Sure they did. Think how relatively easy it was back then to invent A Genuinely Novel Human Sexual Activity.
Good article. Except for the very last line/paragraph (but that's not what you were posting about).
Except for the very last line/paragraph
No kidding. Fuck off, NYT.
Babies also can perform a kind of addition and subtraction, anticipating the relative abundance of groups of dots that are being pushed together or pulled apart, and looking longer when the wrong number of dots appears.
What's wrong with that?
Last line on the last page. The last couple paragraphs are about what an awesome mother she is, because focusing on a scientist's family life is a perfectly standard part of an article on any scientist's research, regardless of their gender, and only a paranoid would think differently.
I'm just irked that everything is on three different pages because of the clicks and the counting thereof.
More seriously, I do hope I live long enough to where most of the simple-minded nature/nurture strawmen are relegated to the rubbish heap (or at least the sideline, there almost certainly continue to be political hay to be made from them). But it really us among the greatest stories that could be told, and it appears that we are getting to the point where we can tease it out.
So they went to the supermom work/life anxiety. My guess was that they were going to go with "how does this research affect my toddler's ability to get into the fanciest preschool." Another classic NY Times option, the size and location of her apartment, was irrelevant because it was in Boston, but you know that if she was a Columbia prof that would have featured prominently. The NY Times aspirational UMC minimum, the name of the Ivy League college she went to, was at least marginally relevant to the profile.*
*Is there any New Yorker profile of any American that fails to mention which college they went to? I'm going with "no."
So they went to the supermom work/life anxiety.
I'd think anybody with actual supermom work/life anxiety wouldn't bother to read the newspaper and if they did wouldn't bother to read clear to the end.
7.last: It's like the New Yorker equivalent of the cum shot.
They also failed to talk about the most interesting aspect of her research, which has to do with what (in humans) ties together the various systems of core knowledge.
because focusing on a scientist's family life is a perfectly standard part of an article on any scientist's research, regardless of their gender, and only a paranoid would think differently
Especially the part where the article considers whether Spelke is smarter than her husband and daughter. Totally standard!
I don't know what y'all are so uptight about. THey clearly were just trying to inoculate her against the inevitable, "That scientist only experiments with infants so that s/he can steal their souls!" accusation.
Which is definitely wrong.
That must be why they didn't mention it. It would be awkward to include in a generally fawning profile.
There's also the sentence in which we are told that the scientist doesn't act like her months-old subjects:
Yet Dr. Spelke herself never fusses out or turns rote.
Well, good! Glad to know she's not having meltdowns at the lab when she doesn't get her nap on time. (I don't think that's necessarily sexism, just a hamhanded, too-cute transition.)
If it isn't language, it must be math.
Especially the part where the article considers whether Spelke is smarter than her [...] daughter.
Yes, but who's prettier?
just a hamhanded, too-cute transition
Possibly even more pervasive at the NYT than UMC aspirationalism.
BTW, the other day I saw a car with a license plate frame that said, The Gray Lady, and I thought it an odd perk for subscribers, but apparently there's a boat or something in Nantucket.
She thinks language.
He says thinking.
Glad to know she's not having meltdowns at the lab when she doesn't get her nap on time.
Happens to me all the time.
Speaking of children in neuroscience, I was irrationally annoyed recently by a cinema ad for Haribo (specifically, Starmix). It basically appropriated the famous Stanford marshamallow experiment (not to be confused with the prison experiment) to argue that Haribo is irresistible. Fair enough, Haribo is irresistible. But the experiment wasn't about the relative resistibility of foodstuffs, dammit.
My kids might have been subjects in those studies. We've taken them to the Harvard lab for developmental studies since they were babies and some of the models sound like what they did. Each session you get $5 and either a stuffed animal or a dippy cup. (Honestly, it really is $5, ostensibly for transportation expenses.)
Dippy cup was a different study looking at chewing tobacco effects on child attention span.
You get $10 if your baby can pass on the marshmallow.
$5? Stuffed animal? Sippy cup?
I'm listening.
29: Compared to nothing for passing on the corn.
People who take the sippy cup and not the five dollars are better hydrated as adults.
The hardest part is when you bring the baby home and he screams for his wire mommy.
Were they special Harvard-branded sippy cups?
She thinks language.
which is definitely wrong
Well, you have to admit that language does seem to get its fingers in a lot of cognitive processes.
They are! Harvard logo and words "future scientist". I'll bring one to the next meetup. They're kind of faded from going through the dishwasher, the last several years they take the stuffed animal instead (also wearing little Harvard branded shirts- I think we have about 10 different species).
My kid does these studies too! Also the ones at BC. In addition to the fat cash we've got a couple of t-shirts and a sweet bouncy ball made of translucent blue plastic with red LEDs inside that flash when you bounce it.
also wearing little Harvard branded shirts
[Sniff.] Good times, good times.
Well, you have to admit that language does seem to get its fingers in a lot of cognitive processes.
I would claim the causality there runs the wrong way. A lot of cognitive processes get their fingers into language.
(Incidentally, when I said "definitely wrong" above I meant "definitely wrong" in an "I think it's wrong but it should be clear that I don't actually know shit compared, for instance, Spelke".)
Anyhow: her claim is that the recursive, combinatorial processes involved in universal grammar are what allow for general combinatorial cognition, which requires a pretty strong claim about the innateness of grammar, which claim I don't really buy. That there is some combinatorial faculty that is involved in both language and other kinds of more abstract, syncretic thinking seems pretty difficult to argue with.
I've never looked into theories about the innateness of grammar. It's one of those things that sounds interesting at first, but gets really tedious once you try to read something in depth. Like D&D.
OT: Not to derail, but lately I've been struck by the number of people I have seen in public reading the books that I have tended to think of as marketing/Internet comment fodder, rather than narrative or informative works: e.g., In Defense of Food, Fifty Shades of Pr0n for Your Mom, some dating manuals with absurd titles. Am I the only one surprised that people read such things, rather than just fight about them online?
Do you (you probably meaning Tweety) know if she works with kids from less-than-ideal backgrounds? I know that before age 3, Mara could give turn-by-turn directions (by pointing) to places she'd only ever visited once before, and it's my understanding that this is typical of little kids who are hypervigilant and have been left alone a lot as babies. In her case, I really think she did a mental Hansel-and-Gretel trail so she could always find her way back to somewhere if adults ended up letting her down again. It's been about a year since she started deliberately "forgetting" things and testing us to make sure we could give the right answer, and I think she no longer pays that much attention, but I know her teachers also agreed that she was very unusual in basically knowing where everyone and everything was at all times.
42: When I worked at Borders ten years ago, I was shocked that about 9/10 books sold were either The Prayer of Jabez or Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Who Moved My Cheese? was on its way out. Behind that was probably romance and Af-Am queer-curious pr0n (of the Homo Thug ilk), and behind that, at a distance, music CDs and books about pregnancy. Oh, and magazines. Lots of people buy magazines.
43: I got the impression from the article that she was mostly working with infants in an attempt to subtract out effects of prior experience, so even very young children might not be her thing if the goal was specifically to identify learned skills.
I've said many times that when I've slipped myself into position on the subway to figure out what big fat tasty book some sexy-looking person is reading, it's always fucking Harry Potter.
I am puzzled at In Defense of Food being in this Flippanter-defined category.
Happy May Day! Remember Haymarket! Revenge! Revenge! Workingfolx, arm yourselves and appear in full force!
The time has come when the silence of Spies, Fischer, Engel, Parsons and Lingg is louder than the voices which were strangled 125 years ago!
Hurrah for Anarchy!
45: I just wasn't sure, since she said most kids can't manage to judge based on wall color until age 5 and I'm 100% sure Mara would now and would have when I met her before her third birthday, though this may get us back to the conversation about whether/how much kids know color.
I hope Spelke knows not to get in too deep with the subjects of her studies and get eaten by them like Timothy Treadwell.
43, 45, 49: I think she works with kids up to like six or so at least (in order to get a sense of the larger developmental trajectory). I suspect that most of her work is with non-deprived UMC babies, because 1. it mostly attracts motivated parents in the greater Camberville area and 2. a kid with recent or ongoing emotional trauma might not be as likely to finish the experiment without getting uspet (which is not to say that they would preclude them, just that it might be harder to get usable data).
As far as the colored wall thing, I think the article was a little incoherent about what that actually entails; very young children (like, certainly early toddlers, but possibly even infants) are generally able to navigate by landmark (such as "next to the colored wall"), as well as by what I'm going to inaccurately call cardinal direction (the upper left-hand corner of the room), but they can't integrate those two (core) systems, so they can't for instance manage "to the left of the colored wall".
I don't think I did a terribly good job of explaining that, but anyhow, my suspicion is that landmark-based navigation in a three-year-old (which is what I would describe turn-by-turn pointing as) would be basically comprehensible under Spelke's framework.
fucking Harry Potter.
Don't give up on the people reading those, some of that fanfic genre is pretty well written.
How do anarchists agree to anarchize on May Day?
I'm briefly above ground on the subway, so let me preface my comment by saying that I haven't read the comments. Those final paragraphs of the article *were* atrocious, but I heard something similar on Radio 4 Claudia Hammond was doing a profile of Mary Ainsworth--who lived babies and really pioneered the scientific study of attachment in infants-and they mentioned her regret over never having children of her own. It wasn't quite as bad as the Times, but still. They might have done the same for someone like Bowlby. Of course, I know nothing about whether he had children which absence is a kind of data point of its own.
I don't know who Bowlby was but if he was a male baby scientist there's the other possibility he could be portrayed as an amoral monster like BF Skinner or JB Watson.
Only a monster would have misrepresented the travesty of ping-pong he trained those pigeons to do as the real thing.
I used "preclude" instead of "exclude" in 52. Horrible!
re: 46
Heh. I noticed someone in the tea room at work the other day reading a book with a brightly coloured cover. When I took a sneaky look, it was some grammar of medieval Tibetan. </naieldoB>
57: He was a British psychoanalyst who gave Mary Ainsworth her first post-doc like job. She had followed her husband to London with no job and applied for a position at, I believe, the Tavistock clinic.
I'm just irked that everything is on three different pages because of the clicks and the counting thereof.
I have been chastised for not linking the single-page version, and now I shall pay it forward to LB.
I brought a Kindle back from the US last week. So no-one will be able to sneakily scope out what I'm reading on the train. I wasn't sure I'd like it, but it's pretty great.
Did you have the proper license to export our secret technology?
OT: Just overheard a conversation between our office manager and a HVAC guy. His basic argument was that our office's average temperature over the past week was 72 degrees and therefore we had no grounds to complain. On the veldt, I would have brained him with a rock.
1. it mostly attracts motivated parents in the greater Camberville area
Ding ding ding! We are, in fact, on the lookout for things like this for the upcoming spawn. Because, hey, there's only so many experiments you can run yourself.
So no-one will be able to sneakily scope out what I'm reading on the train.
It does get you past the first cut of "potentially interesting", though. People's electronics on trains:
* Notebook: Work (boring)
* Phone: Either work (boring) or games (mindless)
* Kindle: Book (possibilities)
Of course people could be running an e-reader on their phone or their notebook, but IRL how many are?
I read PDFs on my phone all the time. I figure the nearsighted squint is extra sexy.
It's easier to use my phone to read PDFs than it is to use my phone to make phone calls. Whoever designed my phone assumed (correctly) that making actual phone calls isn't as important as the other features.
Why on earth would you have your kids participate in these studies? $5? It's not like the kids get anything out of it. No way some Harvard neuroscientist gets to monkey around with my kid's brain.
71: Science is neat, and they're not going to hurt the kids.
I've been able to sneakily scope someone's Kindle on the bus enough to tell that it was Russian. I bet with more time and effort I could identify the type of book (if English).
It's not like the kids get anything out of it.
Actually they often think it's fun as shit.
In some of the studies infants who are too young to manipulate objects are given velcro mittens so they can pick things up.
In some of the studies they are shown videos where various colored blocks have conflicts and adventures, which, if you're a baby, are incredibly fascinating.
In some of the experiments they actually get to pick toys out of boxes and shit like that.
Other experiments (for instance the numerosity experiments) are basically magic shows. Where did the other dots come from? Where?
Of course people could be running an e-reader on their phone or their notebook, but IRL how many are?
I do, when I don't have my Kindle on me. I also regularly use my phone's RSS reader (possibilities!) on the tube.
And of course in all of the studies you can learn more about what your preverbal infant does and does not understand and enjoy, but who wants that.
I bet with more time and effort I could identify the type of book (if English).
With more time and effort you could ask them what they're reading.
I dunno, you get some half-baked lab result that hasn't been tested against anything. And I'm not so sanguine about the kids not being fucked with. Experimental psychology has a prett shitty track record here. Most likely harmless, but why take the risk for no gain?
What's the track record you're thinking of that involves damage to the subjects?
I'm comfortable knowing that I wasn't really torturing that guy. No real damage done.
I'm baffled about what injury you could cause a child by showing them videos of colored shaped or letting them play with toys while their parent is in the room. That seems about four hundred steps below daycare as far as potential level of danger goes.
Child psychology labs are cheap daycare.
Under those conditions, I think you're fine. If the parents aren't there, the track record isn't great.
83: I was assuming the parent had to wait in another room with a two-way mirror or camera, to prevent coaching, but on second thought little kids would be agitated without them around, and some kinds of studies might not care about coaching as much as others. I'm still kind of surprised they get enough volunteers for so little payment, though. I don't even have kids and I'm already thinking that there's never enough time in the day.
Well, 83 doesn't sound too bad, and is likely harmless. Still, there was that monster study and John Watson and what have you. I know a guy who was in the Stanford prison experiment and got pretty fucked up by it. But I'm sure that's all ancient history and nothing like that happens now and no scientist would ever manipulate children in a potentially harmful way for research ends.
Okay, 1939? Any study that predates Dr Mengele's best-known work doesn't have much to say about the risks of a modern psych lab.
86: I think the parents will often stand behind them or at least someplace where they can't see the presented stimuli.
Also I think you are underestimating the draw of having something 1. intellectually engaging and 2. outside the house for new parents.
86: If you've got an infant, what's eating all the time is caring for the infant. Spending the day in a lab isn't any more timeconsuming than spending the day in a playground.
88: Not to mention that the field as a whole is paranoid as hell thanks to past abuses. You're less likely to be exposed to something horrible in a psych study than you are channel surfing.
But I'm sure that's all ancient history and nothing like that happens now and no scientist would ever manipulate children in a potentially harmful way for research ends.
Hence we should spend our lives treating scientists like we'd treat sex offenders?
Admittedly, I don't think scientists should be allowed to sell ice cream from trucks.
My theory is that if someone has an incentive to do something, they'll likely do it, and there's at least some incentive for research scientists conducting experiments on children's mental development to fuck with your kid's mind (or, at least, not worry too much about whether they're fucking with your kid's mind) for experimental purposes, constrained by ethical guidelines. I'm sure almost everything done is harmless, but how would you know?
The Stanford prison study was in the 60s, admittedly not with small children, and the guy who ran it is super-famous. And these are just the things that me, someone with zero knowledge of the field, remembers off hand.
88: Things have clearly gotten better, but in 1946 the U.S. government started a study where people were deliberately infected with syphilis.
I'm with Halford. This, in particular, bothered me when I initially read the article:
"If I reach for a corner of a book and grasp it, I expect the rest of the book to come with me, but not a chunk of the table," said Phil Kellman, Dr. Spelke's first graduate student, now at the University of California, Los Angeles.
A baby has the same expectation. If you show the baby a trick sequence in which a rod that appears to be solid moves back and forth behind another object, the baby will gape in astonishment when that object is removed and the rod turns out to be two fragments.
So, you're arbitrarily fucking with babies' expectations (perhaps hard-wired expectations!) about how the world is supposed to work, by creating the illusion that things in fact work differently. And we're sure that won't have any harmful effects? Might this impact their confidence in their own mental models? How does this impact their development?
I mean, I'd expect it's more likely than not that this sort of thing wouldn't be harmful, but I don't know whether that's been rigorously tested.
I'm sure almost everything done is harmless, but how would you know?
Mostly because it's the sort of thing you wouldn't worry about at all if you saw it outside a lab context?
This discussion is making me think that many infant studies have some of the same intrinsic population selection problems as those that sample the space of undergrad and grad students hanging around research universities.
So, you're arbitrarily fucking with babies' expectations (perhaps hard-wired expectations!) about how the world is supposed to work, by creating the illusion that things in fact work differently. And we're sure that won't have any harmful effects? Might this impact their confidence in their own mental models? How does this impact their development?
Next thing we know everyone will be fucking with kids' brains by displaying images of characters being smashed flat by anvils to no lasting ill effect.
Arbitrarily fucking with babies' expectations is basically how you make them laugh. I wouldn't worry about that.
t, and there's at least some incentive for research scientists conducting experiments on children's mental development to fuck with your kid's mind (or, at least, not worry too much about whether they're fucking with your kid's mind) for experimental purposes, constrained by ethical guidelines.
And ethics committees. And funding bodies. And reputational concerns. And so on. Regardless, I'm not suggesting parents blindly hand their children over to anyone who says they're doing a study. I presume all but the worst parents ask what the study involves before letting their children take part.
99: do you know many children who "gape in astonishment" when they see images of characters being smashed flat by anvils to no lasting ill effect? I don't. At that age, they understand what's going on. The article certainly gave the impression that the babies don't, necessarily, and that this researcher is basically pulling the rug out from underneath them.
and that this researcher is basically pulling the rug out from underneath them.
If you do it with a flick of the wrist, the baby doesn't even move.
So, you're arbitrarily fucking with babies' expectations (perhaps hard-wired expectations!) about how the world is supposed to work, by creating the illusion that things in fact work differently.
Babies gape with astonishment when your face reappears from behind your hands. Their expectations are pretty fucked to begin with.
And one of the very few entertaining things to do with or for a baby that age is to make it gape in astonishment somehow. That's a basic mode of playing with babies.
I mean, kids are very resilient. I'm sure we'd have trouble detecting any identifiable lasting harm if the researcher just took the babies and arbitrarily spanked them. But I don't think the same parents would be so eager to sign up for that.
Halford's concerns about whether these studies somehow harm kids are way off base. This ain't the Stanford Prison Experiment. Most of these studies amount to doing magic tricks in front of infants, almost always with parents present. Sometimes they get to play with some toys or boxes with blinking lights. Any kid who's traumatized by that is going to get eaten alive in the real world. Maybe you could argue the 'Strange Situation' paradigm upsets some kids, but again, it's probably not worse than an anxious moment at the mall. In what the modern era of developmental psych I can think of exactly zero cases where an experimental paradigm has even been suspected of leading to harm. I guess you never know, but casting aspersions on the field based on some free-floating suspicion about Those Evil Behavioral Scientists is a bit offensive.
Any kid who's traumatized by that is going to get eaten alive in the real world.
Along with most of the kids who weren't traumatized.
Also, the world doesn't always conform to your expectations; you need to learn that, too.
102: I presume all but the worst parents ask what the study involves before letting their children take part.
For instance avoid:
Children's Dietary Institute
Gingerbread House Annex
123 Deep Forest Lane
Babies gape with astonishment when your face reappears from behind your hands.
Right! And that's because they're still learning object permanence! So that gaping in astonishment is part of the process of them learning something new and important about the world.
The experiment is doing the opposite--it's taking something that appears to be hard-wired knowledge about the world, and "teaching" babies (by tricking them) that it's actually false.
And again, I'm not saying it's actually harmful, just that it bothered me that I didn't see anything to suggest that the researchers had even considered the question. Maybe they have.
I dunno, a quick Google search for "unethical psychological experiment" and "children" brings up tons of case studies from the 60s and 70s, or not that long ago. Maybe absolutely everything has changed, but the bottom line is that the number one concern of the research scientist will be the research results, not avoiding harm to your kid.
IANAS, but comparing the 10 or 15 minutes of experience in a lab to the plethora of information a baby is getting every other second of every single day, I just can't get that worried about it.
Have you ever heard of psychological damage to a child blamed on early exposure to special effects, magic tricks, or other apparently physically impossible sights? I mean, babies have to be capable of learning that some things are illusions, because the real world incorporates illusions, and babies aren't systematically sheltered from them.
113: Look, of course in a suitably skeptical frame of mind one never 'really knows' whether this might do something weird to an infant. Granted. But take a step back. They see maybe a minute or two of video, or a little skit involving these funny objects. And they look a little tiny bit longer (a second, maybe) at the scenes that involve the funny objects, from which we infer that something about them violates their expectations. Again: these are essentially brief magic tricks. We'd all better hope that human minds don't break *that* easily...
Even the simplest studies (2 dots plus 3 dots equals 6 dots! Gape!) are IRB reviewed, so someone considered the question.
Now when he was older and could agree to it we let the oldest kid do a more involved experiment involving an EEG and an fMRI, but that involved real money (like, $140 for 2 hours) which for a 6 year old is like winning the lottery. And he thought it was cool wearing lots of wires on his head.
Oh, if it's just 10 or 15 minutes then it's probably no big deal. I assumed the babies were kept in these controlled artificial environments for weeks or months at a time.
It doesn't seem like you'd get much data in 15 minutes.
Also I am a terrible person for putting chocolate chips in the shape of a face on pancakes and feeding them to my two year old because now he thinks you're supposed to bite off the face of every brown person you meet.
108: Come on, showing a baby a magic trick is akin to randomly slapping it? Really? Really.
the babies were kept in these controlled artificial environments for weeks or months at a time
Those Cambervillains. They just drop their babies off and go about their lives.
I assumed the babies were kept in these controlled artificial environments for weeks or months at a time.
Possibly that's what's blocking your sewer pipes. Who knows where psychologists could be keeping babies?
What you're saying seems very spun-glass-y, urple.
OTOH, in this context it is probably a good thing to continue to have very strict ethics committees, even with the tradeoff of significantly complicating researchers' everyday work. (I'm sure there are myriad ways they complicate work unhelpfully, but still, in abstract.)
117 -- sure, I'm not saying that these particular experiments necessarily pose a significant risk. But it's pretty hard as a layperson to know one way or another. Concerns are obviously alleviated if the parents are there and the testing is non-extreme, but there's an incentive to get better research results, I'm sure.
I assumed the babies were kept in these controlled artificial environments for weeks or months at a time.
Seriously? Is Halford under this illusion as well? Because that would explain the knee-jerk opposition to any research being done on young children.
114: Do you actually know any developmental psychologists? Because I know quite a few, and I can't think of a single one who would run a study that they believed would harm a child just to get the results. And let's not define things down here--I mean *harm*, not 'momentarily unsettle' or 'cause a second of puzzlement'. Almost everything is weird to infants, but like most of us they get used to it. You can find exceptional cases, sure, but they are massive outliers plucked from a vast sea of basically fine research practices.
No, I didn't think they were kept in controlled environments for months at a time. I just don't see a benefit to subjecting your kid to this stuff sufficient to overcome my skepticism about the scientists' incentives, and my inability to effectively monitor or know what they're up to. In practice it may be that particular experiments are very obviously no big deal at all, but I'm just not seeing a big upside to having my kids be lab monkeys.
Why are developmental psychologists today so ethical, when their most famous predecessors 30-40 years ago weren't?
You can find exceptional cases, sure, but they are massive outliers plucked from a vast sea of basically fine research practices.
Probably, but why get involved in the game at all?
Yeah, $5 and a sippy cup for months of taking your kid away probably isn't a good deal. Unless they provided the meals and diapers at no charge.
130: This seems like an overstatement even about psychologists thirty/forty years ago, doesn't it? I mean, schoolteachers sexually abuse children: googling it gets you hundreds of different instances. This does not make sending your child to school a significant risk.
Right, but your kids are required by law to go to school and need to go to school to learn. You get more than $5 and a sippy cup.
My theory is that if someone has an incentive to do something, they'll likely do it...
Going broader, this heuristic of yours doesn't really help when there are multiple incentives pushing in different directions, as is normally the case. There's the professional need to get results; there's also laws, social regard, ethics committees, etc. It's rarely possible to tell which incentive triumphs using a priori reasoning - one has to learn more about the specific situation.
No, I didn't think they were kept in controlled environments for months at a time. I just don't see a benefit to subjecting your kid to this stuff sufficient to overcome my skepticism about the scientists' incentives, and my inability to effectively monitor or know what they're up to. In practice it may be that particular experiments are very obviously no big deal at all, but I'm just not seeing a big upside to having my kids be lab monkeys.
Ah, the precautionary principle. Better keep them away from vaccines and medical tests as well. Also other children, and definitely adults.
131: Because the risks are infinitesimal, and the rewards are (1) advancing science, which is honestly a good thing even if it's not a benefit limited solely to your own child, and (2) an afternoon's amusement, which is worth some risk (oh, don't lie, Halford. I know you've crossed streets with your kid just to get her someplace you think she'll be entertained. Was that kind of daredevil behavior really justified?).
Probably, but why get involved in the game at all?
Cheap daycare.
There's the professional need to get results; there's also laws, social regard, ethics committees, etc.
Right, but at least in the very recent past, the most professionally successful research psychologists were the same ones engaging in questionable behavior. Zimbardo, the guy who conducted the Stanford prison experiment, came and gave a lecture to an undergrad class I took and was treated as a titan of the field. I know the prison experiment in particular produced a lot of reflection, but certainly the incentives weren't "you do something questionable with kids, shunned forever."
136 -- vaccines keep them from getting sick. It's worth more than $5 and a sippy cup to be part of someone else's experiment.
129: This is a very wrong way to think about decision-making -- splitting things into 'unnecessary' so no risk, however small, is acceptable, and ordinary things to do, so you don't think about risks much at all.
Also I am a terrible person for putting chocolate chips in the shape of a face on pancakes and feeding them to my two year old because now he thinks you're supposed to bite off the face of every brown person you meet.
Absolutely. Those chocolate chips are full of refined sugar which is rotting your two year old's teeth and brain.
at least in the very recent past, the most professionally successful research psychologists were the same ones engaging in questionable behavior.
As a generalization, this just isn't true. (A) The Stanford Prison experiment isn't very recent. I'm forty, and it was from the summer I was born. (B) Come up with a name other than Zimbardo that you're going to call 'recent'.
Why are developmental psychologists today so ethical, when their most famous predecessors 30-40 years ago weren't?
I'm pretty sure there's a lot more institutional oversight of professors today than there was then. Wikipedia says IRBs were mandated by law in 1974.
I didn't mean weeks or months at a time like they were locked away for 24 hours a day in cages. I just meant that I assumed that parents would sign their kids up for a research session, which would be something like an 8 or 10 weeks from 10-12 every Monday and Wednesday, or whatever. Not a single 10 minute session.
Why are developmental psychologists today so ethical, when their most famous predecessors 30-40 years ago weren't?
Because now they have to get approval from IRBs and get informed consent by the parents of the children involved before they start doing anything.
(I actually don't think that's why, but given a mindset where everyone is out to get Better Results, helpless babies be damned, it seems like a convincing enough reason).
Have you ever heard of psychological damage to a child blamed on early exposure to special effects, magic tricks, or other apparently physically impossible sights?
I still wake up at night screaming "WHERE'S MY NOSE, DADDY? GIVE ME BACK MY NOSE!"
129: my skepticism about the scientists' incentives
While fucked-up experiments on babies are not completely unheard-of, Spelke doesn't look to be in Little Albert territory.
Also avoid:
Looking for a large number of five year-olds for a one-time study.
-- Center for the Investigation of Eternal Questions
142: sugar doesn't rot your brain. Eating brown people, on the other hand, might, if they're Foré.
Studies I've been involved with that involved small children (a) took a shit ton of work to get approval for, with the ethics boards being really whiny about all imaginable potential negative effects and whether you had a plan for dealing with that and an explanation of why the benefits of the study outweigh the tiny tiny risks, and (b) expect you to pay subjects (or their parents) about $20/hour.
Maybe the sippy cups are really fancy?
Again, what bothers me is the idea that there's a few specific things we think babies' brains are possibly hard-wired to understand, or at least that they develop an understanding of very early, and so we're going to target those particular specific things, and we're going to try to break those parts of the babies' brains.
I would just like some assurance that they're already run all these tests on babies chimpanzees, and confirmed that they all grow up to be normal chimpanzees, or what have you.
That seems like a crazy way to frame what the scientists are doing. Nobody is trying to break any part of a baby's brain. They are trying to find out what it is that the babies are expecting the world to be like, at what ages/developmental stages.
It's worth more than $5 and a sippy cup to be part of someone else's experiment.
Given the way IRBs work, actually paying some substantial amount could be a bigger problem. You can easily get approval to pay the participant's costs (i.e. $5 for the bus or gas), but if you offered real money, you could have concerns about undue influence*. Also, it is often easier to get participants if you are seeking them in what is clearly a "volunteering" ethos.
Full disclosure: I've never been involved in research with minors, so I don't know how the regulations about consent come into play for the small set.
153: Right, but my point is that no one seems to be going to much length to confirm that broken baby brains isn't a by-product of that.
concerns about undue influence
I wasn't allowed to offer the Rwandan orphans any money because of this. I gave them t-shirts and colored pencils, and I gave the school a lump donation too.
154 gets it right. In an academic context it's almost impossible to get approval to pay people for being involved in an experiment. The IRB inevitably says "If you give people $200 you will get poor people who really need $200 and therefore you will exploit them."
155: I think you're mistaken about that.
This is a very wrong way to think about decision-making -- splitting things into 'unnecessary' so no risk, however small, is acceptable, and ordinary things to do, so you don't think about risks much at all.
Hey! That's my entire worldview you're calling "very wrong" there!
(Not really, but I do have a tendency to it, and it's something that's caused me a huge amount of trouble over the years.)
139: Okay, again, I really have to protest. 'The most professionally successful research psychologists were the same ones engaging in questionable behavior'? This is, ahem, bullshit. The most famous psychologists have NOT done the questionable study you're so focused on--except for the ONE GUY who DID IT.
I'm not going to argue for the merits of the Stanford Prison Experiment, or try to say that some people don't lionize Zimbardo. That's not the issue. You're reaching back to John goddamn Watson for an illustration of the moral depravity created by the research incentives of developmental psych? Here's what happens in the typical study these days. You sit in a room with your infant on your lap. The kid is show a display and they videotape where she looks. (You can't see the display she sees, so that you can't subtly influence what she does.) Then you get your stickers or cup or whatever and go home. If you can find in this paradigm, or anywhere in the research literature now, anything comparable to the Zimbardo study, I'll eat my goddamn hat.
If you think there's some immeasurably small risk here you don't want to take, that's fine. No one's compelled to help out with these studies. If, on the other hand, you want to characterize an entire discipline, let's be a tiny bit more careful.
IRBs
Mostly staffed by other social scientists.
The voice of experience: I was born in 1963, and my family lived in the grad student ghetto at Brown University. My parents lent me out to a psych student buddy when I was six months ot a year old, for a variety of experiments allegedly intended to determine at what age babies become smarter than piegons. My mother beleives that the experimental design, which involved hitting a bar with the left hand to get a reward, made me both left handed and rather uncoordinated, traits that continue to the present.
I on't remember that experiment, but I do recall another one I was involved in during second or third school. It involved matching shapes and finding patterns of random line drawings on a 1970 era computer screen, two afternoons a week after school for several months. It seemed intended to measure the precise moment when a child starts crying because he's trying to play by the rules but the rules keep changing in ways that were totally unfair. I survived that one also. My parents told me I had earned enough money to buy a bicycle, but they may just have said that to stop the crying.
158: maybe I am! That would be good news. But people here certainly seem dismissive of the concern.
152: and so we're going to target those particular specific things, and we're going to try to break those parts of the babies' brains.
Pshaw. Spelke's clearly being a wuss about breaking those babies' brains. No hammers, no rolling pins, no electro-shock... I don't even see any allusion in that article to deployment of Teletubbies.
156: I've never done research with participants outside the U.S. either.
163: It could be that's because the concern seems hilariously overblown and hyperbolic? Just a thought.
Who is on IRBs? Does it pay better than what I do?
Right, but at least in the very recent past, the most professionally successful research psychologists were the same ones engaging in questionable behavior.
To reiterate, I'm not saying that the incentives always go in the direction of virtue. I'm saying that they can go different directions in different situations, as is patently the case, therefore your "incentives" is uselessly oversimplistic.
(Plus their going off the rails seems to be very much the minority of situations in recent memory, what with the institutional counterbalancing that took place after Stanford/Milgram/etc.)
Big blue bags of badly broken baby brains.
160 -- well, you may be right in standing up for your profession now (I don't know, and how would I know) but it's the prominent bad apples that folks will remember, and, if you're right about the field, that's a real PR problem the answer to which is not simply to assert the voice of SCIENCE. You just are in a field that had years of problems that it's now trying to overcome (as I say, my only experience with the field involved lionizing Zimbardo). I don't get bent out of shape when people claim that lawyers are unethical liars, although that's mostly not true; the suspicion is understandable, and it's my professional job to prove people wrong.
My guess was that they were going to go with "how does this research affect my toddler's ability to get into the fanciest preschool."
I was in Manhattan the other day and actually overheard one person telling another person 'my kid scored in the 99th percentile on the nursery school exam'. He was smug about it. I actually interrupted them to confirm what I had heard -- 'did you just say that a preschooler scored in the 99th percentile on an entrance exam'. They grinned and said yes.
They also failed to talk about the most interesting aspect of her research, which has to do with what (in humans) ties together the various systems of core knowledge.
No, they did mention her idea that language integrates the brain in various ways, but it was very hard to evaluate the idea without any detail. It sounded vaguely Chomsky-an. It seems clear that whatever superpower the brain does have is heavily involved with language but that might be different from saying language is that superpower, I don't know.
It depends on the institution and what kinds of research people do. There's supposed to be a mix of hard science, social science, non-science and community members, with "community specialists" for any particular population that is regularly targeted by the institution.
I don't think they get paid anything though. Maybe a course waiver?
If somebody had a very dry sense of humor and endless free time, writing up the protocol deviations and adverse event reports that a modern IRB would get from the Stanford prison experiment might be fun.
Predictably, the child psychologist my parents knew did many more experiments on his own children from infancy forward. Unpredictably, they have grown up to be neither brilliant scholars nor schizophrenics, just ordinary suburbanites.
at what age babies become smarter than piegons.
Has it happened yet?
the experimental design, which involved hitting a bar with the left hand to get a reward, made me both left handed and rather uncoordinated
I'm skeptical.
I stand corrected. I thought they generally had only the one required token "non-scientist".
179: I think it used to be that way back a few years. At any rate, I can remember when it used to be much less formal.
These days you can't use phrases like "will not cause discomfort except to weak -minded people" or "we are excluding women so we don't have to test for differences by gender."
The discussion of IRB boards and the like is somewhat reassuring.
It seems clear that whatever superpower the brain does have is heavily involved with language
Why? Not saying it's wrong, but aside from the fact that we clearly do have language, I'm not sure why this should be obvious.
If you do have birds in your research, can you eat them when you are done with the study?
Because linguistic behavior is one of the areas where our difference from other animals is most obvious? To the extent we're cognitively different from other animals, our capacity for language has to be involved with that difference somehow.
177: Has it happened yet?
Yes, as part of the upgrade from the Lemurian to the Hyperborean Age, babies got +5 think points.
What's not clear to me is that an IRB would even raise a question about an experiment like this. Again, I'm not seeing any indication that they do trial runs on chimpanzees (which wouldn't themselves be determinative, of course, but would at least suggest that someone is thinking about the issue), before moving on to human babies.
171: None of this is supposed to be 'the voice of SCIENCE'. It's not any kind of appeal to authority at all. It's just a simple description of what actually goes on in the kinds of studies that Spelke and countless other dev psych researchers do. From such surprisingly simple procedures, such insights--that's the real magic trick.
I actually thought that, despite its problems, the NYT article was pretty good evidence that dev psych *doesn't* have a PR problem. Top-notch work is getting a decent write up, enabling a lot of non-specialists to understand the structure of our best theories of the infant mind.
Of course, it still may be that folks whose stereotype of psychology was formed decades ago and not updated much since have an erroneous understanding of what goes on in the field now. Hence my little attempt at public education, I guess.
Is there any link between the Lemurian Age and lemurs?
(I'm still disappointed about the lack of connection between "marmot", "marmoset", "marmoreal", and "marmalade", so be gentle here.)
Right, but my point is that no one seems to be going to much length to confirm that broken baby brains isn't a by-product of that.
You're asking for proof of a negative. Somebody is convicted of something heinous at the age of 40, having been through all the tribulations of life, and you require a demonstration that it wasn't somebody showing them a situation where 2+2=5 for fifteen seconds when they were six months old that sent them off the rails? Can't be done.
Mickey Kaus social scientists have inadequately denied blowing goats.
"Is it irresponsible to speculate [about Castro blackmailing Clinton modern scientific research being no better than the Stanford prison experiment? It is irresponsible not to."
I realize who I'm directing this question to, but have you no common sense? Seriously, there are illusions in the world, and babies aren't protected from them. And they don't do any harm that anyone's ever noticed.
190: You could do it. You'd need around 1,000 babies for the study to be sufficiently powered.
"experiment?" should be "experiment]?"
My parents lent me out to Cal as an infant/toddler, and it turned me into an inveterate slacker. I don't remember it at all, so I just assume it was a modified Stanford Baby Prison Experiment. I'm still waiting for my sippy cup.
189. I believe there is. According to the mythology, "Lemuria", the lost continent of the Pacific, left behind a fragment which evolved into Madagascar (since it's fictional, the name is a back formation, obvs.)
189: Is there any link between the Lemurian Age and lemurs?
Yes, very explicitly. The original concept was of a continent which explained similar fossils in Madagascar and India. They were somewhat too broadly classified as lemurs.
185: But our capacity for language could be an effect of some other difference between us and other animals.
Wait, were now using babies to power experiments? That does seem wrong.
My parents lent me out to Cal as an infant/toddler, and it turned me into an inveterate slacker.
I totally read this as "My parents lent me out to Cala as an infant/toddler", and I thought, what an amazing coincidence, but what a great baby sitter.
198: Sure, cause and effect could go any way, but whatever the cognitive differences they have to be involved with language one way or the other.
56: I wish I could say that there was a secret cabal of head anarchists who met in the secret backroom of some club in London, or in a Paris cemetery but really, it mostly is Facebook nowadays. And meetings at radical spaces. Which are not usually very clandestine.
I know I've said this before, but I feel like saying it again, based on last night's vandalism in the Mission: Anarchists are involved with hundreds of projects that promote everything from DIY bike repair and community gardens to free child care and media access for the disenfranchised. Yet the only time you see us in the news is if a bank window gets broken or a Starbuck's gets spraypainted. That kind of thing represents far less than 1% of the annual activities of the anarchist movement in this country, and yet it's the only time people even know we exist. Given that, is it really so surprising that we sometimes glorify vandalism and other property destruction? Anarchists were some of the first people to go back into New Orleans after Katrina to help people clean up and rebuild their communities. How many stories were there about that in the mainstream press?
Meanwhile, the US military murders civilians every fucking day, and yet all we read about in the paper is sob stories about some little girl whose dad is overseas getting a free dog or some shit. If anarchists use violence (and I would argue that by and large, anarchists are some of the least violent people you'll ever meet) it is only because we recognize exactly what the state does: Violence works. We don't like it, it's not the world we want to live in, but it's what we've got and unfortunately, we'll have to put up with it for awhile longer until more folx come around to our way of thinking.
185: well, the typical counter-argument to that is that we're also different from animals in that we build cars, or use autotune, or (more realistically) wear clothes. Are those components of our cognitive differences or are they epiphenomena of whatever the underlying difference is? Same deal with language.
Pwned by ursyne, but I made a stupid analogy.
Seriously, there are illusions in the world, and babies aren't protected from them. And they don't do any harm that anyone's ever noticed.
What sort of illusions are you thinking of?
I think most real-world illusions present an opportunity for the acquisition of knowledge, rather than the destruction of knowledge.
I'm not saying that child psychology experiments are literally like the Stanford prison experiment, just that there's not a huge reason to trust that the experiments are designed to be harmless, that, until recently, avoiding harm has not been priority #1 for these kinds of experiments, and, absent benefit for the child, there's not much reason to do them as a lark. But maybe the IRB system is so well established and vigorous that the protections are completely safe.
What's not clear to me is that an IRB would even raise a question about an experiment like this.
Right, because they aren't idiots.
the destruction of knowledge.
What on earth does this mean?
Wow. I wasn't expecting to read this argument in the thread.
I do think it's kind of charming that you guys successfully trolled Man Suit.
Pay attention, Sifu. The scientists are trying to break the babies' brains.
That's not what I said, E. Messily. I said they seem worryingly indifferent to the possibility.
206: It's a pleasant surprise when dealing with university bureaucracy.
209: Hey, I haven't yelled at anyone on the internet in weeks. This is so much cheaper than therapy.
Mostly staffed by other social scientists
If they were other social scientists, mightn't the pressure that the IRB experienced go to: "no results for you, because that might steal my thunder"
204: As ajay said, "Got your nose". If a baby fell for it, they'd believe (I assume by 'destruction of knowledge' you mean 'acquisition of false beliefs') that body parts were painlessly detachable. Literal heat mirages: over there is water, but it disappears instantly as you approach. Things that look like a solid block, but when a piece is lifted it comes free. Anything that doesn't behave as you'd immediately expect when you look at it.
The scientists are trying to break the babies' brains.
This would be the psychology equivalent of high energy physics, no doubt.
206 said, though (and I'm repeating people above), any experiment done with children will have gone through review by the full IRB, will involve safeguards for parents who don't want their children to participate, will explicitly allow people to stop the experiment whenever they want, will have an explicitly stated route for redress of grievances, and will in an likelihood (not my field, but this is my strong informed guess) involve nothing that an informed person could possibly construe as being even temporarily aversive for the child, let alone harmful.
I mean, looking time studies, if the kid cries, they have to throw out all the data! Seriously if they can't keep the kids entertained and happy, they can't publish! I don't know how you could better align your incentives than that.
211- Well, actually it is what you said (152). But since your overall attitude about the whole thing seems to me to be worryingly indifferent to any sort of actual information about the issue, it's hard for me to take your concern very seriously.
until recently, avoiding harm has not been priority #1 for these kinds of experiments
Again, the measure of 'recently' you seem to be using is a forty-year-old experiment on adults that was stopped out of concern for the unexpected ill-effects on the subjects.
Whoops, 172 was me. Had not read down enough to see the further discussion on the issue. LB's comments above get what I meant.
What if there was a specific hand puppet that, when you showed it to an infant, would literally cause the infant's head to explode? Can you trust scientists not to experiment with that hand puppet?
I'VE SEEN VIDEODROME, YOU MONSTERS.
At least through 1980 a quick google search gets you tons of nasty-looking unethical incidents. I don't know the literature well enough to know what's gone down after that. I'm only citing the SPS because it's the one famous example I'm familiar with.
At least through 1980 a quick google search gets you tons of nasty-looking unethical incidents.
Pick a couple?
Not just being a jerk, I've been googling and I'm not seeing what you're seeing.
221: Stop leaking my latest experimental protocols, you jerk!
Really, though, Halford, you'll need to actually describe the other examples if you want them to have any rhetorical force. "I know about one example that doesn't show what I say it shows, and also google knows about other examples" does not make a terribly strong case.
any experiment done with children will have gone through review by the full IRB, will involve safeguards for parents who don't want their children to participate, will explicitly allow people to stop the experiment whenever they want, will have an explicitly stated route for redress of grievances, and will in an likelihood (not my field, but this is my strong informed guess) involve nothing that an informed person could possibly construe as being even temporarily aversive for the child, let alone harmful.
It's really only the last that would provide protection, but if that's true, great.
I think urple is suggesting a concept similar to "learned helplessness". Babies start to believe the physical world follows no rules, that cause and effect can work in reverse, the sun rises in the east one day and the west the next day, and so on. End result, societal anomie, helicopter parents, and unprecedented youth unemployment resulting not from any sort of economic factors but from kids today who are addicted to instant gratification and don't know that hard work can bring satisfaction. Wait, I turned into a comment on a newspaper website.
It's really only the last that would provide protection, but if that's true, great.
I would have thought "the experimens involve looking at a screen full of colored shapes or some hand puppets for ten or fifteen minutes with the parent in the room" would have already set your mind at ease on that count (and incidentally, anybody signing up will see those words or something like them before signing up for anything, let alone arriving at the lab), but okay.
This would be the psychology equivalent of high energy physics, no doubt.
The Large Headon Collider.
You know, there were all the experiments where they raised infants from birth with glasses that offset their field of view by fifteen degrees to see how that changed the organization of their dorsal visual cortex, but those kids are basically fine as long as they keep the glasses on.
And I guess some of the experiments that involve injecting muscimol into the hippocampuses of human infants and testing how many weeks it takes for memory formation to return to normal might freak people out.
Oh geez, and I forgot about the experiments that involved injecting human infants with radioactive dye, showing them a dot pattern, then sacrificing them and flattening and developing the visual cortex to show retionotopy. Those were probably a bummer for the kids.
Halford, Urple, you guys are right. In the past ten years, there's been a whole underground series of Bouncing Baby, Stabby Baby, Eyeless Baby, etc experiments. What's weird is to see the rest of Unfogged so unified in sheltering you two from the truth.
And, while they were incredibly scientifically important, I can understand how the experiments involving strapping knives to toddlers' feet and having them fight to the death in pits while surrounded by degenerate gamblers might strike some non-experts as harmful.
I seriously am starting to feel trolled by the worries about whether there might really be long term negative effects from these particular studies, though. Human cognitive development, like development more generally, is pretty goddamn buffered against experiential perturbations. ('Canalized', if you like the jargon.) Little blips of weird experience are not going to throw off the development of, say, the child's normal view of the physical world, objects, causality, etc. The very idea that you can undermine something as massively well entrenched as how infants view physical objects just by a little trick or two is bonkers. Humans just aren't that fragile.
Should be "retinotopy" in 233. Sorry.
If we concede that you're absolutely right, urple, and stop arguing about it, will you tell us about the novel sexual practice?
The very idea that you can undermine something as massively well entrenched as how infants view physical objects just by a little trick or two is bonkers.
Videodrome, dude. Not to mention The Ring. That shit can happen.
239: I see what you did there.
240: And blipverts, I guess. Exploding tends to be a pretty radical worldview-changer.
241: Ixnay on the ommentcays. I inkthay it was orkingway.
LB probably doesn't think Sparkle Motion could get past an IRB.
236: And what a fucking gyp that was; toddlers can't kick for shit. Fifteen no-contests out of twenty bouts! The knives-on-hands trials were much more productive.
I cannot believe the "locking kids in refridgerators" experiment hasn't come up yet. I fucking love that study and re-read it regularly.
247: Too old. Dates back to before they could spell refrigerator.
There have, of course, been kids harmed and killed by dubious medical experiments, some undertaken outside the supervised research world (e.g. chelation for autism) and at least one within it (gene therapy, done without adherence to protocol).
229: So, urple has invented a novel sexual practice, and he's also concerned about how developmental psychologists might traumatize small children. Hm.
My favorite experiment is this:
Experimenter: We're about to leave. Don't check out the cool toys. See you in 5 minutes.
...
Kids presumably unable to resist.
...
Experimenter: Did you cheat? No? Great! Here's the game. Each toy makes a noise. You guess which toy it is, based on the sound.
Toy 1: waaah
Kid: Baby doll!
Experimenter: Great!
Toy 2: Some obvious toy-sound
Kid: Obvious toy!
Experimenter: Great!
Toy 3: plays tinkly music
Kid: [Head explodes, as they realize that the third toy they saw was a soccer ball, and apparently this soccer ball plays music, so what are they supposed to answer?!?] !!
So awesome.
250: My thoughts exactly, Merganser.
249: Chelation is so aughties, dude -- although, sure, it's killed a child. The new hip treatment for autism in the Je/n/n/y Mc/Car/thy crowd is Lupron -- aka chemical castration.
Lupron -- aka chemical castration.
The new generation of rappers just doesn't have the knack for names yet.
I can't read this thread right now. Did Sifu already make the point that acquired early != innate? If not maybe I'll come back and make it.
So, do I have this right? It is ok fine to use and abuse infants in ways that cause them discomfort and psychological distress as long as the damage is probably only temporary and the data obtained is way cool?
Did Sifu already make the point that acquired early != innate? If not maybe I'll come back and make it.
Not except for indirectly in reference to language.
She thinks language.
Gay Science 354 incorporated by reference.
256: That's exactly it bob. Exactly. There's no other possible interpretation of this thread. We beat babies and probably our domestic partners.
253: I'm trying to find a way to fit a Crossfit joke in there, but it's not working. I do think Lupron is mid-aughties more than current, but don't really know what's supplanted it. Gluten-free/casein-free, certainly. In adoption circles, sketchy "attachment" therapy is all over the place, but I don't know the straight-up autism side as well.
It really causes problems for my avoiding-making-fun-of-mcmanus-and-boringing-things-up-with-his-whining system when he changes his pseudonym.
I think some kid got killed in sketchy "attachment" therapy also.
The infamous SuperGlue experiments.
This article has a long discussion of very current unethical research practices on children, through the 1990s. Much of the discussion is on medical research, and the improper psychological/psychiatric research discussed is chemical, not behavioral experiments, so Man Suit's honor is unbesmirched. Still, it's not hard to come away from the article nervous about entrusting children to research scientists. A sample graph, discussing research at Johns Hopkins (there are many more examples discussed in the article):
From 1992 to 1995, healthy babies and toddlers in Baltimore were exposed to lead paint dust in a clinical trial for the purpose of determining the effectiveness of varying degrees of lead paint abatement. The experiment was sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency and the State of Maryland; it was conducted by researchers at the Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) of Johns Hopkins University; and came to light when two lawsuits were brought before the Maryland Court of Appeals after being dismissed by a lower court. 262 During the experiment, researchers drew blood samples from the children and recorded the rising level of lead in their blood. The Washington Post 263 reported that in seven months, lead levels for three of the children rose from 6 to 21 micrograms (Myron Higgins), from 9 to 32 micrograms (Ericka Grimes), and from 10.7 micrograms to 24 (for Charnice Martin). In its strongly worded ruling, on August 6, 2001, the Court of Appeals noted that the researchers did nothing to intervene even as the lead in the children rose to hazardous levels. KKI lawyers argued that the institute bore no legal obligation to warn the parents about the risks to which the children would be exposed--namely that exposure to lead dust could reduce the intelligence quotient (IQ) and cause mental retardation. KKI lawyers argued that federal regulations (45 CFR 46) do not apply, claiming that the regulations "only require to inform research subjects of the risks inherent in the interventions to which the researchers intend to expose them." 264 They made the preposterous claim that the researchers were only engaged in "passive data collection" not in the actual intervention process, therefore they should be exempted from federal regulations. The institution's lawyers further argued that exposing children to lead poison does not fall under "biomedical research" and does not, therefore, come under federal regulations. And they argued that the signed consent forms are not binding contracts, that KKI had no duty to report the elevated lead levels to families.
I found that if you pull hard, your fingers won't stay superglued together. It does hurt a bit.
The problem is of course simple and obvious, and only fails to be noticed or taken into account because the little rugrats are somebody's personal property.
It is about informed consent. If they don't or can't give it, we don't fuck with people.
Yeah, really fucking boring.
262: By unlicensed quacks who went to jail. By the same token, that homeopathy sometimes leads to deaths is not a knock against medical science.
262: Oh, several kids have died, especially when there's some kind of "holding therapy" going on. The death stories I've been seeing recently are mostly about kids being deprived of food and forced to do pointless exercise (run laps, stack rocks) or being forced to do something like drink an insane amount of vinegar or hot sauce or maybe even milk.
To elaborate on 269, I think the biggest part of the problem is parents diagnosing their kids as having Reactive Attachment Disorder and then responding to that in unproductive ways. I personally talk and think about attachment a lot, mostly in the Bowlby sense, but there are a lot of things out there I find deeply questionable.
268: I know it was quackery. Homeopathy is safe, to the same extent that doing nothing is safe.
drink an insane amount of vinegar
I hadn't heard of that one.
I mean, it's just wrong (I think) to say that there are no dangerous research experiments involving children that we should be worried about, and not just by quacks, either, but by official scientists. I agree that sitting on someone's lap and looking at a screen for 15 minutes is probably not one of them.
267: I'd like to point out the obvious even thought it is completely pointless in this context. It is impossible to raise a baby if all decisions require the informed consent of the baby.
Wow, the woman who wrote the article in 265 sounds, uh, fairly intense.
271: In point of fact, people have also been jailed for manslaughter for using homeopathic treatments on infants in place of actual medicine.
Oh goodness, and she's an anti-vaccine'r.
In 1997, the Archives of General Psychiatry published a report Dr. Daniel Pine 278 and a team from the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) about a fenfluramine "challenge" experiment that had been conducted on 34 six- to eleven- year-old African American and Hispanic boys. The children were drawn from a sample of a larger study involving 126 brothers who were deemed "at risk" of following in the footsteps of their older brothers who were incarcerated juvenile delinquents. The investigators claimed that "there is evidence" of a correlation between reduced serotonin activity and aggressive behavior. They hypothesized that by measuring the boys' biochemical responses to fenfluramine they would be able to replicate earlier findings and find a predictive biological marker predisposing the children to violence. The published report indicates that the children were required to follow a special diet for four days, to fast for 18 hours before they were to swallow fenfluramine ("challenge"), and they were to have an intravenous catheter inserted in their arm, which would remain for more than five hours, during which time blood would be drawn. The investigators justified the risks and discomfort that the children would bear, by stating: "Research on the relationship between adverse rearing and serotonin may enhance understandings of the association between serotonin and aggression across development." [p. 841]. [Emphasis added] Parents were paid $125 and the children received $25 dollar gift certificates to Toys 'R Us. 279 This experiment encapsulates many of the flaws in the current human research review, approval and oversight system, by demonstrating institutional failings. First, although federal regulations prohibit the use of children in research involving "greater than minimal risks" if there is no potential benefit for them, 51 four prominent institutional review boards approved this speculative, nontherapeutic experiment. The members of those review boards saw nothing wrong with an experiment that would expose children to greater than minimal risks, discomfort, trauma, and label them as "predisposed to violence." Nor did they appreciate the potential harm that may be caused the children from being labeled henceforth with a psychiatric diagnosis linked to aggression. 280 Second, fenfluramine carries far greater risks than "minimal risk"--it carries the risk of neurotoxicity, 281 and it was later learned, the risk of heart valve damage. As early as December 15, 1993, neuroscientists had warned the FDA not to approve fenfluramine or its combination form, fen-phen (trade name: Redux). 282 They pointed out that, "Redux had been shown to cause brain damage in animals and might do the same in humans by eroding the body's supply of serotonin." In 1996, Dr. Muldoon and investigators at the University of Pittsburgh reported that a single dose of fenfluramine had caused adverse side effects in 90% of the normal human subjects who reported fatigue, headache, lightheadedness, and difficulty in concentrating. 283 In September, 1997, the drug was recalled after FDA had received at least 100 reports of heart valve damage and news of a much higher than expected percentage of abnormal cardiograms. In its withdrawal announcement FDA stated: "Approximately 30% of the patients that were evaluated had abnormal echocardiograms, even though they had no symptoms. This is a much higher than expected percentage of abnormal test results." 284 Third, the children did not display any aggressive behavior at the time they were recruited for the experiment. The children could not, therefore, be regarded as having a condition that could be helped by the study. Indeed, the study was not designed to provide any benefit for either aggressive or nonaggressive children--it was a wholly nontherapeutic experiment. Aside from the experimenters' very questionable hypothesis 285--i.e., a biological disposition to aggression and conduct disorder--the experiment put the children at greater than minimal risk but offered no conceivable benefit to the children tested. Further, given what was already known to neurologists about fenfluramine, the experiment clearly violated medicine's first principle, "First, do no harm," not to mention existing federal standards for approvable experiments involving children. 51 It would seem that everyone with a duty to protect the children's best interest had failed to act in their best interest.
272: I think the vinegar reference I saw was this case. One site that keeps track of abuse etc. of adoptees is Pound Puppy Legacy, but I don't really keep up with them directly.
276: Her views on trying to find ways to treat the negative symptoms of schizophrenia (that they are the hidden first step to creating drugs to increase intelligence in everybody) seem very much unrelated to the actual symptoms of schizphrenia.
I'd read about the Baltimore lead study before. I don't know of studies of UMC white kids with similar problems, though.
278: Better to join Jehovah's Witnesses but maybe the door knocking gets tiring.
282: she pretty much seems like a kook, if an influential one.
275: bob's had that explained to him roughly a billion times; he's reliably impervious to that line of reasoning, though he's never let on to having anything better to offer.
I don't know. That lead study sounds pretty fucked up if she's accurate.
286: I'm afraid he'll open a day care if we don't remind him.
I aspire to being an influential kook, someday, though I think moderate kookiness and moderate influence are about the best I can hope for.
289: in the future, corporations may band together to seek out kooks that are influential. It could be called the kook Klout plan.
290: Grand wizard cocksucker, Annelid!
There was a Law & Order about a kid dying in a "holding" therapy.
Oh, and going back to 67, congratulations to Nathan if you're announcing real rather than hypothetical future offspring. Best wishes either way!
Her take on RTCs isn't wrong in any specifics that I can see except one*, but it is also clearly a diatribe. It isn't as if the weaknesses are unknown and that there aren't some countermeasures in place.
*It's a big one. "He points out that when a treatment effect is therapeutically significant (rather than merely statistically significant), RCTs are unnecessary."
273: The reason we get consent forms from college students is not entirely to escape liability.
Nor, honestly, will almost any amount of social or societal judgement, permissions, and approval really provide any comfort to me. Belly-of-Baal babies, castrated "defectives." I don't give a flying fuck if society thinks practice X is ok fine.
I might accept a system that required social unanimity, but that would make the Christian Scientists a problem.
Mainly you know, neither slave nor master, walking away from Omelas
286:I have never been asked, but the answer is always:Socialism! End private property. End fucking parentage.
It takes a village, and babies should be in the commons.
This is not a complete answer, see above. Accepting a tragic sense of life, and the realization that we really are all fucking Omelans, no good ones among us, is a start toward a humility that protects the vulnerable.
287: Googling on the lead study makes it look fucked up and the sort of thing that should have resulted in disciplinary action, but somewhat less insane than the portrayal. What they were doing was trying alternative methods of lead paint abatement on housing with lead paint, letting families with kids move in, and monitoring the kids' lead levels. Without immediate action for any kid showing elevated levels, and informed consent for the subjects, that's wrong, and someone should have stopped it. On the other hand, the study wasn't introducing new hazards into the environment, it was studying methods for ameliorating hazards that were there already -- it's not clear that the risk of lead exposure was worse for a kid in the study than one of their local peers not in the study.
I mean, it looks like the Baltimore lead paint thing and the fen-phen tests on children are totally real. I'm not gonna google every assertion in the article.
Don't take fen-phen. It's not good for your heart.
But seriously, no one's ever claimed that there's no risk that a kid could be injured by a researcher. The claim is that the risk these days is awfully low compared to all sorts of things you do without thinking, and when you can see that the research consists of showing them pictures and letting them touch toys, thinking of it as a significant risk is loony.
(Actually, I'm sure someone has made that claim. But I'm not, and I don't think anyone in this thread has.)
287: Yeah, I would take her with a huge grain of salt, though. She might, for all I know, be right about some of what she says, but I'd want lots of independent confirmation; something smells really off about her and the Alliance for Human Research Protection she heads up. I see from a bit of Googling around that they deny being a Church of Scientology front group... but the specific pitch of some of their vitriol sounds awfully similar to groups like CCHR in a way that makes me wonder if that denial will hold up in the long term.
the kook Klout plan
I would attend a kook Klout cookout.
But the first and most important step respect for individual autonomy. Infants may not be able give consent, but I do believe that informed consent is much more available at a much earlier age than our pet/slave society is comfortable acknowledging. Of course 7 year-olds can choose a blood transfusion, if they aren't brainwashed by their parents. Avoiding the suicidal brainwashing is a societal duty and challenge.
The kid is not there for her parents or her society. "You won't like it, but it's for your own good" is usually for my good. I have two dogs. I don't have to feel all righteous about it.
Huge amount of freedom, fucking maximalize it, and a corresponding massive safety net.
10 year old wants to go fishing for ten years, not my right to stop her. I am not so confidant in my own concept of the good life, and don't care what society wants. Maybe we should all go fishing.
"He'll put a padded towel on the wire monkey mommies. Macmanus 2032."
10 year old wants to go fishing for ten years, not my right to stop her. I am not so confidant in my own concept of the good life, and don't care what society wants. Maybe we should all go fishing.
Tragedy of the commons.
303: Infants may not be able give consent
So the babies are out of your socialist commons, now? That's an outrage, you callous, slavery-promoting, baby-abusing bastard.
10 year old wants to go fishing for ten years eat poison, not my right to stop her.
306:You misread, babies are in the commons. I want access to them for myself, so I can read them Sorel and Blanqui.
babies are in the commons. I want access to them for myself
This is where I get off the train.
No matter how fast the train is going.
I was just wondering if we only feel a responsibility to that which we have a property stake in. There would of course be a corresponding pleasure in power over that which we own.
If so, and that is probably social conditioning, it is a very bad thing. It might be better if we cared equally for those with whom we don't have a personal relationship.
307:We should provide, and make sure the suicidal are aware of, their other options.
But you skipped the fun stuff
1) Should a 7 year old, raised by Christian Scientists, be able to choose a blood transfusion against the wishes of her parents?
2) Should your 7 year old, recently converted to Christian Science, be able to refuse a blood transfusion?
3) Different for a 27 year old? Are you so positive the random arbitrary 27 year old is in a state where they can give informed consent, even if legally of sound mind? What is so different that we radically discount gullibility, credulousness, non-rationality etc in "adults?"
Whenever I'm sick, I ask a 7 year old raised by Christian Scientists if I should have blood transfusion.
That sounds better than my idea of asking a 7 year old raised by Christian Scientists what kind of tattoo I should get.
To the extent that the IRB process failed (catastrophically, it looks like) in RH's examples, that does support the idea that you can't trust scientists to tell you whether or not their experiment is going to harm your baby, and to be safe you shouldn't get involved at all.
However, I think (firstly) the difference between medical/chemical experiments and the type of social science research in the OP is vast. I'd be way less likely to let my kid be involved in a medical study than in a social science one. And (secondly), the existence of a few shitty experiments doesn't, I think, demonstrate that getting involved in any research at all is likely to be dangerous.
I ask a 7 year old raised by Christian Scientists if I should have blood transfusion
They're like Magic 8-Balls, those kids. You just give them a few hard shakes and they'll give you a different answer.
Was the fenfluramine experiment really that bad? As far as I can tell, they were testing for psychological effects from a drug that had been approved by the FDA. It looks bad because that approval was later withdrawn, but from what was known to the researchers at the time, I'm not clear that it was all that terrible.
In general her paper seems like it uses the worst possible interpretation of real events to sow FUD about the whole process of randomized controlled trials (and clinical science generally). Which is not to say that fucked up shit never happens; I'm sure it does. But... yeah, don't trust that woman to tell me about it, frankly.
114 the bottom line is that the number one concern of the research scientist will be the research results, not avoiding harm to your kid
I haven't read the rest of the thread, but, really? You think typically psychologists care more about getting research results than the welfare of children? Were you beaten up by scientists when you were a kid, or something?
Infants may not be able give consent, but I do believe that informed consent is much more available at a much earlier age than our pet/slave society is comfortable acknowledging.
Tread carefully, bob, or we'll have to send you back to 4/c/h/@/n.
I just re-read 114 and it is cracking my shit up all over again. Aieee! I have no idea if objects could blink out of existence at any time! I can't live this way!
You think typically psychologists care more about getting research results than the welfare of children?
Of course they do. I mean, most take all the steps they can to protect child welfare, but why wouldn't they care more about research results than protecting the welfare of the kids they're experimenting on? Their professional advancement and compensation depends on their research results, not on how well the children are treated in research. That's why you need protections like IRBs. Similarly, do you think most bankers are more concerned about making money or the well-being of their clients?
318 -- at an absolute minimum, even without knowing what we know now about fen-phen, it was a highly intrusive study in which kids were given a drug with known severe health risks in a nontheraputic setting.
Have you ever heard of psychological damage to a child blamed on early exposure to special effects, magic tricks, or other apparently physically impossible sights? I mean, babies have to be capable of learning that some things are illusions, because the real world incorporates illusions, and babies aren't systematically sheltered from them.
I'm coming late to this thread, but I basically second this and am puzzled by what I take to be the Halford/Urple position. How is it that things you wouldn't think twice about in any other context acquire magical baby brain destroying powers when they're associated with the word "science"?
essear, I was sure your comment would be about the Hearst College Prison Experiment.
325: That was a sociology experiment, supposedly.
I take to be the Halford/Urple position
Not my position. I'm OK with the experiment actually described, if it is as described. I'm just defending a more generalized skepticism towards having your kids participate in research studies.
In the past there were issues with some staffers, but now that we don't seem to be getting any more applications from Argentineans with German-accented Spanish, the number of problems has dropped.
her paper seems like it uses the worst possible interpretation of real events to sow FUD about the whole process of randomized controlled trials (and clinical science generally)
No, at most it's doubt about safety controls on human experimentation in clinical trials when there's a strong financial incentive to ignore those controls. Which is at least a plausible corrective to the "trust us, we're scientists" attitude shown in this thread. I mean, maybe she's a bit of a nutter in real life, but the point isn't to shut down science entirely, just to point out that there are risks with human experimentation that are real and really happening, which is why you need things like IRBs.
The quote I mentioned in 294 is completely beside the point of safety and frankly bizarre.
330 -- Maybe! But I haven't seen anyone claiming that her bottom line that there are both potential and actual abuses out there w/r/t human subject experiments isn't roughly right.
Yes, that's totally right. However, she doesn't mention how you could actually advance medical technology. Everybody has a pet issue.
Just because copyright lawyers like to eat babies, you shouldn't conclude that most people would put their own career ahead of the well-being of children. At any rate, if their "compensation" were their main concern, they wouldn't be academics.
The lead study wasn't about financial interests, as far as I can tell. It was wrong, and should have been stopped, but it was do-gooderism; monitoring the lead exposure of the subject children to determine how best to abate lead paint in affected housing generally.
And certainly, people in any position do bad things that hurt other people, and scientists are included. The volume of wrongdoing you're looking at compared to the amount of research that gets done seems to me to make participating in a research study look pretty safe, generally. Not perfectly safe, but pretty safe.
333 -- OMG, are you actually arguing that academic scientists are not subject to the same incentives as other people and therefore don't need to be regulated?
No, he's arguing that just because you think people generally would hurt babies for career advancement, you should think that maybe that's particular to IP lawyers rather than applying to scientists as well.
But wait a minute! Clinical trials is not the same as "human subject experimentation". She might make a plausible case about pharmaceutical influence in (some) clinical trials (although the thing where she bitches about how IRBs should have pre-emptively stopped studies with scientific worth, but let them proceed, and then they got published in peer-reviewed journals is completely bizarre), but that really says nothing about a misalignment of incentives in human subjects research more generally. (She does conflate the two, but that to me is just an indication of whatever her weird agenda is.)
In most human subjects research there is absolutely not a strong financial incentive to ignore the controls, certainly not on an institutional level (which is the level at which the IRB operates). If anything there's the opposite; if bad research gets through it's not the grad student who gets sued; it's the University.
I'm just defending a more generalized skepticism towards having your kids participate in research studies.
If my kid were healthy, I would be fine with them being in any study that didn't involve them taking medication. (Roughly speaking.)
If my kid were sick, and it's an experimental treatment, then all bets are off - obviously that's a case-by-case situation.
There's a historian's blog that (too sceptically) tracks IRBs in the humanties and social sciences. A recent entry linked to a complaint about IRBs and lap dancing that referenced Swallows & Amazons.
I'm pretty sure that research psychologists are more likely to hurt babies in the name of career advancement than copyright lawyers. I mean, there's an actual history of them doing so, and they have good reasons to do so. But I'm sure we can just abandon IRBs and trust to the good hearts of those kindly scientists.
335 333 -- OMG, are you actually arguing that academic scientists are not subject to the same incentives as other people and therefore don't need to be regulated?
I'm actually arguing that the fraction of people who would harm children in order to advance their career is quite small. Perhaps I have too much faith in humanity, but it doesn't seem like such a controversial claim to me.
I don't mean that people are consciously executing babies for money. The lead study is a good example -- hey, our science is out there to help everyone! We're doing good here! -- but there are incentives to ignore the well being of the actual research subjects. That seems pretty uncontroversial and well recognized, which is why we have things like IRBs.
In most human subjects research there is absolutely not a strong financial incentive to ignore the controls, certainly not on an institutional level (which is the level at which the IRB operates). If anything there's the opposite; if bad research gets through it's not the grad student who gets sued; it's the University.
Well, that's right at the University level (and is why it's a good thing that we have IRBs and lawsuits!) but not really for any individual researcher, who does have a (career, if not strictly financial) incentive to get the best possible research result regardless of the external controls. Again, I think that's pretty uncontroversial and why we have IRBs; the question is to what extent they've worked and the experimentation is actually safe.
But, you know, we have things like IRBs. Given that it's now, rather than 1939, and we have the procedures we do, why would you think of something not apparently risky as being unacceptably dangerous just because it's research? I don't think anyone here is arguing that we should get rid of protections for human subjects, just that most scientists don't want to hurt their subjects and the procedures we have work pretty well on the malicious or careless ones.
Looking at psychological research on children, I haven't seen anything scary in the thread later than the Monster Study.
340
I'm pretty sure that research psychologists are more likely to hurt babies in the name of career advancement than copyright lawyers.
It would be irresponsible not to speculate! It would!
why would you think of something not apparently risky
How would I know? I mean, this works pretty well for the 15 minutes on a parent's lap blinking at a Keith Haring cartoon, if that's how that particular lab works. For a clinical drug test, I'd have no possible method of realistically evaluating the risks.
Remember when that daycare got sued into oblivion for painting copyrighted Disney characters on the wall?
Copyright lawyers: clearly anti-baby.
340- I dont think that has been demonstrated- none of your examples of harm involved either psychologists or babies.
For a clinical drug test, I'd have no possible method of realistically evaluating the risks.
So don't do a clinical drug test. That, as has been said over and over again, has absolutely zero to do with volunteering your healthy baby for a psychology study, and also has zero to do with the incentives of psychology grad students.
347: That's what I meant by 'not apparently risky'. I agree with you, I wouldn't let researchers test medications on my healthy baby either, because that's, in my book, apparently risky. But you came into this thread freaked out about psych research, not medications.
349: There was that kid in the 20's who was conditioned to be afraid of rats. So, one.
End result, societal anomie, helicopter parents, and unprecedented youth unemployment resulting not from any sort of economic factors but from kids today who are addicted to instant gratification and don't know that hard work can bring satisfaction.
Uh-oh. I'd better ask my parents if they signed me up for any studies when I was young...
Here's an older, random example of a psychological experiment that looks at least potentially harmful. Not saying it is, necessarily, but who knows? Anyhow, if this kind of thing doesn't exist anymore, great.
And, I mean, let's be frank: day cares themselves are way more anti-baby than either copyright lawyers or developmental psychologists. What incentive do they have to make sure your child is happy and safe? They just want to make sure that you think it's happy and safe enough that you keep giving them money. And that's just at the institutional daycare level. The employees have absolutely no incentive to keep your baby safe other than that they 1. don't want to get hired and 2. probably aren't monsters. That's fucked up!
Where are the daycare lesson-plan review boards? Where are the committees on daycare subject care?
Lots and lots of babies have been injured at day care, after all.
I mean, you really should be cautious about day cares, and they can and do and should (in many places) have a bunch of controls on them. Any parent knows that.
354: come on, dude. A study from forty two years ago that may have led to toddlers (not children!) behaving more aggressively, because it, like, set a bad example?
Can it be that the best way in the world to keep your child safe and healthy is to sign them up for as many psychology experiments as possible at all times?
(I mean, actually, maybe.)
I could see worrying about that if you literally never let your kid watch cartoons. Short of that? Not really frightening. And isn't that fifty, rather than forty, years old?
Oh, huh. It's ten years later than I thought it was. Hello!
Continuing 357, per Blume, the on-campus daycare at the college where a certain commenter will soon be working is actually run by the Psychology department.
Also, here's the correction the BBC published and linked from that page:
The programme explored legitimate concerns about a research project involving the testing of anti-HIV drugs on children in the care system, where (it had emerged) there had been a failure in some cases to provide independent advocacy as required by the research protocols. However, the programme portrayed this failure as being the more serious because the drugs being trialled were, it claimed, both "lethal" and ineffective. In support of these claims, the programme interviewed an expert witness who was, though the audience was not told, a leading advocate of the propositions that HIV is unconnected with AIDS, that anti-retroviral drugs do not work in the treatment of AIDS and that they are, in fact, responsible for deaths attributed to AIDS. The audience was not told that his was a minority and controversial view which would be challenged by mainstream medical opinion. No other medical opinion was heard on this subject. The programme also gave the false impression that parents or carers who objected to their children being placed in the trials risked losing custody of their children. In fact, the three case studies which created this impression did not involve children connected with the trials. Though there was no explicit claim that "denying medication to children with AIDS will improve their health while appropriate treatment will kill them", the treatment of case studies in the programme contributed to that impression.
Also: the problem with randomized clinical trials is that you can't give everybody the absolute best known treatment if you want to learn anything. You have to have a control group. Now, this is an intensely complicated ethical situation, but it is really not relevant to alleged malfeasance by publishing-happy IRBs (or pharmaceutical companies). It's how randomized clinical trials (the only generally accepted method for making causal inference in the sciences) work. It would be impossible to find new drugs without doing it (sort of; there are people who are working on alternatives to RCTs that wouldn't run into this issue, but I don't know what the status of that is).
I thought the current state of medical ethics is that you could only do the trial if you were legitimately perfectly agnostic about whether the treatment being tested was better or worse than the control treatment.
the programme interviewed an expert witness who was, though the audience was not told, a leading advocate of the propositions that HIV is unconnected with AIDS, that anti-retroviral drugs do not work in the treatment of AIDS and that they are, in fact, responsible for deaths attributed to AIDS. The audience was not told that his was a minority and controversial view which would be challenged by mainstream medical opinion. No other medical opinion was heard on this subject.
How very "Vaccine Roulette." Jesus, do journalists ever suck at science.
340: "they [research psychologists] have good reasons to do so [hurt babies in the name of research advancement]"??
Jesus christ, this is 12th-dimensional hypertrolling.
No, Urple is 12th-dimensional hypertrolling. Halford's good, mind you, but he's no Urple.
364 -- so, there was a correction, but NYC was in fact using potentially dangerous experimental drugs on HIV positive children without their consent. Yay science.
365 -- I don't think any of the issues identified above have to do with getting rid of control groups.
Here's this totally harm-free experiment.
potentially dangerous
Why on earth would that be the case? Because the crazy anti-HIV guy said so?
372.1: I don't think that's clear. Here's a report on the trials that I haven't read in full, but that seems to show that most of the concerns in the BBC report were unfounded.
The information on the AIDS testing one is murky, I'll admit.
373: 1. Not babies. 2. Over fifty years ago. 3. No lasting harm caused (and they don't mention it explicitly there, but I think they stopped the first phase of the experiment early after the "raid" on the camp got ugly)
I'm actually kind of shocked that Halford can't even come up with one example.
366, 368: that's what I understand to be the case, but IANAE and IANAMR. I'm very confused by that, too. It just seems restrictive to the point of being enormously (studied use) counterproductive. OTOH, well, Tuskegee.
Hmm, there's this lovely case of Pfizer killing Nigerian children to test a meningitis drug.
I'm also puzzled as to what's supposed to be so harmful about the study in 373. That example really looks like grasping at straws.
I think the exploitative and dangerous practices by pharma in the Third World references in cases like the Pfizer one in 380 are a far better example of realistic fears to have about human experimentation. Also note that these abuses happen in part because ethical review capacity in Africa is relatively weak.
More of 375: See page 89:
Reviewers found no children who were removed from families because of a parent's refusal to enroll a child in a clinical trial.
Scanning Chapter 10, there seem to be some findings of bad record keeping, some occasions where a foster care agency gave consent to enrolling a child in a clinical trial without contacting the parents, but not a systematic process of using foster kids as guinea pigs with no one responsible for the child giving consent.
366: Even with a loose interpretation of "perfectly agnostic", there is almost no way to become that certain about a new treatment that doesn't involve either a randomized trial or once in a generation luck.
373 kind of sounds like wholesome 1950s summer camp fun to me.
I'm actually kind of shocked that Halford can't even come up with one example.
Cases of provable harm are of course going to be few and far between. I'm more concerned about cases that may or may not be harmful but we'll never know because no one is even bothering to ask the question. Taking babies and exposing them to magic tricks specifically designed to try and sever their brain-body connections, etc. Again, I doubt there's any measurable harm if it's a one-off 15 minute event (just as their would be no measurable harm if the researchers just spanked the babies for 15 minutes!), but it's not something I'd be comfortable having a baby exposed to long term.
to try and sever their brain-body connections
I have absolutely no idea what this means. Nobody is chopping the heads off of babies.
magic tricks specifically designed to try and sever their brain-body connections
They've stopped the 'sawing the baby in half' trials.
You've got to look at this from Urple's point of view. Think of the life events he's reported, and think of the nightmarishly hallucinatory sense of causality he must have developed through that. He just wants to protect babies from having the same experiences.
Maybe "sever brain-body connections" isn't the right phrasing. But the goal is clearly to fuck with the baby's expectations.
I can't believe none of you are responding to 380, obviously because it's an actual example of scientists (but not the sainted research psychologists) killing children in a third world experiment.
As to 384, are you kidding me? Would you send your kid to fake summer camp where the kids are being manipulated to hate each other?
As to 384, are you kidding me?
Yes, she is.
391: 1. not psychology. 2. clinical trial. 3. not babies. 4. not in this country. 5. not at all relevant.
I mean, is your claim that sometimes pharmaceutical companies and people in their employ (even if those people have PhDs) can be unethical? Because okay, fine. But totally irrelevant.
I can't believe none of you are responding to 380, obviously because it's an actual example of scientists (but not the sainted research psychologists) killing children in a third world experiment.
Or because it doesn't seem to have much to do with the discussion about letting your child participate in a psych experiment at Harvard...
OMG. Halford is totally right. I never knew.
392: Well, the caveat was 1950s fun, which probably means braindamaging and evil somehow. But really, while I don't know from sleep-away camp, it sounds like the plot of a wholesome Disney camp movie -- first the kids on the rival teams were mad at each other and competed, and then when vandals (or the mischevious scientists!) broke the water pipes, they learned to work together. All you need is Kurt Russell playing a dog, and you'd be furious at me if I downloaded it without paying.
391: it's an actual example of scientists (but not the sainted research psychologists) killing children in a third world experiment
You seem to be losing the plot, now. I haven't seen anyone claim that Science Can Do No Evil, which now appears to be the view you're imputing to... someone or other. You've been told by various people now that the regulatory regime in modern science was beefed up a few decades ago in response to abuses and nuttiness; and the best example of harmful experimentation you've been able to produce is from a continent where that very regulatory regime is notoriously much weaker than elsewhere. That would seem to say something for the efficacy of the regulatory regime.
Wait, so research scientists actually killing children outside of the US as part of a clinical research trial isn't relevant to the question of whether or not we should place total confidence in scientific ethics towards children? I mean, if what you're saying is that the IRB process in the US has been a success, that seems right; it does appear that short-term obviously unethical things like the fake camp experiment aren't around here anymore. But that doesn't go to the question of whether we can trust psychological researches generally to ensure that what they're doing do not have harmful repercussions.
In what sense was the camp 'fake'? That's like the question "Is that guy a real clown, or is he just dressed up as a clown?"
In what sense was the camp 'fake'?
It had ulterior motives. If the man dressed as a clown also has ulterior motives, then he too is a fake clown.
urple, please come visit the other thread and tell us about cooking.
I haven't seen anyone claim that Science Can Do No Evil
Essear was more or less claiming this (or, at least, that "Scientist don't do evil"), and LB is pretty close.
You've been told by various people now that the regulatory regime in modern science was beefed up a few decades ago in response to abuses and nuttiness
Yes, as I said earlier, the IRB controls are reassuring and seem to have put the worst stuff underground. And I agree that if an experiment seems basically totally harmless, it probably is. But people seem super into defending the idea that we not only have a completely effective regulatory regime but that even skepticism towards the human experimentation ethics of research science is the exclusive province of nutters.
But real clowns are a priori trustworthy. Man, you're in for a world of hurt when one asks you to smell the pretty flower in his lapel.
the question of whether or not we should place total confidence in scientific ethics towards children
Not, in fact, the question.
to have put the worst stuff underground.
Look, is it wrong if I find mainstream science kind of boring? Indie science just has more edge to it.
skepticism towards the human experimentation ethics of research science is the exclusive province of nutters
I mean, I wouldn't have believed that before, but you've been doing your best to convince me with the people whose claims you've been linking to.
Essear was more or less claiming this
No? He was claiming that scientists are no more or less evil than anybody else.
404- If you're not willing to place total confidence in scientific ethics towards children, you must admit that blanket condemnation of all research involving children is the only sensible response.
398: It also seems like you're moving goalposts now. Since you've had to concede that there's something of a functional regulatory process in place in North America, now your point is instead about "total confidence" in some vaguer "scientific ethics." But I don't see anyone else talking about this. Unless you count essear's remark that most people, most of them are not actually that likely to willingly harm babies in pursuit of an "incentive," but that's not the same thing as advocating "total confidence" in "scientific ethics."
A group of scientists led by Carolyn Wood Sherif gathered several 11 and 12 year old boys and took them on a summer camping trip, without telling anyone that this was actually an experiment. The scientists had them divided into two groups, making sure to break apart any friendships that the boys had established previously. Once on the campgrounds the scientists encouraged the boys to call each other names and pull pranks on the other group. But don't worry they also had planned some group-building activities at the end of the whole experiment, such as cutting the water supply and let the kids figure out how to avoid thirst.
In both of the first and second experiments the boys rebelled against the experimenters, probably realizing they were mad scientists. Of course these two experiments were not published originally; Sherif only publicized the results from the third test where the boys apparently resolved their conflicts at the end of camp. This prompted the scientists to declare this a successful experiment in conflict resolution; although the study did not monitor the boys over long periods of times to see if a summer spent in a camp where they were constantly insulted did any lasting psychological damage.
Totally harmless 50s fun! Yay science! Scientists can do no wrong! Everyone who says otherwise is a vaccine nutter!
405 -- By "underground" I meant, "in the third world where you're less likely to run into trouble for experimenting on kids."
And speaking of the academy . . .
Is there any subject which does not have its own academic center or institute?
There is, I submit, not.
Joe Goldblatt, professor and executive director of the International Center for the Study of Planned Events at Queen Margaret University, in Edinburgh, Scotland
you must admit that blanket condemnation of all research involving children is the only sensible response.
Not what I'm saying. Just that skepticism is justified.
401: Oh yes yes yes, she said, yes.
(ZOMG, is urple's new thing done via internet comment????)
402: but that even skepticism towards the human experimentation ethics of research science is the exclusive province of nutters.
I haven't seen anyone claim this. Skepticism about possible abuse of human experimentation is why you have regulatory frameworks. That Vera Sharav happens to look like something of a crypto-Scientological nutter is a separate question.
373 kind of sounds like wholesome 1950s summer camp fun to me.
I forgot about a totally horrific summer camp story! I dated a guy who'd attended Orthodox Jewish summer camps, and each year the counselors tried to outdo themselves with something spectacular to announce the beginning of Color Wars, then end of summer whatever spectacular.
So this one year, all the kids are outside for something, and there's a plane, and someone shouts "Oh no!" and the plane is smoking, and then it crashes. (Or appears to crash. Lots of smoke.)
Then a car arrives and someone gets out and says "The camp director and co-director and whoever else is widely loved were all on the plane! They're dead! Dead!"
Kids started crying and it got quickly out of hand, and they really regretted it fast. (Or so I'm told.) The plane had been rented and plane crash faked. Time for Color Wars?
410: I think it's very closed minded of you not to have linked to the source for that just because it's a blog called Weirdworm. (Now I'm just being a jerk -- I don't know if the claim about the unpublished part of the study being worse is false, I just don't have another source for it.)
Just that skepticism is justified
Yeah, but, no. Skepticism of the good intentions of "research scientists" generally is stupidly meaningless. Skepticism of pharmaceutical company-employed researchers (especially those operating in nations with less constraints) is probably justified. Skepticism of psychologists working sixty years ago was probably not warranted in most cases, but sure, I'll give it to you. Skepticism of developmental psychologists doing pure research in this country in the present day? You have entirely failed to make that case
Or, I mean, skepticism of everybody's good intentions all the time is reasonable on some level, but that doesn't put researchers on a different plane than bus drivers, day care workers, or the guy who did the maintenance on the carnival rides at the state fair.
Calling it 'Race Riot' was so 1930's.
415: Well, if you never err on the side of overdoing it, then you're probably underdoing it.
You have to do things you regret from time to time to stay calibrated.
I'll bet that the Pharma company that conducted the lethal drug trials in Africa only did it because their IP lawyers told them they could get away with it.
More seriously, drug trials and the psychology experiments in the original post are apples and oranges. It makes sense to be wary of feeding your kid some new chemical whose properties are poorly understood under any circumstances. You wouldn't do ordinarily (I assume), so it makes sense to be leery of doing it in the context of a clinical trial even if someone in a lab coat tells you there's no significant risk. But that's because ingesting strange chemicals is inherently dangerous; it's not dangerous purely by virtue of being part of a clinical trial.
On the other hand, letting your kid look at colorful things or play with different shaped blocks or watch cartoons or whatever are things you normally wouldn't think twice about. And yet when done in the presence of one of those eeeeeevillll scientists these activities suddenly become dangerous through some mysterious process that hasn't been explained.
through some mysterious process that hasn't been explained
Well, science.
422.last: Although in fairness, Halford has now said he's past the hostility to the study mentioned in the original post. (I'm not quite clear on whether the fear now is that the psychologists might surreptitiously resurrect a behavioral experiment from the 1950s and run it on the kids, or what.)
Here's an apparently famous child development psychology experiment.
It involved subjecting infants to stress -- separation and stranger anxiety. The worst stress in the world ever known? No, it's not as bad as the Pfizer experiments literally killing people in Africa. But it's still not the kind of thing I'd sign my kid up for. Now, I don't know the relevant child psychology experimental literature to go through it example by example, but this is the kind of thing that I'd guess persists, even under the IRB guidelines.
Although you probably have left your infant alone in a room with a stranger for minutes at a time.
Yes, but not deliberately as part of an experiment designed to see how they react to separation stress. Would you sign your kid up for that experiment?
That's really bringing us right back into "showing an infant a magic trick is deliberately breaking its brain" territory, Halford.
Probably not, but I wouldn't think someone who did, out of a desire to advance psychology or whatever, was doing their kid much harm. I mean, I caused my six month old a lot more stress than that leaving her in the day care center at a ski resort.
In both of the first and second experiments the boys rebelled against the experimenters, probably realizing they were mad scientists.
White Water Summer was real!
I'll bet that the Pharma company that conducted the lethal drug trials in Africa only did it because their IP lawyers told them they could get away with it.
To be fair, it was probably lawsuits that drove the adoption of better standards and practices (like, e.g. the IRB). So the lawyers get one in the "reducing evil" column, too!
425: Conducted nearly 40 years ago...
Late to this, but I have friends that participated with their kids in the Bulldog Infant Cognition Lab, and the idea that this is some thing likely to damage your child is pretty crazy. Things that it might involve: watching a puppet show where two things disappear behind a screen and three things come out; watching a movie about some shapes moving up and down a hill; interacting with a researcher who can't get the closet door open because his hands are full.
The point isn't to deceive them. It's seeing what happens when they run across a pretty common scenario, and at what ages they react, etc.
If this is the kind of thing likely to damage your child, I hope you never do something really dangerous, like let them wear shoes or play peekaboo. This is basically a playdate where one of the parents involved happens to be your friend working on her diss.
It's very reasonable to believe that exposure to mild separation stress is good for a young child, that it inoculates a child against later negative experiences by giving them an opportunity to learn that stress doesn't have to persist or be overwhelming, because the stressor can resolve or go away, and to practice some emotion regulation skills.
Anyway, it's certainly true that child development researchers today do things that are designed to be stressful -- here's an example. I myself tried to play unpleasant sounds for kids in an experiment -- an experiment which TOTALLY FAILED for many reasons, not least of which was that the kids didn't react at all to the sounds. But kids experience stresses like this all the time in their life. In this case, they get debriefed. Their parents give informed consent. Perhaps their parents think the opportunity to learn something about psychology, the prize they get at the end, the satisfaction of having volunteered for and contributed to something bigger than themselves, and maybe the opportunity to do some emotion regulation in a controlled environment are worth the costs of some emotional discomfort. Life is going to bring them way more emotional discomfort later.
Not too reassured by 434. Let's stress my kid out for science isn't very compelling. Actually, that's pretty much exactly the kind of thing that I expected -- not murdering babies in Africa, probably not that big a deal, but not the kind of thing that we should be clamoring to get our kids to do, at least not just for $5 and a sippy cup.
Sent study SWAG pictures to the pool. Sippy cups and cute little Harvard attired animals.
I would actually pay money to not have my kid have that particular swag.
No one is making you stress your kid out for science, RH. Did you miss the part about the parents providing informed consent?
Oh, I assume in any normal experiment the consent is (reasonably) "informed" (though, obviously, not given by the infant). But it just goes back to my original question of why you would want to do this in the first place.
Who is "you"? The parent? Or the researcher?
The parent and the child. I get why the researcher would want to do the research.
1. To teach their kids about the scientific process, which the kids are often interested in too.
2. A benevolent desire to contribute to science.
3. Sometimes, if it is research that has an emotionally challenging component, parents are explicitly interested in the kids having the challenging experience. For example, this isn't about the content of the research, but sometimes kids get nervous about going in the scanner or putting on an EEG cap, and the parents are interested in encouraging the kid through a difficult, but controlled, experience, to teach them they can try something hard, and nothing bad will happen. When I was little my mom made me go up to a cash register and buy some milk by myself even though I was scared and I cried about it. After that day, I was never scared of going up and conducting normal business with a strange adult again.
4. The kids get prizes. They like them.
The parents I know who do bring their kids in for experiments (SP, but several others) generally find it rewarding and fun. So maybe that's why they do it?
When I was little my mom made me go up to a cash register and buy some milk by myself even though I was scared and I cried about it. After that day, I was never scared of going up and conducting normal business with a strange adult again.
There's kind of a big difference between that and "I'm gonna deliberately subject you to a stress inducing scientific experiment, for the good of science."
generally find it rewarding and fun.
Those are good reasons!
407, 409: Thanks, Sifu and Castock, for correctly interpreting me to Halford.
There's kind of a big difference between that and "I'm gonna deliberately subject you to a stress inducing scientific experiment, for the good of science."
I actually don't see this kind of a big difference, because in each case the parent is deliberately subjecting the kid to stress for the good of the kid.
The good of science might diverge from the good of the kid.
447: As well it may, but the motivation of the parent I was discussing in point 3 above was for the good of the kid.
I think that whether a kid ought to participate in heavily regulated science experiments is a subject for parental discretion. The standard IRB's use for approval is whether or not this is the kind of stressor or event you'd typically encounter in the daily life of a sheltered, comfortable kid. If you (general you) think that caviling about other people's childrearing choices is annoying in other cases, maybe this is a good time to generalize the principle.
Well, in the former you are teaching a kid a lesson about how to interact with the world productively in a more or less ordinary situation. In the latter, you are asking the kid to get over the stress of being a research monkey. I mean, I'm not saying it's totally without utility, but I can see being retroactively pissed off as a kid about it.
Let's stress my kid out for science isn't very compelling.
How about for art?
448:Whew, the shrink tries to intimidate. My name is Sue, how do you do?
I oppose "parental discretion" and "other people's childrearing choices" in principle, and not just regulating those choices that are not trivial.
I see no reason to hand over a human being to be raised a Mormon, a Buddhist, a freethinker, a socially adept overachiever or a defeated bum in circumstances of complete dependency and implicit or explicit physical and emotional violence.
And it isn't as if this system is a proven success. Problem is, most everybody thinks they are an exceptionally competent and loving parent. Anybody here think they suck as parents, and kids would be better off elsewhere? Anywhere else?
Fucking property. The world sucks.
We should raise all kids in a common area to a mutually determined, socially oriented, and consensus-based way that isn't a complete strawman for fruitless bitching and smugness.
453: yep, if everything was different, things sure would he different!
341
I'm actually arguing that the fraction of people who would harm children in order to advance their career is quite small. Perhaps I have too much faith in humanity, but it doesn't seem like such a controversial claim to me.
I think you are wrong. Perhaps it would be less contentious to ask what fraction of people would harm themselves in order to advance their career? I think it is pretty high especially in very competitive fields like modern science.
The tournament structure of academic careers does provide some malign incentives. Like fudging or faking results as well as the fears in this thread.
And the dangers can be pretty subtle, people are great at rationalizing selfish behavior.
I'm pretty sure that research psychologists are more likely to hurt babies in the name of career advancement than copyright lawyers.
Halford, you get paid to deprive children of entertainment. That's actually your job. There's a guy on one side of the wall going "let me draw hilarious Mickey Mouse cartoons and give them away for free!" and there are lots of little children on the other side of the wall going "yes! draw free hilarious cartoons for us! woohoo!"
And you? You're the wall.
I am so glad Ajay wrote 457, because, holy shit was I thinking it, but I feel at this point the Trapnel vs Halford thing is a bit played out, and second, damn, that was just beautiful. You are the wall, Halford. You are the wall.
Wow I totally didn't see 340. Hmmm.
Halford: Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls are IP lawyers. Who's gonna do it? You? You, x.trapnel? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Winnie-the-Pooh, and you curse Disney. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Pooh's protection, while on the surface absurd, probably helped children. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, helps children. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about on blogs, you want me as that wall, you need me as that wall. We use words like first sale, fair use, property. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you hire a lawyer, and apply for a copyright. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.
x.trapnel: Did you send the Cease and Desist Letter?
Halford: I did the job I...
x.trapnel: *Did you send the Cease and Desist Letter*?
Halford: *You're Goddamn right I did!*
457 considers only the first-order effects of a restriction. But when the relation is so indirect and mediated as the one at question, you really need to consider all the net effects, and it is not clear whether babies are generally better or worse entertained because of copyright law.
That Pooh's protection, while on the surface absurd, probably helped children. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, helps children.
The above to 461.
Daycares, emptying and decaying, open to the elements. The laughter of children lost, forgotten. Happy murals on the walls smashed by the copyright man's hammers. Never forget.
"They mostly sue at night... mostly."
461
457 considers only the first-order effects of a restriction. But when the relation is so indirect and mediated as the one at question, you really need to consider all the net effects, and it is not clear whether babies are generally better or worse entertained because of copyright law.
And maybe children benefit in the long run from being beaten on occasion.
Anyway the choice isn't really no copyright law at all.
And maybe children benefit in the long run from being beaten on occasion.
There's no way to get that study by an IRB.
This is pretty great.
You know, I really did work to try to prevent one of my daughter's now favorite movies from getting made. Not for copyright reasons at all, though. I don't feel bad, however; the movie sucked and never should have been made in the first place, and we got a nice payoff -- not just $5 and a goddamn Harvard sippy cup.
468 If it was the Lorax you can consider yourself a personal hero of mine.
466: the choice isn't really no copyright law at all.
There's an analogous choice at the margin, though.
interacting with a researcher who can't get the closet door open because his hands are full.
I saw that video with Cosma and JP! It was so great.
This does not violate off-blog sanctity because the lecture was actually discussed here. It's your own fault for missing it.
460/3/5 are also great. You guys are the best!
470
There's an analogous choice at the margin, though.
But the answer at the margin is clear. Copyright law is too generous to right holders at the expense of society as a whole.