'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result • Hacker News Board

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#201

Post by DanBC » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 12:27 AM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #196

DanBC wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your phrasing is frustratingly confrontational. For example: So you're saying that it's OK to roll the dice with a child, since after all it's only a 20-sided die? That forcing a mother to restrict all alcohol, and thus suffer stress (which we know to be harmful to the child) is more important than an unknown chance of the child suffering damage from alcohol?

Your phrasing is frustratingly confrontational. So was the phrasing of the post I responded to. He didn't even raise the question of whether the mother's drinking might have benefits (such as the one you cite) which might outweigh the risk the alcohol poses to the child. He just said, "oh, it's not really all that dangerous". That, IMO, is not a justifiable mindset for a parent. If there is no compensating benefit, t…

> If there is no compensating benefit, then IMO a parent should not incur any avoidable risk to a child.

Wait, what? Are you actually serious? Not joking? I'm sorry to ask but I have a problem understanding people and I can never tell when people are pulling my leg or not. I almost never spot satire. So, if you're engaging in some devastatingly witty attack on something or other then I'm afraid it's gone right over my head.

> There must always be a reason for incurring the risk, and it must be a stronger reason than "well, I like drinking". If the mother's stress level would really be increased that much by not drinking, then that could be a valid reason.

We don't know if a pregnant woman drinking a couple of units a week is doing any harm to her child. Thus, the advice is to avoid all alcohol. But this has some disadvantages. It makes people ignore much clearer health advice. (This thread has someone suggesting that the drinking advice is similar to the smoking advice, as an example.) It also causes a great deal of stress to women. Some women may drink their regular amounts and then be very distressed when they discover that they are pregnant and have been drinking during the pregnancy. For most women the stress they experience is more harmful than the alcohol.

> (Though I would tend to be skeptical of such a claim; is abstaining from alcohol, for a person who is not an alcoholic, really that hard, hard enough to outweigh the risk to the child's health?)

Wow. That sentence bundles up so many misunderstandings of pregnancy and societal pressures and all kinds of stuff. It's too hard to respond to.

> There must always be a reason for incurring the risk

I'm quoting this part again because it's the core of your message, and it's very very wrong.

You assume that we know what the risks are, and that we can communicate those risks to pregnant women, and that they have power to control the risks they're exposed to.

Women undergo a bunch of prenatal checks. To get to those checks they have to use some form of transport. Are the risks of travel outweighed by the benefits of the prenatal checks?

What about different types of scans? There's no point in the 3d / 4d scans, and there's a possible risk of harm, so should the scans be banned? Or should we tell women not to get them? And who should we be criticising, the firms making money by pushing a possibly harmful but pointless scan to vulnerable women, or the women who get these scans?

(http://www.nhs.uk/news/2010/02February/Pages/Warning-over-so...)

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#202

Post by AlexandrB » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 12:36 AM UTC

bittired wrote: post #67

antoko wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem like an idiot but all your comments in this thread seem to be making the same obvious error. "Being raised in poverty" is a broad term that means all kinds of things, you seem to think it is merely a measure of wealth. This myopic view is why you're so very very wrong.

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…

IQ is not an objective measure of innate intelligence, hence it creeps up over time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Since this effect is so rapid (~100 years), it is unlikely be due to genetic changes. It's pretty clear that developmental and social factors are playing into IQ test results. Both of these are negatively affected by being born into a low income family (less access to food, learning materials, mentors, other IQ individuals, etc.).

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#203

Post by rlanday » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 1:10 AM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #92

napoleond wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have No I wouldn't, because: a) I doubt the age distribution for "kids who see people get shot in a year" is constant. The linked article doesn't include age distributions, but they surveyed children up to age 17, and I would expect many more 15 year-olds to see people get shot than 7 year-olds. b) I doubt the syste…

Good points. In terms of lifetime prevalence, that study says that, "Similarly, 3.5 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds had witnessed a shooting during their lifetimes, whereas more than one in five 14- to 17-year-olds (22.2 percent) had witnessed a shooting." So the population in question is definitely no where near average, my was just that strictly in terms of the amount of violence witnessed, the differences probably ar…

What the hell!? One in five teenagers has witnessed someone being shot? I must live a sheltered life…

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#204

Post by yummyfajitas » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 1:12 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #197

yummyfajitas wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I'm not familiar with the side effects of steroids, etc, but nobody tells pregnant women that they shouldn't eat any salt, any fat, any carbs, etc. Nobody freaked out at a restaurant when my wife ordered a nice ribeye or a piece of chocolate cake.

You miss the point. Without evidence, "they" tell everyone (pregnant or not, male or female) to avoid all sorts of things for imagined or minor harms.

And if you decided to light up and expose others to harmless secondhand smoke, "they" certainly would freak out.

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#205

Post by rlanday » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 1:13 AM UTC

arkades wrote: post #21

bittired wrote: post #10

Earlier 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…

Attending college increases pre-college IQ scores a mean of just under 20 points (I don't recall the precise number from the study now, I remember it was between 15 and 20). That's not "smarter people get into college" - that's before-and-after on the same subjects. Growing up wealthy entails a lot more advantages than four years of courses, at that.

I would like to see that study if you can find it. IQ is generally believed to become more genetic (that is, environmental effects start to wear off) as people get older.

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#206

Post by rlanday » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 1:15 AM UTC

JulianMorrison wrote: post #83

"Crack baby" ALWAYS was simply a synonym for "poor and black". It turns out that racism harms its victims. Who knew?

Do you think racism harms crack users more than their crack use?

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#207

Post by sk5t » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 1:20 AM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #145

rayiner wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 proven there aren't harmful effects at low levels? Erm...in health and safety related contexts. At least in countries that care about those things. When it comes to someone's life isn't that hard to assume that if something is considered it could even be dang…

> Erm...in health and safety related contexts.

Exactly. The rule is not "put on your seatbelt except when you don't plan to exceed 10mph and there are no obvious nearby hazards, or if the windows are open and you're near a body of water," the rule is "always wear a seat belt."

If American society would tolerate it, surely we'd have anti-drunk driving laws that allowed no higher BAC than naturally occurs due to metabolism.

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#208

Post by Sealy » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 1:42 AM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #2

tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine."

> tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine."

This is an interesting and almost 'common sense' observation about demographics. It is more difficult to thrive in a poor environment then it is to do badly out of a rich environment.

That's why we are obsessed about 'rags to riches' stories right?

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#209

Post by arkades » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 1:48 AM UTC

rlanday wrote: post #205

arkades wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attending college increases pre-college IQ scores a mean of just under 20 points (I don't recall the precise number from the study now, I remember it was between 15 and 20). That's not "smarter people get into college" - that's before-and-after on the same subjects. Growing up wealthy entails a lot more advantages than four years of courses, at that.

I would like to see that study if you can find it. IQ is generally believed to become more genetic (that is, environmental effects start to wear off) as people get older.

Sorry, I hit up Google Scholar trying to find it but had no luck. It's not my field of expertise, so I don't know the proper jargon to throw in to get the right search results.

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#210

Post by mpyne » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 2:03 AM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #145

rayiner wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 proven there aren't harmful effects at low levels? Erm...in health and safety related contexts. At least in countries that care about those things. When it comes to someone's life isn't that hard to assume that if something is considered it could even be dang…

> 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 proven there aren't harmful effects at low levels.

A specific 'health and safety' context where this exact issue comes up is actually with ionizing radiation (such as from nuclear reactors).

Humans (like most animals) actually have a remarkable ability to overcome low levels of radiation damage, by means such as genetic repair, programmed apotosis (essentially ASSERT()s in your own genetic code), and even roving patrols by your immune system that catch pre-cancerous cells.

The problem is that it is difficult to determine whether there is a real low-dose threshold, below which people do not suffer appreciable increase in health risk from radiation. Also, whether that threshold depends on the person, depends on prior exposure, depends on type of dose received, a combination of the above, etc.

The evidence leans heavily to there being a threshold much higher than the levels of radiation we'd ever encounter in day-to-day life (and possibly even there being a beneficial effect to low levels of radiation).

But our radiation health physicists (and UN health organizations) have tended to take a very conservative view and simply recommend that people minimize radiation exposure, at least until there is enough evidence to make very clear what a safe threshold level is.