This is a teenager • Hacker News Board

Re: This is a teenager

#361

Post by unholythree » Tue, Apr 16, 2024, 9:23 PM UTC

feoren wrote: post #339

thegrim33 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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…

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.

Re: This is a teenager

#362

Post by no-dr-onboard » Tue, Apr 16, 2024, 9:25 PM UTC

anon291 wrote: post #302

richardlblair wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

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…

> 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.

Re: This is a teenager

#363

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Apr 16, 2024, 9:26 PM UTC

imacomputertoo wrote: post #209

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.…

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.

Re: This is a teenager

#364

Post by cameldrv » Tue, Apr 16, 2024, 9:26 PM UTC

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.

Re: This is a teenager

#365

Post by nurple » Tue, Apr 16, 2024, 9:26 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #315

imacomputertoo wrote: post #209

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.…

>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'…

Do you realize that having the time and resources for those things is a privilege that many in poverty don't have?

Re: This is a teenager

#366

Post by 3minus1 » Tue, Apr 16, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

Laylo_ wrote: post #284

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.

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.

Re: This is a teenager

#367

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Tue, Apr 16, 2024, 9:31 PM UTC

fzeindl wrote: post #218

subpixel wrote: post #6

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: This is a teenager

#368

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan » Tue, Apr 16, 2024, 9:33 PM UTC

RobCat27 wrote: post #14

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 pro…

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.

Re: This is a teenager

#369

Post by naasking » Tue, Apr 16, 2024, 9:33 PM UTC

unholythree wrote: post #361

feoren wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> 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.

Re: This is a teenager

#370

Post by spyckie2 » Tue, Apr 16, 2024, 9:34 PM UTC

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #115

spyckie2 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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.