> Some among the medical staff and social workers involved in the case thought that Jenn reacted strangely to the discovery of her children’s injuries. She didn’t show emotion or seem bothered. Her affect was “flat,” according to the D.S.S. report. The hospital’s abuse specialist concluded that the baby girl’s fractures were “diagnostic of physical abuse” and that the bruises were “inflicted.” D.S.S. concluded the boy’s injuries were also the result of abuse. A factor in this determination was that Robbie and Jenn did not have “a plausible explanation” for the injuries. “We had no idea,” Robbie told me later.
What’s perverse is that the state can take your kids away without a trial and on the basis of evidence this flimsy, and the expectation is that you are guilty unless you can provide an explanation they’re happy with. To add insult to this obvious injury, you will be held to account for your affect when dealing with the state apparatus charged with taking your children away and subjected to weird psychologizing by people without any particular psychological expertise (as if there is a correct way to respond to these questions in the first place). A tired and overworked social worker who just came from collecting six kids from a drug den can operationalize a gut feeling that your responses were “flat” and you’ll go to bed that night not knowing where your children are or when (if ever) you’ll get them back.
The idea that this only ever happens to bad people who deserve it is naïve in the extreme, and the annals of CPS are full of cases of outrageous mishandling and overreach.
> But we’re talking about kids, so people turn off their brains and assent to ann extra-legal task force that can swoop in and break up a family on a hunch.
I think the reality is that making an error in either direction can lead to tragic consequences.
Sorry, I deleted that part right after posting it, because I thought it was a little bit uncharitable. But I stand by the general sentiment, and I would just say that in our system of law and government, we have decided to solve this problem in one direction, which is to say that you are innocent until proven guilty. Taking an innocent person’s children away from them is an outrageous harm, and nobody should be subjected to it on the basis that extreme caution may save some other kids someday.
People should not feel guilty about saying plainly, no, you cannot take my children out of their home, just because an abundance of caution might help you prevent some real cases of abuse elsewhere.
His fixation is so intense that it extends to the dinosaurs. What if the real problem with that asteroid 65 million years ago wasn’t a lack of food, but the weak bones that follow a lack of sunlight? “I sometimes wonder,” Dr. Holick has written, “did the dinosaurs die of rickets and osteomalacia?”
Isn't the whole article by a long shot - certainly an interesting counter point, thanks for the links and your thoughts.
True, it's not bad as a thought, I threw it in there to tease others into the full article, it's the suspicion of zeal driven by funding that's the more damaging charge.
Still not as strong as the famous "Dinosaurs are thin at one end, much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the other end" conjecture.
Sure, it is vital, but he claims that lack of vitamin D underlies nearly all diseases of modernity, which isn’t well-established. Meanwhile he was making money selling vitamin D and not disclosing it, which makes his motivation seem suspect. It’s very easy for bias to obliterate the validity of research.
It was published in "Scientific Reports", a known low-quality journal. They are not necessary predatory like some of the truly bad journals, e.g., work in this journal still is supposed to pass the "not a low effort triviality and not obviously wrong" check and there are even some really cool things published in this journal. However, I generally take publications in this journal with a significant grain of salt.
Also, just FYI, "Scientific Reports" is not in a specific subfield -- I have published on quantum computing in this journal. That is not too strange, there are plenty of "generalist" journals that are good, but I thought it could still be useful context to know.
Well, it's been hand wavily described on 50 students with similar socio-economical backgrounds how much more replication would you like? There are also some references to statistics terms so it must have statistical power.
They didn’t address the possibility that some of those views on X come from bots. It depends on your goals, but I’d much rather have a post read closely by fewer humans who are really engaging with it, versus lots of fleeting engagement including from bots.
Click bait-y title, for a study about mice. I’m fundamentally skeptical about both click bait-y titles and studies about mice (and the inferences made about humans).
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