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Muscle Building and Fat Loss...
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I appreciate the reference @AnnPT77 I'm not a tremendous fan of the marshmallow experiment, at least how this was executed. I do agree with the core concept as this is true in nearly every discipline of life.
Regarding the conveyor belt analogy I've heard this discussed as an elevator, but like trust this takes a long time to build up and can be removed in a fraction of the time. Consider in our own lives if you are given a task and succeed, you are given more tasks with greater responsibility and greater reward. Over time you develop skills so that you can more effectively market skills and make greater use of time. To the contrary - fail in a task and this begins a terminal cascade of disaster. You lose trust with colleagues, lose opportunities, and eventually lose hope. Inevitably an output of behavior.
Are there external forces beyond one's control - of course. Are there steps one can take to mitigate this? If not then there's no point. If one has no control, then there is no solution, which is where you find many people in a permanent state of depression and anxiety. Not because of reality, but due to their perception.
If I'm reading you right, I think my conveyors may be different from the elevators.
It seems to me that conveyors are about doing a default set of things without really consciously deciding to do them: They're just "what people do" (so normative tendencies kick in), or they're about meeting expectations (parental or otherwise), or something like that. Like I said, taking a path because it's less hassle in the moment to take it, and more hassle not to take it. **
In one sense, I went to college because it would've been a bigger fuss to oppose my parents' intentions in the short run, than it was to go and take the classes and get adequate grades, etc. I can't really say it was about hard work, or virtuous intention, or anything of that sort, mostly. There were moments where work was involved, of course, but I'd be virtue-posturing if I pretended that my good character was why I went to college and did OK there, then went out and got a decent job after. It was a low-resistance path.
There can be bad conveyors, too. If my parents were alcoholics, created a disruptive and insecure, even dangerous environment, my conveyors would've headed in bad directions.
I perceive what you're talking about as being more of a personal, reputation and/or skill building virtuous (or the opposite) cycle, with more will or intention involved. I'm talking abou defaults.
** ETA: I know way too little about the subject to be saying this, but I perceive the "nudge" idea in behavioral economics as maybe having something to do with manipulating conveyors.2 -
magnusthenerd wrote: »magnusthenerd wrote: »
From the NPR story,magnusthenerd wrote: »
Kind of to be expected. The prefrontal cortex starts coming online in a strong way around puberty. By 15, a lot of dietary restraint patterns are already going to be there.
Cut for brevityThe ability to delay gratification may be the single greatest ability humans hold and the root cause of disparity. It requires knowledge of self and the environment. It requires not only seeing the immediate reward, but requires seeing the abstract potential of a greater reward at the risk of immediate suffering.
By disparity I mean all inequality, or at least the vast majority of cases to the point all else becomes statistically insignificant. Those who manage weight do so due to through sacrificing present for future.
So I'm assuming you're not talking about things like economic, health, education, and wealth disparities right? If you are, then there's a lot more to it than the ability to delay gratification. In fact, the ability to delay one's gratification doesn't play a role.
With regards to the marshmallow test, more recent research has shown that it's fairly flawed. There's an episode of Invisibilia from 2016 that discusses it which is how I first came across the idea that the results of the original study were likely flawed. Here are three articles about it in The Atlantic, The Guardian and Smithsonian Magazine.
Lastly, here's an abstract from a 2018 paper that replicated the 1990 study http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661 . Note the last sentence of the abstract, "Associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcomes at age 15 were much smaller and rarely statistically significant."
edit: the Invisibilia link is especially interesting because the person who ran the 1990 study is saying in part, "I said X and everyone ran with it and turned it into Y - it is not Y".
You also have to consider that last sentence is prefaced by:But this bivariate correlation was only half the size of those reported in the original studies and was reduced by two thirds in the presence of controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and the home environment
So the factors they're using to diminish the correlation are also possible factors that foster delayed gratification - like I don't honestly understand how you remove the component cognitive ability from delayed gratification, I would consider delayed gratification a cognitive ability.
Note - these kids weren't 15 when they were told how to reframe their interpretation. Additionally, the article from The Atlantic also mentions the socioeconomic factors that can lead a child to choose the instant gratification route. Those, quite logically, are not about cognitive ability. Nor is home environment or family background.The vast majority of children in Mischel's study were able to delay gratification when they reframed their interpretations of the situation in front of them.
The point of the marshmallow test was to show how flexible people are — how easily changed if they simply reinterpret the way they frame the situation around them. But that's not the moral that our culture drew from the marshmallow study. We decided that those traits in the preschoolers were fixed — that their self-control at age 4 determined their success throughout life.
...
The marshmallow test became the poster child for the idea that there are specific personality traits that are stable and consistent. And this drives Walter Mischel crazy.
"That iconic story is upside-down wrong," Mischel says. "That your future is in a marshmallow. Because it isn't."
And of course, none of this has to do with the causes of educational, wealth, and health disparities (among other disparities that I can think of at 6:40am).
One cherry picked article and case closed? Can you think of a situation which disproves your assertion?
A statement closes the mind. A question opens the mind.
Does sacrifice impact disparity? Of course. To say otherwise is an act of escape - of ego protection. Just as one blames their weight on metabolism or some other minor variable, weight is an output of behavior. Wealth, education, etc. all the same. The competing variables may change, but the core concept is identical. The issue with each is a misunderstanding of the subject.
Over 79% of millionaires in the United States grew their wealth through the basic principle of sacrificing their present wants for future goals maintaining the simple concept of spending less that income.
It is an interesting standard that one study doesn't dismiss one other other study, but you logically pontificating do, somehow, negate an empirical matter.
I have absolutely no idea how you come up with that 79%. Spending less than you earn isn't a principle of sacrifice. That's some serious aggrandizing to say "well, he makes 200K a year, but he only lives on 100K, that's sacrifice."
A possible explanation. You have another, more accurate explanation?
This originated from a study on millionaires and their activity - published in "Everyday Millionaires" by Chris Hogan. It dispels much of the misinformation on the wealthy just and MFP does on weight management.
I don't know how it can be an explanation when it doesn't even have an explanation of what is meant by sacrifice because it seems a potentially very idiosyncratic use of the term, and rather than correcting misinformation, seems to be a semantics game to give a connotation to investment that sounds more noble than it is.
I could as easily say 100% of millionaires derive their wealth via exploiting surplus value, be just as accurate, and it certainly doesn't sound nice. I'd also doubt you'd consider it myth dispelling.
Regardless, I don't think it addresses what is meant by disparity. I don't want to put words in someone else's mouth, but I took it to be a kind of class disparity. To say that 79% of millionaires did X to become millionaires, therefore we can't say class disparity exists because you can just do X doesn't really work.
Consider the counter example. 100% of Olympic athletes train hard. Therefore, genetics can't explain disparities in athletics. Do you agree with that reasoning?
I had been, trying to figure out what types of things CSARdiver meant when they said "disparities". Where they only talking about weight or where they talking about health (more broadly), educational, wealth, and other disparities. Eventually it became clear that they were talking about all types of disparities which is when I started disagreeing because how would one be able to say, equate self control to educational disparities?
Donna prefers to have fun with video games rather than do her homework well, or at all sometimes - so her grades suffer.
Tim prefers to joke around with his peers during school classes and misses a lot - so his grades suffer.
Donna's parents prefer to watch TV or go out with friends or insert-list-of-other-hobbies most nights rather than dealing with hassle of helping her do homework.
Tim's parents would rather not have difficult discussions with him about his class behavior. Few comments, that's it.
Easier to just let things happen in either case.
So some self-control there, pouring on over to self-sacrifice of the here and now for the future.
But as grades suffer, educational opportunities suffer. Disparities occur.
Now there's Don whose parents want him to have better than what they had, and the self-control to sacrifice their time now in order to give him better in the future helps him with his grades even when he's not thrilled to., and their sacrifice to have monetary means to do so goes along with their time.
Doesn't guarantee it by any means since Don must have same thinking - but it makes it more possible than Donna & Tim.
Disparities aren't just about one person though. They aren't about the ends of the bell curve, they're about large populations. Educational disparities occur when there are societal factors that disadvantage groups of people. If we take black students as an example, racism, black students being seen as "bad" or "unruly" more often than their white peers, teachers having lower expectations for black students (yes, there have been studies showing this to be the case), historically black students flat out being forbidden to colleges and universities, segregation, black students not being put in talented and gifted programs when their similar academic performing peers are, being the first person in their family to go to college (I think there are four people in the whole of my extended family who have gone to college, and that's not because people didn't work hard), who gets disciplined for the same behavior, the effects of not being acculturated into the type of learning that goes on in schools before actually reaching kindergarten - I could go on but I'll stop there.
Instead of making up stories, here are multiple articles and websites for you from reputable sources:
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/11/cover-inequality-school
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-education-still-separate-and-unequal
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/charlottesville-riots-black-students-schools.html
Just to start off - I wasn't making up stories - but relating stories that I've heard and seen repeated often times over by those living them.
And for many of the cases, despite the effects you mention that truly do happen. I've seen those studies, I've seen those effects happen too.
Yes it makes it more difficult, and in some cases likely impossible to get out of the cycle of hold down that occurs to the kids.
I wasn't trying to explain or make it sound like non-ability to sacrifice the now for the future was the only reason for education disparity - but it sure can almost guarantee it.
And lacking that skillset (as others have said one can be trained and learn to do it) because you never had help to develop it, is going to take what could have even been a potentially easy "belt" and knock you right off it.
I don't think anyone is saying this skill or lack of it is the sole reason why other societal factors can't have an overwhelming influence on these disparities - but lack of that skill sure is going to either cause or allow them.
Are you feeling that if it's accepted that some personal skill ability could help or hurt these disparities that it removes the big societal issues like you bring up?
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magnusthenerd wrote: »magnusthenerd wrote: »
From the NPR story,magnusthenerd wrote: »
Kind of to be expected. The prefrontal cortex starts coming online in a strong way around puberty. By 15, a lot of dietary restraint patterns are already going to be there.
Cut for brevityThe ability to delay gratification may be the single greatest ability humans hold and the root cause of disparity. It requires knowledge of self and the environment. It requires not only seeing the immediate reward, but requires seeing the abstract potential of a greater reward at the risk of immediate suffering.
By disparity I mean all inequality, or at least the vast majority of cases to the point all else becomes statistically insignificant. Those who manage weight do so due to through sacrificing present for future.
So I'm assuming you're not talking about things like economic, health, education, and wealth disparities right? If you are, then there's a lot more to it than the ability to delay gratification. In fact, the ability to delay one's gratification doesn't play a role.
With regards to the marshmallow test, more recent research has shown that it's fairly flawed. There's an episode of Invisibilia from 2016 that discusses it which is how I first came across the idea that the results of the original study were likely flawed. Here are three articles about it in The Atlantic, The Guardian and Smithsonian Magazine.
Lastly, here's an abstract from a 2018 paper that replicated the 1990 study http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661 . Note the last sentence of the abstract, "Associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcomes at age 15 were much smaller and rarely statistically significant."
edit: the Invisibilia link is especially interesting because the person who ran the 1990 study is saying in part, "I said X and everyone ran with it and turned it into Y - it is not Y".
You also have to consider that last sentence is prefaced by:But this bivariate correlation was only half the size of those reported in the original studies and was reduced by two thirds in the presence of controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and the home environment
So the factors they're using to diminish the correlation are also possible factors that foster delayed gratification - like I don't honestly understand how you remove the component cognitive ability from delayed gratification, I would consider delayed gratification a cognitive ability.
Note - these kids weren't 15 when they were told how to reframe their interpretation. Additionally, the article from The Atlantic also mentions the socioeconomic factors that can lead a child to choose the instant gratification route. Those, quite logically, are not about cognitive ability. Nor is home environment or family background.The vast majority of children in Mischel's study were able to delay gratification when they reframed their interpretations of the situation in front of them.
The point of the marshmallow test was to show how flexible people are — how easily changed if they simply reinterpret the way they frame the situation around them. But that's not the moral that our culture drew from the marshmallow study. We decided that those traits in the preschoolers were fixed — that their self-control at age 4 determined their success throughout life.
...
The marshmallow test became the poster child for the idea that there are specific personality traits that are stable and consistent. And this drives Walter Mischel crazy.
"That iconic story is upside-down wrong," Mischel says. "That your future is in a marshmallow. Because it isn't."
And of course, none of this has to do with the causes of educational, wealth, and health disparities (among other disparities that I can think of at 6:40am).
One cherry picked article and case closed? Can you think of a situation which disproves your assertion?
A statement closes the mind. A question opens the mind.
Does sacrifice impact disparity? Of course. To say otherwise is an act of escape - of ego protection. Just as one blames their weight on metabolism or some other minor variable, weight is an output of behavior. Wealth, education, etc. all the same. The competing variables may change, but the core concept is identical. The issue with each is a misunderstanding of the subject.
Over 79% of millionaires in the United States grew their wealth through the basic principle of sacrificing their present wants for future goals maintaining the simple concept of spending less that income.
It is an interesting standard that one study doesn't dismiss one other other study, but you logically pontificating do, somehow, negate an empirical matter.
I have absolutely no idea how you come up with that 79%. Spending less than you earn isn't a principle of sacrifice. That's some serious aggrandizing to say "well, he makes 200K a year, but he only lives on 100K, that's sacrifice."
A possible explanation. You have another, more accurate explanation?
This originated from a study on millionaires and their activity - published in "Everyday Millionaires" by Chris Hogan. It dispels much of the misinformation on the wealthy just and MFP does on weight management.
I don't know how it can be an explanation when it doesn't even have an explanation of what is meant by sacrifice because it seems a potentially very idiosyncratic use of the term, and rather than correcting misinformation, seems to be a semantics game to give a connotation to investment that sounds more noble than it is.
I could as easily say 100% of millionaires derive their wealth via exploiting surplus value, be just as accurate, and it certainly doesn't sound nice. I'd also doubt you'd consider it myth dispelling.
Regardless, I don't think it addresses what is meant by disparity. I don't want to put words in someone else's mouth, but I took it to be a kind of class disparity. To say that 79% of millionaires did X to become millionaires, therefore we can't say class disparity exists because you can just do X doesn't really work.
Consider the counter example. 100% of Olympic athletes train hard. Therefore, genetics can't explain disparities in athletics. Do you agree with that reasoning?
I had been, trying to figure out what types of things CSARdiver meant when they said "disparities". Where they only talking about weight or where they talking about health (more broadly), educational, wealth, and other disparities. Eventually it became clear that they were talking about all types of disparities which is when I started disagreeing because how would one be able to say, equate self control to educational disparities?
Donna prefers to have fun with video games rather than do her homework well, or at all sometimes - so her grades suffer.
Tim prefers to joke around with his peers during school classes and misses a lot - so his grades suffer.
Donna's parents prefer to watch TV or go out with friends or insert-list-of-other-hobbies most nights rather than dealing with hassle of helping her do homework.
Tim's parents would rather not have difficult discussions with him about his class behavior. Few comments, that's it.
Easier to just let things happen in either case.
So some self-control there, pouring on over to self-sacrifice of the here and now for the future.
But as grades suffer, educational opportunities suffer. Disparities occur.
Now there's Don whose parents want him to have better than what they had, and the self-control to sacrifice their time now in order to give him better in the future helps him with his grades even when he's not thrilled to., and their sacrifice to have monetary means to do so goes along with their time.
Doesn't guarantee it by any means since Don must have same thinking - but it makes it more possible than Donna & Tim.
Disparities aren't just about one person though. They aren't about the ends of the bell curve, they're about large populations. Educational disparities occur when there are societal factors that disadvantage groups of people. If we take black students as an example, racism, black students being seen as "bad" or "unruly" more often than their white peers, teachers having lower expectations for black students (yes, there have been studies showing this to be the case), historically black students flat out being forbidden to colleges and universities, segregation, black students not being put in talented and gifted programs when their similar academic performing peers are, being the first person in their family to go to college (I think there are four people in the whole of my extended family who have gone to college, and that's not because people didn't work hard), who gets disciplined for the same behavior, the effects of not being acculturated into the type of learning that goes on in schools before actually reaching kindergarten - I could go on but I'll stop there.
Instead of making up stories, here are multiple articles and websites for you from reputable sources:
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/11/cover-inequality-school
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-education-still-separate-and-unequal
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/charlottesville-riots-black-students-schools.html
I'd quibble: Disparities may be either, until we get more specific about what we mean.
Societal or social disparities: I'm with you.
There can be disparities between groups or classes of people, or disparities between individuals; disparities in starting conditions, or disparities in outcomes, or both.
CSARdiver, I think, may've used the term first in this discussion, in a post that includes quite a broad generalization about deferred gratification and disparity. Personally, I'm not sure what that quite-abstract statement meant, in applied terms. He seemed to be making a more generalized point, but the post where he made it (IIRC) had specifics only about weight loss and fitness.
I think there's some genuine disagreement going on, but also some talking past each other.
JMO, though.2 -
I appreciate the reference @AnnPT77 I'm not a tremendous fan of the marshmallow experiment, at least how this was executed. I do agree with the core concept as this is true in nearly every discipline of life.
Regarding the conveyor belt analogy I've heard this discussed as an elevator, but like trust this takes a long time to build up and can be removed in a fraction of the time. Consider in our own lives if you are given a task and succeed, you are given more tasks with greater responsibility and greater reward. Over time you develop skills so that you can more effectively market skills and make greater use of time. To the contrary - fail in a task and this begins a terminal cascade of disaster. You lose trust with colleagues, lose opportunities, and eventually lose hope. Inevitably an output of behavior.
Are there external forces beyond one's control - of course. Are there steps one can take to mitigate this? If not then there's no point. If one has no control, then there is no solution, which is where you find many people in a permanent state of depression and anxiety. Not because of reality, but due to their perception.
If I'm reading you right, I think my conveyors may be different from the elevators.
It seems to me that conveyors are about doing a default set of things without really consciously deciding to do them: They're just "what people do" (so normative tendencies kick in), or they're about meeting expectations (parental or otherwise), or something like that. Like I said, taking a path because it's less hassle in the moment to take it, and more hassle not to take it. **
In one sense, I went to college because it would've been a bigger fuss to oppose my parents' intentions in the short run, than it was to go and take the classes and get adequate grades, etc. I can't really say it was about hard work, or virtuous intention, or anything of that sort, mostly. There were moments where work was involved, of course, but I'd be virtue-posturing if I pretended that my good character was why I went to college and did OK there, then went out and got a decent job after. It was a low-resistance path.
There can be bad conveyors, too. If my parents were alcoholics, created a disruptive and insecure, even dangerous environment, my conveyors would've headed in bad directions.
I perceive what you're talking about as being more of a personal, reputation and/or skill building virtuous (or the opposite) cycle, with more will or intention involved. I'm talking abou defaults.
** ETA: I know way too little about the subject to be saying this, but I perceive the "nudge" idea in behavioral economics as maybe having something to do with manipulating conveyors.
Yes - I should have noted that distinction.
What I believe you're referencing are the input of societal norms beyond academia - cultural norms. Which brings forth the notion that behaviors within cultures can be beneficial and/or harmful depending on the situation.
I think back to a statement made by Milton Friedman where he corrected someone in thinking that the US was an individual economy and he clarified this as a "family economy". The in group preference within our economy lies at the heart of the family.
This is a very good defnition and one I agree with - better to address an issue at the root cause before the symptoms get out of hand downstream.0 -
@AnnPT77 I don't want to get involved in this debate, but I am feeling your conveyor belt references. I see them all over my life and the lives of the people around me. Thank you for your TED talk
As an aside to the aside to the thread (and I'll try to keep this brief): I started to think about this in explicit terms a few years after college, when a college-age friend was vociferously lamenting the many things his school had failed to teach him, to his detriment. I was astonished.
On reflection, I realized that I didn't as much think of my school - not a very good school system, in a rural poverty area - as fundamentally a place that taught me things, really, to the extent that he thought of his that way. It seemed like he was thinking of school as a conveyor that one would ride, with knowledge being stuffed into one's head, pretty much all of it the school's responsibility. I had implicitly thought of my school more as a place where I could learn things, potentially, but the burden was more on me to be learning, if that makes any sense. Since then, I've felt like it was in some ways an advantage to go to a pretty-bad K-12 school.
IIRC, something like a quarter or a third of my small (120-ish person) high school graduating class . . . didn't graduate.1 -
magnusthenerd wrote: »magnusthenerd wrote: »
From the NPR story,magnusthenerd wrote: »
Kind of to be expected. The prefrontal cortex starts coming online in a strong way around puberty. By 15, a lot of dietary restraint patterns are already going to be there.
Cut for brevityThe ability to delay gratification may be the single greatest ability humans hold and the root cause of disparity. It requires knowledge of self and the environment. It requires not only seeing the immediate reward, but requires seeing the abstract potential of a greater reward at the risk of immediate suffering.
By disparity I mean all inequality, or at least the vast majority of cases to the point all else becomes statistically insignificant. Those who manage weight do so due to through sacrificing present for future.
So I'm assuming you're not talking about things like economic, health, education, and wealth disparities right? If you are, then there's a lot more to it than the ability to delay gratification. In fact, the ability to delay one's gratification doesn't play a role.
With regards to the marshmallow test, more recent research has shown that it's fairly flawed. There's an episode of Invisibilia from 2016 that discusses it which is how I first came across the idea that the results of the original study were likely flawed. Here are three articles about it in The Atlantic, The Guardian and Smithsonian Magazine.
Lastly, here's an abstract from a 2018 paper that replicated the 1990 study http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661 . Note the last sentence of the abstract, "Associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcomes at age 15 were much smaller and rarely statistically significant."
edit: the Invisibilia link is especially interesting because the person who ran the 1990 study is saying in part, "I said X and everyone ran with it and turned it into Y - it is not Y".
You also have to consider that last sentence is prefaced by:But this bivariate correlation was only half the size of those reported in the original studies and was reduced by two thirds in the presence of controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and the home environment
So the factors they're using to diminish the correlation are also possible factors that foster delayed gratification - like I don't honestly understand how you remove the component cognitive ability from delayed gratification, I would consider delayed gratification a cognitive ability.
Note - these kids weren't 15 when they were told how to reframe their interpretation. Additionally, the article from The Atlantic also mentions the socioeconomic factors that can lead a child to choose the instant gratification route. Those, quite logically, are not about cognitive ability. Nor is home environment or family background.The vast majority of children in Mischel's study were able to delay gratification when they reframed their interpretations of the situation in front of them.
The point of the marshmallow test was to show how flexible people are — how easily changed if they simply reinterpret the way they frame the situation around them. But that's not the moral that our culture drew from the marshmallow study. We decided that those traits in the preschoolers were fixed — that their self-control at age 4 determined their success throughout life.
...
The marshmallow test became the poster child for the idea that there are specific personality traits that are stable and consistent. And this drives Walter Mischel crazy.
"That iconic story is upside-down wrong," Mischel says. "That your future is in a marshmallow. Because it isn't."
And of course, none of this has to do with the causes of educational, wealth, and health disparities (among other disparities that I can think of at 6:40am).
One cherry picked article and case closed? Can you think of a situation which disproves your assertion?
A statement closes the mind. A question opens the mind.
Does sacrifice impact disparity? Of course. To say otherwise is an act of escape - of ego protection. Just as one blames their weight on metabolism or some other minor variable, weight is an output of behavior. Wealth, education, etc. all the same. The competing variables may change, but the core concept is identical. The issue with each is a misunderstanding of the subject.
Over 79% of millionaires in the United States grew their wealth through the basic principle of sacrificing their present wants for future goals maintaining the simple concept of spending less that income.
It is an interesting standard that one study doesn't dismiss one other other study, but you logically pontificating do, somehow, negate an empirical matter.
I have absolutely no idea how you come up with that 79%. Spending less than you earn isn't a principle of sacrifice. That's some serious aggrandizing to say "well, he makes 200K a year, but he only lives on 100K, that's sacrifice."
A possible explanation. You have another, more accurate explanation?
This originated from a study on millionaires and their activity - published in "Everyday Millionaires" by Chris Hogan. It dispels much of the misinformation on the wealthy just and MFP does on weight management.
I don't know how it can be an explanation when it doesn't even have an explanation of what is meant by sacrifice because it seems a potentially very idiosyncratic use of the term, and rather than correcting misinformation, seems to be a semantics game to give a connotation to investment that sounds more noble than it is.
I could as easily say 100% of millionaires derive their wealth via exploiting surplus value, be just as accurate, and it certainly doesn't sound nice. I'd also doubt you'd consider it myth dispelling.
Regardless, I don't think it addresses what is meant by disparity. I don't want to put words in someone else's mouth, but I took it to be a kind of class disparity. To say that 79% of millionaires did X to become millionaires, therefore we can't say class disparity exists because you can just do X doesn't really work.
Consider the counter example. 100% of Olympic athletes train hard. Therefore, genetics can't explain disparities in athletics. Do you agree with that reasoning?
I had been, trying to figure out what types of things CSARdiver meant when they said "disparities". Where they only talking about weight or where they talking about health (more broadly), educational, wealth, and other disparities. Eventually it became clear that they were talking about all types of disparities which is when I started disagreeing because how would one be able to say, equate self control to educational disparities?
Donna prefers to have fun with video games rather than do her homework well, or at all sometimes - so her grades suffer.
Tim prefers to joke around with his peers during school classes and misses a lot - so his grades suffer.
Donna's parents prefer to watch TV or go out with friends or insert-list-of-other-hobbies most nights rather than dealing with hassle of helping her do homework.
Tim's parents would rather not have difficult discussions with him about his class behavior. Few comments, that's it.
Easier to just let things happen in either case.
So some self-control there, pouring on over to self-sacrifice of the here and now for the future.
But as grades suffer, educational opportunities suffer. Disparities occur.
Now there's Don whose parents want him to have better than what they had, and the self-control to sacrifice their time now in order to give him better in the future helps him with his grades even when he's not thrilled to., and their sacrifice to have monetary means to do so goes along with their time.
Doesn't guarantee it by any means since Don must have same thinking - but it makes it more possible than Donna & Tim.
Disparities aren't just about one person though. They aren't about the ends of the bell curve, they're about large populations. Educational disparities occur when there are societal factors that disadvantage groups of people. If we take black students as an example, racism, black students being seen as "bad" or "unruly" more often than their white peers, teachers having lower expectations for black students (yes, there have been studies showing this to be the case), historically black students flat out being forbidden to colleges and universities, segregation, black students not being put in talented and gifted programs when their similar academic performing peers are, being the first person in their family to go to college (I think there are four people in the whole of my extended family who have gone to college, and that's not because people didn't work hard), who gets disciplined for the same behavior, the effects of not being acculturated into the type of learning that goes on in schools before actually reaching kindergarten - I could go on but I'll stop there.
Instead of making up stories, here are multiple articles and websites for you from reputable sources:
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/11/cover-inequality-school
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-education-still-separate-and-unequal
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/charlottesville-riots-black-students-schools.html
I'd quibble: Disparities may be either, until we get more specific about what we mean.
Societal or social disparities: I'm with you.
There can be disparities between groups or classes of people, or disparities between individuals; disparities in starting conditions, or disparities in outcomes, or both.
CSARdiver, I think, may've used the term first in this discussion, in a post that includes quite a broad generalization about deferred gratification and disparity. Personally, I'm not sure what that quite-abstract statement meant, in applied terms. He seemed to be making a more generalized point, but the post where he made it (IIRC) had specifics only about weight loss and fitness.
I think there's some genuine disagreement going on, but also some talking past each other.
JMO, though.
A very generalized point at that - all root causes are.
I believe the divide to be on how one addresses it. Does this lie with the individual or with societies?0 -
magnusthenerd wrote: »magnusthenerd wrote: »
From the NPR story,magnusthenerd wrote: »
Kind of to be expected. The prefrontal cortex starts coming online in a strong way around puberty. By 15, a lot of dietary restraint patterns are already going to be there.
Cut for brevityThe ability to delay gratification may be the single greatest ability humans hold and the root cause of disparity. It requires knowledge of self and the environment. It requires not only seeing the immediate reward, but requires seeing the abstract potential of a greater reward at the risk of immediate suffering.
By disparity I mean all inequality, or at least the vast majority of cases to the point all else becomes statistically insignificant. Those who manage weight do so due to through sacrificing present for future.
So I'm assuming you're not talking about things like economic, health, education, and wealth disparities right? If you are, then there's a lot more to it than the ability to delay gratification. In fact, the ability to delay one's gratification doesn't play a role.
With regards to the marshmallow test, more recent research has shown that it's fairly flawed. There's an episode of Invisibilia from 2016 that discusses it which is how I first came across the idea that the results of the original study were likely flawed. Here are three articles about it in The Atlantic, The Guardian and Smithsonian Magazine.
Lastly, here's an abstract from a 2018 paper that replicated the 1990 study http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661 . Note the last sentence of the abstract, "Associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcomes at age 15 were much smaller and rarely statistically significant."
edit: the Invisibilia link is especially interesting because the person who ran the 1990 study is saying in part, "I said X and everyone ran with it and turned it into Y - it is not Y".
You also have to consider that last sentence is prefaced by:But this bivariate correlation was only half the size of those reported in the original studies and was reduced by two thirds in the presence of controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and the home environment
So the factors they're using to diminish the correlation are also possible factors that foster delayed gratification - like I don't honestly understand how you remove the component cognitive ability from delayed gratification, I would consider delayed gratification a cognitive ability.
Note - these kids weren't 15 when they were told how to reframe their interpretation. Additionally, the article from The Atlantic also mentions the socioeconomic factors that can lead a child to choose the instant gratification route. Those, quite logically, are not about cognitive ability. Nor is home environment or family background.The vast majority of children in Mischel's study were able to delay gratification when they reframed their interpretations of the situation in front of them.
The point of the marshmallow test was to show how flexible people are — how easily changed if they simply reinterpret the way they frame the situation around them. But that's not the moral that our culture drew from the marshmallow study. We decided that those traits in the preschoolers were fixed — that their self-control at age 4 determined their success throughout life.
...
The marshmallow test became the poster child for the idea that there are specific personality traits that are stable and consistent. And this drives Walter Mischel crazy.
"That iconic story is upside-down wrong," Mischel says. "That your future is in a marshmallow. Because it isn't."
And of course, none of this has to do with the causes of educational, wealth, and health disparities (among other disparities that I can think of at 6:40am).
One cherry picked article and case closed? Can you think of a situation which disproves your assertion?
A statement closes the mind. A question opens the mind.
Does sacrifice impact disparity? Of course. To say otherwise is an act of escape - of ego protection. Just as one blames their weight on metabolism or some other minor variable, weight is an output of behavior. Wealth, education, etc. all the same. The competing variables may change, but the core concept is identical. The issue with each is a misunderstanding of the subject.
Over 79% of millionaires in the United States grew their wealth through the basic principle of sacrificing their present wants for future goals maintaining the simple concept of spending less that income.
It is an interesting standard that one study doesn't dismiss one other other study, but you logically pontificating do, somehow, negate an empirical matter.
I have absolutely no idea how you come up with that 79%. Spending less than you earn isn't a principle of sacrifice. That's some serious aggrandizing to say "well, he makes 200K a year, but he only lives on 100K, that's sacrifice."
A possible explanation. You have another, more accurate explanation?
This originated from a study on millionaires and their activity - published in "Everyday Millionaires" by Chris Hogan. It dispels much of the misinformation on the wealthy just and MFP does on weight management.
I don't know how it can be an explanation when it doesn't even have an explanation of what is meant by sacrifice because it seems a potentially very idiosyncratic use of the term, and rather than correcting misinformation, seems to be a semantics game to give a connotation to investment that sounds more noble than it is.
I could as easily say 100% of millionaires derive their wealth via exploiting surplus value, be just as accurate, and it certainly doesn't sound nice. I'd also doubt you'd consider it myth dispelling.
Regardless, I don't think it addresses what is meant by disparity. I don't want to put words in someone else's mouth, but I took it to be a kind of class disparity. To say that 79% of millionaires did X to become millionaires, therefore we can't say class disparity exists because you can just do X doesn't really work.
Consider the counter example. 100% of Olympic athletes train hard. Therefore, genetics can't explain disparities in athletics. Do you agree with that reasoning?
I had been, trying to figure out what types of things CSARdiver meant when they said "disparities". Where they only talking about weight or where they talking about health (more broadly), educational, wealth, and other disparities. Eventually it became clear that they were talking about all types of disparities which is when I started disagreeing because how would one be able to say, equate self control to educational disparities?
Donna prefers to have fun with video games rather than do her homework well, or at all sometimes - so her grades suffer.
Tim prefers to joke around with his peers during school classes and misses a lot - so his grades suffer.
Donna's parents prefer to watch TV or go out with friends or insert-list-of-other-hobbies most nights rather than dealing with hassle of helping her do homework.
Tim's parents would rather not have difficult discussions with him about his class behavior. Few comments, that's it.
Easier to just let things happen in either case.
So some self-control there, pouring on over to self-sacrifice of the here and now for the future.
But as grades suffer, educational opportunities suffer. Disparities occur.
Now there's Don whose parents want him to have better than what they had, and the self-control to sacrifice their time now in order to give him better in the future helps him with his grades even when he's not thrilled to., and their sacrifice to have monetary means to do so goes along with their time.
Doesn't guarantee it by any means since Don must have same thinking - but it makes it more possible than Donna & Tim.
Disparities aren't just about one person though. They aren't about the ends of the bell curve, they're about large populations. Educational disparities occur when there are societal factors that disadvantage groups of people. If we take black students as an example, racism, black students being seen as "bad" or "unruly" more often than their white peers, teachers having lower expectations for black students (yes, there have been studies showing this to be the case), historically black students flat out being forbidden to colleges and universities, segregation, black students not being put in talented and gifted programs when their similar academic performing peers are, being the first person in their family to go to college (I think there are four people in the whole of my extended family who have gone to college, and that's not because people didn't work hard), who gets disciplined for the same behavior, the effects of not being acculturated into the type of learning that goes on in schools before actually reaching kindergarten - I could go on but I'll stop there.
Instead of making up stories, here are multiple articles and websites for you from reputable sources:
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/11/cover-inequality-school
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-education-still-separate-and-unequal
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/charlottesville-riots-black-students-schools.html
I'd quibble: Disparities may be either, until we get more specific about what we mean.
Societal or social disparities: I'm with you.
There can be disparities between groups or classes of people, or disparities between individuals; disparities in starting conditions, or disparities in outcomes, or both.
CSARdiver, I think, may've used the term first in this discussion, in a post that includes quite a broad generalization about deferred gratification and disparity. Personally, I'm not sure what that quite-abstract statement meant, in applied terms. He seemed to be making a more generalized point, but the post where he made it (IIRC) had specifics only about weight loss and fitness.
I think there's some genuine disagreement going on, but also some talking past each other.
JMO, though.
A very generalized point at that - all root causes are.
I believe the divide to be on how one addresses it. Does this lie with the individual or with societies?
Why not both?
Besides ( - warning! generalization coming --> ) actions by societies require actions by individuals.1 -
magnusthenerd wrote: »magnusthenerd wrote: »
From the NPR story,magnusthenerd wrote: »
Kind of to be expected. The prefrontal cortex starts coming online in a strong way around puberty. By 15, a lot of dietary restraint patterns are already going to be there.
Cut for brevityThe ability to delay gratification may be the single greatest ability humans hold and the root cause of disparity. It requires knowledge of self and the environment. It requires not only seeing the immediate reward, but requires seeing the abstract potential of a greater reward at the risk of immediate suffering.
By disparity I mean all inequality, or at least the vast majority of cases to the point all else becomes statistically insignificant. Those who manage weight do so due to through sacrificing present for future.
So I'm assuming you're not talking about things like economic, health, education, and wealth disparities right? If you are, then there's a lot more to it than the ability to delay gratification. In fact, the ability to delay one's gratification doesn't play a role.
With regards to the marshmallow test, more recent research has shown that it's fairly flawed. There's an episode of Invisibilia from 2016 that discusses it which is how I first came across the idea that the results of the original study were likely flawed. Here are three articles about it in The Atlantic, The Guardian and Smithsonian Magazine.
Lastly, here's an abstract from a 2018 paper that replicated the 1990 study http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661 . Note the last sentence of the abstract, "Associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcomes at age 15 were much smaller and rarely statistically significant."
edit: the Invisibilia link is especially interesting because the person who ran the 1990 study is saying in part, "I said X and everyone ran with it and turned it into Y - it is not Y".
You also have to consider that last sentence is prefaced by:But this bivariate correlation was only half the size of those reported in the original studies and was reduced by two thirds in the presence of controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and the home environment
So the factors they're using to diminish the correlation are also possible factors that foster delayed gratification - like I don't honestly understand how you remove the component cognitive ability from delayed gratification, I would consider delayed gratification a cognitive ability.
Note - these kids weren't 15 when they were told how to reframe their interpretation. Additionally, the article from The Atlantic also mentions the socioeconomic factors that can lead a child to choose the instant gratification route. Those, quite logically, are not about cognitive ability. Nor is home environment or family background.The vast majority of children in Mischel's study were able to delay gratification when they reframed their interpretations of the situation in front of them.
The point of the marshmallow test was to show how flexible people are — how easily changed if they simply reinterpret the way they frame the situation around them. But that's not the moral that our culture drew from the marshmallow study. We decided that those traits in the preschoolers were fixed — that their self-control at age 4 determined their success throughout life.
...
The marshmallow test became the poster child for the idea that there are specific personality traits that are stable and consistent. And this drives Walter Mischel crazy.
"That iconic story is upside-down wrong," Mischel says. "That your future is in a marshmallow. Because it isn't."
And of course, none of this has to do with the causes of educational, wealth, and health disparities (among other disparities that I can think of at 6:40am).
One cherry picked article and case closed? Can you think of a situation which disproves your assertion?
A statement closes the mind. A question opens the mind.
Does sacrifice impact disparity? Of course. To say otherwise is an act of escape - of ego protection. Just as one blames their weight on metabolism or some other minor variable, weight is an output of behavior. Wealth, education, etc. all the same. The competing variables may change, but the core concept is identical. The issue with each is a misunderstanding of the subject.
Over 79% of millionaires in the United States grew their wealth through the basic principle of sacrificing their present wants for future goals maintaining the simple concept of spending less that income.
It is an interesting standard that one study doesn't dismiss one other other study, but you logically pontificating do, somehow, negate an empirical matter.
I have absolutely no idea how you come up with that 79%. Spending less than you earn isn't a principle of sacrifice. That's some serious aggrandizing to say "well, he makes 200K a year, but he only lives on 100K, that's sacrifice."
A possible explanation. You have another, more accurate explanation?
This originated from a study on millionaires and their activity - published in "Everyday Millionaires" by Chris Hogan. It dispels much of the misinformation on the wealthy just and MFP does on weight management.
I don't know how it can be an explanation when it doesn't even have an explanation of what is meant by sacrifice because it seems a potentially very idiosyncratic use of the term, and rather than correcting misinformation, seems to be a semantics game to give a connotation to investment that sounds more noble than it is.
I could as easily say 100% of millionaires derive their wealth via exploiting surplus value, be just as accurate, and it certainly doesn't sound nice. I'd also doubt you'd consider it myth dispelling.
Regardless, I don't think it addresses what is meant by disparity. I don't want to put words in someone else's mouth, but I took it to be a kind of class disparity. To say that 79% of millionaires did X to become millionaires, therefore we can't say class disparity exists because you can just do X doesn't really work.
Consider the counter example. 100% of Olympic athletes train hard. Therefore, genetics can't explain disparities in athletics. Do you agree with that reasoning?
I had been, trying to figure out what types of things CSARdiver meant when they said "disparities". Where they only talking about weight or where they talking about health (more broadly), educational, wealth, and other disparities. Eventually it became clear that they were talking about all types of disparities which is when I started disagreeing because how would one be able to say, equate self control to educational disparities?
Donna prefers to have fun with video games rather than do her homework well, or at all sometimes - so her grades suffer.
Tim prefers to joke around with his peers during school classes and misses a lot - so his grades suffer.
Donna's parents prefer to watch TV or go out with friends or insert-list-of-other-hobbies most nights rather than dealing with hassle of helping her do homework.
Tim's parents would rather not have difficult discussions with him about his class behavior. Few comments, that's it.
Easier to just let things happen in either case.
So some self-control there, pouring on over to self-sacrifice of the here and now for the future.
But as grades suffer, educational opportunities suffer. Disparities occur.
Now there's Don whose parents want him to have better than what they had, and the self-control to sacrifice their time now in order to give him better in the future helps him with his grades even when he's not thrilled to., and their sacrifice to have monetary means to do so goes along with their time.
Doesn't guarantee it by any means since Don must have same thinking - but it makes it more possible than Donna & Tim.
Disparities aren't just about one person though. They aren't about the ends of the bell curve, they're about large populations. Educational disparities occur when there are societal factors that disadvantage groups of people. If we take black students as an example, racism, black students being seen as "bad" or "unruly" more often than their white peers, teachers having lower expectations for black students (yes, there have been studies showing this to be the case), historically black students flat out being forbidden to colleges and universities, segregation, black students not being put in talented and gifted programs when their similar academic performing peers are, being the first person in their family to go to college (I think there are four people in the whole of my extended family who have gone to college, and that's not because people didn't work hard), who gets disciplined for the same behavior, the effects of not being acculturated into the type of learning that goes on in schools before actually reaching kindergarten - I could go on but I'll stop there.
Instead of making up stories, here are multiple articles and websites for you from reputable sources:
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/11/cover-inequality-school
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-education-still-separate-and-unequal
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/charlottesville-riots-black-students-schools.html
I'd quibble: Disparities may be either, until we get more specific about what we mean.
Societal or social disparities: I'm with you.
There can be disparities between groups or classes of people, or disparities between individuals; disparities in starting conditions, or disparities in outcomes, or both.
CSARdiver, I think, may've used the term first in this discussion, in a post that includes quite a broad generalization about deferred gratification and disparity. Personally, I'm not sure what that quite-abstract statement meant, in applied terms. He seemed to be making a more generalized point, but the post where he made it (IIRC) had specifics only about weight loss and fitness.
I think there's some genuine disagreement going on, but also some talking past each other.
JMO, though.
A very generalized point at that - all root causes are.
I believe the divide to be on how one addresses it. Does this lie with the individual or with societies?
Why not both?
Besides ( - warning! generalization coming --> ) actions by societies require actions by individuals.
Both would be optimal, but requires consensus and an identical goal. Man is very good at reacting to dire strait situations where a mutual enemy or threat is present. We are attrocious at finding common ground in times of peace. Even a well meaning endeavor is more than likely to be coopted by the unscrupulous.
As we will not have consensus in the short term - barring alien invasion, the primary focus should be on ourselves. Once we get our own houses in order we can utilize our skills and wisdom to aid others. Iron sharpens iron.0 -
Lest anyone think I'm ignoring this thread, I'm just being human and going grocery shopping, making food, not being on MFP every waking moment, etc 3
-
magnusthenerd wrote: »magnusthenerd wrote: »
From the NPR story,magnusthenerd wrote: »
Kind of to be expected. The prefrontal cortex starts coming online in a strong way around puberty. By 15, a lot of dietary restraint patterns are already going to be there.
Cut for brevityThe ability to delay gratification may be the single greatest ability humans hold and the root cause of disparity. It requires knowledge of self and the environment. It requires not only seeing the immediate reward, but requires seeing the abstract potential of a greater reward at the risk of immediate suffering.
By disparity I mean all inequality, or at least the vast majority of cases to the point all else becomes statistically insignificant. Those who manage weight do so due to through sacrificing present for future.
So I'm assuming you're not talking about things like economic, health, education, and wealth disparities right? If you are, then there's a lot more to it than the ability to delay gratification. In fact, the ability to delay one's gratification doesn't play a role.
With regards to the marshmallow test, more recent research has shown that it's fairly flawed. There's an episode of Invisibilia from 2016 that discusses it which is how I first came across the idea that the results of the original study were likely flawed. Here are three articles about it in The Atlantic, The Guardian and Smithsonian Magazine.
Lastly, here's an abstract from a 2018 paper that replicated the 1990 study http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661 . Note the last sentence of the abstract, "Associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcomes at age 15 were much smaller and rarely statistically significant."
edit: the Invisibilia link is especially interesting because the person who ran the 1990 study is saying in part, "I said X and everyone ran with it and turned it into Y - it is not Y".
You also have to consider that last sentence is prefaced by:But this bivariate correlation was only half the size of those reported in the original studies and was reduced by two thirds in the presence of controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and the home environment
So the factors they're using to diminish the correlation are also possible factors that foster delayed gratification - like I don't honestly understand how you remove the component cognitive ability from delayed gratification, I would consider delayed gratification a cognitive ability.
Note - these kids weren't 15 when they were told how to reframe their interpretation. Additionally, the article from The Atlantic also mentions the socioeconomic factors that can lead a child to choose the instant gratification route. Those, quite logically, are not about cognitive ability. Nor is home environment or family background.The vast majority of children in Mischel's study were able to delay gratification when they reframed their interpretations of the situation in front of them.
The point of the marshmallow test was to show how flexible people are — how easily changed if they simply reinterpret the way they frame the situation around them. But that's not the moral that our culture drew from the marshmallow study. We decided that those traits in the preschoolers were fixed — that their self-control at age 4 determined their success throughout life.
...
The marshmallow test became the poster child for the idea that there are specific personality traits that are stable and consistent. And this drives Walter Mischel crazy.
"That iconic story is upside-down wrong," Mischel says. "That your future is in a marshmallow. Because it isn't."
And of course, none of this has to do with the causes of educational, wealth, and health disparities (among other disparities that I can think of at 6:40am).
One cherry picked article and case closed? Can you think of a situation which disproves your assertion?
A statement closes the mind. A question opens the mind.
Does sacrifice impact disparity? Of course. To say otherwise is an act of escape - of ego protection. Just as one blames their weight on metabolism or some other minor variable, weight is an output of behavior. Wealth, education, etc. all the same. The competing variables may change, but the core concept is identical. The issue with each is a misunderstanding of the subject.
Over 79% of millionaires in the United States grew their wealth through the basic principle of sacrificing their present wants for future goals maintaining the simple concept of spending less that income.
It is an interesting standard that one study doesn't dismiss one other other study, but you logically pontificating do, somehow, negate an empirical matter.
I have absolutely no idea how you come up with that 79%. Spending less than you earn isn't a principle of sacrifice. That's some serious aggrandizing to say "well, he makes 200K a year, but he only lives on 100K, that's sacrifice."
A possible explanation. You have another, more accurate explanation?
This originated from a study on millionaires and their activity - published in "Everyday Millionaires" by Chris Hogan. It dispels much of the misinformation on the wealthy just and MFP does on weight management.
I don't know how it can be an explanation when it doesn't even have an explanation of what is meant by sacrifice because it seems a potentially very idiosyncratic use of the term, and rather than correcting misinformation, seems to be a semantics game to give a connotation to investment that sounds more noble than it is.
I could as easily say 100% of millionaires derive their wealth via exploiting surplus value, be just as accurate, and it certainly doesn't sound nice. I'd also doubt you'd consider it myth dispelling.
Regardless, I don't think it addresses what is meant by disparity. I don't want to put words in someone else's mouth, but I took it to be a kind of class disparity. To say that 79% of millionaires did X to become millionaires, therefore we can't say class disparity exists because you can just do X doesn't really work.
Consider the counter example. 100% of Olympic athletes train hard. Therefore, genetics can't explain disparities in athletics. Do you agree with that reasoning?
I had been, trying to figure out what types of things CSARdiver meant when they said "disparities". Where they only talking about weight or where they talking about health (more broadly), educational, wealth, and other disparities. Eventually it became clear that they were talking about all types of disparities which is when I started disagreeing because how would one be able to say, equate self control to educational disparities?
Donna prefers to have fun with video games rather than do her homework well, or at all sometimes - so her grades suffer.
Tim prefers to joke around with his peers during school classes and misses a lot - so his grades suffer.
Donna's parents prefer to watch TV or go out with friends or insert-list-of-other-hobbies most nights rather than dealing with hassle of helping her do homework.
Tim's parents would rather not have difficult discussions with him about his class behavior. Few comments, that's it.
Easier to just let things happen in either case.
So some self-control there, pouring on over to self-sacrifice of the here and now for the future.
But as grades suffer, educational opportunities suffer. Disparities occur.
Now there's Don whose parents want him to have better than what they had, and the self-control to sacrifice their time now in order to give him better in the future helps him with his grades even when he's not thrilled to., and their sacrifice to have monetary means to do so goes along with their time.
Doesn't guarantee it by any means since Don must have same thinking - but it makes it more possible than Donna & Tim.
Disparities aren't just about one person though. They aren't about the ends of the bell curve, they're about large populations. Educational disparities occur when there are societal factors that disadvantage groups of people. If we take black students as an example, racism, black students being seen as "bad" or "unruly" more often than their white peers, teachers having lower expectations for black students (yes, there have been studies showing this to be the case), historically black students flat out being forbidden to colleges and universities, segregation, black students not being put in talented and gifted programs when their similar academic performing peers are, being the first person in their family to go to college (I think there are four people in the whole of my extended family who have gone to college, and that's not because people didn't work hard), who gets disciplined for the same behavior, the effects of not being acculturated into the type of learning that goes on in schools before actually reaching kindergarten - I could go on but I'll stop there.
Instead of making up stories, here are multiple articles and websites for you from reputable sources:
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/11/cover-inequality-school
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-education-still-separate-and-unequal
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/charlottesville-riots-black-students-schools.html
I'd quibble: Disparities may be either, until we get more specific about what we mean.
Societal or social disparities: I'm with you.
There can be disparities between groups or classes of people, or disparities between individuals; disparities in starting conditions, or disparities in outcomes, or both.
CSARdiver, I think, may've used the term first in this discussion, in a post that includes quite a broad generalization about deferred gratification and disparity. Personally, I'm not sure what that quite-abstract statement meant, in applied terms. He seemed to be making a more generalized point, but the post where he made it (IIRC) had specifics only about weight loss and fitness.
I think there's some genuine disagreement going on, but also some talking past each other.
JMO, though.
A very generalized point at that - all root causes are.
I believe the divide to be on how one addresses it. Does this lie with the individual or with societies?
Why not both?
Besides ( - warning! generalization coming --> ) actions by societies require actions by individuals.
Both would be optimal, but requires consensus and an identical goal. Man is very good at reacting to dire strait situations where a mutual enemy or threat is present. We are attrocious at finding common ground in times of peace. Even a well meaning endeavor is more than likely to be coopted by the unscrupulous.
As we will not have consensus in the short term - barring alien invasion, the primary focus should be on ourselves. Once we get our own houses in order we can utilize our skills and wisdom to aid others. Iron sharpens iron.
I guess I'm more of an optimist, or a decentral-ist, or something.
I think societies can gradually muddle their way in positive directions incrementally, via individuals doing things that seem better to them. . . kind of analogous to how a slime mold runs a maze, maybe (and they do ). However, societies can also muddle themselves into quicksand.
A giant metaphorical army marching as one toward some shared urgent goal can be fine, too. Or dangerously totalitarian, depending on the goal.1 -
magnusthenerd wrote: »magnusthenerd wrote: »
From the NPR story,magnusthenerd wrote: »
Kind of to be expected. The prefrontal cortex starts coming online in a strong way around puberty. By 15, a lot of dietary restraint patterns are already going to be there.
Cut for brevityThe ability to delay gratification may be the single greatest ability humans hold and the root cause of disparity. It requires knowledge of self and the environment. It requires not only seeing the immediate reward, but requires seeing the abstract potential of a greater reward at the risk of immediate suffering.
By disparity I mean all inequality, or at least the vast majority of cases to the point all else becomes statistically insignificant. Those who manage weight do so due to through sacrificing present for future.
So I'm assuming you're not talking about things like economic, health, education, and wealth disparities right? If you are, then there's a lot more to it than the ability to delay gratification. In fact, the ability to delay one's gratification doesn't play a role.
With regards to the marshmallow test, more recent research has shown that it's fairly flawed. There's an episode of Invisibilia from 2016 that discusses it which is how I first came across the idea that the results of the original study were likely flawed. Here are three articles about it in The Atlantic, The Guardian and Smithsonian Magazine.
Lastly, here's an abstract from a 2018 paper that replicated the 1990 study http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661 . Note the last sentence of the abstract, "Associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcomes at age 15 were much smaller and rarely statistically significant."
edit: the Invisibilia link is especially interesting because the person who ran the 1990 study is saying in part, "I said X and everyone ran with it and turned it into Y - it is not Y".
You also have to consider that last sentence is prefaced by:But this bivariate correlation was only half the size of those reported in the original studies and was reduced by two thirds in the presence of controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and the home environment
So the factors they're using to diminish the correlation are also possible factors that foster delayed gratification - like I don't honestly understand how you remove the component cognitive ability from delayed gratification, I would consider delayed gratification a cognitive ability.
Note - these kids weren't 15 when they were told how to reframe their interpretation. Additionally, the article from The Atlantic also mentions the socioeconomic factors that can lead a child to choose the instant gratification route. Those, quite logically, are not about cognitive ability. Nor is home environment or family background.The vast majority of children in Mischel's study were able to delay gratification when they reframed their interpretations of the situation in front of them.
The point of the marshmallow test was to show how flexible people are — how easily changed if they simply reinterpret the way they frame the situation around them. But that's not the moral that our culture drew from the marshmallow study. We decided that those traits in the preschoolers were fixed — that their self-control at age 4 determined their success throughout life.
...
The marshmallow test became the poster child for the idea that there are specific personality traits that are stable and consistent. And this drives Walter Mischel crazy.
"That iconic story is upside-down wrong," Mischel says. "That your future is in a marshmallow. Because it isn't."
And of course, none of this has to do with the causes of educational, wealth, and health disparities (among other disparities that I can think of at 6:40am).
One cherry picked article and case closed? Can you think of a situation which disproves your assertion?
A statement closes the mind. A question opens the mind.
Does sacrifice impact disparity? Of course. To say otherwise is an act of escape - of ego protection. Just as one blames their weight on metabolism or some other minor variable, weight is an output of behavior. Wealth, education, etc. all the same. The competing variables may change, but the core concept is identical. The issue with each is a misunderstanding of the subject.
Over 79% of millionaires in the United States grew their wealth through the basic principle of sacrificing their present wants for future goals maintaining the simple concept of spending less that income.
It is an interesting standard that one study doesn't dismiss one other other study, but you logically pontificating do, somehow, negate an empirical matter.
I have absolutely no idea how you come up with that 79%. Spending less than you earn isn't a principle of sacrifice. That's some serious aggrandizing to say "well, he makes 200K a year, but he only lives on 100K, that's sacrifice."
A possible explanation. You have another, more accurate explanation?
This originated from a study on millionaires and their activity - published in "Everyday Millionaires" by Chris Hogan. It dispels much of the misinformation on the wealthy just and MFP does on weight management.
I don't know how it can be an explanation when it doesn't even have an explanation of what is meant by sacrifice because it seems a potentially very idiosyncratic use of the term, and rather than correcting misinformation, seems to be a semantics game to give a connotation to investment that sounds more noble than it is.
I could as easily say 100% of millionaires derive their wealth via exploiting surplus value, be just as accurate, and it certainly doesn't sound nice. I'd also doubt you'd consider it myth dispelling.
Regardless, I don't think it addresses what is meant by disparity. I don't want to put words in someone else's mouth, but I took it to be a kind of class disparity. To say that 79% of millionaires did X to become millionaires, therefore we can't say class disparity exists because you can just do X doesn't really work.
Consider the counter example. 100% of Olympic athletes train hard. Therefore, genetics can't explain disparities in athletics. Do you agree with that reasoning?
I had been, trying to figure out what types of things CSARdiver meant when they said "disparities". Where they only talking about weight or where they talking about health (more broadly), educational, wealth, and other disparities. Eventually it became clear that they were talking about all types of disparities which is when I started disagreeing because how would one be able to say, equate self control to educational disparities?
Donna prefers to have fun with video games rather than do her homework well, or at all sometimes - so her grades suffer.
Tim prefers to joke around with his peers during school classes and misses a lot - so his grades suffer.
Donna's parents prefer to watch TV or go out with friends or insert-list-of-other-hobbies most nights rather than dealing with hassle of helping her do homework.
Tim's parents would rather not have difficult discussions with him about his class behavior. Few comments, that's it.
Easier to just let things happen in either case.
So some self-control there, pouring on over to self-sacrifice of the here and now for the future.
But as grades suffer, educational opportunities suffer. Disparities occur.
Now there's Don whose parents want him to have better than what they had, and the self-control to sacrifice their time now in order to give him better in the future helps him with his grades even when he's not thrilled to., and their sacrifice to have monetary means to do so goes along with their time.
Doesn't guarantee it by any means since Don must have same thinking - but it makes it more possible than Donna & Tim.
Disparities aren't just about one person though. They aren't about the ends of the bell curve, they're about large populations. Educational disparities occur when there are societal factors that disadvantage groups of people. If we take black students as an example, racism, black students being seen as "bad" or "unruly" more often than their white peers, teachers having lower expectations for black students (yes, there have been studies showing this to be the case), historically black students flat out being forbidden to colleges and universities, segregation, black students not being put in talented and gifted programs when their similar academic performing peers are, being the first person in their family to go to college (I think there are four people in the whole of my extended family who have gone to college, and that's not because people didn't work hard), who gets disciplined for the same behavior, the effects of not being acculturated into the type of learning that goes on in schools before actually reaching kindergarten - I could go on but I'll stop there.
Instead of making up stories, here are multiple articles and websites for you from reputable sources:
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/11/cover-inequality-school
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-education-still-separate-and-unequal
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/charlottesville-riots-black-students-schools.html
I'd quibble: Disparities may be either, until we get more specific about what we mean.
Societal or social disparities: I'm with you.
There can be disparities between groups or classes of people, or disparities between individuals; disparities in starting conditions, or disparities in outcomes, or both.
CSARdiver, I think, may've used the term first in this discussion, in a post that includes quite a broad generalization about deferred gratification and disparity. Personally, I'm not sure what that quite-abstract statement meant, in applied terms. He seemed to be making a more generalized point, but the post where he made it (IIRC) had specifics only about weight loss and fitness.
I think there's some genuine disagreement going on, but also some talking past each other.
JMO, though.
A very generalized point at that - all root causes are.
I believe the divide to be on how one addresses it. Does this lie with the individual or with societies?
Why not both?
Besides ( - warning! generalization coming --> ) actions by societies require actions by individuals.
Both would be optimal, but requires consensus and an identical goal. Man is very good at reacting to dire strait situations where a mutual enemy or threat is present. We are attrocious at finding common ground in times of peace. Even a well meaning endeavor is more than likely to be coopted by the unscrupulous.
As we will not have consensus in the short term - barring alien invasion, the primary focus should be on ourselves. Once we get our own houses in order we can utilize our skills and wisdom to aid others. Iron sharpens iron.
I guess I'm more of an optimist, or a decentral-ist, or something.
I think societies can gradually muddle their way in positive directions incrementally, via individuals doing things that seem better to them. . . kind of analogous to how a slime mold runs a maze, maybe (and they do ). However, societies can also muddle themselves into quicksand.
A giant metaphorical army marching as one toward some shared urgent goal can be fine, too. Or dangerously totalitarian, depending on the goal.
I would agree and feel the same - optimist grounded in realism and decidedly decentralist. Add me the list of reformed Marxists.
Historically this is the only way societies progress, but this requires time and invested individuals who mutually work towards a common goal. If forced to change, populations resist with disastrous consequences.
This should be obvious, but how can one change the world if they cannot manage their own house first? It is far easier to adopt pseudo-moralistic problems which cannot be fixed than turn attention to own problems - ego protection lies at the heart of man's evil.
As long as the effort is voluntary there is no issue. If forced, then the endeavor, no matter how noble the intent, is soured.1
This discussion has been closed.
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