Slashdot Mirror
Oxford Professor Taken To Task For Linking Internet Use To Autism
esocid writes with excerpts from a piece written by Ben Goldacre of The Guardian: "Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of pharmacology at Oxford, apparently announced that computer games are causing dementia in children. ... Two months ago the same professor linked internet use with the rise in autism diagnoses (not for the first time), then pulled back when autism charities and an Oxford professor of psychology raised concerns. ... When I raised concerns, she said I was like the epidemiologists who denied that smoking caused cancer. Other critics find themselves derided as sexist in the media. If a scientist sidesteps their scientific peers, and chooses to take an apparently changeable, frightening, and technical scientific case directly to the public, then that is a deliberate decision, and one that can't realistically go unnoticed. ... I think these serious scientific concerns belong, at least once, in a clear scientific paper. I don't see how this suggestion is inappropriate, or impudent, and in all seriousness, I can't see an argument against it."
A disproportionate number of people who are obsessed with video games score high on the ASD. These aren't controversial ideas.
Causation is different, not so much for smoking and yellow fingers. Nutter's blathering aside, the real question is:
Are video games harmful to people who score high on the ASD?
although you might be tempted to apply that question to several other groups.
Its just plain nuts to pretend a link doesn't exist (although that hasn't stopped climate deniers), the important bit is 'what is the effect', 'how do we mitigate it', and 'how certain are we of the linkage'. The rest is for dingbats.
News flash, professors can be just as crazy as other humans.
will be for a good decade or so, one of these illnesses that people will blame or all sorts of mysterious "evils" that we experience in every day life.
Lead in petrol, mercury in the sea, vaccines, internet, WiFi, video games, contraceptive pills, pesticides, radon, highway noise, electrical cables, plastic soft drink bottles.... There'll always be some crazy self-promoting dickhead trying to get some publicity for himself with his stupid theory.
It's a natural human response to want to find the cause of something. That's why gods were invented (it doesn't have to be a rational cause). It's also why these theories occur around illnesses that are down to pure chance or at least not currently explained. You don't see many people blaming their chlamydia infection on aluminium pots, because it's well established what causes that disease! So things like lupus, other autoimmune conditions, cancer (not lung cancer), autism, tend to attract these kinds of lies.
But just because it's human nature give Baroness Susan Greenfield a reason to abuse her position with crap like this. Shame on her. She should know better. I hope she loses her job for making up bullshit (and purposely difficult to disprove bullshit) like this. She's meant to be a scientist, not a self-promoting celebrity.
If a scientist sidesteps their scientific peers, and chooses to take an apparently changeable, frightening, and technical scientific case directly to the public, then that is a deliberate decision, and one that can't realistically go unnoticed. ... I think these serious scientific concerns belong, at least once, in a clear scientific paper. I don't see how this suggestion is inappropriate, or impudent, and in all seriousness, I can't see an argument against it."
Does this mean esocid (the guy who wrote the summary) is saying he agrees that video games cause dementia? And that he can't find an argument against it? Because I've seen a more confusing summary on Slashdot before, but not in a long time.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Tourettes syndrome FUCK YOU and similar FUCKETY fuck fuck problems. We all know FUCK that you know fuck face. Next thing they'll be saying the Internet causes FUCK problems with people's ability to interact in a FUCK face to FUCK face context. FUCKERS.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This guy is worse then Jenny McCarthy.
Dementia is no one single illness or condition, it is a blanket term used for any condition that affects normal cognitive functions. The way the original statement was made was just as scientific as the blanket statements about 'hysteria' in women at the end of the 19th century. I'm surprised that someone who holds such an esteemed position in academia would apply such a crude label to a problem, real or otherwise. Perhaps the Baroness will recommend which of the four humors need to be drained in order to cure this dementia, or if trepanation is in order to relieve the heat from the brain.
On a related note, there is substantial evidence to support the high percentage of insanity amongst the noble houses of Europe due to centuries of inbreeding.
...that everything is causing autism in children. Shit, I'm probably autistic. And please, that microwave does NOT belong there.
Without reading the article, I reasonably expect this is the reason for "games, internet, or some other couch potato activity increasing autism..."
- Many people who we would usually call geeks or nerds have a topic fetish, by removing other distractions they can focus on that. Autistic individuals tend to do the same, they focus on specific topics and are rather anti-social in situations that have nothing to do with their topic fetish. -
But you see, you can classify pretty much everyone as having some autism spectrum disorder (oh god aspergers, absolutely nobody really has that) because they want a label and excuse to be dysfunctional and anti-social and remain on welfare.
On the latter half of the 60 minutes program with the Steve Jobs Biography stuff, they were talking about how iPads can improve REAL autistic individuals ability to communicate (they don't speak.) They showed near the end that the brain of someone with autism has a "kink" or "bend" near the base of the brain responsible for speech. You can learn to speak if this area is "broken", but the brain wires more "capacity" to it. You can't say games cause brain damage, hence autism, so directly linking it is absurdity. Autism is a genetic "programming" bug that mis-allocates brain neurons because of less bandwidth availability. Speech is apparently low priority on our ability to survive. An analogy is that a regular brain has a 64bit address bus to the CPU, I/O and RAM, but an autistic individual has only a 32bit bus to the I/O, so more latency is the result.
Autistic individuals can actually do work, they just require work that is "brain busy" like sorting/organizing things that fits their interests. Because they become distracted if their eyes are taken off the work, it has to be something that is easily focused on.
Or at least that is what I got out of the program. I'm not a doctor, and I don't pretend to be one.
There are 56.5 guards (.5 cause one is napping due to his irregular breathing patterns) if i shoot 1 bullet at an angle of 36.6 degrees from the horizontal and 128 degrees from north i will kill 26.5 guards with 14 ricochets, and the rest when the bullet ends its flight by igniting the nitro glycerin in the armory. I WILL ONLY FLY ON QANTAS I WILL ONLY FLY ON QANTAS.
Rocket Surgeon.
You're basically suggesting that crowd sourcing is better than peer review. Crowd sourcing works for some things. For simple fact finding or culling through large amounts of data, it can work. For researching things that may take years to study and would require a background in the field, not so much. In fact, the only place you'll find people who are qualified to check you on things like that are, you guessed it, amongst your peers in the field. The only reason to skip them and go straight to the press is because you're playing a political game, and politics should have no place in research.
I suppose I'm being a bit idealistic and naive, however.
Also, I think you're intentionally being obtuse by suggesting that getting it published anywhere is sufficient. Sure, there are crap conferences and journals out there. And if you get published in one of them instead of a higher tier publication it speaks volumes about the quality of your work and how much stock will be put in it. But the major publications still do their job pretty darn well, and you really need to get published in one that has an established reputation if you want for your work to be taken seriously.
Just how far up on the scale of stupid is she?
Take the Red Pill.
.... a genetically based disability. I swear some of these people are just off the wall clueless. A more accurate statement would be "Heavy screen time stunts social skills". It certainly doesn't cause autism though.
So by not seeing the data as more ASD individuals simply USING the internet, you're saying it CAUSED ASD? Autism shows it's first symptoms at 2.5-3 years. I didn't have an AOL account until I was 6 & I doubt any toddlers are hitting up Club Penguin that early. If this "professor" had simply modified the criteria to include OTHER forms of electronic media like television or video-games, it wouldn't be so...retarded, for lack of a better word. Incidentally, my first recallable memory is Super Mario Bros. 3, when I was roughly 3 years old.
It sure looks like Oxford's standards are slipping.
Perhaps the actual thing that is happening is that Autism is this decade's Disease du Jour, and like ADHD before it, is being overdiagnosed at a truly frightening rate.
But just wait until the next DSM comes out. We'll ALL be diagnose-able with SOME sort of mental disorder. So, at that point, maybe nutjobs like BARONESS von Greenfield will eventually be "right" (at least according to the increasingly out-of-their-ever-lovin'-minds psychiatric community).
People from my generation and older are the ones most commonly found in Congress now. Most of those guys are obviously quite insane.
I'm sure a lot of that crap also addled our DNA, which I think probably explains a lot about kids these days. Having insane parents probably doesn't help, either.
Now if you have an axe to grind with the Internet or Video Games, that's all well and good, but I really don't think you have to go out of your way to explain why kids these days or their parents are quite abnormal. The parents just chewed on too much leaded paint as toddlers, and their kids are getting a double whammy of messed-up DNA and whacky parents from that.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The critical review in the mass media isn't "complete and honest". It's the crazed shoutings of a hundred million uninformed assholes, each with their own axe to grind. There will be some good feedback buried in the mountains of shit, but you could have gotten ~80% of it (without all the noise) by undergoing peer review.
Publishing in the mass media instead of traditional channels is like using a really crappy amplifier. You may get a few extra decibels of output, but the SNR is going to be trashed. Plus you have the additional downside of scaring millions of people, and possibly even tricking them into harming themselves or others. Of course, for many people who skip peer review, that's the whole goal. They want fame and money, and nothing gets ratings like some good ole fashioned fear mongering.
And for the record, getting published in the New Elbonia Journal of Medicine doesn't constitute peer review. The fact that trash journals exist doesn't invalidate the process.
Near as I can tell it's the aspies causing the games, not the other way around. If the game's not inhumanly complex and impossible for mere mortals to complete it's savaged in the press before it's even launched, and a commercial failure. You have to have perfect recall and reflexes that border on precognition to play some of these games. It's been like this for something like fifteen years. I couldn't beat Zelda on the Nintendo 64 even now.
Maybe I'm just old and slow. Games aren't my thing. My eight year old son used to laugh at my feeble gaming skills in Unreal Tournament. Now and the he'd let me snipe him just so I'd continue to play. When he got tired of killing me he would just follow me around and if I turned about suddenly, wax me on the spot. He's voting now - not the online poll, gamer ranking kind of voting - he's Of Age. I've got a second grader that regularly slays me on some Wii Mario game, when I'm really trying. Maybe it's just me. I think I'm an above average guy, but what these kids can do - it scares me.
I was introduced to computers in what's now called "middle school" but back then was called "junior high". Back then a computer was a pretty serious thing, demanding respect and training before you approached it. I was precocious, and got in this game early. Now it's an environmental thing. My youngest was online, playing games at two years old. My first grandson adored Angry Birds on my phone and Android tablet at 18 months. My oldest son, just now 18, types 150 wpm on the crappiest keyboard available - not because he's deliberately trained for that specialty, but because the keyboard is how he's communicated for as long as he's been talking to people. The keyboard is his tongue.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
She completed a full research on the topic in less than 2 months. It must have been a proper and thorough.
Well I know anecdotes aren't evidence but my boys were practically born with a controller in their hands and an Ethernet cable in their laps, one is kicking ass in premed, has a wonderful GF, and is generally a hell of a great guy and the younger is trying to decide whether to go with his love of cooking or his love of computer art, helps out his elderly relatives,hates having a dime spent on him because he always thinks there could be good done with the money, and is also a hell of a nice guy.
Both of them have been on the net practically since they could walk (I had the PCs set to where they would only go to approved kids sites at the time of course) and both have been models of trustworthiness and never had any problems as far as autism or anything else. of course i treated them as intelligent human beings that deserve to be talked to and not down to and was more than happy to sit there with them and explain how things worked, from how data is turned from analog into digital and finally is drawn upon a screen to how a packet is formed and where it goes when they click the button.
And THAT, that right there, i think is the REAL problem. too many have turned to PCs, DVDs, game systems etc as cheap babysitters rather than as useful devices that can help their child learn. I would let the boys visit their friends growing up and when I would pick them up it always amazed and saddened me how many households didn't even have a single book in them, and the kids were given every kind of electronic junk they could possibly want as long as they left the grow ups alone and there was practically NO interaction between parent and child unless the parent had some order to bark at them like clean up their room.
So I don't think the problem is the machine per se, but the parents simply not stepping up and being parents. Parenting is a damned hard job but if you want a child to grow up into a responsible smart young person you just gotta put in the time. Hell I'm probably down about 3 years sleep and lost more than one GF because she gave me an ultimatum of the boys or her and I told her where the door was, but now that I see two happy young men starting out into the world i think it was worth it. The net is a tool, not a babysitter, simple as that.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Uh, I don't think so. Have you gone through peer review in a scientific journal? The process is long and can last 6 months or even a year. It is very thorough as there is always something that can be improved in a paper. In my experience papers usually come out better than the entered the process. You do encounter the occasional dick reviewer, but that is not enough to break the system.
Critical review by mass media is not done by specialists who have several months to write their comments. It is done by journalists on a field they are incompetent in within an afternoon. It is done by pundits with an agenda (in this case against videogames and Internet), who will put their own spin on the issue. It is then fed to the unwashed masses who know nothing of the subject and can easily be swayed.
The proper process is: first peer review, then, when the findings have been verified, you go to the public.
You betcha. The results are interesting either way.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
mothers must have had computers in in their womb
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
A tl;dr coming your way.
It's really a double-edged knife. My parents went through a messy divorce, which was probably one of the reasons I ended-up spending a lot of my childhood hidden away in my room, playing around with computers. It has upsides and downsides.
It left me with somewhat stunted social skills, and difficulties in forming relationships. Those have improved, but I don't think they'll ever be as good as they should be. The short attention-span and habit of obsessing with a task were lessened when I took the time to understand how they were affecting my life. In work, I tend to occupy a position somewhere between visionary and mad scientist. I'm very good an analyzing problems and building processes and tools to fix them. The communication issues remain because I don't always realize how my way of thinking gives the wrong impression. i.e. a large staff meeting is not always the best time to lurch in to a very theoretical thought process. Colleagues are entertained though when I get that giddy schoolboy look on my face as I begin describing how x problem can be solved, and how it'll give us x results while saving x amount of money.
I don't think I'd like to have changed things back then. I would however wish that I'd become more self-aware earlier in life. I would have screwed around fewer people with my selfish and obsessive behavior - myself included. I would have had more success earlier in my career if I'd better understood how to present my ideas to people.
I completely agree that technology should not be a babysitter. Technology, like anything else, should complement life, not rule it. Books are even more important than before; the Internet is not a place where an unsupervised child can be expected to learn reading comprehension. Just like with any relationship, it's about engagement and interest. If a kid is playing WoW it really should not be difficult for the parent to know the basics of what they're doing, even if they have no interest in playing it. They'd quickly learn that it's a very socially-driven thing, and in some cases quite addictive. My parents didn't really understand computers, so they probably assumed that I was learning stuff while I was locked away in my room. I did a fair bit of hacking around, but it was mostly playing games. The former contributed to my technical and problem-solving abilities I have now, which from a job perspective means that the initiatives I take have probably more than paid my salary in the past year, on top of the main work I do. There remain social problems, albeit not as many as there used to be. I would have benefited from my parents just taking more time to get me out of that room.
Things like this give me cancer...
You've incorrectly assumed that research was performed. It wasn't.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"Most cases are diagnosed around the age of two, when not many children are using the internet" - Dr Dorothy Bishop
Autism is not "poor social skills".
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Why yes I did.
Not obviously faked, but I was given a paper to review that had one obviously wrong parameter value. It was off 6 orders of magnitude from typical real values. Substituting a realistic value invalidated the whole paper, as they were solving a problem due to the value of that parameter. The paper was well written and logically consistent, but they solved a non-existing problem.
What I did was to send back with "major revision" being requested, making it clear to the editor that they had to come with pretty convincing evidence for their parameters, or they should be rejected. Rejection followed.
That's what happened with that paper. It ended up somewhere else, even though this time it carried a notice about the unrealistic value of the parameter.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
That's what you always do with data, you trust the submitter. What would the alternative be? Replicating the experiments is costly and there is no guarantee that reviewers (who work anonymously and for no money) have the resources for that. Still reviewers are the most likely people to spot errors or inconsistencies as they are experts in the field.
Reviewers filter bad logic and bad math. Bad data is filtered down the road, when someone else tries to reproduce the results. It can take a few years, but if you are caught making up data like this guy Stapel you mention (there was a similar crook in my university for that sake), you usually get your doctorate retired and your reputation tarnished. Good luck with your career after that.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
. . . Over the last 20 years or so. And yes, internet usage, interestingly enough, has increased over the same time period.
Here's a list of other things you can correlate to the rise in autism diagnoses:
1) Cell Phone usage
2) Rap Music
3) Movies starring Keanu Reeves.
4) The Simpsons
5) Baby names that start with the letter "J"
6) The number of different flavors of Mountain Dew
7) The decline of the fax machine
Clearly, we as a country, need to use fax machines more and name all of our children "Cody" from now on.