This is the kind of shallow, uncharitable dismissal that we need less of on Hacker News. Obviously a popular news treatment isn't going to supply "data".
When it comes to the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth, you could hardly be more wrong, since apart from everything else they were champions of empirical observation.
Attachment theory within the early areas: lots of great science. Applying it to what feels like every aspect of human interaction and decision making: not so much. Attachment theory was hot in the 90s as well, with lots of not so great studies trying to show impact of attachment style on anything folks could come up with, and I see some of the same errors being repeated today.
That being said, where it applies, it's provides a nice explanation of interaction patterns in relationships.
Maybe a little less paywall nytimes on HN as well. I dunno, but I find a lot of their journalism is just 90% padding. I suspect we see a lot of distrust in media isn't just that they're inaccurate, but they're often filled with non experts trying to sound like experts by padding nonsense speculation into their articles.
I mean, is this the same Kate Murphy that wrote "10 richest U.S. presidents before Trump takes top spot" I'm not saying she's bright. She's probably smarter there most and I'd love for her to comment in on HN. But I don't think she should be writing articles titled "Yes it's your parents fault"
The standard here is to judge each article on its own merit, and this is a good piece, certainly above the median. The title is beyond stupid, but reporters don't write those. We changed it to a representative phrase from the text, as usual with baity titles.
To an outsider, this theory sounds like a really hard one to test. The hypothesis is that experiences in infancy condition adult behaviour, so someone would need to track a large cohort of people for decades. That kind of thing is rarely done.
And that is just the start. Once it's been shown that bad parents have permanently bad kids, how do you demonstrate causality? Maybe there is a bad people gene that they all have. Maybe the cause is the physical effects of stress during pregnancy. Or the effects of alcohol consumption: no doubt that correlates with the kind of parental behaviour that's being blamed. Sure, you can look at adoption, twins, etc. At that point, we're talking about a really impressive series of experiments, which deserve a bit more than, "it's been scientifically verified," even in a newspaper story.
I both agree and disagree with you. A popular news treatment doesn't have to have supplied all of the data. However, it is free to link or directly reference the data. And a large part of the problem in many reporting places is that the data wasn't actually there.
So, I agree we can't hold everyone to a super high standard of "show me the data!" However, I do think we should be moving further in that direction.
Anecdotally, in this field it is especially important. Parents get enough crap as it is. Most of it completely unsubstantiated. So, please, less of that crap. If there is advice that can help. Give it and the circumstances that it could help in. If there is a new line that people are investigating, discuss it. But don't over reach on what is capable. Present hypotheses as falsifiable assertions that people are researching. Not as assertions that are merely waiting to be validated.
