Baby Development Videos a Fraud

[WakataDreamer]

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/aug...-babyeinstein7 lol

[Marvo]

Studies like these don't really prove anything.

[dajo]

still pretty interesting. thanks

[Xaqaria]

I think that this is pretty intuitive. Anyone who thinks they can plop their infant down in front of a television to make them smarter is bound to have stupid children regardless, because they are obviously unattentive parents.

[Xei]

Junk statistics, junk inference.

[dajo]

well, but it has been shown in neurology that watching television at an early age is correlated with lesser educational success. and it can be explained as well. Recently there was this 30-year study published, I have a lecture on it, but it's in german - I'll try to find that study though. Anyway, children at a very young age watching television is bad for the development. And I agree, it makes sense if you think about it and how a child processes and learns information - the used neuropathways (at that age fundamental ones) are never going to change again, new ones are added 'on top', but what a child learned at that time is, neurologically speaking, permanent. And it is kind of obvious that a child should learn the basic things about our world by exploring, especially the outside, rather then from a flat representation of the world. No matter what's on the tube.

[DuB]

Studies like these don't really prove anything. Correlation doesn't prove causation, that's my point. There's no evidence here that TV is inherently bad. The problems with correlational studies are well known, but there's no reason to dismiss them entirely. For the present example, there are rather obvious ethical problems with assigning large groups of infants to a treatment group which the researchers believe will permanently harm them. Correlational studies are the best that we can do in this case and many others. They do not allow strict causal inference, of course, but they are suggestive, and much good science would be thrown out the window if we simply wrote off every correlation.

[Marvo]

The problems with correlational studies are well known, but there's no reason to dismiss them entirely. For the present example, there are rather obvious ethical problems with assigning large groups of infants to a treatment group which the researchers believe will permanently harm them. Correlational studies are the best that we can do in this case and many others. They do not allow strict causal inference, of course, but they are suggestive, and much good science would be thrown out the window if we simply wrote off every correlation. This is true. The problem is that many people take studies like these for absolute proof, which is wrong. That's what I was getting at with my first post. Studies like these don't prove anything, though they create grounds for further research.