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Comment by victoriap | Hacker News Reader

>>low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests

Wouldn't highly busy people with a lot of stuff to worry about such as startup entrepreneurs, chief level executives also perform poorly on cognition tests? Doesn't that prove that when your mind is busy at any level of Maslow pyramid, cognition tests and other games become trivia to ignore?

So IMO, these results tell more on attitude towards cognition tests than cognitive power. Au contraire, it can be argued that, people in need focus more on what matters by ignoring noise including tests. So necessity is the mother of positive change and maybe of innovation?

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The study is not trying to prove that worried people do worse on tests. That's well-established, not news to anyone.

It's demonstrating that day-to-day financial decisions like "should spend $1500 to repair my car?" produce enough worry in poor people to have a strong cognitive effect, wheras they don't have that effect on rich people.

Have you ever tried to push code after not eating for three days because paying taxes wiped you out?

It's a very different sort of distraction.

As a matter of fact, I have. Except that I still owed the taxman a lot of money, and was hitting up everyone I knew for loans to keep him off my back just a bit longer, all while working 16+ hour days, 7 days a week in an incubator, trying to get a new business off the ground so that I could get some money coming in and eventually pay everyone back. I learned a LOT of lessons in frugality, and as of last year I'm finally in the clear, hopefully forever this time.

It's a shitty situation, but it's not an insurmountable problem. Life ain't fair and nobody owes you shit. You may not be responsible for the situation you're in, but nobody's going to drag you out, so you have to drag yourself out. Or just sit there and die. Your choice.

mmmmm yes golden bootstraps all around

Look, it's something that is surmountable, but we shouldn't for a second treat people in that situation with anything but compassion.

Good, you had the energy, youth and education to know how to acquire loans without getting shorted, working 16 hours without preoccupation for other things aside from your own well-being (your business very much counts as that), and in the context of an incubator.

Now think of someone with little formal education who has been taught all his life that there is not way to solve those issues because you don't know anyone who has gotten out of that shithole.

What motivation would you have?

People seem to underestimate how important is to have a glimmer of hope that a situation is insurmountable. Sitting in a couch watching TV is not an irrational response for spending decades under that situation without any possibility of clawing your way out.

Or just, avoid stress by working a reasonable amount of time and planning your meals.

I think they call that working smarter.

Most poor people (not enough food to eat level poor, not 40k is poverty in SF kind poor) do not pay any taxes and actually get money back from the government (unearned income tax credit).

Before I moved to US I lived in a poor Eastern European country. When I was in university my food budget was ~$70 and my total budget was around 150-160 dollars/month. Eating out was not really an option even once a month. 2k/month is as far from real poverty as I am from Bill Gates.

One (admittedly cynical and disrespectful) hypothesis could be that some of the low-income people are low-income precisely because they disliked abstract reasoning in the first place, thus making them less likely to pursue their education.

To be honest, there are dozens of different ways to interpret this data.

There really isn't. You're letting your bias influence your opinion. Read the paper, draw your conclusions carefully, I wager you will have to change them.

Replace 'disliked' with 'incapable of,' and that hypothesis is neither cynical nor disrespectful. People with subpar cognitive abilities are less likely to move themselves out of poverty.

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