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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Just believe the parents seems like it may not always be the best policy either. There's some really terrible parents out there. I don't know off hand whether the numbers suggest more people are affeted by bad science and government overreach, or bad parents and government indifference, but I feel this blog is probably on the wrong side of the argument, even if there's areas everyone should agree on (no junk science for example).

Though the blogger doesn't actually say believe the parents, they say believe the mother (well, they say "don't automatically discount the mother" which in context appears to be a weaselly way of saying the same thing) which is a bit more specific. One of the cases seems to involve an accusation from a husband, that the test backed up. So even if the lab was tossing coins to come up with their results, we also have to assume a husband and father lied about his child's mother's behaviour.

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Taking a child away from a family is one of the worst violations a government can subject someone to, all the way up there with imprisonment. The argument isn't a binary choice between trusting the mother or not, it's to raise the bar for evidence significantly - which is what I take don't automatically discount the mother" to mean.

This should be treated like a criminal matter, with the same standards of evidence. If we're comfortable letting a criminal go free of prison because guilt can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (and we should, for the record), we should be comfortable letting a child stay with its parents until the parents inability to care is established beyond a reasonable doubt. Or at the very least, the parents in question should have a court appointed defence lawyer.

I was with you until this:

If we're comfortable letting a criminal go free of prison because guilt can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (and we should, for the record), we should be comfortable letting a child stay with its parents until the parents inability to care is established beyond a reasonable doubt.

The difference is that in one scenario it’s about punishing something that happened and is done and in the other it’s to prevent ongoing/future harm. If you’ve seen some of the things parents are willing to do to their own kids, you would see why it’s not that simple.

> The difference is that in one scenario it’s about punishing something that happened and is done and in the other it’s to prevent ongoing/future harm.

Letting a criminal go free (think serial-murderer, rapist) is just as valid an argument for future harm.

I don't see why you treat these 2 cases differently.

The legal requirements to restraining an individual to prevent some future violence with a known specific potential victim (eg. restraining order, arrest) are lower than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard.

The rights of a child to be abused and the rights of a parent to not have their child be taken away are both very important. It’s my subjective impression that the “child abused” case is much more common than the “child taken away where no abuse occurred” case. I see no reason that our laws should be biased in favor of letting that case occur.

There already exists mechanisms to remove people from opportunity to do harm without due process if there is overwhelming, immediate risk. It's very tightly controlled and very temporary. The same could be applied here.

If a child has been living with a mother that (apparently) has 18 drinks a day (getting to 18 drinks a day while still being a functional human is not something you get to overnight, it's a long process) without obviously suffering, this is cause for grave concern, it is a significant risk, but it's not an immediate risk. In this context it's also important to keep in mind that removing a child is possibly the correct answer in many cases, but it hurts the child 100% of the time. That hurt must be less, by a very significant margin, than the hurt of staying put.

>The argument isn't a binary choice between trusting the mother or not, it's to raise the bar for evidence significantly - which is what I take don't automatically discount the mother" to mean.

We could start by adding Fathers back into the equation, and not automatically assuming that a child is in danger if they're not in their Mothers' sphere.

I think this is the worst thing that governments have done for families: the idea that a single-parent (Primarily the Mother) family is anything less than ideal for the children needs to attain mainstream acceptance. Dads need to stay, and Mothers need to move over and make way for it.

This is up to the Fathers to step in: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/cathy-meyer/dispelling-the-my...

>According to the report, a married father spends on average 6.5 hours a week taking part in primary child care activities with his children. The married mother spends on average 12.9 hours. Since two-income households are now the norm, not the exception, the above information indicates that not only are mothers working, but they are also doing twice as much child care as fathers.

Society has to make it okay for Fathers to play this role. Right now, it is "expected" that Mothers are the primary caregivers - this is entirely cultural, and must change.

Fathers stepping in is one way it'll change. Mothers stepping out is another. To find the balance we have to make room for it.

Why do Mothers need to step out? Do you think they're refusing requests from Fathers about helping out with care-giving?

I think there is definitely a proclivity towards staying at home, as a cultural norm, while sending ones partner off to work - and I don't think this is really balanced, no. The idea that there is one parent that is more 'ideal at the home' than the other is what needs to change.

It is certainly not "entirely cultural". We are still part of the animal kingdom. There is actual biology and evolution at play. Ignoring that is pseudoscience.

Hours of daily parental exposure is not how anyone assigns "broken family" status. Psychologically it's about where both parents sleep at night.

> we also have to assume a husband and father lied about his child's mother's behaviour.

Given that we’re talking about a clearly contentious divorce, it’s sadly not entirely unjustified to assume this might happen.

Are divorces in Canada contentious? I've been led to believe that USA has a uniquely dire set of divorce laws...

Ultimately you're talking about breaking up two people who have probably lived together for some time and working out a sharing agreement with two people who don't really want to be around each other anymore. It's hard to imagine a scenario where there isn't friction or hurt feelings in this case.

Best case scenario the couple wasn't married very long and doesn't have much in the way of joint possessions and no kids and they both work so you don't have alimony concerns you still need to decide who has to move out.

I think it's useful to remember that this is, at it's core, a signal detection problem.

As such, there is necessarily a tradeoff between the rate of hits (correctly identifying "bad" parents) and false-alarms.

The question then becomes: what's an acceptable false-positive rate?

Zero. If the choices are to leave a child in a bad situation vs. destroying a family for no reason, I would err on leaving a child in a bad situation. Neither option is great, of course, but in the absence of perfection...

Well perfection at predicting the future is impossible. While I don't know what level would be acceptable, your option of never removing a child to safety doesn't seem right either.

> Zero

Then you cannot, under any circumstances, remove a child from his or her parents.

I mean this in the strictest, most mathematical sense.

Are you sure that's what you want?

I'm not sure being so reductive helps.

Even in other applications, you wouldn't just come up with an acceptable false-positive rate. You'd consider that as part of a larger process.

How often do you test? What other tests are available? What's the cost/benefit tradeoffs?

So for example in some medical tests they tell people of certain ages to just come in for tests. They review and change that age based on evidence. Some tests may give borderline results so people get asked to come back sooner than average if they only just pass. Better techniques for confirming or denying the conclusion may be developed for use before doing anything drastic and irreversible.

False-positive rates (of the multiple different tests available) are only one factor.

I would guess almost all of these things are already done in the current case under discussion, e.g. as mentioned before one case involved accusations from a husband. Now maybe that's just two false signals that happen to agree, but already you're talking about two false-positive rates you need to consider. Judges and social workers are probably making snap decisions based on gut instinct and rules of thumb as well that factor in. Presumably a case needs to be pretty serious before removal is even considered.

From just reading a libertarian blog that focusses on goverment intrusion into child-rearing though, you may think people are having their hair snipped randomly in the street and finding their children gone when they get home. A false-positive for that hypothetical case would obviously need to be much, much lower to be acceptable than in tests used as part of a bigger process.

>How often do you test? What other tests are available? What's the cost/benefit tradeoffs?

I don't disagree wit you, but none of what you say gets around the fact that once you start removing children from the custody of their parents, a non-zero FA rate sets in.

>Better techniques for confirming or denying the conclusion may be developed for use before doing anything drastic and irreversible.

Case in point: this is also a signal-detection problem. You can certainly try to build a more sensitive detector, but the infamous tradeoff doesn't magically go away.

As such, you have to have at least some idea of what kinds of FA-odds you're wiling to tolerate, else you're just flying blind.

And I must insist on this point: the universe doesn't care how disturbing one finds the Hit/FA trade-off. It's still there, even if one doesn't want to look at it.

If the test was a coin flip then the result coveys no information. That means the only information to base the decision on was the husband’s accusation and the wife’s counter. What should be done in that situation?

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