VooDoo_BoSs wrote:momuuu wrote:Show hidden quotes
You fail to read properly. It's possible to conclude with 95% certainty that there is a correlation between spanking and people being less succesful in life. That is not the same as saying spanking is per definition bad. You are therefore claiming you can conclude something based on something that does not warrant that conclusion. The problem here is that the basic language is forming a definitive barrier between you and actual understanding. I cannot solve this problem unfortunately. If you thinking "spanking being per definition bad" is equivalent to "spanking being correlated to people being less succesful in life" then you are simply doing a poor job at reading. The unfortunate result is that you somehow assume I am unable to understand statistics while I am very aware of the ins and outs of statistics.Show hidden quotes
You simply didn't understand my point, again due to poor reading. You can not control for the case I outlined, because you would literally be checking the same thing. I have asked you how you would even check for this explanation and you have not provided an answer to that; probably because you cannot think of one, which is because there is no way to check for that. I will try to rephrase this once again, in the hopes that you understand the point:
It could be possible that bad parents end up struggling to raise their children and then elect to spank their children more often. If we assume that the goal of parenting is to have your children be succesful (analogous to what these studies do, although you could take different metrics in place of succesful if the studies would do the same thing) then children with bad parents would be less succesful by definition of bad parents. If we then measure unsuccesful children, children with bad parents, we find that unsuccesful children have been spanked more often. But then it's entirely possible to conclude that children are unsuccesful because they have bad parents and bad parents are more likely to spank their children. That doesn't mean the children being unsuccesful is causally connected to being spanked, as we can also conclude that them being unsuccesful is causally connected to them having bad parents, and being bad parents is correlated to spanking. So then the same two things we are measuring (succes and spanking) can be explained in two ways. In other words, we merely have a correlation and not a causation. It is literally impossible to correct for this statistically. Preferably you would account for bad parents in the measurement, but bad parents is equivalent to kids being succesful. In other words, to correct for this you would have to correct the correlation between children being succesful and being spanked for children being succesful and being spanked, which obviously leads to no result.
This is logic, not misunderstanding of statistics or of the researches conducted. I'm logically showing that you can't draw any other conclusion than that spanking and being less succesful in life are correlated. Yet, you want to claim that being spanked causes children to be less succesful in life is a fact. This is not a fact, this is the belief that one explanation for the correlation is correct based on no evidence. It would be equally legitemate to favor the other explanation based on the information that you have provided.Show hidden quotes
Yes, they are. You don't understand how science or statistics work.Show hidden quotes
Please read my post again and educate yourself about correlation and causation.Show hidden quotes
The difference here is in behaviour versus physical processes. Behaviour is, by nature, very different and the same thing might affect behaviour differently. The differences in how the human body works from human to human are far smaller, and thus a correlation between two things provides a much stronger evidence. Add to that that smoking is smoking, yet there are different ways to spank a child in different circumstances.Show hidden quotes
How would one show the positive single case effect of spanking? To do so, one would have to seperate two twins, somehow make them showcase the exact same behaviour and punish them differently once, to then raise them equally and then, hypothetically, you can state if spanking was positive. But this seems practically impossible.
For your lack of 'imagination': Imagine a child growing up in an environment that might easily put them on a bad path in life. Imagine a parent that is not great at verbally adjusting the behaviour of this kid, but does have to ability to spank his child at times of very bad behaviour. This spanking could potentially learn the child a lesson that he wouldn't have learned otherwise (as the parent would have been unable to teach the child this lesson otherwise) which could make the difference between the child completing school and the child dropping out of school and becoming a criminal. This scenario can logically exist and there are many more hypothetical scenarios in which spanking can have a positive effect on the life of a child. Again, it's impossible to measure this, as you can't create two realities, but it is a possibly truth.
I have not honestly presented a view about spanking at all; you have failed to read comprehensively if you think so. I have only stated that, given all the evidence provided, it is possible that spanking can have a positive effect on a life, and that it is impossible to conclude that spanking is always a bad thing to do.Show hidden quotes
Again, the data proves that there is a correlation between spanking and children having a less succesful life. That is not the same as that "the data proves quite consequentially that spanking your children will negatively affect their life." Sure, you can conclude that, but then you're reaching an incorrect conclusion. That's fine by me. We can argue non-stop about this, if you please, although I can assure you that I will give up after some amount of times where you fail to understand the evidence that you presented yourself.I promise you that your children will remember that you beat them and will judge you by the standards of their adulthood.
This is an empty promise, as children will remember and judge many things by the standard of their adulthood. If you are trying to say, as a promise, that a child will judge his parents negatively for spanking them, then I can promise you that this does not have to be the case. I happen to be one of those childs that doesn't judge his parents negatively for spanking me but rather is grateful for them skewing my behaviour in a positive direction.
I please beg of you to show understanding of statistics in your next post. I know it's common to instantly assume that any scientific research is 'fact', but if you were taught to think critically you should be more aware of the shortcomings of scientific research and how it is in reality often very far from fact. You should have been taught to discriminate between correlation and causation properly.
You have no idea how statistics work.
I have, literally, a degree in mathematics & statistics (Bachelor's).
There are thousands of free courses online on statistics and scientific method. You keep talking about how you can't "control" for those factors - you can and that is the whole point of statistics. What you are referring to are called "confounding variables".
What is more likely, that ALL of these scientific studies are wrong and momuu is right, or that momuu is wrong and people who have decades and millions of dollars to research this complicated issue may be right.
I think it takes enormous arrogance to say they are all wrong and you are right.
What did you say? @gibson[/spoiler]