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Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

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Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#51

Post by dang »

JordanFarmer wrote: post #9
ngold wrote: post #4

Imagine being so poor you can't concentrate on what tomorrow is. That is what being poor does to you. It robs you of thinking.

Wrong, reasoning like yours has caused so much pervasiveness of poverty and other problems. You probably reason that abortion and birth control could help the US black population also. Unintended consequences of thinking like yours has done so much harm to society (especially by politicians/government) and could sadly have easily been avoided by simply seeking solutions from truly creative problem solvers with analyt…

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what the site is for. Worse, it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#52

Post by downerending »

xyzzyz wrote: post #47
pdpi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crucially, there’s a difference between “males have statistically significantly better memory”, which is what you are talking about, and “gender is one of the top predictors of memory”, which is, reportedly, what the data in the article shows.

Can you explain to me what the difference is?

Not OP, but statistical significance has to do with how _sure_ you are that there is an effect. It doesn't really say anything about how _large_ the effect is.

It's pretty obvious that gender can't be a top predictor of memory, intelligence, etc. The reason is that even if there is a definite difference where males are better than females, it'd be a modest delta between two bell curves. That would leave huge numbers of pairings in which a female had better memory than a male, etc.

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#53

Post by TomMckenny »

ngold wrote: post #4

Imagine being so poor you can't concentrate on what tomorrow is. That is what being poor does to you. It robs you of thinking.

Poverty is also thought to have caused the diffidence in performance in the marshmallow test[1]. Poor kids learn to take advantage of the moment and distrust the future. And poor kids tend to be lower earners in later life than wealthier kids due to advantage differences[2][3]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

[2]https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmall...

[3]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761876166...

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#54

Post by Ghjklov »

jlawson wrote: post #48
Ghjklov wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been there. Once you start thinking to yourself that there is no long term future ahead of you, the kind of choices you make becomes almost like a sick joke. Buy some fruit and vegetables to eat so that you can feel nourished and live a long life, or eat some feel good salty sugar loaded fast food because you have no fucking future anyway? Study and gain employable skills or play video games right now because yo…

>you're going to die homeless next month Help me understand how someone could believe something along these lines for more-or-less their entire life. The fact is that poor people live long lives of many decades; they observe others around them just like them living many decades. There's nothing close to a rational reason to discount the future that hard. How does one end up believing that every month is their last wh…

People don't believe they'll literally drop dead next month. But they believe they'll get kicked out of their apartment if they can't pay rent. If that happens, they might end up losing their job after not being able to show up for a few days in order to find a new place if that's even possible. Being poor is miserable. You know how you might lament that due to your full time job you have so little time to spend on your interests and hobbies? Likewise, poor people have very little time or the mental bandwidth to think about doing things that only pay off in the long term. They're focused on surviving to next month. So they spend money on groceries instead of on coding lessons or something which won't get them a better job any time soon. They're probably right anyway. What's the point of learning to code when companies wouldn't hire them in a million years instead of a college graduate or someone with previous experience in the field. So you can imagine how many people are condemned to forever working food service jobs or other such work.

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#55

Post by ptry-line »

staplers wrote: post #50
jlawson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you're going to die homeless next month Help me understand how someone could believe something along these lines for more-or-less their entire life. The fact is that poor people live long lives of many decades; they observe others around them just like them living many decades. There's nothing close to a rational reason to discount the future that hard. How does one end up believing that every month is their last wh…

Humans are not immune to inertia.

Well said.

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#56

Post by jpindar »

nradov wrote: post #18
johnnyAghands wrote: post #12

I hope data like this can help society in ridding this disease -- poverty is a disease. Looking at the results and anecdotal evidence it feels like this is obvious.. but the fact of the matter is unless you've been through it, it's very unlikely you can truly appreciate the magnitude of the results. I hope studies like these and the changing demographics of power (with respect to age and race) will start focusing on…

Eliminating extreme poverty would be nice, but unfortunately overreactions to COVID-19 in some countries are currently driving the world economy into a depression and increasing poverty. While the pandemic is clearly a terrible public health crisis, poverty also kills people. It just takes longer than the virus. Expect to see higher rates of suicide, substance abuse, and chronic disease in the next few years.

There's going to be a lot of homeless people as soon as the various state's eviction bans are lifted.

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#57

Post by booboolayla »

johnnyAghands wrote: post #12

I hope data like this can help society in ridding this disease -- poverty is a disease. Looking at the results and anecdotal evidence it feels like this is obvious.. but the fact of the matter is unless you've been through it, it's very unlikely you can truly appreciate the magnitude of the results. I hope studies like these and the changing demographics of power (with respect to age and race) will start focusing on…

This little theory falls completely apart because its axiom is wrong - poverty is NOT a disease. It's a natural state of human affairs in this physical world and it is _complicated_: it is relative to one's point of view, it's an intrinsic part of mammal hierarchy and therefore intrinsic part of humanity. When egalitarianism is pushed externally on a human society, humans tend to "invent" new kind of poverty by simply changing the definition of what "being poor" means, for example.

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#58

Post by booboolayla »

twomoretime wrote: post #19

>This research was funded by Elrha’s Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises (R2HC) Programme ( https://www.elrha.org/project/yale-psychosocial-call2/ ), which aims to improve health outcomes by strengthening the evidence base for public health interventions in humanitarian crises I know that the intentions appear to be benevolent but I'd just point out that this isn't really an unbiased source, so it may be prude…

Typical leftist front organization masquerading as subject matter experts. You can recognize them easily because their analyses of poverty for example never include analyzing potential negative traits or behaviors in their subjects that might be causing poverty. All blame and potential solutions are always political in nature and inevitably lead to more government involvement.

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#59

Post by toomanybeersies »

jpindar wrote: post #56
nradov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eliminating extreme poverty would be nice, but unfortunately overreactions to COVID-19 in some countries are currently driving the world economy into a depression and increasing poverty. While the pandemic is clearly a terrible public health crisis, poverty also kills people. It just takes longer than the virus. Expect to see higher rates of suicide, substance abuse, and chronic disease in the next few years.

There's going to be a lot of homeless people as soon as the various state's eviction bans are lifted.

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Who are landlords going to find to replace their tenants that didn't have a job for 6 months? Another unemployed tenant?

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#60

Post by js8 »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #59
jpindar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's going to be a lot of homeless people as soon as the various state's eviction bans are lifted.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Who are landlords going to find to replace their tenants that didn't have a job for 6 months? Another unemployed tenant?

That's a rational look at things. But if they believe they can (find replacement tenants), they will try, possibly making things worse.
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