Why Do We Judge Parents for Putting Kids at Perceived But Unreal Risk? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/08/22/490847797/why-do-we-judge-parents-for-putting-kids-at-perceived-but-unreal-risk?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20160822 <comment><USER2> Even since I was 10 or so I would often come back to school on my own. Then let myself into our apartment. Eat some lunch, do homework, play until my parents came home in the evening. I was effectively often alone for about 4 or so hours.

I wouldn't let my kid do it here in US. Not because I wouldn't trust them or think it is dangerous. But because I am afraid what neighbors, school, CPS would do.

My co-worker let his kids play in the cul-de-sac for an hour while they watched from the house. An anonymous neighbor reported them to police, and a sequence of embarrassing calls at work ensued, statements to police, follow up visits from police, etc.

And this is not some dangerous part of the city. This is suburbs, as safe as they come.

But apparently you are never safe from neighbors with an agenda.

And the thing is, there is nothing you can say or do, even if you knew this neighbor. "Well I was worried for the children!". Unless they openly confessed it was because you cut the lawn wrong or they don't like the color of your house, there is nothing you can do to them (well maybe turn evil and report them for other irrational fears -- terrorism "but I was worried about this country's safety, swear heard them talk about buying a lot of fertilizer").

The interesting thing is, once those in power act irrationally about something. There will always be people to exploit that element. I heard from my grandparents how neighbors would rat on each other imaginary things during Stalin's times. The results were usually the neighbors family would be taken in the middle the night and sent to Siberia never to be seen again. This is of course, an extreme example but it illustrates, how irrationality can and will be exploited.

<comment><USER3> One hears of this kind of thing happening in the US all the time (obviously it is a big place.) I always wonder what proportion of it is due to genuine misplaced concern for the children, and how much of it is strife of the "they don't like the color of your house" variety.

One thinks of Homeowner Associations and the way they place fines and pseudo- legal orders on people, a concept which is utterly anathema to the english. The two cultures have very different ideas of privacy.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, I think a lot of this nannying comes from middle aged people who never had children, but maybe who wanted them and could not have them. So there's an element of ignorance about how autonomous children can be, and also jealousy and revenge against those who have what they wanted and can no longer have.

<comment><USER5> Nannying is just one aspect of a more pervasive underlying cultural problem: a lot of people here seem to feel entitled to impose their opinions and judgment on others. Not just share them, but actually impose them.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure this is anything particularly new. There have always been busybodies. What probably is newer is that the local government is, for better or worse, quicker to inject themselves into domestic situations than they may have been in the past.

The challenge is that, if someone sees behavior that isn't the norm in their experience, and that they personally consider (rightly or wrongly) to be insanely dangerous, what are they really to do? OK, they probably shouldn't raise a stink if some kid is riding a bike without a helmet. What if they're playing with firecrackers?

<comment><USER5> I agree, there are busybodies everywhere and they have always existed. What's new to me, who have lived in two very different countries before coming here to the US, is how often and how easily those busybodies recur to authorities.

Unlike other places I've lived in, here there is a real fear that someone will dislike the way you raise your children and report you, creating much more serious problems for you than they might do elsewhere, at least not with the same ease.

I think it has a lot to do with what @stinkytaco said in his reply. It's a breakdown in communication and the same thing happens in other aspects of our lives, not just the child-rearing. I believe that this is what happens when there's so much emphasis on personal, individual freedom at the expense of larger communities those individuals form part of, all the way to the largest community -- the society itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm most interested in the enshrinement into law of these risk assessments, where if you disagree with the risk assessments you get flagged for CPS or criminal judgement. Even if you 'win', society just imposed a massive, _massive_ cost on you (and your children) for disagreeing about the relative risk of an action.

There needs to be some way of walking this back, but I can't think what that might be except literally trying to get a law in place giving parents broad immunity. I can't even really imagine how such a law would be worded without completely gutting CPS and related organizations in other countries.

<comment><USER8> I think the struggle for civil forfeiture reform offers some suggestions. Child Services operates similarly to these programs in that they can size children and impose sanctions without a court finding any wrongdoing first.

Child Services makes use of broad powers and would indeed be "gutted" if they couldn't act until neglectful parents were tried or pled guilty. I think that is a good tradeoff. Similarly, I don't mind that civil forfeiture reform lets drug dealers continue to drive sometimes. This is a major political controversy, though.

<comment><USER7> Can't really agree though. The issue with child services is that they can act faster than the criminal system. You might want to say that they couldn't act to remove or otherwise enforce parental restrictions until criminal charges are made (leaving other less adversarial actions available). An unintended consequence of this may be that charges are made much more easily for the purpose of unblocking child services.

Alternatively, it may be that we want to take the same 'rational' look at risk that we want the courts/child services to take. Maybe the few kids that get taken away 'unreasonably' are actually just the cost of having an otherwise sane system. Lest that come off as callous, I just mean that if you have a country of 300 million, you'll get some pretty far out scenarios played out. You don't necessarily want to add process to protect those very few scenarios that are outrageous because it may cost more (by e.g. tying CPS' hands so that they can't take _actually_ at-risk children out of homes).

I guess I'm suggesting that this might, in the end, be much ado about nothing. It's hard to say without numbers and analysis.

<comment><USER9> Realistically, CPS is overloaded. I know people who've worked with CPS, and I think if you went and worked with CPS for a few months you would change your tune pretty quickly. They don't have the resources to take children and put them into foster care on a hunch.

<comment><USER8> The percentage of placements is at a nadir but will change as budget crises are solved, child services scandals are forgotten, improved reporting and improvement plan maintenance technology is deployed, outsourcing becomes more common, etc. It is better to solve this problem than to rely on underfunding to lessen the problem's impact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The same is true for terrorism of course. Terrorism catches our attention because it's morally outrageous, not because it's statistically dangerous to people in Western countries.

But if you talk with "regular people", you'll notice that media coverage gives people an unwarranted fear of outlier events: terrorism, mass shootings, plane crashes, etc.

In reality, almost everyone in the US should fear the real killers: obesity, cancer, stroke, etc.

<comment><USER11> I think it's almost 100% news media sensationalism.

News media today is not about investigative reporting, or real news. It's about selling ads and getting eyeballs. So they report rare events as if they happen every day and you need to keep watching so you know what to do about it.

The news media today is toxic. You could do little more to improve your outlook on life and the future than simply not watching it. At all. I haven't watched a news program on any major network or any cable news in several years, and I don't miss it at all.

<comment><USER12> I agree. It seems like everything on the news is blown out of proportion and beaten to death in an attempt to fill the day with "interesting" stuff. No, this is just making people scared to go outside and actually enjoy life.

I've stopped watching the news and just read it whenever I hear of something going on that piques my interest on the Internet. It's pointless for me to watch 24-hour news coverage of a shooting or kidnapping that is just going to make me think less of the world I live in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > A 2-year-old was found unattended after his parents allegedly left home to > play Pokémon Go.

> How much risk was there of some harm coming to the child while the parents > were gone?

As a parent to young children, I would say pretty damn high, actually. Kids do stupid things all the time, and if you aren't there, and they know you aren't there, there is no limit to the stupid things a 2 year old can do. It's a normal part of growing up, but that doesn't make it safe to do it alone in the slightest.

That said, I agree with the gist of the article overall.

<comment><USER14> I could see that. A two year old could easily run out into traffic. A 7 or 8 year old, not so much.

I remember years ago about a women who had the police escort a kid to her house because she'd let him bicycle to school (wearing a helmet and it was < 2 miles). That is kinda crazy. When I went to elementary school (early 90s), there was a whole group of kids who walked to school. Sometimes the teacher in charge of the gate would forgot to unlock it and we'd see them all pile up while in homeroom (huge fence, took like 15 min to walk around so most kids would just wait).

<comment><USER15> > A two year old could easily run out into traffic. A 7 or 8 year old, not so > much.

You overestimate 7 & 8 year olds. I know I definitely did. Ran into the side of a moving car.

<comment><USER16> I used to walk to school all by myself when I was 7 - I had to lock the door behind me, cross two roads to get to school, come back, let myself in, and have a fruit or a sandwich while I waited for my parents to come back. That was in 1998. Everyone walked to school - maybe one kid got dropped off by his parents but he was from a "rich" family and no one liked him because of it.

<comment><USER17> Same here. When I was 7 I had a half hour walk to/from school. Many of my class mates had similar distances to walk. We we walked along busy roads, and some had to cross them. We'd also be home alone for hours afterwards.

At one point my parents got worried that maybe it was to much, and got me a child minder. I proceeded to boycott her by dropping my school bag, leaving to play outside and not coming back until my parents would be there to pick me up - after a couple of weeks of that they decided it was pointless and let me be at home by myself again instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My wife has been yelled at by strangers for filling up the car with gas, then walking 25 feet from the gas pump to the payment window and paying for the gas... because our kids were in the car 25 feet away.

She's had the police and the neighborhood watch called repeatedly because our children were playing in our own yard.

It's not a world I recognize and I'm increasingly disturbed by people's strange ideas about children.

<comment><USER19> When I was a kid my parents would let me pump their gas. I also ran errands in town by myself, and was left to look after younger siblings before my teens.

IMO the sooner you're given responsibilities the sooner you learn to be responsible.

As when there was talk of raising the driving age because 'all these teens are dying' \- it's inexperience, not so much the age which matters.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I myself was a latch-key kid, biked everywhere, had a landscaping job at 14 and worked in grocery stores throughout high school.

Although I'm not super-excited about putting teenagers behind the wheels of cars until their brains have caught up with their bodies and they don't think they are immortal any more...

<comment><USER19> Anecdotal; but my first accident was in my 20s, several years into my driving career.

I think the fact a lot of people's first car is normally old, cheap and crappy has a lot to do with it. It's commonly believed it's an inevitability young drivers will wreck and then we put them in the most unsafe vehicles available...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting research. Looks like a cognitive bias related to the reverse-Halo Effect ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect) ). The mother left for some morally bad reason, so the predicted events receive bad associations (larger risk).

Sounds easily exploitable too. Want to advertise something dangerous? Just show people doing it in morally good situations.

<comment><USER21> I started out thinking that, but after considering it some more, I'm not sure it's _just_ a halo effect.

Here's a chain of correlations: parents who leave their children alone at random (rather than in a structured and pre-planned way) are probably more impulsive. Trait-impulsivity is hereditary. Thus, leaving a (blood-related) child alone is _predictive_ of that child taking more risks and being the kind of child who _can 't_ be left alone safely.

(On the other hand, leaving a child you're the adoptive parent or guardian of alone isn't predictive of anything.)

<comment><USER22> If it has some sort of deep evolutionary roots, why has it arisen in the past like half-century?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a strong reason why I don't want to raise children in the U.S. I grew up in a very controlled environment with very controlling, paranoid parents and I am still dealing with the many consequences of that.

To think that I would be forced to raise children to be deficient per social rules is unsettling at best, and disturbing when considering that this is happening everywhere in the US.

What could the future hold in store? How much more extreme can this get?

</comment><comment><USER24> I really wish people in the US would prefix these sort of statements with "In the US, we ..." The rest of the world isn't so crazy. Speaking as if what people in the US do is universal makes these sort of things seem as though they're the result of the passage of time, that some other solution just isn't possible, that the outcome was inevitable, and those people affected are somehow victims. When really it's a matter of deliberate choices some people made, in the US. Today's article on ADHD also suffers from the same myopic perspective.

<comment><USER25> It's totally reasonable to want to distance yourself from this sort of thing. However, NPR is an explicitly American news organization, and the _second_ sentence of TFA is prefaced with, " _In the United States today..._ "

Actually a lot of the crazy shit you might associate with "USA" is only relevant for certain communities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I understand the overall thrust of this article, but I somewhat disagree with the suggestion that my judgement of morality should have no impact on my judgement of the risk to a child.

For instance a parent that would leave a 2-year old alone to go play pokemon probably has other terrible parenting judgement/skills and most likely the environment they leave the kid in IS actually more dangerous than someone who accidentally leaves their kid alone.

They are standardizing risk assessment across all environments, but that's statistics not reality. Certainly some peoples moral assessments have gone overboard (it's crazy that kids can't go to the park unattended when they reach a general maturity). But I don't think it's unreal to assess the risk to a child as higher if you also think their parents are amoral and likely bad parents. Those kids ARE probably at higher risk in my opinion, either from their parents not being as cautious at establishing a healthy environment or in not being good enough parents to teach their kids how to behave in a safe manner when left alone.

<comment><USER27> > I somewhat disagree with the suggestion that my judgement of morality should > have no impact on my judgement of the risk to a child.

The risk to the child for a specific situation does not change based on the reason why a parent put the child in a situation, the same way that the probability of getting hit by a landmine doesn't change based on whether you're walking across a minefield to cheat on your spouse or to save a baby.

The researchers wasn't asking "how good of a parent do you think they are", they were asking "how risky do you think this behaviour is", and it is irrational to be changing your estimation of the risk in a situation based on the reasons for being put in that situation (but what else is new when it comes to human psychology).

<comment><USER28> >The researchers wasn't asking "how good of a parent do you think they are"

They may not have asked that question, but that seems to be the question people were answering. Isn't it somewhat obvious that we almost never answer the literal question?

If I consider the situation where the parent left their 2 year old alone to go meet a lover vs going to work to put food on the table, I'll judge the former situation more harshly. To explain myself, I'd say both situations put the child at the same risk, but the first situation is not a responsible reason to assume that risk.

In short, when you present these scenarios, you're not asking me, "mathematically, which situation is more dangerous for the child?". You're implicitly asking me, "is this parent making a responsible decision?".

<comment><USER22> The same result was observed (or even strengthened) even when morality and risk were separated in the questionnaire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are there places in America where things are not this extreme?

I am looking for a career in IT, so coming to the Valley might be something I am going to do in my career.

But I would want my kids to grow up in a different, more independent way. Like I did in my home country.

(If I was in America now and thinking about getting children, this article would be a 100% reason to go back to my home country, it totally gave me the creeps.)

<comment><USER30> Well, I grew up in a small town of 20000 in Virginia, and I don't think things are, or were, like this at all. When I go home, I see children arrive at the YMCA to play basketball unaccompanied. They also arrive at the library alone. When I worked at the town pool as recently as 5 years ago, our most common swimmers were kids who showed up alone on their bikes or skateboards. Thinking back about 10-15 years ago when I was younger, I'd walk the 30 minutes to school alone if I didn't want to ride the bus. My younger brothers did likewise. The four of us would have firework battles in the yard; in hindsight perhaps someone should have come out to discourage us on that last activity. In the early 2000s, at age 7-10, I would spend most summer days down by the creek with a friend or two. We'd set off by bike after summer swim team in mornings, take our lunches, and spend most of the day there.

I guess that's all a decade in the past, but I would wager that it's media portrayal that's more likely to have done most of the recent changing, not crazy people. There have always been crazy people, but it seems like they all organized to abuse CPS together suddenly over the last 10 years.

<comment><USER31> 20000 is a small town for you? I guess I've never lived in a small town, only in tiny villages between 300-900 people or cities of 100000+ but my nearest town is ~20000 and I've always considered it pretty large with lots of disconnected communities and areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Children must be allowed to do dangerous things. Doing dangerous things does not guarantee injury. Children, despite our observations otherwise, do not have a death wish. They have a strong self-preservation instinct and purposefully risky behavior is usually due to ignorance because they don't understand how the world works yet. A child wants to touch the candle flame because they don't know it's hot, not because they want to get burned.

Doing dangerous things is risky though. A child is NOT guaranteed to get hurt everytime but if you allow them to explore the work and engage in risky behavior they will get hurt eventually. It is my goal as a parent to let them do dangerous things from an early age even when it scares me.

At one that means letting them walk without a walker anad without being there to catch them all the time. At two-four it means letting them climb the stairs on their own and letting them swing and go down the slide without hand holding. At 5+ it means letting them build a fire, swim in the creek, shoot a bow and arrow and climb trees. By giving them freedom (and responsibility - but that's another topic) early they learn what their limits are and, I hope, learn to judge for themselves what is safe for them. This may be different for each of my kids and is almost certainly different than what I believe is safe and or appropriate. Of course I am there to veto really misinformed decisions (we are going to build a diving board into this 2 feet pool in the brook!) and to provide direction and guidance.

Putting this into practice has resulted in one broken arm, three staples and numerous small home-treatable cuts and bruises. I don't always like where this philosophy puts me as a father. I many times say yes and then quietly follow from a distance out of my own fear for their safety.

But because I know what a struggle it is to decide how to raise my children, even if the ultimate decision is that I am not raising them so much as watching them develop and prodding them occasionally, I try very hard not to judge parents who have made different decisions and different trade-offs.

The article doesn't go into much detail about why people judge parents so harshly but mostly focuses on changing social norms. I understand though. I have to actively remind myself NOT to judge parents who make different decisions than I do and I'm only aware of that because I have made decisions that are different than most of my peers and acquaintances.

</comment><comment><USER33> Bodies like CPS have to justify their existence and increase in budgets. If my job is to go to office everyday and find parents to arrest the best way is to lower the bar for "putting kids in danger".

It is okay to send your kids to play soccer or the hand-football americans play where they can possibly receive life threatening injuries but it is not okay to let them walk back home from school because all it takes a evil guy with a van and candies to kidnap that kid.

<comment><USER34> Never attribute to malice... My mother was a CPS worker for a while so here's a little perspective from the inside. CPS is generally wildly underfunded, underpaid, and understaffed. It's staffed largely by bleeding hearts straight out of college, most of whom will burn/churn out in a year or two. They've never had kids; most are still kids themselves. There are a few lifers and first job in a second career people, but they're the minority. It's one of the more systematically dysfunctional branches of government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Are perceived risks lower in smaller countries?

The article mentions Norway, which has a population of 5M. Even if the rate of child abduction is the same as the USA, there will be far fewer scary stories.

1) How many foreign cases does the Norwegian media report?

2) Are Norwegians worried about them? I'd think "oh, America" and move on, but I'd guess that if I lived in Idaho and the case was in Michigan I wouldn't be so dismissive.

<comment><USER36> Just watch news in the US. They indulge for hours in killings, child abductions and other stuff. It's a very fear-driven society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I agree with this, but I still have a hell of a time letting my kids outside unsupervised, not because of abduction or crime fears, but because of cars. At least in the States, people don't give a crap about anything while they are driving. Excessive speeding is the norm on all city streets, marked crosswalks are a mild suggestion, and unmarked crosswalks do not exist. If 50% of the land outside of my house were literal minefields I'm not sure it would be less dangerous. I don't think anyone was abducted in my city last year, but 10 pedestrians died. A teenager was just mowed down in a crosswalk over the weekend. That scares the shit out of me.

<comment><USER30> For that, I recommend living in older neighborhoods and trying to get involved in re striping streets narrower. Cars speeding are a clear sign that the speed limit doesn't match the road design. When you make drivers feel uncomfortable, they slow down and drive more carefully. When you make roads wide enough for firetrucks to do three-point turns and with highway safety margins, drivers will intuitively listen to the design language encouraging them to drive fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Ladders to help children get up to neck-breaking heights when climbing trees (in Denmark):

[http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2016/08/23/ladders-to-help- ch...](http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2016/08/23/ladders-to-help-children-get- up-to-neck-breaking-heights-when-climbing-trees/)

</comment><comment><USER39> It's the result of a bizarre American Protestant religious tenet that gradually evolved into existence over the 20th century, namely: People deserve health and happiness in life in inverse relationship to their degree of cynicism; Children are born in a perfect state, without cynicism, therefore _any effort by a cynical (by definition) adult that could protect a child from anything that could possibly affect their health or happiness is mandatory._ The most important thing a child needs to learn is to control themselves and to be optimistic, which will immunize them to the effects of adult cynicism, _not_ how to handle themselves independently in the world, and especially not math.

It's a complete inversion of the previous straightforward pre-20c mindset, which was: adults take longer to make, are stronger, and they know more stuff, so they're more important. Also, religiously, that babies are born fundamentally broken, and need to gain understanding of the world before they have any chance to fix themselves. Dead babies go to Hell, or at best an endless purgatory.

IMO 80% of the character of its current expression comes from spoiled Baby Boomers having a combination of condescension and hate towards their parents. They were perfect, ruined by the world, and endangered by their parents cynical reasoning about why we should be in Vietnam and hate communism (something about sharing being evil and assuming the worst about everybody.)

<comment><USER30> I buy your argument that we value children too highly in relation to adults, but I think the connection to religion is under-formed at best. If nothing else you need greater specificity of blame: surely there's a common theme with higher correlation than whether people follow a church that split from Catholicism 500 years ago, given the huge variation within that category.

Myself, I'd argue that the way we've built towns has lent itself to destroying community and wealth. We put people in cars so they don't interact with their surroundings. We put the cars on massive road networks we can't afford to maintain (to say nothing of the sewer and water out to the edges of towns.) Then a downturn cones and we cut services because the maintenance is crushing us. We build places that aren't meant to last, and then only the rich can afford to move to the next generation's good suburbs. Everyone left behind was too poor to get out, and now they'll suffer decreased services and accessibility as the local government spends on the new growth areas. Given such a miserable setting, people are unable, by fact of their patterns of life, to look out for one another. Culture breaks down, because there's no community maintaining it. The earth-conquering strength of human teamwork is not utilized in these places; the new suburbs are full of people wealthy enough to overcome that, but the aging ones have no such strength.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The worst part of parenting is dealing with other parents. Yuppie millennial parents are the worst. I thought I grew up with overprotective Asian parents but they let me wander all around the town at 7-8, stuff that's apparently get them arrested in the Dame suburbs today.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm surprised they made no mention of [http://www.freerangekids.com/](http://www.freerangekids.com/) or (owner/blogger) Lenore Skenazy, both of which typically come up in such discussions.

<comment><USER42> There is a mention of free range parenting, but not an explicit call out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I have my own theory. I think parents have gone so far in the r/K selection[1] toward the K direction that people have gone completely overboard in protecting children.

It would be very interesting to compare with cultures where having lots of kids is still the norm.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory)

</comment><comment><USER44> If anyone else is interested in how Debra Harrell and her daughter's story turned out, here is a recent FB update from a person who helped crowdfund $47k to support them during the legal problems. Thankfully the charges were dropped with seemingly no media coverage whatsoever. Unfortunately, it sounds like the young girl is now experiencing anxiety issues from the trauma of being taken by Child Protective Services.

[https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=532307546952426&id...](https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=532307546952426&id=274254686091048)

</comment><comment><USER45> The research actually looks kind of cool, but this headline and the whole framing of the issue sounds like it was written by an alien. Uh, _why_?

We judge _everything_ on the basis of perception, not reality. That's just... how this works.

And this is far from the most worrying thing Americans have a dramatically detatched perception of danger about, right now. If you want to really address this issue, and a few others besides, I'd stop worrying about how people relate to kids or parents and start worrying about how they relate to _reality_.

<comment><AUTHOR> While there are plenty of ways people are disconnected from reality, the impact on our culture when kids don't have independence and parents make decisions out of fear has a significant impact on our world.

<comment><USER45> Count me as reeeeally leery of ascribing harm to an amorphous "cultural impact". Not that I think it's sensible or right that a child might not be allowed to walk around the block, but that in general, as with any other thing other people's parents seem to worry about, the kids are probably going to be fine.

Contrasted with our outrageously inverted reaction to the real and fictional (respectively) threats of climate change and terrorism, it's hard for me to muster up too much outrage. Fix this without fixing them, it's hard for me to clap too hard.

<comment><AUTHOR> In general, kids and young adults are more unhealthy in measurable ways -- cancer, depression, suicide rates -- all higher. While this is just one aspect of what is causing trouble, the lack of independence has been linked to kids making really, really bad choices when they are finally alone. You can also ask any college professor how the quality of problem solving and independence has changed in the past decade or so.

In order to fix a problem, you need to fix the cause, not the effect. Many of the causes of the poor decisions we make are due to conditioning of our childhood. While adults cannot blame their bad decisions on their parents, they certainly can see a root cause of much of their poor choices -- if they can see it at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I didn't read the entire article and I do not have kids but to me the world seems more hostile than when I was a kid but I guess that's expected.

People seem much more opportunistic and are proud of it when I point out it's not a compliment to be called such a thing.

Overall maturity seems really low I mean these days people act immature compared to when I was a kid. I don't think I'd see adults in their 20, 30 or 40s chasing Pokemons in the 1970s.

These days people swear every second word around kids, seniors, just in public gatherings as if it's nothing I'm sure I'll be mocked for thinking that's wrong. Then again breasts are censored on TV but not when I was a kid. Although contrasting that every now TV show didn't have "this show may have words or situations that may offend someone" warnings after commercial break.

Then you have the "everyone is a winner" or "you can do anything" drilled into kids in school I think that stunts maturity. If kids are going to be left alone they need to know sometimes they can screw up big time and it's their fault.

</comment><comment><USER47> Wish people (especially scientist) would just stick to the facts. In the McDonald's case people were not "angry at this woman for not being a full-time mom". They were angry that the child was left alone. No one has a problem with a mom working and a care giver watching a child. And of course we have to throw in a dig at evil McDonalds for not having childcare services.

<comment><USER48> But why would they be angry at her for leaving the kid alone? What danger is the kid in? What do they care what she does with her kid if the kid is in no danger?

(Not to mention, how could she afford the child care?)

</comment></comment><comment> B-Con Parenting is a 24/7 job. Parents make thousands of decisions balancing many ideal and pragmatic factors. Seeing one parenting decision is not sufficient for assessing their entire parental lifestyle. Putting aside the specifics of this topic, it is curious how many people are quick to condemn a parent the moment they make a single decision not up to the observer's standards.

</comment><comment><USER49> There is no such thing as "perceived but unreal risk". A risk is some sort of estimate that harm will occur: a likelihood. No risk is real; it is always perceived. There is only the question of how rationally founded is that estimate. Some risks can be established via measurement. If the statistics give some risk as 0.1%, but you perceive it subjectively as 30%, then there is a degree to which your perception of risk is unrealistically inflated. Neither the 0.1% nor the 30% are 'real' though; both are just a tool for guessing about the future.

We judge people when their behavior hints at a risk estimate which differs from ours. Anyone who estimates a risk lower than you do is reckless; anyone who estimates it higher is a wimp.

Sometimes, estimates of risk are just culturally enshrined B.S., not founded in anything. If you don't protect yourself from a certain risk in a certain culturally endorsed, widely practiced manner, then you're an ignorant or crazy cultural outsider. Likewise if you go too far in protecting yourself from something.

<comment><USER50> If I'm flipping a coin, would you not say that the real risk of a flip coming up heads is about 50%?

<comment><USER49> If I said that, I could drop the word "real" and still say the same thing.

"Real risk" in conversation is usually just an intensifier which means "risk significantly greater than zero percent" implying that it's high enough to be considered on its own, or ahead of other risks. That's already more or less given by the 50% figure.

In this sense there is "no real risk" that the coin will land on its edge. There is a probability attached which is too small to bother with; and possibly lower than the probability that a crow will swoop from the sky and snatch the coin before it lands.

<comment><USER50> I think you kind of lost the plot here. In this context, "real" means the actual fact-based risk, rather than an imagined risk. For example, if you've flipped 10 heads in a row, a human suffering from the Gambler's Fallacy might think the risk of a tail is 90%, while the real risk is still about 50%. We're not talking about "real risk" as a synonym to "significant risk."

<comment><USER49> I wouldn't feel the need to say that there is a real (true, actual, mathematically determined, ...) risk of 50%, except to disagree with some different figure posited by someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The survey completely overlooks a very important possibility:

The participants know their own ignorance of the _exact_ circumstances of each situation, and so they use their judgement of the parent's character to fill in the gaps.

For example, when the parent leaves for an "immoral" reason, it reflects badly on their character, so the participant would have less reason to believe that they've thought about the child's safety.

On the other hand, when a parent whom the participant has judged to be of good character leaves the child, they assume that the parent them-self has thought through the safety implications and has judged it to be safe. Since the parent would have more information than the participant, the participant is trusting their judgement, and is able to determine that the situation is safer.

In essence, the stories told to the participants actually do have different amounts of information in about the child's safety.

</comment><comment><USER30> When I saw this title, the thing that jumped onto my head was child car seats. Beyond infant seats, child seats don't provide any significant benefit over sitting in the back with a seatbelt. The difference between those two is an often-perceived, but infinitesimal, risk.

On the other hand, we don't judge parents for driving their kids all over the place, or living far away from things so that they're forced to drive many miles with their kids. But that's a highly risky behavior.

If you live in a place that's walkable for your kids, you've probably sheltered them from far more danger than child predators ever pose.

</comment><comment><USER52> Here's a snapshot of what things are like in Berlin, Germany.

I dropped my 7 year old off at a new day camp (in the centre of the city) last week. They asked me if she was allowed to leave on her own at the end of the day.

Here are the rules for kids riding on the subway system:

"Children under four years of age may only use public transport if they are accompanied by a person who is at least six years of age."

That said, you don't see a lot of little kids travelling alone but it seems that the discretion is with the parents.

</comment><comment><USER53> Divorced parents would have to answer to their formers spouse, their former spouse's attorney, a child's rep, the Court, etc. for any serious mishap. Its not worth the knee jerk tragic outcomes the Courts can produce. Therefore, a divorced parent is best served playing it ultra conservative and ignoring this article.

</comment><comment><USER54> The minds and endocrine systems of children that at raised in safe and sterile environments, under the constant, close attention of guardians, are necessarily unprepared for the randomn inputs available in nature and society.

Children that grow up this way will be better suited for a virtual life, where the number of variables is controlled.

</comment><comment><USER55> Because info spreads more quickly now-a-days and even if 99% of people think it's okay to leave a kid unattended in a given situation, the 1% that care are more likely to see these situations and make a big stink out of them.

</comment><comment><USER56> I judge parents that deny their children their childhood by "protecting" them from perceived but unreal risks.

</comment><comment><USER57> Captain Fantastic is a great movie to get you thinking about kids' education and safety.

</comment><comment><USER58> It's easy and lets us perceive ourselves as better than them.

</comment><comment><USER59> you have to multiply by an outrage factor as well. bad outcomes do not all have unit '1'

</comment><comment><USER60> People seem to confuse rates and percentages with figures. There may be less on average, but more in reality. Not having so many kids on the streets may also cause the crimes to be less. Children wear less clothes than they used to and there seems to be more pedophiles, if those little kids were left alone, more may be taken advantage of. The risk is real. Children don't know how to react when confronted with maybe a drunk driver or someone that offered them candy, so letting children on their own leaves real risk. However, whether it should be criminalized for a rather small risk is debatable.

<comment><USER61> >There may be less on average, but more in reality.

Mind explaining this? I'm having trouble grokking it.

>Not having so many kids on the streets may also cause the crimes to be less.

The article accounted for this.

>Children wear less clothes than they used to and there seems to be more pedophiles, if those little kids were left alone, more may be taken advantage of.

What? Do you have any more information on any of these claims? It's coming across as pure conjecture on your part.

<comment><USER60> 1\. Smaller percentage of a greater amount. 2\. Oh well. 3\. Children wear much smaller clothes than they used to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> What's the difference between perceived and real? Someone preceiving it thinks it's plenty real. I've never been in a traffic accident - is the need for seat belts and air bags real?

<comment><USER63> Perception: there's a 75% chance my kid will be kidnapped by a pedophile. Reality: there's a 0.01% chance of the pedophile kidnap, but a 75% chance of drowning in the bathtub.

Numbers are made up.

Perception is not reality.

Another example: Trayvon Martin was a dark-skinned young male wearing a hoodie. Perception: he is a criminal casing the houses in order to commit a future crime. Reality: he was a kid walking home to his house.

Other examples: * Perception of the likelihood of terrorist attack, vs likelihood of dying in a fatal traffic crash.

* Perception that vaccinations cause autism, vs reality that vaccinations prevent fatal disease.

<comment><USER64> I'm sorry, but I think this is making the same errors in the opposite direction.

1) Yes, child abduction/predation is unlikely ... _because_ we've adopted a huge number of countermeasures that close of this vector. That doesn't (by itself) mean you can just stop doing those measures and act like the risk is still low.

2) The risk of death by bathtub is not 75%.

3) Terrorists ramp up efforts against any vector they've found to be weak. While they _currently_ account for a very small percentage of deaths, that doesn't mean we should have just shrugged our shoulders and done nothing, even basic measures like locked cockpit doors and ending the recommendation of passenger compliance.

4) Trayvon Martin was acting suspiciously and similarly to burglars -- peering into houses around the time there had been other burglaries and reports of similar behavior [1]. _OBVIOUSLY he didn 't deserve what happened_ (let's count how many people miss this clause!), but we don't know, as you're implying, that Martin was somehow merely walking home and not casing houses during a spate of robberies.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Trayvon_Martin#Bac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Trayvon_Martin#Background_of_the_shooting)

<comment><USER65> > Yes, child abduction/predation is unlikely ... because we've adopted a huge > number of countermeasures that close of this vector.

Actually, most of the social "countermeasures" were adopted _after_ high- profile single incidents in the 1990s (perhaps largely because the larger 1960s-1980s crime wave that had been the pretext for expanding government powers in the law enforcement arena previously was ending, and a new pretext was needed) and later, when the overall rate of incidents had been dropping for decades (since, IIRC, the 1950s or 1960s), but media attention to them -- and hence public _perception_ of the prevalence of incidents -- had, at the same time, been increasing.

AFAIK, there is little-to-no evidence that any of the "countermeasures" have had any significant effect on the prevalence of child abduction/predation.

<comment><USER64> The problem in claiming "the evidence says..." in cases like this is that the body of potential perpetrators is intelligent and adaptive.

Say someone cracks a major bank account by guessing "password" as the password. The bank changes the password.

I claim that the weak password was a security risk, and changing it was the right response.

Someone comes a long and gives me a data-intense lecture about "well, electronic bank theft was already declining, and it accounts for only a tiny fraction of financial losses, so changing the password was a waste of time, and was in the context of the IT department using a bunch of pretexts to order people around".

How would you refute that, given all the evidence on their side?

<comment><USER61> I'm having trouble building an internally consistent response because of things like how "changing a password" is a trivial change, i.e. I'm struggling to take into account the hypothetical in a way consistent with your intent and with what reality would have to work like for the hypothetical, as given, to hold true.

Mind trying again with a different example?

<comment><USER64> The smallness of the change doesn't affect the point I was making. [1] The point is that you can't simply look at the raw _incidence rates_ and conclude that specific added countermeasures are unnecessary or irrelevant to the attacker's incentives.

If you agree with that, then you agree with my general point and it's just an issue of which specific countermeasures survive a CBA.

[1] In fact, I chose a small change specifically to highly the absurdity of being bound by low/declining attack rates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you ever see a kid alone outside the best course of action is to call cops.

1\. If you try talking to kid while the kid is alone you might be charged as a sex offender, attempt to kidnap and what not. 2\. If you dont try to help and if something happens to the kid may be later you might face some charges or come under suspicion.

This is absolutely nothing to with what you feel and think. The risks for not calling cops are simply very high.

<comment><USER66> What?? If I see an 8 year old walking around outside by themself, my first and only reaction is to do absolutely nothing and let that child go about their business.

If something did happen to the kid, every person who happened to see that kid and didn't flip their shit and call the cops is not morally or even legally responsible in any sense.

If I saw a kid get snatched into a van, I'd call the cops and do everything in my power to make sure that the kid was returned to his normal life, but _holy shit, do not call the cops because you saw a kid outside_!</comment></comment>


A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/05/11/this-professor-stunned-his-students-when-he-revealed-the-secret-identity-of-his-teaching-assistant/ <comment><USER3> This is definitely an impressive result, but I'm pretty sure it was made easier by the opposite pattern.

I've had a couple of TAs who I strongly suspected of being chatbots, even when I was talking to them in person. I'm still not 100% convinced they were human.

<comment><USER4> More human than human is our motto ...

Next step will be to replace the prof, and then have the students replaced by surprisingly attentive interrogative expert systems, and the cycle will be complete.

<comment><USER5> Reminds me of a scene in the movie "Real Genius". The class was empty of people, was just tape recorders listening to another tape recorder set up by the professor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was a student in this class, and had at least one question on the forum answered (correctly) by Jill. I can see this technology being hugely useful for teachers who conduct large lecture classes in any subject on a regular basis.

That said, I'd be even more excited if Jill had the ability to synthesize new answers to questions through some type of case-based reasoning. This would require Jill receiving feedback on "her" answers, which might mean the students would have to know "who" "she" was in advance. (Sorry, got lost in the quotes.) Right now, Jill is essentially an automated FAQ-retrieval bot.

<comment><USER7> If you had some reddit/HN-style forum where the questions get replies and votes, that would be valuable information for what counts as a "good answer".

<comment><USER8> Yeah I can see that going over well in Physics McPhysicsFace 101

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For anyone interested, the class, which covers interactive intelligence and knowledge based AI, is freely available at [https://www.udacity.com/course/knowledge-based-ai- cognitive-...](https://www.udacity.com/course/knowledge-based-ai-cognitive- systems--ud409) . It's a great starting point if you're looking to automate the sort of human intelligence tasks that don't lend themselves well to the traditional searching/planning/proving/minimax/retrieval route that underpins most AI.

I took it before they rolled out the chat bot TA, unfortunately.

<comment><USER10> thanks for the link ! question though does anybody have any good resources for doing something similar to this in javascript? I know a small amount of java, no python, and want to brush up my js skills anyways.

<comment><USER11> IIRC there was nothing specific to java or python, except for using opencv for the last exercise to visually solve ravens matrices. You could do the same with nodejs, I'd presume. It might be easier too, considering most of the code involved manipulating dynamic data structures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the key:

> The system is only allowed to answer questions if it calculates that it is > 97 percent or more confident in its answer.

Knowing when you don't know the answer is something that has been lacking from AI I've seen. Of course the problem is that not all AI has the option of deferring to a human.

Anyone know what percent of questions the AI answered, vs redirected?

<comment><USER13> > _Anyone know what percent of questions the AI answered, vs redirected?_

That's actually a very good question. The article doesn't give many details other than: _" There are many questions Jill can't handle."_

For comparison, here's are the highlights of a study from 2014 on the mobile assistants (Siri, Cortana, Google): [http://searchengineland.com/google-now- beats-siri-cortana-di...](http://searchengineland.com/google-now-beats-siri- cortana-direct-answers-study-205388)

Google was able to offer "enhanced" answers (i.e. more than a web search) 58% of the time. Siri was at 29% and Cortana was at 20%. Siri improved some with iOS9, but not enough to beat google: [http://www.recode.net/2015/9/20/11618696/how-intelligent- is-...](http://www.recode.net/2015/9/20/11618696/how-intelligent-is-siri-we- put-her-through-a-few-tests)

From the actual study: _... we took 3086 different queries and compared them across all three platforms. These were not random queries. In fact, they were picked because we felt they were likely to trigger a knowledge panel._ ( [https://www.stonetemple.com/great-knowledge-box- showdown/](https://www.stonetemple.com/great-knowledge-box-showdown/) )

<comment><USER12> > That's actually a very good question. The article doesn't give many details > other than: "There are many questions Jill can't handle."

I emailed and asked. If I get a reply I'll post it here.

<comment><USER14> It would be nice if Jill Watson could respond to your email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Rather than inventing sophisticated chat bots, couldn't he have just had a well organised web page? If the question were where is assignment two / when is assignment due. The examples given seem like a "high tech" (possibly unreliable) solution to a low tech problem.

<comment><USER16> Having written documentation for end users, that will work for only a portion of them. Probably most, which is good.

But there are a significant percentage of users who can't (or won't) read documentation. Even they do manage to read it, they don't understand it.

For some reason, human interaction works better for those people. They ask a question, and someone copies the answer from the documentation, and pastes it into the chat conversation. The user then goes "Oh, wow! That's helpful!"

But ask them to read a web page, and they get lost.

I would love to know the psychology behind this phenomenon.

<comment><USER17> > I would love to know the psychology behind this phenomenon.

Laziness. It's usually faster to ask someone a question than to look up the answer. I used to do this on IRC when learning a new programming language and it saved me a lot of time. If you want an even faster answer, you guess the wrong answer and wait for someone to correct you ([https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law)).

<comment><USER16> > Laziness. It's usually faster to ask someone a question than to look up the > answer.

:(

My common answer is "If you're too lazy to read the documentation, I'm too lazy to cut & paste it into the email".

Followed by them complaining about how I'm an asshole...

<comment><USER18> I did this with my brother. Would always ask me beginner programming questions instead of getting Google-fu (while running a business making FileMaker Pro integrations, ugh).

Eventually I LMGTFY. He stopped asking.

<comment><USER19> I bitly my LMGTFY. The passive/aggressive nerd Rick Rolling.

<comment><USER18> That's gold. I'm going to use that one next time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Goel plans to use Jill again in a class this fall, but will likely change its name so students have the challenge of guessing which teaching assistant isn't human."

This will be a fantastic Turing test, at least as far as basic question understanding and natural response formation.

<comment><USER21> Hmm, does it count to use things that are not so much to do with the course?

For example, if a guy is able to answer questions at all times of day, really fast, they're either an AI or Jon Skeet.

Also, real TAs have a life outside of the course. What will an AI say when you ask them whether they enjoyed last night's episode of Game of Thrones?

<comment><USER4> The software worked remarkably well in this instance because the system was well constrained, and the students weren't on the lookout for it. If they do start quizzing their new unseen TA (Dr Colin V Olutionalnet) on random trivia it could presumably deflect the query or have a few canards pre-programmed.

<comment><USER22> But likewise, if I were a TA for that course I'd probably try to act like a bot just to confuse the students.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> That's stunning. I studied AI in undergrad and I just didn't give it enough of my focus at the time. Little did I know that in my lifetime I'd see real world evidence of computers passing the Turing Test with flying colors.

Of course, Turing was right. What's outside of the set of computable sets? Not much!

I recently read an article headline that talked about creeps using AI to stalk porn stars. It's interesting to think that as computation power continues to grow, there's a huge potential for evil uses of AI. All of the things we see and hear and consider "public" have little or no nefarious uses to other humans. But what about a computer that has human-like capabilities and inexhaustible computation resources? The sci-fi scenarios of conscious AI making decisions to save humanity from itself are not what I fear. The evil humans sitting at the helm of powerful AI is what I fear.

A lot of society's norms are predicated on humans having private thoughts and telling small and large lies as appropriate. What happens when AI-augmented humans know when you're lying?

The future is so exciting and so terrifying.

<comment><USER24> > What's outside of the set of computable sets?

Human _intution_ can jump. Mechanical deduction must expend energy.

Let me give you an example: Dmitri Mendeleev goes to bed, has a dream, and then delivers the _periodic table_.

Can your machine do that?

<comment><USER21> The periodic table is the elements ordered such that common features occur together. You'd think some sort of clustering algorithm would detect this.

A line of elements that almost never react with anything. A bunch of things that gain one electron, some that lose one. And so on.

<comment><USER24> Note: "must expend energy"

How many Joules did Mendeleev expend in his dream? How many Joules will your clustering algorithm require? In fact, how many Joules before a meta-algorithm supervisor decides on exclusively using clustering to solve the problem?

> A line of elements ...

Indeed. He arrived at the result with _incomplete_ information.

        Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?
        ..
        Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For those wondering what technology is being used. It is using this Watson product: [http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/engagement_...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/engagement_advisor.html). We are in the process of revamping it and making it a self-service API that will be released this quarter in [http://ibm.com/watsondevelopercloud](http://ibm.com/watsondevelopercloud). Some of the core functionality is already available in [http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/nl- classifier.html) and [http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/dialog.html) in case you don't want to wait.

</comment><comment><USER21> Makes sense as a use case. TAs must hear the same questions over and over again from different students, both practical things like "what homework is there" and reference stuff like "What does the line above the X mean?" (No pun intended!)

I wonder how good it is when people don't know what they're asking. This used to happen all the time when I was in tutorials. "I don't get why there's two transistors in a chain". "What's the significance of the process being adiabatic?"

If you can crack that, education will be changed forever, massively.

</comment><comment><USER26> >Goel and his teaching assistants receive more than 10,000 questions a semester from students on the course's online forum.

Is this normal?

<comment><USER27> Not 10,000 questions, 10,000 messages: [http://www.news.gatech.edu/2016/05/09/artificial- intelligenc...](http://www.news.gatech.edu/2016/05/09/artificial-intelligence- course-creates-ai-teaching-assistant)

That article says ~300 students, 30 posts each seems pretty normal.

<comment><USER26> So the original article:

1\. Didn't mention it was an online course

2\. Didn't mention there were 300 students

3\. Claimed it was questions instead of posts

<comment><USER27> I don't think 1 and 2 are very important for the story, and the questions/posts thing seems like an honest mistake. No harm done. The meaning is basically the same, since the bot can presumably reply to any post, not just a top level question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Actual URL path:

        /this-professor-stunned-his-students-when-he-revealed-the\
        -secret-identity-of-his-teaching-assistant/

HN can do better than clickbait sites like the WaPo.

<comment><USER29> I've never read much of the Washington Post, so I can't say whether there's actually been a decline since Bezos bought them. But there's been a remarkable quantity of terrible reporting from them lately, so at least we can say it's not very good under his ownership.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can't help feeling a big FAQ page with a search function would be a lot more useful. Especially if the entries contain aliases for common search terms, like "length" on the entry of "word count", it should cover everything.

Now this is a forum where others can chip in as well, but the FAQ page could prevent you from having to post in the first place. And if you don't have to post publicly to get an answer from the chat bot (because it's a FAQ page and not a bot) you can do 20 searches before deciding it's not in there.

<comment><USER31> Speaking from experience from being in this class, the unfortunate truth is many people don't bother to read the documents for assignments (thoroughly, at any rate). This one wasn't as bad as another one I took, but many people will ask questions which are easily answered by looking at the materials they're given. That's essentially the area in which this AI excels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This sounded cool until, "Now Goel is forming a business to bring the chatbot to the wider world of education." // are all educators just trying to create companies these days?

<comment><USER33> In my honest opinion, innovating in the Educational sphere and showing value to one or more groups - educators, students, administrative tasks - <USER2> really be rewarded fiscally. An institution won't really do that, except in the long-term by way of job stability and benefits (all subject to modern fiscal pressures). So, while it might seem the case, I think this avenue is perfectly reasonable.

Now, educators who write texts in concert with publishers and then somehow coerse students into buying brand new copies every semester, that's what I'd call profiteering. Not so highly esteemed to me. But, as noted, the profession is a tradeoff a lot of times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> in a way i'm not sure why there is still no parents or students complaining they're kind of being 'defrauded' for a chatbot while paying high tuition (cue discover card tv ad.) one thing for sure is that there are a lot of undergrad or grad students around looking for a part-time job and teaching experience. i know this is a great achievement in AI with huge potential in open course, and great for grant application, but on the very other end is someone paying with an expectation of a human interaction & care. for years i've seen a lot of complaints about foreign human TAs.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Education is such a huge priority for the entire human race."

Half a century into this current iteration of the game called 'Life as a Human on planet Earth' I have come to the conclusion that our _primary_ focus must be Education and Mental Health. Take care of these and we may yet see our full positive potential.

</comment><comment><USER35> The next step is to build a chatbot to replace the professor at teaching. If someone is not going to enjoy the fruits why are you going to supply the knowledge base for a chatbot that is going to replace you?

</comment><comment><USER36> Pretty amazing. Considering that I've only really taken 1 online class so far excluding tutorials that I've done. I wonder if one day how this would be used for real responses for a real professor someday

</comment><comment><USER37> The site comes with an obnoxious "enter your email" overlay that won't go away and messes up scrolling when you block it. They do accept @washpost.com addresses though, so...

</comment><comment><USER38> I wonder how many of the responses were "check the syllabus"

</comment><comment><USER39> Anyone know whether they used watson APIs to create this bot or used the original watson codebase (with IBM collaboration)?

<comment><USER25> It's using this: [http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/engagement_...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/engagement_advisor.html) but if you are smart you can reproduce a lot of the functionality using both [http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/nl- classifier.html) and [http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/dialog.html). We are also coming up this quarter with a fully integrated self-service API that will make doing all this much easier (especially the dialog part). Stay posted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wonder what the 'layers of decision making software' on top of Watson mean. Are these rule engines ?

</comment><comment><USER41> Anyone have technical details about this story? What kind of bot used, languages, algorithms, etc?

<comment><USER42> IBM Watson

Here's a better article that was linked a few days ago: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/if-your-teacher-sounds-like-a- ro...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/if-your-teacher-sounds-like-a-robot-you- might-be-on-to-something-1462546621)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Already posted in original form: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11688061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11688061)

I don't know why SMH would take a Washington Post story and change the title to something stupid, while keeping everything else the same, but that's what they've done.

Wait.. there's one more difference. A pathetic picture of "an AI".

"an AI"? Seriously SMH, just use the original title. Your editorial blundering is embarrassing, and could easily be replaced with "an AI" tasked with re- wording headlines.

<comment><USER44> Thanks for that, the original article was a much better read.

<comment><USER43> the original has the sample interaction with students, so its definitely worth switching, otherwise its the same copy apart from butchered title.

SMH is a bottom of barrel source. Changing a story title to something more click-baity, sums up the entire Fairfax network and Australian news media in general.</comment></comment></comment>


We Are All – Fill in the Blank - <AUTHOR> http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/We-Are-All---Fill-in-the-Blank-20150110-0021.html

<comment><USER2> Fun factoid: rms was a member of the advisory committee of this media organization (TeleSUR). He left in 2010: [https://www.stallman.org/archives/2010-nov- feb.html#26%20Feb...](https://www.stallman.org/archives/2010-nov- feb.html#26%20February%202011%20\(Telesur%20Propaganda\))

Of course, this is irrelevant in this case - they are just publishing Chomsky's opinion.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm Serbian, so this resonates very strongly.

To start off, here is an article by one of the journalists who survived the attack: [1]. I'm not sure of his political affiliation and if he was pro- regime or not (the regime at that time was undoubtedly evil), but the way of writing about the tragedy really struck a chord, so it is very relevant. The civilian casualty reports of the attack itself range between 489 and 528[2].

I was only 2 when the the NATO air invasion on Serbia started. At that time, me and my parents were living in a remote town in Eastern Serbia and the main targets were elsewhere. However, there was a factory of chemical compounds near us that was rather high-profile, and they announced it will be targeted soon, so as a precaution we fled to a nearby afer village where my grandparents lived then. They say you usually don't remember anything before the age of three, but there is one picture that I strongly believe came from there. We were all in a basement, with some other people, crammed, and I think I remember the sound of sirens or faint explosions somewhere, but maybe that's just a fake memory. I remember an old, broken fridge in the corner, and when I talked to my parents about this, they say that they remembered the same old fridge in that basement that day.

Only later, when I grew up, I heard the stories of the Radio Television of Serbia building being bombed and the circumstances surrounding it. I don't know enough facts to know if that media outlet was censored and manipulated, or if the director knew that the building will be targeted and left the journalists there to be sacrificed so the regime could use that event for propaganda later. But it doesn't matter in the end. All I know is that people died---journalists who probably just did their job. Journalists who had to be protected, but were instead hung out to dry. The media was most probably censored (that's my perspective from today, but again I don't know most of the facts), but I doubt that any of them had any say in that. The ones who were responsible are higher-up officials.

Those were not the only civilians who died, as mentioned before. For instance, my high school bears a memorial engraving in memory of an 18-year-old student who died when a bridge collapsed near Varvarin[2].

The Yugoslav people from then never had any hate for anyone. It was amidst a huge crisis and they mostly wanted just a better life. We were led by a psychopathic leader who brought incidents like the killing of those journalists and all these civilians. Somehow my country has never succeeded in avoiding evil.

I'm not trying to belittle other incidents. All human deaths are scary and sad. I am scared and sad when hearing about the Charlie Hebdo incident. But it's hardly an isolated case. It seems to happen all the time, and people should be more aware---maybe then, there is a chance of some change in the world for the better.

And a small digression: I remember that PG, in a heavily technical essay that I really liked, mentioned something rather political about Yugoslavia and freedom for people's homelands. Such a political sentiment felt really out of place, so I wrote to him about it---I never got a reply, but that's completely understandable and beside my point here.

[1]: [http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAR304A.html](http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAR304A.html)

[2]: [http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/nato/Natbm200-01.htm](http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/nato/Natbm200-01.htm)

[3]: [http://emperors-clothes.com/misc/nota.htm](http://emperors- clothes.com/misc/nota.htm)

</comment><comment><USER4> One side says terrorist, the other side says freedom fighter. This distinction has existed since the beginning of time depending on which side you've stood on.

</comment><comment><USER5> It is absurd for Chomsky to compare botched NATO bombings to the intentional slaughter of civilians for blasphemy. He's been making this same argument for decades. The recent atrocities in France are just another opportunity for him to espouse it. Sam Harris addressed Chomsky's points in a section of _The End of Faith_ called _Perfect Weapons and the Ethics of "Collateral Damage"_[1]. The difference in morals can be made obvious by asking: What would each side do if they had the power to do whatever they wanted?:

 _What we euphemistically describe as "collateral damage" in times of war is the direct result of limitations in the power and precision of our technology. To see that this is so, we need only imagine how any of our recent conflicts would have looked if we had possessed perfect weapons – weapons that allowed us either to temporarily impair or to kill a particular person, or group, at any distance, without harming others or their property. What would we do with such technology? ... A moment's thought reveals that a person's use of such a weapon would offer a perfect window onto the soul of his ethics._

 _Consider the all too facile comparisons that have recently been made between George Bush and Saddam Hussein (or Osama bin Laden, or Hitler, etc.) – in the pages of writers like [Arundhati] Roy and [Noam] Chomsky, in the Arab press, and in classrooms throughout the free world. How would George Bush have prosecuted the recent war in Iraq with perfect weapons? Would he have targeted the thousands of Iraqi civilians who were maimed or killed by our bombs? Would he have put out the eyes of little girls or torn the arms from their mothers? Whether or not you admire the man's politics – or the man – there is no reason to think that he would have sanctioned the injury or death of even a single innocent person. What would Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do with perfect weapons? What would Hitler have done? They would have used them rather differently._

Another way to see the difference in ethics is to ask what would happen if the roles were reversed:

 _Consider the recent conflict in Iraq: If the situation had been reversed, what are the chances that the Iraqi Republican Guard, attempting to execute a regime change on the Potomac, would have taken the same degree of care to minimize civilian casualties? What are the chances that Iraqi forces would have been deterred by our use of human shields? (What are the chances we would have used human shields?) What are the chances that a routed American government would have called for its citizens to volunteer to be suicide bombers? What are the chances that Iraqi soldiers would have wept upon killing a carload of American civilians at a checkpoint unnecessarily? You should have, in the ledger of your imagination, a mounting column of zeros._

 _Nothing in Chomsky's account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this "terrorism"), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this "collateral damage"). In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or states, could hardly be more distinct. Chomsky might object that to knowingly place the life of a child in jeopardy is unacceptable in any case, but clearly this is not a principle we can follow. The makers of roller coasters know, for instance, that despite rigorous safety precautions, sometime, somewhere, a child will be killed by one of their contraptions. Makers of automobiles know this as well. So do makers of hockey sticks, baseball bats, plastic bags, swimming pools, chain-link fences, or nearly anything else that could conceivably contribute to the death of a child. There is a reason we do not refer to the inevitable deaths of children on our ski slopes as "skiing atrocities." But you would not know this from reading Chomsky. For him, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all._

The only reason the Charlie Hebdo attackers didn't kill more innocent people is because they lacked the ability to do so. The only reason NATO forces kill innocents is because soldiers make mistakes or occasionally go crazy.

1\. [http://books.google.com/books?id=V1NXG1ob- WcC&pg=PA142&lpg=P...](http://books.google.com/books?id=V1NXG1ob- WcC&pg=PA142&lpg=PA142#v=onepage&q&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER6> couldn't agree more</comment>


Sergey Brin's Search for a Parkinson's Cure (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2010/06/ff_sergeys_search/ <comment><USER2> Science can devise solutions to problems like Parkinson's, eventually. The article discusses a few items in the current search-- a good start.

If you want better results than an amorphous "someday", you're not gonna get it with our society's current level of engagement with science. Science isn't lucrative, and the public doesn't care about anything other than the usually overstated "breakthrough" headlines.

You want diseases to be cured? Make science a priority rather than something extraneous. Get the children and the public excited about science again, then try to steal smart and qualified people from other disciplines with outstanding benefits and hard problems. Make sure there's enough patience and funding (in that order!) to really delve into things.

<comment><USER3> The work of Dr Bredesen deserves more than some negative rumbling. Dr Bredesen comes with a treatment that has a solid basis: do everything possible that is anti-inflammatory. And he reversed (that is the technical term for 'cured') severe memory loss and the patients that were unable to work, were able again to work after a few months of treatment. That is most certainly a breakthrough since before the work of Dr Bredesen there were only medicines that could slow down the disease.

<comment><USER2> As a scientist I'm interested in his results, but highly skeptical. Let's see someone else replicate them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Genetically I have a 50% chance of getting Parkinsons. My father was diagnosed earlier this year, and 2 of his 4 siblings already have it. There's a medical study being done on our family to try and identify the gene responsible, but we already know my cousins and I have a 50% chance. I'm not sure I'd even want to know whether it's 100% if they were able to do the tests. Not until there's a possible cure for it. Knowing won't change anything if I can't do anything about it. I guess I'm still in denial, trying to just ignore it away for now.

I just hope there's a cure by the time my children (6 and 3 now) get to my age, otherwise I'll advise them to think hard about having children and passing on the gene.

<comment><USER5> Please don't take this the wrong way, I'm in a similar situation, did you have kids hoping that there would be a cure by now? Or were you not aware of the 50% chance when you had them?

<comment><USER6> The average age for Parkinson symptoms is 60 years old. In the year 2070 I would hope we will have an effective treatment.

<comment><USER7> Also, 60 years of life is well worth it.

<comment><USER6> You can easily live 10 or 20 years after you get it. I think Michael J Fox and Andy Grove have had it for almost 20 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> To Sergey Brin and all others that fear for Parkinson: only if you forget what others told you and look at the work of Dr Dale Bredesen, you can open your eyes for new ways to cure brain diseases.

In a recent presentation, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzCXyjy3BRo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzCXyjy3BRo) Dr Perlmutter and Dr Bredesen talk about a real cure for Alzheimer and hint that they think that they can do the same for Parkinson.

More info at [http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n9/full/100690.html](http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n9/full/100690.html) (9 out of 10 patients cured!) and [http://www.drperlmutter.com/learn/studies/](http://www.drperlmutter.com/learn/studies/)

<comment><USER8> "Nine of the 10 displayed subjective or objective improvement in cognition beginning within 3-6 months, with the one failure being a patient with very late stage AD."

The way this sentence (from the abstract) hedges by including "subjective OR objective" hardly makes this sound like a "real cure". As the summary notes, "These anecdotal results suggest the need for a controlled clinical trial of the therapeutic program."

<comment><USER3> Notwithstanding the cautious phrasing of the author, 9 of 10 patients had such huge improvements, from not being able to work and forgetting everything, to the opposite, that I take the liberty of calling that a 'cure'.

<comment><USER8> A sample size of 10 is hardly something to base any meaningful conclusions on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great article, in my opinion it sums up the immense possibilities of data usage in modern research. Coming from a health science background I quite often get frustrated from how long it takes for a scientific paper to go from hypothesis to publication. I believe that the use of our immense computational power to process through large amounts of data will continue changing the traditional approach to research. Once we figure out how to reliably tackle the inevitable bias of these data sets traditional data collection will become a topic in statistics history.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thank you for posting this. I don't have any personal connection to Sergey. But I'd be damn heartbroken to see such a titan of our time be captured by this miserable, disgusting disease.

<comment><USER6> Andy Grove and Michael J Fox suffer from Parkinson's. I've donated here before:

[https://www.michaeljfox.org](https://www.michaeljfox.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Methylene blue had some good research behind it. It's not the high tech cutting edge billion dollar drug made possible by big data and artificial intlligence that everyone is dreaming of, so it will probably be ignored no matter how much academic research piles up on it.

It also has the intolerable side effect of making one's pee blue.

<comment><USER12> _It also has the intolerable side effect of making one 's pee blue._

Doesn't seem that intolerable to me, as far as negatives go.</comment></comment>


Datamining a Flat in Munich (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://funnybretzel.svbtle.com/datamining-a-flat-in-munich <comment><USER2> Show HN: I made a very basic piece of programming that didn't help me at all.

:p</comment>