6 ms·

That's very literally survivor bias. How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home? They're not here to t

That's very literally survivor bias. How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home? They're not here to tell the tale about how it "worked fine for them". I'm not saying that things haven't gone too far the other way, but anecdotes about how things were fine aren't good data.

goodJobWalrus 10y ago
> That's very literally survivor bias. How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home? According to this guy, very few: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201404/risky-play-why-children-love-it-and-need-it https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201404/ri... > From an evolutionary perspective, the obvious question about risky play is this: Why does it exist? It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death, so why hasn’t natural selection weeded it out? The fact that it hasn’t been weeded out is evidence that the benefits must outweigh the risks. What are the benefits? Laboratory studies with animals give us some clues.
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  While I don't disagree with his premise, that gives almost no data, and seems like a weak argument. Why hasn't war been weeded out? It must not really be all that risky.
  - burke 10y ago
    Societal behaviour like war differs from individual behaviour like 'risky play'. War, as a societal behaviour, emerges from the individual behaviour of fighting others for resources in a world of scarcity. That was a beneficial behaviour in many situations, as it prevented starvation. It would take much longer than our time within complex society has allowed to weed this behaviour out of our DNA on account of emergent behaviour.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    That's not the correct way to look at it. Those who won wars ended up more prosperous (up until very very recently) and where able to reproduce more.
  - goodJobWalrus 10y ago
    Have you read the whole article? He goes on to describe research on rats who are prevented from playing as pups and develops his argument from there.
- lmm 10y ago
  All an evolutionary argument tells us is that the benefits outweighed the risks in the ancestral environment.
  - maratd 10y ago
    For that to make sense you'd have to have credible evidence that evolution moves at a glacial pace. It doesn't. It responds very quickly to a changing environment. http://allafrica.com/stories/201501280875.html http://allafrica.com/stories/201501280875.html
    - taco_emoji 10y ago
      It's very silly to draw such a broad conclusion about evolution in general from a single adaptation (most likely involving a single mutation) by a single species.
  - goodJobWalrus 10y ago
    I was referring to this part of his argument: >It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death keywords: "rare" and "very rarely", although it would be better argument to look at statistics on accidental deaths during risky play, now and in years past if I had time.
  - pantalaimon 10y ago
    The ancestral environment was way more dangerous though
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
mdorazio 10y ago
If you want to argue against anecdote, it's best to provide actual facts instead of your own questions. For example, only 1 in 5 drowning deaths are children, and there's no reason to assume a significant portion of those are unsupervised [1]. Should we be helicopter-observing adults instead, or do their lives matter less? Traffic accidents are the largest cumulative killer of children [2]. If you want to go the route of "how many aren't here to tell us about it" you should really be arguing that parents should avoid putting kids in or near cars as much as possible. Children die, and that sucks a lot, but if you start making emotional appeals based on preventing all possible child deaths you're going to end up espousing that we keep all kids in padded rooms until they're adults. [1] http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/waterinjuries-factsheet.html http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/wa... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_injury_deaths_highlighting_unintentional_injury_2011-a.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...
- electriclove 10y ago
  "Drowning was the leading cause injury death for those 1 to 4 years of age." via http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/child_injury_data.html http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/child_injury_data.html
  - infinite8s 10y ago
    Unfortunately they don't separate out whether the drowning happened in a swimming pool or a bathtub.
- electriclove 10y ago
  Go ahead and helicopter-observe adults if that is how you interpret that data. I will surely be vigilantly watching my young children when they are near water.
  - pilom 10y ago
    You could, you know, teach them how to swim? The reason so many children die of drowning is that so many don't know how to swim. MIT literally has a swim test requirement to graduate college for exactly this reason.
maratd 10y ago
> How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home? Very few. Those who have a tendency to do things that get them killed ... get killed and eliminated from the gene pool. Everybody who is around now mostly knows how to judge risk. Yeah, we'll have some cuts, bruises, broken bones, etc. but it's very rare that someone does something so profoundly stupid that they get themselves killed. Just because you heard about it on the news doesn't mean it's common. If one kid out of 10,000 gets himself killed this way, you'd get a dozen kids nationally offing themselves daily, but in reality that's a very small number and in truth, the real number is probably much less.
m_fayer 10y ago
There's a spectrum of risk here that IMO we don't like to acknowledge. It's uncomfortable to say that accepting a certain quantity of seriously injured or even killed children actually does come with benefits to those who aren't hurt. But I think we shouldn't shy away from this calculus, we should rather be clear-eyed about the fact that we have chosen to minimise risk, and have accepted the trade-off of reduced independence, joy, and adventure. I think we've moved in this direction organically. We have much fewer children much later in life than we used to, we do not accept child mortality, and every child is a much bigger investment (education and economic dependency into the mid twenties or later), so every life literally becomes more valuable, so we naturally hedge more and more against any risk to this life. The more we move into a high-education and EQ driven economy, the more investment each child demands, and the further this cycle perpetuates. Personally, I would not make this tradeoff, but I understand how hard it is to make this argument when faced with grieving parents who have suffered a huge loss, both emotionally and materially.
mcphage 10y ago
> I'm not saying that things haven't gone too far the other way Right now I don't think we can have the conversation about having gone too far—people always reply "what's the harm in being too overprotective?" To have this conversation—which I think we absolutely need to have—we first need to recognize and admit that there's real, actual harm in being too overprotective.
coldtea 10y ago
>How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home? Very very few. If anything this is "overblowing the danger" bias.
mhb 10y ago
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745272: We might accept a few more phobias in our children in exchange for fewer injuries. But the final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have. According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital visits, the frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans. The number of deaths hasn’t changed much either. From 2001 through 2008, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 100 deaths associated with playground equipment—an average of 13 a year, or 10 fewer than were reported in 1980. Head injuries, runaway motorcycles, a fatal fall onto a rock—most of the horrors Sweeney and Frost described all those years ago turn out to be freakishly rare, unexpected tragedies that no amount of safety-proofing can prevent.
- electriclove 10y ago
  Injuries decreased 20% from 1980 to 2012 according those numbers.. seems significant no?
  - ska 10y ago
    You have to be careful with those sorts of numbers. It says that monitored hospital visits (not injuries) have gone down, but those hospital visits have got a lot more expensive for most people too - one possible confounding factor.
    - electriclove 10y ago
      Agreed. If anything, I'm questioning the quote referencing that exact data point: "our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have"
  - Diederich 10y ago
    I think playground equipment is quite a bit safer! I'm pretty sure supervision has little to do with it.
33W 10y ago
Isn't the opposite then a negative selection bias? If we have N children killed per year doing an activity A, and N anecdotes of children being perfectly okay, neither matter without knowing the denominator of the number of child-activities per year.
rocqua 10y ago
The bias can't be larger than child mortality though, which is 0.59% in the US according the us CIA factbook.

goodJobWalrus 10y ago

> That's very literally survivor bias. How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home? According to this guy, very few: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201404/risky-play-why-children-love-it-and-need-it https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201404/ri... > From an evolutionary perspective, the obvious question about risky play is this: Why does it exist? It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death, so why hasn’t natural selection weeded it out? The fact that it hasn’t been weeded out is evidence that the benefits must outweigh the risks. What are the benefits? Laboratory studies with animals give us some clues.

sliverstorm 10y ago
While I don't disagree with his premise, that gives almost no data, and seems like a weak argument. Why hasn't war been weeded out? It must not really be all that risky.
- burke 10y ago
  Societal behaviour like war differs from individual behaviour like 'risky play'. War, as a societal behaviour, emerges from the individual behaviour of fighting others for resources in a world of scarcity. That was a beneficial behaviour in many situations, as it prevented starvation. It would take much longer than our time within complex society has allowed to weed this behaviour out of our DNA on account of emergent behaviour.
- gravypod 10y ago
  That's not the correct way to look at it. Those who won wars ended up more prosperous (up until very very recently) and where able to reproduce more.
- goodJobWalrus 10y ago
  Have you read the whole article? He goes on to describe research on rats who are prevented from playing as pups and develops his argument from there.
lmm 10y ago
All an evolutionary argument tells us is that the benefits outweighed the risks in the ancestral environment.
- maratd 10y ago
  For that to make sense you'd have to have credible evidence that evolution moves at a glacial pace. It doesn't. It responds very quickly to a changing environment. http://allafrica.com/stories/201501280875.html http://allafrica.com/stories/201501280875.html
  - taco_emoji 10y ago
    It's very silly to draw such a broad conclusion about evolution in general from a single adaptation (most likely involving a single mutation) by a single species.
- goodJobWalrus 10y ago
  I was referring to this part of his argument: >It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death keywords: "rare" and "very rarely", although it would be better argument to look at statistics on accidental deaths during risky play, now and in years past if I had time.
- pantalaimon 10y ago
  The ancestral environment was way more dangerous though
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

mdorazio 10y ago

If you want to argue against anecdote, it's best to provide actual facts instead of your own questions. For example, only 1 in 5 drowning deaths are children, and there's no reason to assume a significant portion of those are unsupervised [1]. Should we be helicopter-observing adults instead, or do their lives matter less? Traffic accidents are the largest cumulative killer of children [2]. If you want to go the route of "how many aren't here to tell us about it" you should really be arguing that parents should avoid putting kids in or near cars as much as possible. Children die, and that sucks a lot, but if you start making emotional appeals based on preventing all possible child deaths you're going to end up espousing that we keep all kids in padded rooms until they're adults. [1] http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/waterinjuries-factsheet.html http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/wa... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_injury_deaths_highlighting_unintentional_injury_2011-a.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...

electriclove 10y ago
"Drowning was the leading cause injury death for those 1 to 4 years of age." via http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/child_injury_data.html http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/child_injury_data.html
- infinite8s 10y ago
  Unfortunately they don't separate out whether the drowning happened in a swimming pool or a bathtub.
electriclove 10y ago
Go ahead and helicopter-observe adults if that is how you interpret that data. I will surely be vigilantly watching my young children when they are near water.
- pilom 10y ago
  You could, you know, teach them how to swim? The reason so many children die of drowning is that so many don't know how to swim. MIT literally has a swim test requirement to graduate college for exactly this reason.

maratd 10y ago

> How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home? Very few. Those who have a tendency to do things that get them killed ... get killed and eliminated from the gene pool. Everybody who is around now mostly knows how to judge risk. Yeah, we'll have some cuts, bruises, broken bones, etc. but it's very rare that someone does something so profoundly stupid that they get themselves killed. Just because you heard about it on the news doesn't mean it's common. If one kid out of 10,000 gets himself killed this way, you'd get a dozen kids nationally offing themselves daily, but in reality that's a very small number and in truth, the real number is probably much less.

m_fayer 10y ago

There's a spectrum of risk here that IMO we don't like to acknowledge. It's uncomfortable to say that accepting a certain quantity of seriously injured or even killed children actually does come with benefits to those who aren't hurt. But I think we shouldn't shy away from this calculus, we should rather be clear-eyed about the fact that we have chosen to minimise risk, and have accepted the trade-off of reduced independence, joy, and adventure. I think we've moved in this direction organically. We have much fewer children much later in life than we used to, we do not accept child mortality, and every child is a much bigger investment (education and economic dependency into the mid twenties or later), so every life literally becomes more valuable, so we naturally hedge more and more against any risk to this life. The more we move into a high-education and EQ driven economy, the more investment each child demands, and the further this cycle perpetuates. Personally, I would not make this tradeoff, but I understand how hard it is to make this argument when faced with grieving parents who have suffered a huge loss, both emotionally and materially.

mcphage 10y ago

> I'm not saying that things haven't gone too far the other way Right now I don't think we can have the conversation about having gone too far—people always reply "what's the harm in being too overprotective?" To have this conversation—which I think we absolutely need to have—we first need to recognize and admit that there's real, actual harm in being too overprotective.

coldtea 10y ago

>How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home? Very very few. If anything this is "overblowing the danger" bias.

mhb 10y ago

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745272: We might accept a few more phobias in our children in exchange for fewer injuries. But the final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have. According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital visits, the frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans. The number of deaths hasn’t changed much either. From 2001 through 2008, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 100 deaths associated with playground equipment—an average of 13 a year, or 10 fewer than were reported in 1980. Head injuries, runaway motorcycles, a fatal fall onto a rock—most of the horrors Sweeney and Frost described all those years ago turn out to be freakishly rare, unexpected tragedies that no amount of safety-proofing can prevent.

electriclove 10y ago
Injuries decreased 20% from 1980 to 2012 according those numbers.. seems significant no?
- ska 10y ago
  You have to be careful with those sorts of numbers. It says that monitored hospital visits (not injuries) have gone down, but those hospital visits have got a lot more expensive for most people too - one possible confounding factor.
  - electriclove 10y ago
    Agreed. If anything, I'm questioning the quote referencing that exact data point: "our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have"
- Diederich 10y ago
  I think playground equipment is quite a bit safer! I'm pretty sure supervision has little to do with it.

33W 10y ago

Isn't the opposite then a negative selection bias? If we have N children killed per year doing an activity A, and N anecdotes of children being perfectly okay, neither matter without knowing the denominator of the number of child-activities per year.

rocqua 10y ago

The bias can't be larger than child mortality though, which is 0.59% in the US according the us CIA factbook.