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Comment by aestetix | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

At an individual level, a fatalist view is definitely incredibly harmful. But at that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to counter it at a systemic level.

That's exactly what's said in what you quoted, even so far as putting the emphasis on societal effort by mentioning it first, so clearly I don't disagree :)

While it wasn't your intent, this argument is often used to shut down discussions of how we can improve social programs.

I've been through it as well, not as in severe poverty, but definitely to the degree where what you can do in life is very limited and ...

>that's a really disempowering belief

... for me at least, it had the complete opposite effect. When you're young and particularly a teenager, you want to do as much cool things as possible (not just fun, but also things like profiling yourself to end up in a good career, make money, etc), plenty of times this does not happen if you're not privileged enough, and then most of the time people blame this on themselves, maybe I wasn't that smart, maybe I wasn't that disciplined, blah blah.

Sometimes "you just didn't have enough money" is an acceptable answer, it takes the blame out of yourself and it gives you an objective to pursue. Note: this last phrase could definitely be misinterpreted and strawman-ed to death, so I'll clarify on both points:

* It takes the blame out of yourself ... in a healthy way; most likely you are just good enough or are as good as all the other people that are already doing what you want to do. Money could well be the only limiting factor and, if this happens to be the case, you're actually lucky in the sense that is much easier to "just get some money" than to actually nurture and develop an ability that you don't have.

* It gives you a (clear and focused) objective to pursue. Money is not everything but once you identify this as the limiting factor in your life, you can become laser-focused on acquiring said wealth and things just get easier down the road. Anecdote from me: I was once a plane trip short (out of money) from enrolling on a nice PhD in a different country than mine; that, of course, got me very frustrated and sad, but after that my only purpose for a short while was to make money, I went on to work and live frugally (by choice!) and after a year I had saved up a significant wad of cash, this put me in a position where I could not only afford the plane ticket towards any PhD program I wanted, but also afford at least 6-8 months of life anywhere I wanted in the world, so I could just go to places and explore and make a decision about that when I was comfortable about it. Also that small cycle of "set up goal", "work towards it", "execute", gave a lot of meaning to my life at the time and it's a framework that is very useful to master going forward in life.

I appreciate your perspective! But learning to recognize that not all lives can find a path to the same place and that you should stay focused on your own opportunities and wellness, seems a far cry from internalizing that "poverty fucks you up".

In fact, I'd say it's almost the opposite. You don't sound fucked by poverty, honestly. You seem more grounded and capable than many people who had far more privileges, and it sounds like your experiences ended up playing a positive contribution to that even if you wouldn't want to inflict those experiences on anyone else.

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).

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.

Better environments produce a population with a higher IQ.

Maybe but you can't teach a Labrador algebra no matter how many treats you feed it. These are aggregate effects of low IQ genetic traits as they play out over generations in our capitalist society. The trauma is a consequence of poverty and bad parenting which is because of low IQ. And don't call me racist. Ask why there was no IQ test line up amongst all that visualized data

> The trauma is a consequence of poverty and bad parenting which is because of low IQ

You have the primary direction of causality between trauma and IQ reversed. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=childhood+trauma+and+IQ...

Population scale trauma exposure and bad parenting is a result of poverty, social structures, and sometimes wars and conflicts, not something predetermined by genetics.

The IQs of adopted children have next to nothing to do with their environments, and much more to do with the IQs of their birth parents. IQ in general is very strongly heritable. There are several adoption and twin studies that have demonstrated this effect, e.g.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8513766/

Trauma (physical and emotional) causing reduction in IQ is totally compatible with IQ being in part heritable.

Regarding race/ethnicity correlations from the paper you posted:

"(McGue et al., 2007; Miller et al., 2012). McGue et al. (2007) reported minimal ethnicity effects in the SIBS sample at intake, which we largely replicate in the current follow-up assessment. While rearing family socioeconomic status and polygenic scores were both moderately higher among Asian offspring (Cohen’s = d .36–.46; p < .01 ), no measure of cognitive ability differed significantly between offspring of different ethnicities. See SI Table S6 for these and other comparisons, along with a discussion of their relevance."

Also, the children in that study have not been victims of trauma (or the study has not considered and controlled for it), so it says nothing about that factor in eventual IQ of the individuals studied.

It's also compatible with low IQ causing poverty and bad parenting.

Low IQ doesn't "cause" poverty. Poverty is highly multivariate, and likely dominated by factors having nothing to do with IQ, like structural inequities in health/education access and historical lack of access to asset ownership, and exclusion from access to other vehicles of economic advancement.

Of course low IQ can cause poverty. Someone with below 70 IQ is going to have a much harder time finding gainful employment than someone with 100 IQ. A college degree is huge for escaping poverty, and the average US college graduate has an IQ of 113.

I agree that it's multivariate, and I'm open to the possibility that it is primarily another factor (although you haven't supported that claim), but it's absurd to conclude from that that low IQ does not cause poverty. People with learning disabilities have a much harder time finding success in the modern world, and I'm bewildered that I even have to say so.

> low IQ can cause poverty

Is not the same as "people who are poor are that way because they disproportionately are genetically predisposed to have low IQs", which is the gist of the original comment I replied to.

The discussion also isn't about intellectually disabled people (who fall into a separate category with specific legal protections).

Ah, okay. My initial intent was to call out the different evidentiary standards between your own position and the opposition- it was enough for you to rule out low IQ leading to trauma by showing that childhood trauma leads to low IQ, but it was insufficient when someone pointed to evidence that genetics are the primary cause of IQ differences because it was still compatible with your position.

I was quite surprised with your response and that should have triggered a more charitable reading; I can see now that you were quite obviously not saying what I interpreted. My apologies.

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.

For earnings: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/36853322/Ben_Pal...

Among many others.

Even in health and longevity: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.01...

Besides, low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes even if, as you say, low EQ is most strongly associated with the same. They're not mutually exclusive.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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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