4 ms·

A lot of connections made in that article, with no data to back any of it.

• dang 10y ago
  This is the kind of shallow, uncharitable dismissal that we need less of on Hacker News. Obviously a popular news treatment isn't going to supply "data". When it comes to the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth, you could hardly be more wrong, since apart from everything else they were champions of empirical observation.
  • blazespin 10y ago
    Maybe a little less paywall nytimes on HN as well. I dunno, but I find a lot of their journalism is just 90% padding. I suspect we see a lot of distrust in media isn't just that they're inaccurate, but they're often filled with non experts trying to sound like experts by padding nonsense speculation into their articles. I mean, is this the same Kate Murphy that wrote "10 richest U.S. presidents before Trump takes top spot" I'm not saying she's bright. She's probably smarter there most and I'd love for her to comment in on HN. But I don't think she should be writing articles titled "Yes it's your parents fault"
    • jayajay 10y ago
      NY Times is like a garbage can full of crinkled up rough drafts of poems, with a crinkled up Scientific American article somewhere near the bottom.
      • sctb 10y ago
        We've asked you to comment civilly and substantively before, so please do this. We have to ban accounts that won't.
        • jayajay 10y ago
          The average user downvotes, flags, or attacks content they disagree with. I have only ever upvoted and responded with effort to people who do the same to me. If you feel like you need to ban me from this community, that is your prerogative.
    • dang 10y ago
      The standard here is to judge each article on its own merit, and this is a good piece, certainly above the median. The title is beyond stupid, but reporters don't write those. We changed it to a representative phrase from the text, as usual with baity titles. On the paywall thing please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989.
  • closed 10y ago
    Not to mention that the article links to a meta-analysis, which is a pretty good place to start!
  • taeric 10y ago
    I both agree and disagree with you. A popular news treatment doesn't have to have supplied all of the data. However, it is free to link or directly reference the data. And a large part of the problem in many reporting places is that the data wasn't actually there. So, I agree we can't hold everyone to a super high standard of "show me the data!" However, I do think we should be moving further in that direction. Anecdotally, in this field it is especially important. Parents get enough crap as it is. Most of it completely unsubstantiated. So, please, less of that crap. If there is advice that can help. Give it and the circumstances that it could help in. If there is a new line that people are investigating, discuss it. But don't over reach on what is capable. Present hypotheses as falsifiable assertions that people are researching. Not as assertions that are merely waiting to be validated.
  • redundant_ 10y ago
    Shut the fuck up, dang. You're a shit moderator, who wants everyone to think happy thoughts. You moderate the wrong people, and fail to deal with the real world in a rational manner.
  • thisrod 10y ago
    To an outsider, this theory sounds like a really hard one to test. The hypothesis is that experiences in infancy condition adult behaviour, so someone would need to track a large cohort of people for decades. That kind of thing is rarely done. And that is just the start. Once it's been shown that bad parents have permanently bad kids, how do you demonstrate causality? Maybe there is a bad people gene that they all have. Maybe the cause is the physical effects of stress during pregnancy. Or the effects of alcohol consumption: no doubt that correlates with the kind of parental behaviour that's being blamed. Sure, you can look at adoption, twins, etc. At that point, we're talking about a really impressive series of experiments, which deserve a bit more than, "it's been scientifically verified," even in a newspaper story.
  • mwexler 10y ago
    Attachment theory within the early areas: lots of great science. Applying it to what feels like every aspect of human interaction and decision making: not so much. Attachment theory was hot in the 90s as well, with lots of not so great studies trying to show impact of attachment style on anything folks could come up with, and I see some of the same errors being repeated today. That being said, where it applies, it's provides a nice explanation of interaction patterns in relationships.