Interested in what you guys think about this. Jayman(hbd blogger) say’s parenting has no effect on how children turn out. Seems empirically incorrect to me and it’s just probably difficult to encapsulate the results/hard to see non-linearities to make it easy to reference.
He insists on twin-adoption studies contrary to my views.
Thoughts? This sort of seems like the two cultures divide we agree on. I might make a thread just for this.
Argument: Does parenting have any effect on child outcomes?
His view: Zero effect & Breast milk confers no advantage either
My view: Parenting has some variable effect that is difficult to encapsulate in the studies he references while maintaining the correctness and good taste of genetic arguments.
I cite decision theory, statistical inference, study design, and the related area as being primal over empirical references which have failed to encapsulate the effects he is pointing to in his observables. Statistical inference just doesn’t work like that to give such strong conclusions. Any one who reads the literature on study design/inference knows that it’s just not possible to give recommendations that are that strong. Sort of in the realm is Isaac Levi’s “Gambling with the Truth” if not only the first few chapters although not quite, probably just statistical study design/inference in general.
Thoughts any one? I think scientists or empirical researchers are not used to being told that there is a higher plane of reference. Saying that there is zero influence is equivalent to saying all the relevant variables have been enumerated and assigned exact values for probability & effect and that there is nothing else to be assigned.
I believe my orientation is correct.
edit: I might add that not ONLY would that be saying that the relevant variables have been completely enumerated && assigned cost functions but that we are sure there is nothing else(no uncertainty) and that we are sure they all equal zero/canceled out.
Jayman is correct that adoption studies typically show negligible parental effects. But remember the studies can only talk about the environmental variation present in their data, and are generally done on normal, western, middle class cohorts. In studies where they include stronger environmental variation—e.g. Turkheimer et al 2003, you find that it matters.
So basically, the kind of parenting choices that people typically worry about are probably meaningless, but severe trauma, poverty, abuse etc. do matter. That being said, You can’t just say “X is difficult to encapsulate” with studies. This is a fully general counter argument to any evidence you don’t like.
You can’t just say “X is difficult to encapsulate” with studies. This is a fully general counter argument to any evidence you don’t like.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that even if a small percentage of the population took that advice as definitive and executed over it, all latent small probabilities would be realized and the mistakes would be immediately manifested. Stuff like that isn’t being difficult as any pharmaceutical company or any medical company has to know for sure that their studies/devices are correct for health effects. In fact in statistical decision theory texts pharmaceutical examples are standard.
I cite decision theory, statistical inference, study design, and the related area as being primal over empirical references which have failed to encapsulate the effects he is pointing to in his observables. Statistical inference just doesn’t work like that to give such strong conclusions.
I think you need to be more specific about your criticisms here… I don’t see why the twin study design, and extensions thereof, don’t allow such inferences. The cool part about them is that they exploit some very unusual properties to do what they do. (Unusual enough that when I went looking for uses of twin designs outside of behavioral genetics to get inspiration for a diet self-experiment, I couldn’t find any.)
My view: Parenting has some variable effect that is difficult to encapsulate in the studies he references while maintaining the correctness and good taste of genetic arguments.
If there is some variable effect, then there should still be some average effect.
Saying that there is zero influence is equivalent to saying all the relevant variables have been enumerated and assigned exact values for probability & effect and that there is nothing else to be assigned.
I don’t think that’s true. Could you explain how the twin design requires that, keeping in mind the fundamental logic of the design?
I’m saying in general with probabilistic inference not necessarily to twin study design. I think I worded it relatively poorly. I’m saying there is that is not necessarily encapsulated in the study because there would have to be some relatively exhaustive statistical machinery applied.
When someone says something with such strength that there is zero effect(ask him on twitter) that means there is no uncertainty and we know all relevant variables and have assigned probabilities and utility values to them(everything is known). Which is false. We do not know if we have missed something related to for , because we have not done exhaustive statistical studies on it. we probably only have so much empirical knowledge related to it. His statement is even stronger that there is no uncertainty, he is saying there is no risk to executing over the advice that parenting has no effect and therefore we can just go do whatever we want with parenting. Which is equivalent to assigning the utilities to all equal zero or the integral to zero.
He is saying there is neither uncertainty, nor risk.
A bit long winded, I think I might ask Mrs.Mayo if I have it right.
To say a statement with such strength of
Parenting has no effect
and that it is advice that could be executed over, say ten thousand people stop parenting their kids would mean that any negative effects that were not captured in the study would be realized no matter how small the probability, that we missed something not encapsulated in the study or something in general. It’s just a problem with executing over empirical advice in general. It’s hard for me to state declaratively.
For example I think we could argue that the fact that these people exist to be studied means that there is a survivorship bias accordingly(for those that did not get studied are dead/did not show up) and that that weights the probabilities in the favor of the people who survived but if we evaluate the entire sample space(dead+alive) it would be in favor of parenting.
For us to ascertain with a greater degree of certainty we would need to pull out the big guns of statistics/probability in general to make sure we have done due diligence and only then after that we can conclude with certainty.
“I don’t think that’s true. Could you explain how the twin design requires that, keeping in mind the fundamental logic of the design?”
I think I covered this with my response and just wait for a follow-up response.
When someone says something with such strength that there is zero effect(ask him on twitter) that means there is no uncertainty and we know all relevant variables and have assigned probabilities and utility values to them(everything is known).
Could you link to the twitter post where he describes his position? Without a clear reference to the claim under debate this exercise isn’t useful.
“One of the greatest pieces of evidence demonstrating that the family/rearing environment has no effect on eventual outcomes is the absence of birth order effects. Birth order is an excellent test for these effects: it is something that systematically differs between siblings and is bona fide non-genetic (mostly). Hence, it’s a great way to see if childhood environment leaves any sort of mark on people.”
He is just straight up naively saying parenting has no effect and the consequential statement that any one can act as if this is completely true. This is not an exercise, this is trying to convince an actual person why he is wrong. I’ll ask him for a clarified picture right now.
Parenting is simply less important than most people think. But as with the issue with health and obesity, even individuals who understand the pervasiveness of nature and the apparent stochasticity of what we call “environment” like to believe there is some way they can exert control (see locus of control, courtesy Richard Harper).
One of the greatest pieces of evidence demonstrating that the family/rearing environment has no effect on eventual outcomes is the absence of birth order effects
The first comment is equally as strong. I’m having a running dialogue with him and he will come here and correct/clarify if necessary. Please focus on the topic at hand.
I’m not sure what that means, we are not talking about normal people we are talking about people like us who can adjust to this. The goal is to understand what the upper-end people think and how they use their advanced epistemology to run their hedges/beliefs accordingly. He seems to imply from his “You do not have free will” && “Parenting has no effect” stance that it is irrelevant.
I am trying to get an idea of an interval of where parenting is for the advanced people. Fixing disorders/adhd with medication from a parents perspective vs a parent who doesn’t will easily make a kid succeed.
ADHD meds are very effective while not being on them is very bad, so is teaching them valuable skills that other people do not know IS a good idea.
This style of conversation is important because the advantage of knowing even rudimentary decision theory gives you over say naive rationalism/‘traditional rationalism’/naive empiricism.
If you don’t understand what that means, than it would be useful to work on understanding. If you don’t understand the position of the person with whom you argue you can’t know whether or not you agree with them.
I am not trying to have a side conversation.
Clarifying where disagreement is isn’t a side conversation. Do you believe that there are meaningful differences in parenting quality of US middle class people? (When genetics are factored out)
His view: Zero effect & Breast milk confers no advantage either
Breast milk “confers no advantage” compared to what? (baby dying from starvation? water? cow milk? soylent? infant formula—which one?)
All that stuff that exists in breast milk—such as immunoglobulin A, lysozyme, blood albumin, creatine—it’s just completely useless, I guess. I wonder why evolution even bothered to design such system, when it provides no advantage. (This is a sarcastic way to say “my priors for this hypothesis are very low”.)
(I’m not Viliam, but:) For Jayman’s hypothesis, obviously. The argument is: Here’s all this complex machinery put in place by evolution; it’s terribly unlikely that what it does is actually useless.
(That would argue that breast milk is a good food for babies, which I don’t think anyone denies. It’s only a strong argument against feeding them infant formula in so far as we have reason to think that formula doesn’t have in it those things that evolution helpfully put into human breast milk.)
Yes, low priors for Jayman’s hypothesis. Although it wasn’t sufficiently specified what exactly his hypothesis was, so I could be arguing against a strawman.
I am not an expert on infant formulas, but I think that if someone could factory-produce a drink that updates your immune system (as breast milk does), that would have huge implications in medicine. Essentially, we could replace vaccination by drinking soylent.
I just did a little googling and that appears to be untrue. What’s the source of your information?
The first hits from a Google search for <> were:
Scholarly articles (Google pulls out a few of these at the top of its search results):
A study on promotion of breastfeeding in Belarus. Intervention appears to have increased breastfeeding and also substantially (and significantly) reduced the incidence of two of the three health problems they measured.
A study on how often breastfeeding passes on HIV from mother to child. (Conclusion: about 1⁄6 of the time; using formula is an effective way of reducing this. Interesting but not relevant here.)
A study on the effect of “peer support” on making mothers breast-feed for longer. Not relevant here.
Ordinary search results:
First five hits are for the same study, looking at very premature babies. Conclusion was that mother’s milk appears better than both donor breast milk and formula, and the latter two aren’t much different.
Meta-analysis of studies comparing donor breast milk with formula. Conclusion is that unfortified donor breast milk (i.e., no extra nutrients added) leads to slower growth than formula, but formula leads to more necrotizing enterocolitis. Apparently donor breast milk is generally fortified nowadays.
Different meta-analysis looking specifically at necrotizing enterocolitis. Found only four relevant trials, from 20 years before. They were too low-powered to find significant results, but aggregating them finds a substantial and significant reduction in NEC risk for donor breast milk versus formula.
CBS News report on a study that found that giving a little formula to babies who lose a lot of weight shortly after birth may result in longer breast-feeding. Interesting but not obviously relevant.
And that’s the end of the first page. So it looks to me as if
There haven’t been that many randomized controlled experiments—fully half the first page of Google results were from a single one, and the meta-analyses seem to have found rather few, rather old, rather small studies.
Some small old studies didn’t find significant results.
But that seems to have been because of lack of power rather than because differences weren’t there.
Aggregating those studies finds significant differences.
There may be relevant differences between mother’s milk and donor milk; comparing mother’s milk to formula in RCTs is probably harder than comparing donor milk to formula. (Because of ethical difficulties in telling mothers not to breast-feed their children; because of practical difficulties telling mothers to breast-feed their children if they have trouble with that; because of difficulties in blinding. Maybe other reasons.)
Which seems like pretty much the reverse of what you say. But of course looking briefly at one page of Google results is not a proper scholarly literature review; would you like to tell us more?
I agree with Viliam & gym. This just points to the limits of statistical knowledge & that we need to supplement with other logical-experimental knowledge, such as arguments from evolution.
Risk cannot only be based on statistical knowledge, as chapter one of bayesian risk argues.
“Nurture” here is a synonym for parenting (nature vs nurture as in genes vs upbringing). The nurture assumption is that parenting matters. You seem to believe that parenting matters.
Non-naive nurture matters to an extent, my argument has nuance. This is pretty much the exact domain of statistical decision theory/prescriptive decision theory and its conclusions have strict priority. The problem is that a large class of the professional intellectual class have not caught up.
A comment on your style of argumentation in general: Can you please stop vaguely referring to theories without pinpointing what exactly it says that supports your view?
I’m sort of shocked I have to refer to anything, this is pretty much standard less-wrong material. This is not ‘vaguely’ this is pretty much bread and butter. I gave references in my original post(first few chapters of gambling with the truth/any textbook on statistical decision theory). His statement is incorrect out of the box without me being difficult whatsoever.
I mean, obviously parenting matters, right? You can’t just drop kids in the wilderness.
What’s actually being said here is that if we remove the extreme cases, the people who aren’t really fulfilling the role of “parents” as they should, the normal diversity we see among various types of parenting isn’t really a big deal as far as outcomes are concerned. (This is still a bold claim, because, as you said, we might just not be aware of the slice of diversity that matters.)
In this cases, I think “non-extreme cases” basically means “the child manages to survive until the age of psychological maturity with no debilitating injuries”. The claim is that the main role of parents is just to get the kid to adulthood in one piece, and anything else is extra and might not seriously help or harm commonly measured outcomes. One might add the assumption that the parents at least didn’t actively inhibit ordinary non-parental exposure, to rule out things such as never learning to talk or something.
(But remember, I’m not claiming this at all, just stating what I think the real claim is. I don’t even think the more conservative version is correct: even if you assume that childhood experiences with parents controlling-for-differing-non-parent-related experiences aren’t that important, how could variations in ongoing parental support in adulthood possibly not make a difference?)
Yeah parenting definitely matters in specific skills you choose to teach your kids/putting your kids on medication if they need it etc. It’s a problem with scientists getting over-excited about the implications of their studies, they want to believe they can be a priesthood to the world when there is a higher plane of counsel & reference, which is prescriptive decision theory.
It’s a problem with scientists getting over-excited about the implications of their studies, they want to believe they can be a priesthood to the world when there is a higher plane of counsel & reference.
Well, I can’t say I agree with that sentiment at all (but I suspect that discussion will devolve into disagreements about tone, and which types of media we take as representative of “scientists”.)
I think my statement is understated. Read Isaac Levi’s gambling with the truth for kind of the right area but any statistical decision theory book will work. This is a place for prescriptive decision theory and not scientists even though they are important.
I think dogs give us the clearest insight on this problem. Dog breeds tend to be vastly different from each other despite being genetically close enough to interbreed. Breeds have certain tendencies common that breed in terms of behavior, but if you really want complex stuff to happen you HAVE to train them. And on the converse side, no matter how well you train a chihuahua it will never be a great sled dog. I think the same logic can apply to humans.
Humans are capable of self-training (eg an ambitious child can go and learn physics on his own), but parents have a huge amount of control of the kinds of training kids get as well as the kinds of social contexts they live in (which Judith Rich Harris in No Two Alike argues is the main explanation for why children sometimes end up very different from each other even if they are both born to and raised by the same parents). Humans (like dogs) learn and adapt to the kind of environment they end up, with their natural genetic advantages and disadvantages playing a hugely important role in how well they do so.
Jayman looks at the failure of all the studies looking for parental influence and finds little effect, but I think he goes too far in dismissing it because he (like most of the researchers in the field) ignore the importance of context to behavior. This is not to mention that the kind of contexts and environments parents are allowed to put their children in these days are extremely constrained. Measuring different parenting styles on how well children do on standardized tests after going to standardized Prussian schools is of course not going to going to find that big a difference. But imagine arguing that kids will end up the same whether their parents apprentice them to a Blacksmith, send them off to join the Army, or give them to the Priesthood.
And on the converse side, no matter how well you train a chihuahua it will never be a great sled dog. I think the same logic can apply to humans.
The ‘dog breed’ analogy seems to a common pop-sci way of talking about differences between human beings but there’s no evidence that it is a useful analogy at all. The average genetic variation between dog breeds is far greater than between humans. Even the most dissimilar humans are more genetically similar than the average pair of dogs. But really, it’s more correct to say that the genetic variation of humans and dogs is not comparable at all. Human genomes vary in quite different ways than dog breeds.
On the converse side, it does lend credence to the idea that nurture is important.
I agree with your sentiment, but presumably there’s even greater variation among wolves than there is among dogs, yet most wolves are pretty similar. The stunning variation among dog breeds is due to variation in selection, not variation in genotype.
I agree with your sentiment, but presumably there’s even greater variation among wolves than there is among dogs, yet most wolves are pretty similar.
Perhaps you mean that despite large genetic variation in wolves, there appears to be small phenotypic variation in them. In terms of morphology and appearance this is true, but there’s no reason, in my view, to think that it’s true in terms of behavior and intelligence and so on.
Here is a government study showing a markedly higher risk for perpetrating violent crime among children who were abused or neglected by their parents. So that’s one effect. Bad parenting leads to bad outcomes.
That study is observational, not experimental. Maybe genes for disagreeableness make parents abuse their children, and they pass those genes on to their offspring. Probably both nature and nurture contribute.
Certainly. Correlation isn’t causation. One hurdle is that any experimental study of this phenomenon would be highly unethical.
But all is not lost. Single-parent households are also associated with higher risk of juvenile delinquency. I’ll see if I can dig up a study of children abused by foster parents or step-parents.
Single-parent households are also associated with higher rates of parental divorce and teenage pregnancy.
I think I remember reading what happens if you only look at single-parent households where the other parent got sick and died, but I don’t remember the answer.
Certainly. Correlation isn’t causation. One hurdle is that any experimental study of this phenomenon would be highly unethical.
Not always. It might be possible that there are orphanage systems where children are randomly assigned to either orphanage A or orphanage B. If you go to Africa to set up such a system you can add special funding to one of the two orphanages to raise it’s quality much higher than that of the average African orphanage.
You can also split test different educational philosophies that way.
The role of parenting in the development of criminal behavior has been the source of a vast amount of research, with the majority of studies detecting statistically significant associations between dimensions of parenting and measures of criminal involvement. An emerging group of scholars, however, has drawn attention to the methodological limitations—mainly genetic confounding—of the parental socialization literature. The current study addressed this limitation by analyzing a sample of adoptees to assess the association between 8 parenting measures and 4 criminal justice outcome measures. The results revealed very little evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal behavior before controlling for genetic confounding and no evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal involvement after controlling for genetic confounding.
Sadly, most of these sorts of studies can be written off with a single sentence: “includes no family design, therefore is useless and merely shows that heritable traits gonna inherit.”
Argument: Does parenting have any effect on child outcomes?
Certainly there are some things affected by parenting. A baby born in Japan to Japanese parents, but adopted in infancy by English speaking Americans will grow up speaking English, not Japanese. If her bio-parents were Buddhists and her adopted parents were Christian, there is a good chance she will be a Christian at adulthood. While I would say these parenting affects are substantial, I get the feeling this is not what you and Jayman are talking about. It would be helpful if you specified what precisely you disagree about.
The fact that he claims so authoritatively and certainly that there is zero effect which is hubris manifest. it is also incorrect for the arguments I have or at best rather incomplete.
The null hypothesis is always false, and effect sizes are never zero. When he says it’s zero you should probably interpret zero as “too small to care about” or “much smaller than most people think”. I’ll bet the studies didn’t say the effect was literally zero, they just said that the effect isn’t statistically significant, which is really just saying the effect and the sample size were too small to pass their threshold.
People say a lot of things that aren’t literally true, because adding qualifiers everywhere gets annoying. Of course if he doesn’t realize that there are implicit qualifiers, then he’s mistaken.
I think you’re essentially right, but just out of curiosity, what are the ‘twin-adoption studies’ he refers to? As far as I know, there are really very few twins where one twin has grown up entirely separate from the other.
Yes, separated twins are rare. But twins and adoption by themselves are common and can be studied separately. Either one alone can separate nature from nurture. And they both show the same result: 50% genetics, 0% parenting.
Either one alone can separate nature from nurture.
In what way? As knb mentioned above, parenting has a direct effect on e.g. what language you learn. On the other hand, parenting has zero effect on, for example, the color of your eyes. So you have to first specify what variables you’re looking at.
And they both show the same result: 50% genetics, 0% parenting.
I hope you realize that this is an extremely strong claim.
Hint: when the result of scientific studies is confusing, not conclusive, it is probably better to take a step back and try to see things from a common-sense angle, because it helps deciding what would we exactly want kinds of hypotheses we want scientists to test.
So let’s generate typical parenting moves that we may think could have an impact.
Positive:
getting children hooked on reading (worked for me and I guess for 75% of LW)
getting children hooked on sports (discipline, mature thinking, a friend’s 13 year old athlete daughter is literally the most adult thinking child I ever saw)
an athmosphere of ambition and confidence (don’t think CEOs are a separate kind of people who reproduce amongst themselves, think like you can become one)
Negative:
the usual kind of violent, abusive, drunken non-parenting, the chaotic environment of parents with problematic personality disorders
not insisting on things like homework, not caring about grades
anti-intellectual athmosphere at home, against studying, “why care about geography just be a miner like your dad”
It’s too far against nurture. This is pushing against the limit for hard reductionism there are definitely non-genetic emergent effects while maintaining the absolute good taste of genetic arguments.
Interested in what you guys think about this. Jayman(hbd blogger) say’s parenting has no effect on how children turn out. Seems empirically incorrect to me and it’s just probably difficult to encapsulate the results/hard to see non-linearities to make it easy to reference.
He insists on twin-adoption studies contrary to my views.
Thoughts? This sort of seems like the two cultures divide we agree on. I might make a thread just for this.
Argument: Does parenting have any effect on child outcomes?
His view: Zero effect & Breast milk confers no advantage either
My view: Parenting has some variable effect that is difficult to encapsulate in the studies he references while maintaining the correctness and good taste of genetic arguments.
I cite decision theory, statistical inference, study design, and the related area as being primal over empirical references which have failed to encapsulate the effects he is pointing to in his observables. Statistical inference just doesn’t work like that to give such strong conclusions. Any one who reads the literature on study design/inference knows that it’s just not possible to give recommendations that are that strong. Sort of in the realm is Isaac Levi’s “Gambling with the Truth” if not only the first few chapters although not quite, probably just statistical study design/inference in general.
Thoughts any one? I think scientists or empirical researchers are not used to being told that there is a higher plane of reference. Saying that there is zero influence is equivalent to saying all the relevant variables have been enumerated and assigned exact values for probability & effect and that there is nothing else to be assigned.
I believe my orientation is correct.
edit: I might add that not ONLY would that be saying that the relevant variables have been completely enumerated && assigned cost functions but that we are sure there is nothing else(no uncertainty) and that we are sure they all equal zero/canceled out.
Jayman is correct that adoption studies typically show negligible parental effects. But remember the studies can only talk about the environmental variation present in their data, and are generally done on normal, western, middle class cohorts. In studies where they include stronger environmental variation—e.g. Turkheimer et al 2003, you find that it matters.
So basically, the kind of parenting choices that people typically worry about are probably meaningless, but severe trauma, poverty, abuse etc. do matter. That being said, You can’t just say “X is difficult to encapsulate” with studies. This is a fully general counter argument to any evidence you don’t like.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that even if a small percentage of the population took that advice as definitive and executed over it, all latent small probabilities would be realized and the mistakes would be immediately manifested. Stuff like that isn’t being difficult as any pharmaceutical company or any medical company has to know for sure that their studies/devices are correct for health effects. In fact in statistical decision theory texts pharmaceutical examples are standard.
tl;dr this would be a big lawsuit of some sorts
I think you need to be more specific about your criticisms here… I don’t see why the twin study design, and extensions thereof, don’t allow such inferences. The cool part about them is that they exploit some very unusual properties to do what they do. (Unusual enough that when I went looking for uses of twin designs outside of behavioral genetics to get inspiration for a diet self-experiment, I couldn’t find any.)
If there is some variable effect, then there should still be some average effect.
I don’t think that’s true. Could you explain how the twin design requires that, keeping in mind the fundamental logic of the design?
Thanks for the reply
I’m saying in general with probabilistic inference not necessarily to twin study design. I think I worded it relatively poorly. I’m saying there is that is not necessarily encapsulated in the study because there would have to be some relatively exhaustive statistical machinery applied.
When someone says something with such strength that there is zero effect(ask him on twitter) that means there is no uncertainty and we know all relevant variables and have assigned probabilities and utility values to them(everything is known). Which is false. We do not know if we have missed something related to for , because we have not done exhaustive statistical studies on it. we probably only have so much empirical knowledge related to it. His statement is even stronger that there is no uncertainty, he is saying there is no risk to executing over the advice that parenting has no effect and therefore we can just go do whatever we want with parenting. Which is equivalent to assigning the utilities to all equal zero or the integral to zero.
He is saying there is neither uncertainty, nor risk. A bit long winded, I think I might ask Mrs.Mayo if I have it right.
To say a statement with such strength of
and that it is advice that could be executed over, say ten thousand people stop parenting their kids would mean that any negative effects that were not captured in the study would be realized no matter how small the probability, that we missed something not encapsulated in the study or something in general. It’s just a problem with executing over empirical advice in general. It’s hard for me to state declaratively.
For example I think we could argue that the fact that these people exist to be studied means that there is a survivorship bias accordingly(for those that did not get studied are dead/did not show up) and that that weights the probabilities in the favor of the people who survived but if we evaluate the entire sample space(dead+alive) it would be in favor of parenting.
For us to ascertain with a greater degree of certainty we would need to pull out the big guns of statistics/probability in general to make sure we have done due diligence and only then after that we can conclude with certainty.
I think I covered this with my response and just wait for a follow-up response.
Could you link to the twitter post where he describes his position? Without a clear reference to the claim under debate this exercise isn’t useful.
He is just straight up naively saying parenting has no effect and the consequential statement that any one can act as if this is completely true. This is not an exercise, this is trying to convince an actual person why he is wrong. I’ll ask him for a clarified picture right now.
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/category/parenting-2/ https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2014/12/21/iq-and-birth-order-effects-real-no/
That’s different then claiming that the effect is zero and that you can completely mess it up without bad effects.
The first comment is equally as strong. I’m having a running dialogue with him and he will come here and correct/clarify if necessary. Please focus on the topic at hand.
For once can we actually have a discussion?
edit: https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/no-you-dont-have-free-will-and-this-is-why/
My framing is coherent and correct
editedit: he said read this post https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/the-son-becomes-the-father/
When the goal is to focus on the topic at hand it’s vital to understand the position on the participants.
Do you agree with the claim “Parenting is simply less important than most people think”?
I’m not sure what that means, we are not talking about normal people we are talking about people like us who can adjust to this. The goal is to understand what the upper-end people think and how they use their advanced epistemology to run their hedges/beliefs accordingly. He seems to imply from his “You do not have free will” && “Parenting has no effect” stance that it is irrelevant.
I am trying to get an idea of an interval of where parenting is for the advanced people. Fixing disorders/adhd with medication from a parents perspective vs a parent who doesn’t will easily make a kid succeed.
ADHD meds are very effective while not being on them is very bad, so is teaching them valuable skills that other people do not know IS a good idea.
This style of conversation is important because the advantage of knowing even rudimentary decision theory gives you over say naive rationalism/‘traditional rationalism’/naive empiricism.
If you don’t understand what that means, than it would be useful to work on understanding. If you don’t understand the position of the person with whom you argue you can’t know whether or not you agree with them.
Clarifying where disagreement is isn’t a side conversation. Do you believe that there are meaningful differences in parenting quality of US middle class people? (When genetics are factored out)
I don’t agree that it is relevant and it skewers the conversation in a direction that I do not think is important or obscures the discussion.
Breast milk “confers no advantage” compared to what?
(baby dying from starvation? water? cow milk? soylent? infant formula—which one?)
All that stuff that exists in breast milk—such as immunoglobulin A, lysozyme, blood albumin, creatine—it’s just completely useless, I guess. I wonder why evolution even bothered to design such system, when it provides no advantage. (This is a sarcastic way to say “my priors for this hypothesis are very low”.)
Wait did you mean for Jayman’s hypothesis is low or breast milk?
(I’m not Viliam, but:) For Jayman’s hypothesis, obviously. The argument is: Here’s all this complex machinery put in place by evolution; it’s terribly unlikely that what it does is actually useless.
(That would argue that breast milk is a good food for babies, which I don’t think anyone denies. It’s only a strong argument against feeding them infant formula in so far as we have reason to think that formula doesn’t have in it those things that evolution helpfully put into human breast milk.)
Yes, low priors for Jayman’s hypothesis. Although it wasn’t sufficiently specified what exactly his hypothesis was, so I could be arguing against a strawman.
I am not an expert on infant formulas, but I think that if someone could factory-produce a drink that updates your immune system (as breast milk does), that would have huge implications in medicine. Essentially, we could replace vaccination by drinking soylent.
There have been many randomized controlled experiments of breast milk vs formula. Every single one of them has shown no effect.
I just did a little googling and that appears to be untrue. What’s the source of your information?
The first hits from a Google search for <> were:
Scholarly articles (Google pulls out a few of these at the top of its search results):
A study on promotion of breastfeeding in Belarus. Intervention appears to have increased breastfeeding and also substantially (and significantly) reduced the incidence of two of the three health problems they measured.
A study on how often breastfeeding passes on HIV from mother to child. (Conclusion: about 1⁄6 of the time; using formula is an effective way of reducing this. Interesting but not relevant here.)
A study on the effect of “peer support” on making mothers breast-feed for longer. Not relevant here.
Ordinary search results:
First five hits are for the same study, looking at very premature babies. Conclusion was that mother’s milk appears better than both donor breast milk and formula, and the latter two aren’t much different.
Meta-analysis of studies comparing donor breast milk with formula. Conclusion is that unfortified donor breast milk (i.e., no extra nutrients added) leads to slower growth than formula, but formula leads to more necrotizing enterocolitis. Apparently donor breast milk is generally fortified nowadays.
Different meta-analysis looking specifically at necrotizing enterocolitis. Found only four relevant trials, from 20 years before. They were too low-powered to find significant results, but aggregating them finds a substantial and significant reduction in NEC risk for donor breast milk versus formula.
CBS News report on a study that found that giving a little formula to babies who lose a lot of weight shortly after birth may result in longer breast-feeding. Interesting but not obviously relevant.
And that’s the end of the first page. So it looks to me as if
There haven’t been that many randomized controlled experiments—fully half the first page of Google results were from a single one, and the meta-analyses seem to have found rather few, rather old, rather small studies.
Some small old studies didn’t find significant results.
But that seems to have been because of lack of power rather than because differences weren’t there.
Aggregating those studies finds significant differences.
There may be relevant differences between mother’s milk and donor milk; comparing mother’s milk to formula in RCTs is probably harder than comparing donor milk to formula. (Because of ethical difficulties in telling mothers not to breast-feed their children; because of practical difficulties telling mothers to breast-feed their children if they have trouble with that; because of difficulties in blinding. Maybe other reasons.)
Which seems like pretty much the reverse of what you say. But of course looking briefly at one page of Google results is not a proper scholarly literature review; would you like to tell us more?
http://www.bayesianrisk.com/chapters.html http://www.bayesianrisk.com/sample_chapters/Chapter%201%20There%20is%20more%20to%20assessing%20risk%20than%20statistics.pdf
I agree with Viliam & gym. This just points to the limits of statistical knowledge & that we need to supplement with other logical-experimental knowledge, such as arguments from evolution.
Risk cannot only be based on statistical knowledge, as chapter one of bayesian risk argues.
Always a good questions to ask.
You might be interested in a fairly well-known book, The Nurture Assumption.
I will read it but I must insist I do not have any ‘nurture’ assumption.
“Nurture” here is a synonym for parenting (nature vs nurture as in genes vs upbringing). The nurture assumption is that parenting matters. You seem to believe that parenting matters.
I don’t think that definition is adequate.
Non-naive nurture matters to an extent, my argument has nuance. This is pretty much the exact domain of statistical decision theory/prescriptive decision theory and its conclusions have strict priority. The problem is that a large class of the professional intellectual class have not caught up.
A comment on your style of argumentation in general: Can you please stop vaguely referring to theories without pinpointing what exactly it says that supports your view?
I’m sort of shocked I have to refer to anything, this is pretty much standard less-wrong material. This is not ‘vaguely’ this is pretty much bread and butter. I gave references in my original post(first few chapters of gambling with the truth/any textbook on statistical decision theory). His statement is incorrect out of the box without me being difficult whatsoever.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gu1/decision_theory_faq/#what-do-decision-theorists-mean-by-risk-ignorance-and-uncertainty
I mean, obviously parenting matters, right? You can’t just drop kids in the wilderness.
What’s actually being said here is that if we remove the extreme cases, the people who aren’t really fulfilling the role of “parents” as they should, the normal diversity we see among various types of parenting isn’t really a big deal as far as outcomes are concerned. (This is still a bold claim, because, as you said, we might just not be aware of the slice of diversity that matters.)
What do you mean by “extreme cases”? One culture’s “extreme case” is anther’s typical parent.
In this cases, I think “non-extreme cases” basically means “the child manages to survive until the age of psychological maturity with no debilitating injuries”. The claim is that the main role of parents is just to get the kid to adulthood in one piece, and anything else is extra and might not seriously help or harm commonly measured outcomes. One might add the assumption that the parents at least didn’t actively inhibit ordinary non-parental exposure, to rule out things such as never learning to talk or something.
(But remember, I’m not claiming this at all, just stating what I think the real claim is. I don’t even think the more conservative version is correct: even if you assume that childhood experiences with parents controlling-for-differing-non-parent-related experiences aren’t that important, how could variations in ongoing parental support in adulthood possibly not make a difference?)
Yeah parenting definitely matters in specific skills you choose to teach your kids/putting your kids on medication if they need it etc. It’s a problem with scientists getting over-excited about the implications of their studies, they want to believe they can be a priesthood to the world when there is a higher plane of counsel & reference, which is prescriptive decision theory.
Well, I can’t say I agree with that sentiment at all (but I suspect that discussion will devolve into disagreements about tone, and which types of media we take as representative of “scientists”.)
I think my statement is understated. Read Isaac Levi’s gambling with the truth for kind of the right area but any statistical decision theory book will work. This is a place for prescriptive decision theory and not scientists even though they are important.
Very lesswrongish.
I think dogs give us the clearest insight on this problem. Dog breeds tend to be vastly different from each other despite being genetically close enough to interbreed. Breeds have certain tendencies common that breed in terms of behavior, but if you really want complex stuff to happen you HAVE to train them. And on the converse side, no matter how well you train a chihuahua it will never be a great sled dog. I think the same logic can apply to humans.
Humans are capable of self-training (eg an ambitious child can go and learn physics on his own), but parents have a huge amount of control of the kinds of training kids get as well as the kinds of social contexts they live in (which Judith Rich Harris in No Two Alike argues is the main explanation for why children sometimes end up very different from each other even if they are both born to and raised by the same parents). Humans (like dogs) learn and adapt to the kind of environment they end up, with their natural genetic advantages and disadvantages playing a hugely important role in how well they do so.
Jayman looks at the failure of all the studies looking for parental influence and finds little effect, but I think he goes too far in dismissing it because he (like most of the researchers in the field) ignore the importance of context to behavior. This is not to mention that the kind of contexts and environments parents are allowed to put their children in these days are extremely constrained. Measuring different parenting styles on how well children do on standardized tests after going to standardized Prussian schools is of course not going to going to find that big a difference. But imagine arguing that kids will end up the same whether their parents apprentice them to a Blacksmith, send them off to join the Army, or give them to the Priesthood.
The ‘dog breed’ analogy seems to a common pop-sci way of talking about differences between human beings but there’s no evidence that it is a useful analogy at all. The average genetic variation between dog breeds is far greater than between humans. Even the most dissimilar humans are more genetically similar than the average pair of dogs. But really, it’s more correct to say that the genetic variation of humans and dogs is not comparable at all. Human genomes vary in quite different ways than dog breeds.
On the converse side, it does lend credence to the idea that nurture is important.
I agree with your sentiment, but presumably there’s even greater variation among wolves than there is among dogs, yet most wolves are pretty similar. The stunning variation among dog breeds is due to variation in selection, not variation in genotype.
Perhaps you mean that despite large genetic variation in wolves, there appears to be small phenotypic variation in them. In terms of morphology and appearance this is true, but there’s no reason, in my view, to think that it’s true in terms of behavior and intelligence and so on.
Here is a government study showing a markedly higher risk for perpetrating violent crime among children who were abused or neglected by their parents. So that’s one effect. Bad parenting leads to bad outcomes.
That study is observational, not experimental. Maybe genes for disagreeableness make parents abuse their children, and they pass those genes on to their offspring. Probably both nature and nurture contribute.
Certainly. Correlation isn’t causation. One hurdle is that any experimental study of this phenomenon would be highly unethical.
But all is not lost. Single-parent households are also associated with higher risk of juvenile delinquency. I’ll see if I can dig up a study of children abused by foster parents or step-parents.
Single-parent households are also associated with higher rates of parental divorce and teenage pregnancy.
I think I remember reading what happens if you only look at single-parent households where the other parent got sick and died, but I don’t remember the answer.
Not always. It might be possible that there are orphanage systems where children are randomly assigned to either orphanage A or orphanage B. If you go to Africa to set up such a system you can add special funding to one of the two orphanages to raise it’s quality much higher than that of the average African orphanage.
You can also split test different educational philosophies that way.
Here is a different study which says:
Indeed. One could also look at Sariaslan’s population registry studies.
Sadly, most of these sorts of studies can be written off with a single sentence: “includes no family design, therefore is useless and merely shows that heritable traits gonna inherit.”
Certainly there are some things affected by parenting. A baby born in Japan to Japanese parents, but adopted in infancy by English speaking Americans will grow up speaking English, not Japanese. If her bio-parents were Buddhists and her adopted parents were Christian, there is a good chance she will be a Christian at adulthood. While I would say these parenting affects are substantial, I get the feeling this is not what you and Jayman are talking about. It would be helpful if you specified what precisely you disagree about.
The fact that he claims so authoritatively and certainly that there is zero effect which is hubris manifest. it is also incorrect for the arguments I have or at best rather incomplete.
The null hypothesis is always false, and effect sizes are never zero. When he says it’s zero you should probably interpret zero as “too small to care about” or “much smaller than most people think”. I’ll bet the studies didn’t say the effect was literally zero, they just said that the effect isn’t statistically significant, which is really just saying the effect and the sample size were too small to pass their threshold.
People say a lot of things that aren’t literally true, because adding qualifiers everywhere gets annoying. Of course if he doesn’t realize that there are implicit qualifiers, then he’s mistaken.
Yeah but his abrasiveness of delivery is contrary to your goodwill. I’m being polite in his favor.
I think you’re essentially right, but just out of curiosity, what are the ‘twin-adoption studies’ he refers to? As far as I know, there are really very few twins where one twin has grown up entirely separate from the other.
Yes, separated twins are rare. But twins and adoption by themselves are common and can be studied separately. Either one alone can separate nature from nurture. And they both show the same result: 50% genetics, 0% parenting.
In what way? As knb mentioned above, parenting has a direct effect on e.g. what language you learn. On the other hand, parenting has zero effect on, for example, the color of your eyes. So you have to first specify what variables you’re looking at.
I hope you realize that this is an extremely strong claim.
I’m not sure, I just took his word on it. I’ll ask him in the morning and edit it in later
Hint: when the result of scientific studies is confusing, not conclusive, it is probably better to take a step back and try to see things from a common-sense angle, because it helps deciding what would we exactly want kinds of hypotheses we want scientists to test.
So let’s generate typical parenting moves that we may think could have an impact.
Positive:
getting children hooked on reading (worked for me and I guess for 75% of LW)
getting children hooked on sports (discipline, mature thinking, a friend’s 13 year old athlete daughter is literally the most adult thinking child I ever saw)
an athmosphere of ambition and confidence (don’t think CEOs are a separate kind of people who reproduce amongst themselves, think like you can become one)
Negative:
the usual kind of violent, abusive, drunken non-parenting, the chaotic environment of parents with problematic personality disorders
not insisting on things like homework, not caring about grades
anti-intellectual athmosphere at home, against studying, “why care about geography just be a miner like your dad”
unpredictable parenting
The question is, are they testing these?
The case is made over twin studies. If you believe that parents equally try to get all their children hooked on reading, it’s factored in.
You assume that the people here wouldn’t have getting hooked on reading if their parents didn’t encourage reading.
It’s too far against nurture. This is pushing against the limit for hard reductionism there are definitely non-genetic emergent effects while maintaining the absolute good taste of genetic arguments.