Comment by dwohnitmok
5 years ago
The article seems fairly problematic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/b0so4h/how_...
EDIT: Well this is proving to be a pretty wild ride. As far as I can tell both this post and its replies (by TheAdamAndChe and ebg13) are getting voted down, which is very surprising to me (I would've expected either/or not both).
That leads me to believe there's something wrong with my link.
Does HN know something about my link that I don't?
No offense, but "problematic" is a weasel word[1]. Based on your link, a better way to describe it is inaccurate or misleading. The link describes how intuit used to spank their children in the past, and how the studies the post is based off of were poorly designed.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/weasel%20word
Any discussion of parenting and Native peoples needs to include the context of the Indian Residential Schools. The state (Canada and the US) would force Native children to attend boarding schools with restricted parental visitation rights (legally compulsory in Canada 1894-1948, and de-facto compulsory for the 20 years before and after). The schools would punish the children for 'acting Native' (wearing traditional clothing, not speaking english, etc). It was a program of forced cultural assimilation (sometimes called 'cultural genocide') which was supported by saying that Native parents were bad influences on their children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
Any attempt to remove Native children from their parents needs to acknowledge the use of children by the government to attempt to wipe out Native culture. Around a quarter of Native children were removed from their homes in the US by child protective services and permanently placed in non-Native homes. This was such an issue that the Indian Child Welfare act requires that Native tribes and Native family have the first opportunity to claim custodianship over Native children removed from the home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Child_Welfare_Act
So for the comment you link to, I have the following objections:
- Native people were raised in government schools (until 1970) which used corporal punishment regularly. They're criticizing parenting styles which the government taught parents as kids.
- Canada and the US have a long history of removing lots of kids from Native parents. Of course Native leaders are going to care about CPS rules
- The SSC guy is completely ignoring how shitty White Canadians have treated Native people when he compares abuse rates between Inuit and "Western" (White) populations. This reeks of a long history of calling Native people "savage".
Hmmmmm now we're getting somewhere if this is the heart of the objections.
However, this seems like it's covered by
> Also, the Inuit have changed a lot recently as they get influenced by European culture (but NPR did their interview with Inuit this year, who talk as if they're describing the present).
Granted I'm sure you'd find this far too lenient in terms of phrasing, something more like "Traditional Inuit culture was both destroyed by what was effectively Western cultural and actual imperialism and retroactively viewed and criticized through a warped Western lens."
But the basic essence of that is still addressed by Scott's comment. It may not be the way things used to be, and it may not be the "fault" of the Inuits at all, nor may it even be the right perspective to view Inuit culture.
Nonetheless the empirical observations made in this article seem to be in direct opposition to multiple other sources of data we have. That seems bad. More specifically it suggests the article is suffering greatly from selection bias and its conclusions are therefore suspect.
> Nonetheless the empirical observations made in this article seem to be in direct opposition to multiple other sources of data we have. That seems bad. More specifically it suggests the article is suffering greatly from selection bias and its conclusions are therefore suspect.
Yes, the article is overly broad if you take it to mean 'all Inuit', but I don't think that's a reasonable reading of the article. This is a 'feel-good' story talking about ideals of child raising in an Inuit town. Scott objects to this narrative, so he collects negative evidence to debunk the article. He isn't picking neutral counter-evidence, he is exclusively saying that Inuit abuse their kids and each other:
- "protesting Canada's anti-child-abuse policy": this cannot be discussed without the context of history mass child-separation by the Government.
- Interviews of "how things were in the traditional old days.": This book interviewed elders in 2000, which means they grew up in the Residential School era. The white culture approved of corporal punishment at the time, and the residential schools used most corporal punishment than average. Scott is focusing just on the existence of spanking, and is ignoring the ideals the interviewees express.
> Ilisapi: Some of us tended to take out our frustration on our children when it was our husband who we were angry at. Even if the child had done nothing wrong, if he made one small mistake, we took out our frustration on him. If children were treated like that, they could be damaged. It was their spouse they were angry at in the first place but they took their frustration out on their child. That is not the way to treat a child. It is not good.
...
> Tipuula: Yes. When they are finished crying and are feeling better, that is a good time to talk to them. You need to explain the situation. Let them know you do not like spanking them but what they did required discipline. Once they understand that, they will feel closer to the mother or the father. Things are completely different today. We only reprimand our children verbally because we are not allowed to use physical discipline with our children anymore.
- "(some of these are adult abuse statistics rather than child abuse statistics, but if adult Inuit never get angry or act impulsively, why are they doing all this abusing?)": This is straight-up character assassination. This is the point which I most object to, not because the abuse statistics are wrong, but because it is being used to discredit the ideals of a community.
For anyone interested in Native American / Canadian issues, I can't recommend Kent Nerburn's "Neither Wolf nor Dog" series [1][2][3] highly enough.
The second and third books deal more directly with the boarding schools, but all three are fantastic in terms of giving a perspective that is usually left out when it comes to Native issues.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/72662.Neither_Wolf_Nor_D...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6532022-the-wolf-at-twil...
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17707906-the-girl-who-sa...
If people find this link valuable can somebody please just rephrase this comment however it's meant to be phrased and repost it so that it doesn't getting buried due to my poor wording?
It's surreal to me to see a bunch of sibling comments higher up arguing over its conclusions when the article's premise is in serious question.
I think your downvotes are entirely because you used the word “problematic” which some people feel is often used to shut down debate.
A shame, because your link pretty convincingly shows that the article’s claims about the Inuit are simply false.
dwohnitmok in response to your edit, I agree this is the issue. Your link was fantastic and adds to the conversation.
But you're getting voted down too! (Maybe not anymore?) And ebg13 is getting absolutely destroyed.
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Please don't go on about downvotes like that. It's tediously meta and breaks the site rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
My apologies, all the more so because this is something I dislike in comments myself.
I was genuinely surprised by this though in a way I haven't been by previous downvotes. "Everyone" so to speak were getting down votes and the only common factor I could find was the link itself, which as far as I could tell was entirely unproblematic unless it was referencing some studies which were widely acknowledged to be bad scholarship.
Regardless I'll take the humbling reminder to read the guidelines and my own comments more closely.
Appreciated! I know it sucks to get a mod reply like that.
"Problematic" is a kind word for cherry-picked, misinterpreted, hypergeneralized, and contrary to available evidence with a hefty dose of noble savage xenoromanticism thrown in.
I’m always amazed at how English speakers took some loanwords from French, then derive their meanings up to the point they became offensive (examples: problematic, oriental). The issue is that for non-English native speakers those overloads are easy to miss (and usually absent from dictionaries), and a post can be made pretty trollish accidentally.
I don't consider it offensive. I consider it vague and euphemistic.
It happens with all non-specific language. The word "problematic" is vague; it doesn't say anything about what the problems are, just that someone thinks something is wrong somehow. The only thing the reader can do given vague words is guess at what the writer meant.
Then _that_ phenomenon collides with idiomatic euphemism. Vague words become euphemisms exactly because of how vague and weak they are, weakness being basically the entire purpose of a euphemism.
IMO the first thing that people should be taught in school about writing (assuming schools bother teaching anything about writing) is that writers should always use the most concrete, specific, unambiguous words possible. But we don't learn that, so the world doesn't communicate that way, and so the world falls apart.
It is noa names, like eg. bear or how characters in HP speak about Voldemort. An old superstitious concept.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa-name
We have so much french in this language. Ever wonder why it's called a "vending machine"? Look up the french verb for "to sell"
It's everywhere. English usually has a competing french and German derived word for each experience.
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That is indeed a problematic point, for non native speakers.