My Insider post this week covered seven prospect-laden minor league rosters, which went up after Eric Longenhagen identified the Opening Day assignments for all 300 prospects in my thirty team top 10s. This week’s Klawchat transcript, full of “small sample size” questions, is up as well.
And now, the links…
- Orphan Black, one of the best shows on television, is back tonight with the first episode of season 3. The New Yorker has a history-cum-review of the series that points out that it’s one of the few shows on TV that provides a quality leading role for a woman.
- Security expert Bruce Schneier MLB metal detectors are a waste of time. Schneier’s been shouting into the void for years about how our reactions to real or imagined threats of terrorism are usually ineffective and sometimes harmful.
- New Republic‘s informative history of the Hot Take. ESPN comes in for a little bit of blame in there.
- A vaccine denier mom writes – from quarantine – how she realized she was an idiot when her whole family caught whooping cough.
- How should journalists cover quacks like the FoodBabe in a fair, ethical manner? I don’t see a quandary here: Present the facts, and if that paints the subject in a bad light, so be it.
- Self-styled “free range” parents arrested *again* in Maryland for leaving their kids unsupervised well away from the house. They’re invoking the same “parental rights” nonsense that vaccine deniers try to use, but you can’t put your kids at risk (and, in this case, violate the law, which is very clear on what’s not permitted) in the name of some vague freedom.
- From the Virginia Quarterly Review comes a piece on cooking, social media, and intellectual property rights in the kitchen, oddly titled “The Meringue War.”
- Why can a pharmacist invoke religion to refuse to fill a prescription? Shouldn’t we deny such people the right to become pharmacists or doctors?
- A roundtable on the state of barbecue in the U.S. Granted, that’s not the ideal set of six voices, but there are some solid insights and recommended Q joints in there.
- From the BBC: 9 psychological reasons we love lists. Only nine? My lists go to 100, so take that, John Bull.
This country’s push of “my belief trumps all known science” needs to come to a stop, but it’s hard to get that past emotional people who refuse to see things logically. Until their entire family gets whooping cough and they realize their emotions won’t protect them from disease.
I thought you might also enjoy this article about vaccinating your kids from actress Kristen Bell.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristen-bell/vaccines-are-safe-and-facts-are-your-friends_b_7083504.html
While I tend to agree that letting a ten year old outside on his own may be too much at a young age, I don’t know if I agree with your take on the “free range” parents. My quandary is that there are certain choices we leave at the discretion of the parents (school choice, language, punishment), but there are times when the parent’s choice is simply too dangerous or harmful to the child or others, so the state must step in (vaccinations, medical treatments). It is one thing to tell a parent that a child needs vaccinations or needs to undergo treatment for cancer due to the high risk to the child (backed up with copious amounts of research), but when parenting choices simply differ without the benefit of a known right way, it’s harder for me to see why the parent should not be given the choice in the face of other areas in which they already have some constitutionally protected rights. Again, I disagree with their parenting style, at least for children so young, but I can’t get the same vitriol as a parent refusing to vaccinate a child or withholding lifesaving treatment.
I don’t understand the the issue with the pharmacist. Is everything that’s legal required? Should a Muslim butcher be required to sell pork?
Nice straw man, dude. Fortunately, a denial to fill a prescription usually results in nothing more than a headache for the person trying to fill it, as s/he can go to another pharmacy that doesn’t have such judgmental employees. However, not everyone is fortunate enough to have so many options. What are women in rural areas supposed to do when the only pharmacy in town won’t dispense them birth control? Just get pregnant and deal with it to preserve their pharmacist’s religious freedom?
I’m a pharmacist and I completely agree that we should not be able to invoke “religious conscience” to deny people care. There is no place for that in any aspect healthcare; people should not come to you expecting help and instead receive judgement. My wife (also a pharmacist) had to use misoprostol to complete a miscarriage and I cannot even imagine her reaction if she was told something like this by the pharmacist. Perhaps if we can’t do anything about “religious freedoms” we can allow the MDs who prescribe these drugs to dispense them to avoid potentially devastating situations like this.
In pharmacy school, I was surprised at how many seemingly deeply religious people were in my class, given how science and logic based the profession is (that’s not to say that religious people can’t use logic and science correctly, it’s just that some seem to have the propensity to ignore such lines of thought and I can’t understand why they would want to enter the field). There was even at least one vaccine denier in there that I knew of and potentially more. Fortunately, even in the conservative bastion of Arizona, our faculty did their best to dissuade these people, with religious conscience allowances being presented in a negative light.
I think you’re way off on free range parenting Keith.
Vaccinations are a big deal and of public interest because unvaccinated children put society at risk, not just themselves.
Letting your kids walk to the park by themselves at worst puts your kids in danger and no one else, requiring a much higher bar for state involvement. And considering how safe our cities are compared to 20 or 30 years ago, I think it’s very much in question that what those parents are doing is putting their kids in danger at all.
Keith, I generally agree with your viewpoint, however, I disagree with you about the free range parenting case in MD. While I agree the government should play a role in protecting children who cannot advocate for their needs. In this case, the children were forcibly removed from a park that was less than a mile from their home without immediately notifying their parents. I think this can cause psychic harm to the children. Second, there is a general notion these days that children always need to be inside or carefully monitored by adults. They are not allowed to ride a bike or play pick up ball away from their custodian ‘ s line of sight. I grew up in NYC in the 19th and 80s when NYC was crime ridden. My parents worked but wanted us to get exercise and more importantly be cognitive of the dangers of the world. They knew they could not always be around to protect us. So for rxanple, my dad taught my siblings and me how to catch the subway, where pay phones were generally located…. My dad a looked my 12 yr brother and me (at 9 yrs old) to go from Brooklyn to the Bronx to see the Yankees play. In the process, my siblings and I became more independent and self reliant. That said, I have no idea if the Free range parents taught the children about safety. However, I disagree with the notion that allowing a 10 yr old child watching his 6 yr old sibling is suburban, middle class neighborhood park is inherently neglect.
Keith, I generally agree with your viewpoint, however, I disagree with you about the free range parenting case in MD. While I agree the government should play a role in protecting children who cannot advocate for their needs. In this case, the children were forcibly removed from a park that was less than a mile from their home without immediately notifying their parents. I think this can cause psychic harm to the children. Second, there is a general notion these days that children always need to be inside or carefully monitored by adults. They are not allowed to ride a bike or play pick up ball away from their custodian ‘ s line of sight. I grew up in NYC in the 1970s and 80s when NYC was crime ridden. My parents worked but wanted us to get exercise and more importantly be cognitive of the dangers of the world. They knew they could not always be around to protect us. So for example, my dad taught my siblings and me how to catch the subway, where pay phones and police were generally located in the NY subway system. My dad allowed my 12 yr brother and me (at 9 yrs old) to go from Brooklyn to the Bronx (which is a hour subway rude) to see the Yankees play. In the process, my siblings and I became more independent and self reliant. That said, I have no idea if the Free range parents taught the children about safety. However, I disagree with the notion that allowing a 10 yr old child watching his 6 yr old sibling in a suburban, middle class neighborhood park is inherently neglect.
There were errors in my last post:
I generally agree with your viewpoint, however, I disagree with you about the free range parenting case in MD. While I agree the government should play a role in protecting children who cannot advocate for their needs. In this case, the children were forcibly removed from a park that was less than a mile from their home without immediately notifying their parents. I think this can cause psychic harm to the children. Second, there is a general notion these days that children always need to be inside or carefully monitored by adults. They are not allowed to ride a bike or play pick up ball away from their custodian ‘ s line of sight. I grew up in NYC in the 1970s and 80s when NYC was crime ridden. My parents worked but wanted us to get exercise and more importantly be cognitive of the dangers of the world. They knew they could not always be around to protect us. So for example, my dad taught my siblings and me how to catch the subway, where pay phones and police were generally located in the NY subway system. My dad allowed my 12 yr brother and me (at 9 yrs old) to go from Brooklyn to the Bronx (which is a hour subway rude) to see the Yankees play. In the process, my siblings and I became more independent and self reliant. That said, I have no idea if the Free range parents taught the children about safety. However, I disagree with the notion that allowing a 10 yr old child watching his 6 yr old sibling in a suburban, middle class neighborhood park is inherently neglect.
It’s not a straw man, Michael. My issue remains requiring everything that’s legal simply because it’s legal. I’m legitimately asking what the reason is for that. Ironically, your being a pharmacist strikes me as an appeal to authority.
You do love your logical fallacies, don’t you? Even if you don’t really understand them.
The pharmacist/Muslim pork parallel is absolutely a straw man argument, because the situations are not the same. Really, not even remotely so. Most obviously, nobody NEEDS pork, and to the extent that they do need it (if they are starving or something), chicken or some other protein is a viable substitute. By contrast, if you need Mifepristone (aka RU-486), you cannot just replace it with aspirin or penicillin or something that the pharmacist IS willing to sell you and achieve the same result. Ergo, the Muslim butcher is not denying you the ability to feed yourself, at worst he’s compelling you to feed yourself in a slightly different way. The pharmacist, by contrast, absolutely is denying you the medical care you want or need.
Meanwhile, the “appeal to authority” charge is–I think–the most overused of all logical fallacy arguments, deployed as a weapon to undermine or denigrate expertise. It is entirely apropos for a pharmacist to reference his or her relevant experience in a discussion of the ethics of that profession. Michael was providing what would best be described as an “informed opinion.” An appeal to authority, by contrast, would look something more like this: “I’m a pharmacist, so I can tell you that vaccines cause autism.” The former (informed opinion) expresses a point of view, the latter asserts a fact (that is untrue).
I had written a longer response as my initial one was put together fairly hastily, but I think that CB did a good job addressing the matter so I will only make a few additional points. While both serve the public, healthcare workers in general and pharmacists specifically have a different set of responsibilities than people who serve food. All are responsible for providing people with safe, properly identified products, but pharmacists have an additional responsibility to use their clinical judgement to make decisions in the best interest of the people they serve. Allowing your own personal values to cloud your judgement makes you, by definition, and incompetent or unprofessional provider (these are actually codified in our regulatory laws). Note that the pharmacist quoted in the article framed her refusal as a clinical one and not a personal one, though one could argue that a failure to recognize the use of mifepristone to assist a miscarriage constitutes incompetence.
Unfortunately, this issue is far from settled as state legislatures and the American Pharmacist’s Association (the largest pharmacy organization in the U.S.) have both made allowances for “conscientious refusal”, though both also generally have provisions that you must provide the person with another option e.g. another pharmacy that will dispense the medication. Legality is not the same as ethical and professional responsibility, however, and in my “informed opinion” these policies are pandering and do not accurately reflect our obligations to the public. In other words, this pharmacist was no more legally obligated to provide this medication than a Muslim butcher is to provide a customer with pork, but the expectations for each of these individuals is far different. A reasonable person would not present to a Muslim butcher for pork but should expect to be treated professionally rather than judgmentally by someone in the healthcare field.
Using one’s status as a pharmacist does not add any insight into that person’s opinion of the ethics of declining medication based on religious beliefs. If it did, the pharmacist who declined the medication would be right, too. Therefore, it’s an appeal to authority.
As for the idea that the pharmacist has a more important or necessary function and is therefore unable to use his or her religion as a basis for not providing care, it’s a slightly more compelling argument than saying that religion should not be allowed to be used as a basis for declining to provide a service he or she finds morally objectionable. Even then, though, must a pharmacy be required to stay open on Sunday (or Saturday, if the pharmacist is Jewish) or Christmas? Or is the pharmacist then *allowed* to close?
Daniel:
I’m going to say this again: You clearly do not understand what “appeal to authority” means. I suggest you do some reading (and read carefully, please, so you do not misread in the same way you misread my post).
An appeal to authority, first of all, involves an assertion of fact. Michael was not asserting fact (at least, not the part you objected to), he was clearly asserting opinion. Second, an appeal to authority generally involves invoking SOMEONE ELSE’s opinion in support of your own argument–the appeal is not to your OWN authority. Third, an appeal to authority is predicated upon the “expert” opinion of someone who is not actually an expert–someone who is actually speaking outside their area of expertise. As such, if I say “99.9% of doctors say vaccines are safe,” that is NOT an appeal to authority–that’s evidence. If I say, “99.9% of Fortune 500 CEOs say vaccines are safe,” it is, because that’s not their area of expertise. Michael’s experience, both as a practicing pharmacist and a student in pharmacy school, is absolutely relevant here because it makes clear that he’s not just hypothesizing or philosophizing, he’s had to grapple with these issues in the real world. If a pharmacist on the other side of the debate chose to explain themselves here, it would absolutely be apropos for them to mention their professional status, and how it has shaped their approach to the issue.
And your “forcing a pharmacy to stay open on Sunday” argument is ANOTHER straw man. To start, no professional is expected or required to provide their services 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. Beyond that, you are not denying someone medical care by closing on Sundays, you’re just delaying that care (which, if it is an emergency, will be handled by the physician/hospital, anyhow). Similarly, you are not denying someone medical care if you put a menorah on the counter, or if you decline to stock bacon-flavored gum, or if you say a prayer at the start of every workday, or if you close from 10-11 to go to mass. That is why those choices are neither illegal nor controversial. By contrast, if you won’t fill a prescription for birth control, you are denying the person medical care. They cannot choose another equally serviceable option (beef or chicken instead of pork) they cannot come back tomorrow…
Kids who get ferried to and from soccer practice every day are probably at a greater risk for physical harm than kids walking a mile from their house to a public park.
Bit surprised at your take on the so-called free range parents, especially the comparison to vaccine deniers. There is clearly no defense for not administering vaccines to children, both for their protection and the society they inhabit. The risks of diseases are well known, provable and quantifiable.
This is not the case with children. Statistically, children are in virtually every state in the country safer than they have ever been. And in the terrible instances where they are abducted, the most likely kidnapper is a member of the family, which implies that adult supervision is not a solution to the problem.
Obviously parents need to use judgment in determining when kids are prepared to be more independent, and because judgment is involved, opinions will differ. But unlike vaccine deniers, parents who choose to let their children play unsupervised at least have data on their side. In addition, it seems self-evident that the constant supervision of children and their lack of autonomy relative to their parents generation is likely to have unintended consequences.
Sample Size School, with Prof. Klaw
Most of the comments I’ve gotten on the “free range parenting” subject, here and on Facebook, have focused entirely on a point I didn’t make – the risk of abduction or related harm to the child. There are indeed costs associated with that, from the (impossible to measure) cost of injury to or death of the child to the costs of searches, investigations, and the public’s reactions after the fact (just as people react to acts of terrorism). But there are lots of other reasons why society expects you to actually supervise your kids. You don’t want children wandering around in traffic or crossing busy streets. You don’t want them out where a lack of supervision leads them to damage property or endanger others – they don’t even develop normal inhibitions until they’re about 8. The fact that there’s a tiny (yet nonzero, and extremely high-cost) risk of abduction, assault, or murder isn’t the main reason that “free range parenting” has societal costs that merit regulation.
You specifically used the phrase “put your kids at risk” in your original post, so I don’t think you get to say that comments have focused on a point you didn’t make, and and only one of the comments here directly referenced abduction anyway.
At risk, yes. At risk of what, I didn’t say, because it includes dozens of possibilities. I never cited abduction/murder because the probability of that is quite low.
You absolutely do have the right to put your kids’ safety at risk, I’d even say you have the responsibility to. I let my six year old climb a tree that was probably too big for her yesterday. This was not out of vague sense of “freedom” or even nostalgia for the good old days when I used to climb trees, it was because kids get a feeling of confidence when they’re able to do new and challenging things. And when she’s a little bit older, when I, as the prison who knows her best and is best able to make a judgment on her maturity and competence, I want to let her take similar “risks,” like riding bus or walking to the playground. It’s the sense of danger people have that’s vague, not the idea of freedom. The vaccination analogy is silly; a better analogy is parents allowing their kids to have candy, even though unsupervised, they might eat too much and get a stomachache, or, worse, a piece of candy that was laced with arsenic by a madman. Sure, that’s unlikely, but you never know these days, and can you never be too safe with your children, right?
Her children are coughing so hard they’re vomiting and the first thing she does is consult Google? What the hell did she find on the internet to keep her from calling or going to the ER immediately? This is someone that is not scared of information, just that information that doesn’t validate her beliefs.
I’m with @Rob that it is the pervasive sense of danger that’s vague and unquantifiable, and I’d add that the objections based on a need to supervise kids are a classic slippery slope fallacy. If children are granted autonomy they might might wander into traffic and/or damage private property, so they must not be granted autonomy.
All of that said, I support some regulation of children’s behaviors and parental responsibility. My objections are based instead on the fact that the current regulatory climate seems to be based on fundamentally incorrect assessments of the risks that children actually face. And there is still very little discussion of the developmental costs to children who are asked to do less and less, and are likely to be less capable as a result.
I’ve never made the “no autonomy” argument, which would indeed invoke the slippery slope fallacy. I am arguing in favor of less autonomy than those MD parents (seem to) want, although I acknowledge we probably don’t know exactly what their philosophy is, only that it runs afoul of their town’s views of the state law on the topic.
In this specific case, though, would I allow my daughter, who is nearly 9, to go to a playground – assuming the walk there and back didn’t cross a major road or railroad track or Superfund site – with a 10-year-old friend but no adult? Probably not. The risk of one of them getting injured at the playground would be my primary reason.