Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)
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Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)
#2All programmers here know how hard it is to get work done when you need to focus and are in a disruptive environment. It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead.
Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)
#3I can vouch for that. As a company founder who has not raised any funding, meeting payroll and other expenses month on month is so mentally exhausting that it leaves little for other tasks. I think, in a way, the brains of startup founders and those below poverty lines work in the same way.
Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)
#4Nice article, but awful title... It could be parsed either way. "Poverty reduces brainpower" or "Poverty makes navigating other areas require less brainpower"
Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)
#5I can vouch for that. As a company founder who has not raised any funding, meeting payroll and other expenses month on month is so mentally exhausting that it leaves little for other tasks. I think, in a way, the brains of startup founders and those below poverty lines work in the same way.
I'm going to frame this comment and put it on a wall
Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)
#6At one point in the past I was most definitely dealing with poverty and I found it a lot more difficult to get development tasks done at work. The reduced mental capacity is really noticeable but importantly it's also temporary.
Since then I've kept an eye out for disadvantaged people who do good development work. If they are able to produce things despite having a reduced capacity it's such a good sign that they have real talent. Poverty can be dealt with more easily than a lack of talent.
There's a great book called "scarcity" by by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, that explains the mechanisms behind this, would highly recommend reading it.
Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)
#7All programmers here know how hard it is to get work done when you need to focus and are in a disruptive environment. It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead.
Absolutely, given the huge decrease in capacity from disruptive environments it's just insanity that people create work spaces filled with distractions. When framed from the perspective of "hey do you want to have every employee in your company be one standard deviation less capable" the true costs become much more apparent.
Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)
#8I can vouch for that. As a company founder who has not raised any funding, meeting payroll and other expenses month on month is so mentally exhausting that it leaves little for other tasks. I think, in a way, the brains of startup founders and those below poverty lines work in the same way.
This is the peak of hacker news
Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)
#9I can vouch for that. As a company founder who has not raised any funding, meeting payroll and other expenses month on month is so mentally exhausting that it leaves little for other tasks. I think, in a way, the brains of startup founders and those below poverty lines work in the same way.
Holy shit, this not a joke comment, right?
Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)
#10All programmers here know how hard it is to get work done when you need to focus and are in a disruptive environment. It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead.
This is my concern with the article: maybe the impairment doesn't necessarily depend on scarcity/money... Maybe it's more a matter of bandwidth, in which case blaming Poverty only sounds quite ideological.
1- Does the bandwidth problem go away when you fix poverty (costly but easy to measure)?
2- Does the problem go away when you lessen perceived stress instead? (teach meditation/auto-hypnosis and measure if it helps)
3- Solutions to this problem should have applications in the teaching world, when exam-stress can reduce bandwidth, yet we can't just make exams easier
"It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead": sometimes the opposite is true, like when you decide to burry yourself with work to escape hardships... It's a matter of mind state, so learning to control it should help.