This is an impressive blog! So far I've read two posts and found information I've been unable to locate on my own.
Much though I appreciated this post, I will say that I'm skeptical of the conclusion, though not because I'm particularly credulous about the accuracy of retrospective accounts of past events. Rather, I'm *also* skeptical about the accuracy of official findings. From where I sit in the admitted comfort and safety of my home, neither child protective services, therapy, nor the legal process seem optimized for investigative discovery.
It's also hard to avoid extremely obvious pathways by which negative events would cause some kind of harm: External stress --> cortisol, adrenaline, etc --> behaviors & physiological adaptations optimized for short term survival in a harsh environment. It's one thing to point out that people have an emotional predisposition to presume "trauma is harmful," but people also have a motivation to understand basic causality in the world around them. Denying that trauma has any significant effect leaves us baffled as we consider how the human organism:
1. Goes to such great lengths to avoid psychological pain, even enduring physical discomfort and danger to avoid it,
2. Experiences moral outrage at the sight of traumatic mistreatment of others, and
3. Commits suicide in response to trauma.
Indeed, this last factor gives the clearest evidence that trauma really is damaging; were there many individuals in the above prospective/retrospective studies who were dead at the time the study was carried out?
The obvious conclusion here is straightforward: "there is about a d=0.2, r=0.1 relationship between abused and non-abused college students in terms of mental health, which is statistically significant but not big..." This is the kind of signal one expects from genuine causal factors which may neither be necessary nor sufficient to give rise to an outcome on their own, as Scott Alexander has posted about elsewhere: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/19/beware-summary-statistics/
In other words, r = .1 from trauma is *exactly* what we would expect if trauma really were traumatic, but psychological factors made the difference between overcoming the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or being thereby destroyed:
Another popsci meme bites the dust.
This is an impressive blog! So far I've read two posts and found information I've been unable to locate on my own.
Much though I appreciated this post, I will say that I'm skeptical of the conclusion, though not because I'm particularly credulous about the accuracy of retrospective accounts of past events. Rather, I'm *also* skeptical about the accuracy of official findings. From where I sit in the admitted comfort and safety of my home, neither child protective services, therapy, nor the legal process seem optimized for investigative discovery.
It's also hard to avoid extremely obvious pathways by which negative events would cause some kind of harm: External stress --> cortisol, adrenaline, etc --> behaviors & physiological adaptations optimized for short term survival in a harsh environment. It's one thing to point out that people have an emotional predisposition to presume "trauma is harmful," but people also have a motivation to understand basic causality in the world around them. Denying that trauma has any significant effect leaves us baffled as we consider how the human organism:
1. Goes to such great lengths to avoid psychological pain, even enduring physical discomfort and danger to avoid it,
2. Experiences moral outrage at the sight of traumatic mistreatment of others, and
3. Commits suicide in response to trauma.
Indeed, this last factor gives the clearest evidence that trauma really is damaging; were there many individuals in the above prospective/retrospective studies who were dead at the time the study was carried out?
The obvious conclusion here is straightforward: "there is about a d=0.2, r=0.1 relationship between abused and non-abused college students in terms of mental health, which is statistically significant but not big..." This is the kind of signal one expects from genuine causal factors which may neither be necessary nor sufficient to give rise to an outcome on their own, as Scott Alexander has posted about elsewhere: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/19/beware-summary-statistics/
In other words, r = .1 from trauma is *exactly* what we would expect if trauma really were traumatic, but psychological factors made the difference between overcoming the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or being thereby destroyed:
Steel can weather hammer blows, and
Brass endure ages of rust
Willow bends to the howling winds, but
Glass shatters into the dust