I have a draft of a blog post on this.
Originally I was going to write about how cortisol isn't always bad, or good, it's just a chemical in us.
But then I started noticing the pattern you point out here where I'm not sure anyone uses the cortisol argument in good faith. Everyone who brings up cortisol is usually trying to sell you something
Abo is a major part of organ matching. Abo has to be considered for any organ transplant. Every organ differs but HLA antigens is a different, more complex set of antigens that needs to be matched to some degree as well. Abo is usually a simple test, so hla antigen matching is most of what "organ matching" labs spend their time on. I work in this field.
I'm used to articles like this having some citation, but this doesn't seem to have any. I know about los Alamos lab but not familiar with their writing, am I correct in assuming this is pre-published findings?
The article has that. Google engineers are not going to propose something that will dramatically impact their bottom line. Executives nudge that out of the roadmap.
Your post points out the similarities to freud. I agree it's similar. I also think they are both wrong.
If this were true would you expect a child with a stay-at-home mom to have more anxiety/repression than kids with two working parents. Ten minutes Google search shows studies say the opposite or at worst that there is no effect.
Also, i think the way this relates back to freud is in the concept of the superego. Which indeed causes anxiety. And it is learned from the parents ego.
I could write a longer review but people on Goodreads have already done it for me. Try going here and filtering for one-star reviews, I agree with them all:
Its no surprise that an economist cherry picked and used anecdote to support their writing. It's one of the least rigorous fields out there whose practitioners are primarily used to green light whatever policy a politician deems fashionable or appropriate
Indeed. Economics is the art of using meaningless spreadsheets and number-crunching to justify the decisions you were going to make anyway. Oster's book is a great example of how.
It sounds like you’re getting mad at someone for reading Malcolm Gladwell or Freakanomics. It might be NYT bestseller middlebrow pop science that you find facile and contemptuous but a lot of people do not. And the author doesn’t even indicate how Oster informed his parenting. Seems overly dismissive of the article.
This is pretty disingenuous. Oster's book(s) is tantamount to long-form data journalism, principally citing research to criticize confidence in certain notions rather than arguing for overconfidence in another.
Much like nutrition and sociology, research can be politically fraught, have lots of data points, etc. But that's neither here nor there, either research is high quality or it isn't, including in the domain of economy.
Children become most like whoever they spend the most time with. So, one of the best things you can do is just be the type of person you want your children to grow up into -- and spend time with them.
But this is not a binary thing, but a gradient. Your children will also learn from the other people they encounter, and care must be taken to make sure the community and school they reside in is also one that exerts the influence you want it to (e.g. look at the parents of the schools you want to send them off to, because it will be a look into what sorts of kids your children will interact and grow with).
There is also an emotional component -- which either you know how to handle or you don't (or will learn in the process). Perhaps this is the most important one, because if you neglect it, your children may fit into society and your ideals, but they will be deeply troubled and unhappy.
Keeping vigilant, present, and aware of your children's emotional state (and helping them deal with such) is a vital -- often neglected -- part of parenting. The other one would be keeping an eye on their health. There are numerous chronic health issues that could pop up that would greatly influence the way they see and experience life -- such as inherited diseases like celiacs, neurodivergence, etc. -- that must be accounted for. But also fitness, good nutrition, and the rest that guarantees your children won't be living life handicapped.
Other than that, no. Much of the "parenting books" have been very harmful, and more than useless. Most books that get published are not published because the info is true and wholesome, but because someone thought they would be commercially useful. You're better off talking with other parents who you respect about how to deal with specific issues. So what I've written above is a decent start.
If I remember correctly, the tide began turning against her when she advocated for reopening schools during covid. Also, in her book, she concluded that there wasn't compelling evidence for abstaining from drinking small amounts of alcohol during pregnancy.
I was under the impression that it's more a matter of how this makes some folks extremely uncomfortable. From what I've seen, they haven't been able to point to any good evidence to the contrary, other than the general idea that absence of evidence doesn't necessarily mean evidence of absence. There's also the idea that some expecting mothers might not care to understand the little details and as a result take it as a pass to drink at levels we know to be harmful.
It's not that she is particularly 'controversial', it is that she is biased and misleading.
She is an economist who wrote a book that misrepresents, ignores and twists science what does know about childrearing and then presents that with a high level of confidence.
This is a projection. Oster seems to do the opposite, cast skepticism on overconfidence of certain ideals using data as a guide, or criticizing the lack of it or the rigor of studies leaned on.
The only thing that stands out as controversial about her books was:
> In the book [Expecting Better, 2013], Oster argues against the general rule of thumb to avoid alcohol consumption while pregnant, contends that there is no evidence that (low) levels of alcohol consumption by pregnant women adversely affect their children. This claim, however, has drawn criticism from the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and others.
I don't have any strong opinion on the topic of the claim[0], but the way it is reported as having "drawn criticism from [Some National Organization Specializing in Arguing the Opposite of the Claim]" in my experience pattern-matches in favor of the claim.
So beyond that, what's exactly so controversial about her books?
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[0] - Like everyone, I've had "zero alcohol while pregnant or breastfeeding" message drilled into me for decades, and that's my prior, though I've personally heard an experienced gynecologist, widely respected in the region, giving pregnant women allowance for a small glass of champagne for New Year's Eve...
I've come to see "No alcohol while pregnant" as the better simple rule. The alternative is "No more than X drinks in a day, and no more then Y drinks over your pregnancy." There will be a lot of people failing to remember the numbers (especially after a drink), the numbers vary by body type, the effects vary a lot between pregnancies for no known reason, drinking impairs decision-making, and the bad outcomes harm somebody besides the mother.
Public health guidelines targeted at non-professionals need to be simple. Same idea behind telling somebody who just wants a retirement fund to park their money in a managed portfolio, then ease those investments into safer stuff close to retirement. You could totally explain things in more detail, giving them more options and better opportunities, but most people are likely to not understand enough to safely do it. (I probably explained it incorrectly, which would reinforce my point of the general public's ignorance.)
> Public health guidelines targeted at non-professionals need to be simple.
And that's how you lose their trust. Just telling me to do simple X when it's clear to me from my own experience that sometimes not-X is better for me will make me think your overly simplifying and that your advice is not to be trusted, no matter your credentials.
I liked the way I learned git. I started with sourcetree, a third party git gui. Super simple to use and understand. Then I moved to git gui, this step could be skipped. Then I got tired of pulling up my UIs and learned the terminal commands. Highly suggest this for anyone new, but just my (n=1) experience.
All I know of git is clone, pull, commit, and push. That’s all I’ve ever needed. Git can be that simple. Of course it supports more complex uses, which you can learn if you need them.
It's not possible to alter commits with git. They are immutable. You can only make new commits that are based on existing ones in some way. The distinction is important, because the original commit (such as a commit pre-rebase) still exists after it's been "changed".
The use case for more is managing the history of it in a specific way to make it easier to understand. Most applications don't need this level of management since most applications don't have lives depending on them
Yeah even that has caused me trouble. I usually just copy the problem file to another directory, checkout the file from the repo, pull, and then diff/merge my changes. It may sound like more work, and maybe it is, but I understand what's happening and it's rare enough for me that to do it "the git way" I'd have to look it up every time.
>Then I got tired of pulling up my UIs and learned the terminal commands
I'd never revert to terminal commands. Git is basically begging to be interfaced with through a GUI given how much sense it makes to visualize a git repo and its workflows. The moment I started using Magit git started to make sense for me.
I like GitKraken, except for the fact that it lacks the ability to show first parent only, i.e. `git log --first-parent`. That feature is available in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code (Git Graph extension), but I don't like these as much as GitKraken, so I end up switching between command line, GitKraken and VS/Code. It's a bit of a mess. Does Fork support `--first-parent`? It's especially hand in merge-heavy workflows with very noodly graphs that you want to simplify.
Not only does Fork support --first-parent, but it even lets you expand/collapse any merge commit just by clicking the node in the graph!
Agreed it's the best way to make sense of a merge-heavy history.
