What Is Silent Evidence?
Written By Bel Heaton
Silent evidence is evidence that we don’t have access to, either because of the way information is gathered, or the way we choose to interpret the information we do have.
The phrase ‘silent evidence’ was coined by statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb borrows a story from Cicero to describes the phenomenon:
"Diagoras, a nonbeliever in the gods, was shown painted tablets bearing the portraits of some worshippers who prayed, then survived a subsequent shipwreck. The implication was that praying protects you from drowning."
Diagoras asked, “Where are the pictures of those who prayed, then drowned?”
How many drowned? Were they all-non believers, or did they pray? We don't know. In this case, the people are drowned are silent evidence.
Silent evidence pervades every aspect of Gender Affirming Care
The diagnosis is subjective and unfalsifiable.
The judgement of doctors and wisdom of parents is being suppressed.
Accurate numbers of patients, treatments, complications and regret are unknown.
Many patients are young, gay, or suffer multiple comorbidities, but Gender Affirming Care doesn’t consider alternative explanations.
The body of research is corrupted by wandering concepts and definitions (like transgender, gender dysphoria, gender identity, detransition…).
Detransitioners are stigmatised and silenced.
Research is being supressed:
The Gender Affirming model hides its own errors. For a long time, this made it extremely difficult to properly evaluate the risks or long-term benefits of Gender Affirming Care.
A picture is slowly starting to form, but it isn’t a pretty one.
Despite all the unknowns, invasive hormonal and surgical treatments, are being performed (often on minors), on the premise that Gender Affirming Care is a safe and rigorously tested treatment process.
When we hide negative outcomes, something that causes damage can be repeated again and again. We drift into a ‘normalisation of deviance’.
So, error correction isn't just a critical component of medical ethics and scientific reasoning - in another sense, it’s a cornerstone of morality.
In order to know what is kind, we need to know what is true. In the words of British physicist David Deutsch:
"Mistakes are the normal condition of humans. All we can do is try to find them. Maybe not destroying the means of correcting errors is the heart of morality; because if there is no way of correcting errors, then sooner or later, one of those will get us.”