[HN Gopher] This is a teenager
___________________________________________________________________
This is a teenager
Author : gmays
Score : 792 points
Date : 2024-04-16 16:07 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pudding.cool)
(TXT) w3m dump (pudding.cool)
| rideontime wrote:
| Not to distract from the important content of this piece - which
| I simply can't devote any attention to in the middle of my
| workday, lest I ruminate for the next few hours - but for those
| interested in its development, here's a dev diary:
| https://bigcharts.substack.com/p/behind-the-scene-this-is-a-...
| numlocked wrote:
| Very cool site, however...
|
| ...my takeaway is a little different than what is in the
| commentary box (for the year 2017 in particular). The
| distribution of incomes don't actually look _that_ different, to
| my eye.
|
| If this is the grand reveal -- showing that childhood heavily
| influences future financial mobility -- it's not super obvious. I
| mean, yes, there seem to be a bit of a skew towards low earners
| in the bottom tranche -- but really it looks like the group that
| has had some _astounding_ headwinds is kinda sorta doing about
| the same as the 'no adverse experiences' group? That is amazing
| as well!
|
| It'd be nice to be able to get to the underlying data more
| easily, and drill into see the statistical conclusions. The
| horizontal bands not being of even length doesn't help either.
|
| Edit: I don't think I was correctly taking into account the "no
| data" group, which makes the skew much more obvious (that the
| "many adverse experience" group has substantially lower earning
| power). I wish that the horizontal groups were of the same
| length, and the "no data" group was simply removed. I think that
| would make a transformative difference in terms of actually being
| able to understand this visually and intuitively.
|
| Edit 2: Also how amazing is it that this study got done! The link
| to the study is very hard to find on this site, and also is
| wrong. The correct link (I think anyway) is
| https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| The visualizations suggested the differences were very
| marginal. Some people with no adverse experiences struggle;
| some with many adverse experiences thrive; and while the
| reverse is more often true there appear to be other factors
| more strongly determining outcomes.
| WesternWind wrote:
| the best determinant, statistically, is what zip code you
| grew up in.
| ianbicking wrote:
| I noticed that too... the effects didn't look nearly as
| dramatic from the visuals as the text would make me believe.
|
| The exception was health, that was a much more dramatic
| correlation than income/etc. It reminds me of a study recently
| of homelessness in California, and people made a big deal about
| housing availability and affordability as the prime factor, but
| seemed to ignore the very notable health correlation in that
| study.
| philsnow wrote:
| > If this is the grand reveal -- showing that childhood heavily
| influences future financial mobility -- it's not super obvious.
| I mean, yes, there seem to be a bit of a skew towards low
| earners in the bottom tranche -- but really it looks like the
| group that has had some astounding headwinds is kinda sorta
| doing about the same as the 'no adverse experiences' group?
|
| This was my takeaway as well. My expectation was that the
| longitudinal study would show that bad experiences compound
| much more dramatically over time than the video appears to
| suggest.
|
| Another issue I have with the presentation is that I had to
| keep pausing and carefully considering what each slide was
| saying, because the first several slides start by
| - categorizing people according to whether they had bad
| experiences or not, - arranging them spatially in one big
| group on the "bad experiences" axis, - and coloring them
| according to the severity / occurrence.
|
| So now my brain thinks "okay, warmer colors mean more/worse
| childhood experiences. got it.", but then all the following
| slides - categorize people on lots of different
| dimensions (income, health, etc) - but always grouped
| spatially by no/some/many bad experiences - color them
| according to the dimension being measured - some of
| them are arranged spatially in reverse order compared to the
| legend, see 4:50 in the linked video / the slide on "general
| health"
|
| So the entire time, I'm fighting my brain which is telling me
| "warmer colors -> bad experiences".
|
| I wonder if it would be clearer if the measurement slides were
| instead grouped / arranged spatially by outcomes and colored
| according to the childhood experiences.
|
| _edit: it 's ugly as heck but this is kind of what I mean:
|
| their slide:
| https://snap.philsnow.io/2024-04-16T10-16-25.uifh7bss3d5f66b...
|
| proposed rearrangement + recoloring:
| https://snap.philsnow.io/2024-04-16T10-45-19.n7ft281jipgv3tx...
|
| Like I said, it's ugly, I obviously just copy/pasted regions
| around, but it should get across the idea that this would make
| it easier to see the proportions of each measurement class
| (income bucket, health bucket, etc) according to childhood
| experiences._
| pc86 wrote:
| A large proportion of the time -- I hesitate to say "most" but
| that is my inclination -- the people making these
| visualizations have an agenda, and it's usually increased
| funding for their pet cause. So any time you're looking at this
| sort of thing especially when they're making broad over-arching
| generalizations (more "trauma" as a child makes life harder)
| it's important to read critically, interrogate the validity and
| bias of sources, and try to see if and where they may be
| skewing things with visualizations, omitting or lessening the
| perceived impact of damning data that disagrees with them,
| and/or making things that agree with their point more prominent
| than they probably should be. I usually don't even try to
| figure out what their "pet cause" may be before doing any of
| that because I don't want my own implicit biases to influence
| me more than they already do.
|
| It's hard to be sure but I also think several of the folks
| earning the _most_ as adults came from the "bottom" tier with
| the most adverse childhood experiences.
| subpixel wrote:
| Positive relationships with adults is shown to be means of
| counteracting adverse childhood experiences.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8237477/
|
| I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something
| has to change.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Less kids in households that don't want them. This is a
| pipeline problem. Intentional children only. Hard topic to
| cover online, nuance and emotions on the topic.
|
| > I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but
| something has to change.
|
| You're a good person doing necessary work. There aren't enough
| humans doing it, but it matters to who you're helping.
| bumby wrote:
| Related, and equally hard to cover online:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e.
| ..
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39978774 ("HN: Steven
| Levitt and John Donohue defend the abortion-crime
| hypothesis")
|
| https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/04/08/steven-
| le... | https://archive.today/m3zl0 ("Steven Levitt and
| John Donohue defend a finding made famous by
| "Freakonomics"")
| throwway120385 wrote:
| It would also help if more people that are doing marginal
| work could receive a wage that they felt secure with. Money
| is one of the biggest stressors for couples and families.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I do not disagree. But it will take years, if not decades,
| for labor rights and organizing to improve the situation
| you mention. Preventing unwanted children takes less time
| and effort, tragic as it is to type out.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I don't understand how to practically make this work.
|
| There's a strong case to be made that a minimum wage helps
| people whose value approaches the minimum while hurting
| people above or below (e.g. $12 and $18 wages in an
| unlimited market both round to $15 with a minimum, while
| someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer
| employable). Similarly with cash infusions - giving people
| more money is inflationary.
|
| Nobody wants to live in a world where people are trying to
| participate in society and failing. That's truly
| heartbreaking.
|
| At the same time, naive solutions (decide a "living wage"
| and force people to pay it, set up and enforce rent
| control, give out stimulus payments) seem to have a lot of
| second-order effects/unintended consequences without
| actually solving the problems they're meant to solve.
| bjt wrote:
| I don't think it works if we're narrowly focused just on
| wages, but I don't know why that has to be the only
| focus. If we as a society want to support people having a
| baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together
| rather than pushing it all on employers.
|
| I don't think we put enough money behind it today, but
| the Earned Income Tax Credit is designed to do this while
| minimizing the disincentives for people to work.
| https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-the-earned-
| incom...
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >If we as a society want to support people having a
| baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together
| rather than pushing it all on employers.
|
| Baseline quality of life isn't decided just by pay. I
| find that society doesn't support people having a
| baseline quality of life when it comes to areas other
| than pay, so it makes me question the motives of society
| in the case of pay.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| My personal position is to abolish the minimum wage and
| update the tax scale with negative tax rates that support
| a reasonable quality of life at all income levels. The
| market will find its own balance for what a true minimum
| wage is in that environment (and not have weird perverse
| incentives like you state).
|
| Yes, this is UBI. But phrased as a tax cut makes it
| politically viable (at least in the US).
| bsimpson wrote:
| I would be interested to see this modeled.
|
| One of the classic unintended consequences of social
| welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to
| work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in
| formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and
| stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all
| the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local
| restaurants?)
|
| I'm curious to see an example scale that would continue
| to incentivize social behavior the whole way up the chain
| - avoiding the "oh I don't want to make $100 more dollars
| because I'm in a sweet spot now and bad things happen at
| $99."
|
| You can certainly argue that many of the current
| disincentives are bugs in the bureaucracy. I'd like to
| see a proposal for the UBI tax scale you describe that
| doesn't have any bugs (that is, bumps in the distribution
| where people are afraid to reach for state C from state
| A, because the intermediary state B is worse than A).
| Freebytes wrote:
| We should not make it more than $1000 per month. Very few
| would choose to be poor. It would put a lot of pressure
| on companies to pay decent wages, though.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| $1000/month is $12,000/year. Thats far far below poverty
| levels. It needs to be enough that people can _choose_ to
| supplement in order to engage with luxury consumption. If
| people are _forced_ to supplement to just survive, then
| we need to maintain the minimum wage and a whole host of
| other weird baggage.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Very much agreed that there should be no cliffs. Every
| dollar earned should at minimum increase your usable cash
| flow by at least X amount no matter where you are in the
| income distribution and other tax incentive phase space
| KittenInABox wrote:
| > One of the classic unintended consequences of social
| welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to
| work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in
| formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and
| stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all
| the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local
| restaurants?)
|
| I remember this, the cash assistance gave people back
| their time to focus on starting their own businesses,
| pursuing self-education, taking care of their kids, etc.
| It was fully apparent to me that these low-wage jobs
| effectively trapped people by sucking up all the time
| they had for self-improvement.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _We saw this during the pandemic when people in
| formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and
| stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all
| the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local
| restaurants?)_
|
| Unwilling to work or temporarily not desperate to stay
| alive? How many receiving assistance were still working,
| just doing it less?
|
| The only studies on outcomes I recall is that a lot of
| kids were no longer experiencing food insecurity.
| kulahan wrote:
| I can't imagine they were very compelling studies if the
| only changes they could come up with was "some kids were
| less hungry"
| Freebytes wrote:
| It is important that this is based on all income levels
| equally. Yes, some will pay back that money in taxes, but
| the important part is keeping the amount equal. It would
| be even more effective if you gave them a monthly check
| (even if you would eventually take it all back via a
| consumption tax on people earning more). A ~25% national
| sales tax should be sufficient to cover a UBI program.
| (We should still have an income tax, though.)
| Furthermore, a consumption tax would decrease unnecessary
| spending since you can target only new products and not
| used products to encourage people to reduce, reuse, and
| recycle.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| If UBI is encoded as a negative tax rate at low income
| levels, it no longer really makes sense to talk about it
| as applying to all income levels equally. It naturally
| gets distributed as
|
| 1) A check (issued by Social Security service?) if income
| is less than X
|
| 2) Less of your paycheck being withheld if your income is
| greater than X (or more if you're significantly above X,
| depending on how this gets funded)
| naniwaduni wrote:
| We _have_ a tax rate with negative tax rates at the low
| end of the scale. For sketchy social policy /political
| tenability reasons it doubles as a child subsidy and
| phases in up to a nominal amount of preexisting so-called
| earned income, but functionally that's what the earned
| income tax credit is.
|
| Expansion of the EITC program is fairly well-regarded
| among economists and has been historically quite popular!
| We should do more of it!
| Misdicorl wrote:
| True. It would be nice to decouple it from children and
| expand its scope of economic impact dramatically.
| pants2 wrote:
| I have a family member that is severely disabled. She
| used to be on a program where the government would
| supplement her wages - she worked at Jack in the Box,
| where her employer would pay like $3/hr and the
| government would top that up to $10/hr.
|
| Now that program is gone and minimum wage for fast food
| is $20/hr. She simply cannot perform $20/hr worth of
| work, so she's unemployed (and living on government
| assistance).
|
| The previous arrangement was fantastic because the work
| gave her a purpose and something to do all day, and she
| contributed to society while saving the government money.
| Now she stays home and watches TV endlessly.
|
| This has informed my ideas - I think supplementing
| minimum wages could be a better alternative to UBI (with
| some exceptions).
| Clubber wrote:
| There's usually carveouts for people with certain
| disabilities. It allows companies to pay them below the
| minimum wage. I would be surprised if that was abolished
| with the increase in minimum wage.
| ineptech wrote:
| > someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer
| employable
|
| This is the wrong model. You're using a worker's wage to
| describe their productivity, and a big reason for the
| mess we're in is that wages stopped increasing with
| productivity fifty years ago. (search "wages productivity
| graph")
| bsimpson wrote:
| This feels like you're nitpicking the language, not the
| thinking.
|
| Imagine someone's contribution to a business increases
| revenue by $1000 and the total cost to employ that person
| for the same period is $800. Do you think most businesses
| would go "nope, we only hire highly leveraged people who
| produce $2000 in revenue"?
|
| There are inefficiencies in scale (like
| communication/bookkeeping overhead) that might
| disincentivize a business from growing, but generally
| speaking, I think it's fine to model decisions as
| rational cost/benefit ones.
|
| Workers who are only "worth it" at some wage. Nobody is
| going to pay you a million dollars to go sell a hundred
| dollars worth of stuff. If the value you can earn on the
| market is sufficiently lower than what someone is allowed
| to pay, they simply won't hire you. That's bad for
| everyone.
| Aunche wrote:
| A rather low hanging fruit is smoothing out welfare
| cliffs so poor people don't feel stuck in an position of
| a local maximum of utility near the bottom. The problem
| is that these initiatives are very complicated, and you
| get more public support just blindly throwing money at
| the problem.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| The real issue is that a few people have accumulated a
| lot of wealth and property, and they use it as a tool to
| extract even more money. It's basically the late stage
| capitalism money vacuum hoovering up everything. In the
| past the only levers we had against this were breaking up
| firms and enforcing anti-monopoly and preventing capital
| from even entering certain parts of our economy. We
| could, for example, ban private equity companies from
| buying houses and healthcare companies, break up national
| monopolies into regional companies, and eliminate a lot
| of the consolidation that has traditionally enhanced the
| bargaining power of the company owner against the
| employees.
|
| In the short term it would make a lot of stuff less
| efficient, but when people talk about "efficiency" they
| really mean driving costs down and driving income up. So
| we really don't want an efficient capitalist economy, we
| want a capitalist economy that is just efficient enough
| to meet our needs while not being so efficient that a few
| people can exploit that efficiency and run away with our
| things.
| carom wrote:
| Abolish the minimum wage along with density restrictions
| in zoning. Make it affordable for someone making $300 per
| month to have shelter.
| smeej wrote:
| You can change up the emotions on the topic pretty quickly if
| you change the framing to "intentional _sex_ only " rather
| than "intentional _children_ only, " even though the former
| accomplishes the latter.
|
| It's fun, because you can get virtually everyone to agree
| that people should only have sex they mean to have, but as
| soon as you suggest they should only have sex _when all
| parties involved have carefully and accurately assessed the
| risk of pregnancy,_ you 're a killjoy.
| causal wrote:
| You can select a dropdown at the end for "Parenting style"
| which divides the groups by number of parents involved. This
| seems to be the strongest correlator of any of the data shown.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Parenting style is much more likely to not be causative
| though
| drawkward wrote:
| Citation, please?
| gowld wrote:
| Strong argument for helping more parents be more involved.
| fzeindl wrote:
| This is old news.
|
| Basically children in bad situations need just one reliable
| person who believes in them in their lives.
|
| What it does is making them realize that it's not them who are
| doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed.
| The problem begins when children start to believe everything is
| their own fault.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| ding ding ding!
|
| I call it "Bastard's Syndrome"
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > What it does is making them realize that it's not them who
| are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are
| flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe
| everything is their own fault.
|
| This is only tangentially related, but I think your point is
| critically important. Relatively recently I did ketamine
| infusion therapy for depression, and it was life changing for
| me. Ketamine is a "dissociative", and one thing that it
| seriously helped me do was separate my "self" from my
| depression, which I've never really been able to do before
| despite decades of trying through therapy. That is, now that
| I see depression as a chronic condition I _have_ (say perhaps
| analogous to people that have to deal with migraines), as
| opposed to something that I _am_ at my core, it makes it
| much, much less scary and threatening to me.
|
| In my experience, I've noticed that the people who I think of
| as the most successful (both from a society-wide and personal
| perspective) have the clearest view of what is their control
| and what they can accomplish, and also what is not. A huge
| benefit of this is that when they see an obstacle that some
| person could potentially overcome, even if it would be very,
| very difficult, they tend to think "Heck, why not me?" And
| when they do hit setbacks because of the unpredictability of
| the world, they don't take it personally, they just tend to
| think "Well, the world is chaotic - is this new problem
| something that can reasonably be overcome?" I contrast with a
| mindset I had for a long time (which a large part I think was
| a consequence of being bullied) that if I put a lot of effort
| into something and just didn't succeed, it was fundamentally
| because I wasn't "good enough", so why bother trying that
| hard at something else as I'm likely not going to be good
| enough there either.
| naasking wrote:
| > What it does is making them realize that it's not them who
| are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are
| flawed
|
| Speculative. I rather think that it shows them that there are
| other ways of living and that they have agency to get there.
| concordDance wrote:
| > The problem begins when children start to believe
| everything is their own fault.
|
| My experience is it's the opposite and you need to overcome
| learned helplessness and understand that you _can_ change
| your life.
|
| Are there any good studies that could tell us which of us is
| correct?
| richardlblair wrote:
| > I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but
| something has to change
|
| Teachers and volunteers are how I was able to find a better
| life. What you're doing matters.
| kulahan wrote:
| How do you volunteer at the local school? My wife and I are
| both passionate about and interested in improving children's
| lives, but not super sure how best to do it outside of
| donations and big brother big sister-type programs.
|
| As an aside, maybe it's because I'm inexperienced, but I'm
| finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to
| help people that isn't a highly specific cause like religion,
| LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc.??? Is it just me? I am
| clearly very ignorant about all this
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Am I supposed to see more than one teenager at the point where
| the narrative suggests I can? I only see one as I'm scrolling
| through. Firefox 120.0.1
|
| [edit]
|
| I scrolled all the way to the top and then back down and it seems
| to have resolved the issue.
| svachalek wrote:
| yes
| tetromino_ wrote:
| Same but here with Chrome on Android. I also get scrolling
| freezing in places so I am forced to reload the page (and then
| graphics disappear).
|
| The article would have been _vastly_ more readable if it was
| plain html with static embedded images and without any custom
| scroll /touch event handling - then one would easily be able to
| scroll around in it, search text, and view charts uncorrupted
| by javascript bugs.
|
| I am sure the author is proud of their nytimes-like data
| visualization project, but in this case, the visualization
| makes the result in every way worse.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| They get points for linking to a video at least.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The visualization will frequently incorrectly show something of
| the form: <--- False True ---> True
| True False False True True False False
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| I noticed this on Relatives died (thus far).
| sweetbacon wrote:
| Yes I saw this on a few "screens" and it really confused me at
| first. They flashy visuals detract from the message in a
| variety of ways.
| SuperHeavy256 wrote:
| Yeah I agree this was very confusing.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| I thought I just wasn't understanding the visualizations. Glad
| it wasn't just me.
|
| It also wasn't very clear to me what I was supposed to be
| noticing in the visualizations that was related to whatever
| text was currently popped up. In the end I just watched the
| youtube video that was linked to at the very beginning and it
| made everything much clearer to me.
| fillskills wrote:
| Saw in the "Parents Involved" section
| Almondsetat wrote:
| The page opens.
|
| Title appears.
|
| I start scrolling.
|
| Nothing happens.
|
| I scroll and I scroll but the page doesn't budge. I come to my
| senses: "aha, I get it! For the last few minutes I've been
| aimlessly scrolling in search of content and all the people
| around me in the train must have seen me do it with the same
| crooked posture and lifeless expression of a modern day teenager
| on their phone! This is me, the teenager! I have been the victim
| of a piece of performance art!"
|
| Then I realized it simply doesn't work properly on my phone's
| Chrome...
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| The scrolling on Android was horrible, much like being a
| teenager.
|
| Well done.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Oh, is that the issue with all of this scroll-jacking bullshit
| web design lately? I'm not using the Designer's Choice mobile
| platform, so my experience just sucks? NYTimes is one of the
| worst offenders.
| RobCat27 wrote:
| I like the message, but I feel like this is bad data
| visualization. The width of each group of people is not the same,
| so it's somewhat meaningless to visually compare groups without
| being able to see the raw percentages. For example, the "Many
| Adverse Experiences" group is stretched to be longer than the
| other groups so that proportionally fewer people in that group
| appear to be a larger proportion than the same proportion would
| be in other groups because they're not as wide.
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| Also, the visualization doesn't update well when scrolling back
| and forth; and the grouping is bad -- "bullied" is listed as an
| adverse condition, but is also shown as a separate grouping;
| and the way it's displayed for "Seen someone shot with a gun"
| is backwards, implying that the vast majority have seen that.
| Too bad, because it otherwise seems like an interesting study.
| candiodari wrote:
| Social sciences is not value-free. In reality the most
| important indicator of "at-risk" is previous involvement with
| social services and mental health professionals. Usually
| because these experiences tend to be so bad that the kids
| involved start to hide problems, or even attack anyone
| involved with social services. And THEN they get into a
| negative spiral. It is not the first time they get into a
| negative spiral, except now their experiences with mental
| help are so incredibly negative they fight to remain in the
| negative spiral, sometimes to the point of physical violence.
|
| Likewise, these professionals hide that almost all
| experiences kids have with social services are negative for
| the kids. Now I suppose you could say the above is an example
| of that, but really, it goes further. Kids seek help with
| homework, and only get berated by someone that couldn't do
| the homework themselves ...
|
| Studies keep pointing out that social services is exactly the
| wrong approach. What makes teachers, and social professionals
| good is excellent subject knowledge, combined with basic
| psychology. NOT the other way around. And in practice every
| mental help professional I've ever seen thinks they know what
| to do, and when pushed fail to produce even basic
| psychological facts, or outright deny them. I like to think
| you can explain this that when push comes to shove our minds
| are trying to solve problems in the real world.
|
| The majority of mental problems are someone failing to solve
| real world problems, and repeatedly failing to influence the
| outcome. A little bit of psychology is needed to get them to
| try again ... and a LOT of knowledge of the real world is
| need to make sure the outcome is different.
| bombcar wrote:
| It also seems backwards, unless I'm reading it wrong and 80% of
| high school kids see someone get shot ...
| fnordlord wrote:
| I think you're reading it right. They have the color key
| correct but the key for which side is seen vs not seen is
| incorrect. It should be <--Seen someone shot ... Not seen
| someone shot-->
| aggieNick02 wrote:
| Agreed. Spent a couple minutes trying to figure out how I
| was reading it wrong for several of the categories -
| sometimes it is correct, but often it is not.
| joshcsimmons wrote:
| Came here to say similar - making the page extremely wide helps
| a big by making the rows more similar but ideally consistent
| scale and number of rows should be maintained so we can see a
| column-to-column width comparison of the data points.
| kadushka wrote:
| I agree that the visualization could be better, but it actually
| seems the differences between the three groups are not that
| large.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I'm torn. On the one hand, I agree with your remarks. On the
| other hand, I strongly appreciate the attention to detail in:
|
| - Actually keeping individual datapoints all the time,
| clickable and with full details, and just moving them around to
| form different charts;
|
| - Making the icons consistent with data - based on a few random
| instances I checked, the person's body shape and hairstyle
| correlated to biometric parameters in the data set.
| themanmaran wrote:
| I think it's an easy fix to include both!
|
| At the top of each section header (No adverse, Some adverse,
| ect.) they could include a section count + percentage of each
| category they're showing.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| I don't even think that the message is likeable. "Oh no they
| don't go to college!" is schoolmarmish and patronizing.
| "College is for _everyone_! " and "you're not _really_ an adult
| until you 're 25!" have done an awful lot of societal harm.
| mattzito wrote:
| As a college non-graduate, I think that is leveraging the
| strong data that _for most people_ a college degree is a huge
| net benefit is reasonable.
|
| As someone who was once <25, I think that version of me is
| stupid in a wide variety of ways. I hear you that it can be
| negative to divide things that way, but it seems reasonable
| to say "after you are either a non college graduate with a
| number of years of experience or a college graduate with ~2
| years of post-college experience.
|
| I hear you, though, it's hard to sort people into buckets.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| The visualization is a good iteration on trying to get complex
| papers distilled into a digestible format. That was nice.
|
| I'm not super sure how I feel about the message though as it
| operates on a handful of really big presumptions. I'll share my
| own bias to save everyone the tldr on where I'm coming from:
| I'm a parent advocate. I think the nuclear family is the
| backbone to society and that much, if not every, societal ill
| can be linked to the destruction of the nuclear family. Parents
| matter, and I agree with the general conclusion that we need to
| focus TREMENDOUS effort into raising children in a loving and
| safe way. If you are still reading, consider also that I'm a
| 3rd generation son of Mexican immigrants. I grew up in a lower
| economic class background in Los Angeles county during the 90s.
| I grew up shoulder to shoulder with many of the people included
| in this study.
|
| The first is that it's somehow a bad thing not to go to
| college. The trades by now are a known lucrative path with
| significant upward mobility, especially as we consider
| entrepreneurship. This is, in my experience, hand in hand with
| a lot of cultural practices that just doesn't get captured in
| these types of sociological studies. I can personally attest to
| the increased risk tolerance that a lot of cultures have
| towards starting a business or joining a labor based trade.
| Food trucks, car washes, detailing services, maid services,
| laundromats, dry cleaning businesses, convenience market
| franchises. In the privacy of your own head, and without fear
| of judgement from your HN peers, I invite you to honestly
| consider the ethnicity of the people who own these businesses.
| See my point? The mobility is there. These aren't "bad" lives.
| They're different. These people also have different standards
| of living. Most people who are immigrants or 2nd to 3rd
| generation of those immigrants don't want a multi-hundred
| thousand dollar life. Just speaking from personal experience
| here, most lower class migrants see the prospect of making that
| much money in America as foreign and unsafe. Maybe this
| furthers the point that not everyone should or can be a
| doctor/lawyer/FAANG-engineer.
|
| The second presumption is that "abuse" or "adverse experiences"
| is able to be categorized by the researcher's definition.
| Again, we're dealing with people of different cultures who have
| different standards for living. We're overlaying our own
| "refined" terminology of what constitutes "abuse" or "danger"
| to them and drawing conclusions. Worse yet, we're saying that
| those same conclusions are correlated to the conditions that
| they experienced, regardless of how they themselves would
| classify it.
|
| "High risk" is a highly contestable term, especially as the
| diversity of subjects increases. Maybe it's a good thing that
| mom divorced the man who was never around. Maybe mom was
| sleeping around and dad found out? Maybe mom remarried because
| dad died. Either way, non-intact households are being labelled
| "high risk" in a general sense.
|
| "Being held back" as a bad thing is contestable. Some kids fall
| in that weird Nov-December enrollment period and make it
| through by being the oldest kid in their class. This isn't
| typically a good thing. The threat of being held back a grade
| is also encouraging for those who take their schooling
| seriously. Should it ever happen, its a serious kick in the
| pants for kids to wake up and take this seriously.
|
| "Suspension", again any type of school based discipline, is
| seen as a adverse event. Suspension protects the children of
| the school, it notifies the parents of the suspended that there
| is a __real__ problem with your child, and provides a
| significant deterrent from bad behavior. It's wild to me that
| anyone would think of suspension as a noteworthy heuristic for
| adverse experiences.
|
| Thanks to anyone who made it this far, even those that will
| disagree.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > The second presumption is that "abuse" or "adverse
| experiences" is able to be categorized by the researcher's
| definition. Again, we're dealing with people of different
| cultures who have different standards for living. We're
| overlaying our own "refined" terminology of what constitutes
| "abuse" or "danger" to them and drawing conclusions. Worse
| yet, we're saying that those same conclusions are correlated
| to the conditions that they experienced, regardless of how
| they themselves would classify it.
|
| I think in this case, it seems they did pretty well. They're
| not lumping in "people failed to use their pronouns" into it,
| but things like gun violence, violent crime, and bullying.
| Some kids might be made of tougher material and shrug that
| off better, but even for them if that's not an adverse
| experience, I don't know what could be. It seems like the
| researchers are using an appropriately conservative
| definition.
|
| > Maybe it's a good thing that mom divorced the man who was
| never around.
|
| Yeh, but now we're confusing propaganda that was designed to
| encourage women to leave abusers for something of statistical
| significance about another matter entirely. If there are more
| men who would have made the kids' lives better than there are
| men so dangerous it's good they were separated from their
| children, then it doesn't matter that some are bad. The fact
| that the father has divorced and is out of the picture puts
| them at a higher risk of poor outcomes.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| > The fact that the father has divorced and is out of the
| picture puts them at a higher risk of poor outcomes.
|
| Hundred percent agree on this point. My concession was that
| it's not always beneficial that the parents stay joined nor
| is it deterministic that a single father or mother is
| strictly worse off than an intact family with an
| abusive/negligent/not present parent. Ideally none would
| divorce, but we can't factor for that.
| fragmede wrote:
| Question one of the ACE test is
|
| > Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very
| often... Swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate
| you? or Act in a way that made you afraid that you might be
| physically hurt?
|
| seems pretty clear to me, regardless of if something is
| considered okay in one culture but not in another, the
| question is was the experience humiliating, not did X happen,
| where X could be considered not humiliating in one culture
| and not in another.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| That's an excellent observation. When I wrote this I was
| looking for the questions/heuristics from the study that
| produced these statistics. I couldn't find much. Do you
| happen to have a link by any chance? I'm sure others would
| find it helpful as well.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I know that the author is trying to argue that minorities are
| at higher risk for bad outcomes, but it feels intellectually
| dishonest to use the same colors for white and rich, or black
| and poor. If white people can be poor and black people can be
| rich, you can't overload the color to reinforce your bias.
|
| Plus, that whole section seemed to be sorted in an incoherent
| way.
| jagthebeetle wrote:
| Agreed, not least because: - area-based visualizations make the
| effect hard to distinguish; bar charts or data clouds with
| numbers and confidence intervals would have been way more
| immediate. - the colors make the negative group (usually) more
| visually prominent, since it has higher contrast with the
| background, exacerbating the area-estimation problem. (e.g. me
| wondering, "are there more overweight pink people as a fraction
| of pink people?")
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| It's an awful visualization.
|
| I understand the motivation of trying to (literally) humanize
| the data points, but it would have been much more successful if
| there were vertical groupings as well as horizontal ones.
|
| Right now it's 3 buckets + colors, but you could literally make
| it monochrome, make it an actual grid, then you could see which
| cells are completely empty, which is impactful.
| neom wrote:
| We really do love pudding.cool[1]- I'd never bothered to go look
| at what it's _actually_ all about till today, and you should too
| if you 've not, because it wasn't exactly as I expected:
| https://pudding.cool/about/ - these people seem great, we should
| probably support them. I noticed they have a Patreon if you're
| feeling generous[2].
|
| [1]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..
| .
|
| [2]https://www.patreon.com/thepudding
| jonahx wrote:
| Their mission statement is disingenuous, to say the least, and
| I sensed it as soon as I started the current post. Here is the
| mission statement, in bold, and in this form, great, I'd be all
| for it:
|
| _The Pudding explains ideas debated in culture with visual
| essays. We're not chasing current events or clickbait._
|
| Then we scroll down a bit and see that, in fact, they are not
| taking a fresh, objective look at issues, but are strongly
| committed to one side of the culture war, the progressive left:
|
| "We believe in journalism that denounces false equivalence, one
| that can explicitly say Black Lives Matter"
|
| "We strive for our journalism to be one of key making, not gate
| keeping, and we won't shy away from stories that tackle racism,
| sexism, and classism head on."
|
| "We're a small group that operates as a collective rather than
| hierarchical team."
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKv1Mixv0Hk
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Just clicking randomly shows a (to me) unexpectedly low age for
| first sex. If I understand right, the people in here were born in
| 1984, so they are younger than me (late Gen-X), and i keep
| hearing that Millennials are having less sex than all previous
| generations, but these numbers look on the young side. Sampling
| 11 across cohorts I got a median of 15, which is lower than I
| found for one all-generations measure I found[1]
|
| [edit]
|
| Finally got to the end where I can sort by various metrics and
| found a median of 17/16/15 for low/medium/high ACEs score, which
| is slightly closer to what I expected.
|
| Also reading the "millennials are having less sex" articles, they
| mostly focus on people born in the early '90s, so the tail-end of
| millennials.
|
| 1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1802108/
| michaelt wrote:
| _> i keep hearing that Millennials are having less sex than all
| previous generations_
|
| This article is about a longitudinal study; it follows "Alex"
| who was age 13 in 1997, i.e. born in 1984.
|
| US teen birth rates have been falling a lot - 61 births per
| 1000 in 1991 fell to ~48 births per 1000 in 2002 (When Alex
| would have been 18) and continued falling to just 13.9 births
| per 1000 today according to
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/259518/birth-rate-among-...
|
| You have probably heard reports that _teenagers_ are having
| less sex today. The teen birth rate would seem to clearly show
| that. But "millenials" aren't teenagers any more, they're
| 30-40 year olds.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Might be poor reporting, but it's not hard to find headlines
| like: _Why millennials are having less sex than generation
| Xers_ [1]
|
| 1: https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/02/health/millennials-less-
| sex-t...
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| That is an 8 year old article. Nearly half a generation
| ago. That article would how he comparing generation Z to
| older generations (assuming the focus was still on the
| average 20 something year old).
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| The article refers specifically to people aged 20-24 in
| 2016, but the headline just says "Millennials".
|
| I, a millennial, was 30 by then.
|
| My younger brother, a millennial, was only 23.
|
| Millennials are people who were born between 1981 and
| _1996_. Some millennials were having sex when other
| millennials were toddlers. I would call it poor reporting
| to call out a 15-year wide cohort when the research being
| reported spans a narrow 4 of those years.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| Why are some statistics awkwardly phrased in terms of "per
| 1000", "per 10k", "per 100k", etc. when we have a perfectly
| good shorthand for that?
|
| 13.9 per 1000 is 1.39%.
|
| Just to be clear, this is not directed at parent, because it
| is phrased that way on the web page they cited. I'm just
| hoping someone here has the answer.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I remember reading somewhere that people, on average,
| understand integer ratios better than they understand
| percentages. As in you you write 283 out of 10,000 vs.
| 2.83% and then ask comprehension questions the former shows
| much better comprehension.
|
| As a side note, I have personally encountered large number
| of adults who are unable to restate a percentage as a
| fraction, and even the idea that a percentage represents a
| fractional value is foreign to them.
| karaterobot wrote:
| It's self-reported, and if someone's going to lie about this,
| it's more likely they'll give a younger age than an older age
| than reality.
| zbentley wrote:
| Why?
| twelvechairs wrote:
| The animation is dominating the narrarive rather than assisting
| it. I (as many I assume) just want to skim the information and
| find myself stuck waiting for things to load or pathfinding
| algorithms to work. People keep flipping side to side needlessly
| also. Sometimes I'd just prefer flat 2d diagrams.
| jordanpg wrote:
| "Don't feel like scrolling? Watch the video instead!"
|
| Please add a TL;DR here as well. Some of us _never_ want to watch
| the video instead.
| davidcollantes wrote:
| Everything can't have a TL;DR. Well, it can, but it loses the
| essence, the meaning. I saw the animations, I read the text, I
| interacted with the page, and felt touched. I understood the
| message the author is trying to convey. I liked the execution.
|
| Just as you, I don't like (much) watching videos.
| jordanpg wrote:
| Fair enough. I think I was just reacting to the "watch the
| video" suggestion which is a continuous source of irritation
| to me especially in the complicated video game word (e.g.,
| Paradox games).
| elil17 wrote:
| Anyone else notice how those with the most adverse experiences
| were both more likely to be depressed and more likely to be happy
| "all of the time" for the past month?
|
| Is this a flaw in the data? What is the causal explanation for
| this?
| ch33zer wrote:
| When you see a friend or family member shot/experience drug
| use/other awful things maybe you stop taking for granted the
| things you have.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| it's self reported data so it's not super reliable
|
| It could be people with more adverse experiences are less
| likely to take care in answering survey questions
| markwj wrote:
| Challenges with emotional regulation was my first thought.
|
| I imagine children who grow up in stable environments can
| better regulate their mood as they can return to a caring
| parent who will soothe them when they're emotionally
| dysregulated, compared to those in instable environments.
|
| This might lead to the highs being higher and the lows being
| lower, a stretching of the bell curve.
| imzadi wrote:
| I noticed that the no adverse group had very few people who
| said they were happy most of the time. I think this could come
| down to the weight of debt and maintaining a "stable"
| lifestyle. The more adverse effect group is probably generally
| lower income and less likely to have a lot of debt.
| drawkward wrote:
| Maybe high achievers can never get enough...whatever...to be
| content, and will always seek to define themselves not by
| looking at what they have, but by looking at what they don't
| have (yet).
| visarga wrote:
| Apparently GPA distribution is less affected by adverse
| experiences. So doing college admissions based on GPA sounds more
| fair than affirmative action. Some people from disadvantaged
| groups also say they would rather be admitted on merit alone
| because it is more reliable in the long run, but they don't get
| this choice.
| yonaguska wrote:
| Problem is, GPA is incredibly subjective across different
| schools, hence the need for standardized testing. Do you rank
| someone that has a 3.5 at a boarding school where they were
| taking college level math classes at Princeton as less
| qualified than someone that has a 4.0 at a school where half
| the students aren't literate?
| drawkward wrote:
| Agree. The place I went to HS had a 4.0 grading scale. There
| was no other high school in my town. Several towns over,
| their school district decided that AP classes should get
| weighted grades, putting me at a comparative disadvantage
| within the same curriculum.
| aestetix wrote:
| I watched the video. Maybe I am not understanding the visuals,
| but it looked like the narrator's conclusions do not actually
| match the data. He is trying to make an argument that poor kids
| need extra help or they will have a rough life. But the data
| seems to show that over the last 20 years, people from all
| background types are likely to experience bad things.
|
| Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11,
| various wars, and other things. So I'm not really sure if I can
| take anything away from the video.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Yeah I saw the same thing in the shape of what was presented.
| The proportions are roughly the same in the visualization, it's
| just that most people had some or many adverse experiences. But
| what I see is that in my generation your home life didn't
| matter as much. I agree that we need to move as many kids as
| possible out of the "adverse experiences" category but I don't
| think this data supports that.
|
| The last 20 years have been really really awful for everyone I
| went to school with.
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _The proportions are roughly the same in the visualization_
|
| They're not, though? E.g.,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKv1Mixv0Hk&t=278s -- note
| that the final bar is also _shorter_ , so really you need to
| elongate it a bit in your mind (and compress the bar above
| it): the proportion of the "many adverse experiences" group
| is definite greater than the other two. (I wish they'd've
| just labelled the %'age on the screen, made the bar lengths
| equal -- I have a lot of issues with the data visualization
| here, but none severe enough that they defeat the core point
| of the video.)
|
| Edit: okay, I've counted the miniature people on this chart.
| For this specific example, they are: no adverse exp.: 7 aff,
| 109 total; some adversity: 16 aff, 239 total; many adverse
| exp.: 24 aff, 152 total. In percentages, that's "No adverse
| experiences" - 6.4% victims of crime, "Some adverse
| experiences" - 6.7% victims of crime, "Many adverse
| experiences" - 15.8%. The last group is more than double the
| other two. (The first two, _in this example_ are equal; but
| the visualization also roughly shows that.)
| Panoramix wrote:
| I'm willing to bet poverty is really what is leading,
| everything else is a spurious correlation. If you're poor
| you probably live in a more dangerous area, are in a
| significantly worse situation to study, need money right
| now so need to get a job asap after school - or even during
| school, etc etc. I wish we could easily check this from the
| data.
| deathanatos wrote:
| First, ... I don't think I dig the visualization done. These
| are essentially like bar-pie charts (whatever you call a bar,
| split into segments, each segment representing a % of a whole),
| but many of the "bars" are not of the same length, which makes
| visual comparison of the subsegments tricky.
|
| > _But the data seems to show that over the last 20 years,
| people from all background types are likely to experience bad
| things._
|
| But that adverse backgrounds are _more_ likely to experience
| those things. Take "Happy person in the last month" at 2021
| (the final outcome, essentially): the "many adverse
| experiences" group is unhappier. "General health" is the same.
| "Victim of crime" is the same. I think "Annual income" shows
| the same as the rest, but I think this is also the hardest
| graph to read.
|
| I.e., it's not that people from all backgrounds aren't
| adversely affected by bad things, it's that people from adverse
| childhoods are _disproportionately_ affected.
| rahkiin wrote:
| > whatever you call a bar, split into segments, each segment
| representing a % of a whole
|
| A percentage stacked bar chart
| hedora wrote:
| But it's not that, since the bars are different
| thicknesses, and that changes the horizontal scale of each
| bar. These are some of the hardest to interpret charts I've
| seen in a long time.
|
| The animations are misleading too. When the people run
| around on the page, you can't tell if they're changing
| color or not. It gives the impression that every individual
| in the study ends up being the same color in each scenario,
| which clearly isn't true.
| codexb wrote:
| They even through in a non-sequitur jab at Trump for good
| measure. This is what happens when you use ideology to read and
| interpret data rather than the other way around.
| vlz wrote:
| The following is the full passage. It has Trump's as well as
| other president's (Reagan, Clinton) quotes as evidence for a
| certain kind of responsibility rhetoric. I think it is
| neither non-sequitur nor ideological but judge for yourself:
|
| > It's 2015.
|
| > In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president -
| a man who constantly insults poor people and calls them
| "morons."
|
| > This generation grew up hearing presidents say similar
| things. Ronald Reagan said people go hungry because of "a
| lack of knowledge," and that people are homeless "by choice."
| Bill Clinton said "personal responsibility" is the way to
| overcome poverty. We grew up in a country where most people
| believed the top reason for poverty was drug abuse, and half
| of Americans blamed poor people for being poor.
|
| (The article has links to the quotes.)
| jtriangle wrote:
| Also, weirdly, it seems that the years following Trump's
| election, the people in the group did better, made more
| money, etc. So I'm not clear on how presidents being
| demeaning to people is relevant. That's not to say it's
| alright for them to do so, just, seems like a strange
| interjection when everything else is talking about the data
| itself.
| rlt wrote:
| > Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11,
| various wars, and other things.
|
| Those are awful things, but I suspect they don't affect kids in
| the same way that poverty and violence does.
| moralestapia wrote:
| (as others have said countless times)
|
| Poverty fucks people up like no other thing, sometimes for
| life.
| swatcoder wrote:
| FWIW, and as someone who's been through it, that's a really
| disempowering belief for people who have already
| experienced it or who are currently living through it.
|
| Life involves _many_ profound challenges, most of which are
| unfairly distributed. Learning to overcome the challenges
| that one faces and turn them into novel opportunities and
| perspectives is the constructive way of looking at it.
|
| There are enough of these challenges that we as a society
| don't need to encourage them and can work to eradicate or
| minimize many, but this fatalist view (as indeed gets said
| countless times) doesn't help the people who already faced
| it or who will in the coming decades.
|
| And of course, this is not just limited to poverty.
| organsnyder wrote:
| > There are enough of these challenges that we as a
| society don't need to encourage them and can work to
| eradicate or minimize many, but this fatalist view (as
| indeed gets said countless times) doesn't help the people
| who already faced it or who will in the coming decades.
|
| At an individual level, a fatalist view is definitely
| incredibly harmful. But at that doesn't mean we shouldn't
| work to counter it at a systemic level.
| swatcoder wrote:
| That's exactly what's said in what you quoted, even so
| far as putting the emphasis on societal effort by
| mentioning it first, so clearly I don't disagree :)
| organsnyder wrote:
| While it wasn't your intent, this argument is often used
| to shut down discussions of how we can improve social
| programs.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I've been through it as well, not as in severe poverty,
| but definitely to the degree where what you can do in
| life is very limited and ...
|
| >that's a really disempowering belief
|
| ... for me at least, it had the complete opposite effect.
| When you're young and particularly a teenager, you want
| to do as much cool things as possible (not just fun, but
| also things like profiling yourself to end up in a good
| career, make money, etc), plenty of times this does not
| happen if you're not privileged enough, and then most of
| the time people blame this on themselves, maybe I wasn't
| that smart, maybe I wasn't that disciplined, blah blah.
|
| Sometimes _" you just didn't have enough money"_ is an
| acceptable answer, it takes the blame out of yourself and
| it gives you an objective to pursue. Note: this last
| phrase could definitely be misinterpreted and strawman-ed
| to death, so I'll clarify on both points:
|
| * It takes the blame out of yourself ... _in a healthy
| way_ ; most likely you are just good enough or are as
| good as all the other people that are already doing what
| you want to do. Money could well be the only limiting
| factor and, if this happens to be the case, you're
| actually lucky in the sense that is much easier to "just
| get some money" than to actually nurture and develop an
| ability that you don't have.
|
| * It gives you a (clear and focused) objective to pursue.
| Money is not everything but once you identify this as the
| limiting factor in your life, you can become laser-
| focused on acquiring said wealth and things just get
| easier down the road. Anecdote from me: I was once a
| plane trip short (out of money) from enrolling on a nice
| PhD in a different country than mine; that, of course,
| got me very frustrated and sad, but after that my only
| purpose for a short while was to make money, I went on to
| work and live frugally (by choice!) and after a year I
| had saved up a significant wad of cash, this put me in a
| position where I could not only afford the plane ticket
| towards any PhD program I wanted, but also afford at
| least 6-8 months of life anywhere I wanted in the world,
| so I could just go to places and explore and make a
| decision about that when I was comfortable about it. Also
| that small cycle of "set up goal", "work towards it",
| "execute", gave a lot of meaning to my life at the time
| and it's a framework that is _very_ useful to master
| going forward in life.
| swatcoder wrote:
| I appreciate your perspective! But learning to recognize
| that not all lives can find a path to the same place and
| that you should stay focused on your own opportunities
| and wellness, seems a far cry from internalizing that
| "poverty fucks you up".
|
| In fact, I'd say it's almost the opposite. You don't
| sound fucked by poverty, honestly. You seem more grounded
| and capable than many people who had far more privileges,
| and it sounds like your experiences ended up playing a
| positive contribution to that even if you wouldn't want
| to inflict those experiences on anyone else.
| dionidium wrote:
| It actually seems like it's _the behaviors of other poor
| people_ , which those in poverty cannot escape, that "fucks
| people up." It's not privation. It's proximity to violence
| and abuse (both of which are highly correlated with --
| note: not demonstrated to be _caused by_ -- poverty).
| cm2012 wrote:
| There's a pretty good, evidence backed system of childhood
| suffering, its an adverse childhood experience score. And yep
| its all about personal experiences.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| yeah agree.
|
| I feel bad for Alex but it seemed like a pretty impressive
| percentage of people with very adverse childhoods ended up
| being happy. The graph didn't make it seem like his outcome was
| typical.
|
| It also looked like the claimed racial disparity wasn't very
| pronounced?
|
| Maybe the visualizations are just bad.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| Agreed, the visualizations don't sell the story.
|
| If you actually take the percentage, it's like 30-50% more
| likely to have the worse outcome the worse your adverse
| background gets.
|
| But on the chart, it's only like an extra line of kids. The
| absolute number increases don't look like much, but the
| percentage increase is very high. I think the authors could
| have done a much better job at highlighting that.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| > If you actually take the percentage, it's like 30-50% more
| likely to have the worse outcome the worse your adverse
| background gets.
|
| I realize that this is a taboo subject, but how much of that
| is nature and how much is nurture?
|
| Low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes, and it's not
| exactly a problem you can fix by throwing money and resources
| at it.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Better environments produce a population with a higher IQ.
| underlogic wrote:
| Maybe but you can't teach a Labrador algebra no matter
| how many treats you feed it. These are aggregate effects
| of low IQ genetic traits as they play out over
| generations in our capitalist society. The trauma is a
| consequence of poverty and bad parenting which is because
| of low IQ. And don't call me racist. Ask why there was no
| IQ test line up amongst all that visualized data
| danans wrote:
| > The trauma is a consequence of poverty and bad
| parenting which is because of low IQ
|
| You have the primary direction of causality between
| trauma and IQ reversed. https://scholar.google.com/schola
| r?q=childhood+trauma+and+IQ...
|
| Population scale trauma exposure and bad parenting is a
| result of poverty, social structures, and sometimes wars
| and conflicts, not something predetermined by genetics.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| The IQs of adopted children have next to nothing to do
| with their environments, and much more to do with the IQs
| of their birth parents. IQ in general is very strongly
| heritable. There are several adoption and twin studies
| that have demonstrated this effect, e.g.:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8513766/
| danans wrote:
| Trauma (physical and emotional) causing reduction in IQ
| is totally compatible with IQ being in part heritable.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| It's also compatible with low IQ causing poverty and bad
| parenting.
| the_sleaze9 wrote:
| Do you have a source for the claim "Low IQ is associated
| with worse life outcomes"? I've never seen one.
|
| In fact it is EQ - emotional intelligence - and not IQ that
| predicts positive life outcomes most strongly.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| For earnings: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1
| /36853322/Ben_Pal...
|
| Among many others.
|
| Even in health and longevity: https://journals.sagepub.co
| m/doi/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.01...
|
| Besides, low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes
| even if, as you say, low EQ is most strongly associated
| with the same. They're not mutually exclusive.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| This is the exact question that this research tries to
| portray from a data perspective.
|
| The narrative is trying to make a claim that nurture is
| significant.
|
| The stats of this research essentially says "slicing the
| data in a way that highlights differing qualities of
| nurture shows that nurture has an impact".
|
| But it crucially doesn't isolate nurture from nature (which
| is admittedly very difficult). It doesn't show if the
| nature side (IQ in this instance) has significant overlaps
| with the nurture or not.
|
| So ultimately we are left guessing.
|
| I bet if you did, you would see that IQ indeed is also
| significant, and the narrative can tell a different story.
| That's the thing about stats and narratives. They tell a
| story and leave a bunch of stuff out, so you have to
| evaluate it yourself.
|
| My takeaway is that nurture may play a role, but is not the
| only thing that determines outcome. Eyeballing the end
| results, being in the worst category of nurture makes the
| odds worse for you, not 90/10 worse, but probably closer to
| 65/35.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| > Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11,
| various wars, and other things.
|
| This might be a side trail, but you can find at least as much
| awful - probably quite a bit _more_ - in any previous 20 year
| period. (Iraq War? How about two world wars? Financial
| crisis... Great Depression? 9 /11 and fear of terrorists? Cold
| war and fear of global annihilation? etc)
| schnable wrote:
| Bingo. The time period of this study is pretty much the
| golden age of peace and stability worldwide.
| moduspol wrote:
| That's kind of my takeaway. Nearly all of the visualizations
| did not show substantial differences between the groups. I was
| always surprised at how many kids with high numbers of adverse
| events were in the top group, and vice versa.
|
| I feel like it also doesn't draw enough attention to perhaps
| one of the biggest factors: marriage, and its effect on one's
| choices.
|
| It's quite possible I'm seeing a bunch of housewives with no
| income that had no adverse experiences, and they're making it
| look like adverse events aren't as impactful as they otherwise
| would be. Or maybe the data references household income, but
| then I'm looking at visualizations of little people that are
| more realistically representing a person AND whoever they're
| married to.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Kind of cool, but the conclusion was completely backwards.
|
| The final line of the study was "So he is our collective
| responsibility. They all are.", but the entire study was about
| how the home environment affects your outcomes. I guess their
| conclusion is that if an individual does a bad job raising their
| kids, it is societies fault.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I think the idea is that "only support your family" harms
| everyone. The example, Alex, has 2 kids, works manual labor to
| earn poverty wages, and is depressed. Which one of the types of
| teen do you think his kids will be?
|
| The common refrain is "then he shouldn't have had kids" but
| unless you're going to create an authoritarian state people
| will always have kids (and restricting kids went awfully for
| China anyway).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think social and individual expectations are a big part of
| this. Why is Alex depressed? If they had 20k more a year,
| would they be happier, or just 2 steps ahead on and empty
| hedonistic treadmill. Alex now has a new mustang, but is
| still depressed and fails as a parent.
|
| I think it would be interesting to see the relative impact of
| a 2 parent + low risk home vs income, and I think there is a
| lot lost when people assume every variable reduces to income.
|
| What about Alex when they have low income, but a healthy home
| life? What about Alex when they have higher income, but a
| shit home life?
| nvy wrote:
| Money actually does buy happiness, despite what the wealthy
| would like you to believe.
|
| It is very likely that yes, he would in fact be happier
| with an extra 20k a year.
|
| You don't know he'd have a new mustang; that's just you
| projecting. He might put the extra 20k a year into savings
| for his kid's education - I know that feeling like I'm
| setting my kids up for future success makes me happy.
| dmoy wrote:
| Money buys happiness, up to a point. It's like a pretty
| linear increase in happiness to some spot somewhere above
| median income (I forget, something like 1.5x median
| income). After that, it has very little impact on
| happiness, if at all.
|
| Supposedly, based on some studies.
| Jaygles wrote:
| Another way to view it is to say poverty buys misery
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Money _can_ buy happiness, but it isn 't a guarantee, and
| isn't necessarily the most important factor.
|
| Kill Alex's parents, and rape them as a child, addict
| them to meth, and 20k wont fix that.
|
| This article and data is in desperate need of a Analysis
| of variance for the different factors.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > Money actually does buy happiness, despite what the
| wealthy would like you to believe.
|
| Individual happiness and being a good parent (which
| contributes to breaking the cycle) don't necessarily
| intersect as much as you think, or at least it's based on
| the individual.
|
| Some people's happiness is only marginally related to how
| well their kids are doing (as evident by rise in single-
| parent households), so the 20k may contribute essentially
| 0 to the long term solution.
|
| > You don't know he'd have a new mustang; that's just you
| projecting.
|
| If I don't know, then you don't know either. You're
| taking the other good extreme and presenting is at fact.
| The reality is somewhere in the middle.
| nvy wrote:
| It's like you didn't read anything I wrote, and then
| built your own straw man to argue with.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm not sure who you know that makes $40k and has a foot on
| a "hedonistic treadmill"
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Most everyone I know, of all incomes, are on some form of
| hedonistic treadmill.
|
| Sometimes it is one beer and cigarette to the next,
| sometimes it's one sailboat and handbag to the next.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| There are plenty of pre-industrialized peoples that
| smoked tobacco, drank alcohol, and did drugs
| recreationally. Were they too on hedonistic treadmills?
|
| It's funny how Americans love to brag about how they have
| the freedom to do whatever and pay less tax, but then
| turn around and treat their poor like fools if they live
| in any way that doesn't resemble soviet-era russia.
|
| This is the same thing boomers do when they tell
| millennials to stop eating avocado toast to pay their
| school loans.
| antisthenes wrote:
| You can certainly go into debt to get your foot onto that
| treadmill. You can live with your parents and spend the
| entire $40k on entertainment. The exact figure of the
| income barely matters. FOMO and consumerist culture
| almost ensures that everyone is participating.
|
| The companies are certainly happy to take your money,
| regardless of how hard it will be to pay back.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Convincing people that their problems are outside of their
| control and that the only way to solve them is to vote a
| certain way is also a form of authoritarianism. If you aren't
| to blame for your own life that implies you have no control
| over it.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Statistically most people born into poverty stay there. Do
| you think most of them aren't trying? Conversely, do you
| thing most people born wealthy have to put as much effort
| into staying wealthy?
|
| There are a number of systemic barriers, one of the big
| ones mentioned in this demonstration is education.
|
| If we had equal baseline access to education, housing,
| healthcare, and food... then sure, if people stayed
| impoverished I might begin to agree with you.
|
| We're not even close in our current state so "you're in
| control of your own life" is a completely ignorant
| argument.
| ericmcer wrote:
| The system is obviously not fair but individuals are
| still responsible for how they play their hand.
|
| You really think it is ignorant to believe you have
| control over your life? What do you do just lay on the
| floor and wait for things to wash over you?
| vundercind wrote:
| There should be an Internet law for the phenomenon of
| taking systemic or statistical analyses personally and
| then dismissing them on that basis. It's _so_ common and
| always just results in a mess of people commenting past
| each other.
|
| That it's possible to work one's way out of poverty or to
| maintain a healthy weight through willpower or what have
| you is simply _irrelevant_ when talking policy. Its only
| possible role is to dismiss the problem or discourage
| action. The reverse is also true: that a system could
| hypothetically make it easier for one to succeed is
| irrelevant _to the individual_ who's trying to decide
| what to do to improve their life in the system that
| _currently exists_.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I guess all those guys that lost to Lance Armstrong over
| the years should have played their hands better? Being
| born wealthy is essentially economic doping.
|
| I feel like when people start talking about money like
| this they're being intentionally illogical.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >Statistically most people born into poverty stay there.
|
| That simply isn't true. Look at the data on economic
| mobility, and the vast majority of people born in the
| bottom 20% leave the bottom 20%.
|
| Outcomes obviously aren't random, but are far from
| deterministic.
|
| For example, this article puts the number at 63% leaving
| the bottom 20%. 80% would require that there are no
| impacts whatsoever from every factor correlated with
| poverty
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/upward-mobility-income-
| quintile...
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| That data is paywalled, but I've got some conflicting
| sources:
|
| > Rates of relative intergenerational mobility in the
| U.S. appear to have been flat for decades
|
| > Most Americans born in 1940 ended up better off, in
| real terms, than their parents at the same age. Only half
| of those of those born in 1980 have surpassed their
| parent's family income
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/articles/raj-chetty-
| in-14-charts-b...
|
| Also worth mentioning that the mean income for the second
| quintile is only ~$40k -- it's still ~$30k off from the
| middle quintile... so we're not talking anything close to
| the american dream here either way. We're talking
| multiple generations _at best_ for a small percentage of
| the lower quintile to reach the middle.
| lawrenci wrote:
| Saying that problems are completely outside of someone's
| control or completely their own fault is a false dichotomy.
| Reality is usually somewhere in the middle, especially in
| studies like this one on teenagers. Everyone's situation is
| shaped by a mix of personal choices and the world around
| them. It's not just about blaming people or the system;
| it's about seeing how both play a role. Voting is one way
| to make a difference, but it's not the only way--people
| have a lot of ways to shape their lives.
| sophacles wrote:
| Basic, simple logic, says not all of someones problems are
| in their control either.
| cardanome wrote:
| > Convincing people that their problems are outside of
| their control and that the only way to solve them is to
| vote a certain way is also a form of authoritarianism
|
| Yes, systemic poverty can only be solved politically. That
| is just the nature of a systemic problem. I am pretty sure
| encouraging people to be active in the political process of
| which voting is a small but important part is the opposite
| of authoritarianism.
|
| > If you aren't to blame for your own life that implies you
| have no control over it.
|
| Yes. Bitter pill to swallow but that is the reality. We are
| mostly defined by nature and nurture and we can't choose
| with which genetics we are born with or our upbringing and
| if we will have adverse childhood experiences.
|
| The circle of influence most people have over their own
| life is very tiny, especially the lower they are on the
| ladder.
|
| The ideology of personal responsibility is propagated to
| justify the current status quo and block political change
| that would help poor people.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I would say that the circle of influence people have is
| by far the most impactful on their happiness and that of
| their family. The individual choice to try meth or not
| will vastly outweigh any genetic or environmental factor
| on personal outcome. Beating ones children is much more
| influential than your socioeconomic class.
|
| No a mount of political action can compensate for
| dissolution of individual responsibilities.
|
| Ideally, they are complementary, but they can easily be
| antagonists.
|
| Teach a generation of juveniles that they have no agency,
| and their individual efforts and work, and they will
| never succeed.
| cardanome wrote:
| > I would say that the circle of influence people have is
| by far the most impactful on their happiness and that of
| their family.
|
| This is factually wrong. Otherwise there wouldn't be such
| a strong correlation between socioeconomic class and
| later success in life.
|
| > The individual choice to try meth or not will vastly
| outweigh any genetic or environmental factor on personal
| outcome.
|
| Drug use and poverty wouldn't be so strongly linked if
| that were a free choice.
|
| Maybe you should tell all the drug addicts to just not do
| drugs. Problem solved.
|
| Are you telling people with depression to "just snap out
| of it" as well? Drug addiction is a serious medical
| illness. It requires a whole support network of people to
| cure in most cases.
|
| > Teach a generation of juveniles that they have no
| agency, and their individual efforts and work, and they
| will never succeed.
|
| You empower them by teaching them that it a systemic
| issue, that it is NOT their fault. That they can organize
| together and lift each other up. Individuals are weak,
| groups are strong.
|
| Individual responsibility only works for the rich.
| Collective responsibility is what breaks the cycle of
| violence of poverty. It takes a village to raise a kid
| after all.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| You may see correlations between socioeconomic class, but
| they are still by far weaker than correlations with
| Individual behavior and choice, which is my point.
|
| Telling someone not to be born poor isn't actionable
| advice. Telling them their chance of success is 1000%
| better if they don't do drugs IS actionable advice.
| Telling them to live in misery and wait for the
| collective to solve a social problem in decades isn't
| actionable or useful advice either.
|
| >You empower them by teaching them that it a systemic
| issue, that it is NOT their fault.
|
| It is a big difference between a higher statistical risk
| factor isn't your fault, and telling them their choices
| and behavior have no impact.
|
| Individual responsibility and effort is the foundation of
| collective responsibility. You can't have collective
| action with personal action. It isn't one or the other.
| The boat won't move if there is individual responsibility
| to paddle.
| cardanome wrote:
| Everyone and their dog knows not to do drugs. Still
| people do. This is not actionable advice.
|
| Knowing about the effects of poverty means knowing more
| about yourself. Understanding yourself leads to being
| able to take more effective actions increasing the
| control you have over your life.
|
| You seem to think it is about victim mindset vs whatever
| you toxic middle-class self help "individual
| responsibility" thing is. Real change can only happen
| once you understand and accept yourself, including being
| a victim of circumstance and birth. After that there can
| there be healing and proper action.
|
| > Telling them to live in misery and wait for the
| collective to solve a social problem in decades isn't
| actionable or useful advice either.
|
| That is not the point. The point is for them to educate
| themselves on the issues they are facing, to politically
| organize, to organize in the neighborhood, to help each
| other out and ideally become leaders and role-models in
| their community. It starts with seeking help and
| community, not trying to lift yourself up by your
| bootstraps which often is not realistic.
|
| > Individual responsibility and effort is the foundation
| of collective responsibility. You can't have collective
| action with personal action. It isn't one or the other.
| The boat won't move if there is individual responsibility
| to paddle.
|
| Yes, obviously collective responsibility includes a form
| of individual responsibility. They only work together
| when your are poor.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Being born into a situation where your problems are minor
| is a great way to be ignorant of how systemic issues affect
| people.
|
| If a child shows up to school every day unfed for breakfast
| and without lunch money, right-wing states have decided
| that somehow their kid not having food is a motivational
| issue for the parent. And their solution for when a
| distracted, hungry student is unable to focus in class is
| to bring back corporal punishment and post religious texts
| in classrooms.
|
| If it were merely a motivational issue for parents, then
| the child would already be fed. The political situation
| that made the most sense for the school district in which I
| grew up, which is a bright red area that is also a public
| education stronghold, was to dip into the budget to ensure
| that all kids got breakfast and lunch if they wanted it.
| That way it can't be framed as a political issue.
|
| The issue was never about the benefit, it was about the
| race and class of people who received it.
|
| Same thing with work. We have age-based workplace
| discrimination laws precisely because a class of workers
| who are over the age of 50 have been discriminated against
| due to their age and in lieu of other concerns. Those
| problems are outside of their control. Most people with 20+
| year careers are unemployed for reasons that have nothing
| to do with performance, and they can't help what age they
| are.
|
| This isn't authoritarianism. It's basic common sense.
| jf22 wrote:
| The point is that, as a society, we should do more to help kids
| who are having a rough time.
|
| Another point is that if you're not thriving as an adult, it
| could be because of the experiences you had when you were a
| kid.
| anon291 wrote:
| I honestly think that the sorts of experiences that break
| kids are things like parents breaking up, not 'not having the
| newest toy' or 'not going on vacation'. In the sense that
| material poverty can cause family stress, I completely agree.
| I fully support programs to feed kids, provide medical
| insurance, etc. I even support it for adults. I'm just not
| sure how any of that at the end of the day is going to fix
| daddy cheating. Unless you're suggesting a crackdown on
| prostitution and/or making adultery a crime again (in which
| case sure! as a social conservative, I'm down)... but good
| luck getting that passed today!
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I guess I can see this conclusion if you start from a position
| that all families are nothing but isolated, self-interested
| atoms in the world. Rather than, you know, a part of society!
| lagniappe wrote:
| The take-home for me was that as parents, or future parents,
| here are some things we can do to make the child have a greater
| chance at success. None of these are doorways to success, but
| they make it easier for success to happen with those conditions
| present, as well as the inverse.
| gnramires wrote:
| I think the core message is that a child's life is strongly
| determined by his family life/environment, it's not just a
| personal choice to succeed or to fail.
|
| So if we want people to have better outcomes, we need to help
| better family lives/environments (and lives in general) to
| break the cycle, and not just give them basic education. Also,
| the family is just a group of individuals that probably
| themselves have come from poor conditions: this means there's
| hope of breaking the cycle.
| renlo wrote:
| Where in the data does it indicate that it's possible to
| "break the cycle"?
| gnramires wrote:
| It shows that family/environment influences life outcomes
| (it should be obvious); it's not conclusive (in
| establishing causation), it does show a correlation. I
| really think it's almost obvious this is true, but it's
| important reinforcing with data nonetheless.
|
| So you can break (or weaken) the cycle if you improve those
| conditions, and this improvement propagates.
| renlo wrote:
| > It shows that family/environment influences life
| outcomes
|
| Not to nitpick but this statement implies causation
| (family environment causes life outcome) which you
| contradict right after.
|
| Sorry to sound obtuse, but, I asked because it may seem
| obvious to you, but it's not so obvious to me that there
| will be much improvement. I've seen data that indicates
| that outcomes are not changed (much) when those early
| interventions / "investments" are made. There is _an_
| improvement, but not to the level people expect. Like a
| person's height, access to high quality food will only do
| so much; some people are just going to have short stature
| however much money you invest into making sure they have
| access to nutritious meals.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| In the presentation it talked about college, even a short
| amount, can give better outcomes.
|
| But the presentation was more of an overview of the issue,
| and I don't think it's fair to argue that, because it
| doesn't go deeply into every data point, that it's not
| valid. It more about bring awareness to the issues, and
| grounds for further research.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| There is a difference between fault and responsibility
| burkaman wrote:
| Responsibility doesn't imply fault. For example we all have a
| collective responsibility to protect and improve our
| environment, even though none of us created it and none of us
| caused any of its problems.
| SuperHeavy256 wrote:
| I think the conclusion is: Think about how you can help in
| reducing this problem
| zaphar wrote:
| If a society has a trend line of poor home environments then I
| think the society is in some sense at fault for fostering poor
| home environments. This doesn't and shouldn't take away from
| the individual's responsibility for raising kids.
|
| But home environments exist in a specific social context that
| effect how people think they _should_ foster a good home
| environment. We 've lost a lot of societal knowledge and
| experience around good family structures since probably the
| 60s. As a society we have definitely encouraged, especially the
| lower income bands, to outsource it to schools and
| institutions. That is going to have an effect.
| sojsurf wrote:
| Under President Johnson, government funding began to
| incentivize single (predominantly black) mothers not to marry
| the father of their children. IMO this had disastrous effects
| on our urban centers. Before the social welfare solutions of
| the Johnson era, 25% of black children were born without two
| parents. Now the number is nearly 75%, and the effect on
| young men has been tragic, in a way that affects the whole
| community.
| csours wrote:
| In health care, sometimes we help the body fix the problem, and
| sometimes we "just" treat symptoms.
|
| It's ... probably not a good idea for the government to try to
| fix families. Any interventions must be very carefully
| considered.
|
| But some of the symptoms can be helped out relatively easily.
|
| ---
|
| I also think the author(s) may have a different perspective on
| responsibility, fault, and blame. I feel like blame is
| something that our minds do for us so we can stop thinking
| about a problem - to fix things you have to look past the
| blame.
| koolba wrote:
| > It's ... probably not a good idea for the government to try
| to fix families. Any interventions must be very carefully
| considered.
|
| The government has been actively working to _break_ families
| for years through economic policies that encourage single
| mothers to raise children on their own:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biggest-root-cause-of-
| crime...
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| I don't think that "fault", which I take as implying _blame_ ,
| had anything to do with the presentation. I interpreted it as
| very neutral in that respect. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it?
|
| I do think it touches on how everyone is exposed to adverse
| outcomes, whatever category they are in. And I agree that it's
| a collective responsibility, although the presentation does a
| poor job of arguing the "collective responsibility" point.
| dionidium wrote:
| It also begs the question of nature vs. nurture. If researchers
| won't take this seriously, then nobody should take their
| findings seriously. It's almost impossible to untangle,
| "single-fatherhood leads to bad outcomes because kids need a
| father figure in the house" from, "single-fatherhood leads to
| worse outcomes because the type of person who would abandon
| their children is likely more impulsive and less conscientious
| than average and those traits are _heritable_. "
| jonahx wrote:
| Fair point in theory and I'm not familiar with the
| literature, but I'd guess at least some researchers have
| studied ways of controlling for this: eg, looking at cases
| where father dies early and mother does not remarry, single
| mothers who adopt or do artificial insemination, etc.
| dionidium wrote:
| Yes, my (limited) understanding of the literature is that
| this is exactly what they do. You don't see the same
| single-fatherhood effects when looking at the children of
| widows, for example.
| qwery wrote:
| Maybe you missed some of the bits in the middle? Like how
| education is a greater boon to the people who can't afford it
| and that the cost of it has increased over time.
| anon291 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm tired of being told that it's all our responsibility,
| but we get none of the agency. My mother was a teacher in the
| inner city. There were kids our whole family fell in love with,
| and frankly, my mother knew what was best for them, and for a
| few would have been willing to even take them in. But, alas,
| they had to go home to their abusive parent. I am in no way
| advocating for forced separation, but it's hard to experience
| these things first hand and then be told it's all our
| responsibility.
|
| I mean.. I agree that we are responsible for each other.
| However, for other things in life I'm responsible for, like my
| car, my property, and even my government, I am given a direct
| say. Imagine if you were forced to take responsibility for a
| car, except you were never allowed to drive it and it was made
| freely available to every teenage boy at the local high school.
| What responsibility could you possible have? What does it even
| mean to say you're responsible for something you have no
| control over?
|
| A good priest once told me in confession when I confessed
| feeling upset that I couldn't help the homeless, the destitute,
| etc, and he properly identified the problem was that there's
| only one Saviour and I'm not him. And I feel that sagacious
| advice is applicable here. What are we possibly to do in this
| situation other than the unthinkable?
|
| Previous progressive movements have indeed advocated for the
| removal of children in bad environments, and indeed many of
| these 'worked', but they're highly criticized (rightly, I
| guess) today.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| >>> He'll be bullied at school. He'll be held back a few grades.
| He won't go to college.
|
| I dont even know where to start with this.
|
| 1. The whole anti bullying campaign that we now have two and a
| half decades of in schools has backfired spectacularly. This
| feels like "well DARE didn't work, we need to put this money
| somewhere else". We tell kids dont bully people, but if you
| defend yourself in a fight everyone gets suspended because of
| zero tolerance... it is obscene.
|
| 2. College? Really? We stripped schools of anything that was
| vocational, or practical. What happened to shop and home
| economics... and the computer labs that got many of us started
| are long gone. Meanwhile we're short on plumbers, welders and all
| sorts of middle skill jobs...
|
| Note: that there are now middle skill jobs (trained professionals
| but not college) that not only make more than those with degrees,
| they will do better over the course of their life because they
| dont have massive debt.
|
| Alex has a shitty home life, but we under fund public schools and
| then rob kids for college (and we dont need more college grads).
| throwway120385 wrote:
| > We stripped schools of anything that was vocational, or
| practical. What happened to shop and home economics... and the
| computer labs that got many of us started are long gone.
| Meanwhile we're short on plumbers, welders and all sorts of
| middle skill jobs...
|
| I completely agree. The hollowing out of the education system
| in response to NCLB and the relentless drive for "data" and
| "standards" is why a lot of people no longer graduate from high
| school with any life skills.
| Qwertious wrote:
| >but if you defend yourself in a fight everyone gets suspended
| because of zero tolerance... it is obscene.
|
| Zero tolerance, in it's current meaning, is stupid. But the
| original concept was great: if _anything_ happens, then you
| respond to it. "Respond to it" including things like sitting
| down and talking about it, without necessarily issuing any
| punishments whatsoever.
| edm0nd wrote:
| Who cares about zero tolerance rules tho, just simply ignore
| them on the parent and adult level. My nephew was getting
| bullied and we told him the kid bullying him was simply just
| mad at his own home life and to ignore him. We also told him
| that if the bully attacked him first, he has 100% the right to
| punch him back.
|
| Well well well, the bully cornered him in the school bathroom
| and attacked him. My nephew punched him in the face. my nephew
| got made into a legend at school and got suspended.
|
| Guess who doesn't get bullied anymore? Violence works.
| ambrose2 wrote:
| You can't say that you can just not care about zero
| tolerance. I was the nephew in a similar story and was
| probably held back from membership in the National Honor
| Society because of the timing of the suspension, worsening my
| college applications.
| riversflow wrote:
| > that there are now middle skill jobs (trained professionals
| but not college) that not only make more than those with
| degrees, they will do better over the course of their life
| because they dont have massive debt.
|
| I don't believe this. My first and second hand experience is
| that sure, there are _some_ people who work blue collar and get
| paid better than $DESKJOB, but those are typically from wealthy
| households that can help them financially so they can ascend to
| owner.
|
| If you are poor and start working in the trades it's the
| _status quo_ to be completely taken advantage of with no real
| opportunities. Expect to end each day beat-up and exhausted,
| with very little energy to take care of yourself. This is the
| poverty trap.
|
| Blue collar is chock full of sociopath owners who actively lie,
| exploit, steal from, and emotionally manipulate their
| employees.
| chaorace wrote:
| I couldn't agree more regarding college education. Speaking as
| a member of the highschool graduating class of 2015, the
| pressure on every single child to go directly into college was
| insane. Even the mere act of telling an adult that you weren't
| interested in college could get you referred to a school
| counselor or called into an impromptu parent-teacher meeting.
| During my senior year, I was personally pulled out of class to
| discuss this topic on _five separate occasions_. I happened to
| be an unusually stubborn kid, but even I eventually caved and
| pre-enrolled at a local college.
|
| Naturally, I almost immediately flunked out of the program. Who
| wouldn't quit something making them miserable when they didn't
| even want to do it in the first place? I was one of the lucky
| ones, actually... Many like-minded cohorts in my graduating
| class wasted years of time and money with nothing to show for
| it. They deserved adults who'd help pair them with the pathways
| that best suited their individual talents and risk tolerances
| -- not some blindly optimistic, cookiecutter college-for-all
| solution.
|
| What about you, dear reader? Perhaps you're responsible for
| teenagers of your own... can you say with certainty that the
| adults in their lives have given them consistently honest and
| thorough conversations about the paths before them? I bet some
| parents would accuse me of being totally full of shit right
| about now... That's fine, I'm not some nostradomus bringing
| news of impending doom -- I only want the next generation to
| have things better than I did. If nothing else, it doesn't hurt
| to entertain the idea, right?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITwNiZ_j_24
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| > but we under fund public schools
|
| Isn't the US in the top of funding per student? I think if
| anything we _over_ fund public schools.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| By what metric?
|
| Teacher Pay?
|
| Class room size?
|
| Hours of education?
|
| We may WASTE more money on students than other countries but
| in these metrics were behind and our below average everything
| makes that apparent.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| Hey! Teacher! Leave the kids alone!
| moralestapia wrote:
| Great site. However, I think there's much more interesting things
| one could visualize from the same dataset.
|
| I'll go out on a limb (these days?) and say that nothing is more
| influential when growing up than what your parents teach you.
| That alone transcends all other negative/positive effects
| considered (health, income, "have you seen someone getting shot",
| ...).
|
| I see the study does account for parents present or not but I
| would've liked to read a similar story in which this is the
| categorical control.
|
| The other one "classic" correlation of interest is race vs. all
| the other variables, but I can understand why they didn't want to
| initiate yet another flamewar.
| Dig1t wrote:
| >But in 2022, the average cost for first-time college students
| living in campus was $36,000 - nearly $10,000 higher than a
| decade prior. It's made college inaccessible for kids who need it
| most.
|
| College kids do not need to live on campus, most people in this
| country live within commuting distance of a community college or
| university. It may not be a top rated university, but it will
| always be one that teaches skills kids need to build a life. You
| do not NEED to pay anywhere near $36,000 for college, and stating
| it as a necessity is misleading. The point that the author misses
| is that the subject, Alex, would have easily qualified for free
| tuition at his local community college or university, and most
| likely a scholarship or grant would have paid his living expenses
| while attending as well, based solely on his economic and ethnic
| background and not his grades. The only missing piece was someone
| to tell him how to do it, or someone to encourage him to do it.
| This is generally what people mean when they say that poor people
| lack the knowledge to get themselves out of poverty.
|
| >Over the last few years, his annual income was around $20,000.
| He has struggled with his weight for much of his adult life, and
| it affects his overall health.
|
| It is worth noting that the poorest in the USA struggle with
| eating too much, not too little. This is at least a silver lining
| that we should not ignore. Many countries in the world, poor
| people are starving.
|
| >In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president - a man
| who constantly insults poor people and calls them "morons."
|
| As part of this paragraph, the author links to an extremely
| partisan article which does not even try to hide its bias. It
| quotes something that Donald Trump said back in a 1999 interview.
| I don't love Trump and wouldn't vote for him, but I think the
| author's point about him is stretched quite a bit and was
| unnecessary for the overall point he's trying to make.
|
| In the end, the main takeaway from this article seems to me to be
| that you can justify any bad decisions or bad outcomes in your
| life by blaming your childhood trauma. With such a worldview how
| can one ever better themselves? It seems such a self-defeating
| way to look at things, if you never blame yourself for your bad
| decisions how can you ever learn how to make better decisions?
|
| I know that if I personally lived my life blaming my childhood
| trauma for problems I've had, that I would still be poor to this
| day.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| This is wonderful in a lot of ways but also seems to be designed
| to annoy HN specifically. With its somewhat, um, adventurous
| choices in data visualization combined with an overall conceit
| that poverty is harmful and kids are not the ones to blame...
| It's like a dangerous cocktail. I could read this thread in my
| head probably!
| zuminator wrote:
| The color scheme is terrible. Salmon, plum, light purple, medium
| purple, dark purple, and grey?
| tomvalorsa wrote:
| In case the author swings by - I think the presentation of this
| is really cool. The sprites bring it to life as they hurry around
| the screen! The way Alex bookends the walkthrough of the data is
| clever as well, and I felt the return to him at the end was quite
| evocative. Nice work!
| Cockbrand wrote:
| For a different approach on the socio-economic background's
| influence on growing up (and eventually growing old), check out
| the very interesting "Up Series" [0].
|
| It's a British documentary series that starts out with interviews
| with kids at age 7 from different backgrounds, and then
| interviews the same group of people every 7 years (14 Up, 21 Up,
| you get the idea). They've come to "63 Up" so far.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_(film_series)
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I agree, fantastic series
| readams wrote:
| One thing that jumps out is that being held back in school is one
| of the "adverse experiences" that will cause poor performance
| later. But of course being held back in school is what happens
| when your school performance is poor, so this seems backward. All
| of these things just seem to be proxies for "your parents are
| rich".
| zbentley wrote:
| > being held back in school is what happens when your school
| performance is poor, so this seems backward
|
| Why is that backward? Couldn't they be mutually affecting
| factors a la the failures of "No Child Left Behind"'s penalty
| system (as in: ACEs damage school performance, leading to risk
| of being held back a year, which risks additional ACEs)?
|
| > All of these things just seem to be proxies for "your parents
| are rich".
|
| If that is indeed a strong correlation, then that would be
| valuable insight gained from this study, I think.
| Clubber wrote:
| >All of these things just seem to be proxies for "your parents
| are rich". 1. You have good parents
| (attentive/loving/encouraging/supportive/available). 2.
| You have access to a good education.
|
| Those seem to be the big differentiators in my experience. Rich
| people typically have #2, so that's 1 of 2 right out of the
| gate.
| kulahan wrote:
| Having a lot of money and having loving parents are not
| related in any way I can tell. Maybe they're less likely to
| fight with each other in a money-based scenario, which is
| probably better for the kid.
|
| Education makes a bit more sense since it's at least easy to
| buy your way into a better education.
| albert_e wrote:
| Visualization was confusing and I don't think the narrative
| matches the data being shown. Differences between groups were way
| less dramatic in the visuals than the narration suggests. The
| differences could just be statistical noise for all we know.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Every single one I clicked on said they weren't in college or
| work. Is it bugged?
| pie_flavor wrote:
| The data visualization is fun, but the conclusion has exactly the
| same problem as the studies it links to: it's an analysis of a
| previous survey, with no experimental interventions, and as such
| is only measuring a correlation, with the causality being an
| asspull. In reality, every idealistic explanation of why these
| things happen gets shot down by RCTs or twin studies.
| tux1968 wrote:
| It sure appeared that on a percentage basis, the difference in
| outcomes between the 3 identified groups, wasn't that
| significant. Or maybe it was just a poor visualization of the
| data.
| alex_lav wrote:
| Crashes my browser.
| nailer wrote:
| Watching the video And looking at the visualisation rather than
| the voiceover, I'm surprised that having more adverse experiences
| in childhood doesn't have A more significant effect on the
| adults.
| sethammons wrote:
| you can find out your ACE score online easily. It is 10
| questions. A lot of folks commenting are getting stuck on
| poverty. Even folks in higher socioeconomic categories can have
| high ACE scores; poverty is only part of an ACE score. What is
| wild is the relationship to health as it ties to ACE scores.
|
| I found a lot of value reading The Deepest Well by Dr. Burke
| Harris. She notices that some of her patients are having strange
| health issues and then she realizes that these strange health
| issues can be tied to their ACE scores. Issues include epigenetic
| changes and immune system dysfunctions among many others. She
| advocates for early ACE screening to help address issues as early
| as possible.
| erquhart wrote:
| > College isn't just a place that teaches you how to do a job;
| it's also a safe, structured, and productive environment for
| people to continue growing up - and to fend off adulthood for a
| bit.
|
| This is actually a problem.
|
| > in developed countries, there is an era between ages 18 and 25
| when we collectively agree to let people explore the world and
| figure out what role they want to have in it. He calls it
| "emerging adulthood". And college is an environment built for
| emerging adults - a place where kids can leave their family
| environment and finally have a chance to independently shape
| their futures.
|
| This is a wholly inaccurate description of college.
| andruby wrote:
| Would you care to expand a bit more of what your experience was
| like or your perception?
|
| Why is the first statement a problem?
|
| (not trying to be confrontational, just would like to know
| more)
| manc_lad wrote:
| it was my experience of college. many I know would agree, and
| few would agree with you. I'm sure there are some that didn't
| feel this way, but strange sweeping statement to make.
| xandrius wrote:
| It might be me not getting it but all the charts seemed to have
| roughly the same percentage of people across the different types,
| given some small wiggle room.
|
| It was never an obvious impact.
|
| Am I getting it wrong or is it a tiny change that statistically
| is significant at huge scales of population?
| oglop wrote:
| "Ultimately, initial conditions matter"
|
| Whoa. Mind blown. Worth the infinite scroll and meandering
| presentation.
|
| Condescending and pearl clutching read. I used the military to
| escape. Life's tough, navel gazing and pushing college doesn't
| help in the vast majority of cases. Everyone has adverse things
| happen, but not everyone makes the choice to start finding
| solutions.
| sublimefire wrote:
| Great point, getting away is an important step when you are
| stuck in an environment that causes more harm to you than good.
| I think one of the related issues is that it is difficult to
| get away when you are 14 or similar.
| 10xDev wrote:
| Everything is a matter of probability. Resorting to
| survivorship bias even if that includes yourself is just
| spitting in the face of statistics.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Hono - [Yan ] means flame in Japanese_
|
| oh, cool! that must mean, because of all those volcanos, that
| Honolulu means...
|
| > _From Hawaiian Honolulu, from hono ("bay, harbor"), cognate
| with Maori whanga, + lulu ("shelter"), from Proto-Malayo-
| Polynesian_ duNGduNG ("sheltered").*
|
| ok, nope. "fire shelter" would have been pretty cool tho.
| dimgl wrote:
| Is it just me or does this visualization show that things aren't
| actually that bad? And that adverse experiences don't have that
| much of an impact on outcomes?
| TheEggMan wrote:
| They should show the crime the person will commit. Some
| interesting data on that found on FBI.gov
| nahikoa wrote:
| I don't want to be that guy, here's a nice summary of what you
| missed, since the creator is so inconsiderate when it comes to
| accessibility:
|
| The video introduces us to Alex, a 13-year-old in 1997, who is
| Hispanic and living with his dad and stepmom. At this point in
| his life, Alex's family has a net worth of just $2,000, and his
| parents are not particularly supportive or involved in his life.
| Despite these challenges, Alex expresses a sense of optimism
| about his future. This optimism is shared by many teenagers, as
| evidenced by a survey from the National Longitudinal Survey of
| Youth, which includes 9,000 participants followed from their
| adolescent years into adulthood.
|
| The video then shifts to highlight the importance of childhood
| experiences, as research by Vincent Fidi published in 1998 would
| later reveal. This research indicates that traumatic and
| stressful events during childhood can have profound, lifelong
| effects on an individual's health, relationships, financial
| security, and overall well-being. The video follows 400 of these
| survey participants, focusing on those with uninvolved parents,
| those who have been bullied, and those growing up in risky home
| environments. It tracks adverse experiences such as parental drug
| use, being held back or suspended from school, and witnessing
| violence.
|
| By 2001, the participants are in their senior year of high
| school. The video examines the adverse experiences these students
| have faced, noting that Black and Hispanic youths are
| disproportionately represented among those who have experienced
| multiple negative events. These experiences often correlate with
| academic performance; students who face more adversity tend to
| struggle more in the classroom. The video also introduces the
| concept of "emerging adulthood" as a period between childhood and
| adulthood, during which college can provide a supportive
| environment for young adults to navigate this transition.
|
| By 2010, some participants have completed a four-year college
| degree, with a clear trend showing that those who had fewer
| adverse experiences in childhood are more likely to have attended
| college. The video also highlights the financial struggles of
| those from less privileged backgrounds, many of whom are still
| grappling with the economic implications of their challenging
| upbringings.
|
| In 2021, the long-term impact of childhood adversity is starkly
| evident. The participants' life outcomes, including income
| levels, health issues, and overall happiness, show a direct
| correlation with the adverse experiences they faced as children.
| Alex, whose story we have followed, is now 37 years old, living
| with his partner and two kids. He has struggled with his weight
| and health throughout his adult life, and his annual income
| remains around $20,000. The video concludes by emphasizing that
| the circumstances of our youth significantly shape our lives and
| that systemic factors play a significant role in individual
| outcomes. It calls into question the blame placed on individuals
| for their life circumstances and suggests that the collective
| responsibility to support young people is essential for breaking
| cycles of adversity.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Its confusing and hard to make comparisons when the length of the
| rows is different for each group. It seems disingenuous.
|
| Cool website though, kudos to the author.
| LeroyRaz wrote:
| The visualization works poorly on my phone, basically unusable.
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| Yeah, lots of people are traumatized. Lots of people have seen
| close friends or family members get killed... some have been
| sexually exploited... I'm not sure the answer is for them to get
| a degree in communications.
|
| And furthermore, what actually is stopping them from getting a
| college degree if they so choose? The price. What is driving up
| the price?
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's hard to take the Western world seriously. There was a guy on
| Reddit who lamented how so many Americans live in their cars,
| unlike Indians or Chinese. The 15th percentile in India puts one
| at 10k INR / year apparently and this constant woe and gloom in
| the US does not have a counterpart.
|
| It would seem that some degree of thriving requires striving. The
| median person here has an iPhone - a luxury device. Here, the
| cultural belief is that if some other guy is richer than you, he
| cheated his way there. And you should steal from him. And the
| relentless woe is me whining about normal life.
|
| "We were the first generation who had to live through 9/11 and a
| pandemic and the global financial crisis!"
|
| Bro, in the '90s India was testing nuclear weapons and Pakistan
| had them and the possibility that two nuclear armed nations would
| go to war was real. There were massive genocides. The Gulf War.
| The President was impeached. The Unabomber. The LA Riots. In the
| '80, the AIDS pandemic was getting known and it wouldn't be
| handled for 30 years! It was a shadowy figure. Challenger blew
| up. Lockerbie bombing. The Iran-Iraq War. The Soviets invaded
| Afghanistan. The UK fought the Argentines in the Falklands. The
| French blew up the Rainbow Warrior. This is what normal life
| looks like. Things happen.
|
| The number one thing that has come out of the modern Internet is
| this whiny brigade of losers who want to blame everything in the
| world for their problems. The majority of Americans are actually
| happy with their own lives. It's these few loud whiners. No,
| dude, 9/11 isn't why you can't get a girlfriend. Get a grip.
| 10xDev wrote:
| Top comment: "I volunteer in a local school."
|
| Bottom comment: "Get a grip!"
|
| Two kinds of people...
| swader999 wrote:
| Study is great and all but how would it work when corrupted by an
| event like the pandemic lockdown.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| It won't look good, I'll tell you that much. Society hysterical
| reaction to covid did kids dirty.
| fourseventy wrote:
| I don't like the victim mentality of the message.
| drawkward wrote:
| Yea, those kids who were born into crappy situations should
| just get out of those crappy situations! Dumb victims.
|
| :/
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Poverty and abuse is a cloud that very few people can see
| through. Normal people try to help but often make it worse.
| samatman wrote:
| Everything this is based on is subject to absolutely massive
| genetic confounds.
|
| How you're raised is who your parents are, except for when it
| isn't.
|
| Which is why we have adoption studies. Which strongly indicate
| that it's who your parents are, not how you're raised, which is
| more determinative of outcomes. Is it a mixture of factor? Yes,
| but the dominant component is clear. A study like this focuses on
| the minor component and presumes that it's causal. That is
| unlikely to be the case.
| gymbeaux wrote:
| This should be the measure of our country, rather than the Dow
| Jones Industrial Average.
|
| Incidentally, rehabilitating these traumatized kids-turned-adults
| would probably have profound positive impacts on the economy
| (since that's all Jamie Dimon and friends care about).
| kypro wrote:
| Not disagreeing with your point that economic metrics often
| held too highly above others, but Jamie Dimon has commented a
| lot on the need to tackle inequality. Even if he's doing so for
| ulterior reasons, I feel like this is an uncharitable
| representation of his views.
| worik wrote:
| > Jamie Dimon has commented a lot on the need to tackle
| inequality.
|
| Good
|
| Let's put him on the BBQ
| sxg wrote:
| > This should be the measure of our country
|
| The most important thing about a metric is that we all agree on
| how to interpret it. While money may not measure exactly the
| right thing, we can all agree that $50 is $50 regardless of our
| age, race, gender, upbringing, etc. Take a look at the other
| comments on this thread. There's hardly any consensus on what
| this visualization shows. If this was how we measured our
| country, we'd get nowhere because there's no agreement on what
| this data means or what to do about it.
| sireat wrote:
| I couldn't really understand the annual income being so low on
| the about 20 persons I clicked on.
|
| It was between $50 to $1700 annually. Was that the income when
| they were 13 years old?
| imacomputertoo wrote:
| The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these
| people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't
| convinced. I wish they had shown percentages with the
| visualization. They choose not to.
|
| I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should
| have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the
| many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and
| make a high salary. that was shocking! and look at the people who
| had no adverse experiences and still managed to end up poor. how
| does that happen?
|
| I was left with the impression that if the government threw a lot
| of resources at it we might be able to move a noticeable
| percentage of those people in a better direction, but not most of
| them.
|
| The questions that remain are, how many people's lives could we
| improve and by how much? And, critically, how much are we willing
| to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a
| positive direction?
| theicfire wrote:
| I had very similar takeaways, you said it well!
| tomrod wrote:
| This highlights what Judea Pearl's causal framework gets at:
| Pr(Y|X) versus Pr(Y|do(X)), where we can set early.
|
| Causality isn't easy to establish. Correlation is insufficient.
|
| Note, too, I am unfamiliar with the literature cited by the
| Infoanimatedgraphic.
| colonelpopcorn wrote:
| You have to balk when anyone says that anybody is the same
| person they were 24 years ago.
| erikerikson wrote:
| You have to disbelieve anyone who says they aren't a
| derivation of their previous person states. That's just
| physics.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Oh you have a comprehensive physical model of individual
| human behavior do you, in particular the decision making
| process of life-changing choices? I'd love to see the
| publication.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| The future is still a function of the past, even if we
| lack that function's complete specification.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Yes, we can believe many things without any proof or
| justification. We call that religion, not "physics".
|
| Edit: this was in response to a prior edit of the parent
| that (correctly) explicitly stated their position was a
| personal belief, not some sort of universally
| acknowledged axiom as they have since edited it to seem.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| The spirit of the edit was for clarity of position, sorry
| for the misdirection.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >The future is still a function of the past
|
| If you don't believe in conscious choice the whole debate
| is moot anyway.
| geysersam wrote:
| This is too simplified. What is the _state_ of a person? It
| 's an object of infinite information, the question what
| aspect you focus on is very non-trivial.
|
| You don't _have_ to disbelieve anyone who says _a certain
| aspect_ of a persons life typically has little influence on
| their later life. Another issue is that for some a
| particular event might be life changing and for some the
| same event might be a nothing burger, for no obvious
| reason.
| erikerikson wrote:
| I agree with you that like the post I responded to that
| my response is too simplified. I also agree with the post
| I first responded to that we are, physically or mentally
| and emotionally, in at least some regards never in the
| same exact state twice.
|
| To clarify my comment, I was attenuating to the causal
| progression of identity and referencing the physical
| dimension of that as it is less likely to dissolve into
| wasteful argument. Once we exist past a day boundary we
| don't get to be us today without an us yesterday. I admit
| that the lines of existence and self can be plausibly
| taken as very fuzzy and I don't want to debate any of
| that minutiae.
|
| My point is that we are the intersection of what we are
| across all the domains of our being to whatever extent we
| exist at the times that we do. Confusing ourselves about
| what we mean by a person doesn't help.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| You have like zero molecules left in your body from 10
| years ago. If you are worried about physics, the most
| important consideration is your diet.
|
| And are you really a derivation of your state, or of the
| things that happen to you? The guys who were drafted into
| war in Vietnam and then got killed there, was there
| anything about them that would have made a difference to
| their cruel fate? If we go by this philosophy, the most
| import decisions are when you were born, where, and into
| what environment.
|
| For example if you want a house, you should have timed your
| birth to 30 years ago.
| thfuran wrote:
| >If we go by this philosophy, the most import decisions
| are when you were born, where, and into what environment.
|
| Isn't that basically the gist of TFA?
| jf22 wrote:
| A big part of what makes a person is their unique collection
| of experiences.
|
| You can be the same person but different because of those
| experiences.
| richardlblair wrote:
| It's hard to look at visualizations like this and reflect on
| the experiences of the individuals living through hardship.
| Even those who 'make it out' may struggle in ways not fully
| captured in the data or this visualization.
|
| I grew up in a 'high risk environment', and experienced all the
| adverse experiences with the exception of gun violence (yay
| Canada). I'm one of the few that 'made it out'. Many of my
| childhood friends are dead (usually overdoses), suffer from
| substance abuse, or are still stuck in the poverty cycle (on
| average it takes 7 generation to break the cycle).
|
| I look at this visualization and I can feel, to my core, what
| these folks feel. Even for those that 'made it out', I feel for
| them. I struggle with my mental health, I've had to actively
| reparent myself, and I feel pretty lonely. Many of the people
| I'm surrounded by don't know what it feels like to carry all
| the weight from your childhood.
|
| I do agree that the government shouldn't just throw resources
| at the problem. There are some things the government can do,
| though.
|
| 1. Teach conflict resolution skills to young children. This
| mitigates adverse experiences and prepares the children for
| adulthood (especially if they 'make it out')
|
| 2. Address addiction as a health problem and not a criminal
| problem. Children don't need to see their parents as criminals,
| they need to witness them get better.
|
| 3. Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you
| are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The
| people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food
| have to travel for food.
|
| 4. Access to education. The people I grew up around who have
| found success did so because our schools were really well
| equipped.
|
| You'll notice I didn't list access to support systems.
| Honestly, they are kind of useless. As a child you understand
| that if you open up about your experience there is a solid
| chance your parents will get in trouble or you'll be removed
| from your home. No child wants this. You end up holding it all
| in because you can't trust adults.
|
| These are just some of my thoughts. Definitely not
| comprehensive, I could ramble on about this for ages.
|
| (edit - formatting)
| anon291 wrote:
| Unfortunately a solid number of these things would rely on
| the moral equivalent of slavery.
|
| > Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you
| are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The
| people who often don't have the means to easily travel for
| food have to travel for food.
|
| No one wants to work in these neighborhoods because they are
| invariably awful. At some point the risk of an employee being
| murdered / assaulted means stores close down.
|
| There's no good answer for this, other than to keep doing
| what we're doing. Our current economic system has
| consistently lifted large numbers of people out of poverty
| historically, and is still doing it today. We should at least
| give it a go for seven more generations.
|
| That's not to say we should do nothing, but large overhauls
| seem uncalled for given the data.
| richardlblair wrote:
| My context is Canada where getting killed at work wouldn't
| been an issue. In the context I'm speaking about it would
| likely drive opportunity in low income neighborhoods.
|
| Canada also have horrific city planning, so when I say
| people need to travel far I mean they need to spend up to 3
| hours in some major (major for us) cities just to get
| groceries.
|
| The US is a whole other can of worms, I don't know how to
| solve those problems. I'm also not as familiar with the
| nuances.
| anon291 wrote:
| > Canada also have horrific city planning, so when I say
| people need to travel far I mean they need to spend up to
| 3 hours in some major (major for us) cities just to get
| groceries.
|
| I can't imagine anyone in a major US city spending 3
| hours. Maybe rurally, but even the so-called 'food
| deserts' in a big city like LA ... it's just a few miles.
|
| At the end of the day, look... my mother taught in inner-
| city public schools. I know the problems these kids have.
| They're given meals and such (and they should be), but
| that is not going to solve a cheating father, a mother
| too depressed by said cheating to lift a finger to do
| anything (and maybe whoring herself out or doing drugs to
| damp the pain?), and a family that sees the child as a
| cash bag. I mean what are we possibly to do? You give the
| food and still the child doesn't get it.
|
| I feel these policies end up failing because the policy
| makers are from whole families (And are likely extremely
| socially conservative in their own life) and can't
| imagine anything so debased.
| parpfish wrote:
| 3 hours seems plausible if you need to take a bus trip
| with a transfer.
|
| 1:15 each way on the bus and 30min in the store
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Canada is about to become a 2nd world country. No
| industry, no ability to own a home, no healthcare [1],
| only one party, banking restrictions, etc etc,.
|
| 1. Healthcare is where you can see a doctor.
| andyferris wrote:
| I also had trouble when we needed to see a GP when we
| lived in Canada. Seemed strange.
|
| The hospital seemed functional, at least.
| smegger001 wrote:
| Thats not what a second world country is. Second world
| was used to describe Soviet Communist block countries as
| opposed to Western Industrialized Capitalist Democracies.
| Third World was everyone else, what we would now refer to
| as the global south (because apparently economist much
| like Eurovision organizers are a bit fuzzy on geography
| and seem to believe Australia and New Zealand to be
| somewhere in the atlantic)
| Kamq wrote:
| I think they intentionally meant second world. They
| mention "one party" (presumably one political party),
| which was generally a feature of the second world instead
| of third. Additionally, the third world generally allows
| you to own your house, which is another one of their
| examples.
| ska wrote:
| > 3 hours in some major
|
| That doesn't sound plausible. Got some examples?
| magicalist wrote:
| > _Unfortunately a solid number of these things would rely
| on the moral equivalent of slavery._
|
| Weird conclusion to jump to. GP did not suggest grocery
| stores staffed under threat of jail time anywhere.
|
| Better public transit benefits everyone. Better urban
| design favoring walkable neighborhoods benefits everyone.
| Better zoning allowing neighborhood shops at street level
| benefits everyone.
| anon291 wrote:
| > Better public transit benefits everyone. Better urban
| design favoring walkable neighborhoods benefits everyone.
| Better zoning allowing neighborhood shops at street level
| benefits everyone.
|
| Sure, as someone who is raising a family in a city, I
| completely agree. But the reason why stores leave is
| invariably safety issues.
| KTibow wrote:
| The point isn't necessarily that stores need to spring up
| nearby, the point is that it needs to be easier to access
| stores (eg by making it easier to get transportation).
| James_K wrote:
| > Our current economic system has consistently lifted large
| numbers of people out of poverty historically, and is still
| doing it today.
|
| I think you mean China's economic system, which was in turn
| based on the practices of the USSR. China's economic system
| is lifting millions out of poverty, but western systems are
| systematically dragging people into it. Poverty in the US
| has never been lower than it was in 1973. Since then,
| poverty in China decreased by about 85%.
| smegger001 wrote:
| The same economic systems you praise resulted mass
| starvations due famine killing millions in the process of
| trying to raise them out of poverty, (see the great leap
| forwards). Whats really lifting them out of poverty is
| the west exporting manufacturing to China. its not
| socialism pulling China out of poverty its mercantilism.
| As western cash is exchanged for Chinese products, its no
| surprise then that as poverty has waned in China is has
| been waxing in the west?
| James_K wrote:
| > Whats really lifting them out of poverty is the west
| exporting manufacturing to China
|
| How does one export manufacturing? It is undeniable that
| that China has benefited from science and innovation, but
| these I would consider to be the fruits of all mankind.
| If anything, the west has tried its hardest to keep
| knowledge from China. China has only advanced by
| systematically breaking intellectual property law that
| the west set up with the intention of hoarding knowledge
| to ourselves.
|
| > its not socialism pulling China out of poverty
|
| As you would expect, since China isn't really socialist.
| that said, there is certainly something unique about
| China's approach that has cause it to be much more
| successful than many other countries.
|
| > As western cash is exchanged for Chinese products, its
| no surprise then that as poverty has waned in China is
| has been waxing in the west?
|
| It should be a surprise. You cannot eat money. China
| consistently runs a trade surplus. That means that they
| give other countries more than they get in return. It is
| surely a great critique of the western system that China
| giving us stuff for free made us poorer. That the rich
| and powerful of our own countries discarded their
| citizens in favour of cheap Chinese labour. And so the
| benefit of all this free stuff which China has given us
| is focused into the hands of the few, rather than the
| many. This is sad, but not inevitable.
|
| > The same economic systems you praise resulted mass
| starvations due famine killing millions in the process of
| trying to raise them out of poverty
|
| Exactly. Just because a system lifts people out of
| poverty doesn't make it good. Yet the western system
| fails to even lift people from poverty.
| busyant wrote:
| > Between 1973 and 2013, the number of people in poverty
| in the US increased by ~60%.
|
| You edited your comment. I believe it originally
| contained the text above.
|
| I'm assuming the edit was due to the fact that the
| statistic was based on absolute numbers and was not
| corrected for US population growth.
|
| I also think the US vs China comparison is basically
| apples to bowling balls. It's "easy" to lift a giant
| percentage of the population out of poverty when a large
| swath of your population is in poverty.
|
| Not saying the US doesn't deserve some criticism here,
| but your comparison was not apt.
| James_K wrote:
| > It's "easy" to lift a giant percentage of the
| population out of poverty when a large swath of your
| population is in poverty
|
| Not entirely true. When you look at the decrease of
| China's poverty, it is almost linear up until the numbers
| got to essentially 0. Even if this were true, it should
| be easy for the US to lift people out of poverty, given
| that it has a huge number of poor people in America.
|
| > Not saying the US doesn't deserve some criticism here,
| but your comparison was not apt.
|
| My point more broadly is that China has spent 40 years
| going in the right direction and the west has spent 40
| years stagnating and deteriorating. At any rate, my main
| qualm was with the text "and [our economic system] is
| still doing it [lifting people out of poverty] today".
| This is not true by any metric.
| maxerickson wrote:
| What measures of poverty are you using for each country?
|
| Are they roughly equivalent, so that you are comparing
| similar things?
| James_K wrote:
| Pick a metric, it really doesn't matter. The claim that
| western economic systems are presently lifting people out
| of poverty is absurd, and my point is that China is
| responsible for the decreases in global poverty that have
| taken place over the last decades. Both of these facts
| are relatively uncontested.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Yes, in recent decades the US has barely had the sort of
| poverty that China has been eliminating, so it hasn't
| really made any progress against it.
|
| I think it would add a lot of clarity to your comparison
| to name the metrics you are using.
| James_K wrote:
| I wasn't really intending to compare the countries. Just
| to point out that something which was being attributed to
| America (a decrease in poverty) was actually happening
| because of China.
| fragmede wrote:
| OTOH, if being a cashier at the 7-11 paid $100k/yr in
| hazard pay, I'm sure you could find people willing to work
| there. the only question is where that money comes from.
| nox101 wrote:
| That sounds like it has possible unintended consequences?
| "Go shoot lots of guns and do violent things and then our
| hazard pay will go up!"
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| > No one wants to work in these neighborhoods because they
| are invariably awful
|
| Yeah, no kidding. But why are they awful to begin with? I'd
| hazard that it's because families have been asleep at the
| wheel in teaching their children to be good citizens. The
| change for something like this comes bottom-up, not top-
| down.
|
| You could try to boil it down to economics, but that's
| misguided. The markets are a terrible tutor of morality and
| accountability.
|
| Fix the families, fix the society. Hold parents
| accountable. Teach morality in the schools. It's not
| slavery to do that. You're not harming anyone by teaching
| children to have a modicum of respect for their
| communities, elders, authority figures or eachother.
| jtriangle wrote:
| Not to mention, if you rat on your parents and get yanked
| into a group home, your experience is very likely the same or
| worse as it would be at home, and growing up, you know kids
| who this happened to and more or less have proof as to why
| you don't talk about it. I certainly saw this happen to
| people I knew, one of them lived with us for awhile and my
| folks arranged for her to live with a relative, which allowed
| them to really make it in life instead of being stuck in the
| system. Weirdly, after some initial trouble that looked
| impossible to overcome, it was very simple to get them placed
| into our home, and, very simple to get them in with a
| relative. Most of that was the workings of the social worker
| assigned to them, who was hard to reach out to, and very
| clearly over worked.
|
| Basically, there has to be a better intervention than just
| taking people's children away, which certainly keys into your
| points.
|
| I'd take it further to the point where, the poverty line is
| re-evaluated per locality, and inflation needs to be
| accurately reported, and with it the tax brackets as required
| by law. Then we need to dump the tax burden completely off
| the lowest earners, along with their requirement to file
| taxes at all. Then, we need to re-evaluate the bottom tiers
| to ramp in slowly to help eliminate welfare traps. It'd
| probably be a good idea, additionally, to no longer tax
| things like unemployment/workmen's comp/disability/social
| security/etc, for similar reasons. Reporting taxes itself is
| a burden all its own, and it negatively affects people who
| already struggle with math.
|
| Also, something that isn't currently done, and certainly
| should be done, is to create interactions between the kids
| who have poor situations with the kids that have good
| situations. My elementary school had a 'buddy' program, where
| the older kids would hang out in a structured way with the
| younger kids. I think it'd go a long way in terms of support
| to have a system where kids from the good side of town
| interact with kids from the bad side of town in that way, and
| to make it a K-12 program. You additionally get the side
| product of the kids who have better situations being able to
| socialize with, and therefore have empathy for, kids in bad
| situations, and real empathy at that, not "spend some more
| tax money" empathy, actual boots on the ground empathy,
| person to person.
| richardlblair wrote:
| I had a lot of what you're talking about in your last
| paragraph in our Air Cadet program. I was exposed to a lot
| of different people, both adult volunteers and peers, from
| different walks of life. It had a really positive impact on
| my life.
| nurple wrote:
| I'm 2 generations from immigrants on one side, 2 from
| pioneers and 1 from blue-collared work on the other. I wish
| more people could empathize with those who struggle within
| poverty as it is an incredibly hard row to hoe, not just
| physically, but also mentally.
|
| I think a lot of people take for granted what an impact a
| small amount of money, or the lack thereof, has on a person's
| ability to thrive and contribute to their community, and how
| much its impact on a person's mental health contributes to
| hopelessness and often ultimately substance abuse.
|
| I do like your thoughts on things the government could
| change. Frankly, though, I actually think they know these
| things but have perverse incentives to keep the population
| stratified. This country would financially crumble without
| the abuse of those in poverty for every one of those 7
| generations, if not more.
|
| I think managing this pool of exploitable resources is
| actually a primary component of most govs immigration
| strategies.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| > Teach conflict resolution skills to young children.
|
| This is pretty huge. A lot of my experience growing up in
| California during the 90s was "tell an adult" and "zero
| tolerance" coming down from school administrators. This is
| useful at a very young age, but it neglects to equip the
| children with agency for when the adults aren't around. You
| can't tell an adult when you're on the school bus and
| conflict breaks out. You can't tell an adult when you're out
| on a soccer trip and people are getting rowdy in the locker
| room. The bystander effect is very strong in school aged
| children because we neglect to introduce them to their
| inherent agency in conflict.
|
| There is also a degree of antifragility that parents could
| teach as well. Your emotions aren't reality. What people say
| about you isn't either. Again, these should come from
| parents.
| tomp wrote:
| What do you mean?
|
| In the adult world, you'd just call the police.
|
| In the child world, sometimes you tell the adults, but they
| don't do anything, and the abuse continues. That's at least
| my experience with bullying in primary school. "Conflict
| resolution" and such virtue-signalling buzzwords don't work
| against _violent bullies_.
| jaysinn_420 wrote:
| Call the police? I don't need two problems.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| The role of law enforcement is rarely about direct
| intervention to stop criminal behavior (or in your
| example, violent bullying). They investigate and,
| potentially, punish criminal behavior that has happened
| in the past. They act as a deterrent to crime, but also
| to vigilante justice.
|
| Conflict resolution provides the potential victim with
| agency to intervene in a situation on their own behalf.
| Of course, this doesn't preclude the option of calling
| the police. Why not expand someone's options for keeping
| safe?
| hirsin wrote:
| This is fairly literally how people watch a homeless guy
| get choked to death in the New-York subway. "Someone will
| call the cops eventually".
|
| No, you can't be a bystander, even if it might be
| dangerous.
| fyrepuffs wrote:
| That's because Canada has safety nets for people. They have
| affordable healthcare and places to turn to if you're out of
| work and need assistance. It's because Canada is a
| compassionate society. It doesn't take this down right mean
| attitude of a "f-u" you're poor because it's your fault.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Whether it counts as a collective sacrifice would sort of
| depend how it balances against the benefits of living among a
| population with a lower desparate/safe ratio. It may well be a
| collective investment instead.
| skrbjc wrote:
| The argument of the data seems to say we should put resources
| towards those with more adverse experiences in childhood.
|
| But I wonder, if you were optimizing for improving more
| people's lives in a more meaningful way with limited funds,
| would you come to the conclusion that you could do so by
| focusing on improving the lives of those in the no adverse
| experiences group because you might be able to get more "life
| improvement units" per dollar?
|
| Most think resources should be targeted towards groups that
| "deserve it more" because they are "worse off", but it's
| interesting to think if your goal is to create more happiness
| or whatever per dollar, maybe the discussion would lead us to
| investing in groups that are not on the proverbial "bottom"
| 12907835202 wrote:
| If you haven't already look up John Rawls he's probably the
| most famous person who has argued for helping the worst off.
|
| Of course reading his books would be the best source but for
| now here's a link:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/#JusFaiJusWitLibSoc
| bumby wrote:
| > _Most think resources should be targeted towards groups
| that "deserve it more" because they are "worse off"_
|
| I believe there is behavioral game theory research that shows
| we are hard-wired for "fairness", even at the expense of a
| more optimal solution. E.g., Two subjects are given $100 to
| split and one was allowed to determine the split and the
| other the choice to accept it or both would go with nothing.
| A "$90/$10" split would often be rejected, even though the
| decider is giving up $10 and instead choosing nothing because
| of a sense of being slighted.
| gowld wrote:
| We're hard-wired for fairness toward _ourselves_ than to
| others. That 's why $90/$10 splits exist, but $10/$9 splits
| don't.
| gowld wrote:
| It depends entirely on how you define utility.
|
| Making rich people happier makes me more unhappy that it
| makes them more happy, so by your calculus it's not worth
| helping them.
|
| See how quickly this line of reasoning runs aground?
| wiz21c wrote:
| I'm really surprised that you consider it a "sacrifice" to help
| others. Because when "others" are doing well, I'm doing better
| too.
|
| Give a job or a good life to anybody and you'll see, they'll
| just be better. Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like
| that because they choose to but because they had more hurdles
| to pass and ultimately were more at risk to fail. And it's not
| because some made it that it proves that the others should have
| made it too (survivor bias)...
| richardlblair wrote:
| I fully agree. OP also ignores the compounded returns. If you
| lift a person out of poverty you immediately set their
| children up for better outcomes.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| You're just being obtuse. The topic is about spending
| resources in an attempt to achieve a goal. You can't just say
| "whatever we spend just makes people's lives better so it's
| worth it". There's a very real cost involved, and a very real
| effectiveness of spending that cost.
|
| To put it to extremes as an example, if we're spending $1 per
| person to give them a 99% chance of living a better life,
| that's a much different situation than if we're spending $1
| million per person to give them a 1% chance of living a
| better life. That million dollars per person could have
| otherwise funded countless other programs which may have had
| a better positive affect on the population. You can't just
| say "well others are doing better when we spend that money so
| it's worth it" with no other thought given.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| If parent is obtuse, so are you. The topic is clearly _not_
| entirely contained in "spending resources in an attempt to
| achieve a goal", if how you do it can either be understood
| as a "sacrifice" or something else entirely (though, to
| you, it might, if you don't care about the difference).
|
| There is a cost that can be measured in money. There is an
| outcome that can be measured in a variety of ways. And then
| there is also different ways of how we think about
| something, that definitely informs what we do and how.
| aredox wrote:
| You're always "spending resources", even when you decide
| not to spend time and money: in effect, you decide to
| expend some people's lives.
|
| Is it effective?
|
| Why is it right for you that the starting point should be
| "we spend nothing", and then "we spend on one action only
| if it is proven it is effective", and not "we spend
| everything to help others", and then "we stop spending only
| if it is proven it is ineffective"?
|
| (And before anyone makes a reverse Godwin point by shouting
| "communism!", reminder what the taxation rates in Nordic
| countries are: Denmark 55.56%, Finland 51.25%, Iceland
| 46.22%, Norway 47.2% and Sweden 57%. And these are not
| khmer-rouge hellholes where nobody can be rich and people
| are beaten into submission by an overwhelming state.)
| feoren wrote:
| Almost all of these calculations work out _extremely_ in
| favor of just giving the poor money. It 's expensive to be
| poor, and not just for them. They cost more in healthcare,
| crime, and other support systems. Literally just giving all
| the homeless cheap housing for free is _by far_ the better
| option if you actually pay attention to the numbers. The
| same is abundantly clear for free education. But we can 't,
| because _we like the suffering_. That 's it: Americans like
| it when other people are suffering. We like it so much that
| we're willing to suffer ourselves just so that _those other
| people_ can suffer even more.
|
| To a lesser extent, there's also the Boomer Trolley
| Problem: if you divert a trolley onto a track wherein
| nobody dies, how is that fair to all the people who it's
| already killed!?
| unholythree wrote:
| Except inflation, in the US we gave everyone money a
| couple of years ago (probably had to) and it caused
| (probably unavoidable) spectacular inflation. We narrowly
| achieved our soft landing, but that should have taught us
| that while sometime helicopter money works, it isn't
| free.
| naasking wrote:
| > Except inflation, in the US we gave everyone money a
| couple of years ago (probably had to) and it caused
| (probably unavoidable) spectacular inflation
|
| No it didn't.
| gowld wrote:
| Inflation wasn't caused by the giving, it was caused by
| the printing. The cure for that is to destroy money
| (taxation). If you tax the people you just gave to,
| that's just doing nothing with extra steps. So if you
| want to help someone by giving them money, you need to
| take that money from someone else.
|
| Giving without taking is (Keynesian) only useful when it
| "greases the gears of the economy" enabling productive
| people to trade with consumer, in which case the
| inflation is cancelled out by the increased real
| productivity.
| smegger001 wrote:
| Maybe if more of that PPE money had actually been paid to
| those that need it rather than the employers that
| pocketed millions instead it would have gone better.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| It's not that the US likes suffering. No, the US likes
| their 7% ROI.
|
| There's a reason why the average S&P500 is still 7% year
| over year. Why does Coca Cola have a 3% dividend yield?
| Why does Google still have a 50% yoy ad revenue growth?
|
| Why does health insurance get priced at 10% annual
| income, no matter how high your income seems to be? Why
| does mortgage / rent inevitably go up to 28% of income,
| no matter how high an income you seem to get?
|
| It's because to make the numbers go up for corporations
| at the ROI they promised to their stakeholders, they have
| to make it from somewhere, and that somewhere is the
| consumers.
|
| As long as we hold sacred the 7% ROI dream, that 7% ROI
| on assets is going to continue to leech all the excess
| prosperity and wealth our predecessors have enjoyed. You
| cannot have an infinite wealth printing machine - news
| flash - that money comes from society. The house that
| once costed 200k, and now costs 1.6 million? That 1.4
| million went into funding the 7% ROI money printer. The
| 126k/yr Masters degree? It's also funding the 7% ROI
| money printer.
|
| That's where all the money is going.
| willmadden wrote:
| Interesting. Would you agree that not everyone is the same?
| How about that not everyone is a "good person" by nature?
| anon291 wrote:
| I dunno as someone who grew up with relatives who have been
| trapped in these cycles, I do think some of it is a choice. I
| realize people are affected by all kinds of things, but when
| things are given to you and you have no interest, it's hard
| to see that as anything but what it is.
|
| But of course, it's important to help people who are down;
| but being poor does not absolve you of all self
| responsibility.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Why? State funded social programs are funded by taxes, I pay
| money so these programs exist. How would _I_ feel better in
| any way? I certainly do not.
|
| >Give a job or a good life to anybod
|
| This is beyond the capacity of almost all people. I don't
| even have any idea what you are thinking of.
|
| >Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because
| they choose to
|
| Simply not true. Being willing, but unable to work is
| extremely rare. They just do not like the work they would
| have to do, which I don't begrudge them for I wouldn't do
| that work either if the state was paying my rent and my food.
| But pretending that somehow they can't do basic jobs is
| simply nonsense.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move
| that percentage of people in a positive direction?
|
| Thats the wrong question -
|
| How many adolescents and citizens of the future are we willing
| to sacrifice for our comfort today.
|
| It will come back to byte us in the ass, condemn adolescents to
| life of poverty today, and get lost productivity, crime and
| political instability.
|
| Push it far enough and get French Revolution
| hammock wrote:
| >The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these
| people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't
| convinced.
|
| That conclusion came out of left field for me. He started off
| saying these certain adverse events affect you in adulthood. So
| the logical conclusion would be:
|
| Be involved parents, give your kids a quiet place to study,
| don't have a drug problem as a parent, don't tolerate bullying,
| don't let your kid fall behind and be held back in school,
| don't let your kid do things that will get him suspended, don't
| shoot people in front of kids.
|
| The vast majority of these are about good parenting. I would
| not describe that as a "collective responsibility," though,
| rather an individual civic duty.
| Ntrails wrote:
| We have largely moved away from anything so crass as holding
| parents responsible
| James_K wrote:
| Exactly, and I've always said the same thing about murderers.
| Why should we pay for police to catch murderers when the
| murderers could just not murder? This seems like a matter of
| individual, rather than collective responsibility. If they
| don't murder, it is better for us, better for them, and
| better for their victims. Why should we have to protect the
| victims of murderers when murderers could simply not kill
| people?
|
| Without the sarcasm now, the victims of bad parents are no
| different than the victims of any other crime. Yes, it may be
| the parents' fault that their child has a bad life just as it
| is a murderer's fault that his victims die, but that hardly
| justifies it happening. A child cannot choose their parents
| any more than you can choose not to be the victim of a crime.
| It seems obvious to me that, as a society, we should protect
| the vulnerable from those who might harm them.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| It would be better for society if someone inclined to
| murder did not. Police do _not_ protect the victim of
| murder -- they are dead already.
|
| Your view appears to say "society" (the police?) should
| "protect" children from their own parents, if they are
| deemed "bad"? The line for police intervention should
| probably not include "living in a bad neighborhood" or
| "being poor". Those strategies are tried pretty often by
| evangelicals who steal poor children from vulnerable
| countries/populations, yet are perceived as bad by most
| people.
|
| If the fault is with the parents then isn't it just as
| likely with the grandparents? or great grandparents? and so
| on down the line?
| James_K wrote:
| > Police do not protect the victim of murder
|
| But if they could, they most certainly should. Preventing
| murder is good, just as preventing a bad childhood is
| good.
|
| > Your view appears to say "society" (the police?)
|
| The police are (or should be) an extension of society.
| They are a part of the government, which in a democracy
| means the represent the will of the people, and hence
| they are society manifest. There are other manifestations
| of society that can help these children (schools, social
| services, etc). I am obviously not suggesting that the
| police become child catchers and round up all children of
| poor people.
|
| > If the fault is with the parents then isn't it just as
| likely with the grandparents? or great grandparents? and
| so on down the line?
|
| From my perspective, there is no "fault". Blaming people
| for things is unproductive. There are bad things which
| might happen, and things we might do to prevent them from
| happening. If we can sever this great chain of injustice
| of which you speak, where poverty and suffering are
| transmitted from parent to child like a disease; aught we
| not take that action? It is even in our best interest to
| do so, as those children who live better lives will go on
| to contribute more in taxes and more towards the
| betterment of society.
| nurple wrote:
| Do you realize that having the time and resources for those
| things is a privilege that many in poverty don't have?
| gowld wrote:
| Of course! Poor children are innocent victims. But once
| they turn 18 and start having children, it's time those
| adults pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and their
| deprived childhoods don't matter anymore. Flawless logic.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| I took these types of surveys in junior high. All my friends
| did heroin and were prostitutes. (it was funny). I wouldn't
| trust a survey like that more than toilet paper and tea leaves.
| The truly horrifying thing is adults thinking the data is real
| and making decisions.
| jeppester wrote:
| How would you interpret the results then? That there's a
| correlation between lying in the survey and doing worse in
| life?
| computerdork wrote:
| Yeah, agree with you that if they used percentages - it would
| have been _much_ easier to see - disagree with you about what
| their data is implying. Think it clearly shows that those with
| less adverse experiences have more success in life.
|
| Took another look at their data visualizations, and yeah, look
| at 2013, for the people with no adverse experiences, it looks
| like at least 40% make $45k more, while those with multiple
| adverse experiences it looks something like 15%.
|
| And, in 2021, it's harder to see (because looks like people's
| income rises as they get older), but it looks like for no-
| adverse experiences, good 50% are making over $60k, while maybe
| 30% for multiple adverse experiences.
|
| ... and actually, do agree with one aspect, it is interesting
| that the older they get, the less the differences in income and
| other life attributes are. Maybe it just means that for people
| who had difficult childhoods, it takes more time to get past
| all the early obstacles, and live a more stable life.
| maxerickson wrote:
| _And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively
| sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive
| direction?_
|
| This begs the question, at least to some extent. A big lesson
| of modern economics is that lots of things are win-win.
|
| For example, if you could eliminate years spent in prison by
| spending more on K-12 education, that looks like a big
| sacrifice if you don't have the prison counterfactual to
| compare to, but it's potentially the cheaper path.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| The person in the story might has well have been me
|
| - I repeated 7th grade
|
| - Was suspended Multiple times
|
| - Lived in 11 different houses
|
| - Lived with a teacher for two months
|
| - Good friend murdered
|
| - Mom of good friend murdered by their Father
|
| - Gnarly parents divorce with police etc regularly
|
| I joined the AF because I read a book about John Boyd and
| figured I could pursue technology that I saw in the movies so I
| got out
|
| What could the govt have done? The question is incoherent.
|
| Are they going to make my toxic narcissistic parents stop being
| that way?
|
| No, I needed a family and community to take care of me. So
| unless you believe government = collective community then
| there's nothing the govt can do but stop letting businessmen
| and conservatives keep standing on our necks
| rglover wrote:
| Semi-related: often astounded by what can be achieved with HTML5
| canvas.
| rconti wrote:
| I'm not sure if it was just me, but I struggled with the visual
| style. In some groups there were more rows than others, but then
| the rows would be of different lengths, making it difficult to
| intuitively compare the population sizes, especially when trying
| to break them down by color coding.
|
| It felt like the "some adverse experiences" group was worse off
| than the "many adverse experiences" group, which I'm guessing is
| incorrect.
| robocat wrote:
| I was a bit sceptical to start with about correlation versus
| causation. Causes are what we are looking for here. If we see
| someone get shot, does that mean we decide not to go to
| university[1]?
|
| I watched the video, and the semantic meaning of pink people
| kept changing, and I couldn't follow the story because too many
| moving parts.
|
| There's a study looking at people from a "bad" neighbourhood,
| that used data on immigrants to and emmigrants from the
| neighbourhood to try and track causation.
|
| If I was feeling obnoxious I would grab the data, and massage
| it until the conclusion is that we should blind children so
| they don't see someone get shot so that they go to university.
|
| [1] actually I can think of plenty of friends where that would
| be plausible (disclaimer: gun violence isn't so common in New
| Zealand). I'm trying to pick an example where causation and
| correlation are more disjoint but I think I've failed here.
| goldenchrome wrote:
| How about if we control for IQ?
| sgammon wrote:
| Beautiful evidence.
| fregonics wrote:
| The presentation argues that the adverse experiences cited are
| outside the individual's control, some of them are and they can
| have negative effects, i agree, like gun violence or uninterested
| parents, but others are questionable, like suspensions or being
| held back in school, which is (in most part) derived directly
| from the individual's actions.
|
| Since the margins in some of the statistics are so small i wonder
| how would they look with the adverse experiences ignoring this 2
| points.
|
| For me it is obvious that a person who was held back in school
| and received suspensions will be less likely to be well off when
| they are older.
| thfuran wrote:
| >derived directly from the individual's actions.
|
| Are you saying that a person's actions aren't influenced by
| their environment?
| concordDance wrote:
| Assuming a materialistic (non-spiritual) world this statement
| seems a bit vacuous as we are all the direct products of our
| environment (including womb environment, genes, nutrition,
| culture, etc).
| RationalDino wrote:
| My biggest takeaway is that they nowhere address address the fact
| that correlation is not necessarily causation. Yes, our childhood
| affects who we become. But it is not the only thing that affects
| it. For example
|
| Two giant factors come to mind. Genetics and racism.
|
| Consider one genetic factor. I have ADHD. That means that it is
| extremely likely that one or both of my parents had ADHD. (My
| father, certainly. My mother, maybe. She certainly had a genetic
| propensity for depression that her children struggle with.) This
| resulted in an unstable family home. Unsurprisingly this resulted
| in me falling into their adverse environment category. As an
| adult I've done reasonably well. But yes, my challenges have
| affected my children. But were those challenges because I grew up
| with horrible problems? Or was it because I have a well-known
| genetic condition that causes challenges?
|
| On genetics, I highly recommend
| https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190808/th....
| GWAS studies can only tease out genetic correlations for European
| Caucasians. Part of that is that they can only be done with a lot
| of data from somewhat related people. And part of that is that
| with Caucasians it is reasonable to assume that bad results are
| due to personal characteristics, and not racism.
|
| But we can do it for Caucasians. And so we can know for
| Caucasians that the impact of genetics is about as strong as the
| impact of socioeconomic status. We can also separate the effects
| of things like the effect of when you first had sex from the
| genetics that make you first have sex early or late. That one is
| fun, because it turns out that the genetics matters a lot, and
| when you first did it only matters because it is correlated with
| your genetics. We can look at the impact of reading to kids.
| Yeah, that's pretty much genetics as well. We put a lot of effort
| into getting kids read to more, and didn't get demonstrable
| results for it.
|
| So you see, understanding the impact of genetics is very
| important for what public policies are likely to work. They tell
| a great just-so story. But I'm not convinced.
|
| Moving on, what about racism? They trace the story of Alex.
| Hispanic. He had a terrible upbringing. Which could be caused by
| the impact of racism on his family. He had a terrible adulthood.
| Which could be caused by the impact of racism on him. He's just
| as good an example for "racism sucks" as he is for "adverse
| childhood sucks". Which is it? We don't know. What should we do
| about it? That's still an open question!
|
| And finally, let's look at personal responsibility. I don't agree
| with condemning poor people for being poor. But suppose you are
| born in whatever circumstances, with whatever genetics. What's
| the best way to improve your life? Judging from my experiences
| and understanding of human nature, it is to encourage an attitude
| of personal responsibility. Don't worry too much about what's
| outside of your control. Focus only on what's in your control,
| and try to do the best that you can.
|
| Ironically, this matters more when the deck is stacked against
| you. If you have family background and racism are holding you
| back, you can't afford the third strike of a self-destructive
| attitude. But if your background and race give you resources,
| your attitude probably doesn't hurt you as badly.
|
| Does "personal responsibility" make for a good social policy? No.
| But should we encourage people to individually embrace it?
| Absolutely!
|
| I strongly disagree with their cavalier dismissal of the idea.
| legitster wrote:
| What a cool visualization!
|
| ... of a fairly mundane data set.
|
| If anything, I am shocked by how much the data between the groups
| evened out over time. The differences in "adverse experiences"
| started out so stark, but almost seemed to disappear by 2021,
| especially in categories like happiness and wealth. I would hate
| the be the researched who followed this for 20 years just to find
| nothing particularly interesting.
|
| > "If we fail, we are punished. We are blamed for not going to
| college, for being unhealthy, for being poor, for not being able
| to afford healthcare and food and housing."
|
| Not sure if the author and I are looking at the same data set. If
| anything, it's saying the opposite to me - the difference between
| a terrible childhood and a perfect childhood results in some
| _barely perceivable_ differences by the time you are 27.
| patwolf wrote:
| On the section for gun violence, it says "And these are the kids
| who witnessed gun violence", but the title says "See someone shot
| with gun". I'm curious which it is since gun violence encompasses
| things other than seeing someone shot.
| Laylo_ wrote:
| This data seems suspect. Three "some adverse experience" and four
| "many adverse experiences" individual all report a most recent
| annual income of exactly $380,288? That seems highly unlikely,
| and if that is a data error there are likely others.
| 3minus1 wrote:
| It doesn't seem unlikely to me at all. Lots of people are smart
| or successful despite coming from a broken home. Weird example
| but Eminem was extremely poor growing up.
| dc96 wrote:
| You're misinterpreting. When sorted by annual income, the top
| 5 incomes all have the same value: 380,288. This points to
| something weird going on in the data, unless all of those
| specific participants happen to work the same job at the same
| company. Even then, years of experience and salary increases
| would likely differ.
| taurath wrote:
| I have 7/10 ACE's and am a self-taught senior software
| engineer. We exist. Not always well, and good lord is it hard
| to find empathy from coworkers who had the "standard" life
| advancement, but we exist. Among folks who've gone through the
| same stuff as me, they are not doing nearly as well as a group
| compared to others in my generation.
|
| (But yeah there's some data checking that needs to be done as
| denoted elsewhere in the thread)
| hnburnsy wrote:
| "Being held back" or grade retention is rare for high school
| students (teenagers), so rare that it is hard to find a study on
| it. RAND studied middle school and elementary school retention
| and found only some smallish negative effects.
|
| https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10025.html
|
| Most middle\high school grade retention I see these days is self-
| imposed for an advantage in athletics; don't get me started.
| narrator wrote:
| Let me guess, the solution is ban guns and pay higher taxes. That
| is the solution to literally every single problem in human
| history according to western sociology.
|
| Then you get some guy like Nayib Bukele who cuts the Gordian Knot
| of societal disfunction going from the highest murder rate in the
| world to the lowest in the western hemisphere in 3 years short
| years by putting all the gangsters in prison. All the "surplus
| elite" NGO people who spent their entire career ineffectually
| addressing "the root causes of crime" are all now out of a job
| and/or very upset.
| leokennis wrote:
| This will probably greatly interest you:
|
| https://mattlakeman.org/2024/03/30/notes-on-el-salvador/
| narrator wrote:
| It's amazing how surprised everyone was that the whole thing
| worked phenomenally well. It went against a century of
| "expert" advice. It literally did the exact opposite. The
| purpose of the system is what it does [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_
| wha...
| ricardobeat wrote:
| What kind of expert advice did it go against? Honestly
| sounds like the obvious approach, I think the controversy
| is around the authoritarian aspects of the whole thing.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > In early October, El Salvador's police announced the seizure
| of 2,026 firearms, including 1,371 pistols and other small arms
|
| > Imports of certain high-caliber firearms are prohibited. Arms
| for personal defense or hunting may be imported but are
| strictly controlled
|
| No open carry either. Sounds like gun control to me. It goes
| way beyond "putting gangsters in prison" and a large part of
| the plan is investment in education to get kids away from this
| path.
|
| One thing to note is the 72000 in prison did not receive a life
| sentence. They will be released at some point, and one has to
| trust that the "integration" part of the plan will work.
|
| There are also an infinite amount of reports of police abuse,
| violence, unlawful imprisonment, and media being silenced.
| We'll only know the true cost of this many years from now.
| rafaelero wrote:
| What's missing here -- and in most of social sciences -- is the
| realization that adverse events is itself a product of genetics,
| and bad social outcomes are only weakly mediated through those
| events. Genetics is most of the story here and, although it's a
| depressing narrative, I'm sick of seeing people push a narrative
| that is not based on facts.
| shimon wrote:
| On what factual basis can you claim that adverse events are
| primarily driven by genetics?
|
| On the face of it this seems ludicrous. A baby born to a mother
| living in a high-risk environment but then adopted by a low-
| risk family would likely do far better in their life than the
| inverse.
| anon291 wrote:
| As someone who was on the adoption lists in California, we
| had to learn that statements like 'On the face of it this
| seems ludicrous. A baby born to a mother living in a high-
| risk environment but then adopted by a low-risk family would
| likely do far better in their life than the inverse.' were
| false. I don't know if it was right or wrong, but California
| in its mandated adoption (fostering) training courses thought
| that we should be disabused of the idea that taking in a
| child (even a newborn) would mean that the child wouldn't end
| up significantly like the genetic parent. There were several
| studies we had to read (don't have them) that supported this
| claim.
|
| We didn't end up fostering, for unrelated reasons.
| ImAnAmateur wrote:
| Do you remember the age ranges of those foster kids?
| anon291 wrote:
| For us, because of our apartment we were looking at very
| young (less than a year old since we didn't have a
| separate bed room).
|
| They showed us studies that even infant adoptees tended
| towards the educational achievement of their genetic
| parents, not their adopted ones, for example.
|
| Again, I don't even know if it's right or wrong, but the
| agency we were working with thought we should know that.
|
| EDIT: Okay, here's an example:
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/adoption-and-genetics-
| imp_b_4...
|
| And reading that I'm reminded of the agency we were going
| with: PACT in Berkeley.
| rafaelero wrote:
| See for example the classic association between childhood
| maltreatment and future antisocial behavior [1]. As intuitive
| as it may seem that a child that is maltreated may develop
| negative externalizing behavior because of that, it looks
| like the true route of transmission is genetics, not
| environmental.
|
| [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-
| medici...
| anon291 wrote:
| I disagree with you but upvoted you. I think it's an important
| discussion to be had, because I have seen lots of conflicting
| data, but it's unfortunate the forum doesn't want to have it.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Hey Alvin (the author), you see us discussing this, how about
| addressing the issues raised in this discussion?
|
| https://twitter.com/alv9n/status/1780289344852431041
|
| >So this piece is now at the top of @hackernews. This experience
| is always cool and terrifying, especially when they also see all
| the small things that don't quite work about the piece.
| abhayhegde wrote:
| > _Then we turn 18 and we 're expected to be "adults" and figure
| things out. If we fail, we are punished. ... The world we've
| built has shaped his life._
|
| This is a powerful message. A cynical (mostly realistic) outlook
| is that we are powerless pawns at the mercy of the powerful (read
| rich) in the world whose actions are ultimately reasons for
| blaming the powerless.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Maybe I missed something but the adverse experience factor didn't
| seem to be very meaningful. Not convinced by their argument.
|
| Great title and initial presentation though!
| astura wrote:
| I feel like this is trying to tell me something really important
| but the data visualization crashed my browser multiple times.
| cameldrv wrote:
| The punchline is this:
|
| "It's 2021.
|
| The research participants are in their late-30s now, which means
| they've had plenty of time to shape their own destinies. But we
| can clearly see that the experiences of their childhood had a
| huge effect on their financial situation as adults.
|
| It also has an effect on virtually everything else in their
| lives."
|
| You cannot infer the direction of causality from this data, i.e.
| that the traumatic experiences themselves cause the poorer
| outcomes. I remember reading about how in Chicago someone had
| noticed that kids who did better had more books at home, so they
| decided to give poor kids books. Certainly not a bad thing to do,
| but just giving them some books is not going to make them like
| the better off kids in all of the other (highly correlated) ways
| that they're different.
|
| Just as an example, one of the traumatic factors they identify is
| if a kid had witnessed someone being shot. The wealthy kids are
| way less likely to see anyone get shot, because if people were
| regularly getting shot in their neighborhood, they would move.
| The poor kids' parents don't always have that option. In this
| case it could be the poverty itself, not the shooting that is
| causing the poor outcomes. But then you get into why the parents
| are poor in the first place, and there are many causes, but a lot
| of them get passed down to the next generation in one way or
| another.
| refulgentis wrote:
| > Certainly not a bad thing to do, but just giving them some
| books is not going to make them like the better off kids in all
| of the other (highly correlated) ways that they're different
|
| From personal experience, I can absolutely vouch for that. 35,
| came from nowhere with nothing, absentee parents, out of house
| by 15. Dropped out of college, waited tables, did a startup,
| sold it, worked for 7 years at Google, now I'm doing my 2nd
| startup.
|
| Does it fix _everything_? No.
|
| But it gave me _something_ to do that wasn 't TV, and it kept
| me safe from [redacted] dad and [redacted] mom, I could hole up
| wherever I wanted and spend hours in them.
|
| You'd be surprised at the things that are lifelines. I had a
| really hard time explaining to this CS PhD dude who ran a
| weekend night basketball league for no particular reason how
| different and better that kept my life the last couple years of
| high school.
|
| You aren't shifting the whole distribution with one act, but
| just like the little shifts add up in the negative, they add up
| in the positive too.
|
| I remember a woman in her 30s running into me in the library
| lugging around those 7 volume MSDN published sets at 9 years
| old. She was incredulous and told me to keep it up. That
| mattered! No one had even noticed me or remarked on it before,
| gave me pride.
| renjimen wrote:
| Given the order of events (childhood trauma THEN adult
| outcomes), and the strong relationships identified in the
| source material (while controlling for confounding factors), I
| think it's about as close as we can get to inferring
| directionality.
| concordDance wrote:
| > I think it's about as close as we can get to inferring
| directionality.
|
| No, we can try interventions (e.g. do a big and expensive
| anti-violence/CCTV/policing campaign in a neighborhood) and
| record the result.
|
| I do think the grandparent has a point and a lot of these
| could have a common cause. e.g. a violent environment and
| poor educational attainment could both be caused by poverty
| or genes for impulse control or a subculture with a higher
| acceptance these things.
| James_K wrote:
| > But then you get into why the parents are poor in the first
| place, and there are many causes, but a lot of them get passed
| down to the next generation in one way or another.
|
| Are you trying to say that these people are genetically poor?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I think witnessing someone being shot is a good metric because
| it is factual. Either you saw someone being shot or your
| didn't, no ambiguity there, and no matter where you live,
| someone being shot is someone being shot. Not like "uninvolved
| parents" and "bullying" which are open to interpretation.
|
| This metric is also a proxy for living in a violent
| environment. It correlates with wealth, but it is also kind of
| the point. Children who lived in a wealthy environment are
| better off as adults in terms of income. It is not that
| obvious, as rich kids could simply burn through their family
| wealth.
| Nevermark wrote:
| It is odd that they don't normalize the width of the dozens of 3
| cohort graphs. Apparently in order to show fully filled rows.
|
| But it dramatically blunts the visual clarity of comparison
| between the differing percentages in each cohort associated with
| better and worse outcomes.
| timzaman wrote:
| This depiction actually slowed me the issue was much more subtle
| and less severe than I thought.. I thought it would have been
| much worse. I don't think that was their intent!
| rkho wrote:
| > College isn't just a place that teaches you how to do a job
|
| Sorry, what? This statement feels like the exception, not the
| norm for most people who have attended college.
| apsec112 wrote:
| The chart titled "Percentage of people 25 to 29 years old with a
| bachelor's degree" is just wrong. Looking at their own source,
| NCES, in 2010 this was 32%, while their graph seem to show around
| 70%:
|
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_104.20.a...
| 3minus1 wrote:
| As others have mentioned this site heavily implies causality with
| statements like "we can clearly see that the experiences of their
| childhood had a huge effect" and "college or technical school can
| mitigate some of the effects of adverse childhood experiences".
| It is simply not possible to draw such conclusions from a
| longitudinal study. Interventions and actual experiments are
| necessary.
|
| The site is really nicely done and even moving, but I find the
| ideas it is putting forth harmful honestly. We all would like to
| see better outcomes for teenagers, but if that is truly our goal
| we should not be shaping public policy around non-scientific
| observations on correlations. Let's do some actual science please
| and build policy around that.
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