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Comment by CincinnatiMan | Hacker News Reader

> For better or worse, we can expect further blurring of many conventional boundaries—between work and home, between “amateurs” and professionals, and between public and private.

Recently having a child, I'm definitely finding this blurring of amateurs and pros to be true. There's so many blogs and sites that say different things, it's hard to know what or who to believe. I wish there were just one highly-regarded expert source so that I could just go with what they say and not have to research every little thing.

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With rearing a child, as stupid as it may sound, trust your gut. If something feels wrong - it probably is. Other than that - don't worry: the best parent is a happy parent.

I was surprised to find out how many "child rearing" experts do not eat their own dog food or have no children altogether.

> With rearing a child, as stupid as it may sound, trust your gut. If something feels wrong - it probably is.

This feels like dangerous advice re: vaccinations.

I believe the parent is presuming a higher base level of rationality in GP's "gut" than that of the population-at-large. While I'm not a parent, I'm certain that my "gut" would tell me that vaccinating my child is the opposite of wrong, however unpleasant for the child it might seem at the time.

Of course, having watched friends become parents it's also quite clear that becoming a parent changes one's brain in some fundamental ways so it's possible you have a point ;)

I accept the downvotes but I still feel like "by-the-gut" parenting has serious downsides that shouldn't be overlooked.

It's possible being homosexual and raised in a conservative household has influenced that opinion, though.

Agreed. One should trust one's gut if it is trustworthy. Dunning-Kruger makes this advice moot ;-)

Or just in general. Peoples’ “gut feelings” about babies have often historically been pretty bizarre.

Recent example, of a quack medical treatment involving giving babies alcohol:

> Prior to alcohol's removal from the recipe, Woodward's maximum recommended dose of gripe water contained an alcohol content equivalent to five tots of whiskey for an 80kg adult. It was only in 1992 that Britain mandated that alcohol be removed from Gripe water, and in 1993 the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered an automatic detention of all shipments of Woodward's Gripe Water into the U.S.

Giving babies alcohol, in various forms and often in quite large amounts, was part of the ‘conventional wisdom’ for a long time (though never really endorsed by medical science). If peoples’ guts were so wrong then, I wouldn’t trust them now.

This comment is a good example of the attack of junk science from experts.

Why can't you give a baby a small amount of alcohol exactly? They might become alcoholics?

The alcohol helps them sleep. Which if you as a parent are falling apart is better than shaking them to sleep.

I think this is back to the intense pressure put onto parents through pop science.

"Woodward's Gripe Water contained 3.6% alcohol" So it's like giving them a teaspoon of mild beer.

Scientists : Fat makes you fat, so we all ate sugar. Scientists: A virus is tiny and obviously can pass through a non-N95 mask.

It hampers brain, nervous, and muscular development. Researching this is easy. It took less than 20 seconds: https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/AA67/AA67.htm.

You're proving OPs point - you can't apply bullshit logic to science.

Lol, from your link which took 20 seconds.

"It’s simply not known how alcohol will affect the long-term memory and learning skills of people who began drinking heavily as adolescents."

Maybe the section on drink driving is more appropriate on babies having a teaspoon of beer when colic?

We've lost the ability to think for ourselves, and it seems to Google.

So:

We know that it actively harms cell division and brain development...

But long term studies of babies/adolescents' drinking problems haven't been studied (disregarding that it's impossible due to ethics)...

And you still want to argue that it should be okay to give babies alcohol?

Again, think about it for a sec. OFC scientifically there are no compelling studies on the lifetime of alcohol abuse. Empirically hard to do!

That does not rule out that it's bad - and our point here is giving alcohol to babies - well, knowing the evidence, babies shouldn't drink!

If you consider the Bloomberg article on SuperMicro, they repeatedly claim expert/insider sources corroborate their version of the story, and have issued no retraction after their story was thoroughly debunked. While this certainly reflects poorly on Bloomberg, it reflects most on the journalistic standards of the article's authors. I don't think we will ever have a world where authoritative sources exist, since there can always be elements within the source of authority willing to bend the truth for more clicks.

This makes sense if you remember that one of Bloomberg's reason to exist is to report news that moves markets.

Truth or lies, it gets said all the same.

Funny how prescient The Protomen seem to be.

Seems an uncharitable interpretation. I would regard that more as a guide to the type of news they want their reporters to focus on - and what their audience wants to read. As far as corporate goals go its actually pretty specific and measurable.

I think there is still something to that story. The authors involved are pretty good journalists from what I hear. I think that the coincidence of the US government's efforts to sanction chinese companies is a little suspect.

I'm also suspicious of the coincidence, but an organized disinformation attempt explains it just as well as a real event.

Yes, that is what I was alluding to. Which in that case, takes some of the onus off of the reporters and the paper, I think.

I have this view that the previous era of social structure was crafted through long trickles of actual know-how. This made the authority feels a bit stiff, but with the new open land of interwebs we're seeing how a "fluid" variant is mostly good to drown in.

ps: side note, I tried to leverage access to direct science (pubmed and similar) and I was quite surprised that the struggle you describe for mundane topics (no offense to your family) is similar in deep research. A gazillions of publications all talking about similar things but with various conclusions and a lot of maybes. I kinda saw that human society is that thin autofocus line between high education doubts and high ignorance. We live in the 'field tested' middle ground which is not truer, just more agreed upon.

As another recent parent I absolutely agree, add in to the mix to Google any possible answer you want to see and it becomes pretty useless as a resource. I have given up on the internet for parenting information except for healthcare provider information.

I've seen my share if incompetent healthcare providers. Better to do your own research. Instead of Google, use PubMed.

As a parent, there are so many things like "my child is hunching during breastfeeding, what does that mean?" or "why is baby choking during sleep" that you will find absolutely nothing on PubMed for.

I'm just saying to verify what your provider tells you.

Ya, there is so much information on raising kids that is just pulled out of thin air. So I started pretty much ignoring anything I see online unless it is accompanied with studies that are done on largish sample sizes.

> I wish there were just one highly-regarded expert source so that I could just go with what they say and not have to research every little thing.

I find the same with different subjects matters. Something I really needed to dive into, fish farming, in the end resulted in me taking a one year vocational course. That was a good expert source. Another thing I do, is work with recording music, as an amateur. Again a subject with tons of information available, most of it is poor IMHO. I know a vocational course would help, but most materials for this is not available publicly. It frustrates me that a lot of school material, paid for by the government, is behind a gatekeeper. Not sure how to solve that.

A few decent/expert/well researched sources ordered roughly (and subjectively) by unbiasedness:

https://ourworldindata.org/ https://aeon.co/ https://psyche.co/ https://www.economist.com/ https://www.zeit.de/index (for German speakers)

Compare this to how it was pre-web: Just in time for the post-war baby boom, Dr. Benjamin Spock's "Baby and Child Care" was new parents' single go-to source of information for decades; selling over 50 million copies, it is one of the most popular books ever. His name recognition was exceedingly high; he'd regularly be mentioned on news and political shows, as well as in jokes on Laugh-In etc.

The point being, you're certainly demonstrating an example of the recent trend where "voice of authority" is giving way to "the very notion of an expert is an elitist concept." Then again, maybe Spock is the explanation of all that ails us boomers?

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