Comment by numlocked

A large proportion of the time -- I hesitate to say "most" but that is my inclination -- the people making these visualizations have an agenda, and it's usually increased funding for their pet cause. So any time you're looking at this sort of thing especially when they're making broad over-arching generalizations (more "trauma" as a child makes life harder) it's important to read critically, interrogate the validity and bias of sources, and try to see if and where they may be skewing things with visualizations, omitting or lessening the perceived impact of damning data that disagrees with them, and/or making things that agree with their point more prominent than they probably should be. I usually don't even try to figure out what their "pet cause" may be before doing any of that because I don't want my own implicit biases to influence me more than they already do.

It's hard to be sure but I also think several of the folks earning the most as adults came from the "bottom" tier with the most adverse childhood experiences.

> If this is the grand reveal -- showing that childhood heavily influences future financial mobility -- it's not super obvious. I mean, yes, there seem to be a bit of a skew towards low earners in the bottom tranche -- but really it looks like the group that has had some astounding headwinds is kinda sorta doing about the same as the 'no adverse experiences' group?

This was my takeaway as well. My expectation was that the longitudinal study would show that bad experiences compound much more dramatically over time than the video appears to suggest.

Another issue I have with the presentation is that I had to keep pausing and carefully considering what each slide was saying, because the first several slides start by

  - categorizing people according to whether they had bad experiences or not,
  - arranging them spatially in one big group on the "bad experiences" axis,
  - and coloring them according to the severity / occurrence.

So now my brain thinks "okay, warmer colors mean more/worse childhood experiences. got it.", but then all the following slides

  - categorize people on lots of different dimensions (income, health, etc)
    - but always grouped spatially by no/some/many bad experiences
  - color them according to the dimension being measured
    - some of them are arranged spatially in reverse order compared to the
      legend, see 4:50 in the linked video / the slide on "general health"

So the entire time, I'm fighting my brain which is telling me "warmer colors -> bad experiences".

I wonder if it would be clearer if the measurement slides were instead grouped / arranged spatially by outcomes and colored according to the childhood experiences.

edit: it's ugly as heck but this is kind of what I mean:

their slide: https://snap.philsnow.io/2024-04-16T10-16-25.uifh7bss3d5f66b...

proposed rearrangement + recoloring: https://snap.philsnow.io/2024-04-16T10-45-19.n7ft281jipgv3tx...

Like I said, it's ugly, I obviously just copy/pasted regions around, but it should get across the idea that this would make it easier to see the proportions of each measurement class (income bucket, health bucket, etc) according to childhood experiences.

The visualizations suggested the differences were very marginal. Some people with no adverse experiences struggle; some with many adverse experiences thrive; and while the reverse is more often true there appear to be other factors more strongly determining outcomes.

I noticed that too... the effects didn't look nearly as dramatic from the visuals as the text would make me believe.

The exception was health, that was a much more dramatic correlation than income/etc. It reminds me of a study recently of homelessness in California, and people made a big deal about housing availability and affordability as the prime factor, but seemed to ignore the very notable health correlation in that study.