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Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

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Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#251

Post by neilv »

heavyset_go wrote: post #151
malvosenior wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone from a poor background will tell you that this is true in a shockingly large number of cases. Crab bucket mentality is real, bread and circuses are real and most of all anti-intellectualism is definitely real and a core tenant of modern lower class society.

Person from a poor background here. You're generalizing.

Agreed, and don't be disheartened. There are a few topics on HN that bring out comments and voting that are surprising and confusing to me, and this is one of them.

In this case, I have a sense that a certain generalization is very present in society, and harmful (e.g., a barrier to solving problems of injustice, or otherwise adversely affects how we treat each other). Someone might be speaking of their own anecdotal experience, and upset about that, and not thinking about why it might be important not to make blanket generalizations from that.

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#252

Post by dekhn »

sbierwagen wrote: post #233
mrguyorama wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The best thing to do when you see science you don't like, is pretend it reinforces your already existing biases" What?

There is a big big big gap between an individual newsworthy article, and science tested by multiple replications. Only 62% of articles published in Nature and Science actually replicated: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06075-z About a coin flip if you can believe a given headline at all. A single article is a data point, not ironclad unimpeachable argument-ending fact.

I would argue that the DNA paper by W&C was an ironclad unimpeachable argument-ending fact. The nice thing is that you could take their structure, run it forward through the scattering algorithm, and see that the simulated data looked identical to the measured data. Further, the simple prediction the paper made (that duplex DNA could form a template for DNA replication) turned out to be so audaciously true...

(I could quibble and say the W&C structure is technically wrong, because it was done in non-physiological conditions, and subsequent studies did find very minor structural details for B-DNA when done correctly...)

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#253

Post by allannienhuis »

speedplane wrote: post #238
allannienhuis wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what part of my statement you're agreeing with, as the two points seem contradictory :) The fees and penalties at 60 and 90 days that are common in contract terms like we're talking about are there for when the client doesn't pay by the agreed 30 day term, aren't they? 30 days payment is the behavior that the company wants, pretty clearly. Yes, they're also agreeing to limited penalties if they don't meet th…

> I'm calling out the idea that there's nothing bad (immoral/unjust) going on if someone doesn't pay within the ordinary term expected unless it's been explicitly agreed to When I first founded my startup, I was vigilant about paying all of my contractors and vendors perfectly on time or early. As a business owner, I wanted to provide a great product and didn't want to chase people for money, and tried treating compa…

Right, but all of that behavior by those people is immoral/wrong/bad. I said nothing about whether moral behavior should be expected at all times (or any time) from large companies or frankly most of the people we do business with.

I'm trying to point out that people who think there's nothing bad about it (as the original post I replied to stated) are completely missing something about the basic definitions of bad behavior. It's like some shared delusion or psychopathy that people seem to believe, because it's in their self-interest to believe it.

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#254

Post by [deleted] »

spaginal wrote: post #126
bcrosby95 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But I was a lazy entitled "upper middle class" kid. I have my job because my parents could afford to support my lazy ass for so long. So yeah, if you have the grit and drive you can help yourself out to a certain point. But some of us didn't need any grit and basically coasted through life. Why do I deserve this more than kids with less well off parents that fell somewhere between me and you - not a complete la…

Because your parents worked hard for your outcome, as theirs did for them. It's the same thing that drives the success of societies and nations, each generation living on the bounty of the blood, sweat, and toil of those that came before. An outsider may view with envy at the position of the people in the society, but it doesn't diminish the rights of the people in that society to it just because they didn't make it.…

[deleted]

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#255

Post by sbierwagen »

dekhn wrote: post #252
sbierwagen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big big big gap between an individual newsworthy article, and science tested by multiple replications. Only 62% of articles published in Nature and Science actually replicated: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06075-z About a coin flip if you can believe a given headline at all. A single article is a data point, not ironclad unimpeachable argument-ending fact.

I would argue that the DNA paper by W&C was an ironclad unimpeachable argument-ending fact. The nice thing is that you could take their structure, run it forward through the scattering algorithm, and see that the simulated data looked identical to the measured data. Further, the simple prediction the paper made (that duplex DNA could form a template for DNA replication) turned out to be so audaciously true... (I coul…

Did I say that no authoritative papers have ever been published?

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#256

Post by speedplane »

allannienhuis wrote: post #253
speedplane wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm calling out the idea that there's nothing bad (immoral/unjust) going on if someone doesn't pay within the ordinary term expected unless it's been explicitly agreed to When I first founded my startup, I was vigilant about paying all of my contractors and vendors perfectly on time or early. As a business owner, I wanted to provide a great product and didn't want to chase people for money, and tried treating compa…

Right, but all of that behavior by those people is immoral/wrong/bad. I said nothing about whether moral behavior should be expected at all times (or any time) from large companies or frankly most of the people we do business with. I'm trying to point out that people who think there's nothing bad about it (as the original post I replied to stated) are completely missing something about the basic definitions of bad be…

> It's like some shared delusion or psychopathy that people seem to believe, because it's in their self-interest to believe it.

A business is not an individual, it's a collection of individuals each doing a specialized task that collectively make up a large system. Applying moral principles that are generally applied to individuals to organizations just doesn't work. There needs to be a different set or prioritization of moral principles to be effective in a large organization or system.

In my example (highly paid attorneys spending inordinate amounts of time negotiating a tiny contract), the attorneys themselves were not bad, they were instructed to zealously negotiate every contract. The finance folks that paid late are not bad, they were charged with keeping high cash reserves and to tolerate a certain level of legal risk.

As a straightforward example for reducing out-right fraud: Most individuals already know that fraud, lying and cheating is bad. If an individual scams someone, they are bad. In contrast, for a business to be "moral", it must routinely audit their work processes to make sure that fraud cannot accidentally occur, and also provide safeguards when "bad" individuals do it intentionally. If there are no safeguards (regardless of whether fraud occurs or not), the company is "bad". Conversely, if stringent and proper safeguards are in place, and yet someone within the organization is nevertheless able to devilishly get around them and commit fraud, then it's possible that the business is still moral.

The point here is that individual morality is not the same as organizational or systems morality. Lots of moral people can come together and become an immoral organization. Similarly, a moral organization can withstand lots of bad people within their ranks.

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#257

Post by chr1 »

gmadsen wrote: post #61
chr1 wrote: post #10

Getting low grades on exams is also linked to thinking problems in later years, we should automatically assign the same grade to all children to help them to become smarter

are you suggesting poor people are inherently less intelligent?

Are you suggesting people who do not pass exams are inherently less intelligent?

I think in both cases the answer is partly, because in both cases some kind of misfortune prevents them from achieving the desired result, and brain not functioning well is one such misfortune. There are many other ways to become poor, so being poor won't tell you much about intelligence, but most of less intelligent people will be poor.

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#258

Post by dpq »

celticmusic wrote: post #75
dpq wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While generally you are of course correct, this is not always the case. Some facets of reality have been willed/believed into existence. Nations and social orders are real, but only exist as long as people believe in them. For example, when in 1991 people stopped believing in the existence of the USSR, it was erased from the objective reality in a very brief span of time. It can be similarly argued that the modern in…

That is absolutely not what happened with the USSR.

Do you object to the notion that the USSR, like any country, was in a way an imaginary entity, or to the notion that it mainly ceased to exist because the its citizens decided to imagine something else and actually pulled it off?

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#259

Post by allannienhuis »

speedplane wrote: post #256
allannienhuis wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but all of that behavior by those people is immoral/wrong/bad. I said nothing about whether moral behavior should be expected at all times (or any time) from large companies or frankly most of the people we do business with. I'm trying to point out that people who think there's nothing bad about it (as the original post I replied to stated) are completely missing something about the basic definitions of bad be…

> It's like some shared delusion or psychopathy that people seem to believe, because it's in their self-interest to believe it. A business is not an individual, it's a collection of individuals each doing a specialized task that collectively make up a large system. Applying moral principles that are generally applied to individuals to organizations just doesn't work. There needs to be a different set or prioritizatio…

That's an interesting look at it. I guess I still feel that the finance guys that are paying late are still doing something objectively bad, even if they've been instructed to do so. 'just doing my job' doesn't seem like a valid excuse from moral obligations (even if they weren't the ones who signed the contract). But I agree with the basic premise that you're making about the distinction between individual and organizational morality.

I personally prefer to think of organizations as being groups of people, each of which have moral obligations, and leaders have moral obligations to ensure that their organization as a whole (sum-of-parts) maintains moral behavior. So not so much the idea that the organization has some moral mandate, but the individual leaders. That view might fall apart in really large organizations; so I'm not sure.

Another twist is that large organizations (as clients in some theoretical exchange) might say : our payment terms will be 120 days, take it or leave it. That's bad on a different level (taking advantage of power imbalance), but if the vendor accepts the contract at that point I don't think one could point the finger at the payment behavior as being immoral in and of itself (assuming they keep to their stated terms). Some (many??) people would not put nearly as much moral weight on the act of using their power imbalance ("isn't that what competition is all about?") compared to the act of breaking their agreement, just because they can get away with it (another form of taking advantage of the power imbalance, but seemingly more sinister).

All that said, I'm just a dude in an armchair at his keyboard that finds this topic interesting, and willing to think about it a bit. I've never studied the philosophy of morality - although I guess I have a fairly strong internal sense of it for myself :)

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#260

Post by etagobla »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #239
dragonwriter wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people on this Math and Science Forum This is not a “Math and Science Forum”.

The worst thing about this Politics and Rachel by the Bay Forum is how people don't even read the site description.

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