[speaking for myself, not for any organization]
If this is an allegory against appeals to consequences generally, well and good.
If there's some actual question about whether wrong cost effectiveness numbers are being promoted, could people please talk about those numbers specifically so we can all have a try at working out if that's really going on? E.g. this post made a similar claim to what's implied in this allegory, but it was helpful that it used concrete examples so people could work out whether they agreed (and, in that case, identify factual errors).
I note that one of Davis' categories was friends from competitive gaming - I'd guess there are a lot of nerdy, introverted types there. Some other activities that come to my mind as having a lot of people from that demographic: various other kinds of games (video/computer games, go, chess, pen-and-paper roleplaying games), juggling, historical reenactment, Wikipedia editing, fiber arts (spinning, dyeing, knitting, etc).
"Sites were randomly assigned to receive an experimental intervention (n = 16) modeled on the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative of the World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund, which emphasizes health care worker assistance with initiating and maintaining breastfeeding and lactation and postnatal breastfeeding support, or a control intervention (n = 15) of continuing usual infant feeding practices and policies."
You can certainly buy plant-based formula, but most of the typical formulas you'll find on Amazon or at a US grocery store are based on cow's milk.
Formula is typically based on cow's milk. Human milk has higher sugar (lactose) content than cow's milk. The nutrition for building baby cows and baby humans is different enough that infants shouldn't just be fed a balance of nutrients that works for other mammals. Some cultures use this or other mixtures like sugar water out of necessity, but it's not a good idea if you can avoid it. Around one year, once the child is eating other foods, is when they start recommending adding cow's milk.
I'm not talking about blinding, I'm just talking about randomizing. That's right, in areas with obvious confounders like class, baby health, and maternal stress level, and relatively small differences in outcomes between the groups anyway, I don't think correlational data is worth much.
Having parented a difficult-to-feed baby and having tried everything I could think of to get calories into her, I'm quite sure that even parents who start out willing to follow a given recommendation quickly change their mind if things don't seem to be going well. (If not, you're selecting for parents who are willing to prioritize following instructions over their baby's health, which certainly gets you a different population than is typical.)
But population-level differences in populations that were encouraged to breastfeed vs. not encouraged to breastfeed, as in the Belarusian study, should circumvent that.
I was really glad you wrote this. I'm also confused about what 1-year-olds should drink: https://thewholesky.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/what-should-toddlers-drink/
I'm confused - the Belarusian study Ozy is talking about wasn't a sibling study, right?
I never have a productive six-hour unbroken stretch of work, but my partner will occasionally have 6-hour bursts of very productive coding where he stays in the zone and doesn't notice time passing. He basically looks up and realizes it's night and everyone else had dinner hours ago. But the rest of the time he works normal hours with a more standard-to-loose level of concentration.