60k kids have avoided peanut allergies due to 2015 advice, study finds

Not to confuse things: There quite simply is a long list of things that can kill an infant and we get increasingly better evidence for what's on there and what is not. Avoiding death at all cost is ludicrous, but for a child born in the 1950s in high income countries the mortality rate was ~5%. 1 in 20 kids dead before the age of 5. For contrast, now it's closer to 1 in 300. That's not a coincidence but a lot of compounding things we understand better today.

Are there missteps? Certainly. Figuring out what is effective, what has bad secondary effects (fragility, allergies etc) and what is simply wrong is an ongoing effort and that's great, but less dying is a pretty nice baseline and progress on that front is inarguable.

I wish society at large could be on par with this nuanced and rational opinion. I miss when science was celebrated.

To be a bit morbid, one could also explain OPs observation that "people are more fragile" by the lower child mortality by the hypothesis that these more fragile people wouldn't have made it through infancy before.

I don't particularly believe this, but it fits Occam's razor, so it seems to deserve some examination.

Rational and science might be pretty far apart. Flying a key in a thunderstorm for example isn't the most rational decision. Neither scraping open your family's arms and applying cowpox pus.

Pretty irrational, but definitely celebrated.. eventually

> but it fits Occam's razor

How? You can use that to decide between two (or more) explanations, but you only presented one.

It’s not just save as many lives as possible at all costs, saving 20 kids but 2 will develop debilitating peanut allergies isn’t worth it. Progress must be done slowly ensuring no harm is done along the way.

Science failed here.

> I miss when science was celebrated.

One could argue that science being celebrated too much leads to this type of present-day outcome. Science can tell you how to do something, but not why, or even what we should do to begin with.

What on earth are you saying? It's better to kill 20 children than to risk that 2 of them develop peanut allergies? I don't see how this can even begin to be an arguable position to take. And that's ignoring the fact that it isn't even a correct assertion in this case.

Risky and irrational are different in my mind.

If the best available means to perform an experiment carries some risk, it could still be entirely rational to do it rather than forfeit the knowledge gained from the experiment.

So you avoid things like electricity and the internet, because they've caused children's deaths too?

That makes a huge amount of assumptions but also wouldn’t fit their experience. If it was this then it would add a few percent of the population being “more fragile” and I’d wager they see it as a broader trend.

It was implicit, at least to my eye, that other explanation which was being offered a counterpoint was the grandfather comment.

For clarity, I will include both here:

The two explanations for increased adult fragility are:

forgotoldacc> Parents shelter their children too much and have created adults that have additional allergies as a result of lack of childhood exposure

rocqua> Increased sheltering of children has allowed more of the fragile ones to survive to adulthood, increasing the number of fragile adults we observe today.

They’re not mutually exclusive options, we can save the 20 kids safely while having a mindset that values doing no harm.

Telling anxious parents to have their kids avoid peanuts caused harm that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I guess it’s valuable to better understand allergies, but learning at others’ expense isn’t worth it.

I’d prefer to live in a world where the same technology developed in such a way that they didn’t have to die, yes.

Large scale antibiotic production wasn't until the 40s in the US, maybe a while to spread to all other wealthy countries. Was that the main factor?

Intuitively, this does make a lot of sense, and it's easy to make an argument that if civilizational progress continues, in the far future people will in general have very weak bodies, simply because reliance on medical equipment won't be an evolutionary disadvantage.

Occam's razor is basically (paraphrased) "given two explanations where all else is equal, the one with the fewest added assumptions is most likely true." Based on that Occam's razor is already out the window because all else isn't equal.

Also this "more fragile people" argument assumes the "fragility" is both inherent and of a lifelong kind. This ignores that most causes of infant mortility are external, and that for many of those being exposed to them results in a lifelong increased mortality risk. Excessive hygiene leading to more allergies is a direct example of this.

I think most of the change in death rate is improved medicine (and maybe wealth too – plenty of people in the US in the 50s were very poor by modern standards) rather than parents knowing about many potentially harms. (Maybe I’m wrong? Happy to be corrected here)

This is the conclusion I lean towards, but anecdotally one of my grandparents knew something like 3 or 4 kids who died before the age of 15, all in preventable accidents. Disease got at least a few more. It’s possibly just a coincidence but hearing the stories of how inattentive people could be to their children back then, I’ve always suspected current helicopter parenting norms must have accounted for at least some of the decline.

There’s been a similar shift with people letting their dogs roam free. When I was a kid I remember hearing stories about a dog getting run over by a car every year. I rarely hear these stories anymore because people usually keep their dogs supervised or in a fenced yard. I don’t have any hard data, but I suspect there’s something to these cultural shifts.

Vaccinations and better antibiotics reduced death rates a lot, but in 1950 accidents were still 30% of the death rate for children, killing 5 times as many children than die today for all causes.

What’s this increase in fragile adults you’re talking about? Are you sure it’s a real thing? Are you aware how staggeringly high rates of institutionalisation were in most western countries in the early to mid 20th century? And then there were the adults who were considered ‘sickly’. Like, _fainting_ wasn’t considered dramatically abnormal behaviour until quite recently.

A lot of people who today would be considered to have a condition which is entirely treatable by doing (a), taking (b), not doing/avoiding (c), etc, would, a century ago, have just been kind of deemed broken. Coeliac disease is a particularly obvious example; it was known that there was _something_ wrong with coeliacs, but they were generally just filed under the 'sickly' label, lived badly and died young.

(And it generally just gets worse the further you go back; in many parts of the world vitamin deficiency diseases were just _normal_ til the 20th century, say).

Do you have a source for that?

> It’s not just save as many lives as possible at all costs, saving 20 kids but 2 will develop debilitating peanut allergies isn’t worth it.

Your math isn’t checking out here.

I clearly misspoke and people are misunderstanding my point, which is only that “hurting people is worth it” is a horrible argument and shouldn’t be a valuable thing, we can and should save the 20 kids without causing harm to the 2

doing nothing is better than something if that something might hurt people without understanding how and why

People are misunderstanding your point because you are doing a terrible job of explaining it.

The death rate for children aged 5-14 is is 14.7 per 100,000, i.e. 0.0147%. That's basically zero and five times that much is still basically zero. By comparison, the death rate for the 35-44 age group was 237.3 per 100,000.

Also, the most common type of accidental death is car accidents. So is even that difference from kids not getting to play outside anymore, or is it radial tires and crumple zones?

What specifically do you disagree with? I’ve explained it three different times now and can’t delete my original comment so please let me know

This research shows physicians harmed kids recommending they avoid allergens like peanuts, is that something we should ignore because all the benefits of science are “worth it”?

Science is amazing not because it’s always right, but because it (should) strive to always do better next time

All you're fucking doing is saying "Don't save a million people of 1 person is going to be harmed" OR the utterly trite point of "wouldn't it be great if everything was magical and no one was harmed by anything ever".

> for a child born in the 1950s in high income countries the mortality rate was ~5%. 1 in 20 kids dead before the age of 5.

Essentially all of this was infant mortality, i.e. kids who died before the age of 1, and that in turn was more related to things like sanitation and vaccines and pre-natal screening.

What you’re describing is called utilitarian ethics, the exact tradeoff is called the trolly problem. Ethics is much more complicated than a single comment thread

“it’s worth it” is a horrible argument when people’s health is on the line.

Quick look into it, in the 50s:

- Before the age of 1, top cause of death were defects (prematurity/immaturity, birth injuries) and congenital deformations.

- Age 1-4 it was accidents (e.g., drownings, burns, traffic) followed by influenza/pneumonia.

There seem to be some quite powerful forces acting in the opposite direction - social media maximising engagement by pushing divisive stuff and politicians trying to demonize the other team. Not quite sure what the answer is. I feel there should be some tech type solution. At least LLMs at the moment by taking in the whole internet seem fairly neutral although Musk seems to be trying to develop right wing versions.

Yeah, we should just round up all those peasants with peanut allergies and shoot them!

But if you got into an accident, wouldn't antibiotics help with the injury, surgery etc.? A bad burn could get infected etc. And possibly similar for some birth injuries and birth defects, and bacterial pneumonia for sure.

Rational/risky experiments are illegal currently.

For example take the famous mask debate. It could easily be solved by having volunteers willing to stand in a room with people with covid at various distance, each using randomized masks/no mask. There would be plenty of volunteers for such a study but there's no way it would be approved.

The FDA doesn't count lives lost due to inaction and slow approval of new drugs and treatments. As Munger always said "show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." By any rational calculus, that one Thalidomide win by the FDA has caused incalculable death, pain and suffering by pushing out the timeline on not only recently discovered cures but all those built on top.

Imagine for example the number of lives saved if GLP-1 was purchasable over the counter in the 1990s when it was first discovered.