Joe Hanson

Super cool that the FDA is out there telling doctors the opposite of what the president said as he was vibing through a press conference

People will lie to themselves and unconsciously invent post hoc rationalizations for why they think what they do, but most of the time they are doing just that: lying to themselves

Politics is a game of manipulating human belief in order to create action. Dishonest people are better at the game

More people need to realize politics has devolved into sorting people into buckets and keeping them there

1. Pick position (e.g. vaccines r scary)
2. Signal "if you're one of us, you must believe [1]"

The reality of the position doesn't matter to these people. It's all just shepherding for power

Please tell me it wasn't @alamodrafthouse.bsky.social that got cold feet

Kakistocracy kills.

Epidemiology is hard! We can find real associations between things, but they aren’t always cause and effect. There’s often a third, invisible thing controlling them both.

Luckily, we have a way of teasing out the difference: Careful, well-designed scientific research studies.

Interesting things pop up when you ask “Why was mom taking Tylenol in the first place?”

Was it because of an infection or chronic illness during pregnancy? Maybe mom has a genetic or psych condition that leads to more Tylenol use? Do moms who use it have more access to doctors/autism diagnosis?

If acetaminophen truly increased autism risk, you’d expect to see higher rates in an exposed sibling compared to an unexposed sibling.

But they didn’t see that. It means the previous studies that suggested some link were being fooled by hidden family or genetic factors. It’s not the drug itself.

Acetaminophen Use During Pregnancy and Children’s Risk of Autism, ADHD, and Intellectual Disability This nationwide cohort study with sibling control analysis examines the association of acetaminophen use during pregnancy with children’s risk of autism, ADHD, and intellectual disability.

Last year a study of >2.4 million kids born in Sweden looked at Tylenol exposure and autism

At first, it seemed like there was a small association.

But then they compared siblings where one was exposed in utero and the other wasn’t and found no increased risk jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Trump administration set to tie Tylenol to autism risk, officials say The Trump administration plans to tie Tylenol to autism risk while touting another drug, leucovorin, as a potential autism treatment.

We can save RFK Jr some time here, because we already know a lot about acetaminophen and autism!

There’s no increased risk of autism from use of this drug. This isn’t based on some small study. It’s thanks to a beautiful study of literally millions of children…
wapo.st/4nkMdCO

a man with a beard wearing a suit and black turtleneck is on snl ALT: a man with a beard wearing a suit and black turtleneck is on snl

"You have my S word!"

Factual dorky bully posse assemble

Wtf are we supposed to do when our social contract is this infested with sickness?

There was a great movie in the 80s about mutually assured destruction: WarGames. Its lesson? The only winning move is not to play the game

bsky.app/profile/cwar...

Log off

My woe was over the character limit

Asimov wrote “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”

The loss of any life to political violence is a profound failure of humanity’s potential. We must resist the gravitational pull toward dehumanization and vengeance no matter how much we disagree with someone

Our future depends on it

No one in Texas is surprised that the world epicenter of weird little brother energy is leading the charge on attacking academic wrongthink. Look at what they consider normal!

Lots of people genuinely believe what’s written here. That they were subject to different, unfair rules than the “other side” had to follow, or that they were made to feel “less than” or “evil” for their actions. Some has basis in reality, some is fiction.

Either way, we should try to understand it

The board is wrong. But politics is a game of perceptions more than it is about reality (which I wish wasn’t true but 🤷‍♂️). And plenty of bad actors have been able to make these perceptions more salient/popular, and retcon reality in order to erode trust in institutions.

None of this is an accident!

When you remember that much of the modern GOP mission revolves around weakening institutions by eroding our trust in them, this seems like a big win for them

Had no idea these guys were into BJJ

The quacks and hucksters have invented a remarkable self-reinforcing perpetual persecution machine:

Refuse to engage with their ideas, and it confirms their ideas are being suppressed

But criticize their ideas, and it confirms that the "establishment" is conspiring to protect entrenched beliefs

The problem here is they are taking a reasonable point of view (you should be able to feel safe in your city and not be surrounded by garbage and dangerous drugs) and then turning around and criminalizing the mere existence of people they refuse to help get off the streets or give medical care to

Well it’s well-known that they have no ability to deal with linear time so this tracks

Anyway, it's obvious why a place dedicated to "the increase and diffusion of knowledge" would scare these people

My favorite part of researching the history of the Smithsonian has been learning that the government collected Smithson's bequest as bags of actual fucking gold

(Since I know you're wondering, that's 840 kg of gold, about half the weight of a base Tesla Model 3)

The authoritarians are mad at the Smithsonian for challenging the circa-1940s Disney version of history that they so badly want to be true, but it's clear that the US government REALLY wanted it to be a place for fossils and cool rocks (great idea)

govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pd...

As an Austinite I don’t think I’m alone in preferring that 78-year-old Doggett retires, lets Casar win the new district (Greg rules), and Doggett can be a shoe-in for Austin mayor in 2028 to protect the city from the mentally incompetent Texas state government

Yes. Hahaha. YES

Prepare for me to be insufferable, potentially for the next 160 days or longer

🤘😎 Hook ‘em

For surveys like this, you can usually attribute the high uncertainties about obvious things (e.g. Earth orbits the sun) to lack of education or question confusion

The more alarming trend is that since 2021, conspiracy thinking has noticeably increased and agreement with science has decreased

The USA continues to leap face-first onto the rake of scientific self-owns faster than any other country in modern history. From energy to medical R&D and everything in between, just a stunning trajectory of ignorance and squandered opportunity. The future demands better

We teach about the Lysenkoism when we want to showcase how politics can push a nation’s science to become deadly pseudoscience.

In the future, I wonder if they’ll replace that lesson with RFKJrism