Making causal claims without accounting for genetic confounds is simply pseudoscience, there are no excuses.
It's embarrassing to see HN users reflexively posting (and upvoting) five-second internet tropes to swipe something away. We need to avoid that if we're to have substantive conversation. Criticism is fine, but when criticizing, you owe it both to the material and to the community to engage specifically with specific content.
So the dismissal reads like "there's no excuse for not doing an extremely difficult thing that no one knows how to do reliably." I don't find that to be a useful or informative comment, so I agree with dang's approach here.
On the OP getting warned, it wasn't immediately clear to me if the objection was more about a) knowledge that Matthew Yglesias didn't read the study and therefore was not in a position to summarize his analysis with a pithy analogy and be quoted, b) the use of any pithy analogy itself, or c) the use of an analogy that seemed to explain a confounding issue? There seemed to be some additional, non-obvious context missing (at least to me) that led to the warning.
We already know from earlier twin studies that genetics play a large role in literacy and numeracy.[0][1] So it's not like this is a shot in the dark, everyone already knows it's a confounder that must be taken into account.
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1469-7610.... [1] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797613486982
But trying to get others to not read someone else's work or take it seriously based on something you dreamt up that could be wrong with the study design is a completely inappropriate.
This study was done in response to the Scarborough and Dobrich paper that found that how much parents read to their children (generally) isn't correlated with children's future reading ability, but how many books are in their household is a positive predictor of future reading ability.
It's one of the most famous and surprising findings in all of social science.
I'd suggest rather than the authors not "understanding science" or whatever, perhaps it's more likely that their target audience wasn't people on HN who would complain without knowing anything about the field.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027322978...
As for the conclusion of the study, it is rather mild and has been known for a while: social class has impacts on people, especially on education related outcome.
It will be interesting to see how this updates over time. My children are not physically surrounded by books, but they've got Amazon Freetime and nearly blanket permission to use it, which they take advantage of quite a bit. It's a lot more easy access to books than I had at their age.
Kind of makes sense in a way. Only anecdotal, but I’ve learned to read at 5 years of age almost all by myself (my dad had taught me the letters a little time before that) only because I was bored as hell while I was vacationing at my grandparents’ house and there were a couple of books around. I picked one and started reading it loud while I was alone, and that was it. I’m no genius, mind you, that’s why I think that my experience is not unique.
In essence, a very likely explanation for the observed "childhood books vs adult success" observation is that growing up surrounded by books is an indicator that your parents may have higher socioeconomic status than average, or that they have an above average educational background and IQ, or possibly all of it, and for those things it's well known that they have hereditary (both nature-hereditary and nurture-hereditary) effects that indicate that the kids are somewhat more likely to be successful in most aspects of life.
That observation (both in your link and in the studies described in the main article above) is not a reason to assume any causal relationship; the original studies don't claim that, but the article we're discussing does try to imply such claim without any appropriate justification, and that is inexcusable pseudoscience.
Maybe not in this particular study, but the whole point is that any given study is going to be done in the larger context of a one or more fields of pre-existing research.
If you look at the paper I linked to, the proposed model is that in order for kids to be good at reading, they need to read. And the kids who read the most are going to be those who love reading. Now when you as a parent read books to your kids, some kids will love that and others will hate it. And if you read to them if they don't like it, that can actually turn them off from reading and lead to them being worse at reading in the long term. Whereas if you just leave books around the house, sooner or later they're likely going to read some of them, and are more likely to develop a love of reading just by reading things they're interested in when they're interested in them rather than having reading being forced on them before they're interested.
No one is arguing that there isn't an SES component or whatever. But the actual proposed explanation comes from the context of the last 50+ years of research on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, and is interesting on its own.
Any one paper isn't going to look at more than one specific thing, but if you're only looking at that one paper without understanding the larger context of the research then you're not going to understand what's interesting about it or why it was worth doing.
This is self-contradictory. Research that supports “X is a predictor of Y” which does not inherently refute “X is a cause of Y”, in and of itself, is research supporting “X could be a cause of Y”.
The quality of this research may indeed be poor, but the "tall pants" analogy seems disingenuous.
I'm finding it interesting to consider all three scenarios together. What is the similarly between your analogy and the book study that makes them sound right while the pants analogy sounds wrong? I contend that it is the aspect of growth through practice. My intuition is that these three scenarios exist on a spectrum with regards to how much affect practice has. It is clear that working out a lot results in more muscles, and it's clear that trying on tall pants a lot does not result in becoming tall. To me, it's also clear that reading a lot of books "exercises" some sort of book-reading "muscle". But it's less clear what the follow-on effects of exercising that muscle might be. It's also not clear whether growing up with either gym equipment or books around usually results in heavy use of those things!
If only we could find some smart parents and get them to deny their kids books, we’d know for sure!
I am really tired of people talking about correlation and causation and completely ignoring carefully hedged phrases. Can we save them for when articles actually make concrete claims about causal links? There’s still interesting stuff here to discuss, and you can even soapbox your favorite theory. But there’s little to gain from actually discussing the (obvious) lack of causal link here.
Unless you can point out how you’d improve the study—it’s not entirely obvious to me what the next step would be as I’m not a scientist.
Fyi... in the abstract of the actual paper that the article is based on, the authors used less hedging and suggested more of a cause & effect:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X1...
Even if the underlying reality is that growing up around books is an effect of a shared hidden (genetic or otherwise) cause, the fact that it is a predictor even after for controlling for the identified alternative factors is quite a significant result.
(Though, as other comments point out, self-reporting may be a problem, though “people that are more successful than expected for their occupation, education, and parental education tend to overreport the number of books they grew up with compared to less successful individuals” would be an interesting result in its own way.)
"Well, no," he continued. "Much more likely is that any family that has 100 children's books in the home is likely to be pretty highly educated to begin with, is starting out with a pretty high IQ, and values or treasures or rewards education to begin with."
'Respondents, who ranged in age from 25 to 65, were asked to estimate how many books were in their house when they were 16 years old.'
It's very likely that avid readers will overreport the books, while reluctant readers are likely to underreport.
Parenting is rife with cargo cult activity. Even (or perhaps especially) in places like Palo Alto where you'd think parents would have some understanding of statistics and causality.