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This is a teenager

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Re: This is a teenager

#291

Post by cardanome »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #224
cardanome wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Convincing people that their problems are outside of their control and that the only way to solve them is to vote a certain way is also a form of authoritarianism Yes, systemic poverty can only be solved politically. That is just the nature of a systemic problem. I am pretty sure encouraging people to be active in the political process of which voting is a small but important part is the opposite of authoritarianis…

I would say that the circle of influence people have is by far the most impactful on their happiness and that of their family. The individual choice to try meth or not will vastly outweigh any genetic or environmental factor on personal outcome. Beating ones children is much more influential than your socioeconomic class. No a mount of political action can compensate for dissolution of individual responsibilities. Id…

> I would say that the circle of influence people have is by far the most impactful on their happiness and that of their family.

This is factually wrong. Otherwise there wouldn't be such a strong correlation between socioeconomic class and later success in life.

> The individual choice to try meth or not will vastly outweigh any genetic or environmental factor on personal outcome.

Drug use and poverty wouldn't be so strongly linked if that were a free choice.

Maybe you should tell all the drug addicts to just not do drugs. Problem solved.

Are you telling people with depression to "just snap out of it" as well? Drug addiction is a serious medical illness. It requires a whole support network of people to cure in most cases.

> Teach a generation of juveniles that they have no agency, and their individual efforts and work, and they will never succeed.

You empower them by teaching them that it a systemic issue, that it is NOT their fault. That they can organize together and lift each other up. Individuals are weak, groups are strong.

Individual responsibility only works for the rich. Collective responsibility is what breaks the cycle of violence of poverty. It takes a village to raise a kid after all.

Re: This is a teenager

#292

Post by narrator »

Let me guess, the solution is ban guns and pay higher taxes. That is the solution to literally every single problem in human history according to western sociology.

Then you get some guy like Nayib Bukele who cuts the Gordian Knot of societal disfunction going from the highest murder rate in the world to the lowest in the western hemisphere in 3 years short years by putting all the gangsters in prison. All the "surplus elite" NGO people who spent their entire career ineffectually addressing "the root causes of crime" are all now out of a job and/or very upset.

Re: This is a teenager

#293

Post by aidenn0 »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #213
michaelt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i keep hearing that Millennials are having less sex than all previous generations This article is about a longitudinal study; it follows "Alex" who was age 13 in 1997, i.e. born in 1984. US teen birth rates have been falling a lot - 61 births per 1000 in 1991 fell to ~48 births per 1000 in 2002 (When Alex would have been 18) and continued falling to just 13.9 births per 1000 today according to https://www.statista.…

Why are some statistics awkwardly phrased in terms of "per 1000", "per 10k", "per 100k", etc. when we have a perfectly good shorthand for that? 13.9 per 1000 is 1.39%. Just to be clear, this is not directed at parent, because it is phrased that way on the web page they cited. I'm just hoping someone here has the answer.

I remember reading somewhere that people, on average, understand integer ratios better than they understand percentages. As in you you write 283 out of 10,000 vs. 2.83% and then ask comprehension questions the former shows much better comprehension.

As a side note, I have personally encountered large number of adults who are unable to restate a percentage as a fraction, and even the idea that a percentage represents a fractional value is foreign to them.

Re: This is a teenager

#294

Post by robocat »

rconti wrote: post #238

I'm not sure if it was just me, but I struggled with the visual style. In some groups there were more rows than others, but then the rows would be of different lengths, making it difficult to intuitively compare the population sizes, especially when trying to break them down by color coding. It felt like the "some adverse experiences" group was worse off than the "many adverse experiences" group, which I'm guessing i…

I was a bit sceptical to start with about correlation versus causation. Causes are what we are looking for here. If we see someone get shot, does that mean we decide not to go to university[1]?

I watched the video, and the semantic meaning of pink people kept changing, and I couldn't follow the story because too many moving parts.

There's a study looking at people from a "bad" neighbourhood, that used data on immigrants to and emmigrants from the neighbourhood to try and track causation.

If I was feeling obnoxious I would grab the data, and massage it until the conclusion is that we should blind children so they don't see someone get shot so that they go to university.

[1] actually I can think of plenty of friends where that would be plausible (disclaimer: gun violence isn't so common in New Zealand). I'm trying to pick an example where causation and correlation are more disjoint but I think I've failed here.

Re: This is a teenager

#295

Post by rafaelero »

What's missing here -- and in most of social sciences -- is the realization that adverse events is itself a product of genetics, and bad social outcomes are only weakly mediated through those events. Genetics is most of the story here and, although it's a depressing narrative, I'm sick of seeing people push a narrative that is not based on facts.

Re: This is a teenager

#296

Post by somenameforme »

lancesells wrote: post #211
somenameforme wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement. But fertility is an exponential system. So a fertility rate of means that each following generation (~20 years) will be half as large as the one that came before it (the formula is simply a ratio of fertility_rate/2). So you won't se…

> imagine the state of society when that starts happening The state of my own personal society is my apartment costs $1000 more than it did two years ago and my food costs about 25-30% more than it did two years ago. I definitely wouldn't consider having another kid, nor would I encourage my own to have one.

Absolutely understandable, yet it also leads to a somewhat odd and undesirable reality. The problems you're talking about are ones that we inflicted upon ourselves, owing largely due to poor systems (and societies) enabling the turds of society rise to the top.

So what will the systems and societies of tomorrow look like? Every child born tomorrow is basically just a lottery roll against all people having children today. And today you have vast numbers of intelligent, educated, conscientious, and far thinking individuals are simply removing themselves from the gene pool; that lottery roll for the children of tomorrow is looking less and less pleasant.

There's this irony that the sort of mindset that might consciously make the decision to not have children is the exact sort that should be raising a family 1800s style, if we want a better world. Maybe there's just something about successful urbanization that ultimately causes societies to reboot. The Roman Empire also faced a major fertility crisis in its final years.

Re: This is a teenager

#297

Post by Clubber »

readams wrote: post #75

One thing that jumps out is that being held back in school is one of the "adverse experiences" that will cause poor performance later. But of course being held back in school is what happens when your school performance is poor, so this seems backward. All of these things just seem to be proxies for "your parents are rich".

>All of these things just seem to be proxies for "your parents are rich".

  1. You have good parents (attentive/loving/encouraging/supportive/available).
  2. You have access to a good education.
Those seem to be the big differentiators in my experience. Rich people typically have #2, so that's 1 of 2 right out of the gate.

Re: This is a teenager

#298

Post by 12907835202 »

skrbjc wrote: post #253
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 argument of the data seems to say we should put resources towards those with more adverse experiences in childhood. But I wonder, if you were optimizing for improving more people's lives in a more meaningful way with limited funds, would you come to the conclusion that you could do so by focusing on improving the lives of those in the no adverse experiences group because you might be able to get more "life improv…

If you haven't already look up John Rawls he's probably the most famous person who has argued for helping the worst off.

Of course reading his books would be the best source but for now here's a link: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/#JusFaiJusWitLibSoc

Re: This is a teenager

#299

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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.…

> how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?

Thats the wrong question -

How many adolescents and citizens of the future are we willing to sacrifice for our comfort today.

It will come back to byte us in the ass, condemn adolescents to life of poverty today, and get lost productivity, crime and political instability.

Push it far enough and get French Revolution

Re: This is a teenager

#300

Post by hnburnsy »

Hey Alvin (the author), you see us discussing this, how about addressing the issues raised in this discussion?

https://twitter.com/alv9n/status/1780289344852431041

>So this piece is now at the top of @hackernews. This experience is always cool and terrifying, especially when they also see all the small things that don't quite work about the piece.

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