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Comment by jacalata | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of kids appear to have survived horrific orphanage experiences, growing up abused, and a complete lack of love. I'm yet to hear of one that made it without food.

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> appear to have survived

Plenty of kids appear to have committed suicide due to such experiences. This is a very literal example of "survivorship bias" :-)

But some survived.

How many survived with zero food?

To be clear, I'm arguing the other way around: not that you can survive complete lack of food, but that there are people who did not survive complete lack of love.

That's confusing coincidence with causality. You can't prove "complete lack of love", whatever that means, killed them.

I used "complete lack of love" as a short version of what another commenter wrote: "horrific orphanage experiences, growing up abused, and a complete lack of love".

I can agree that "complete lack of love" is rather hard to define, but are you sure that it's just a coincidence, when an abused, humiliated, tortured person commits suicide?

I'm confident it did cause some of them to commit suicide. I am arguing, as someone else said - some of them made it. Nobody survived without food. Therefore it is silly to suggest love is more fundamental than food to survival.

Their bodies may be alive, but their minds are often dead.

The evidence of people choosing love over survival suggests that there's something to this, though.

I'm thinking of Harlow's monkey studies in particular - there's some evidence that (macaque) infants will choose comfort over food. Certainly food is more directly tied to life, but Maslow's structure carries a lot less weight if people will seek higher tiers even when they lack the basic elements of survival.

The flaw with your analysis is that your independent variable is 'not dying'. There are plenty of other failure modes.

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