Cost-benefit analyses of lockdowns are hard because on one side you have a bunch of reasonably well-defined positives: preventing deaths, and on the other you have a long tail of weird second-order long-term effects like children learning loss, calcification of social relationships because of masks, politicians getting used to exerting this sort of power over the daily lives of normal people, small business closures and all the second-order effects from that, increased videogame addiction, the dramatic increase of Tinder usage instead of face-to-face flirting, increased depression and suicides, that one study that showed babies born during the pandemic had lost 2 standard deviations of cognitive development compared to babies born earlier (babies are likely more resilient than we think and this loss will be temporary, but still). We’ve had pandemics and old people dying before, so the overall impacts can be better estimated than the impacts of the lockdowns and measures we’ve taken in the past 2 years, I think people have drastically underestimated the very long-term and far-reaching effects of these restrictions.
that one study that showed babies born during the pandemic had lost 2 standard deviations of cognitive development compared to babies born earlier
Whoa, that effect size is huge. Too big for me to believe it without more evidence. Seems more likely to be a confounding factor. The discussion section of that paper is pretty good, listing a bunch of hypothesis of what the reason could be, but not finding any obviously good ones.
One thing that stands out to me:
One aspect also not investigated here is the impact of mask-wearing by the study staff during child visits and assessments [53]. The inability of infants to see full facial expressions may have eliminated non-verbal cues, muffled instructions, or otherwise altered the understanding of the test questions and instructions.
This seems like it could be a big confounder. (Though it only makes sense if it has a differentially larger effect on younger children, since the cognitive loss supposedly applies to babies born during the pandemic rather than babies tested during the pandemic.)
babies are likely more resilient than we think and this loss will be temporary
What makes you think so? My prior is that ‘babies are more resilient than we think’ is a fashionable idea because the opposite would be tantamount to blaming parents, especially poor ones, and that’s unfashionable. I’m interested in learning more about the topic.
Here’s a study where they try to predict adult IQ from infant IQ, the correlation is something like 0.32, so about 10% of the variance of adult IQ is explainable by infant IQ, meaning that low-IQ babies can in fact end up with large IQs as adults, which would either indicate that infant cognitive development measures are pretty bad for predicting adult IQ or that it doesn’t matter that much what you do to a baby in the first years of life. There’s also the existence of periods of historical deprivation where babies have been subjected to much worse conditions than during lockdowns, and they didn’t all end up as village idiots like you’d expect from a 2 standard deviation drop. But still, even if most of the effect is going to disappear, something like a 5 point drop in IQ would be a catastrophe, let alone a 30 point one.
Please note that “infant IQ” is a very non-standard use; the article says “ability to process information” instead.
Before three years, things are so difficult to measure that even mental retardation is not diagnosed at that age. I am not surprised by the correlation being low; but from my perspective it simply means “if you try to measure a baby’s mental life, you will get a lot of noise”.
infant cognitive development measures are pretty bad for predicting adult IQ
They are probably also pretty bad for predicting IQ at the age of five years.
(I don’t have evidence for this that I could link; it’s just my understanding of how things work.)
One of the reasons is that in people 3 and more years old, we can distinguish between someone being generally smart/slow vs someone having a specific talent/disorder (e.g. “a genius kid with dyslexia”); but a baby does not have a sufficiently wide range of specialized activities to diagnose this.
Cost-benefit analyses of lockdowns are hard because on one side you have a bunch of reasonably well-defined positives: preventing deaths, and on the other you have a long tail of weird second-order long-term effects like children learning loss, calcification of social relationships because of masks, politicians getting used to exerting this sort of power over the daily lives of normal people, small business closures and all the second-order effects from that, increased videogame addiction, the dramatic increase of Tinder usage instead of face-to-face flirting, increased depression and suicides, that one study that showed babies born during the pandemic had lost 2 standard deviations of cognitive development compared to babies born earlier (babies are likely more resilient than we think and this loss will be temporary, but still). We’ve had pandemics and old people dying before, so the overall impacts can be better estimated than the impacts of the lockdowns and measures we’ve taken in the past 2 years, I think people have drastically underestimated the very long-term and far-reaching effects of these restrictions.
Whoa, that effect size is huge. Too big for me to believe it without more evidence. Seems more likely to be a confounding factor. The discussion section of that paper is pretty good, listing a bunch of hypothesis of what the reason could be, but not finding any obviously good ones.
One thing that stands out to me:
This seems like it could be a big confounder. (Though it only makes sense if it has a differentially larger effect on younger children, since the cognitive loss supposedly applies to babies born during the pandemic rather than babies tested during the pandemic.)
What makes you think so? My prior is that ‘babies are more resilient than we think’ is a fashionable idea because the opposite would be tantamount to blaming parents, especially poor ones, and that’s unfashionable. I’m interested in learning more about the topic.
Here’s a study where they try to predict adult IQ from infant IQ, the correlation is something like 0.32, so about 10% of the variance of adult IQ is explainable by infant IQ, meaning that low-IQ babies can in fact end up with large IQs as adults, which would either indicate that infant cognitive development measures are pretty bad for predicting adult IQ or that it doesn’t matter that much what you do to a baby in the first years of life. There’s also the existence of periods of historical deprivation where babies have been subjected to much worse conditions than during lockdowns, and they didn’t all end up as village idiots like you’d expect from a 2 standard deviation drop. But still, even if most of the effect is going to disappear, something like a 5 point drop in IQ would be a catastrophe, let alone a 30 point one.
Please note that “infant IQ” is a very non-standard use; the article says “ability to process information” instead.
Before three years, things are so difficult to measure that even mental retardation is not diagnosed at that age. I am not surprised by the correlation being low; but from my perspective it simply means “if you try to measure a baby’s mental life, you will get a lot of noise”.
They are probably also pretty bad for predicting IQ at the age of five years.
(I don’t have evidence for this that I could link; it’s just my understanding of how things work.)
One of the reasons is that in people 3 and more years old, we can distinguish between someone being generally smart/slow vs someone having a specific talent/disorder (e.g. “a genius kid with dyslexia”); but a baby does not have a sufficiently wide range of specialized activities to diagnose this.