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I just saw "child safety guidelines" from a pediatrician visit which said not to allow your child out to play from 11AM to 3PM, because of the sun.
Didn't anti-sunlight safetyism peak years ago? Why has the advice continued to get crazier? Is this pediatrician a lone vampire groomer, or is the whole AMA like this?
It wouldn't make me so angry if the children in question weren't pasty obese maggots who desperately need sun and exercise. The doc made a choice to ask "so, are they being exposed to the evils of natural light? Oh, they sit inside and play Minecraft, eating Totino's™ Pizza Rolls™ all day? Good, good, check that health problem off the list. Now, are there any guns or motorcycles in the house? Because they can lead to dangers like going outside and doing things."
I'm not a parent, but everything I've seen of education and child-raising recently has been throwing up giant red flags. How are motte parents dealing with this stuff?
It's funny - I asked my optometrist relative if he had "noticed" anything, like no studies per se, but a gut feeling of something you've realized looking at dozens of eyes a day for years and years. He said he was almost certain that kids not spending enough time outside was linked to why more kids need glasses today. So I'm always trying to do the opposite, get my kids outside for reasonable increments depending on UV index, etc.
Recently some govt org here in Canada made the recommendation that kids be encouraged to participate in lightly risky activities, and that was always a thing I've tried to do. There are some things where I think - as long as the risk of this going bad doesn't result in long term damage, I'm fine with it. My wife stays at home which makes a lot of this much easier, because we know our kids and their limitations really well. It seems to work out well.
There's no shortage of studies on the subject, as a quick search of Google Scholar will show. There is even causal evidence from interventional studies showing that going outdoors reduces the prevalence and severity of myopia in schoolchildren.
This topic was of particular interest to the governments of Korea, Japan, and China a while back, as their rates of myopia are in the high 90% range; I believe it was their funded research that led to the development of interventions like peripheral defocus lenses, that would slow the progression of nearsightedness in children. Alas, about twenty years too late for me.
Huh, well there you go! He must have been somewhat familiar with the literature then
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I suppose it depends what part of the country and how much sunlight they get. A bad sunburn is no laughing matter, and some parents are idiots who will set small children out under direct sun without any sun cream etc.
I managed to get myself very badly sunburned, in my twenties, sitting out on an Irish beach under an overcast sky because I assumed that if the sun wasn't directly shining, I was okay. I was wrong.
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Sure, the sun is going to harm the kid's skin, and so what? Maximizing life expectancy at all costs does not lead to better outcomes. At some point you are getting very small % of reduction of risk for much bigger sacrifices.
For example this article https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/07/black-men-live-longer-inside-prison-out/352939/ claims (but now that I googled it I found also opposite claim) that black men live longer in prison than out, but obviously it isn't a good trade off to imprison people to increase their life expectancy.
In this case there is also the risk arising from less activity, and more obese and less social life. Exercise also has mental health benefits. Ironically, maximizing a safetyism of passivity and staying home, is more unsafe than a more active life which does expose people to various risks, but might decrease to an extend their stress, obesity levels, and make them less likely to be diabetic, suffert from heart diseases. It might also increase likelihood of more successful romantic life, which is good for the individual and good for society due both improvements of collective good, and raising birth rates.
Recommending more use of sunscreen would be a good idea though, including for adults who drive a lot and expose one side of their face to the sun. Not just to improve life expectancy but more to protect the skin from looking really old. Especially for one part of their face.
Doctors should promote behavior changes, and medicine but ones that are good trade offs. There are many.
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Is the guidance the same for all children? If so, it's unironic, literal white supremacy.
It's easy to forget how much closer to the equator the United States is than Europe. White people did not evolve to tolerate the Summer Texas sun.
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As always, a kernel of truth grows into a turd of idiocy.
Motte: Wearing SPF30 sunscreen is probably among the cheaper interventions in terms of cost/inconvenience compared to QOL saved. Even if you can't do it 100% of the time, do it 90% of the time since the damage is additive.
Bailey: Avoid the sun, wear a thick knit sweater, reapply sunscreen hourly.
This is harmful advice. Skin cancer kills almost no one. If I recall correctly skin cancers only lower U.S. life expectancy by a few days.
On the other hand, people who get more sun live years longer.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heres-something-unexpected-sunbathers-live-longer-201606069738
Supplement with Vitamin D you say? Not so easy: https://www.outsideonline.com/health/wellness/sunscreen-sun-exposure-skin-cancer-science/
Sunlight is good for you. Go get some. Personally, I use sunscreen on my face because I don't want to look old. I compensate by sunbathing the rest of my body.
AHEM.
And this is Ireland, not noted for "long hot sunny days year-round".
So basically 100 people in a country of 5m? 1 out of 50k isn’t that worrying. Moreover Irish are probably most susceptible to it.
Dying from something easily preventable is also a stupid way to go.
Why not advise kids to smoke tobacco, too? They probably won't get lung cancer, and the benefits of nicotine are that they won't get fat and will have better focus!
I had a close relative who died of lung cancer from smoking, so "only a few people relative to the entire population are gonna die" isn't a good sell to me. It's a fucking miserable, humiliating, degrading, painful, awful, horrible way to die and I can't think dying of skin cancer is any better.
You are now switching the argument. Is sunscreen stupid? No. Is dying from skin cancer common? No.
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Depends on whether the cost of that prevention would have been too high. It's easy to prevent death via recreational mountaineering -- don't do it -- but I think you'll find that to be a rather unpopular position among mountaineering enthusiasts. Similarly, it may be easy to stay inside when the sun is out, but the cost of doing so is high regardless.
It's a reasonable question to ask, but I think if you added up the pluses and minuses you'd find smoking is a negative on balance. Not just lung cancer but COPD and a host of other diseases which debilitate as well as kill, plus stinking like smoke and having cravings for cigarettes.
But maybe I'm wrong; my mother was a lifelong unrepentant smoker, though it did kill her in the end.
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Yes, getting more sun is good. Sunscreen allows you to get more sun exposure without getting burned or increasing your risk of melanoma.
You're attacking the bailey, not the motte.
The bailey is what needs to be attacked. The motte is generally defend-able position that may or may not have some merit, but is worthy of consideration. It's use in protecting the bailey is the problem.
I think in the context of a discussion where the other side explicitly said "here is the kernel of truth and the rest of a turd of nonsense", there is a different dynamic.
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I remember it as Mr. Mot the hardworking barber from Star Trek TNG, versus Beetle Bailey the lazy layabout private from the comic strip.
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Observational studies without clear mechanisms of action are almost completely worthless. Reading the study it's just the classic thing where they controlled for a handful of factors that they thought of and then declared whatever was left over the effect of the thing they're studying. Rather than it being any of the countless variations across the population that aren't included in the arbitrary list of controls. (I think Scott has a post somewhere where he mentioned how little he trusts studies like this.) For instance this is how they controlled for comorbidity:
I wonder if any illnesses not prescribed those drugs might both increase mortality and decrease sunbathing? Or general variation in health below the level of actual illness?
This is in contrast to the skin cancer risk where the mechanism of action is very straightforward. It seems like a serious failure of both science and science communication that this sort of largely-meaningless observational study gets put on the same level.
I agree that it's very hard to tease out the direct impact of sun exposure from all the other things that come with it, but if that's really the case then clearly it isn't a big deal and it's definitely not worth shifting your attitude to favour indoor activities over outdoor ones.
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Fair point about observational studies.
But I'll still take a huge effect with an unknown mechanism vs a tiny effect with a known mechanism.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. When the effect size is large, we can get still get use from observational studies. For example, I believe that observational studies would be fully sufficient to demonstrate the harms of smoking, even with no other knowledge.
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If that were the extent of the advice, I think it would be fine. Put sunscreen on is good advice. Don’t let your kids play outside is batshit insane. In fact, to my mind the benefits to children from playing outside are substantial enough that if I thought talking about sunscreen would keep a kid indoors I’d never tell parents about sunscreen.
The physical benefits are that a kid gets actual exercise, running around, playing. They develop better coordination. A kid who’s playing is basically getting hours of aerobic exercise, building muscles, and so on. A kid stuck inside gets none of that. They sit and stare at screens and get fat.
Then there’s the social benefits. Making actual real life friends improves mental health. It embeds a child in a social network of peers and other adults. It teaches social responsibility and empathy and a whole host of social skills that simply cannot be learned by chatting over a headset.
It teaches good problem solving. Kid wants to get across a stream, he might accidentally learn something in trying to figure out how to do that. He might want to play a different game than the other kids and have to learn to negotiate with the other kids to get that. He might learn how to practice a skill so he can get good enough to play with the other kids.
If children only got one single benefit, I’d still be in favor of having the kids play outside. Even if the only benefit were preventing obesity, it’s an easy trade. Cancer at 70+ is bad, but if caught early is fairly treatable most of the time. Obesity is a chronic disease that often causes heart attacks in fairly young people. Taking 5 years off retirement or 30 years? Easy choice.
Well, yeah, we agree 100% there. It's batshit insane advice.
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Sunscreen acts as a moisturizer and protects your skin from irritants if your oils have been washed off. It prevents dryness, acne, sub burn and cancer. The good stuff isn't sticky or smelly.
I apply it once a day, but I am also brown and work indoors. Strong recommend.
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The CDC remains batshit insane on the matter:
Personally, I'll be continuing to run without a shirt all summer. Since 2020, my position has become that the safetyists are wrong about basically everything.
Even Australian safetyists?
Especially Australian safetyists -- their COVID response was intensely dumb, why should one believe them on their longstanding crusades against similarly low-risk 'threats'?
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To be clear, if you are white and will be spending all day in the sun, rashguards, broad brimmed hats, and sun blocking sleeves are a very good idea even with sunscreen.
Overall I fully agree with the posters above that safety guidelines regarding the dangers of outdoor activity are fantastically wrong, but you too have a point. You can get an awful lot of skin cancer from the sun, though may take decades for it to show. How serious a problem it is varies from person to person; some can get away with a lifetime of sizzling, others will regret not covering up a little.
I compromise and wear a floppy hat. That's my safety right there.
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Am very white, can work up to a tan such that I can indeed spend all day outside without any accessories and not burn. Some SPF-15 for the first couple of weeks and it's all good. I honestly can't imagine living in such fear that one feels one needs a bunch of crap to safely go outside four months of the year.
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Basically.
In Australia, you can spend 15 minutes unprotected in the sun over Summer as a white person and not get sunburned.
That said, SPF 15 sunscreen/moisturiser is great for general daily regular use. I use it in Winter too if I think I'll be spending more than 15 minutes at a time outside.
Australia is not the world though.
‘Take measures to reduce UV exposure when in the sun’ is actually one of the more reasonable things the CDC has said- as anyone who works outside in Texas(or Australia) can tell you, ‘not taking your shirt off for hours on end in direct sunlight in the summer’ is well worth being mildly more uncomfortable to avoid sunburn.
Hell, blacks who work outside in Texas advise broad brimmed hats and tattoo covers(the local name for detachable sleeves), and they’re the least susceptible to sunburn of anyone. Sunburn and skin cancer are reasonable things to be concerned about and there are reasonable measures to take to reduce them.
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Even seatbelts?
Yes. Seatbelts are an excellent idea and I wear mine. Demanding that everyone do so is stupid and intrusive.
Opposing safetyism doesn’t mean ignoring risk-benefit, it means that you’re against treating safety as an overriding priority in all cases.
But majority of people are too stupid to make a balanced and informed choice to stop wearing seatbelts. Developed countries generally adopted humanism as the guiding philosophy and if you need to slightly restrict personal freedom to do fentanyl or drive without seatbelt to reduce deaths it is worth it.
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The safetyists say that you should wear a seatbelt, you agree, and yet claim.they are wrong about everything.
Pareto. 80% of the improvement in auto safety over the last 40 years comes from seatbelts, first-gen airbags, and crumple zones. The first two were cheap, but the third one was not (if you crash/are crashed into- it's not really more expensive to make a car that accordions if you hit something, but a modern car is more likely to be a total loss from that event).
There isn't much of a difference between survivability of a crash in 2010 (average car on the road has airbags) and 2024 (average car on the road has... more airbags), but the cost of a car has doubled and pedestrians now get killed more often because visibility is the cost of that safety.
Safetyists are demonstrably utility monsters. It's like the car seat thing: massive improvements for a very small cost is fine, marginal improvements for a very large cost are not, and people who are incapable of differentiating between the two because they're stuck on the baseline risk treadmill (exactly like the hedonic treadmill, but for neurotics) will feed literally every scrap of productivity to the machine if they're not slapped down by the people who actually have to pay for it.
My understanding is pedestrian deaths are driven at least partially by trucks becoming bigger for gas consumption standards.
I drive a Tesla. The safety on it is pretty amazing and helped my wife avoid an accident already.
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I don't even disagree about the utility monsters point but I think you are wrong about other points.
Used car prices were flat until the pandemic and have not recovered, but are way less than 2x before: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA02
So no, car prices didn't double in 14 years, even including until today (yes, these are used cars, but if new cars became significantly more expensive demand would increase for used cars and drive up the price).
Front blind zones are driven mostly by aesthetics and rules lawyering around emissions regulations (CAFE) as far as I can tell.
I don't have an index of car features off the top of my head, but electronic stability control (mandated since 2011) has probably prevented some accidents (although it's hard to get a smoking gun here, unlike seatbelts or airbags or crumple zones).
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I still wear mine. But I'll never forget a woman in my highschool. Her family was on vacation, got into a car accident, and she was the only survivor. She was thrown from the vehicle because she wasn't wearing her seatbelt.
Still ended up paralyzed from the neck down and an orphan.
Tragic, but that really illustrates why being thrown clear is not a good thing.
There's a lot of safetyist excesses but people don't remember that until the 70s you'd be impaled by the steering column in case of a crash. There's been a tremendous amount of actually useful improvements by the safetyists that nobody notices or thinks about anymore because they've become the air we breathe.
The problem is the safetyists have no brakes. Nothing's ever "safe enough".
Clearly we need meta-safetyists to invent safetyist brakes. Of course then we will need meta-meta safetyists..and so ad inifinitum.
This is generally called "the enemy tribe". The fact that, all else being equal, they'll outcompete you if they take more calculated risks is why safety cannot be first.
External enemies are the ultimate check against internal risk aversity, and when they stop existing that begins to spiral out of control. I don't see any external enemies around right now and life is generally better than it's ever been, so people just pay the toll and suffer the loss of dignity/productivity quietly since the bill will never come due... right?
Which suggests that in a climate without external threats safetyism does lead to (or contributes to) life being better than it has ever been? If there is no-one to compete against then your people don't need to be taking calculated risks (which will presumably lead to greater levels of injury/death).
In other words you only need to pull the goalie when you are losing. If you are winning, play safe.
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I think it's more likely that safetyism suffers from evaporative cooling. Most people who decry safetyism today still wear seatbelts (see this very thread), which was the safetyist perspective a hundred years ago (and remains the safetyist perspective in many countries today). Indeed there are some people who are never satisfied.
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Okay, but in the meantime, cars keep getting safer?
Hard to say. Not a lot of movement since 2009, but there's a lot of confounding factors. But we keep getting more and more expensive features added in the name of safety.
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It seems like safetyism doesn’t so much peak as plateau- it reaches a ridiculous crescendo, stays there, and everyone ignores it while passing off as sage wisdom idiocy like that.
Like, was this boilerplate that pediatricians pass out to parents in literature without reading it for themselves to begin with?
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