Here begins a story. Because the lady is right. Specifically, I tried it earlier this evening. I Googled the phrase "face time important for infants" and the top result was a link to an article on the website of the American Academy of Pediatrics saying that very thing. But if you followed the link, the article itself was no longer there. As of this moment if you Google the phrase the only result will be the tweet I just linked.
Now if you're just looking for articles in general on whether it's important for small children to see faces, you can find them, including a few from the COVID era. So the material is out there. But should I put an ominous "for now" at the end of that statement? In any case, at least one source is not contradicting its findings but simply disappearing them now that they're politically inconvenient.
Trust The Science? The Science is slinking down the road with your grandmother's fine silverware clinking in its pockets.
2 comments:
Both of us tried various combinations of the phrase that used to lead to the pdf about the necessity of infants seeing faces on AAP. It isn't there. Of course it's good you can still find that information quite easily but having such an important institution pretend there was never such a document in the first place is more than a little worrying. In point of fact it's actually malign.
Although the subject of masking children or masking the faces of those who look after children is horrible enough this isn't the only example of common understandings having been revised for convenience in recent times. For years the WHO publicly defined herd immunity as that which happens when a sufficient number of people have been exposed to an illness that the population at large is immune. Then last autumn they changed their definition to say herd immunity could only be achieved through the use of vaccines. The sudden change was so controversial they modified their rationale to include both, stating that they preferred vaccination as a method of reaching general population immunity (and we know just which illness they're referring to, don't we?).
One thing I found disturbing right away in regard to digital media is just how easy it is to change portions of text depending on the the mood (or politics, fad, fashion, ignorance, or misunderstanding) of the person doing the editing. You're right about adding that ominous 'for now' qualifier to your declaration about how long articles about the importance of particular issues will be freely available. However, there's not much they can do about old Dr. Spock books, other tham the Ray Bradbury solution.
Your conclusion is unbeatable: The Science is slinking down the road with your grandmother's fine silverware clinking in its pockets.
I've tried the "Wayback Machine" at web.archive.org as well. That's a service that makes snapshots of webpages for future reference even if they get taken down or changed in the future. But someone would have had to save that particular page for it to be available. No version of the homepage will allow you to find it. Don't remember the exact URL, so I don't know if anyone did save it. If you have to act on the assumption that an alleged public interest website is going to memory-hole its content then things have gone very far in the wrong direction. Although maybe in this case we never should have assumed the "public interest" part.
I do remember the controversy over the "herd immunity" definition change, of course. All along they seemed to have a lot of support from the chattering classes in re: the changes. Which is to say that a great number of people appeared to believe--and still believe--that COVID has changed the nature of human biology. And maybe the fabric of reality.
Whom to trust, now? That's the question. Obviously the news media has been superficial and distorted forever, but usually you could at least find unbiased reference sources for the basic facts. But they can be coopted and corrupted with lightning speed as well. The continued existence of solid books matters more than most of us ever thought it did.
I'm glad you liked that line. It also occurs to me that the scientific establishment is more like the Church that imprisoned Galileo than it is like Galileo himself.
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