241–250 of 868 posts
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You have to balk when anyone says that anybody is the same person they were 24 years ago.
You have to disbelieve anyone who says they aren't a derivation of their previous person states. That's just physics.
Apparently GPA distribution is less affected by adverse experiences. So doing college admissions based on GPA sounds more fair than affirmative action. Some people from disadvantaged groups also say they would rather be admitted on merit alone because it is more reliable in the long run, but they don't get this choice.
Problem is, GPA is incredibly subjective across different schools, hence the need for standardized testing. Do you rank someone that has a 3.5 at a boarding school where they were taking college level math classes at Princeton as less qualified than someone that has a 4.0 at a school where half the students aren't literate?
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.…
You have to balk when anyone says that anybody is the same person they were 24 years ago.
You can be the same person but different because of those experiences.
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This is a tangent, but when in the world did "happiness" become a desirable metric? If you think about it, it's really quite absurd. Happiness is a brief liminal state that should be triggered by relatively infrequent events. It is not a normal, nor desirable, default state. Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on - there endlessly more rational, logical, desirable, and attainable things to aim for. Yet ever…
> Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on Could you explain to me how this is not another name for happiness?
You are happy to receive good news, or for something to turn out well, or whatever else. But it is not a resting state. It's a liminal state. Contentedness, by contrast, is a resting state. You can awake contented, fall asleep contented, and spend your days contented. You may rarely, if ever, experience happiness - yet find yourself able to find satisfaction in life nonetheless.
By contrast a pitiful, depressed, self loathing individual, can experience happiness as much as anybody else. But he is most certainly not content nor satisfied. Perhaps a junky would be another example. A junky certainly experiences happiness when his poison enters his veins, yet he almost certainly is far from content or satisfied.
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.
I call it "Bastard's Syndrome"
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I don't understand how to practically make this work. There's a strong case to be made that a minimum wage helps people whose value approaches the minimum while hurting people above or below (e.g. $12 and $18 wages in an unlimited market both round to $15 with a minimum, while someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable). Similarly with cash infusions - giving people more money is inflationary. Nobo…
> someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable This is the wrong model. You're using a worker's wage to describe their productivity, and a big reason for the mess we're in is that wages stopped increasing with productivity fifty years ago. (search "wages productivity graph")
Imagine someone's contribution to a business increases revenue by $1000 and the total cost to employ that person for the same period is $800. Do you think most businesses would go "nope, we only hire highly leveraged people who produce $2000 in revenue"?
There are inefficiencies in scale (like communication/bookkeeping overhead) that might disincentivize a business from growing, but generally speaking, I think it's fine to model decisions as rational cost/benefit ones.
Workers who are only "worth it" at some wage. Nobody is going to pay you a million dollars to go sell a hundred dollars worth of stuff. If the value you can earn on the market is sufficiently lower than what someone is allowed to pay, they simply won't hire you. That's bad for everyone.
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.…
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 friends are dead (usually overdoses), suffer from substance abuse, or are still stuck in the poverty cycle (on average it takes 7 generation to break the cycle).
I look at this visualization and I can feel, to my core, what these folks feel. Even for those that 'made it out', I feel for them. I struggle with my mental health, I've had to actively reparent myself, and I feel pretty lonely. Many of the people I'm surrounded by don't know what it feels like to carry all the weight from your childhood.
I do agree that the government shouldn't just throw resources at the problem. There are some things the government can do, though.
1. Teach conflict resolution skills to young children. This mitigates adverse experiences and prepares the children for adulthood (especially if they 'make it out')
2. Address addiction as a health problem and not a criminal problem. Children don't need to see their parents as criminals, they need to witness them get better.
3. 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.
4. Access to education. The people I grew up around who have found success did so because our schools were really well equipped.
You'll notice I didn't list access to support systems. Honestly, they are kind of useless. As a child you understand that if you open up about your experience there is a solid chance your parents will get in trouble or you'll be removed from your home. No child wants this. You end up holding it all in because you can't trust adults.
These are just some of my thoughts. Definitely not comprehensive, I could ramble on about this for ages.
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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.…
Anyone else notice how those with the most adverse experiences were both more likely to be depressed and more likely to be happy "all of the time" for the past month? Is this a flaw in the data? What is the causal explanation for this?
I noticed that the no adverse group had very few people who said they were happy most of the time. I think this could come down to the weight of debt and maintaining a "stable" lifestyle. The more adverse effect group is probably generally lower income and less likely to have a lot of debt.