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This is a teenager

pudding.cool

761–770 of 868 posts

Re: This is a teenager

#761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When do the greater communities need to pay their dues? Schools cost money to run but taxpayers balk and cry over every cent increase. There are crumbling schools with toxic air and water that lack adequate HVAC paying their teachers unlivable salaries. This is the result of neglect to preserve and invest which is a condemnation of those who allowed such neglect on their watch when they should have championed such pl…

Schools in the US cost more than schools in any other developed nation. Every institution in the US has been taken over by careerists and credentialists who produce nothing of value and are a drain on the system. For a simple example in our area look at twitter: we were told the servers would catch fire, the end times will be upon us and cats will live with dogs. Instead the servers kept chugging along just as well a…

> sortition

Cool, I learned a new word. Thanks.

Re: This is a teenager

#762
post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> folks are nothing more than "a derivation of their previous person states" FFS that's an unbelievably bad interpretation. Are you just trolling or you really can't see the difference between that interpretation and "what we become depends in great part on where we're starting from"??

My feeling is that dumbo-octopus wants to fight somebody who believes that we have no agency and that socioeconomic conditions entirely determine our future, but it's not working because there's nobody like that nearby.

My reply was to erikerikson, who I there directly quoted. Just because y'all jumped in in their stead does not make you authorities on their opinion. That said, I've been happy to disagree with the exact points you've made whenever you've made them. (Excepting, I suppose, your comment about the spirit of the edit, which I have no way to reasonably contest)

Re: This is a teenager

#763
post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The future is still a function of the past If you don't believe in conscious choice the whole debate is moot anyway.

IIRC, free will is pretty much a myth, and beliefs are not relevant when it comes to science...

There is 0 scientific basis for your statement.

Re: This is a teenager

#764
post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is not the claim. That is a simple statistical fact that is obvious to anyone who looks at the data. The claim is that folks are nothing more than "a derivation of their previous person states", and that correspondingly there is little to nothing a person can choose to do to escape the path set for them by their start state. I personally think this is blatantly false, and I have many observations to support…

> folks are nothing more than "a derivation of their previous person states" FFS that's an unbelievably bad interpretation. Are you just trolling or you really can't see the difference between that interpretation and "what we become depends in great part on where we're starting from"??

Where does this quote you have made up come from? I am directly quoting the comment I directly replied to, you seem to be quoting... absolutely nothing? It's not on this page or the main article at least. Or do you use quotation marks to mean something besides a quote?

If you don't disagree with my criticism of the comment I replied to, you've certainly picked an odd way to express that.

Re: This is a teenager

#765

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…

Saying society is going to collapse due to population decline is about as absurd as saying society will collapse due to overpopulation. What will end up happening is that some groups will maintain replacement fertility levels or higher, and some groups won't, but we'll trend towards an equilibrium, or flop between too little fertility and too much fertility. Either way we won't go extinct unless we explicitly kill ea…

It depends on what you mean by society. If you mean the entire world, then of course I agree with you. But cultures and societies do go extinct, quite regularly. The Roman Empire, most notably, also had a fertility collapse in their final years. And by the end Rome itself had just become a facsimile of what was once the greatest city of the greatest empire in the world.

So, for instance, many people don't realize that right now is still the good times for Japan. Here [1] is their population pyramid. It currently still looks kinda-sorta pyramidish. But in ~20 years, their population pyramid will be completely and wholly upside down. And their population, economy, and everything else will fall into complete collapse. They'll be losing about half of their population each 20 years at that point. No culture can survive this. This will be made even more true by the fact that it will likely trigger a vicious cycle where the massively skewed age ratios, collapsing economy, and other issues will further reduce fertility.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...

Re: This is a teenager

#766

The punchline is this: "It's 2021. The research participants are in their late-30s now, which means they've had plenty of time to shape their own destinies. But we can clearly see that the experiences of their childhood had a huge effect on their financial situation as adults. It also has an effect on virtually everything else in their lives." You cannot infer the direction of causality from this data, i.e. that the…

Still books/ study material are of extreme importance. No one could be living in more extreme poverty than Michael Faraday did. Still he managed to be one of the greatest minds of all times. He read a book called "The improvements of the mind" by Isaac Watts and applied it on himself literally. The book was written for poor people who can not afford themselves books and means to conduct chemistry/electricity/mechanic…

Weird way to analyze this. If you look at Faraday's biology he was poor but he had an apprenticeship in his youth, so he clearly had at least adults looking out for him and giving him room to study. I would say it's way more likely that his success can be attributed to him having supportive adults in his life, as opposed to his testosterone(??).

Re: This is a teenager

#767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to construct a straw man. The whole point of the study is to show that kids that grow up with more adverse effects which are out of their control makes them more likely to have problems as an adult. You seem to say we can't infer causality, but that's exactly what they do. They show that having been affected by more adverse effects does make you more likely to suffer in the future. As the study says being po…

What if the root cause is the quality of the parents not the external events?

imo shitty parents is an external event, a series of them

Re: This is a teenager

#768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government has the responsibility to provide access to education and make it as transient as possible in regards to class. But government by experience is usually also a bad legal guardian, even if the people involved really want to help these kids. Perhaps they get lucky and grow up in a good adoptive family. But for the others there are a few things that are quite difficult to replace. A democracy isn't a manifeste…

> So perhaps you need not only look at the children and instead try to improve the lives of the parents as well. Clearly. It was other people who started suggesting that the children of poor parents should be forcibly put up for adoption. I can't fathom why anyone would think this is a good idea or even worth talking about.

I think it's when you said "the victims of bad parents are no different than the victims of any other crime"

Re: This is a teenager

#769

The punchline is this: "It's 2021. The research participants are in their late-30s now, which means they've had plenty of time to shape their own destinies. But we can clearly see that the experiences of their childhood had a huge effect on their financial situation as adults. It also has an effect on virtually everything else in their lives." You cannot infer the direction of causality from this data, i.e. that the…

You seem to construct a straw man. The whole point of the study is to show that kids that grow up with more adverse effects which are out of their control makes them more likely to have problems as an adult. You seem to say we can't infer causality, but that's exactly what they do. They show that having been affected by more adverse effects does make you more likely to suffer in the future. As the study says being po…

This is classic correlation is not causation. The thing about correlation is that it could be a causative relationship, or there could be another set of untracked variables that's causing some or all the effects, or it could be unrelated coincidence.

Now, maybe this is a difference between the study and the article. Maybe the study makes stronger claims here than the article does. But I didn't see anything in the article that claimed nor demonstrated causation, only correlation.

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