Comment by cameldrv
2 years ago
The punchline is this:
"It's 2021.
The research participants are in their late-30s now, which means they've had plenty of time to shape their own destinies. But we can clearly see that the experiences of their childhood had a huge effect on their financial situation as adults.
It also has an effect on virtually everything else in their lives."
You cannot infer the direction of causality from this data, i.e. that the traumatic experiences themselves cause the poorer outcomes. I remember reading about how in Chicago someone had noticed that kids who did better had more books at home, so they decided to give poor kids books. Certainly not a bad thing to do, but just giving them some books is not going to make them like the better off kids in all of the other (highly correlated) ways that they're different.
Just as an example, one of the traumatic factors they identify is if a kid had witnessed someone being shot. The wealthy kids are way less likely to see anyone get shot, because if people were regularly getting shot in their neighborhood, they would move. The poor kids' parents don't always have that option. In this case it could be the poverty itself, not the shooting that is causing the poor outcomes. But then you get into why the parents are poor in the first place, and there are many causes, but a lot of them get passed down to the next generation in one way or another.
I think witnessing someone being shot is a good metric because it is factual. Either you saw someone being shot or your didn't, no ambiguity there, and no matter where you live, someone being shot is someone being shot. Not like "uninvolved parents" and "bullying" which are open to interpretation.
This metric is also a proxy for living in a violent environment. It correlates with wealth, but it is also kind of the point. Children who lived in a wealthy environment are better off as adults in terms of income. It is not that obvious, as rich kids could simply burn through their family wealth.
It’s likely strongly subject to Goodheart’s Law, however. In other words, there are probably many things you could do to improve the goal (e.g. figure out how to keep kids from seeing the violence) without improving outcomes for these kids (because they remain just as poor)
Not really? All things being equal a child that sees someone get shot will grow up more traumatized than a child that does not.
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> This metric is also a proxy for living in a violent environment.
Probably, probably not. The probabilities of witnessing someone being shot is extremely low in both environments. If amount of people who are living in violent environment is much lower, it may be that a person who witnessed someone being shot is more probable from a good environment.
https://www.anesi.com/bayes.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZGCoVF3YvM
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 statistical function, so people who became phenomenal adults despite all hardships, but also people who had a good childhood and became utterly disfunctional adults. But if we think about devising utilitarian political measures knowing what "broadly" has an effect on people is useful. Ideally you discover small things that if changed would have huge positive downstream effects. E.g. if bullying would be shown to have a big impact on later lives, it could be justified to pick up more funds to prevent it, to help victims and/or to change the way schools work in order to minimize chances someone is being bullied. Bullying is just an example, one could also pick other triggers.
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 illiterate children in forest school.
Free society is a liberal ecosystem, where participants are continually succeeding and failing. The authority required to mount a collective response to these inequalities is too susceptible to corruption, and represents injustice in its departure from liberalism. Not to mention that well-meaning interventions by federated authority have an abysmal track record.
> 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.
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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.
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> Certainly not a bad thing to do, but just giving them some books is not going to make them like the better off kids in all of the other (highly correlated) ways that they're different
From personal experience, I can absolutely vouch for that. 35, came from nowhere with nothing, absentee parents, out of house by 15. Dropped out of college, waited tables, did a startup, sold it, worked for 7 years at Google, now I'm doing my 2nd startup.
Does it fix everything? No.
But it gave me something to do that wasn't TV, and it kept me safe from [redacted] dad and [redacted] mom, I could hole up wherever I wanted and spend hours in them.
You'd be surprised at the things that are lifelines. I had a really hard time explaining to this CS PhD dude who ran a weekend night basketball league for no particular reason how different and better that kept my life the last couple years of high school.
You aren't shifting the whole distribution with one act, but just like the little shifts add up in the negative, they add up in the positive too.
I remember a woman in her 30s running into me in the library lugging around those 7 volume MSDN published sets at 9 years old. She was incredulous and told me to keep it up. That mattered! No one had even noticed me or remarked on it before, gave me pride.
Up front, I have no intention of trying to detract from any of those accomplishments, because you've obviously been grinding pretty hard for a while and admire the tenacity you must have had as a kid and the progression you've seemed to follow.
I do however find it under-discussed how many subsequent dice rolls have to at least partially work out for that tenacity, and those little shifts, to be a compounding positive instead of negative, and usefully applied long-term. I'd be curious if you had any major setbacks that you rebounded from after things started rolling successfully forward for you. Now at 32, unemployed with a spotty resume and no prospects, I could really use a &pointer (or reference ;))
Reading through your comment and picturing my own upbringing (poor, abusive, but I guess I got a handle on it and discovered programming through gaming eventually, it does make me sad that although there were hand-me-down computers available that I gravitated toward and experimented with, I could not picture where the nearest library was, and had to Google it now. I'm not particularly resentful though, I did get out, and I'm grateful for that.
I wonder if the books alone would have been enough, but having the books and the physical escape together is kind of incredible, and it's heartening to hear you used the hell out of that space.
Much earlier on, I had some exposure to small motors, and had some mentorship from my extended family on the programming front, but didn't really have a sense of how to build on that; no conception of how to connect motors with gears in a more complex system, no business exposure at all, no ability or framework for learning how to execute on any project, and just a debilitating lack of motivation up until around 17, along with no appreciation for the idea of proving myself measurably; I thought I was capable, but apparently wasn't. I got my little bots for Runescape running though, and that was empowering.
Thankfully, I did and continue to have a similar refuge at the skatepark, which provided me some social and physical benefits for free, much like your basketball league, that a surprising amount of people I meet now don't have. I was nerdy, but couldn't execute, and couldn't see how I'd get there. My first job was a glimpse into how much potential there was available; I made more than my father who I was on good terms with, but then I was laid off for lack of reason to have me on the payroll, which took a positive signal and turned it into hopelessness in a way. I experienced adult job loss my first time trying. It was a great opportunity that I relish in some ways still. I then got another job as a frontend developer, making a bit more, and then burnt out, slowed down, and got fired, partially because I was trying to do CSS things that nobody was paying me to do, instead of just writing some JavaScript to handle dynamic layout and getting the job done. I was too deep in the weeds and got stuck there, but the idea of just cranking out things quickly wasn't stimulating enough and I'd just sit there trying to convince my brain to do the work.
Since then, it's just been gradual pay increases, some early freelance clients that worked out for a while, but at this point I've never held a continuous job for longer than a year and a half, and I feel like the pieces of minor success are hard to stabilize, despite being in a wildly better situation still than I'd ever have imagined in high school, and a hell of a lot of personal inward reflection. My last job title was Software Engineer II, but really I'm just a generalist that keeps failing upward, and I don't know whether if I were to double-down and specialize more, go deeper, or pivot out completely, I'd be able to do that well; it's a bit of a constant existential crisis. It's hard to be consistent over a long period of time without a manager deciding I was a liability or me just burning out so badly, or a series of unfortunate life events coming together for the negative, and once you're out, it's extremely hard to get back in.
For the last year, I've been working my way through Nand2Tetris, because in a career highlight I landed an actual interview with Apple (that ended up going nowhere, rightfully so because my lowest level knowledge didn't exist) as well as building a small SwiftUI project that may or may not see the light of day, and while I think those are positive moves, it's going to be a hard year ahead that may take me to net zero again unless I can pick up something in general labor for while (Waiting tables would be quite difficult without a solid short-term memory, and don’t believe someone would hire me for that with largely tech experience and random interspersed menial work).
Anyhow, ultimately I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, those little shifts really do add up for either the positive or sometimes negative. I think the longer you can keep them positive, keep the ball rolling forward, the more likely things will work out, and as a society it's crucial we continue making it possible to smooth out the experience of life, especially for people who grow up in volatile situations.
> My last job title was Software Engineer II, but really I'm just a generalist that keeps failing upward, and I don't know whether if I were to double-down and specialize more, go deeper, or pivot out completely, I'd be able to do that well; it's a bit of a constant existential crisis.
As a generalist that still has the title Software Engineer after over 25 years of experience, I think I am able to empathize. I think, if you are a generalist and, like me, if you like "laying the pipes" to connect things end-to-end and see the satisfaction of having built the entire thing, embrace it. You should be proud that you can build a complete application though OS infra to database to backend services to frontend UIs and provide the glue of scripts as needed, all by yourself (not shitting on working in a team setting, just knowing that you could). I treat that as a badge of honor. Sure, I can't get super deep into one of these verticals, but then I'm a "builder" and I like the feeling it brings.
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It sounds like some of your thought processes are getting in the way of your success. Have you considered seeing a therapist? I think you would find it beneficial.
Given the order of events (childhood trauma THEN adult outcomes), and the strong relationships identified in the source material (while controlling for confounding factors), I think it's about as close as we can get to inferring directionality.
> I think it's about as close as we can get to inferring directionality.
No, we can try interventions (e.g. do a big and expensive anti-violence/CCTV/policing campaign in a neighborhood) and record the result.
I do think the grandparent has a point and a lot of these could have a common cause. e.g. a violent environment and poor educational attainment could both be caused by poverty or genes for impulse control or a subculture with a higher acceptance these things.
Fair. You can do those kinds of analyses from historical data too, though I don’t think CCTV would have much of an effect. Try free school lunches, after school support, parental benefits etc.
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> I do think the grandparent has a point and a lot of these could have a common cause. e.g. a violent environment and poor educational attainment could both be caused by poverty or genes for impulse control or a subculture with a higher acceptance these things.
How does a gene for (presumably less) impulse control make you more likely to have seen someone shot?
And yes growing up in a poor/more violent environment makes you more likely to end up poor with health problems later in life is exactly the point of the study.
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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/mechanical and biology experiments.
Michael Faraday had to draw and write down everything he learned and imagined meticulously in a military and highly disciplined way where testosterone was expressed in its noble manner: discipline and high focus, no distraction. He wrote himself an extremely dense and technical voluminous book like notes of things he read and noticed while he was still a boy.
The success story of Michael Faraday started only because he was accepted to work for a man selling books. There, Faraday read every single book he saw.
I hope the study mentioned in this article will not be taken seriously by people of modest environments. The victimization mindset is a gatekeeper to success.
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.
There are common statistical techniques to better get at causality in this situation. E.g. given how relatively unlikely and random "seeing someone getting shot while still a child" is, it should be fairly easy to match this up with other variables to tease out causality, e.g. just looking at someone in the same socioeconomic situation, same parental situation (i.e. married/single), and then comparing gunshot witnesses vs. others.
If you knew even a little bit about trauma, you'd know it's not even up for debate at this point that trauma is a huge setback in life.
Your risk of bad relationships, emotional dysregulation, physical ailments and diseases, stress, life unsatisfaction, (...) all increase as your ACE score increases.
I keep repeating myself at this point, but trauma is the biggest epidemic with the most negative consequences that isn't being talked about enough.
> I keep repeating myself at this point, but trauma is the biggest epidemic with the most negative consequences that isn't being talked about enough.
I would disagree; trauma is an incredibly well-used word in 2024.
You say it's an incredibly well used word. I say it's not used enough.
I don't see a disagreement. I'll say it again: It's not talked about enough.
Yes, and such research should help increase society's engagement with this issue. Childhood need to be protected.
You seem to construct a straw man.
The whole point of the study is to show that kids that grow up with more adverse effects which are out of their control makes them more likely to have problems as an adult.
You seem to say we can't infer causality, but that's exactly what they do. They show that having been affected by more adverse effects does make you more likely to suffer in the future. As the study says being poor is one of the adverse effects but not all. So that's your control right there.
What if the root cause is the quality of the parents not the external events?
imo shitty parents is an external event, a series of them
This is classic correlation is not causation. The thing about correlation is that it could be a causative relationship, or there could be another set of untracked variables that's causing some or all the effects, or it could be unrelated coincidence.
Now, maybe this is a difference between the study and the article. Maybe the study makes stronger claims here than the article does. But I didn't see anything in the article that claimed nor demonstrated causation, only correlation.
> I remember reading about how in Chicago someone had noticed that kids who did better had more books at home, so they decided to give poor kids books.
The problem here was not trying to infer causality from population-level data, but rather insufficiently controlling that data for correlated variables. If that study had controlled for the income and education of those kids' parents, it would have been much more able to predict the actual impact of giving kids books.
This visual essay thing doesn't present a particularly detailed data analysis, but I wouldn't be surprised if the original study, being properly academic, did dive into this kind of regression analysis.
If you don't agree with certain people that "wet roads cause rain", you are basically doing a heckin' fascism and should be deplatformed.
Honestly I think the effect was hard to even see in the graphs at that point. It certainly wasn't "huge".
Completely agree - "bars" of people weren't scaled to the same width, and analysing it in only one dimension feels manipulative.
I am pretty sure that the fact of witnessing someone being shot has an impact on your life. Maybe not connected with the data that was implemented here but still
I think how people relate to media and attitudes about out-groups can have an even deeper impact on a life. We all can witness people being shot in non-fiction on police bodycam footage, surveillance camera footage, published on video websites, etc.
Most people compartmentalize seeing shooting of a house and killing a child sleeping in their bed in Ukraine in 2024 different from a drive-by shooting on their own street or road rage on a highway killing a child sleeping in bed or car. But we can witness it easily now and most people are taught to detach non-fiction video of "others" and treat it like it is fiction.
It becomes a wealth and power status symbol to move to the "good part of town" and a "safe neighborhood" and create a compartmentalized mindset that what goes on in other areas is "not witnessed" the same. A detachment of compassion for those in the out-groups and a denial that indeed it is reality, it is non-fiction.
> In this case it could be the poverty itself
unfortunately in the US socialists theories, even the most diluted ones, are almost entirely removed from the public discourse.
These kinds of issues can be better analyzed in the context of the class struggle (or class conflict), of which they are a textbook example.
On a personal level people can get over hardships and have a successful happy life, but statistically, on a societal level, those who are born poor will, more often than any other group, end up being poor(er) adults.
Everyone wants to assume causation from correlation.
I would posit that it’s a cumulative effect from many generations and mostly heritable.
> But then you get into why the parents are poor in the first place, and there are many causes, but a lot of them get passed down to the next generation in one way or another.
Are you trying to say that these people are genetically poor?
To give one example, today's wealth distribution in UK still correlates quite strongly with Norman descent from the original participants of the Conquest. That's over 1,000 years of still-measurable generational wealth transfer.
Generational wealth is a thing...
I took it to infer that there are systemic factors that disadvantage segments of the population disproportionately and across generations.
Having worked with disadvantaged and vulnerable populations I would agree, we only hear about the pulled up by the bootstraps success stories and readily ignore the 99.99% of cases where offspring are worse off financially than their parents.