Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

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> Personal behavior is the foundation that everything else is built on. There really is no alternative.

This reminds me of designers who craft poorly designed interfaces which statistically guarantee that some portion of their users will make "mistakes". and then insist that users are exclusively at fault.

There are structural issues in the US which greatly exacerbate the problem of homelessness and which have nothing to do with what moral teachings the homeless may or may not have received. If anything, the vituperative contempt for the homeless illustrates a moral failing in a different population.

> You dont have to come at this from a position of judgment, superiority, or avoiding aid. That is a false binary.

In my view, the comment I was responding to did precisely that — came at this from a perspective of avoiding aid — by asserting that focusing on anything other than personal morality was bound to fail: "However, it's unlikely you'll ever help enough of them permanently out of their holes to address the problem in any substantial way."

I would recommend giving it another read with a charitable mindset. I didn't see any moralizing or judgment of the poor. They had a critique of current methods for addressing poverty, but I'm assuming you also agree that the status quo is not working well.

>In my view, the comment I was responding to did precisely that — came at this from a perspective of avoiding aid

They acknowledged that providing aid to adults is indeed good, but critiqued it as insufficient.

  It is indeed noble to help the homeless who are mentally or physically disabled, or addicted to drugs or alcohol, or unemployable for lack of job skills or education, or abandoned by spouses or family, or simply too old and alone

They further advocated for providing aid that is missing, and focusing it on younger populations to empower them to avoid critical pitfalls and poverty traps.

  Instead, the first step has to be a truly intensive effort to educate and convince children, beginning at about ages 6 to 7

They want to help children understand the following list and enable them make better choices on the following:

  1) Importance of health and avoiding addiction

  2) Value of education and marketable skills

  3) The dangers of financial debt

  4) Self sufficiency as a goal

  5) Avoiding crime

Do you think that this education and helping children make successful choices is unnecessary or somehow detrimental?

> I'm assuming you also agree that the status quo is not working well.

I do, insofar as I believe the moralistic emphasis of the status quo is counterproductive.

> Do you think that this education and empowerment is unnecessary or somehow detrimental?

Yes, I believe that such moralistic emphasis is detrimental. I believe that emphasizing personal responsibility while deemphasizing structural factors is hypocritical and morally bankrupt.

To those failures who are the supposed targets of the teaching, they learn from the hypocrisy of their teachers that "personal responsibility" is just a cudgel to beat them with while they are being pressed down. To those who succeed, it induces a crippling inability to acknowledge the role of luck and environment in their success, and a corresponding tendency to "other" society's failures.

> They further advocated for providing aid that is missing,

The only "aid" that they advocate is moral teaching — which does nothing for the homeless, but gives people who are not homeless a narcotic bloom of superiority.

>Yes, I believe that such moralistic emphasis is detrimental. I believe that emphasizing personal responsibility while deemphasizing structural factors is hypocritical and morally bankrupt.

It seems like you are interjecting morality again into our discussion where none was included. A deficit of personal empowerment IS a structural and environmental factor. Not the only one, but it is one of the most important if not the most important in determining outcomes.

If you take a poor, abused, and neglected child and teach them they can not and will not amount to anything because of the material conditions of their birth, you are actively damaging their outcomes.

If you take the same poor, abused, and neglected child and teach them that that there is hope and clear goals which will get them out of poverty the vast majority of the time, you are actively improving their outcomes.

This doesn't require judging anyone. This is actively improving environmental factors which lead to success. The impacts are statistically robust and well understood.

Luck and environment played a huge role in my success. A huge environmental factor was parenting and education which made me understand how those 5 factors impact success, and instilling a belief that it was within my reach if I stuck to them.

> A deficit of personal empowerment IS a structural and environmental factor. Not the only one, but it is one of the most important if not the most important in determining outcomes.

This elevation of personal empowerment over all other factors is indistinguishable from an apologia for the status quo — a system can be corrupt without limit and it still applies. Even if 99.999% fail, it's true that for the 0.001% who succeed, a sense of personal empowerment was almost certainly "one of the most important if not the most important in determining outcomes".

> If you take a poor, abused, and neglected child and teach them they can not and will not amount to anything because of the material conditions of their birth, you are actively damaging their outcomes.

And if you actively damage their outcomes, by e.g. refusing under any circumstances to even discuss the role that the cost of housing has on homelessness let alone contemplate a policy response, you are actively damaging their outcomes.

Dial up the cost of housing, get more homelessness. It's as if an sudden epidemic of "lacking personal empowerment" bolts through the population!

In support of your comment. This debate reminds me of the sex education and free condom and abortion debate in the past.

It may be a personal choice that causes unwanted pregnancies, but putting the failure of teens to avoid getting pregnant on their moral failing has been a massive fail for decades until we fixed the social infrastructure around it instead to make doing the right choice easier.

I would like for you to cite the teen pregnancy rate, and then I would like you to compare it to the average age of pregnancy, and marriage, and "unmarried mother" birth rate.

Teen pregnancies were very high when many women were getting married at 18 and giving birth at 19. Birth rates for younger teens, <16, have never been higher. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/02/why-is-the-...

I think there are parallels but the parent comment is taking the position that personal empowerment with sex education in schools and free condoms are irrelevant because only eliminating economic inequality can prevent pregnancy. I am for giving children the information and tools to make healthy choices.

Hmm, curious that you bring up "economic inequality" when I haven't mentioned it, let alone championed the quixotic goal of "eliminating" it.

It makes sense to me that someone taking a roughly libertarian position on homelessness would be laissez-faire about birth control.

The approach of offering homeless aid exclusively in the form of personal empowerment coaching still seems to me analogous to abstinence-only sex ed.

>This elevation of personal empowerment over all other factors is indistinguishable from an apologia for the status quo — a system can be corrupt without limit and it still applies. Even if 99.999% fail, it's true that for the 0.001% who succeed, a sense of personal empowerment was almost certainly "one of the most important if not the most important in determining outcomes".

It is not an apologia, it is a condemnation of the status quo. If 99.999% fail due to lack of personal empowerment, that is still a failure of the system, not the individual.

I am saying this is a significant problem, it is not the fault of the individual, and the system should work on a policy response to address it.

I don't think we can continue if you keep attacking a straw man position I am not making.

I don't think we can continue if you disagree that hopelessness, despair, and feelings of worthlessness are problematic.

> If 99.999% fail do lack of personal empowerment, that is still a failure of the system, not the individual.

A telling miscommunication appears to have occurred.

In my mind, I granted the normal distribution of personal empowerment to that that population — and therefore, the vast majority of the failures were attributable to something else (the "corrupt" system). In the fight to be part of the 0.001% successful, a sense of personal empowerment was necessary but not sufficient — lots of people believed in themselves, but belief alone was not enough.

But you seem to have thought I meant all 99.999% of them failed due to lacking a sense of personal empowerment. All the successes possess a sense of personal empowerment, and all of the failures lack a sense of personal empowerment.

I assert that ascribing success overwhelmingly to personal empowerment is an apologia for the status quo because it serves as an excuse to change nothing.

> I don't think we can continue if you disagree that hopelessness, despair, and feelings of worthlessness are problematic.

Homeless people feeling hopeless is a problem. Responding to that with moral teaching is futile if your goal is to do something about homelessness, although effective if your goal is to flatter the successful that they are virtuous.

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