Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

philly.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 265 posts

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

#51

Post by marquis »

VLM wrote: post #19

Bad story design... trying to talk about the typical result, then late in the article drop the bombshell "The team considers Jaimee and her mother, Karen, among their best success stories.". If they "have to" go anecdotal, they could have at least picked the median subject. Like doing a report on the health effects of smoking, and intentionally selecting the healthiest 99 year old smoker in the world rather than the…

I found the success story important to heavier weigh the fact that cocaine exposure doesn't stunt brain development to a greater degree than general poverty. The author made plenty of other points about the tested groups not behaving other than expected given poverty as a common factor among them.

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

#52

Post by Alex3917 »

"They found that 81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the kids were only 7 years old at the time."

That's not really much different than the national average for kids whose parents aren't crackheads. E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have, which is in fact exactly 35%. C.f. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf

N.b. that some of these statistics are pretty wonky, e.g. they count getting beat up for your siblings as assault, or getting flashed as being a victim of sexual assault.

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

#53

Post by bittired »

jre wrote: post #35
bittired wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the logic: 1. Given all of the smartest 50% of the people in the world. 2. Take all of their money away. 3. Give it to the other 50%. Lets say we were able to do those three. Now do you think being poor causes lower IQ? DON'T CONFUSE CORRELATION WITH CAUSATION!

I think if you take the babies of the smartest X% people in the world and raise them in poverty then yes, their average IQ will be lower than if they were raised in a middle class household. Poverty means you have to skip meals, you can't afford books, you go to a school were there aren't enough teachers and so on... Those are all things that have an influence the intellectual development of a person.

You are confusing intelligence with intellectual capacity (IQ).

IQ is the ability for a child to do exemplary things with his/her mind.

Intelligence is building upon that.

Being poor does not make you have lower IQ, nor does it make you less intelligent. A large number of the poor have come up from the depths and are very intelligent people.

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

#54

Post by btilly »

rayiner wrote: post #39
bittired wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logically money should have no direct affect on intellectual capacity (e.g. see my other argument about taking the money away and giving it to someone else). In this case, I think the causation is in the other direction. Over time, people with less intellectual capacity will be less successful, and therefore poorer. That is rational. The other direction is irrational.

It depends on how you ascribe causation to hereditary factors. Does it make sense to say that a 4 year old is poor because of his low IQ? I don't think so, because a 4 year old has no agency over his economic circumstances.

Does it make sense to say that a 4 year old is poor because of his low IQ?

No.

But it does make sense to say that a 4 year old is both poor and has a low IQ because his parents do. And this applies whether you believe that his low IQ is due to heredity or a poor environment caused by his parents.

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

#55

Post by rpedroso »

Spooky23 wrote: post #34
calibraxis wrote: post #11

Science vs. hysterical racism, yet again. There's a reason it's "crack baby", and not "cocaine baby". Helps imprison the right sort of person. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act ) There's a much more dangerous drug than cocaine, for babies. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure ) It's alcohol, a legal drug. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome )

My dad worked in an environment heavily impacted by the crack epidemic. It was real, and the hysteria was based on the horrific situations that that existed. Smugly determining that "crack baby" was some racist code word cooked up to imprison black people is missing the point. Crack lowered the price point of cocaine dramatically, and was devastating to inner city communities. You should note who the study didn't loo…

As the article notes:

Hurt's study enrolled only full-term babies so the possible effects of prematurity did not skew the results.

Nonetheless the head of the study does note that crack cocaine can induce premature labor, among other issues:

Hurt, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, is always quick to point out that cocaine can have devastating effects on pregnancy. The drug can cause a problematic rise in a pregnant woman's blood pressure, trigger premature labor, and may be linked to a dangerous condition in which the placenta tears away from the uterine wall. Babies born prematurely, no matter the cause, are at risk for a host of medical and developmental problems. On top of that, a parent's drug use can create a chaotic home life for a child.

I think the OP's point is that some (political) groups attribute minority group failure to advance socioeconomically to drug use, whereas this study suggests that poverty has a very relevant effect on child development (and thus prospects of long-term economic success).

That's not to say that there is no truth to the "crack baby" myth, but that like the "welfare queen" myth, it is part of a strategy to delegitimize welfare programs or socioeconomic criticisms by blaming the low-income groups for their lack of success.

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

#56

Post by colomon »

JshWright wrote: post #38
bittired wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Don't drink too much when pregnant. But, a short glass of wine once a week or so isn't excessive.

A glass of wine a _day_ wouldn't be excessive.

In 1970, a glass of wine a day was what the doctor suggested my mother should drink during her pregnancy.

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

#57

Post by 6d0debc071 »

bittired wrote: post #49
6d0debc071 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, do I think the removal of something posited to be developmentally advantageous would lower IQ after the developmental period had passed?

No, I was saying that money in pocket != intelligence.

'Does not equal' is a very strongly bound form of 'cause.' I don't think you can meaningfully make that definition apply to the topic.

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

#58

Post by btilly »

VLM wrote: post #19

Bad story design... trying to talk about the typical result, then late in the article drop the bombshell "The team considers Jaimee and her mother, Karen, among their best success stories.". If they "have to" go anecdotal, they could have at least picked the median subject. Like doing a report on the health effects of smoking, and intentionally selecting the healthiest 99 year old smoker in the world rather than the…

Bad story design...

I disagree. If you're trying to tell a compelling story, you want to reinforce the story that you're trying to tell in every way that you can. That makes it more compelling, and sells more page views.

The danger being, of course, that making reasoned decisions based on compelling story lines is dangerous. But this article isn't in that business - it wants to sell page views.

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

#59

Post by brazzy »

raverbashing wrote: post #45
rayiner wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alcohol isn't really that dangerous for babies either. The prevalence of fetal alcohol syndrome is less than 5% for babies of women who drink more than 14 drinks per week during pregnancy: http://www.motherisk.org/prof/updatesDetail.jsp?content_id=2... . There's very little evidence that low levels of alcohol consumption during pregnancy are bad for babies: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2023984,00.ht…

You're presenting facts, the "total abstinence" people don't like that. I find it funny how the "total abstinence" people come up with such amount of unproven facts, like "any consumption of alcohol" will cause harm. You'll be hard pressed to find a mother that hasn't consumed any alcohol whatsoever during pregnancy in Europe. This looks like it works as well as the "total abstinence" for sex works.

>You'll be hard pressed to find a mother that hasn't consumed any alcohol whatsoever during pregnancy in Europe.

You are very, very wrong about this.

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

#60

Post by jiggy2011 »

bittired wrote: post #53
jre wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you take the babies of the smartest X% people in the world and raise them in poverty then yes, their average IQ will be lower than if they were raised in a middle class household. Poverty means you have to skip meals, you can't afford books, you go to a school were there aren't enough teachers and so on... Those are all things that have an influence the intellectual development of a person.

You are confusing intelligence with intellectual capacity (IQ). IQ is the ability for a child to do exemplary things with his/her mind. Intelligence is building upon that. Being poor does not make you have lower IQ, nor does it make you less intelligent. A large number of the poor have come up from the depths and are very intelligent people.

"An intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a score derived from one of several standardized tests designed to assess intelligence."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

Post reply on HN