Parenting in a nutshell

Bellowing "Indoor voices!" at the top of your lungs.

Wishful thinking

I'd like—really, really like—to spend an entire day doing adult things for adult reasons.

That is all.

"Objective" assessment by questionnaire

Some time ago we received a recommendation that our daughter get screened for autism. Now, with generally overbooked state of medical specialists around here and the pandemic and all it's taken a year and half to make any headway, but the process is underway at last.

Great.

Part of that process involved a questionnaire for the parents. We were asked to rate our child's willingness to perform various tasks without prompting on a 0-3 scale.

0. The child is unable to perform the task
1. The child is able to perform the task but rarely or never does it autonomously
2. The child is able to perform the task and sometimes does it autonomously
3. The child is able to perform the task and often or always does it autonomously

And there is the options to indicate if we have no actual experience with this task but are extrapolating from related tasks.

So far, so good.

But then we get to list. Honestly it's not bad in general, but the pandemic has played merry havoc with some of its underlying assumptions.

Take "Does your child ring the doorbell or knock when visiting at a friend's house?" Presumably the question is about knowing and respecting social conventions, except that the pandemic has interfered with her ability to find little people to make friends with and prevented her from visiting those friends that she has. Is it time to guess? On what basis?

But that's not the worst of it. Another ran along the line of "Does our child lookup or respond when her name is called?" Well ... always when she's in a good mood, but never if she's really focused on what she's doing or suspects she's not going to like what you have to say (say when she knows it's after bedtime). Is that a 2? But it doesn't really capture the nature of what's going on, does it?

Every time I have to fill out a questionnaire for medical stuff I run into these ambiguities, and even if there is a practitioner around to ask no one knows how you're suppose to handle them.

I find myself assuming that it's down to trying to build nice objective measures out of the chaos that is human behavior. You can't do statistics on a bunch of anecdotes, so you have to covert all that disorder to some nice clean numbers. So, people gather a lot of experience with a phenomenon they want to study, make up some questions and stick the answers on a numeric scale, propose an analysis, test in on a sample of subjects identified by a less numeric mechanism, and check for correlation. If you get a strong enough signal you have a diagnostic mechanism. Tada!

In my fevered imagination that's the whole thing, but I'm pretty sure they try a little harder than that. I know that psychology people like to pepper their questionnaires with distractors, and I'm aware that some of the diagnostics are versioned which implies some kind of feedback and improvement loop. Alas I don't know anything about the details of the validation and improvement process.

Anyway, the problem with the bare process I outlined is that you can get a good correlation as long as there is some uniformity among the way subjects treat ambiguous questions—and anyone who's written assignment and exam questions knows that getting 80 or 90% of people to read a question a single way is easy but making it truly unambiguous is hard—but if you use the same list as a diagnostic you are immediately at the mercy of individual variation. Which offends my sense of order.

Sigh.

Authorization is part of a safety mechanism, but not a goal.

My better half ran a news show tonight and the anchor was interviewing a policy wonk on the subject of Covid19 vaccinations for kids (both teens who are currently eligible under a emergency use authorization and younger kids). On the whole I thought the interviewee very good. Knowledgeable, reasonable in her balancing of competing desires and risk, and in touch with the effects of this pandemic on communities. Not that I was one hundred percent on board with her point of view but at least I could see where she was coming from.

Then right at the end of the segment, the guest triggered a pet peeve of mine.

You may imagine me turning green and bulging out into the looming shape of Semantics Hulk. Or something.

Anyway, this lady said something like "We want to make sure the vaccine is authorized and is safe and effective."

A fine sentiment, except that authorization is not—should not be—a goal in and of itself. The only reason that authorization is desirable is because it forms part of a process which is suppose to ensure the "safe and effective" part. Those are the (only!) real goals.

Observation of the day

We all come into this world with our Pleistocene brains, ready to take on the information age.

Objective knowledge is ... subjective?

I recently finished Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. I found most of the book pretty depressing: it relentlessly examines the ways in which trolls, propagandists, well meaning activists, and shameless bullshitters have been succeeding in attacking the foundation of collective certainty that is the legacy of the enlightenment and subsequent advances. It does make the effort to end on a optimistic note with a exhortation to action in the defense of objective truth.

I recommend it; but hang onto your sense of purpose in the world: it's a rough road.

But I want to point out an oddity in the author's conception of the world (one freely admitted in the text, by the way). One of several guide-stars it the text is what Mr. Rauch calls "the reality-based community" and the rules under which it operates (which he dubs "The Constitution of Knowledge").

We should stop to note that Mr. Rauch's conception of this community encompasses a pretty broad swath including not only scientists but also many other scholars, journalist, intelligence analysts, various members of evidence-based judicial systems, and some governmental and no-governmental policy wonks. Basically everyone who approached the creation of knowledge using The Constitution of Knowledge as a foundation.

One of the key rules of the "knowledge" produced by these systems is that anyone else honestly and diligently following the same rules and using the same base of existing facts should come to the same conclusions. A condition you know you've reached when a strong consensus emerges in the community itself.¹

But that leaves us in the epistemological interesting positions of having "objective" knowledge be the product of consensus (among a suitably trained set of investigators), which is at some level a subjective entity.²

The reason this doesn't bring the whole structure down in ruins is the allegation that the processes is what generates the reliability. Have trained in a physical laboratory science I have recourse to highly repeatable experiments for much of the grounding of my discipline,³ but the idea that persuasion through open, earnest, and largely no-personal argumentation is the legitimate route to authority works more broadly that the experimental sciences.

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¹The author presents a number of examples.

² Indeed, the author talks about the ways consensus forming can fail or be subverted.

³ Even in physics you get into places (like quantum foundations) where interpretational issues become important in the way we teach, relate, and apply the things we know.

Covid update (2)

Not about the renewed threat from the delta variant. Not even about how depressingly unnecessary the renewed threat from delta is. More about the how Covid has affected us.

Both of my regular readers probably recall that the whole family got the thing in late November or early December. Well, we never had the child tested, but she had symptoms similar to, but less severe than her mother.

General update:

• Grandma was in the hospital for over a month. She was sent home in dreadful shape and still on a feeding tube. She rallied and transitioned to liquid, then chopped, then normal diet; but she remains on hospice and is still bed-bound (before Covid she needed increasing levels of assistance in walking and transfers but was decidedly not bed-bound). Her specialists say that Covid accelerated the progress of her underlying condition.
• My wife and I both experienced bouts of unexpected fatigue throughout January and February. One advantage of working from home is that if you have a irresistible need to take a ninety minute nap at 2:30pm the only disruption is the need to make up the lost time that evening.
• My wife seemed to recover well at first, but in March started to grow weaker. In April she was diagnosed with long Covid. One of the main features of the extended version of the disease is a swelling on the heat and lungs which puts pressure on them and reduces their efficiency. The treatment of choice at the moment is supplemental oxygen, avoiding any kind of intense exercise, and waiting for the swelling to go down. So we're lugging O2 bottle around when we go out, and she's been scheduled for consultations with half a dozen assorted specialists. Best guess is that we're in this boat for another six months, give or take.
• My on-going symptoms faded around the end of February. But my better half remains worried on my behalf to this day. So I asked about attending the long Covid clinic and got the expected answer (I'm not sick enough to justify any of their overbooked time), and have restricted my exercise regime to low intensity (walk, don't run; go steady, not hard on the rower; very modest levels of moderate resistance training). I began to feel something like my old self again around late May. Mind you, the gray that appeared in my hair hasn't gone away like it did the first few times it showed up (always during a particularly stressful period in the last ten years or so). I tell my self that a little salt-n-pepper at the temples is "distinguished". Sometimes I even believe it.