Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Childhood Roundup #1, published by Zvi on January 6, 2023 on LessWrong.

I have a few shorter more focused posts in the works, including my practical short version of On Bounded Distrust. In the meantime, it makes sense to continue to clean out the backlog of roundup style things.

Let Your Children Play

We have gone insane on this.

Sane 2022 parents of 10-year-olds: I would like to let you go outside without me. I am terrified that someone will call the cops and they will take you away from me.

That is a thing now. As in parents being thrown in jail for letting their eight year old child walk home from school on their own.

As they stood on her porch, the officers told Wallace that her son could have been kidnapped and sex trafficked. “‘You don’t see much sex trafficking where you are, but where I patrol in downtown Waco, we do,'” said one of the cops, according to Wallace.

Did things get more dangerous since 1980, when we were mostly sane about this? No. They got vastly less dangerous, in all ways other than the risk of someone calling the cops.

The numbers on ‘sex trafficking’ and kidnapping by strangers are damn near zero.

The incident caused ‘ruin your life’ levels of damage.

Child services had the family agree to a safety plan, which meant Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second. Their mothers—the children’s grandmothers—had to visit and trade off overnight stays in order to guarantee the parents were constantly supervised. After two weeks, child services closed Wallace’s case, finding the complaint was unfounded.

Wallace’s sister has started a GoFundMe for her. She is in debt after losing her job and paying for the lawyer and the diversion program. She also hopes to hire a lawyer to get her record expunged so that she can work with kids again.

One of my closest friends here in New York is strongly considering moving to the middle of nowhere so that his child will be able to walk around outside, because it is not legally safe to do that anywhere there are people.

Claim that UNICEF thinks Dutch children are the happiest in the world and that this is because they bike everywhere, things are designed to make this work, and they therefore have freedom to move around.

Childless World

This is also related to the thing where a lot of places give off the vibe that life does not involve children, and children are a weird, shameful and irresponsible lifestyle choice.

I sense this type of attitude ebb and flow in power as I move between places.

School Daze

It’s not like the kids were attending school that much anyway (MR). The chart is San Francisco, but it is far from unique in this. This headline says ‘41% of NYC students were chronically absent’ last year, versus a historical expectation of ~25%.

Note that in school parlance, ‘chronic absentee’ means you missed 18 days of school out of 180. Thus, someone who reports as demanded 90% of the time is still ‘chronically absent,’ no matter the cause.

Public school enrollment continues to be 3% below pre-pandemic levels. Many responded with ‘at least some good has come of this.’

The degree of learning in schools, even high end ones, leaves something to be desired.

I simply don’t know how to update far enough in the appropriate directions.

A paper compared students answers on homework questions to their later answers to the same question posed on an exam. They found that in the past this correlation was high, and said this meant that the homework helped students. One obvious alternative explanation is that knowing X is correlated with knowing X.

None of this is ‘benefit.’ Then, the study notes that this correlation has gone down, due to a large group of students who don’t show this pattern – they get the homework right by copying it, then get the exam question wrong anyway.

Via MR, paper from ...