Oh good grief. I neither agreed nor disagreed with the study in question, nor any other study that has come to light in this discussion.
My original argument was that the study was not substantial enough to warrant such a sensational title. I also questioned why whoever was in charge (mistakenly referred to Dr. Christakis) would release such a study with such sensational title. During this debate, though I have made a few grammatical errors, these two points have been my only points. You have brought up every single other point.
You asked for substantiation, here you are:
My point as to whether the head scientist's methods were good enough:
her methodolgy is poor and her claims poorly substantiated
(Changed his to her because the Lillard is a woman)
My acknowledgement of the inconclusivity of the study, and my attack on its misleading title and presentation
The study is inconclusive at best and misleading at worst. This will play out over a long period of time, and there is much testing left to be done (and hopefully in a more rigorous way). It is too early to judge whether he is right or not, but he has a good incentive to be right.
Why am I not attacking the truth value of the study? Because I don't know whether it is true or not- I am not yet educated to the point that I can make such a statement, though
you seem bent on saying that I have claimed to be thus educated. However, I can make a statement about the study as described in the article. The 'Abomination' I referenced was as follows:
Having 60 non-diverse kids, who are not part of the show's targeted (audience), watch nine minutes of programming is questionable methodology and could not possibly provide the basis for any valid findings that parents could trust
The title was sensationalized, and implied that fast-paced programming permanantly hampered children. What the study actually found would only matter if its findings were conclusive to that end, which they were not,
The results should be interpreted cautiously because of the study's small size
. EDIT: The study was not enough evidence to support such bold claims.
Anecdotally, I watched enough violent, fast-paced TV to last a lifetime when I was very young, and look at me now- I get my kicks by arguing with people on the internet (and only one butt cheek is bruised, WOOT!).
By the way, I think Simaril make a very interesting point about the fallacy of arguing that correlation implies causation, and how the increased television viewing may be the result of the attention problems, and not the other way around. Read it below:
Refuse to read 3+ pages of "Oh, yeah?" ..."Yeah!"
But as someone who diagnoses and treats ADD pretty routinely, and tries to keep up with the literature -
These studies all suffer from the almost insoluble problem of separating CORRELATION from CAUSATION.
(For example, it is a FACT that the more telephone poles per capita a developing country has, the more heart disease they have. That's a correlation, a measure of how much two things track together. BUT - heart disease is not CAUSED by telephone poles; there is a third factor, the "westernization" of lifestyle that ties the two together. Poor countries get by on low calories of food like rice, but once they get wealthy they get both telephone infrastructure and larger quantities of higher fat food.)
This correlation vs causation distinction is absolutely critical, but also beyond the comprehension of every news outlet I've come across.
Bottom line: in real world studies, you can't tell whether the distractability comes first (so the kids love the flashing lights and stimulation of TV) or whether the TV exposure comes first, causing the distractibility. You just can't do those studies, because you can't isolate the kids and control their inputs for 5+ years. You have to watch what happens in various groups, because you can't control the experimental variable (TV watching).
To conclude, you missed my point entirely, and now complain that I restate it.
-Penguin
