Comment by 4bpp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 4bpp | Hacker News Reader

So this is suggesting that childhood poverty may be a strong correlate of whatever the marshmallow test tests (and childhood poverty is plausibly a strong correlate of life outcomes, so the effect might be completely mediated via childhood poverty rather than any notion of "affinity towards delayed gratification"), but I'm not sure I understand how/whether it rules out the following two.

(1) whatever quality X the marshmallow test tests is so strongly heritable that the parents of X children already are X and therefore tend to be more poor

(2) poverty is causative of X (maybe even by the mechanism the article suggests, i.e. less stability -> higher uncertainty -> higher discounting of expected future outcomes), but it's still accurate to label X "delaying of gratification", and it is in fact causative to success; therefore, this is a mechanism by which poverty perpetuates itself

The study is suggesting that the marshmallow test is a test of mother without college degree, and not testing something about the children beyond that. [0]

And in general, my suspicion about psychology is, that since you can always invent an objection in the form of your (1) and (2), I doubt that statistic is an actually good tool to look at these tests. If we assume for a moment that we somehow get a ground truth of the experiment, by divine revelation or however, then I suspect that we would see that we need as many categories as there are children to get anything predictive.

[0] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661

> I suspect that we would see that we need as many categories as there are children to get anything predictive.

Making a category to predict human behavior generally hurts those who are “miscategorized” much more than it helps those who are accurately categorized (there aren’t really “positive stereotypes” that jump into active-decision processes like with negative stereotypes).

Therefore, we should not try to predict behavior by making even fuzzy-categories other than one-child-per-category, since this may literally hurt children, especially systemically underprivileged and underrepresented children.

It’s important to control your own decision factors against your local collection of “known non-causations”!

Actually excessive delayed gratification in such circumstances might be maladaptive, right? Causitive to success in context of type C.

Also not clear that's its ability to delay gratification that is being measured; instead, it's just a measure of risk taking mediated by subjective estimate of situational risk and tolerance for risk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com