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26th June 2007, 12:46 PM | #1 |
Philosopher
Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 5,292
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PRASANNA JAGANNATHAN, Successful children?
Prasanna Jagannathan has approached the JREF with the claim that she can tell whether or not couples have "successful" children.
For the first stage of protocol design, we began to define the word "successful," which Jagannathan says is as follows: "successful children - normal definition of worldly success. So quantitatively , it means a person who is happy with their current situation in life and should earn above $60000 per year. Plus the usual hallmarks of a successful life such as a job, car, decent housing. Should be independent in life. Should not suffer from any severe illness mental or physical. Minor illness such as flu, etc is ok. But diseases such as heart trouble etc or physical handicaps are not allowed." So far, it sounded possible, but then Jagannathan went on to say who would and could not participate in the test: "The test involves only couples with children who are biological parents of all their children. The children would be around age 30. These children should not be adopted or born out of wedlock or previous marriages. There should be atleast two children for each couple. No couple should have had any children outside their wedding. No couple should have any adopted children either legally or mentally, such as considering a person as their child even though no legal steps have been made. The couple should not have given away their children in adoption. They also should NOT have had any abortions. Both the husband and wife should be alive. These rules apply for both husband and wife of the couple. The couple should be considered successful ie., as a pair and still be married and in good relationship with each other. Illness due to old age are allowed. But please avoid any extreme cases. All these children should be either successful or unsuccessful. If a couple have one or more children who are successful and other children that are not successful then those couples should be removed from the test group. Couples who had children but whose children are dead (due to major illness or accidents) can be included in the test group. But all of their children should be successful or unsuccessful ( i.e. if one child is dead then all of their children should be dead) Couples without children can be included in the test group, but how will it be possible to get the birth details and palm prints of the children? Secondly those couple without children should NOT have made a conscious decision not to have children i.e., not by choice. They should be unable to have children due to physical defects such as illness or preexisting health conditions." As soon as the JREF realized that they would have to start asking participants whether or not they'd adopted or had abortions, we began to have reservations. To see whether or not we could, in fact, come up with any group of people that fit the qualifications, we examined our own family members and found them all to be disqualified for one reason or another. A slightly wider search including friend's families came up with the same result. The claim was deemed untestable because of how few potential participants could be found, based on the restrictions Jagannathan gave. ~Remie |
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