Sanity Prevails!!

[albalark]

 Woke this morning to some good news coming out of Florida for a change:   www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/us/23adopt.html .  Though this ought to come under the heading of 'Well, DUH', it's still nice to see idiocy get get the kick in the ass it so richly deserves.

Another lovely thing that made my morning - a new bunch of ficlets/drabbles from verus_janus .  My

Comments

[kellychambliss]

About time! But those "common sense" ideas about what is "obviously" and "naturally" best for children are the hardest to dislodge

[albalark]

We had an on-campus speaker a few years ago who said, "studies repeatedly show that children do better on most psychological and academic measures of success when they are raised by their two biological parents." (Not even just two opposite-sex parents, but the actual biological parents.) When asked "what studies?" she cited some that one of our sociology profs said were not at all conclusive.

If I can let my inner Snape out for a minute (it's hard to stuff him back in when I do ::g::), if there's anything that's more pathetic than sociologists pretending what they do is science, I don't know what it could be. I once used to teach a course in statistical methodology to resident physicians, and to a person they were all stunned that you could take the same data set and end up with completely opposing conclusions. What you get greatly depends on just who you choose to be the cohort group, how large this group is, what one chooses as the parameters defining 'success' (all of which are influenced by things like race, socioeconomic

[kellychambliss]

Oh, please, do rant away /g/. Your inner Snape is absolutely right. I'm no statistician, but even I am skeptical of the various conclusions drawn by so many studies -- ideas offered as "fact" that are so obviously open to all sorts of different interpretations. And people inferring cause/effect from what is often clearly just correlation.. very frustrating.

I hope the single malt did the trick /g/