<story><title>Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood</title><url>https://www.afterbabel.com/p/community-based-childhood</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sircastor</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s trying to &lt;i&gt;appear&lt;/i&gt; to be science. They want the appearance of legitimacy and objectivity to encourage a particular position.&lt;p&gt;A quick read through of the site shows it&amp;#x27;s a conservative-leaning group, and I&amp;#x27;d be willing to bet that sooner-or-later they&amp;#x27;ll be pushing &amp;quot;a return to traditional values&amp;quot; as the cure for all our ills.</text></item><item><author>WorkerBee28474</author><text>&amp;gt; All in all, this is not science&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not trying to be. The intended audience is not peers reading a research journal, it&amp;#x27;s normal folks and policy makers who don&amp;#x27;t know what a confounding variable is but still want to make modern life suck less.</text></item><item><author>chris_va</author><text>Apologies for being critical, but this reads like the author had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward to some flashy graphs to make it work (the right side of the &amp;quot;lies, damn lies, and statistics&amp;quot; spectrum).&lt;p&gt;There is no discussion of confounders, no control groups or paired studies, and there are million things correlated with the last 50 of societal development years besides the topics mentioned here. The mention of phones and other influences in teen behavior is completely unrelated to the main point in the discussion and just serves to provide credibility by association.&lt;p&gt;All in all, this is not science, it is just a reductionist oped presented as fact using classic internet hooks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WorkerBee28474</author><text>&amp;gt; A quick read through of the site shows it&amp;#x27;s a conservative-leaning group&lt;p&gt;While there&amp;#x27;s nothing wrong with being conservative, the group&amp;#x27;s founder is a self-described Democrat.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;d be willing to bet that sooner-or-later they&amp;#x27;ll be pushing &amp;quot;a return to traditional values&amp;quot; as the cure for all our ills&lt;p&gt;If &amp;quot;growing up in close-knit communities&amp;quot; (from the article) is a traditional value, then yes, they are saying that would be a good thing.</text></comment>
<story><title>Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood</title><url>https://www.afterbabel.com/p/community-based-childhood</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sircastor</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s trying to &lt;i&gt;appear&lt;/i&gt; to be science. They want the appearance of legitimacy and objectivity to encourage a particular position.&lt;p&gt;A quick read through of the site shows it&amp;#x27;s a conservative-leaning group, and I&amp;#x27;d be willing to bet that sooner-or-later they&amp;#x27;ll be pushing &amp;quot;a return to traditional values&amp;quot; as the cure for all our ills.</text></item><item><author>WorkerBee28474</author><text>&amp;gt; All in all, this is not science&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not trying to be. The intended audience is not peers reading a research journal, it&amp;#x27;s normal folks and policy makers who don&amp;#x27;t know what a confounding variable is but still want to make modern life suck less.</text></item><item><author>chris_va</author><text>Apologies for being critical, but this reads like the author had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward to some flashy graphs to make it work (the right side of the &amp;quot;lies, damn lies, and statistics&amp;quot; spectrum).&lt;p&gt;There is no discussion of confounders, no control groups or paired studies, and there are million things correlated with the last 50 of societal development years besides the topics mentioned here. The mention of phones and other influences in teen behavior is completely unrelated to the main point in the discussion and just serves to provide credibility by association.&lt;p&gt;All in all, this is not science, it is just a reductionist oped presented as fact using classic internet hooks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasonfarnon</author><text>A quick read through of the site shows it&amp;#x27;s a conservative-leaning group,&lt;p&gt;this is neat, using guilt by association to support a comment alleging the fallacy of guilt by association</text></comment>