Jesse Singal

I don't think it's possible to have it both ways. A commitment to free speech means you get more garbage and conspiracy theories, but in exchange you get more intellectual conversations for adults, something you increasingly can't find on Reddit due to its overbearing moderation. Reddit itself has a good track record of banning subs, with only a few exceptions, but it's mostly the moderators and Reddit-enforced mod policies that have caused its decline. As far as recommendations, it depends what you're interested in. I'd generally agree with the first two and disagree with the last two, but they are all high-quality reads (for me). https://www.slowboring.com https://jessesingal.substack.com https://freddiedeboer.substack.com https://fakenous.substack.com

Every time I read about some company setting up mandatory arbitration process, I think of two things. First, the great article describing someone's successful experience with Paypal's forced arbitration [1]. Second, my own successful experience with the Lemon Law arbitration against Stellantis in California. Not much to talk about here; it just worked and I got my money back in exchange for the car, just as it should be). In general, I think that for a regular consumer, the arbitration process paid by the company might actually be better than a court process: it's much faster, easier, and indeed helps resolve issues, at least sometimes. [1]: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-fought-the-paypal-and-i-won

I think the move to a community notes style feature is a positive. Fact checkers have shown themselves to be untrustworthy[1] [1] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/why-would-i-possibly-trust-bill-ada…

Why the hell was this post flagged, for starters? It seems like a perfectly legimate request for advice from people on the HN site. Secondly, my two cents: May not work for stripe, but an excellent post shared somewhere on HN about what one Paypal user who also happened to be a lawyer did to make that trashfire company respond very quickly to his request for an unfreeze might help your case too. It's possible that the same legal procedures apply. Stripe and Paypal are both payment handlers after all. trying to find it.... And here! https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-fought-the-paypal-and-i-won

As an e-commerce store owner myself with a small amount of experience selling on Amazon, I consider this to be a good idea. I do admit to a instinctual aversion to lawyers. My tech-bias is to grind forward through the "official" routes. Use the existing systems that Amazon put in place. (Though perhaps my tech-bias should push me to "hack" around obstacles using things like lawyers) This reminds me of the recently popular article https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-fought-the-paypal-and-i-won which also gave some great legal advice for routing around useless customer service. Next time I will be quicker to seek a lawyer

In the interest of fairness, here is Singal's response to that page: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/glaad-took-false-previously-disprov… For what it's worth, I'm 100% with Singal here.

sciencebasedmedicine.org used to be one of my go-to places on the internet, along with the Cochrane library (which is more concerned with evidence based medicine). But they've shown themselves to be as dogmatic as they come: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/how-science-based-medicine-botched Such a pity. That is an explosive topic that needs to be examined carefully and honestly, but it is clear that Gorski and Novella are only interested in one narrative. And Novella is the author of one of the best works on critical thinking: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/your-deceptive-mind-a-scientif… I'm not saying that the Ivermectin article isn't reliable, but Singal's piece is utterly devastating to their credibility.

This is a very disingenuous take. "If You Disagree With Me, You Want People To Die" is also not the best way to signal your openness to an honest debate. > The truth is, hormone therapy saves lives. Some of those lives will be teenage lives. The truth is - the current research about that is lacking, we know that there are serious (and good faith) arguments against claiming that puberty blockers are reversible, and we know that many clinics simply don't collect data about people post transition or distort whatever data they do collect: "For those late to this: In April I published a very long post laying out the severe flaws in a study about puberty blockers and hormones University of Washington researchers published in JAMA Network Open, and how they exaggerated the results when describing them to the media and to UW’s own PR apparatus. The very short version is that the study has so many flaws that it does not provide us with any evidence whatsoever supporting the idea that kids who went on gender-affirming medicine (GAM) experienced beneficial outcomes relative to the kids who did not. In fact, any genuine comparison between the GAM and no-GAM kids 12 months out is impossible, because 80% of the kids who didn’t go on GAM had dropped out of study by the final wave of data collection, leaving just six remaining. That is far too small a sample to draw any conclusions from. (The paper gave no explanation as to why some kids went on GAM and others didn’t, making it…

Bluesky is not better (see for instance [0]). I think no one has cracked how to properly run a microblogging website. [0] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/did-i-publish-the-private-medical

> Singal seeks out specific members of the transgender community to harass. No he doesn't. In some of his work, he reports on what prominent voices of that community have to say. Like any journalist. And sometimes, he responds when they lie about what he's written in his articles, or exhibit abusive behaviors against others. Here's one example: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/on-alejandra-caraballo-vs-benjamin Now, you might frame this as Singal "harassing" Caraballo, but if you look at what he's written, he's reporting on Caraballo who is the one actually harassing and doxxing. There are some very, very toxic figures in that community, and the only reason they started to come after Singal is that his journalism challenges their dogma.

You can read Singal's response to these criticisms here: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/a-sorta-quick-response-to-the-error… The criticisms of Singal's piece are pretty weak, and often resort to refuting things he never actually wrote. He explicitly notes that data is sparse - this is one of the most controversial research subjects - but it does indeed suggest a desistance rate of 50-60% absent medical intervention. Contrast that with the common claim that desistance in gender dysphoric children is a myth which is just totally contradicted by the available evidence.

Original: YASSINE MESKHOUT DEC 5, 2023 posted to: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/my-clients-the-liars https://archive.md/c4SRO Other HN discussion of Yassine Meskhout's writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33462658

Another perspective: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/if-you-cant-see-that-adam-rubenstei… > I know this didn’t happen. How do I know? I just know. The problem was, Rubenstein had contemporaneously told a number of people about the sandwich event, including Levine and Bari Weiss, and they started coming forward to say so.

Another side of the story... https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/platformers-reporting-on-substacks

There was an interesting post on HN a while back where someone initiated binding arbitration to get their account back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33462658. https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-fought-the-paypal-and-i-won It looks like MacDonalds will cover the arbitration costs of anything over $250, so it's probably a lot easier to take them to arbitration than suing them. That being said, arbitrators might side with large corporations more than a judge would. Alsom, IANAL but part 11 of the settling disputes section seems to say that it's still possible to do a class action lawsuit against them.

The article that you linked discusses abuse in America and makes the claim: > Furthermore, of the public school teachers who have sexually abused children, most are married or non-celibate, and somehow, public school teachers tend to offend in this way at a higher rate (5-7%) than Catholic priests or other clerics (4%). It cites https://abc7chicago.com/religion/catholic-priest-blasts-idea-that-celi… as the source for this information. However, the cited article is about abuse in Australia and makes no claims about public schools. With some quick googling, I found this article: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/a-lighthearted-dispute-does-more

Not sure if this is relevant to your situation, but I found this blog post interesting: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-fought-the-paypal-and-i-won

Dammit, there was this post here on HN a while back how someone got their account back through the forced arbitration process. So if you care enough about that money, that would be an option. Hopefully someone can find it again, I'll keep looking some more. EDIT: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-fought-the-paypal-and-i-won

To anyone who got problems with PayPal, you may be interested in reading this [1]. It is how an American attorney got his PayPal account back after it was locked for no reason, with all the steps explained. It was sent here on hn months ago. [1] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-fought-the-paypal-and-i-won

Something similar happened to this person but he actually won. May help you too https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-fought-the-paypal-and-i-won

I'm not thinking of a specific book, but I am thinking of this kind of thing (but I haven't read this specific article in full): https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/ya-twitters-victims-and-critics-spe…

“ What’s surprising, in light of all these quotes, is that the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false.” See https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/researchers-found-puberty-blockers

Science Based Medicine isn't exactly squeaky clean either: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/science-based-medicines-coverage Now, someone post a takedown of Singal so we can keep the chain going ...

Response to some of these claims: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/glaad-took-false-previously-disprov…

If Jesse Singal is your idea of a person who isn't "arguing in good faith" and who should be mocked, you're pretty far outside the mainstream. https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/on-cancel-culture-the-new-republic > pushing away people interested in actual debate or intelligent conversation. It's fascinating how "actual debate" and "intelligent conversation" mean, to you, avoiding words that you don't like. The most parsimonious explanation for the spread of these terms is that an increasing number of people intensely dislike the things to which these words refer --- and that every day they're less afraid of being called "toxic" for criticizing our culture of censorship and pitchfork mobs.

>Substack's CEO explicitly said they won't ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down... four of the Nazis. Four. Dash annoyingly doesn't cite his source on this claim, but I think he's referring to Casey Newton reporting offensive content to Substack in January 2024.[0] Newton made it seem like he reported dozens of blogs, but Jesse Singal's reporting indicated that Newton could only find six Substack blogs he believed violated Substack's rules, and Substack removed five of them.[1] The details are hazy because Newton refused to answer Singal's questions about his reporting. So, Dash's presentation is very skewed. A more accurate telling would be "when confronted with six blogs that a reporter believed violated Substack's rules, Substack removed five of them." [0] https://www.platformer.news/substack-says-it-will-remove-nazi/ [1] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/platformers-reporting-on-substacks

> Second, I don't know of any treatments for gender dysphoria (in trans people, not people with other conditions that've been misdiagnosed) that "fix" the mind and actually work. Gender reassignment, on the other hand, works, in the sense that it improves peoples' lives (see https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/transgender-teens-receiving-... for example). There seems to be a prevalent problem in this area (and perhaps others too) to where the reporting on the "science" seems to be a lot more positive than the science itself. The original article alludes to this -- "stop questioning the science" like it's an open and shut case. For that particular study, a more accurate headline would be: "In Our Pre-Registration We Expected To Find Improvements on Eight Measures but We Only Found Improvements on Two, Which Were Very Small, and Only For Natal Females."[1] It's not as snappy, but it's more accurate. That complex and fairly ambiguous outcome gets summarised into an overall optimistic story by the press, which then in turn gets digested into "gender reassignment .. works", not just on HN but on forums all over the internet. It's not just that study though -- whenever the field is looked at holistically the evidence for the effectiveness of these treatments is not strong.[2][3] and the evidence for such treatments on children (the subject of the article) is even weaker. Ultimately I believe adults have the right to do as they wish with their own bodies, however when it comes to…

> Last time this topic came up, I tried so very very hard, to find credible sources about wtf this website or it's users did exactly, and couldn't (found some but it was very light). I mean it's there on Wikipedia sure, but if you keep digging it starts repeating and self-referencing other websites that are just as "not credible" or relying on "other websites" that I can't take them seriously on their claims. Paywalled, but: "How Journalists Botched Their Coverage Of #DropKiwiFarms" https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/how-journalists-botched-their-cover… Author is credible enough, I think. Quoting wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Singal "Jesse Singal is an American journalist. He has written for publications including New York magazine, The New York Times and The Atlantic." "Singal's political orientation has often been described as liberal but "heterodox", though he has expressed an aversion to the latter term as a descriptor of his work" == I'll quote some parts: > briefly, so as not to ignore one of the most serious allegations, I also think the oft-repeated claim that Kiwi Farms directly caused or “was linked to” multiple suicides, is, when presented without any further context, misleading — not to mention an irresponsible way to report on suicide. On this front, I can’t really do anything but link (https://archive.ph/34wUy) to Moon’s own post on the #DropKiwiFarms controversy. YOU SHOULD NOT ACCEPT HIS CLAIMS AT FACE VALUE. But many of them are easily…

No, this sounds exactly like Twitter. On Twitter, self-appointed mobs of the morally righteous call for violence against children [0], farm lulz from the killings of police officers [1], dox strangers to get them fired over off-color jokes [2], and endlessly harass and threaten certain conservative journalists and activists [3]. Actual Twitter employees harassed right-wing reporter Andy Ngo [4] after a real-world mob attack sent him to the ER with a brain hemmorhage, an event which "ACAB Twitter" continues to celebrate and remind him about. The trolls on Twitter blend in by being a few medium-sized fish in the ocean. The trolls on Kiwi Farms are more visible as big fish in their own small pond. They're ideologically flipped compared to Twitter trolls, but fundamentally alike in their methods, moral posturing, and disregard for basic human decency. They're all an enormous net-negative for humanity. [0] https://medium.com/@RevolutionaryId/twitter-democratizing-mobbing-high… [1] https://twitter.com/halfsleeps/status/1320955923205033984 [2] https://news.yahoo.com/journalist-apologizes-for--hasjustinelandedyet-… [3] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/its-insane-were-having-a-debate-ove… [4] https://archive.is/VGuZy