Clarity comments on Towards cause priotisation estimates for child abuse - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (16)
The author of "What You Can Change and What You Can't" did a well informed review of studies that measure influence of child abuse and traumas on adult life.
What he found is that there is barely any, and that studies that detect this influence have severely flawed methodology.
I can't find any references to this online. Given its controversial I call bullshit.
Here are some relevant references from the book:
or
or
Your claim was that child abuse and trauma have barely any influence on adult life. This is clearly an extraordinary claim, that requires evidence to be taken seriously.
Your evidence are three quotations, two of which only contain more links, and the third is about the heritability of divorce, which has nothing to do with your claim.
So in other words you have given zero evidence for your claim. Maybe there is some evidence to be found in one of the many citations you gave, but without knowing which one or what to look for it would take many hours to investigate this. That is not a reasonable burden to place on your readers, given the prior unlikeliness of your initial claim. I'm not saying you should make an airtight case for your claim in a single post, but at the very least you should give us some reason to put in further effort.
To be exact, the claim from the book is except for severe PTSD, there is little influence, and in case of PTSD the healing works the same way for adults as for children (and possibly slightly better in children) - so "childhood" trauma is not in any way "special" compared to adult traumas.
As for evidence, why don't you just go and read the book itself? Reading that chapter is on the order of 20 minutes of easy reading. Sorry, but I have better things to do than repeat what is already written elsewhere.
There have been significant longitudinal studies that comprehensively measure many dimensions of well-being over an amazingly long time-frame and these also support this claim.
A good book on these studies and what we might learn from is Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Study of Adult Development by George E. Vaillant.
Otherwise I wouldn't dismiss claims from 'What we can change and what we can't' easily just because not enough refs are quoted. Read for yourself. Also you migth want to look at lukeprogs http://lesswrong.com/lw/3nn/scientific_selfhelp_the_state_of_our_knowledge/
The 1st and third quote blocks merely reference other sources without summarising them. This leads to a wealth of insubstantiated evidence and holds back efficient evaluation of its truth value.
The second claims something is heritable, but every human trait is heritable by definition. The wording implies the divorce is attributable to the status of having an identical twin that is divorced, which is underdetermined and moreover, twin studies aren't interpreted so simply. So, I expect that the author is a poor biostatistician and wouldn't take their word on the 1st and 3rd claims from these exerpts alone.
The book has summaries in the content (these were just footnotes). So I'd maybe recommend you just read that chapter from the actual book.
Arguing "By Definition"
Is living in Africa heritable? I'm sure if you try, you can understand what is the author is trying to say without picking on his words.
How sure are you that the answer is no?
I mean, obviously it "should" be no. But suppose you attempt to answer that question using the same machinery generally used to estimate heritability. What answer will come out? Bear in mind, e.g., that it is rather rare for identical twins to live on different continents. (C.f. Cosma Shalizi here and here. The former is long and discusses many other things; search for the heading "Cultural transmission".)
(I agree that "every human trait is heritable by definition" is a pretty silly thing to say.)
I didn't mean to suggest this question has a valid answer, but rather to point out that the phrasing is ambiguous.
The quote I gave above from the book says:
So I think the criticism from the article you linked doesn't apply.