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estimator comments on Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015 - Less Wrong
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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.)
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.
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?)