This is a special post for quick takes by Sherrinford. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
It's funny that in the interview episode "Rob Wiblin on how he ended up the way he is" of the 80,000 hours podcast, Misha Saul says that parents don't have much of an influence on the development of their own children (biodeterminism), but at the same time the whole interview is about important, formative experiences.
I am not sure I exactly understand whst that says. Something like "parenting choices are only important if they are really bad"?
7Elizabeth
Not quite. The point is that the studies are mostly done on parents with pretty similar styles, so there isn't enough variation in parenting style to lead to detectable variation in outcomes. It's the equivalent of studying how water affects plant growth, but giving every plant in the range of 5% of what you think their ideal is, while varying other factors (light, nutrients, plant genetics) tremendously. Your results don't show that water doesn't matter for plants, they show that the impact of that small variation in water is lost amongst the noise.