Hacker News Reader

How do you know that these values can't be taught? It's not like it has been tried with any seriousness as of late. On the contrary, these values (literacy, education, strong self-discipline, public-mindedness) used to be rather widespread in the 19th century, pre WWI, and that seemed to help poor folks cope a lot better with their circumstances even in a society that was both much poorer as a whole and much more unequal!

View on HN

These aren't values, so you can't teach them as such. They are cognitive traits connected to biology and likely hereditary. It is like saying everyone can be equally good at spatial ability, which facilitates many concrete skills, with training, despite being robustly and strongly connected to genetics. If these could be addressed with training, we wouldn't need drugs to treat things like ADHD or depression.

There is no evidence that people in the 19th century were more or less self-disciplined than they are today. Countless people from that era demonstrated a widely documented lack of discipline in all things. Human nature is what it is.

I'm not convinced that long-term thinking isn't a strategy that can be taught. Cognitive traits may make it come naturally to some people, but I would describe it as more of a "habit" than an "ability"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com