

[thatdisasterauthor]

And you know, for young writers, this has got to be so detrimental just from the perspective of opening your document and seeing a million corrections that, frankly, don't need to be there. If you're a young writer you're likely not going to have the background knowledge to know what is and isn't a good suggestion, you're just going to see a document that makes it look like you made every mistake possible so clearly you must be a terrible, stupid writer and should just give up.

[animaltestings]

i rlly do like old movies but half of the time it's just some guy harassing a woman like leave her alone omfg

[holohedral]

wildflowers thriving on the side of the road i see you i love you girls

[urie]

stop calling it a girl dinner and call it by its formal name: Fend For Yourself dinner in an ingredients household

[queer-reader-07]

[roxey]

my favorite genre of post. if only I could find more

[hedgehogism]

due to the economy, free use kink now costs 2 dollars. Sorry

[tpwrtrmnky]

The parachute study is actually a wonderful piece of art because it demonstrates so succinctly the kind of situation where randomized controlled trials are not the gold standard of evidence, and in fact reach misleading conclusions.

Because you can't recruit people to willingly jump out of mid-flight passenger planes for science, you redesign the study to engineer a scenario where the risk to the control group is minimsed. The plane is landed.

And then, because you've removed the main reason to use a parachute, you find that parachutes have "no effect" on mortality or injury.

The constraints of performing an ethical RCT guarantee this result. A result that we obviously know is dangerously wrong to extrapolate to the real-life uses of parachutes.

Now here's the thing: The people insisting that "evidence-based medicine" says we need RCTs of trans healthcare know this is what they're doing. It's extremely well established that you can abuse these "standards" to engineer incorrect results.

SEGM and their ilk are doing this on purpose because they know it's an effective way to dress up science denial in a veneer of scientific rigor.

[disbelive]

How would one go about making such a study though?

As in, how would an RCT look like that attempts to create misleading data, when it comes to HRT or trans healthcare in general?

I agree with the post, I just can't think of a way to create a control group with that effect

[tpwrtrmnky]

Well, barring exceptionally fortunate cases like this one, where they were able to use "skip the conventional wait time" as the test group and "wait as usual" as the control, you sort of can't.

It's foundational medical ethics that when you have a treatment that's known to be effective, you don't withhold it for a study. The demand for RCTs is done knowing that it's unserious.

[sanguinifex]

The "gold standard" here would be some kind of quote-unquote "natural experiment" where you have 2 different countries that are very similar but one enforces wait times for trans care and the other doesn't, and then you compare outcomes for trans people in each country. Likewise, the "natural experiment" for parachutes would be crashes where people were able to eject with a parachute vs. crashes where they weren't. Or you could throw ballistics dummies out of planes.

Basically, the way you study this kind of thing is you look at where existing regulatory or other differences have created two different population groups, or you simulate it.

[tpwrtrmnky]

The interesting part there being that we know for a fact that the SEGM-affiliated gender clinics, many of them state monopolies, have worse outcomes than informed consent clinics.

Based on the extreme rates of patient complaints and high rates of patients being traumatized by the clinicians' behaviour, that is.

And yet, somehow, when these clinics self-incriminate in their research, it's taken as evidence that care needs to be restricted more.

[puppy-girl-gock]

> SEGM-affiliated gender clinics

Do you have knowledge of specific norwegian clinics that affiliate with SEGM? Not sure what clinics you're talking about

[tpwrtrmnky]

There is one singular gender clinic in all of Norway that actually treats patients of all ages with government funding, and the leader of their pediatric department, Anne Wæhre, goes to SEGM conferences.

[i-am-cybersmith]

You aren't addressing the actual reasons why these types of study ARE the gold standard.

How do you eliminate the placebo effect without them?

The trouble is, we don't actually know if a sugar pill from a box with the word "estrogen" on it would make trans women happier or cause their boobies to get juicier; we just know that an estrogen pill from a box with the word "estrogen" on it will! Some of the effect could be placeboic, and there's no way to tell without a double blind study!

You used parachutes as an example, but the first man to test a parachute DID die!

(Content warning, obviously)

DISTRESSING FOOTAGE. Unused / unissued material - Paris, France. Franz Reichelt wearing the parachute that he designed and invented before a

We literally only HAVE parachuted because people were willing to accept a certain necessary level of experimental risk!

[cannibalcaprine]

???????? the majority of research done on estradiol-based HRT is done in the context of menopause, and we've very much found that estradiol world there much better than placebo:

to insist that these results *wouldn't* apply to trans women *specifically* for some reason would be completely deranged³

and as a side note not specifically to the cybersmith, the insistence that these studies always *have* to be done on trans women just trying to get their meds has always felt weirdly cruel? as if it's supposed to be worth sacrificing our treatment at the altar of statistics just to ensure we don't have this specific opposition to draw against

feels grotesque

footnotes:

1: notably side effects of this treatment may include breast tenderness and enlargement

2: data sources: (May 2000). "Initial 17beta-estradiol dose for treating vasomotor symptoms". Obstet Gynecol 95 (5): 726–31; (2007). "Praxis der Hormontherapie in der Peri- und Postmenopause". Gynäkologische Endokrinologie 5 (3): 141–149. graph taken from wikimedia commons

3: and that's besides the implication that a trans woman *could* just placebo herself some breast development. if that *were* possible, some desperate girl would've discovered it already and it'd be all over the forums

[tourfilm]

living under a rock is so fun i love watching a movie that’s been famous for decades and being like wow this is so good.. did you guys know about this

[contourkit-deactivated20160224]

What if everything gets better in 2016

[melonisopod]

[neonfretra]

do you want to play dead bodies with me

[neonfretra]

floats along your dash face down and quiet and cold

[woodsdyke]

once i was in the TSA line for a flight and it was SO LONG that TSA decided to just drop all the security protocols. leave everything in the suitcase including electronics. keep your shoes on. don't go through the fancy 360 scanner, just the metal detector. get out of here. and i was like ohhhh so you admit this is all just your stupid community theatre production that you've made me be a part of for all this time and it doesn't actually mean anything real. okayyyyy

[beardedmrbean]

[beardedmrbean]

[beggars-opera]

The old school lack of transparency on tumblr is amazing because you assume the people you follow must all be equivalent to you and then you see someone write “I brought my youngest to college today” and someone else write “my mom wouldn’t let me listen to Ariana Grande when I was a kid” and then your head explodes

[formerlyanon]

and we need that! keeps us humble. 

[dabouse]

Then I'm just like WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE AN ADULT

[tomboy014]

It goes the other way, too, because WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE A CHILD?!!

[dabouse]

I'm 16, that's like, barely a child

[tomboy014]

I'm in my 30s. You are baby

[digitaldiscipline]

I'm older than both of you in a trenchcoat.

[kabretoss]

honestly one of the best things we can do for ourselves is realize that people of different ages than us can still be the same kind of person as us. it's humbling and it gives everyone involved a sense of continuity, and it busts those stupid generational stereotypes media is so fond of.

[sunderwight]

when I was younger an older person in fandom once told me something to the tune of "you might have less life experience and that'll matter sometimes, but just because you're younger doesn't mean you can't know more than me about star trek" and that stuck with me.

every time I catch myself thinking "well they're younger so they probably don't know as much about X" I stop myself because if you spend five years learning a subject, you have five years worth of learning it, whether you started learning it at fifteen or thirty. expertise crops up in all sorts of places and so do shared interests.