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Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

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Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#41

Post by munk-a »

Ghjklov wrote: post #37
mrscottson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you are using your experience as an example...but I think with real poverty, you probably wouldnt know much about nutrition and neither would your parents...with enough caloric difficiency and without proper nutrition, much of the decision making/studying/long-term-planning abilities degrade quite rapidly.

That's the thing. I was pretty self-aware and I still made those choices. Imagine how much worse it is for people who don't even know what they're doing to themselves. They'll just keep pushing on ahead while their mind and body deteriorates.

Those choices are pretty hard - modern junk food has been engineered to reinforce unhealthy consumption, the US (mostly) dictates international laws around junk food restriction[1] and it's exporting the terrible free-market approach to food choice. Some of these junk foods should be heavily taxed or just outright illegal.

1. Here's coke being terrible https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coca-cola-fought-regulatio... and there are some other wonderful examples around tobacco use in south east asia.

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#42

Post by lmm »

jacobolus wrote: post #34
xyzzyz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, one of the strongest predictions of working memory in all groups was gender, which may be an indicator that confounding factors haven't been broken down. Only if you erroneously assume that the sex cannot be predictive of differences in working memory. We know it's not the case: there are sex differences in average scores in subtests (or in group factors). However, most results point in the direction of female…

> Only if you erroneously assume ... The previous commenter made some qualified questioning speculation. Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been and then calling them “erroneous” seems a bit hostile. * * * How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural environment facing…

> Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been and then calling them “erroneous” seems a bit hostile.

The original comment was leaping to the assumption that finding sex differences means there must be something wrong with the study/analysis. That's dangerously wrong.

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#43

Post by pdpi »

lmm wrote: post #42
jacobolus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only if you erroneously assume ... The previous commenter made some qualified questioning speculation. Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been and then calling them “erroneous” seems a bit hostile. * * * How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural environment facing…

> Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been and then calling them “erroneous” seems a bit hostile. The original comment was leaping to the assumption that finding sex differences means there must be something wrong with the study/analysis. That's dangerously wrong.

> Also, one of the strongest predictions of working memory in all groups was gender, which may be an indicator that confounding factors haven't been broken down.

“May be an indicator”. Not quite the Olympic jumping-at-conclusions performance I’d expect from a “dangerously wrong” comment.

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#44

Post by pmiller2 »

ngold wrote: post #4

Imagine being so poor you can't concentrate on what tomorrow is. That is what being poor does to you. It robs you of thinking.

In other words, the submission title is misleading: the effects of poverty are type of trauma. We're not talking about "too poor to afford the latest game console" here; we're talking about people who have trouble with things at the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs [0].

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#45

Post by pdpi »

SkyBelow wrote: post #16
downerending wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there other research indicating that males have better working memory than females?

I can't speak to specifically working memory, but there is a wide variety of research on sexual dimorphism in humans, including in cognitive function. I know there was some research showing males having better spatial memory than females. But all of this is caught up in a large nature vs nurture (vs both) question. Is it genetics that cause this? Is it the environment (social pressure/influence) that causes this? Is…

Crucially, there’s a difference between “males have statistically significantly better memory”, which is what you are talking about, and “gender is one of the top predictors of memory”, which is, reportedly, what the data in the article shows.

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#46

Post by xyzzyz »

jacobolus wrote: post #34
xyzzyz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, one of the strongest predictions of working memory in all groups was gender, which may be an indicator that confounding factors haven't been broken down. Only if you erroneously assume that the sex cannot be predictive of differences in working memory. We know it's not the case: there are sex differences in average scores in subtests (or in group factors). However, most results point in the direction of female…

> Only if you erroneously assume ... The previous commenter made some qualified questioning speculation. Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been and then calling them “erroneous” seems a bit hostile. * * * How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural environment facing…

Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been

If you don’t assume that the subtest scores are the same across sexes, the “qualified questioning speculation” that there is something wrong with control variables makes no sense.

How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural environment facing boys vs. girls?

This kind of unentanglement is usually done through twin studies: you compare how well correlated are monozygotic vs dizygotic twins. Since it’s reasonable to assume that both monozygotic and dizygotic twins share the same or at least very similar environments, if the correlation between monozygotic twins on a given trait is greater than in dizygotic twins, it means that genetic causation plays a role, while if the correlation is the same, there it is likely no genetic causation. Of course, it’s a bit hard to find monozygotic twins of different sexes, but similar ideas are used in that case.

The point is, we do have the tools to unentangle nature from nurture, and in general, all points in the direction of genetic causation when it comes to cognitive traits. I recommend reading the Jensen’s 1998 book I mentioned.

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#47

Post by xyzzyz »

pdpi wrote: post #45
SkyBelow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to specifically working memory, but there is a wide variety of research on sexual dimorphism in humans, including in cognitive function. I know there was some research showing males having better spatial memory than females. But all of this is caught up in a large nature vs nurture (vs both) question. Is it genetics that cause this? Is it the environment (social pressure/influence) that causes this? Is…

Crucially, there’s a difference between “males have statistically significantly better memory”, which is what you are talking about, and “gender is one of the top predictors of memory”, which is, reportedly, what the data in the article shows.

Can you explain to me what the difference is?

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#48

Post by jlawson »

Ghjklov wrote: post #29
ngold wrote: post #4

Imagine being so poor you can't concentrate on what tomorrow is. That is what being poor does to you. It robs you of thinking.

I've been there. Once you start thinking to yourself that there is no long term future ahead of you, the kind of choices you make becomes almost like a sick joke. Buy some fruit and vegetables to eat so that you can feel nourished and live a long life, or eat some feel good salty sugar loaded fast food because you have no fucking future anyway? Study and gain employable skills or play video games right now because yo…

>you're going to die homeless next month

Help me understand how someone could believe something along these lines for more-or-less their entire life. The fact is that poor people live long lives of many decades; they observe others around them just like them living many decades. There's nothing close to a rational reason to discount the future that hard.

How does one end up believing that every month is their last when it clearly isn't? I know people who are persistently poor act like they believe it, but I didn't think they literally consciously thought it was true.

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#49

Post by jacobolus »

xyzzyz wrote: post #46
jacobolus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only if you erroneously assume ... The previous commenter made some qualified questioning speculation. Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been and then calling them “erroneous” seems a bit hostile. * * * How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural environment facing…

Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been If you don’t assume that the subtest scores are the same across sexes, the “qualified questioning speculation” that there is something wrong with control variables makes no sense. How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural envir…

Twin studies don’t help you with this particular question. Beyond that, there are plenty of scholars who question the common interpretation of twin studies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Criticism

> all points in the direction of genetic causation when it comes to cognitive traits

To be precise, some evidence points in the direction that some variation in cognitive traits is “heritable”.

It is obvious to everyone that there are substantial effects on cognitive traits due to malnutrition, disease, exposure to toxins, physical violence, persistent emotional trauma, and so on, as well as a substantial amount of variation that we currently don’t have explanations for (not to mention significant experimental noise and epistomological questions about the design and interpretation of the experiments). It is at least plausible that large-scale differences in the treatment of boys vs. girls could have effects on cognitive traits.

For example it was long thought by some people that there were inherent differences between boys’ vs. girls’ mathematical aptitude, as judged by scores on various standardized tests, but in some countries with more equal social/educational environments those differences in scores entirely disappear. A web search turns up https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/women-and-m...

> I recommend reading the Jensen’s 1998 book

It should be mentioned that Jensen’s work has been highly controversial and has kicked off a lively debate. Some of the biggest promoters of Jensen’s work have been quite unsavory characters. Like all scholarly work (and especially all work seized on more by activists than scholars) it should be read critically and taken in the context of a wider discourse.

* * *

Disclaimer: I am no expert on this subject. Just a layperson who has occasionally read about it, mostly in popular media.

Re: Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

#50

Post by staplers »

jlawson wrote: post #48
Ghjklov wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been there. Once you start thinking to yourself that there is no long term future ahead of you, the kind of choices you make becomes almost like a sick joke. Buy some fruit and vegetables to eat so that you can feel nourished and live a long life, or eat some feel good salty sugar loaded fast food because you have no fucking future anyway? Study and gain employable skills or play video games right now because yo…

>you're going to die homeless next month Help me understand how someone could believe something along these lines for more-or-less their entire life. The fact is that poor people live long lives of many decades; they observe others around them just like them living many decades. There's nothing close to a rational reason to discount the future that hard. How does one end up believing that every month is their last wh…

Humans are not immune to inertia.
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