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Comment by smokey_the_bear | Hacker News Reader

I think the article was pretty clear that the parents are to blame for many reasons. But it was about Dasani, who is not at fault, not her parents.

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That Dasani is demonstrating so much vivacity is impressive to us and so worthy of note that we have an article about her. But we expect the opposite, because all of her environmental cues are encouraging the opposite.

how does it make any sense to blame her parents who are the products of the exact same structure she is now struggling against?

It makes sense to lay (some of the) blame at the feet of her parents because they had a choice. Everybody has a choice. Mom didn't have to smoke crack. Dad didn't have to deal drugs. Did they have the same opportunities as rich white kids from the Upper West Side? No. Does that mean that the choices to smoke crack, deal drugs, and have eight kids is something we should just ignore? Certainly not.

It is true, however in a system like this there have to be failures. Only a small portion of the kids demonstrate enough intuitive capacity for learning, like Dasani, that the meager resources available are utilized for them. Therefore the percentage of the population who fails is by necessity larger. So her parents are of course autonomous human beings, but they lived in a structure that was incapable of not producing them.

In what system are there no failures?

You can minimize failure if the point of a system is not output but process. If you continually improve each individual process rather than just optimize for output. So for example in this case if we asked her parents not to produce a good child but simply to figure out how she can get to bed on time every night, then we are asking them to do an easily focused on thing. Do not tell them what to do, just say, "how can you do [x]?" maybe providing access to internet research capacities would be helpful for the parent, but in general simply getting them to focus on how to improve their immediate surroundings in that moment itself produces meaningful change.

you can repeat this method of assigning tasks until eventually the individual, old or young, rich or poor, begins to focus on their own on How things work rather than What they are.

>You can minimize failure if the point of a system is not output but process.

If the point of a system is process then you have the classic "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the bureaucracy" situation. At some point you need to look at output.

It's somewhat dishonest to put much, if any blame on Dasani's parents. They were raised without the decision making skills and opportunities necessary to evaluate the long-term consequences of their decisions. This behavior will very likely be passed down to their children.

Each of those children, knowing only their own lives, may grow up to have n-more children that they can't afford. Is it suddenly their fault, or is there a bigger, vicious cycle of poverty at play here?

The blame lies with the society that refuses to help impoverished children break the vicious cycle. Most of the people who deride the need for these kinds of services have never even exchanged words with somebody that poor, let alone been in that situation themselves. They have no idea.

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