Which of these interventions will I rate highest on v2 of Biodeterminist's Guide To Parenting?
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Ṁ8500resolved Apr 20
100%23%
Supplement with choline
0.2%Other
20%
Use an air filter
8%
Activated alumina water filter
6%
Supplement with Vitamin D
3%
Supplement with nicotinamide mononucleotide (for fathers)
3%
Avoid touching receipt paper
23%
Eat plenty of oily fish
1.3%
Use abdominal decompression device
10%
Natural vs. Caesarian birth
1.7%
Supplement lutein and zeaxanthin
0.2%
Avoiding heavy impact or injury to the lower abdominal area
0.2%
Avoid highly transformed food (raw/cooked/frozen things are fine, highly transformed food like sugary drinks, chocolate, ice cream, frozen dinners, muffins, sausages are likely bad, though maybe for example fermented foods are OK)
0.2%
Do not drink anything with sugar in it or at least try to limit sugary drinks
I am working on an updated version of Biodeterminist's Guide To Parenting, which I will post sometime in the next few months.
Below, I've listed some interventions I'm considering. Right now, one of these seems most promising (if that changes, I'll figure something out). Your job is to guess which one that will be.
I can't prevent other people from adding new options, but keep in mind I will not be evaluating them and they have no chance of winning.
This question is managed and resolved by Manifold.
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Just spent most of the rest of my fake money betting against air filters. (Quite annoying that I have to do it by buying all the other options, by the way; there should be a shortcut provided for this.) Scott specifically said he's relying on the literature, and the literature for air filters looks mediocre at best.
By the way, as for fish oil tablets, they don't exactly "fail". Here is a meta-analysis of 21 randomized controlled trials (in contrast, there's only 1 RCT for air filters, which was negative):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3109/14767058.2015.1072163?casa_token=tU7CG0KB-ZkAAAAA:6i56IfMrHRlIAsPwp_DOI68OYTALM03qlvW4_qh-80KuomiHxTAwhb83HHZi-CMNoPNEXi_vwTqT
"Twenty-one studies comprising 10 802 pregnant women were included. Dietary fish oil was associated with a 5.8-day increase in gestational age of the newborn, a 22% reduced risk for early preterm delivery (risk ratio [RR] = 0.78, 95% CI: 0.64–0.95, p = 0.01) and a 10% reduction in preterm delivery (RR = 0.90, 95% CI 0.81–1.00, p = 0.05). Fish oil supplementation was associated with higher infantile birth weight (51.23 g), birth length (0.28 cm) and head circumference (0.09 cm), and a 23% lower risk of low birth weight. "
Now, these p-values aren't that great and I didn't read the underlying studies; I also don't see a funnel graph checking for publication bias. Perhaps there are also competing meta-analyses, I didn't check that carefully. But this is not exactly failing, not obviously anyway.
The evidence is pretty overwhelming that air pollution is bad for human health (although I don’t know about IQ, unless you count lead, but my understanding is that air filters don’t help with lead much), and air filters remove a lot of pollution. Simple. Most of the other interventions are dietary supplements, which in aggregate have a terrible track record (that doesn’t exclude the possibility that there’s *some* dietary supplement that will help a lot, but the prior is low). Oily fish has the mercury problem (although maybe Scott will get out of that by saying it is possible to avoid fish with non-trivial amounts of mercury), and the failure of fish oil tablets favors a confounding explanation of the observational data. Receipt paper and water filters are probably a good idea based on the same principle as air filters. I suspect the effect sizes would be smaller for receipts and water filters, but I don’t know much about them so I didn’t bet on them partly due to ignorance.
(Buying 1 so I can comment).
I don't understand why people keep buying this option (it's currently at nearly 50%). Is it that the market knows a lot more than me, or a lot less?
To clarify: to my knowledge, there was only ever a single randomized controlled trial of air purifiers during pregnancy. It took place in Ulaanbaatar, a heavily polluted city. It was not blinded. It also failed to find any significant results on its primary outcome (birthweight), and a secondary analysis when the kids were 4 years old concluded "We found no benefit of reducing indoor particulate air pollution during pregnancy on parent-reported behaviors in children." Sure, some secondary outcomes were just barely significant at p=0.05, but if that's Scott's threshold for a super-effective intervention, his top recommendation would be vitamin D (it's not going to be vitamin D).
I'm new to manifold. I don't know how much to trust the market in this situation; maybe you all have some inside info into Scott's likely choices, or maybe people are blindly going "air purifier good". My guess is this the latter, so I think I will just keep using all my fake manifold money to bet against air purification here.
I suppose if it does end up being air purification, I will be extremely impressed with manifold's markets. If it ends up being oily fish (the obvious baseline guess, but one that's been bet down to 33% at the time of this comment) I will be unimpressed; if it ends up being choline (for which I'm almost the only one buying right now, and which would be at like 3% without my intervention), I will be extremely unimpressed.
Check out my choline in pregnancy literature review here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/96vs5d/choline_supplementation_during_pregnancy/
Bottom line: it increases IQ in rats, but the data in humans is not very convincing at the moment. The since there is little risk, I would still advocate for supplementing with choline, but I don't know if Scott will put it first on his list.
I originally bought this because of https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29220711/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31743803/ but think it is overpriced now.
I know nothing about this field, but Ruth Grace (someone I trust a lot wrt evidence-based parenting) mentioned water filtering & VitD supplementation here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xocdNsa8At3bmQKm3/how-be-productive-before-your-baby-turns-one?commentId=34kfrN2BwmmZnPXMq