BS Detection For Parents (Essential Excerpts)
How to know what advice to trust, what to dismiss, and how to parse truth from bs.
Hello Bar-Setters,
As I showed in Tuesday’s post, many institutions that we should be able to turn to for clarity, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, have repeatedly proven themselves untrustworthy.
On top of that, the media is, generally, far more concerned about sparking emotion than providing clarity. They hit us with shocking headlines, but rarely take the time to teach us how to interpret the data they present.
And the amount of noise coming at us is far greater than any previous time. According to ex-Google CEO, Eric Schmidt:
Every two days, now, we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.
That was as of 2010. Hard to comprehend.
I’ll get to my point now
It has never been harder for parents to parse truth from BS. Which is why Emily Oster has become a household name among many parents. She’s made it her mission to help parents make sense of all the information.
Today’s excerpt comes from her recent post, Data Literacy for Parents: The statistical tools you need once you have kids.
For the record, I think “BS Detection For Parents” is a little more catchy. Regardless, here is Oster’s explanation of what data literacy is and why it matters for you:
“…data literacy isn’t about having everyone “do their own research” à la Kyrie Irving. It isn’t about training people to distrust expertise.
For me, increasing data literacy means training people to engage better with expertise — to ask the right questions and understand the context. It’s about helping people process “panic headlines” in a more nuanced and less panicky way.
In doing this, I see four key data-literacy lessons. Here they are — and, by extension, here’s what I want you to learn.”
According to Oster, these are the four key data-literacy lessons all parents (and citizens) need to be able to parse truth from BS:
Lesson 1: Where does data come from?
Lesson 2: Correlation is not causality
Lesson 3: Be Bayesian (this means that new studies add to the picture but they don’t negate old studies)
Lesson 4: We should democratize data
For a full explanation of each lesson, read Oster’s article:
In addition to these lessons, it would benefit everyone to understand a few terms:
Regression to the mean—With sickness/pain, you will almost always get better on our own—usually at around day four. Often we assume that whatever we did made us better, when it was really just time and our bodies’ natural defenses. Did the homeopathy help or were you about to get better when you took it? This falls under the correlation-causation fallacy that Oster mentioned.
Natural frequency—Convert statistics into natural frequencies. For example, I recently saw a treatment that boasted a 49% reduction in cancer risks. When converted to a naturally frequency this turned out to be 30 out of 10,000 vs. 8 out of 10,000 in the placebo trials. Not that significant.
Understand the Placebo effect. It is profound.
The book Bad Science by Dr. Ben Goldacre does a wonderful job of giving you the tools to parse truth from BS.
Data Tells You What Is, NOT What Ought…
I would caution, however, that data can only tell you so much. At the end of the day, your values tell you what to do with the data relative to parenting and your daily life.
For example, if your top values are safety, comfort, and convenience, you may be fine with your boys substituting video games for real world connection and exploration so long as they are happy.
I am not okay with that, however. I value health, passion, leadership and many other virtues, which conflict with obsessive gaming. Thus, I find the tendency for males to care more about gaming than every other aspect of their life to be terrifying. As a parent, I’d find this behavior unacceptable even if there weren’t data-supported academic and mental health consequences.
More on that next week…
In Case You Missed It:
If you are interested in AI and want more of a primer on the topic, I recommend this podcast episode.
Thank you for reading and sharing!
Carry the fire!
Shane