My Uk school was still doing collective punishment beatings (“Who spoke?” (No-one replies) (30 boys get caned) ) in the early 80s.
I haven’t knived anyone. I was never caned at school.
The absence of someone doing a thing is not proof of a thing doing what you believe it does.
Letting your baby ‘cry it out’ is abuse in my eyes and you can sleep train them without doing this. With my daughter we soothed her in her cot instead of picking her up.
She will now link her sleep cycles and only cry when there is something wrong
Beating children doesn't make them obedient and law-abiding adults.
There were earlier HN posts attributing the decline in the rate of murder rate/violence crime to countries phasing out lead-gasoline. Now we might never know unless we do a properly controlled experiment.
Besides, the effect of lead on the human brain had been well known before leaded petrol was banned.
> We perform the first meta-analysis of the effect of lead on crime by pooling 529 estimates from 24 studies. We find evidence of publication bias across a range of tests.
> When we restrict our analysis to only high-quality studies that address endogeneity the estimated mean effect size is close to zero.
> When we use the full sample, the mean effect size is a partial correlation coefficient of 0.11, over ten times larger than the high-quality sample.
Interestingly, I met someone on HN once who insisted that effect sizes are always smaller in larger trials because that's just the nature of reality. This does not say anything good about scientists' conceptual understanding of what they're doing.