Interesting Links for 16-07-2024

[andrewducker]

1. I see Labour MPs are now being forced to take down their defense of the treatment of trans children

(tags:LGBT transgender Labour OhForFucksSake )

2. UK's Labour 'backtracks' on decision to drop objection to ICC arrest warrants

(tags:UK Labour politics Israel war crime )

3. What's wrong with the Cass Review? A round-up of commentary and evidence

(tags:LGBT research transgender )

4. Who are modern Indians descended from?

(tags:India genetics prehistory viaDanielDWilliam )

5. Lower intelligence may make you more likely to catch Covid

(tags:intelligence pandemic )

6. Scotland incorporates UN children's rights charter into law

(tags:UnitedNations children rights law )

Comments

[simont]

#5: the purpose of the study seems to have been to address the question "does Covid permanently impair your thinking?", and their answer seems to be no, on the basis that now they have an alternative explanation for a correlation between low intelligence and having caught Covid. To wit, the correlation already existed beforehand, so Covid didn't cause it.

But they don't seem to be very interested in the causality of the correlation they do report. Is there a biological effect that means low intelligence goes together with greater vulnerability, supposing that everyone in a (hypothetical, hopelessly unethical) sample were exposed to Covid to the same degree? Or is it just that more intelligent people are better at avoiding exposure in the first place?

(I know which of those sounds more plausible to me! But it'd have been nice to see some text along the lines of "we controlled for the obvious latter possibility by [clever statistical method]" or alternatively "we didn't control for it, so that's probably the answer".)

[andrewducker]

Joking aside, I don't think we know. It could be that smarter people got vaccinated more, or took more precautions, or that they work from home more and so could avoid it more. Or something else entirely!

[simont]

Fair enough, yes, I missed your last possibility – avoiding exposure might be a side effect of other correlations with intelligence, such as what kind of job people do, and not directly related in the sense of "I used my big brain to think of clever ways to avoid infection".

Of course it's perfectly reasonable that the answer should be "we don't know". It just struck me that in normal situations, when a paper reports discovering a correlation, they'd at least speculate – list some possible causes that had sprung to mind, perhaps say whether they could think of anything about their sample that would or wouldn't rule each one out, and suggest how further study could narrow down the possibilities. This lot don't seem to have paid the question even the courtesy of a sentence saying "we have no idea and haven't tried to find out".

[matgb]

The Indian genetics study is fascinating but, um, the author of the thread has a very interesting spin on it.

An almost entirely male group of horse using people turned up, became the upper caste (rulers) of the area, imposed their religion on everyone but it's not evidence of an invasion because *handwaves*

PIE speakers turned up all over the place and took over in roughly the same timescale, in most cases become the rulers of the area, but in India the genetics makes that very clear due to the caste system having kept distinctions a lot clearer

Ah well, was a good read for the actual science just not the spin