It’s really easy to feel like you aren’t doing enough to protect your children. But how much is too much?

I say this as someone who takes his young nephews to the park on a pretty regular basis. My general philosophy is that there is very little that can go wrong on a playground. My job is to watch them to make sure that they don’t do anything too reckless and to encourage them to stretch their boundaries. But if a kid wants to climb a jungle gym that the warning label says he’s too young for, or he wants to climb up a slide the wrong direction, my reaction is usually “go for it.” And then I sit back and nervously watch them, idly wondering where the nearest emergency room is.

Of course, compared to the nannies and young mothers that I see at the park (and I’m not stereotyping here; in my experience it is incredibly rare for a man to take children to a park on a weekday morning) I am a reckless caregiver. They tell their children not to climb jungle gyms if it is at all challenging, not to walk up a slide backwards, not to play with sticks, not to run too fast…. And I’ve had them tell me to not let my child do those things, because it is dangerous and they don’t want their kids getting any bad ideas. On the one hand, I feel sorry for those kids; on the other hand, a part of me wonders if I am doing something wrong.
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There is an extremely interesting (albeit long) article in the upcoming New York Times Magazine (they post their lead articles online a few days before the magazine itself comes out) about noted scientist and global warming skeptic, Freemon Dyson. The article makes note of the fact that Dyson is widely considered to be one of the most brilliant thinkers of the last century, and is widely credited with an ability to incorporate data from a wide array of scientific disciplines. Dyson is also widely noted for his intense aversion to common knowledge. Reading that article, it occurred to me that Dyson is wrong for all the right reasons.
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Check out this article, describing two recently published studies on the effectiveness of a common type of prostate screenings. The gist is that blood exams that look for prostate cancer don’t actually prolong the lives of even at-risk men, on average. In other words, this type of prostate screening may be a large waste of time and money. (I should note that there are two kinds of prostate exams, a blood test and a physical test, and the study was only looking at the blood test.)
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It’s always dangerous to tell a chatty cab driver that you study Political Science. I learned that one the hard way when I was an undergraduate. The driver in question proceeded to spend most of my thirty minute ride from the airport explaining to me how the country has gotten away from the ideals of our founding fathers. But he had the perfect way to fix it. We just plug everything that the founding fathers every wrote into a big computer, and then whenever we have a question about policy or government we just plug it into that computer, and it would tell us what they would have done. He even had this idea of a holographic Thomas Jefferson giving these pronouncements. In the driver’s mind, the technological, philosophical, and practical problems of such an endeavor were either already solved, or trivial given the current state of science.
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Oct 182007
 

Watson, a nobel Prize winner who in conjunction with Crick first understood the nature of DNA, recently incited a storm of controversy by insinuating that different racial groups had different levels of intelligence. To start, I don’t agree with his statements. I’ve read into the genetics of race, and teach classes on intelligence and psychometric testing, and the preponderance of evidence suggests that this isn’t the case. For example, while there are differences in IQ tests based on race, these differences can be made to disappear by simply persuading participants that what they’re taking isn’t an IQ test. This can’t be predicted by a genetic difference hypothesis.
But the point of this post isn’t to discuss race and intelligence. Its to discuss academic freedom. In response to Watson’s comments, a minority rights interest group released the following statement “It amounts to fuelling bigotry and we would like it to be looked at for grounds of legal complaint.”

Legal complaint? Seriously? How politically correct have we gotten as a society that when a scientist puts forth a hypothesis that we disagree with, rather than trying to empirically demonstrate the hypothesis to be false, we instead go to the legal system. The point of such a suit is to chill science. To intimidate scientists into only pursuing research that fits with a particular political agenda. This would lead us to the development of policy based on “evidence” that isn’t really evidence because we couldn’t genuinely investigate the issue. How can we do good research on race issues, and develop coherent policy on race relations, if we can’t engage in the full spectrum of ideas? The place to fight these claims isn’t the courtroom, its the lab. That people are trying to stifle academic freedom in the name of political correctness annoys me to no end.

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