111–120 of 282 posts
>For them, daily life holds fewer guarantees: There might be food in the pantry today, but there might not be tomorrow, so there is a risk that comes with waiting. If food is scarce, wouldn't food hoarding be the rational action?
So this is suggesting that childhood poverty may be a strong correlate of whatever the marshmallow test tests (and childhood poverty is plausibly a strong correlate of life outcomes, so the effect might be completely mediated via childhood poverty rather than any notion of "affinity towards delayed gratification"), but I'm not sure I understand how/whether it rules out the following two. (1) whatever quality X the ma…
Also not clear that's its ability to delay gratification that is being measured; instead, it's just a measure of risk taking mediated by subjective estimate of situational risk and tolerance for risk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This very article is about how the original paper did not control enough for confounding factors: > Watts and his colleagues were skeptical of that finding. The original results were based on studies that included fewer than 90 children—all enrolled in a preschool on Stanford’s campus. In restaging the experiment, Watts and his colleagues thus adjusted the experimental design in important ways: The researchers used a…
The quote you copy-pasted from the article has nothing to do with my comment.
In other words: a more sensible reading of GP's comment would be as a reaction to said paragraph.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somewhat premature to conclude that this 900-person study is definitive.
Agreed. I wish study replication was more gloried in science. I think there are many questionable studies out there that we take as fact.
My own "experimentation" suggests that the character trait that predisposes one to bandy about pop allegories such as "marshmallow test" is a portentous sign in potential managers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The idea that children raised with few resources need help to plan for the long term seems to be rather lost on many politicians these days. The truth is unacceptable to our modern society. We still live in a harsh world where we have to sacrifice some people for the good of the community. Many critical traits like intelligence are largely inherited. Once we focus on the nurture side the three key influencers are g…
This comment is a list of assertions without any base and ties netween each other. Why would we have to sacrifice anybody? How do you define intelligence and how is it biologically inherited? Why would those be the three influencers and not stuff like school, neighbours, family as a whole and public support? Why would feminism have killed fathers at home? Who said gangs are more accepted or that there is even more vi…
Any textbook on the topic will explain. This is not even controversial.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GPs explanation is nothing more than a hypothesis as to why the Marshmallow test would be predictive of later performance: > The post argues that [a "generalised ability/desire to take and pass tests"] is an underrecognised character trait which can predict success in today's Western test-oriented world. In other words: it follows the assumption that being good at the Marshmallow test represents inherent character tr…
> The new paper shows that this is not the case. The Marshmallow test still is predictive, but that seems to be because being able to take it correlates with having affluent backgrounds, not with it representing an inherent character trait that predicts anything. And Smaug123 referenced that by saying > Assuming the trait is either heritable or culturally imbued (and intuitively it seems very likely that at least one…
Furthermore, Smaug123's explanation here is flawed:
> Assuming the trait is either heritable or culturally imbued (and intuitively it seems very likely that at least one of those is true), it makes sense that rich parents are more likely to have children who are either natively or culturally high in The Desire To Pass Tests
The reason it does not make sense in this context is the very thing you cite yourself: when controlled for socio-economic background, the predictive power disappears. If the predictive power of the Marshmallow test could be ascribed to character traits, controlling to socio-economic backgrounds should enhance the signal of the predictive power, not remove it altogether.
> The researchers also, when analyzing their test’s results, controlled for certain factors—such as the income of a child’s household Is that a valid thing to do? If "will power" was a strongly inherited trait, and the theory is that will power leads to increase household income in adult life, then this controlling would remove most of the signal. The original paper relied partly on a questionnaire that asked the par…
I see so many forum discussions where posters criticise the poor for their 'weak' decisions and effectively blame the poor for their own plight. Why don't they just work harder and earn the money to pay for their healthcare and education? they say. It is easy to withhold funding from deprived areas if you convince yourself that it is their own fault. These results should be on the front pages of newspapers and on TV…
Behold the bathing parade below.
> The researchers also, when analyzing their test’s results, controlled for certain factors—such as the income of a child’s household Is that a valid thing to do? If "will power" was a strongly inherited trait, and the theory is that will power leads to increase household income in adult life, then this controlling would remove most of the signal. The original paper relied partly on a questionnaire that asked the par…
> Is that a valid thing to do? If "will power" was a strongly inherited trait, and the theory is that will power leads to increase household income in adult life, then this controlling would remove most of the signal. I suspect you might misunderstand what "controling for" means. Suppose you want to predict A (here "increase household income in adult life") using variable X (here "will power"). You do this by regress…
Collinearity issues can mean that the beta estimates for collinear variables are less robust, making them harder to interpret. Sometimes this is approached by some data reduction technique, eg PCA.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Veggies are very expensive per calorie. A cucumber is ~16 calories and costs ~50 cents each. A 2,000 calorie diet at that rate would be 60$ per day. Granted nobody is eating like that but 1.50$ for 3 servings of vegetables per day is 550$ per year which really is significant for them. PS: This is assuming they even have access to low cost veggies.
Straw man at the very least? How many people use veggies for their energy? That's what most people use grains for - bread, pasta, potatoes. All of them also cheap. Given obesity rates, the problem is too much energy . After all, one part of calling for more vegetable consumption is so that people lower their energy intake. Example: https://www.fruitsandveggiesmorematters.org/eating-vegetable... (the number of article…