That's not an argument, that's just a series of contradictions
Plus the Glastonbury Joker, AI-style
You may be familiar with Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement: it’s basically what could be called “how to argue good”. At the lower levels of the pyramid, you get the lazier forms of argument, starting with “name-calling”, such as (it helpfully offers) “you are an ass hat”. (Before I’d spent much time on the internet, I couldn’t work out what on earth an “ass hat” might be. Still don’t, but I register it as an insult.)
The next level up, which is still pretty rubbish, is “ad hominem”: “attacks the characteristics or authority of the writer without addressing the substance of the argument.”
Which is where I regret that we find ourselves embroiled in the discussion (to put it politely) around the Cass Review, the culmination of a four-year investigation into the state of gender identity services for children and young people. The review was led by Hilary Cass, a paediatrician with decades of experience in children’s health, aided by a team including scientists at the University of York who carried out a systematic review of the English-language1 studies they could find on the topic.
The review suggested that the evidence around the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones was very weak: the studies were frequently of low or medium quality because they didn’t use control groups, or (if it was possible, which it usually wasn’t) placebo arms in randomised double-blind trials, or follow through the outcomes of various treatments for years. Very few studies out of the hundreds that the York team examined were of high quality.
Among the firestorm of criticism that the review attracted was this tweet from Alejandra Caraballo, described by Jesse Singal last year as “a Twitter activist and instructor at the Harvard cyberlaw center last seen causing Democratic congressional staffers to regret tapping her to give expert testimony.”
The first question to ask, of course is: does that account actually belong to Hilary Cass, the doctor who wrote the report? As is the way of the world, it’s not a verified account, so we don’t have that shortcut. The biography matches that of the real Cass. The account was created in December 2010, which is long ago enough that it might be legitimate. (Who would have wanted to impersonate Cass in those days?) The tweets themselves are initially pretty uncontroversial: prizegivings for other people, moments from conferences, mild praise for Penny Mordaunt’s sword performance at the coronation, some quietly brutal retweeted criticism of Boris Johnson, some of the first Cass Review terms of reference… it certainly looks like it belongs to Cass herself.
That having been determined—we think it’s yes—the next question is, does Caraballo’s criticism have any weight? In other words, should we judge a 388-page report with associated systematic reviews by the Twitter accounts that its lead author follows? Let’s look into it further.
If you do dig back through Cass’s tweets (I did so you don’t have to, but feel free) you find plenty of criticism of the Tory goverment. There’s this in May 2020. And this. (Though there’s also criticism of Labour candidates.) There’s no retweeting or mention of trans issues after January 2020, when there’s a single response to a tweet by “a group of parents of trans children who are sceptical about medical intervention and ‘affirmation’” who wrote a letter to the British Medical Journal. Cass simply thanks them and says she’ll read the letter and that consultation plans are on the way. (The bigger Review was already heading down the track.)
You can trundle through Cass’s tweets going back years and not find anything remotely controversial in the trans space. And one has to assume that Caraballo had already done this, given the prominence that tweet archaeology has in the modern-day lexicon of denunciation: though Graham’s Pyramid doesn’t include it anywhere obvious, “person said something indicating bias towards topic X” ranks highly when impartial reviews hove into view.
One also assumes that Caraballo was a touch disappointed not to find Cass expressing or retweeting extreme anti-trans views, and so had to resort to the reflexive “look at who this person follows”. The trouble with this approach is that Twitter won’t show you all the accounts Cass follows; it’s also impossible to know what order those are provided, so she might have only recently begun following Transgender Trend (which describes itself as a “Leading UK organisation calling for evidence-based care for gender dysphoric children”). And as far as accounts someone follows go: Cass also follows the accounts for the TV series of Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon. Therefore..?
My point with all this is that you can find all sorts of argument on Twitter, but what is most interesting about the dialogue around the Cass review that emanated from the US side is that nobody seemed to say “this isn’t important—the English might think this, but what the hell do they know?” Not at all: everyone opposed to the findings treated them as being extremely important, to the extent that every possible avenue was explored to try to tear down the review, or Cass, or the University of York, or the methodology of the review.
It’s interesting to contrast the imperviousness of Cass, the University of York team and the review to social media firestorm presently engulfing Katherine Maher, the new head of National Public Radio (NPR) in the US. She used to work at Wikimedia, the holding company for Wikipedia, and so of course she had a Twitter account on which she Said Things.2 Unfortunately, Wikimedia isn’t a journalistic enterprise, but NPR very much is, and holds its CEOs to the political omertá that Serious Journalists are meant to espouse in the US, which means that Maher’s old tweets have been raked up and raked over—particularly now that NPR as a whole has been the target of a grumpy tirade by one of its longtime, now suspended/resigned, editors, Uri Berliner, who complains that it’s too left-wing.
Maher seems to be clinging on by her fingernails: “NPR C.E.O. Faces Criticism Over Tweets Supporting Progressive Causes” is the NY Times headline, doing the usual passive job of not actually specifying quite where or who the criticism is coming from. (Would it kill you, NYT subeditors, to write “NPR CEO criticised by rightwingers over anti-Trump tweets”? Would you actually die from writing an active sentence?) The story itself misses important context: how does NPR’s audience look, compared to the US? Actually, pretty good—it’s diverse, and evenly split among ages. Oh. Well, how are listener numbers going? Pretty well: 44 million listeners. That’s basically all you need to know to realise Berliner’s complaints don’t hold water.
Maher is probably wishing that Elon Musk had shut the whole of Twitter down a few months after he took it over, but the contrast is striking. She’s struggling to survive in a fusillade of ad hominem arguments: Maher must be bad because of things she said or views she held; no matter about whether she’s actually doing a good job at NPR, fulfilling its mission, whatever. The social media trappings ensure that the debate remains stuck down at the bottom levels of Graham’s Pyramid; at best you could say it rises to the third one, “criticising the tone of the writing without addressing the substance of the argument”. Maher having voted for Biden isn’t a refutation of her ability as a CEO; it doesn’t even enter the equation of how good or bad she would be at running a national radio news service. But because her social media is out there as a thing to tout, while nobody criticising her actually deals with the substantive question of how well she is doing the job, the debate steadfastly refuses to rise up the pyramid. (Perhaps, just perhaps, the NY Times’s media correspondent could take the time to ponder which are the right facts to establish before the next instalment.)
Notably, the Cass Review has yielded few if any hostages to social media. Caraballo’s attempt to link Cass herself to Transgender Trend (whose output doesn’t quite match what I’d expect from a “notoriously anti-trans hate group”, but maybe I see these things differently) fizzled; there really wasn’t anything to go at. Cass’s personal reputation on this is Teflon.
Instead, a lot of people who had never heard of a systematic review before its publication decided that they were now experts in the synthesis of multiple studies (it was a day ending with -y on Twitter, so of course) and attacked the Review on that front. The efficacy of that approach was mixed; those who thought Cass and the York team might have the benefit of expertise weren’t persuaded by the criticisms, while those who thought the whole Review was a scheme cooked up by a biased government to snatch away much-needed healthcare found flaws everywhere they looked.
But at least these arguments tried to be on the higher levels of the pyramid, using refutation and counterargument. At least they tried to argue about the science, rather than the people. It’s a tiny win, but a win nonetheless.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here. And then the update.)
• It’s been a thin week, thankfully, on the “generative AI that could hypnotise you to spend the whole day gazing at it”. I’ll just offer this Twitter thread, available in a single page here, which the creator says only took the system about five minutes to create once the rotoscoping was done. 🤯
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More than 90% of published studies on this topic are in English.
Thanks to reader Seth F for pointing out the developments in this story