161–170 of 405 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An even more outsized role is played by a virtuous life. It may not make you a billionaire, but if you finish high school, get a full-time job once you finish school, get married before you have children, then you are quite likely to have a good life. We are doing a disservice to our fellow man by not telling them this truth.
You’re far more likely to have been born in rural China, India or Africa than in the west.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. Statistically, having children before you get married is much more likely to result in worse outcomes. Maybe cause and effect is inverted, but maybe the better option is to not run a social experiment in fatherless children as we have been doing for the past couple of decades with absolutely no research to suggest that it can result in positive outcomes and loads of data to show that it's almost definitely can'…
I don't think you need to run any experiment. Being married or not is just signing a paper. What matters is if the couple live together and in harmony. You can do so without being married and having children, and it's everyday more common. That's why I'm saying you have cause and effect in the wrong order: children issues are tied to one or both parents not caring about them, and a symptom of that was having children…
If we ignore almost all of human history save for the past 50 years, then yes. If we redefine marriage to not mean what most humans that have ever used the word meant by it, then yes.
But why would we do these things? If you call all relations between two human beings marriage, you gain nothing, you just lose a word.
Marriage is a covenant between two people, a man and a woman, with God, and incidentally, this covenant, not a piece of paper, it's also a precondition for two people to live together and in harmony. It's a commitment by both people to focus not on themselves, but on the family unit and the wellbeing of that family unit.
> You can do so without being married and having children, and it's everyday more common.
Children of married parents still have better outcomes, and the lower income people are, the bigger the advantage of having married parents are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> get married before you have children, then you are quite likely to have a good life. Based on what, exactly? I think you have cause and effect inverted.
Nope. Statistically, having children before you get married is much more likely to result in worse outcomes. Maybe cause and effect is inverted, but maybe the better option is to not run a social experiment in fatherless children as we have been doing for the past couple of decades with absolutely no research to suggest that it can result in positive outcomes and loads of data to show that it's almost definitely can'…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we have any data whatsoever that would support the claim that whether you are married before having children has no impact on your life outcome or the life outcomes of your children?
I don't think you understood my comment, I will spell it out: data by itself just quantifies, doesn't qualify. It doesn't qualify why marrying before having children is better, it just states that, for some reason, the outcomes are better. Now you need to do the qualitative research to understand what are the causes for it, it could be that marriage is a signal for stable relationships, in that case marrying doesn't…
I have unfortunately not spent enough time at a university to follow this line of reasoning. Must be wild to be able to follow it. I'm of the yokel type that thinks if all data and tradition we have shows something works, then it's probably best to do the thing that works instead of trying things that we have no reason to think would work.
But in line with tradition, the underclasses in the west has always been the favourite laboratory for the cultural elites in the west.
> what an outsized role is played by luck This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.
> what an outsized role is played by luck This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.
> what an outsized role is played by luck This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.
It doesn't guarantee anything, you can still be smart and fucked. But you can _try_ to change things.
> what an outsized role is played by luck This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s true to an extent, but has severe limitations. Of the five thing your parent comment listed (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy), only one (geography) is truly under your control, and even then it can be very hard to change depending on where you start and the other four (and more).
I object to those 5 things. Parents and genetics are one thing, but geography, society, and the wider economy are for everyone to navigate so make your own luck.
It is not reasonable to tell a child sold into slavery or forced to be a soldier to “make their own luck”, that “society, and the wider economy are for everyone to navigate”. A person in the eye of storm and another in calm waters cannot navigate the same way.
People who firmly believe they above all “made their own luck” are the ones who had such a large amount of it outside their control they don’t even realise how much of it they had, like a fish unable to perceive the water.
> what an outsized role is played by luck This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.