#emily oster

[zenosanalytic]

Unrelated to anything at all but here's an article from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Online about Long Covid in Children from 15 June 2024

Kids are losing 'huge chunks' of their childhood to long COVID. Too many are being told it's 'all in their head'

They're losing their formative years to this debilitating disease. But for too many children with long COVID, finding help is a frustrating

And Here's An Article by Emily Oster in the Atlantic from 9 October 2020 about how it's totally safe to send kids back to school

Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders

Fears from the summer appear to have been overblown.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Motivated Reasoning: Emily Oster's COVID Narratives and the Attack on Public Education

Free-market interests used fights over COVID protocols to further privatize K-12 education. Economist Emily Oster, whose research is funded by those groups, has laundered their ideologies and given them the imprimatur of science.

The evangelists for the economic style of reasoning exhort their audience to “follow the data”—the alternative being, it is implied, to capitulate to the irrational demons of fear and anxiety. In this narrative, they are the logical, clear-eyed rationalists; those who advocate attentiveness to the precautionary principle—based on well-founded concerns about their own and other people’s safety—are pejoratively associated with emotional, fallacious reasoning. It is emotional and irrational, for example, to be concerned that a novel pesticide could be a carcinogen, at least until “the data” is in.

Such claims to superior logic and reason can be a convenient mask for ideological assumptions. Appeals to “following the data” do not always reflect a scientific consensus; rather, “the data” is a rhetorical device used to grant narrative authority to certain quantitative analyses—those that confirm preconceived ideas. Meanwhile, those analyses can (and often do) have important limitations like weak study designs, arbitrary assumptions, or erroneous math that should alert readers to interpret the findings cautiously. The intent is to shame people for straying from the experts’ superior rationality, and ultimately to portray any demand for change to the status quo as fringe, conspiratorial, and anti-scientific.

The imprimatur of scientific objectivity is often used to substantiate ideological claims, as has been made abundantly clear by the prevalence of other industry-funded or ideologically motivated research—on tobacco, on processed food, on carbon emissions, and on charter schools alike. Normative assumptions and predetermined conclusions can make their way into “scientific” findings with surprising ease. (Consider, for example, the arbitrary values assigned to human life in cost-benefit analyses.) This process of mustering weak evidence to support a previously determined course of action has been called “policy-based evidence making:” the deeply unscientific process of (consciously or unconsciously) massaging data to conform to a preconceived conclusion.

[cinematic-literature]

Midnight Mass E01 (Book I: Genesis)

Book title: Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong and What You Really Need to Know (2014) by Emily Oster 

[nprbooks]

Reviewer (and parent) Selena Simmons-Duffin says Emily Oster’s new Cribsheet -- in which Oster applies her economic training to the wealth of contradictory parenting studies out there -- takes some of the angst out of making decisions for your baby. Check out her full review here.

-- Petra

[lesserjoke]

Book #136 of 2019:

Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool by Emily Oster

One of the major challenges facing new parents is the sheer over-abundance of advice out there -- which has admittedly always been somewhat of an issue, but is exacerbated by the explosion of digital resources over the past several decades. For almost any potential decision about how best to raise your child, apparent experts and passionate advocates on every side are just a few keystrokes away, and it's a real challenge to sort out conflicting recommendations, especially in the sleep-deprived haze of life with an infant.

The strength of this 2019 book from economist Emily Oster, then, is that it's not just another set of tips that might contradict someone else's, but rather an attempt to impose a science-based framework on the overall subject matter. Assessing the existing data, the author illuminates parenting topics where there's clear evidence for one strategy over another (e.g. "cry it out" methods of sleep training are effective and show no short-term or long-term harm), where no quality research on the question exists (e.g. the effects of screentime are still largely unknown, despite what anyone tells you), or where it's largely a matter of individual family choice (e.g. the potential medical benefits and risks of newborn male circumcision are both vanishingly small).

Alongside these conclusions, Oster guides her readers on Bayesian priors, opportunity cost, risk comparison, and other economic tools for critical thinking so that we can evaluate further inflection points ourselves. She also helpfully provides a bullet-point summary at the end of every chapter, either for parents who don't have time to read the extended reasoning or for those who already have but want to quickly review later on. I feel like I'll be in that latter category myself, so although I listened to this title as a digital audiobook from my library, I'm glad to have been gifted a physical copy I can keep around as a reference. (Thanks, Aunt Doreen!)

★★★★☆

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[trendynewsnow]

Restoring Trust in Public Health: A Response to Misinformation and Skepticism

More from our inbox: Secret Trump Donors Teach the Students Well Save the Pink House Seeds of Hate Credit…Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times. To the Editor: In response to “How to Talk About Fluoride, Vaccines and Raw Milk” by Emily Oster (Opinion guest essay, Nov. 17), which suggests that the decline in public trust is largely the fault of public health officials: As a physician…

Restoring Trust in Public Health: A Response to Misinformation and Skepticism

[veryslowreader]

Expecting Better by Emily Oster

Midnight Mass: "Book I: Genesis"

[adderallmother]

Favorite Instagram Accounts

Bear with me, sometime social media can be used for good. A lot of these people have paid courses you can take but also provide a lot of information for free.

BigLittleFeelings - Kristin and Deena are both parents. Deena is a licensed marriage and child therapist. Kristin has a background in international maternal childhood education. Both are very real about parenting highs and lows. Practical and realistic gentle/responsive/respectful/authoritative parenting advice.

SafeInTheSeat - Michelle is a parent and certified car seat technician. She provides so much information about how to properly use a car seat including install, buckling, etc. Very honest about her past mistakes and day to day life.

ProfEmilyOster - Professor of Economics Emily Oster is a parent and author of the ParentData series. She has three books (Expecting Better, Cribsheet, and The Family Firm) that take a cold hard look at the data behind pregnancy and parenting advice to see if the data actually backs them up. Her philosophy is to take in the data, apply your own risk-benefit analysis, and then make a decision. She can be a bit opinionated on her instagram but still reminds her audience to make their own decisions based on their life and comfort within reason.