Comment by fregonics
2 years ago
The presentation argues that the adverse experiences cited are outside the individual's control, some of them are and they can have negative effects, i agree, like gun violence or uninterested parents, but others are questionable, like suspensions or being held back in school, which is (in most part) derived directly from the individual's actions.
Since the margins in some of the statistics are so small i wonder how would they look with the adverse experiences ignoring this 2 points.
For me it is obvious that a person who was held back in school and received suspensions will be less likely to be well off when they are older.
>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 cause shows a path to correcting the issue.
>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.
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Assuming a materialistic (non-spiritual) world this statement seems a bit vacuous as we are all the direct products of our environment (including womb environment, genes, nutrition, culture, etc).
The person is indeed influenced by their environment, but the "adverse experiences" should factor in just that, environmental influences, not actions from the individuals.
I think environment influences can increase the likelihood of those adverse experiences, contact with violent behavior for instance can make a person more likely to be suspended, but a person may have been brought up in a normal family and still be violent and be suspended (i got to know such cases, and they're more common than you imagine), and even a person that had contact with this kind of situation may think that they do not want that for their life and use this as a motivator (also have seen such cases).
But the adverse experiences should focus not on the results, but the causes. What factors are we able to quantify that made this student be held back (uninterested parents? a personality disorder? ...) and how big is the influence of each of them in a person's destiny. Only looking at them we will be able to really learn something meaningful from what happened.