We overwhelmingly give custody of children to the statistically worse parent
Is the implied policy suggestion here to decrease the number of children being raised without married parents (e.g., by making divorce harder, discouraging premarital sex, encouraging abortion if the parents aren’t married, &c.), or are you proposing awarding custody disputes to the father more often? Your phrasing (“the statistically worse parent”) seems to suggest the latter, but the distribution of single fathers today is obviously not going to be the same as the distribution after a change in custody rules!
(Child care is cross-culturally assumed to be predominantly “women’s work” for both evolutionary and cultural-evolutionary reasons: against that background, there’s going to be a selection effect whereby men who volunteer to be primary caretakers are going to be disproportionately unusually well-suited to it.)
When your performance in a task is directly correlated to the presence or absence of another, what does that say about your value in that task?
If the presence or absence of the other also contributes to the task performance, then honestly, not much? If kids are better off in two-parent households, that’s an argument in favor of two-parent households: if you have a thesis about women and mothers specifically, you need additional arguments for that.
From the twin studies we know that parental enviroment has relatively little effect on educational outcomes compared to genetics.
A quick Googling brings me to statistics like single fathers are more likely to be black. Given that blackness does correlate with poor educational outcomes, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a correlation of single motherhood with poor educational outcomes simply because of the sampling.
To be convinced of any effect of parental enviroment I would want to see an effort made to clear up the data to be convinced and most Google hits do’t do that.
If I have a discussion a thousand times I usually do have my sources saved in a way that I can easily share.
I also doubt that you had the same conversation a thousand times because “You make claims about strong effects of parental enviroment and those generally disappear when studies are done in a better way” is likely a different position then when you have the same discussion outside of LessWrong with people who have quite different objections.
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(I feel bad for how little intellectually-honest engagement you must get, so I guess I’ll chip in with some feedback.)
Is the implied policy suggestion here to decrease the number of children being raised without married parents (e.g., by making divorce harder, discouraging premarital sex, encouraging abortion if the parents aren’t married, &c.), or are you proposing awarding custody disputes to the father more often? Your phrasing (“the statistically worse parent”) seems to suggest the latter, but the distribution of single fathers today is obviously not going to be the same as the distribution after a change in custody rules!
(Child care is cross-culturally assumed to be predominantly “women’s work” for both evolutionary and cultural-evolutionary reasons: against that background, there’s going to be a selection effect whereby men who volunteer to be primary caretakers are going to be disproportionately unusually well-suited to it.)
If the presence or absence of the other also contributes to the task performance, then honestly, not much? If kids are better off in two-parent households, that’s an argument in favor of two-parent households: if you have a thesis about women and mothers specifically, you need additional arguments for that.
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Are there specific statistics about the metrics you are referring to?
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From the twin studies we know that parental enviroment has relatively little effect on educational outcomes compared to genetics.
A quick Googling brings me to statistics like single fathers are more likely to be black. Given that blackness does correlate with poor educational outcomes, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a correlation of single motherhood with poor educational outcomes simply because of the sampling.
To be convinced of any effect of parental enviroment I would want to see an effort made to clear up the data to be convinced and most Google hits do’t do that.
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It’s not clear to me why you aren’t linking to quality sources if you think the quality sources for your claims exist.
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If I have a discussion a thousand times I usually do have my sources saved in a way that I can easily share.
I also doubt that you had the same conversation a thousand times because “You make claims about strong effects of parental enviroment and those generally disappear when studies are done in a better way” is likely a different position then when you have the same discussion outside of LessWrong with people who have quite different objections.