In general I’d like to see a lot more of people writing about their
failures in addition to their successes. If a bunch of people all try
a thing and have mixed results, and only the people with good results
write about it, people who don’t know about this selection bias or
don’t realize its extent are going to end up with overly positive
views. I’ve writtenaboutsomeofmymistakes, and I
think it would be good if this were a higher fraction of my posts.
On the other hand, once other people are involved this isn’t entirely
up to me. One place this comes up a lot is parenting: I don’t want to write things about my
kids that they don’t (or won’t) want public. This is especially
tricky if I write a post about something we’ve tried which worked well
in part because the kids did a good job with it, and then later they
stop doing a good job.
I don’t have a good solution here. I don’t want to go all the way to
“if this had come out with my kids looking bad I wouldn’t write about
it, so I also won’t write about it if they look good” because this
would exclude a huge fraction of things involving the kids (there are
a tremendous number of possible ways kids could do something that
would be embarrassing). Sometimes I can handle it with plausible
deniability (one of our kids did embarrassing thing X) but often it
would be clear to some people which kid actually did it, or it’s bad
enough that even being in a pool of three is mortifying. Other times
I’m able to include some minor negative information, if it’s about
them when they were enough younger and it’s combined with positive
information. But mostly I think this will just need to be something
people keep in mind when reading my posts, and posts by other parents.
I asked one of my kids what they thought about this issue and they
suggested: “only write about things where [sibling] looks bad and I
look good, such as [redacted]”.
Parental Writing Selection Bias
Link post
In general I’d like to see a lot more of people writing about their failures in addition to their successes. If a bunch of people all try a thing and have mixed results, and only the people with good results write about it, people who don’t know about this selection bias or don’t realize its extent are going to end up with overly positive views. I’ve written about some of my mistakes, and I think it would be good if this were a higher fraction of my posts.
On the other hand, once other people are involved this isn’t entirely up to me. One place this comes up a lot is parenting: I don’t want to write things about my kids that they don’t (or won’t) want public. This is especially tricky if I write a post about something we’ve tried which worked well in part because the kids did a good job with it, and then later they stop doing a good job.
I don’t have a good solution here. I don’t want to go all the way to “if this had come out with my kids looking bad I wouldn’t write about it, so I also won’t write about it if they look good” because this would exclude a huge fraction of things involving the kids (there are a tremendous number of possible ways kids could do something that would be embarrassing). Sometimes I can handle it with plausible deniability (one of our kids did embarrassing thing X) but often it would be clear to some people which kid actually did it, or it’s bad enough that even being in a pool of three is mortifying. Other times I’m able to include some minor negative information, if it’s about them when they were enough younger and it’s combined with positive information. But mostly I think this will just need to be something people keep in mind when reading my posts, and posts by other parents.
I asked one of my kids what they thought about this issue and they suggested: “only write about things where [sibling] looks bad and I look good, such as [redacted]”.
Comment via: facebook, mastodon