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I liked how Matt Yglesias summarized the quality of this research: "Kids who grow up in households with lots of pants suitable for tall adults grow up to be tal
by bobcostas55 8y ago
I liked how Matt Yglesias summarized the quality of this research: "Kids who grow up in households with lots of pants suitable for tall adults grow up to be tall as adults."
Making causal claims without accounting for genetic confounds is simply pseudoscience, there are no excuses.
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- drb91 8y agoSuggesting genetics is responsible instead (as opposed to any other variable) is no less pseudoscience. If only we could find some smart parents and get them to deny their kids books, we’d know for sure!
- hackinthebochs 8y agoSuggesting that genetics could be the causative factor isn't pseudoscience. It's pointing out that this study cannot disambiguate between the two, and so claiming causation is false.
- drb91 8y agoThe “claim” the original poster complained about also hedged with the word “could”—it’s in the title ffs. I am really tired of people talking about correlation and causation and completely ignoring carefully hedged phrases. Can we save them for when articles actually make concrete claims about causal links? There’s still interesting stuff here to discuss, and you can even soapbox your favorite theory. But there’s little to gain from actually discussing the (obvious) lack of causal link here. Unless you can point out how you’d improve the study—it’s not entirely obvious to me what the next step would be as I’m not a scientist.
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- jasode 8y ago>The “claim” the original poster complained about also hedged with the word “could”—it’s in the title ffs. Fyi... in the abstract of the actual paper that the article is based on, the authors used less hedging and suggested more of a cause & effect: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X18300607* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X1...
- dragonwriter 8y agoIt also indicates that the conclusion is based on controlling for the major social confounding factors that are typically also viewed as key intermediary mechanisms by which genetic factors influence the outcomes of interest, including both own occupation and educational attainment and parental educational attainment. Even if the underlying reality is that growing up around books is an effect of a shared hidden (genetic or otherwise) cause, the fact that it is a predictor even after for controlling for the identified alternative factors is quite a significant result. (Though, as other comments point out, self-reporting may be a problem, though “people that are more successful than expected for their occupation, education, and parental education tend to overreport the number of books they grew up with compared to less successful individuals” would be an interesting result in its own way.)
- hackinthebochs 8y agoYou're right that the headline is cautious enough not to misrepresent the content of the study. I think controlling for parent and child educational attainment, which likely subsumes much of the possible confounders, is sufficient to claim a plausible causative effect of the presence of books.
- EthanHeilman 8y agoOr lock a child in a room full of books for several hours each day as Liebnitz's father's will required to be done to Liebnitz (this may be an apocryphal story).
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- badpun 8y agoThere’s plenty of smart people who don’t read books, they shouldn’t be hard to find for a study.
- EthanHeilman 8y agoIt doesn't even need to be genetic. People who deeply value learning and knowledge are likely to transmit those values to their charges, those people are also likely to own lots of books.
- gumby 8y ago> "Kids who grow up in households with lots of pants suitable for tall adults grow up to be tall as adults." Parenting is rife with cargo cult activity. Even (or perhaps especially) in places like Palo Alto where you'd think parents would have some understanding of statistics and causality.
- microcolonel 8y agoI think that there's an uncanny valley for statistics: Some people don't care about statistics and prefer to operate on philosophy, some people know about statistics but generally choose not to act on them because they know they don't understand, but a lot of people are aware enough of statistics to use them, and not skilled enough with them to know what conclusions they can draw.
- algo646464 8y agoHow about: "Kids who grow up in households full of gym/sports equipments, grow up to be muscular/athletic". The quality of this research may indeed be poor, but the "tall pants" analogy seems disingenuous.
- sanderjd 8y agoThis is a closer analogy. It has the same "sounds right" appeal, while sharing the problem with confounding variables. But Yglesias' analogy does a much better job of illustrating the problem; it is purposefully absurd in a way that quickly leads to the desired explanation. I'm finding it interesting to consider all three scenarios together. What is the similarly between your analogy and the book study that makes them sound right while the pants analogy sounds wrong? I contend that it is the aspect of growth through practice. My intuition is that these three scenarios exist on a spectrum with regards to how much affect practice has. It is clear that working out a lot results in more muscles, and it's clear that trying on tall pants a lot does not result in becoming tall. To me, it's also clear that reading a lot of books "exercises" some sort of book-reading "muscle". But it's less clear what the follow-on effects of exercising that muscle might be. It's also not clear whether growing up with either gym equipment or books around usually results in heavy use of those things!
- pram 8y agoAt a very basic level, it gives you experience. “Mileage” is important in mastery of subjects.
- Alex3917 8y ago> Making causal claims without accounting for genetic confounds is simply pseudoscience, there are no excuses. This study was done in response to the Scarborough and Dobrich paper that found that how much parents read to their children (generally) isn't correlated with children's future reading ability, but how many books are in their household is a positive predictor of future reading ability. It's one of the most famous and surprising findings in all of social science. I'd suggest rather than the authors not "understanding science" or whatever, perhaps it's more likely that their target audience wasn't people on HN who would complain without knowing anything about the field. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273229784710100 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027322978...
- 131012 8y agoIt is ethically impossible to ask for DNA samples to every participants in a social science study. Parent OP comment is equivalent than stating that social science is impossible. As any opinion, it can be held, and yet some people may find it ludicrous. As for the conclusion of the study, it is rather mild and has been known for a while: social class has impacts on people, especially on education related outcome.
- jerf 8y ago"but how many books are in their household is a positive predictor of future reading ability." It will be interesting to see how this updates over time. My children are not physically surrounded by books, but they've got Amazon Freetime and nearly blanket permission to use it, which they take advantage of quite a bit. It's a lot more easy access to books than I had at their age.
- JackFr 8y agoOn top of that, the factor under consideration was self-reported: 'Respondents, who ranged in age from 25 to 65, were asked to estimate how many books were in their house when they were 16 years old.' It's very likely that avid readers will overreport the books, while reluctant readers are likely to underreport.
- Izkata 8y agoAnd then there's those of us where the metric is invalid anyway because we checked them out from the library instead, having a different set of books every week.
- sharadov 8y agoLOL. The fact remains that when you have a household full of books, it means that your parents or the people in your household READ. Period. It says that learning is emphasized. Screw genetics, you will read.
- kurlberg 8y agoAlready Freakonomics noted/claimed that reading to kids makes little difference to educational outcome, whereas having lots books at home matters. The following explanation (taken from https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1633286&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1633286&page=1) was given: "Well, no," he continued. "Much more likely is that any family that has 100 children's books in the home is likely to be pretty highly educated to begin with, is starting out with a pretty high IQ, and values or treasures or rewards education to begin with."
- dang 8y agoThis comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." It's embarrassing to see HN users reflexively posting (and upvoting) five-second internet tropes to swipe something away. We need to avoid that if we're to have substantive conversation. Criticism is fine, but when criticizing, you owe it both to the material and to the community to engage specifically with specific content. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cm2012 8y agoI usually love your moderation, dang, and agree with you 99.99% of the time. But I think the parent here's criticism of the article does add something - the idea of genetics as a powerful confounding variable. He could have expanded on it, but it didn't add nothing.
- snowwrestler 8y ago"Accounting for genetic confounds" is extremely difficult--so difficult that no one in the world knows how to do it reliably--for basically any aspect of human behavior. So the dismissal reads like "there's no excuse for not doing an extremely difficult thing that no one knows how to do reliably." I don't find that to be a useful or informative comment, so I agree with dang's approach here.
- firebones 8y agoI give the post credit in that it provoked your comment and some potentially enlightening discussion for someone not entirely familiar with the study of human behavior (like me). For instance, I would have thought that twin studies might be considered reliable for purposes of accounting for genetic confounds with respect to aspects of human behavior. It sounds from your comment that they are not. On the OP getting warned, it wasn't immediately clear to me if the objection was more about a) knowledge that Matthew Yglesias didn't read the study and therefore was not in a position to summarize his analysis with a pithy analogy and be quoted, b) the use of any pithy analogy itself, or c) the use of an analogy that seemed to explain a confounding issue? There seemed to be some additional, non-obvious context missing (at least to me) that led to the warning.
- crimsonalucard 8y agoCorrelation does not equal causation but it must exist for causation to occur. I wouldn't dismiss a correlation on those grounds.