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Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong

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Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong

#291

Post by nostrebored »

hkt wrote: post #244
nostrebored wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is overlooking another potential factor: Rich culture is better than poor culture. A college dropout who has grown up rich is going to be more likely to value knowledge than a poor person, will have been exposed to more money management, and being rich is positively correlated with making good life decisions. Contrast that with poor culture, where we know that the inverse is true in many cases: Knowledge…

Being poor is actually associated with making modally appropriate decisions. That is to say that people adjust to it. Case in point is discounting: offer someone £20 today or £100 in a year. A person poor enough will likely take the money now, and this is because it has more value to them now . People aren't awful, they're adjusted to circumstances that are awful, being the products of a sick system. Properly provisi…

'There is no "better" or "worse".'

This assumes that everyone is a rational actor. Unfortunately, assuming that everyone is effective at allocating resources or time is unsafe and wildly inaccurate. My mother's hours spent cutting coupons rather than finding a job (over years) misvalued the long term impact of having a job and developing a career. My father's allocation of money that we did not have to cigarettes rather than a savings account had extremely negative long term effects.

I grew up around poor people, and I saw their mistakes. I made their mistakes, and I still do. Which isn't to say that all poor people are incapable of making effective financial decisions, just that the distribution is skewed; there are "better" and "worse" valuations of things, and fundamentally people who are worse at making these valuations will on average be poorer.

Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong

#292

Post by z3t4 »

sundvor wrote: post #259
Throwaway892375 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Yes, I've a couple projects. A couple are more popular than others. My own stuff has about two million total users. But for about the last four months, I've been working exclusively on creating some (combinatorial) design theory algorithms.

2 million users, that's fantastic work - and the algo stuff sounds like a page turner in the making as well. Keep at it, and please don't ever discount your own worth. (Not that I'm massively successful myself or anything. In fact, I'm currently unemployed and seeking .net roles, after redundancy; facing difficulties with this as I have only just under 1y of .net xp even as I've done development for 20. Refreshing /…

What was your old tools?

Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong

#293

Post by LouisSayers »

Mz wrote: post #288
LouisSayers wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being popular on HackerNews is not what I'd consider mingling with 'the haves'. Mingling to me is being invited to dinner parties, socialising in the real world, being called a friend. Of course if you start from homelessness, then you have a hard journey ahead of you. I'm not saying it's easy - it's a long and arduous affair no doubt. I resent your tone somewhat, I can assure you that I did not start from the top at…

You resent my tone. I resent your implicit dismissal that I have a point at all. That is something routinely done to people who are "the wrong kind of people," whether it is their gender, sexual orientation, social class or some other Othering category. Calling it a hack that you are suggesting is an extremely different idea from your initial framing. I am someone who focuses a lot on what the disadvantaged individua…

I never intended my initial post as a dismissal of hard work. I actually assumed that people would understand it to be an expansion of a common saying "It's not what you know, it's who you know" - although I didn't feel the quotes were necessary.

I'm not saying that there's no value in meeting people online - I think that's quite different than having a million karma points on a forum however. I also don't know how you can equate sexism and classism to 'dismissing' points on a forum... for starters, I didn't even register that I was talking to a female, and to be honest, all the points say to me is that you must spend a whole lot of time on here!

Lastly, I understand that you relate what's said on here to your current living situation. It seems to me however that you're reading into things that are simply not there. I have no intention of oppressing or judging anyone, and in fact my intention is quite the opposite. I would hope that if anything, someone might stop and think critically - think about their connections, or their social skills, think of how to improve that area of their life alongside their other skills. That's my real intention here.

I wish you all the best - I know that it sucks to be poor. My mum is poor, I bought her a car last year (she used to just walk everywhere) to be able to take my brother to school etc. When it comes to money, my Grandmother instilled in me a great mindset (probably some Tony Robbins in here as well). She would say that she is rich - that being poor is a mindset. My Grandmother is actually extremely rich - she just happens to be temporarily broke a lot lol.

Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong

#294

Post by Mz »

LouisSayers wrote: post #293
Mz wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You resent my tone. I resent your implicit dismissal that I have a point at all. That is something routinely done to people who are "the wrong kind of people," whether it is their gender, sexual orientation, social class or some other Othering category. Calling it a hack that you are suggesting is an extremely different idea from your initial framing. I am someone who focuses a lot on what the disadvantaged individua…

I never intended my initial post as a dismissal of hard work. I actually assumed that people would understand it to be an expansion of a common saying "It's not what you know, it's who you know" - although I didn't feel the quotes were necessary. I'm not saying that there's no value in meeting people online - I think that's quite different than having a million karma points on a forum however. I also don't know how y…

I do not really want to fight with you and I think you are reading in a bunch of stuff that is not there. But I do want to say framing matters and the quotation marks you left out would have helped, though probably not enough.

Take care.

Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong

#295

Post by rcafdm »

adamnemecek wrote: post #108
wutbrodo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm personally all for fixing the education system, but the idea that this would fix (or even help) income equality is a fantasy. Denmark is often held up as a model of low-inequality, high-income-mobility, high-education-investment countries. But a recent study indicated that these policies' have zero effect on Danish income mobility and education-attainment mobility relative to the US! Their high levels of equality…

Ok, I haven't read the study too closely but I can't imagine how having a more educated population would be beneficial for the society. Also note that you can't really measure poverty by just percentage of income alone. The pool people in US are probably doing better than in Somalia. If nothing else, I can't imagine more education not raising the general standard.

1: We have very limited ability to change educational outcomes in this country and the differences between schools have little to do with external inputs (systematic differences in per pupil funding, teacher quality, etc). https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-r...

2: Years of schools have essentially no explanatory power at an international level (even in lesser developed countries that should have much more "low hanging fruit") Other research shows that without improving test scores, which are strongly influenced by genetics, education is basically worthless for economic development.

https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/06/15/education-econ-growth/

3: Poor people in the US, especially net of taxes and transfers, are quite wealthy by broader international standards. US poor vs Somalia? LOL that's not even a question. The poor in some of the more economically successful nordic/northern european countries might have somewhat higher material living conditions, but the differences are much more modest than you might expect and as compared to what you find in other developed countries (especially larger, less homogeneous, less cherry -picked countries), say, France, Italy, Spain, etc it's far from clear cut. The US also has significantly more diversity in multiple dimensions, especially as compared to an extremely (traditionally) homogeneous country like Denmark.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161011131428.h...

Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong

#296

Post by ap22213 »

rcafdm wrote: post #283
ap22213 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, assuming that you've thought a bunch about this topic, what kind of policies would you recommend to address it? That is, given the genetic influence and subsequent lower quality of life, should it be considered and treated as a disease?

I'd recommend focusing on policy that is actually informed by a realistic assessment of the evidence regardless of your personal views/preferences. In my view, we spend a tremendous amount of money on schools (over-funding -> fancy facilities, labs, etc), pre-K, enrichment programs and the like that have approximately no effect on predictors of future success, some direct evidence suggests does nothing for income/emp…

Do we really need genetic modification to address this though? Humans have had an effective history of inventing tools to scale their performance by magnitudes. For example, a Human was quite ineffective at digging the land so they invented the shovel and plow. There are a million examples, of course.

Why would attributes of the mind somehow be impossible to similarly enhance?

Anyway, it seems like you're main concerns are ineffective and costly methods that don't address the root problem. So, why not propose a new method or invent a tool? Bringing light to the issue helps a little, but at a certain point it is better to do what we're good at - inventing things to make us more effective.

I don't know about you, but personally, I'm exhausted from always being the smartest person in the room. I would love it if someone invented a mental shovel, because there's too much work to do and not enough people to do it.

Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong

#297

Post by mzw_mzw »

Mz wrote: post #80
chinese_dan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A lot of people work their ass off just to pay the rent and feed their kids." We should also be questioning why someone that can barely pay the rent decides to have another kid (or even a kid at all). Financial management should be a bigger part of our education system. "Working your ass off does not imply wealth. That's the problem." It has never and should never imply wealth. When I was in college, I worked my ass…

We should also be questioning why someone that can barely pay the rent decides to have another kid (or even a kid at all). This statement is rife with all kinds of shitty assumptions. Until Obamacare came along, it was common for health insurance in the US to not cover birth control -- yet it often covered Viagra. So, a guy who is too old to get it up anymore is entitled to sexual pleasure, but a young woman servicin…

> Until Obamacare came along, it was common for health insurance in the US to not cover birth control -- yet it often covered Viagra.

Birth control costs literally $7 a month. You can get it from almost any pharmacy in the nation. Complaining about your health insurance not covering birth control is like complaining about your car insurance not covering gasoline.

Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong

#298

Post by antisthenes »

rcafdm wrote: post #289
antisthenes wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, all that is good, but sounds more like concern trolling rather than actual suggestions. Do you have actual economic policies that will result in better outcomes for the poor?

1: There were several concrete suggestions there. It's not mere "concern trolling". 2: Ending wasteful or very low value-add spending vis-a-vis "better outcomes for the poor" is useful regardless. Whatever your priorities, we can allocate those resources better. 3: Just because the economic and social woes of the poor are tough problems that admit of no easy solutions does not mean that we cannot speak frankly about…

So it's a moral argument of what you want to do with the "genetic inferiors" and how much resources you actually want to allocate helping them. That would require making a judgment call about their utility curve.

Got it.

Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong

#299

Post by Mz »

mzw_mzw wrote: post #297
Mz wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should also be questioning why someone that can barely pay the rent decides to have another kid (or even a kid at all). This statement is rife with all kinds of shitty assumptions. Until Obamacare came along, it was common for health insurance in the US to not cover birth control -- yet it often covered Viagra. So, a guy who is too old to get it up anymore is entitled to sexual pleasure, but a young woman servicin…

> Until Obamacare came along, it was common for health insurance in the US to not cover birth control -- yet it often covered Viagra. Birth control costs literally $7 a month. You can get it from almost any pharmacy in the nation. Complaining about your health insurance not covering birth control is like complaining about your car insurance not covering gasoline.

Men tend to make more money than women. Seven dollars a month may not be a big deal to you, but it is for some people. And my criticism is more like saying that insurance companies would pay for your gas if you were male but not if you were female.

Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong

#300

Post by mzw_mzw »

Mz wrote: post #299
mzw_mzw wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Until Obamacare came along, it was common for health insurance in the US to not cover birth control -- yet it often covered Viagra. Birth control costs literally $7 a month. You can get it from almost any pharmacy in the nation. Complaining about your health insurance not covering birth control is like complaining about your car insurance not covering gasoline.

Men tend to make more money than women. Seven dollars a month may not be a big deal to you, but it is for some people. And my criticism is more like saying that insurance companies would pay for your gas if you were male but not if you were female.

> Men tend to make more money than women. Seven dollars a month may not be a big deal to you, but it is for some people.

How is this also not an argument that health insurance should pay for food? People (including women!) pay way more per month for food than the $7 that we've agreed birth control costs, and it's far more vital to one's continued health than birth control is.

> And my criticism is more like saying that insurance companies would pay for your gas if you were male but not if you were female.

Only in a tortured and incorrect fashion. Insurance companies will pay for treating all kinds of maladies that only women can get. Is that an argument that they're discriminating against men?

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