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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Probably because when you are poor you learn that reward is not going to be consistent. Your parents may love you as much as possible, but they don't have the resources to consistently reward you.

Your teachers might be the most caring education professionals ever, but in your poor district, there's no much they can do consistently.

So, basically your brain probably says to you: Don't get over-excited with this, this is probably a one-of-thing.

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But we learn in Psychology 101 that intermittent reward is actually the most motivating, and produces the best results for mice and pigeons and dogs and humans. So this theory would make the poor kids more successful.

intermittent reinforcement is focused on providing motivation when the person needs it - based on some intrinsic understanding of the effort's stressors - instead of rewarding the effort itself.

poorer background kids tend get rewards at random intervals not intermittent intervals.

this is - as a contrasting example - what pushes them to "hustle" culture instead which does reward effort and in addition has intermittent reinforcement with bigger rewards from people who are entrenched in the culture and see a performer who needs motivation.

“Best” as most addictive. Intermittent reward might meant that the world and their cues are not reliable.

Children are slightly more intelligent than doves, so expecting us to behave like winged rats is both reductionist and insulting

intermittent is not the same thing as infrequent, rare, almost non-existing.

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