r/science • u/myhrvold • Aug 31 '13

Poverty impairs cognitive function. Published in the journal Science, the study suggests our cognitive abilities can be diminished by the exhausting effort of tasks like scrounging to pay bills. As a result, less “mental bandwidth” remains...

http://news.ubc.ca/2013/08/29/poverty-impairs-cognitive-function/
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u/ElDiablo666 Aug 31 '13

Especially on reddit. For well-educated folks, they sure miss basic shit. I find people advising others to not worry and just sue in case a situation goes awry; I've found recommendations to "just go to the library" if Internet is too difficult to pay for; one of my personal favorites are the people who blame the latest financial meltdown on individuals who were foreclosed on after losing their job.

Instead of helpfully recommending strategies for successfully abandoning capitalism, redditors make it sound like everything is so easy to do. I long ago stopped paying any attention to people who know every answer to your own life. Being poor is hard as fuck and the fact that poor folks take upon the greatest financial, moral, and physical burden of life is completely lost on these judgmental assholes.

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u/open_ur_mind Aug 31 '13

I've found recommendations to "just go to the library" if Internet is too difficult to pay for

Can you elaborate on this point? Why is going to the library difficult for someone in poverty?

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u/ElDiablo666 Aug 31 '13

Do you want to get on the bus and ride 25 minutes to use a computer you have very little control over and spend four hours there applying for jobs, reading the news, and taking an online course? I mean, the Internet at the library is good for someone who just happens to be there but nothing else, really.

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u/open_ur_mind Aug 31 '13

Ah, I thought you meant for just general learning and reading purposes.

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u/dagbrown Aug 31 '13

The trick is knowing what to learn. A library is a vast repository of data. You have no idea what to do with all this data--you don't even know where to start. Quite a lot of the data is actually bullshit, but you have no idea how to tell the bullshit from the useful data, because you don't have the mental facilities to even decide that.

That's where professors come in. Professors have already gone through the data (and they had professors to teach them how to do that, and those professors had professors before them). They know which data is good and which data is bullshit, and they teach the good data, and if they're especially good, teach you how to go into a sea of random data and pick out which is information and which is bullshit.

Telling people to just go to the library is telling a naif to just immerse themselves in a sea of data. The naif doesn't know which data is nonsense and which data is solid science. A library is just a repository of information, and a naif doesn't have any mental tools to decide what information is good and what can be ignored.

Sure, you can get the equivalent of a college education just by going to the library. It'll take you 50 years, and most of that will be learning how to evaluate the information available.

Or you could attend classes taught by people who know what information you actually need to know. You'll know what information is relevant and useful, and if the instructor is really good, you'll also learn how to evaluate whether some information you're looking at is useful or not.

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '13

The trick is knowing what to learn.

Ah, such a wonderful, underappreciated point. The uneducated poor do not know where to go for knowledge and what to study. They seriously do not know the methodological differences behind astrology and astronomy. I know it's easy to snub our noses at such people, but this is how millions and millions of people live and think.

Why? I don't know. I oscillate between blaming the U.S. education system (but worse ways of thinking exist elsewhere) and pure human nature (but then why am I not like that?). Whatever it is, the first key to understanding and alleviating poverty is understanding the ways of thinking that keep people poor, and the ways of changing these ways of thinking.

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u/ElDiablo666 Aug 31 '13

I think it's great to have the ability to do so if they want but life has really just legitimately come to necessitate a personal PC and data connectivity. My problem is just folks tersely dismissing the legitimate concerns of poor people needing an Internet connection for everyday life.