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This is a teenager

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Re: This is a teenager

#81

Post by cm2012 »

rlt wrote: post #48
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…

> Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11, various wars, and other things. Those are awful things, but I suspect they don’t affect kids in the same way that poverty and violence does.

There's a pretty good, evidence backed system of childhood suffering, its an adverse childhood experience score. And yep its all about personal experiences.

Re: This is a teenager

#82

Post by albert_e »

Visualization was confusing and I don't think the narrative matches the data being shown. Differences between groups were way less dramatic in the visuals than the narration suggests. The differences could just be statistical noise for all we know.

Re: This is a teenager

#83

Post by candiodari »

unbalancedevh wrote: post #30
RobCat27 wrote: post #14

I like the message, but I feel like this is bad data visualization. The width of each group of people is not the same, so it's somewhat meaningless to visually compare groups without being able to see the raw percentages. For example, the "Many Adverse Experiences" group is stretched to be longer than the other groups so that proportionally fewer people in that group appear to be a larger proportion than the same pro…

Also, the visualization doesn't update well when scrolling back and forth; and the grouping is bad -- "bullied" is listed as an adverse condition, but is also shown as a separate grouping; and the way it's displayed for "Seen someone shot with a gun" is backwards, implying that the vast majority have seen that. Too bad, because it otherwise seems like an interesting study.

Social sciences is not value-free. In reality the most important indicator of "at-risk" is previous involvement with social services and mental health professionals. Usually because these experiences tend to be so bad that the kids involved start to hide problems, or even attack anyone involved with social services. And THEN they get into a negative spiral. It is not the first time they get into a negative spiral, except now their experiences with mental help are so incredibly negative they fight to remain in the negative spiral, sometimes to the point of physical violence.

Likewise, these professionals hide that almost all experiences kids have with social services are negative for the kids. Now I suppose you could say the above is an example of that, but really, it goes further. Kids seek help with homework, and only get berated by someone that couldn't do the homework themselves ...

Studies keep pointing out that social services is exactly the wrong approach. What makes teachers, and social professionals good is excellent subject knowledge, combined with basic psychology. NOT the other way around. And in practice every mental help professional I've ever seen thinks they know what to do, and when pushed fail to produce even basic psychological facts, or outright deny them. I like to think you can explain this that when push comes to shove our minds are trying to solve problems in the real world.

The majority of mental problems are someone failing to solve real world problems, and repeatedly failing to influence the outcome. A little bit of psychology is needed to get them to try again ... and a LOT of knowledge of the real world is need to make sure the outcome is different.

Re: This is a teenager

#84

Post by joshcsimmons »

RobCat27 wrote: post #14

I like the message, but I feel like this is bad data visualization. The width of each group of people is not the same, so it's somewhat meaningless to visually compare groups without being able to see the raw percentages. For example, the "Many Adverse Experiences" group is stretched to be longer than the other groups so that proportionally fewer people in that group appear to be a larger proportion than the same pro…

Came here to say similar - making the page extremely wide helps a big by making the rows more similar but ideally consistent scale and number of rows should be maintained so we can see a column-to-column width comparison of the data points.

Re: This is a teenager

#85

Post by kadushka »

RobCat27 wrote: post #14

I like the message, but I feel like this is bad data visualization. The width of each group of people is not the same, so it's somewhat meaningless to visually compare groups without being able to see the raw percentages. For example, the "Many Adverse Experiences" group is stretched to be longer than the other groups so that proportionally fewer people in that group appear to be a larger proportion than the same pro…

I agree that the visualization could be better, but it actually seems the differences between the three groups are not that large.

Re: This is a teenager

#86

Post by sophacles »

ericmcer wrote: post #65
micromacrofoot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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. If you aren't to blame for your own life that implies you have no control over it.

Basic, simple logic, says not all of someones problems are in their control either.

Re: This is a teenager

#87

Post by karaterobot »

aidenn0 wrote: post #20

Just clicking randomly shows a (to me) unexpectedly low age for first sex. If I understand right, the people in here were born in 1984, so they are younger than me (late Gen-X), and i keep hearing that Millennials are having less sex than all previous generations, but these numbers look on the young side. Sampling 11 across cohorts I got a median of 15, which is lower than I found for one all-generations measure I fo…

It's self-reported, and if someone's going to lie about this, it's more likely they'll give a younger age than an older age than reality.

Re: This is a teenager

#89

Post by swatcoder »

moralestapia wrote: post #64
rlt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11, various wars, and other things. Those are awful things, but I suspect they don’t affect kids in the same way that poverty and violence does.

(as others have said countless times) Poverty fucks people up like no other thing, sometimes for life.

FWIW, and as someone who's been through it, that's a really disempowering belief for people who have already experienced it or who are currently living through it.

Life involves many profound challenges, most of which are unfairly distributed. Learning to overcome the challenges that one faces and turn them into novel opportunities and perspectives is the constructive way of looking at it.

There are enough of these challenges that we as a society don't need to encourage them and can work to eradicate or minimize many, but this fatalist view (as indeed gets said countless times) doesn't help the people who already faced it or who will in the coming decades.

And of course, this is not just limited to poverty.

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