All Easterbrooks are wrong, but some Easterbrooks are useful.
You're just trying to justify your irrational hatred of TV by citing hackwork from second-rate universities.
Well, what do you expect from a university that calls itself an Ivy but has an ag school?
First-rate ice cream, that's what I expect.
It's the electronic waves affecting the infant brain. We'll stop letting toddlers watch tv and make them all wear insulated helmets insetad, you just wait and see.
If I were going to guess, I'd speculate that even if this does turn out to be the case, it won't affect TV watching levels at all.
Falling in non-creepy blog crush again
Never wanted to
What am I to do?
Can't help it
4 -- there's a really good ice cream parlor on the road that leads to the Science Museum. Purity, I think it's called. And an excellent sandwich shop very close by.
make them all wear insulated helmets
I'm getting mine one of those fancy new Toshiba models.
Autism can be cured by sitting facing a bare wall, drinking beer, and cursing the darkness.
I'd speculate that even if this does turn out to be the case, it won't affect TV watching levels at all
Really? I think you'll see an anti-TV panic. In fact, you and I now have a $1 wager on this. The Unfoggeteriat will judge who was correct, and I give the panic one year to blossom, from the time the study is confirmed (if it is).
9.--We must do a strict control study for masturbating and crying.
10 ignores that an anti-TV panic can flourish without affecting television viewing levels at all.
9: Well, but what can't, really?
Alcoholism.
$1 wager
Piker.
But measuring the result would be tricky. I'd agree that you'll see a full-blown media panic, I just think that it won't turn into less actual TV time for babies.
I'd agree that you'll see a full-blown media panic
If so, I really really really wanna see how the cable news channels handle it. That should be good for some comedy.
Haven't pored over the links, but the basic argument seems like it'd also be compatible with blaming autism on compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Or, to get closer to the precipitation that's being used for a correlation, you could argue that it's atomized acid rain that's causing the problem. Or the traumatic experience of seeing a rained-out baseball game on television. It all seems impossibly far from establishing causation to me.
But I'll admit that my sympathies are hopelessly divided: on the one hand I hate Easterbrook's science writing, but on the other I would love to see a ban on advertising aimed at children. These warring forces do battle under an umbrella of ambivalence about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Anyway, what's with the sudden increase in autism-oriented activism? Comedy Central just put on a benefit that seemed slightly out of left field. I suppose there's probably some new foundation or campaign that deserves the credit.
would love to see a ban on advertising aimed at children
Because you hate capitalism, Comrade?
what's with the sudden increase in autism-oriented activism?
It seems to be a condition that affects a lot of middle and upper-middle-class parents?
I'm thinking correlation does not imply causality here (actually, I've used that phrase in front of a philosopher once, and he said, "Correlation does not imply anything," but that's besides the point). Autism rates have been increasing since the mid-20th century; tv began insinuating itself into American culture since the mid-20th Century. In a way, it sounds like a re-hash of the whole "Cold-Mother Syndrome" of Bettelheim: 'ignore' your kids during some critical developemental phase and they develop severe, irreperable developemental disorders. I don't know. My brother has Autism, and growing up we hardly watched any TV. Of course, anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything, either.
I would comment on this post, but I am busy counting the 'b's and 'd's in the text.
18: Sudden like in the last couple of months, or do you mean over the last decade? Because rates of autism and autism spectrum diagnoses really have gone way, way up in the last twenty years or so, and people have reacted to that.
Haven't pored over the links, but the basic argument seems like it'd also be compatible with blaming autism on compact fluorescent lightbulbs.
They've also got a correlation with cable TV in the household (or, actually, I think it's with rates of cable TV in a given locality.) I still don't believe it, on the 'too good a story to be true' grounds, but it doesn't look like self-evident nonsense to me.
If there is any panic, it will be most intense among investors in this company.
21: Exactly -- it looks like 'blame the parents'. On the other hand, they aren't suggesting that all cases of autism are caused by TV exposure, just that it's a trigger in some cases.
Easterbrook always starts out with two strikes against him, but then, I hate TV.
Another theory is that autism is genetic and happens when two smart, obsessive, manic people marry one another.
One of a cousin's children got a diagnosis of "mild autism," and what it's meant substantially is that she's been able to tap into state resources for better, more involved developmental training. The kid needs more attention, more directed games, closer supervision. But with those resources and a little luck, he'll probably turn out fine. If they didn't intervene, though, and if instead they sat him in front of a tv a whole bunch, well, maybe his mental development would indeed be in trouble.
jeez. these comments are coming faster than a guy in a dolphin.
19: well, there's that. But also, right now my generation is in the process of forcing society to relive the tropes of our stupid, materialistic childhood. I personally think this is great, of course. But I can see how it might get really irritating for everyone else. More importantly, I don't want to have to extend the same forbearance to future generations.
20: that's my impression, too, which makes me kind of curious about it. My totally uneducated impression is that autism research is probably pretty well-funded, and the condition frequently less debilitating than a lot of other developmental disabilities. Obviously it's stupid to complain about people directing their generosity to something other than the One True Charity (particularly given my own indefensible sympathies), but it does seem a little odd to me.
ambivalence about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
That book SO did not live up to the hype.
A correlation with cable TV would only imply a correlation with wealth to me, not necessarily more TV watching. So I think all that could be proven by the weather study is that wealthier people have something in their house, exposure to which may influence the rate of autism.
My totally uneducated impression is that autism research is probably pretty well-funded, and the condition frequently less debilitating than a lot of other developmental disabilities.
My impression isn't much more educated than yours, but it's different -- I think of full-fledged autism as a godawful nightmare, one of the worst things that can happen to a kid, and even the high-functioning autism spectrum disorders that seem to be really commonly diagnosed these days as pretty rough.
According to my sister, who's a geneticist, some gigantic proportion of autistic children have at least one engineer in their immediate family tree (like a grandfather or an aunt); it seems that some of the genetic markers that would contribute to an autistic spectrum child would in a non-autistic relative lead to comparatively successful careers these days. Which might be a better causation than mercury levels for the autism cluster in the Silicon Valley area.
wealthier people have something in their house, exposure to which may influence the rate of autism.
"something" = nerds.
Hey LB, whatcha got against ag schools?
Just glancing around quickly, I can find no evidence that this has been peer reviewed or is being published in a journal. Am I missing something?
36: Nothing, just giving teo a hard time.
37: I don't think you are, and that is odd. If you look on Waldman's CV, it's listed under 'Other Publications', and rather than a journal or book or something, it's described as 'mimeo'. But I really don't know how unconventional that is.
But I really don't know how unconventional that is.
Super unconventional. And weirdly anachronistic.
So I think all that could be proven by the weather study is that wealthier people have something in their house, exposure to which may influence the rate of autism.
Well, it's a difference so subtle it could really be splitting hairs, but it doesn't exactly imply this, even if we assume cable television penetration is only a proxy for wealth. Their study just implies that extra days inside makes a child more likely to be recognized as autistic (likely due to higher rates of autism) and that extra wealth makes a child more likely to be recognized as autistic (likely due to better resources).
To determine if wealthy people's houses cause more autism, there would have to be an interaction variable combining the wealth and days inside measure. This would tell you an extra day inside a rich house led to higher autism rates than an extra day inside a rich house.
Actually, they should have included such a variable anyway, as it would give away how much the higher number of cable TVs affect the effects of days inside on autism. If that makes any sense.
LB: yeah, I meant last-couple-of-months sudden.
And I have no doubt that autism is horrible for those afflicted. If I sound unsympathetic, it's probably just fatigue from listening to the Slashdot crowd self-diagnose themselves with Asperger's in order to turn their romantic failures into proof of genius. But I went to middle school (briefly) with a girl named Vickie who was severely autistic — enough so that verbal communication with her was impossible, and she had to have the help of a facilitator to communicate at all. Incidentally, the films they showed to prepare us for her arrival were deeply misleading — they basically said that autistics were just normal folk trapped in an misbehaving body. In retrospect that's a bit too dumbed-down, even for addressing kids of that age.
But, to get the point back on track: it seems pretty bad, but in my mind it's not on the same level (as a research priority) as debilitating mental illness, chromosomal defects or illnesses that dramatically shorten life. But maybe that's just a failure of my imagination.
fatigue from listening to the Slashdot crowd self-diagnose themselves with Asperger's in order to turn their romantic failures into proof of genius
Word.
Yeah, I don't really know about relative severity. But it does seem to be one of the most common forms of severe mental disability, or however you'd properly categorize it, and one of the most poorly understood. Downs Syndrome is lousy, but we understand it on some level.
Judging from Nicholson's CV, this seems to be some sort of conference presentation.
LB--
I don't know why you are pretending that the cause of autism is some sort of untouched mystery.
I thought it had been pretty well established by now that it was caused by reading blogs.
47 - That's only for the adult-onset variety.
43: There was a Wired article that referred to Asperger's as geek syndrome, or something like that, and really, being socially maladjusted is totally not the same thing, and the sorts of people who try to blame their geekiness on a disorder they meet none of the diagnostic criteria for really piss me off. Liking the technical manuals for Star Trek is not the same thing as being obsessed by numbers. It's comparable to the gut reaction I have to teenage goths going on about the romanticism of depression: grow up, kiddo, put down the eyeliner and back away slowly.
Anyhow. I'm with ogged. Autism is beyond terrifying to most parents, and practically everything has been investigated as a trigger. Anything that kids start doing around two years old, when in some courses of the syndrome, an apparently normal kid either regresses or stalls. So vaccines were the target for a while. Then when vaccines weren't the problem, it was the thimerosal used to preserve the vaccines. Parents of autistic kids seem to be desperate for the magic cause that gives them the answer. If it's TV, not only will we see a bunch of 'we have a TV-free lifestyle', it'll spawn a cottage industry of mommy drive-bys. 'Oh, you let EllaJonah watch TV. Well, I would, but I'm concerned about autism. You do what you want though.'
"Some autistic children and adults who are able to communicate (at least in writing) are opposed to attempts to cure their autism, because they (and/or the guardians) see autism as part of who they are." ...Wikipedia entry
Well, because of who I am, this has been part of my reaction to this thread. But just because it is my nature to dynamically maximize the number of people I am in opposition to, doesn't make me any less wrong on the substance. I don't know that it is in any way compassion and empathy for those who experience the world differently. And maybe it is 44, a romanticization. Whatever.
Silicon valley has the highest autism rate in California. It gets pretty low rainfall so it screwed up the paper's correlation of rainfall and autism for california. I think it also got widespread cable adoption pretty early too. Figure 7 shows the by county cable adoption and two of the highest counties are contra costa and santa cruz which are pretty "silicon valley"-y. (the actual silicon valley counties aren't shown)
The real correlation is between autism (or autism reports) and engineers (or wealth). In oregon there is a correlation of rainfall with autism because the weathier coastal regions get more rain.
51:Pwned by Cala? Still not sure what pwned means.
This could get weird. Think I'll cook dinner, come back and read about autism.
49: It's even harder than that, because Asperger's diagnostic criteria is pretty vague to begin with. But unlike autism, the rash of Asperger's self-diagnoses can be traced to a source: the endless articles fawning over Braham Cohen, the creator of Bittorrent (and by most accounts somebody with a legitimate claim to the diagnosis).
(only 226 hits -- I'm kind of susprised)
51 s/b 49
Flaking out, trying to defend the indefensible, or communicate the incommunicable, or something.
I highly recommend "Discovering my Autism" by Schneider.
Temple Grandin, the humane slaughterhouse designer, also has Aspergers. I'd love to introduce her to Peter Singer.
In fact, if her slaughterhouses are gentle and painless, why would Singer care? If the animals suffered a certain small amount of distress, they could jerk off enough mice to cancel it out.
Emerson, you're having a very good week.
I may be wrong about the silicon valley/engineer link to autism.
This paper seems to show autism cases are up all over the wealthier regions of california.
This article was the one that convinced me there was a silicon valley/engineer link to autism in the first place.
I wonder if it occurred to the researcher to explore lack of sufficient exposure to sunlight as a possible cause. [WoMan was not meant to live by GE alone. We have to add Vitamin D to milk, for pity's sake.]
Autism is the diagnosis-of-the-day, I think. My neighbour was told by the school system that her daughter suffers from it. Symptoms? In kindergarden, the kid would come in, greet all of her classmates with hugs, then sit down and play by herself. And she has some fine motor control problems, which have led to less-than-perfect articulation. So put a label on her and get some more $$ for the school...
I read a similar pop-science article, years ago, that had a similar theme. Nothing to do with autism, but the article suggested that there was something to astrology.
Not that there was any truth to the claim that astral influences shape personality, but rather, to the claim that there's a broad correlation between month of birth and certain personality traits. The hypothesis was simply that whether or not the weather is nice at certain key stages in a child's life -- e.g. if they begin to walk at a time when they can play outside (summer in the northern hemisphere) -- then they develop differently from kids born 6 months earlier or later in the year. And, that as a result, personality traits are not random distributed by birth-date but rather cluster in certain very loose ways.
I have no idea if there was any truth to it all, it was a pop-science article, but it's a vaguely similar idea -- that personality traits are affected by certain broad featurs of the environment during particular developmental stages.
I wrote 59 before 58 was posted. But the hypothesis -- weather, sunlights, etc -- is similar.
58.--It seems to me that in order to test that correlation, you'd have to find a pool of subjects who grew up in total ignorance of their astrological sign and what it was supposed to mean about them.
So put a label on her and get some more $$ for the school...
That's a real problem. Kids get put into ESL or special ed because the school gets extra money.
re 58
Sillicon valley, and southern california, get a lot of sun but have high autism rates.
Climate best by government test
re: 58
This study was based on pre-school children. I suspect that self-fulfilling prophecies vis a vis their star signs were not a major confounding factor.
You would need to do a hemisphere comparison though -- to see if the traits were reversed in Australia, for example -- for the causal hypothesis to have any support.
See, I was thinking about autism as a successful adaptation. It doesn't take me long taking in mainstream television to feel oppressed by the intense socialization pressure and techniques. Tv is an emotional, social mechanism of enforcing conformity, the best ever created and getting better every day. Niche the audiences, so the Wire crowd and the Lost crowd and the Reality Show crowd are specifically targeted with appropriate techniques and messages. The Alphas get Deadwood and Buffy with messages of avoiding anarchy and responsibility toward to the group. The Deltas get variations on Queen for a Day.
Withdrawal from TV is an option only if you think TV doesn't reflect society. If you look around and see most people acting like sitcom characters, more drastic escape could look appropriate.
The people who think faux-communication, scripted relationships, programmed independence, and pointless productivity are the only good things are really pushy about their preferences.
I have a one year old and I just got cable. I would be pretty spooked if the paper is true.
Autism isn't a metaphor.
pointless productivity is way over-rated. Leeching is much better.
53: They're not vague criteria, just negative criteria, to the extent that an Asperger's diagnosis means having a certain number of problems and not qualifying for any other disorder.
The Temple Grandin book is great.
Well, I was at least half serious. If infantile tv-watching intensifies a pre-disposition, it could be "flickering lights" or it could be the content. Now what is the most universal message of TV content, from Sesame St to Sopranos, across nations and borders? Socialization. They have Oprah clones on al-Jazeera, and game shows in Japan.
66:So keep your cable, but give the kid Bergman and Fellini instead of Sesame St and Disney fish.
On the correlation/causation thing: this is why they use the bad weather measure. It's an instrumental variable. The idea is to find a variable that's (a) correlated with variable of causal interest (TV watching), but (b) uncorrelated with the error term in the regression, and also (c) something that couldn't conceivably itself be causing the outcome of interest (autism). So it's a way to increase your confidence that the result you're seeing isn't an artifact of the model.
Also, I haven't looked at the paper, but I would be willing to bet that the authors are economists.
Here endeth the lesson.
Also, I haven't looked at the paper, but I would be willing to bet that the authors are economists.
Yep.
But Kieran, that doesn't make enough sense to me. The parents' willingness to live in an area with a bad climate could be related to the predisposing genetic load, for example; nerdy engineer-types, they enjoy sitting inside and building model train sets of a rainy night, so living in Seattle doesn't bother them. That would have fuck-all to do with television.
I read somewhere that that was one reason that Microsoft chose to headquarter in the Northwest. That, and Gates was from Seattle.
Microsoft was originally headquartered in Albuquerque. Not a lot of rain there.
Which is why they moved to the Northwest!
Does any of this explain Ste/ph/en Den Worste? No, I didn't think so.
Anyway, the notion that TV causes autism--or even Assburgers--seems absurd to me. What kind of TV? Why didn't radio or the movies have the same effect? I do think the '70s--Conjunction Junction, What's your function?--were the Golden Age of children's programming. (I owe my own success (he says, finishing a bottle of wine while talking to imaginary people on teh internet) to Sesame Street, Schoolhouse Rock, and The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour.) Still, banning or curbing advertising aimed at children seems desirable.
As Emerson hates Swedes I'm pretty sure I can't take seriously anything he says about television.
Autism-spectrum disorders are nightmares for parents. It's true that some folks with lower-end versions can be very high-functioning from an outsider's point of view. But it's excruciating to try to parent a kid who won't potty-train, who won't respond predictably (or at all) to emotional communication, who can be unpredictably violent (including to themselves), and who basically can't handle transitions from one activity to another. I've heard stories of autism-spectrum kids who will physically extract their own feces to spread it on the walls, for god's sake. Not all kids have that kind of problem, of course. But anyway, it's no joke; occasional or constant indifference to other people's feelings would be incredibly hard to deal with in a kid who's too young to really be logical about stuff yet, because caring about mommy's or daddy's feelings is a pretty major part of how you get kids to do stuff that they themselves see no reason to do.
Yeah. I can corroborate what bitchphd is saying: I've lived with someone with Autism who has spread feces on walls, although he very rarely does that anymore (I think the last time was a few years ago). That action is part of what gets called "stimming," which is just a collection of odd behaviors (gesticulating wildly or rubbing his/her lips until they're chapped, for example) that seem to bring some sort of comfort.
And getting kids (or adults, even) with Autism to do certain things is pretty difficult. Behavior modification, which is basically a structured system of positive reinforcement, works, but it takes time and patience.
I don't hate Swedes. I only hate Swedish pop producers, the people who gave us Britney and the rest of them. I like Karl XII, Queen Christina, Swedenborg, and Oxenstierna, for example.
Also D'Ohsson, who was only sort of a Swede.
A genetic correlation with autism
So it's a way to increase your confidence that the result you're seeing isn't an artifact of the model.
But a correlation with rainy weather doesn't increase one's confidence that TV causes autism. Perhaps it's indoor air, or artificial light, or having parents who keep kids inside when it rains, or...
My bet is on no real increase at all, it's just that autism is the scary kiddy disease of the decade (like hyperactivity was a few back).
I'd speculate that even if this does turn out to be the case, it won't affect TV watching levels at all.
I think autism is one of the few things that might scare parents enough to affect tv watching levels. I had a FedEx delivery man break down in tears on my porch as he told me about his autistic children. He would have done anything to prevent it in his younger children.
An old housemate does fancy-dancy cognitive science tests on autistic children. She made me cry telling me about babies who won't be touched or make eye contact with their parents. Isn't holding your baby or toddler and gazing into their eyes one of the profoundist joys of having children?
Also - I hate TV on every day of the week, so I am totally willing to believe it causes everything bad.
I hate TV on every day of the week, so I am totally willing to believe it causes everything bad.
Megan rulez. TV is poop, except for postseason baseball.
I'm not sure that a definitive link to autism would change viewing habits all that much. We've known for years that watching television interferes with brain development, especially in early childhood, but most people apparently either don't know that or don't care.
83: Schneider ("Discovering my Autism", highly recommended) was misdiagnosed as an adult,and treated for the wrong condition, for something like a decade, including institutionalization. So the people now diagnosed as autistic probably weren't out in the normal population getting by, they probably were being hammered by a misdiagnosis.
Here is more on the autism paper
http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/2006/10/17/tv-causes-autism-i-doubt-it/
But a correlation with rainy weather doesn't increase one's confidence that TV causes autism.
I didn't say it was a good instrument. I was just trying to explain why they would even do such a thing.
89: Got it. I reacted with too much blood in my caffeine system. What I've been concerned about for some time now is that having access to a PC and some stat software iappears to be a risk factor for sloppy science, mostly of the correlation->causality kind.
It's a conspiracy, the scientists put that stuff out there and the media wretches don't call them on it. There are exceptions but it's all too prevalent.