Alex Edmonds

is probably doing lots of other things to get their act together?

And it's those other things that are leading to the improvements in performance.

Before I had my first child, I went to some parenting courses and they said, oh, you need to breastfeed.

Breastfeeding is correlated with superior performance in terms of child IQ, child health, mother postpartum depression.

But was it that breast milk causes these outcomes?

Or is it that mothers with a more supportive home environment were able to breastfeed because of how challenging it is?

And that supportive home environment is what caused those outcomes.

Because if so, the onus is then on me as a father to provide a more supportive home environment rather than telling my wife she needs to breastfeed all the time.

So we get information in so many different contexts and we need to think about is this information correlation or causation?

Is this information a unique hand-picked case or is it generally true?

Maybe there was one person who woke up at 5 a.m.

and it did change their life and they will blog about it and tell people.

If you were somebody who woke up at 5 a.m.

and it had no effect, you would keep that to yourself.

So what we might be seeing is a selected sample of isolated anecdotes.

And again, this is a case in which we need to be discerning about the information that we see.

Yeah, and this is a huge challenge in the information age.

So you might think, oh, it's great now that information is so easy to get.

When I was a kid, I had to track down to the library and to look it up into the encyclopedia.

Nowadays, we have easy access to information and even academic research, which used to be behind paywalls.