Think of it another way: What advice would you offer a young poor student lookin...

anemoiac · on March 2, 2021

I don't understand why you can't tell the hypothetical young, poor student both 'A' and 'B.' In fact, not doing so seems a bit manipulative (regardless of your intentions).

A potential consequence of perpetually leaving 'B' out of the discussion is that, while some of these young, poor students will escape poverty and others will not, neither group may realize that the status quo reflects decisions made by human beings, not some invisible law of nature.

Telling poor and disenfranchised people that hard work is the solution to all of their problems sounds just like a recipe for inducing learned helplessness [1] to me. Sure, some hard-working poor people will escape poverty, but plenty won't. The difference between the two groups often lies in factors outside of their control.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

endominus · on March 2, 2021

I would assume the opposite; tell someone that if they work hard, they have a chance is less likely to induce despair in my opinion and experience than telling them that their efforts are meaningless because every part of society is arrayed against them, the odds are laughable, and their failure is all but guaranteed. How could that not make someone feel hopeless? Opportunities and success are not and never will be evenly distributed, but effort still plays a part. Inculcating a victimhood complex in children seems extremely antithetical to the cause of bettering their prospects in life.

anemoiac · on March 3, 2021

> tell someone that if they work hard, they have a chance is less likely to induce despair in my opinion and experience than telling them that their efforts are meaningless because every part of society is arrayed against them, the odds are laughable, and their failure is all but guaranteed. How could that not make someone feel hopeless?

I must not have done a very good job communicating my thoughts, because this is explicitly not what I was advocating for. The post I responded to claimed that both "A) The cards are stacked against you, but your best chance is to work hard..." and "B) You are the victim of a broken system and this system needs to be fixed", then suggested leaving B out of the discussion - even while acknowledging that both 'A' and 'B' were true.

My suggestion was simply to not leave out true, relevant information for the sake of provoking some desired behavioral response from the target audience. That just seems manipulative and paternalistic to me.

This isn't a revelation, however. It's certainly not uncommon for members of marginalized groups to tell their children that they'll have to work twice as hard as other children to end up in the same place.

s1artibartfast · on March 2, 2021

My fundamental concerns are threefold:

First, is learned helpless. As the article you linked points out, learned helplessness is not the result of working hard and encountering challenges. It is the brain's default assumption in the absence of of encouragement. People's brains are already predisposed to inaction and helplessness by millions of years of evolutionary biology. Humans are already predisposed to fallacies and heuristics that overestimate the challenges and obstacles, and reinforcing them is actively damaging. Poor people already know how hard their life is, they don't need other people to reinforce this.

Second, discussion systemic problems is almost never accompanied by a quantification of the relative impact of hard work vs social policy. Is it 90% hard work and 10% luck, or the the inverse.

Last is relevance. A poor child cant wait 30 years for political solutions to improve social mobility by a few percentage points. They can't go back and be born to a richer household. Pursuing an education and clean record has vastly greater impact on outcomes today, and will continue to be more impactful in the future.

anemoiac · on March 3, 2021

My point wasn't that we should gather all of the world's poor and disenfranchised together and hold a giant pity party, it was that being honest with people about the reality of the (unfair) status quo is better than trying to manipulate them with the sort of self-help mumbo-jumbo you might find at a multi-level marketing conference.

In both the contemporary understanding of learned helplessness and its predecessor, that is to say, whether helplessness is the default state of human existence or a conditioned response, what's being considered is a person's view towards their ability to reach a desired outcome through their actions.

Decontextualizing the actions of those who face increased environmental challenges is likely to provide discouragement, not encouragement, as the actions of those facing greater challenges will seem less impactful in comparison to the more fortunate. In more practical terms, this means that the relative under-performance of the disadvantaged may be interpreted as some form of personal inadequacy rather than an expected response to greater-than-average challenges. This relates to something you said, quoted below:

> Poor people already know how hard their life is, they don't need other people to reinforce this.

This actually isn't true, at least in many important ways, and that's a major part of the problem. While poor Americans may realize that their house/neighborhood/car/etc. isn't as nice as those they see on TV, they can't understand what they haven't experienced - for example: the impact of stable finances, well-educated parents, or a high-performing school district on academic performance. This phenomenon also holds true for other segments of society - those more fortunate generally can't fully understand the disadvantages faced by those less fortunate than them.

This is why it's important to have honest discussions about the differing realities faced by those across society. If we don't understand the context of our actions, we can't understand the impacts of our policies, nor can individuals make realistic choices that optimize for their specific environment.

> discussion systemic problems is almost never accompanied by a quantification of the relative impact of hard work vs social policy

I don't think this is at all feasible. The lived experience of every individual is too unique, with an almost infinite array of immeasurable factors contributing to visible outcomes.

>A poor child cant wait 30 years for political solutions to improve social mobility by a few percentage points...Pursuing an education and clean record has vastly greater impact on outcomes today

I don't want to sound overly blunt here, but the entire point of my previous comment was that we can encourage disadvantaged young people to take the actions most likely to lead to success while acknowledging that 'the system' is broken and trying to fix it. Where did you get the impression that we can't tell children to study and avoid crime while also telling them that they should be aware of unique challenges they could face?

And, again, I'm not trying to sound blunt, but what poor child doesn't want to be successful? What poor child wouldn't want "an education and a clean record?" I think it's important to consider why many of them won't achieve those goals. To me, ignoring the disadvantages some children face and simply telling them to work hard seems both naive and insensitive, but, most importantly, unlikely to lead to a satisfactory outcome.