This is a teenager • Hacker News Board

Re: This is a teenager

#791

Post by causal » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 4:39 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #785

causal wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really a citation, and your twins-study outcomes argument blaming genetics also undermines every other conclusion of TFA.

MISTRA is a citation, it's a well-known name, just Google the study. Also: 1. TFA article talked only about correlations, because that's all they have. 2. Genetics influences all of TFA factors as well. 3. TFA discussed "adverse experiences", "parents involved" and "family risk scores". Guess what I said: parenting really only has a significant effect in cases of neglect and abuse. Sounds like we agree.

"Just Google it" - really? I have no doubt MISTRA exists, but demonstrating specifically where and how a study proves your point is something else entirely.

The core assertion that parental involvement doesn't matter much as long as they're not abusive is pretty absurd regardless, but I'll leave the Googling of studies showing why as an exercise for you.

Re: This is a teenager

#792

Post by bccdee » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 4:42 PM UTC

thegrimmest wrote: post #783

atoav wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one feels unhappy about the causality link between a good childhood and a better life as an adult please remember that we are talking about statistical effects here. If more people who were bullied end up in unfortunate positions that doesn't imply direct causality, it implies that people whose live paths lead to bad places often had being bullied as a station on it. There will always be the tail ends of the stati…

Hard disagree with utilitarian interventionism. It violates core liberal fundamentals. People have the right to be as involved of parents as they see fit, and to raise their children with values of their choosing. Economic and social outcomes are not universal moral values. The collective has no right to impose their utilitarian best-guess on the individual. People should have a right to reject them and raise illiter…

> It violates core liberal fundamentals. People have the right to be as involved of parents as they see fit, and to raise their children with values of their choosing.

If that's "core liberal fundamentals," then maybe liberalism is, at heart, rotten. Your take on it certainly is. I don't respect a parent's "right" to neglect or mistreat their children. Society collectively is entitled (in fact, obliged) to intervene in harmful family situations.

That's not what liberalism is, though. Who are you citing here? What aspect of liberal philosophy entitles parents to treat children like their property? Parents don't own their children; liberal individualist property rights cannot apply to the treatment of human beings, who have their own rights.

Rather than any sort of liberalism, what you're espousing here is a form of deep pre-liberal conservatism, where children have no rights and are instead property of their patriarch, whose authority is absolute and arbitrary. How can you possibly believe that the government, with its myriad checks and balances, is too susceptible to corruption to intervene in family life, but that parents, whose power over their children should be absolutely unchecked in your view, cannot be corrupt? That they have an inalienable right to withhold education and socialization from their children; that this self-evidently corrupt and selfish desire is beyond reproach?

This is a ridiculous and half-baked ideology.

Re: This is a teenager

#793

Post by begueradj » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 4:55 PM UTC

KittenInABox wrote: post #766

begueradj wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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(??).

Which apprentcieship are you talking about ? The one he had with the bookmaker ? He did not hire him to help him: he hired him only because he needed him, and Faraday was special as a child. Actually he was exploited by that bookmaker (worked without being paid for few years). It was during that period that he was reading books and he wrote one of his own (a huge selection of technical notes).

He spent 7 years in that library, if I remember. It was much later that Humphry Davy, the chemist, had offered him an internship: again, this chemist, did not hire him to support him but because he met him previously in the book shop where he worked, and many years later, he ad problems with his trainee, so he replaced him with Faraday whom he knew he was too curious and intelligent and cultivated.

So in both cases, Faraday was self taught, and made a huge effort to get the second internship with the chemist (he was rejected few times, if you call this adults supporting him).

And no, Faraday is not known for biology (but I supposed you meant "biography").

About your testosterone question: well, I have nothing to add.

Re: This is a teenager

#794

Post by flir » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 4:55 PM UTC

thegrimmest wrote: post #789

flir wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the limit on physical violence? Why's that the universal line in the sand that society should enforce?

Because it's unambiguous, already a core liberal value, and because the enforcement mechanisms for violating the law are invariably physical (arrest, imprisonment). "Free" means "Free from the threat of illegitimate violence", not "Free from the possibility of having your feelings hurt". It would be unjust to impose physical consequences for non-physically-infringing actions.

I think I'm going to leave it there.

Re: This is a teenager

#795

Post by somenameforme » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 4:57 PM UTC

IIsi50MHz wrote: post #778

somenameforme wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the words just have extremely different meanings. A child opens a Christmas present and starts rejoicing - nobody would claim 'Ah, look at him - he's so content!' One could even take this a step further to add that children, in general, cannot be content. Contentedness is not happiness. And happiness is most certainly not contentedness. They're are just entirely different states of being.

First, it's important to understand that words mean what people tend to use them to mean. Second, "happy" and "happiness" subsume numerous meanings. You're picking one, and as I and others have, at times, done with many other words, trying to restrict the world to only that meaning. Perhaps a more similar word to your meaning would be "joy"? It seems more generally restricted to descriptions of brief periods, in comm…

If I were simply restricting the meaning, then the examples I am offering would mean you could use happy or e.g. contentedness interchangeably, or at least doing so wouldn't sound ridiculous. Yet I'm sure you're realizing by now that you cannot! For another example - a stern and disciplined person, who is rather dour of character, could be completely contented, but it would be illogical to call this person "happy", however you might want to define the term.

The words are simply not synonyms, or even particularly close to being synonyms.

Re: This is a teenager

#796

Post by bccdee » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 4:57 PM UTC

thegrimmest wrote: post #789

flir wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the limit on physical violence? Why's that the universal line in the sand that society should enforce?

Because it's unambiguous, already a core liberal value, and because the enforcement mechanisms for violating the law are invariably physical (arrest, imprisonment). "Free" means "Free from the threat of illegitimate violence", not "Free from the possibility of having your feelings hurt". It would be unjust to impose physical consequences for non-physically-infringing actions.

Why all these appeals to "core liberal values"? You can't justify a bad idea by saying "but it's part of liberalism." If that's true, it just means that liberalism is a bad ideology.

Who says that's what "free" means? Why should we be free only from physical harm and not emotional harm? You can't claim an ideology is self-evident when it rests on arbitrary definitions of terms.

Besides, your definition is flawed. Does sexual assault count as a physical or an emotional harm, if it causes no physical injuries? There are many forms of sexual assault which cause exclusively emotional trauma. Are we not entitled to be "free" from these?

Re: This is a teenager

#797

Post by _a_a_a_ » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 5:04 PM UTC

thegrimmest wrote: post #787

flir wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bearing in mind we're talking about bullying here, which interventions are going to trample your fundamental civil rights? Unless we're going with a reductio ad absurdum panopticon solution, I can't think of any way in which more robust interventions in bullying would be a bad thing.

People have the right to be and to raise bullies as long as their behaviour is nonviolent. As tasteless as it is, there is no law against socially excluding and humiliating people. Nor should there be.

The difference between violent and non-violent bullying can be closer than you'd think. Also, and please note I have much experience in this, physical violence was the one thing I was in permanent fear of as a child but having decades now passed by I came to understand it was the emotional violence that did by far the most damage to me and my siblings. We will not recover.

Meta comment: people like you can argue on the basis of abstractions because clearly that's all you have to argue from – you obviously have no experience of child abuse. And I'm glad of that, but please be careful putting about your opinions ("...no law against socially excluding and humiliating people. Nor should there be.") with Dunning-Kruger boosted confidence.

Re: This is a teenager

#798

Post by thfuran » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 5:16 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #660

thfuran wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>derived directly from the individual's actions. Are you saying that a person's actions aren't influenced by their environment?

Of course they are, but putting the locus of control on external factors disempowers people. "These people didn't do as well as they could have due to poor impulse control" is a better explanation/reason than "these people have poor impulse control because of the environment in which they were raised"; the environment is not the cause of the poor outcomes, the poor impulse control is the cause, and pointing out the c…

>the environment is not the cause of the poor outcomes

It's not the proximate cause, but that doesn't mean it is in no way causative.

>and pointing out the cause shows a path to correcting the issue

Yes, it can often be most efficient to address root causes.

Re: This is a teenager

#799

Post by dumbo-octopus » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 5:26 PM UTC

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #776

constantcrying wrote: post #323

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.

I wasn't trying to argue against free will or anything like that (I'm a compatibilist about that debate). I was just trying to point out that it's obvious that prior conditions are relevant. Prior decisions also. But free or not, there's nowhere to come from but the past. It's a weird thing to be pointing out, like... duh, but the context was a bunch of: > You have to balk when anyone says.... and > You have to disbe…

We do not agree, direction of causation is a matter of personal interpretation. And I'm not the only one who believes a reversal of order could be justified, Scott Aaronson's essay The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine^ goes into far more detail on the matter than I could hope to here. It's long but thorough - I highly recommend it if you have the time.

To overly simplify it: imagine a piece of quantum state is not observed at any point between the universal T0 and TNow. Further, imagine a decision made at TNow is effectively a measurement of that state. There is absolutely 0 way to say that the state was "in" that configuration "before" your measurement, it is 100% equally valid to say that your decision "caused" the state to assume that value, which would be interpreted as your choice causing a propagation backwards in time to the initial configuration. (The essay goes into more details around "No Hidden State" objections to this interpretation.)

^ https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159

Re: This is a teenager

#800

Post by sabarn01 » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 5:30 PM UTC

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #782

monero-xmr wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, Boston spends more per student than every other city ($31.3k in 2023 dollars): https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/05/30/metro/boston-now-spen... . But the outcomes are quite poor. How can society justify spending more on the same institutions that have miserable outcomes? In the private sector, less revenue forces belt-tightening, purchasing software and tools that enhance productivity, and ultimatel…

The families need money. Kids from impoverished and broken homes make poor students that ruin the experience for the everyone in the school. Their misery is contagious. Throwing it at schools won’t solve it because teachers are doing everything they can to support kids but teachers have no control outside the school day. Increase foster care budgets and social welfare programs. If America can afford Musk naziposting…

My wife's family fostered and the only thing that happens is the kids eventually get sent back to the families. Even families who have abused the kids multiple times. We don't have an answer to kids from bad families. The state can't overcome bad parents.