I guess it's time for a War on Poverty. Make poverty illegal @ Jail anybody caught poor.
I thought we started that program in the 80s?
'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
131–140 of 265 posts
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding of the reason for total abstinence is while there may be a shoulder in the graph (eg. more than 5 drinks a week) beyond which FAS begins to take effect, nobody knows where that point is. It's not exactly the sort of thing you want to run a controlled test for. It would be great if we could tell expecting mothers: "have two drinks a week, you'll be fine." We don't know, so "don't drink at all" is a re…
The studies have not proven that there is a level of alcohol consumption below which there are no negative effects, but they fail to demonstrate long-term negative effects from low levels of alcohol consumption. Now, absence of proof is not proof of absence, but in what other contexts do we tell people: the studies don't show harmful effects at low levels, but you shouldn't do it anyway because the studies haven't pr…
We only say "no" when we have actual evidence that some activity is harmful....We do it because we as a society love to control women, their behavior and their bodies, and pregnancy offers a great opportunity to exert that control.
This latter theory is a bit silly.
In fact, we say "no" to all sorts of things regardless of evidence that the activity is harmful. Examples include modafinil, steroids and various other brain and body enhancers. More commonplace examples include salt, fat, carbs, second hand smoke, marijuana, gluten and foods not present in the cave man era.
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn lies and statistics, though. Being poor does not cause lower IQ, nor does lower IQ cause you to be poor. However, you'll find a lot of lower IQ people at poverty level. You can't guarantee that any college candidate that is poor is not going to excel, so poverty, sex, race, religion, sexual orientation, should have absolutely nothing to do with acceptance into any organization, assuming that everything else is e…
No, there's actually a good amount of evidence that poverty does in fact cause low IQs. For instance the divergence between the IQs of East Germans and West Germans during the partition, and the way they converged again after the Cold War. It is true that people with low IQs will tend to become poorer (though conscientiousness is often a bigger factor), but reversion to the mean should limit the impact of that in the…
Be careful about causality and correlation. Poverty probably does not "cause" low-IQ, but poverty is a good indicator for low-IQ due to correlation.
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#134So, vitamins are actually bad for you and there's really no such thing as a 'crack baby'.
It's a bad week for things I learned growing up in the 80s/90s ...
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
IQ not intelligence. IQ is meant to be a measure of intellectual capacity. It is nonsensical to say that someone is unable to be intelligent because they are poor. Let's talk about intelligence, though. Lets say that everyone had the same intellectual capacity, but we still saw the same descrepancy in how well they did on standardized tests. Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from…
> Welfare can make things much worse (misusing food funds for drugs, setting up a cycle of dependence on government funds, etc.), but welfare is a perfectly logical solution to lack of money. We made that mistake before, and can't have a whole new generation of people buying into that statist crap. Except that welfare actually works, and despite the fact that poor people are in general poor money managers, a marginal…
Especially when it translates to greater food availability.
The poor in the US do not suffer from a lack of food availability.
5.1% of poor children don't get enough to eat. For comparison, 5.7% of children above 4 x poverty line don't get enough to eat.
http://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa11/hstat/hsa/pages/221oo.html
Food availability is a solved problem in the United States. Portraying it as a problem takes resources away from real problems which need to be solved.
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who're you going to believe, a randomized controlled trial or your own lying eyes? Hint: if you believe your own eyes, your sample size is one, confirmation bias and the availability heuristic are dancing the cha-cha all over your results, and you fail at science .
Having worked with a slew of severely developmentally delayed crack babies and alcohol syndrome kids, I am going to have to go with my own eyes. This study did not include pre-term crack babies. That is a selection method that is going to skew heavily towards 'light' crack users. Crack or cocaine is very, very bad for development. It can create a child that literally cannot do anything for themselves and some that li…
>This study did not include pre-term crack babies.
It is entirely reasonable to select only full-term babies for the study. Including pre-term babies makes analysis more complicated.
>That is a selection method that is going to skew heavily towards 'light' crack users.
Do you have some basis for that conclusion? It sounds reasonable (if beside the point), but are we working off of the folklore or facts?
>Crack or cocaine is very, very bad for development.
Did you read the article? They concluded after a long and careful study that poverty had a much bigger effect than cocaine use.
>It can create a child that literally cannot do anything for themselves and some that live in excruciating pain every single day of their lives (that is the very dark side of having such advanced neo-natal care).
Did you know that the NY Times and others recently recanted much of their sensationalist reporting of the "Crack Epidemic" http://retroreport.org/crack-babies-a-tale-from-the-drug-war...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/booming/revisiting-the-cra...
>Fetal alcohol syndrome is just as bad if not worse.
FAS probably is worse. If my recollection is correct, one needs to do a lot of binge drinking during the first trimester.
>It is irresponsible to suggest otherwise.
You mean it is irresponsible to disagree with you? No, skepticism and critical analysis are never irresponsible. It is irresponsible to falsely assign a cause to some phenomena or event, and set about treating that cause without ever checking to see if what you're doing is actually helping.
>The fact that astute HN readers are looking at this and saying "See, it is overblown!" is very scary.
No, it isn't. It means that people are reading and thinking instead of reacting to headlines and summaries.
>That means the broader population reading this article is likely to do the same thing.
What's your basis for that assumption?
>The writer of this article owes it to society to be very clear about the limitations and biases of this study.
The study was narrow in scope in order to obtain a clear and concise conclusion.
Note before you jump to a conclusion about the HN general consensus on in-utero cocaine exposure, is that nobody here has come out in support of it. Rather, at least my take on it (judging by a casual perusal of this paper) is that efforts to reduce infant mortality and morbidity, and developmental defects in early childhood by combating drug-use were misguided; and going forward those efforts should be focused on learning about and mitigating whatever the effects of impoverishment are.
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#137What's more likely, that seeing dead people and being poor lowers your IQ, or that having a low IQ means you'll end up poor?
They preselected a bunch of poor people, which means the low IQ could be explained by the fact that their existing IQ put them in this place in society along with the predisposition to cheap drug addiction.
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#138I've read that it's notoriously difficult to measure the impact of crack on prenatal development because so many crack-smoking pregnant women also smoke cigarettes, and the latter is so harmful already that it's hard to isolate the effects of the former.
That doesn't make a lot of sense since there are plenty of pregnant tobacco smokers that don't smoke crack.
I'm not following; could you elaborate?
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, there's actually a good amount of evidence that poverty does in fact cause low IQs. For instance the divergence between the IQs of East Germans and West Germans during the partition, and the way they converged again after the Cold War. It is true that people with low IQs will tend to become poorer (though conscientiousness is often a bigger factor), but reversion to the mean should limit the impact of that in the…
Be careful about causality and correlation. Poverty probably does not "cause" low-IQ, but poverty is a good indicator for low-IQ due to correlation.
Correlation between A and B does not imply causation from A to B, but it does imply causation there is some causation somewhere, from A to B or B to A or something more complicated. In those cases we have to step down a level and look at the particular mechanisms.
We can see some very good mechanisms for how a low IQ might cause poverty in most cases, but the specific reason I mentioned the East/West Germany situation is that it precludes any of the normal ways that people can sort themselves into poverty - it wasn't as if there was any huge migration in Germany that made all the smarter people end up on the west side of the divide. Can you provide a causal mechanism other than poverty->low IQ that could explain that?
Or how about all the immigrants from rural Ireland that had significantly lower IQs than the residents of the cities they immigrated into, but whose children and descendants had substantially the same IQs as other residents of those cities?
There's really a mountain of evidence that the causality here runs both ways.
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#140I got the part about not seeing a relationship between crack usage and mental functioning. It's a very interesting result. What I don't understand is "Hurt and her team began to think the "something else" was poverty." Is there any data referenced in the article to actually support that claim? It's the central thesis here, and I don't see any supporting argument. I see some text around seeing people arrested, dead bo…
It wasn't in the article -- the past few years have been disruptive in the social sciences because of multiple replicated studies that show stress, including poverty stress (which is a well-quantified phenomenon) have a profound impact on working memory ("how much RAM your brain has").
Google it. I first read about it in the Economist, but really, it's where the conversation starts these days.
Brain damage is one of the main mechanisms by which poverty passes itself down to subsequent generations.