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This is a teenager

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Re: This is a teenager

#51

Post by beepbooptheory »

ericmcer wrote: post #35

Kind of cool, but the conclusion was completely backwards. The final line of the study was "So he is our collective responsibility. They all are.", but the entire study was about how the home environment affects your outcomes. I guess their conclusion is that if an individual does a bad job raising their kids, it is societies fault.

I guess I can see this conclusion if you start from a position that all families are nothing but isolated, self-interested atoms in the world. Rather than, you know, a part of society!

Re: This is a teenager

#52

Post by deathanatos »

throwway120385 wrote: post #41
aestetix wrote: post #32

I watched the video. Maybe I am not understanding the visuals, but it looked like the narrator's conclusions do not actually match the data. He is trying to make an argument that poor kids need extra help or they will have a rough life. But the data seems to show that over the last 20 years, people from all background types are likely to experience bad things. Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/1…

Yeah I saw the same thing in the shape of what was presented. The proportions are roughly the same in the visualization, it's just that most people had some or many adverse experiences. But what I see is that in my generation your home life didn't matter as much. I agree that we need to move as many kids as possible out of the "adverse experiences" category but I don't think this data supports that. The last 20 years…

> The proportions are roughly the same in the visualization

They're not, though? E.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKv1Mixv0Hk&t=278s — note that the final bar is also shorter, so really you need to elongate it a bit in your mind (and compress the bar above it): the proportion of the "many adverse experiences" group is definite greater than the other two. (I wish they'd've just labelled the %'age on the screen, made the bar lengths equal — I have a lot of issues with the data visualization here, but none severe enough that they defeat the core point of the video.)

Edit: okay, I've counted the miniature people on this chart. For this specific example, they are: no adverse exp.: 7 aff, 109 total; some adversity: 16 aff, 239 total; many adverse exp.: 24 aff, 152 total. In percentages, that's "No adverse experiences" → 6.4% victims of crime, "Some adverse experiences" → 6.7% victims of crime, "Many adverse experiences" → 15.8%. The last group is more than double the other two. (The first two, in this example are equal; but the visualization also roughly shows that.)

Re: This is a teenager

#53

Post by moralestapia »

Great site. However, I think there's much more interesting things one could visualize from the same dataset.

I'll go out on a limb (these days?) and say that nothing is more influential when growing up than what your parents teach you. That alone transcends all other negative/positive effects considered (health, income, "have you seen someone getting shot", ...).

I see the study does account for parents present or not but I would've liked to read a similar story in which this is the categorical control.

The other one "classic" correlation of interest is race vs. all the other variables, but I can understand why they didn't want to initiate yet another flamewar.

Re: This is a teenager

#54

Post by davidcollantes »

jordanpg wrote: post #23

"Don't feel like scrolling? Watch the video instead!" Please add a TL;DR here as well. Some of us never want to watch the video instead.

Everything can't have a TL;DR. Well, it can, but it loses the essence, the meaning. I saw the animations, I read the text, I interacted with the page, and felt touched. I understood the message the author is trying to convey. I liked the execution.

Just as you, I don't like (much) watching videos.

Re: This is a teenager

#55

Post by Dig1t »

>But in 2022, the average cost for first-time college students living in campus was $36,000 – nearly $10,000 higher than a decade prior. It's made college inaccessible for kids who need it most.

College kids do not need to live on campus, most people in this country live within commuting distance of a community college or university. It may not be a top rated university, but it will always be one that teaches skills kids need to build a life. You do not NEED to pay anywhere near $36,000 for college, and stating it as a necessity is misleading. The point that the author misses is that the subject, Alex, would have easily qualified for free tuition at his local community college or university, and most likely a scholarship or grant would have paid his living expenses while attending as well, based solely on his economic and ethnic background and not his grades. The only missing piece was someone to tell him how to do it, or someone to encourage him to do it. This is generally what people mean when they say that poor people lack the knowledge to get themselves out of poverty.

>Over the last few years, his annual income was around $20,000. He has struggled with his weight for much of his adult life, and it affects his overall health.

It is worth noting that the poorest in the USA struggle with eating too much, not too little. This is at least a silver lining that we should not ignore. Many countries in the world, poor people are starving.

>In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president – a man who constantly insults poor people and calls them "morons."

As part of this paragraph, the author links to an extremely partisan article which does not even try to hide its bias. It quotes something that Donald Trump said back in a 1999 interview. I don't love Trump and wouldn't vote for him, but I think the author's point about him is stretched quite a bit and was unnecessary for the overall point he's trying to make.

In the end, the main takeaway from this article seems to me to be that you can justify any bad decisions or bad outcomes in your life by blaming your childhood trauma. With such a worldview how can one ever better themselves? It seems such a self-defeating way to look at things, if you never blame yourself for your bad decisions how can you ever learn how to make better decisions?

I know that if I personally lived my life blaming my childhood trauma for problems I've had, that I would still be poor to this day.

Re: This is a teenager

#56

Post by throwway120385 »

zer00eyz wrote: post #39

>>> He'll be bullied at school. He'll be held back a few grades. He won't go to college. I dont even know where to start with this. 1. The whole anti bullying campaign that we now have two and a half decades of in schools has backfired spectacularly. This feels like "well DARE didn't work, we need to put this money somewhere else". We tell kids dont bully people, but if you defend yourself in a fight everyone gets su…

> We stripped schools of anything that was vocational, or practical. What happened to shop and home economics... and the computer labs that got many of us started are long gone. Meanwhile we're short on plumbers, welders and all sorts of middle skill jobs...

I completely agree. The hollowing out of the education system in response to NCLB and the relentless drive for "data" and "standards" is why a lot of people no longer graduate from high school with any life skills.

Re: This is a teenager

#57

Post by rahkiin »

deathanatos wrote: post #43
aestetix wrote: post #32

I watched the video. Maybe I am not understanding the visuals, but it looked like the narrator's conclusions do not actually match the data. He is trying to make an argument that poor kids need extra help or they will have a rough life. But the data seems to show that over the last 20 years, people from all background types are likely to experience bad things. Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/1…

First, … I don't think I dig the visualization done. These are essentially like bar-pie charts (whatever you call a bar, split into segments, each segment representing a % of a whole), but many of the "bars" are not of the same length, which makes visual comparison of the subsegments tricky. > But the data seems to show that over the last 20 years, people from all background types are likely to experience bad things.…

> whatever you call a bar, split into segments, each segment representing a % of a whole

A percentage stacked bar chart

Re: This is a teenager

#58

Post by s1artibartfast »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #38
ericmcer wrote: post #35

Kind of cool, but the conclusion was completely backwards. The final line of the study was "So he is our collective responsibility. They all are.", but the entire study was about how the home environment affects your outcomes. I guess their conclusion is that if an individual does a bad job raising their kids, it is societies fault.

I think the idea is that "only support your family" harms everyone. The example, Alex, has 2 kids, works manual labor to earn poverty wages, and is depressed. Which one of the types of teen do you think his kids will be? The common refrain is "then he shouldn't have had kids" but unless you're going to create an authoritarian state people will always have kids (and restricting kids went awfully for China anyway).

I think social and individual expectations are a big part of this. Why is Alex depressed? If they had 20k more a year, would they be happier, or just 2 steps ahead on and empty hedonistic treadmill. Alex now has a new mustang, but is still depressed and fails as a parent.

I think it would be interesting to see the relative impact of a 2 parent + low risk home vs income, and I think there is a lot lost when people assume every variable reduces to income.

What about Alex when they have low income, but a healthy home life? What about Alex when they have higher income, but a shit home life?

Re: This is a teenager

#59

Post by lagniappe »

ericmcer wrote: post #35

Kind of cool, but the conclusion was completely backwards. The final line of the study was "So he is our collective responsibility. They all are.", but the entire study was about how the home environment affects your outcomes. I guess their conclusion is that if an individual does a bad job raising their kids, it is societies fault.

The take-home for me was that as parents, or future parents, here are some things we can do to make the child have a greater chance at success. None of these are doorways to success, but they make it easier for success to happen with those conditions present, as well as the inverse.

Re: This is a teenager

#60

Post by beepbooptheory »

This is wonderful in a lot of ways but also seems to be designed to annoy HN specifically. With its somewhat, um, adventurous choices in data visualization combined with an overall conceit that poverty is harmful and kids are not the ones to blame... It's like a dangerous cocktail. I could read this thread in my head probably!
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