Comment by aestetix
2 years ago
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 9/11, various wars, and other things. So I'm not really sure if I can take anything away from the video.
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.
But that adverse backgrounds are more likely to experience those things. Take "Happy person in the last month" at 2021 (the final outcome, essentially): the "many adverse experiences" group is unhappier. "General health" is the same. "Victim of crime" is the same. I think "Annual income" shows the same as the rest, but I think this is also the hardest graph to read.
I.e., it's not that people from all backgrounds aren't adversely affected by bad things, it's that people from adverse childhoods are disproportionately affected.
> whatever you call a bar, split into segments, each segment representing a % of a whole
A percentage stacked bar chart
But it's not that, since the bars are different thicknesses, and that changes the horizontal scale of each bar. These are some of the hardest to interpret charts I've seen in a long time.
The animations are misleading too. When the people run around on the page, you can't tell if they're changing color or not. It gives the impression that every individual in the study ends up being the same color in each scenario, which clearly isn't true.
> 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.
It actually seems like it's the behaviors of other poor people, which those in poverty cannot escape, that "fucks people up." It's not privation. It's proximity to violence and abuse (both of which are highly correlated with -- note: not demonstrated to be caused by -- poverty).
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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There's a pretty good, evidence backed system of childhood suffering, its an adverse childhood experience score. And yep its all about personal experiences.
Agreed, the visualizations don't sell the story.
If you actually take the percentage, it's like 30-50% more likely to have the worse outcome the worse your adverse background gets.
But on the chart, it's only like an extra line of kids. The absolute number increases don't look like much, but the percentage increase is very high. I think the authors could have done a much better job at highlighting that.
> If you actually take the percentage, it's like 30-50% more likely to have the worse outcome the worse your adverse background gets.
I realize that this is a taboo subject, but how much of that is nature and how much is nurture?
Low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes, and it's not exactly a problem you can fix by throwing money and resources at it.
This is the exact question that this research tries to portray from a data perspective.
The narrative is trying to make a claim that nurture is significant.
The stats of this research essentially says "slicing the data in a way that highlights differing qualities of nurture shows that nurture has an impact".
But it crucially doesn't isolate nurture from nature (which is admittedly very difficult). It doesn't show if the nature side (IQ in this instance) has significant overlaps with the nurture or not.
So ultimately we are left guessing.
I bet if you did, you would see that IQ indeed is also significant, and the narrative can tell a different story. That's the thing about stats and narratives. They tell a story and leave a bunch of stuff out, so you have to evaluate it yourself.
My takeaway is that nurture may play a role, but is not the only thing that determines outcome. Eyeballing the end results, being in the worst category of nurture makes the odds worse for you, not 90/10 worse, but probably closer to 65/35.
Better environments produce a population with a higher IQ.
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Do you have a source for the claim "Low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes"? I've never seen one.
In fact it is EQ - emotional intelligence - and not IQ that predicts positive life outcomes most strongly.
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That's kind of my takeaway. Nearly all of the visualizations did not show substantial differences between the groups. I was always surprised at how many kids with high numbers of adverse events were in the top group, and vice versa.
I feel like it also doesn't draw enough attention to perhaps one of the biggest factors: marriage, and its effect on one's choices.
It's quite possible I'm seeing a bunch of housewives with no income that had no adverse experiences, and they're making it look like adverse events aren't as impactful as they otherwise would be. Or maybe the data references household income, but then I'm looking at visualizations of little people that are more realistically representing a person AND whoever they're married to.
> Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11, various wars, and other things.
This might be a side trail, but you can find at least as much awful - probably quite a bit more - in any previous 20 year period. (Iraq War? How about two world wars? Financial crisis... Great Depression? 9/11 and fear of terrorists? Cold war and fear of global annihilation? etc)
Bingo. The time period of this study is pretty much the golden age of peace and stability worldwide.
They even through in a non-sequitur jab at Trump for good measure. This is what happens when you use ideology to read and interpret data rather than the other way around.
Also, weirdly, it seems that the years following Trump's election, the people in the group did better, made more money, etc. So I'm not clear on how presidents being demeaning to people is relevant. That's not to say it's alright for them to do so, just, seems like a strange interjection when everything else is talking about the data itself.
The following is the full passage. It has Trump's as well as other president‘s (Reagan, Clinton) quotes as evidence for a certain kind of responsibility rhetoric. I think it is neither non-sequitur nor ideological but judge for yourself:
> It's 2015.
> In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president – a man who constantly insults poor people and calls them "morons."
> This generation grew up hearing presidents say similar things. Ronald Reagan said people go hungry because of "a lack of knowledge," and that people are homeless "by choice." Bill Clinton said "personal responsibility" is the way to overcome poverty. We grew up in a country where most people believed the top reason for poverty was drug abuse, and half of Americans blamed poor people for being poor.
(The article has links to the quotes.)
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 have been really really awful for everyone I went to school with.
> 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.)
I'm willing to bet poverty is really what is leading, everything else is a spurious correlation. If you're poor you probably live in a more dangerous area, are in a significantly worse situation to study, need money right now so need to get a job asap after school - or even during school, etc etc. I wish we could easily check this from the data.
yeah agree.
I feel bad for Alex but it seemed like a pretty impressive percentage of people with very adverse childhoods ended up being happy. The graph didn't make it seem like his outcome was typical.
It also looked like the claimed racial disparity wasn't very pronounced?
Maybe the visualizations are just bad.
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