Self-Control In Kids Predicts Future Success 245
SpuriousLogic writes "A new study suggests that a child's future success depends on the amount of self-control they exhibit. From the article: 'The international team of researchers looked at 1,037 children in New Zealand born in the early 1970s, observing their levels of self-control at ages 3 and 5. At ages 5, 7, 9 and 11, the team used parent, teacher and the children's own feedback to measure such factors as impulsive aggression, hyperactivity, lack of persistence and inattention. At age 32, they used physical exams, blood tests, records searches and personal interviews of 96% of the original participants to determine how healthy, wealthy and law-abiding the subjects had turned out to be. The results were startling. In the fifth of children with the least self-control, 27% had multiple health problems. Compare that with the fifth of kids with the most self-control — at just 11%. Among the bottom fifth, 32% had an annual income below approximately $15,000, while only 10% of the top fifth fell into that low-income bracket. Just 26% of the top-fifth's offspring were raised in single-parent homes, compared with 58% of those in the bottom fifth. And 43% of the bottom fifth had been convicted of a crime, far outstripping the top fifth's 13% rate.'"
First post! (Score:5, Funny)
Self control? What's that?
Causation is not Correlia (Score:5, Interesting)
"Among the bottom fifth, 32% had an annual income below approximately $15,000, while only 10% of the top fifth fell into that low-income bracket. Just 26% of the top-fifth's offspring were raised in single-parent homes, compared with 58% of those in the bottom fifth."
Well, that may very well be the problem right there. Ditto for the fact that kids with low self control probably came from low-income families, too.
That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits. I'm half convinced it cures ADHD, too, from my personal experience.
Shocking (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Funny)
Not really, in my country he runs the second-largest telecom. The second and the third to smoke are government ministers.
/ really.
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That was a Berlusconi reference. Try googling "bunga bunga party".
Re:Causation is not Correlia (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Causation is not Correlia (Score:5, Insightful)
The data is right, the conclusion is wrong.
The data clearly shows that US and UK schools fail miserably in educating the potential top 5% percentile of students (ditto for bottom 5%). The best students (especially male ones) are guaranteed to be in that "lack of self control" bucket. They are bored. Anyone who had a smart boy will tell you that based on experience (girls are slightly better at faking interest).
I have seen it first hand with my 8 year old. He was assigned exactly in that bucket and had an "impossible to educate, needs psychiatric assessment" label in 2 schools. The lot - refuse to sit, lashing out, etc. Guess what, his granny taught him to read in another language with a different alphabet in 3 weeks at the age of 6. He has now managed to compensate for the 2 years when the teachers had him labelled as "impossible" and get back to his class level in English (4 years in 2) and to a level which is at least a year ahead of where he should be in math.
I really hate to think where he could have been if his teachers did not assign him to the "non-compliant, belongs to the never succeed bucket" in his last year at the nursery.
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Just for the record, you do realize your argument is full of holes. You have a statistical study of...err...one. And they did a statistical study, they never said "if you have no self-control as a kneebiter, then you will become a wanker".
It is precisely because these are statistical studies that they may not apply in your particular case. It doesn't apply in any other particular case either even if the tyke had no self-control and became a wanker. However, if smoking causes cancer in X % of the cases, you
Re:Causation is not Correlia (Score:5, Insightful)
You're reading too much into this from your own perspective.
Your perspective is that you have an intelligent, but out of control individual, you're assuming all individuals who lack self-control are the same as the individual you know, and that if only the needs of these individuals are met, everyone would be better.
The thing is.. and this is the big thing.. individuals who are just as intelligent, but do not lack self-control have more control over their lives in the future.
It's the difference between being intelligent, finding school boring and lashing out at the environment because you're bored, or being intelligent, finding school boring, but enduring that anyway and taking what you can from it.
In your case, I'd try and develop the kids self-control. Intelligence is a fine tool to cut through obstacles, but self-control is the tool to cleave mountains.
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It has more or less been known for quite a while that things like self-control are correlated with success. More specifically we're talking about things like the ability to delay self-gratification (i.e. "you can have a cookie now before dinner or a big slice of cake as desert, which do you prefer?").
[I think almost all of us know somebody that never seems to be able to save enough to go on those dream vacations he/she always wanted and yet throws away money in thrifles and things that he/she only uses for
Re:Causation is not Correlia (Score:4, Funny)
What are you talking about? I think it's very clear from the research: kids with little self control clearly caused themselves to grow up in a single-parent home. I mean, how else could you possibly interpret that data?
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I haven't RTFA or RTFFP.
Anyway, what I wonder in this case is how much is genetics and how much is environment. Though they don't say anything about anything of it, just how they act as kids.
But for instance genetics may not decide whatever your parents separate or not (or maybe it does if they are more "explosive" characters themselves .. And you get that), but eventually that may affect how you interact with other persons.
Personally I feel pretty fucked up now at the age of 31. I've had a somewhat weird l
Re:Causation is not Correlia (Score:5, Interesting)
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At 30 things CAN be different.
Unless of course you've got a mortgage... which maybe the point of mortgages.
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I think the most annoying part is having to then watch other people deal with the same stuff that messed you up. I mean, I have sympathy. But watching people struggle with far less severe deaths when they're in their late 20s as I did when I was five? It's hard to not wonder if these faces are the same as the kids on the playground who wound up shunning me because they felt like death was contagious.
Surprise, children are people too (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Causation is not Correlia (Score:5, Insightful)
"Among the bottom fifth, 32% had an annual income below approximately $15,000, while only 10% of the top fifth fell into that low-income bracket. Just 26% of the top-fifth's offspring were raised in single-parent homes, compared with 58% of those in the bottom fifth."
Well, that may very well be the problem right there.
It says the study subjects offspring were raised in single parent homes, not that the study subjects themselves were raised in a single parent home.
It also says an annual income of below $15000. Given this was in New Zealand, I doubt very much this is true. $15,000 NZD is not much at all. Perhaps they converted it to some other currency?
Re:Causation is not Correlia (Score:4, Informative)
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I suppose that the very moment a punch is about to strike would be a lousy time to suffer loss of concentration.
I suspect that not only do the low testing subjects suffer from social and psychological problems but many probably carry very hard to diagnose medical problems as well. And being that they may reflect their parents status it is likely that the money needed for good medical care was never available to them from birth
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socialized medicine is not optional
It's New Zealand. They already have that. Try again. Here's a better answer for you:
Some people are just bad protoplasm. Ask a doctor or nurse (or anyone else who sees everyone in society, from top to bottom - but I can't think of another field that does) about it. If your genes are bad, nothing about you will work right: you'll be dumb, you'll be ugly, you'll be unhealthy. By contrast, good looks, good health, and good intelligence tend to go together, because people who have good genetics will express al
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If your genes are bad, nothing about you will work right: you'll be dumb, you'll be ugly, you'll be unhealthy. By contrast, good looks, good health, and good intelligence tend to go together, because people who have good genetics will express all the right genes at the right time during development and end up symmetrical and well-wired (barring some freak accident).
Back to Biology 101 for you. Not even close. Health and intelligence are not genetically linked (Stephen Hawkings, anyone?). Attractiveness and intelligence are not genetically linked (Paris Hilton for the win).
Yes, there are unfortunate people with 'piss poor protoplasm' (the technical term). These people have a much harder time being 'successful' because they're often sick or disabled. However, I can think of a number of individuals with chronically poor health who have managed to make enormous c
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As someone who's studied and taugh (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits.
So does "doing" musical instruments.
Any sport, for that matter.
And any activity that requires concentration and diligence.
I've studied martial arts for quite a few years and taught a little too. The benefits are no better than the above and actually playing sports that use a ball will give a kid "ball sense" - the ability to predict where it's going from looking at it.
Studying music will also give the kid the same mental preperation and more dextarity than martial arts. Martial arts will not make one better at other sports than if one didn't do them.
As far as combat skills: I worked with "jocks" who came off the street with no previous martial arts experience and beat black-belts.
The skills from martial arts are overrated and there's nothing like after several years of practice to walk into your orthopedist and finding him shopping for an airplane while you're hobbling over to his desk. And then there's the dentist for your TMJ.
I don't care how good you become (I was .very good, others will land hits on you.
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I've done sports, played instruments (the violin, which isn't especially easy), and done martial arts. While you might incidentally learn concentration and discipline from sports and music, in martial arts it is taught explicitly.
Well, your mileage will vary, of course, but my instructor in TKD would spend a significant amount of time with students cultivating their character and self-control.
>>I don't care how good you become (I was .very
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Part of the confusion may be that you're discussing martial arts like there's no difference between the different disciplines, let alone different instructors and facilities.
Things like Kung-Fu and Tai Chi will involve much more focus and concentration than most other martial arts.
Similarly, Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), Muy Thai and Wrestling (and, to a lesser degree, Judo, Aikido and Krav Maga) have shown themselves to be very effective in actual hand-to-hand combat whereas most others haven't shown themselves to be w
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Well duh. People who expect otherwise are getting their ideas about martial arts from movies and TV. Might as well believe in detectives who solve a new murder every week and that you can have realistic immersive VR, but you'll die in real life if you die in the VR etc. I can pretty much guarantee that anyone who takes martial arts classes will be a better fighter than they would be without them (barring debilitating injuries). That's pretty much going to be true even if only for the daily exercise. It does
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That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits.
So does "doing" musical instruments.
Any sport, for that matter.
And any activity that requires concentration and diligence.
I born in New Zealand in the 70's, played saxophone (badly) age 10-12, then delivered newspapers to people at 5:30am age 14-17.. does that count?
The article never said otherwise (Score:5, Insightful)
The "causation is not correlation" refrain doesn't really apply here. The article claims that self-control predicts success, not that it causes it. The study seems pretty solid, and it's conclusion is believable. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to determine whether self-control leads to success versus "unknown factor X" leading to both self-control and success. To do that would require you to take a large sample of children, and teach self-control to some who don't have it, while also breaking the self-control of some of those who do. Not the sort of study a parent will sign their kid up for.
The point is that self-control is good, and trying to instill it in a child is likely (but not guaranteed) to help them in life.
Also, I think you're misunderstanding the summary. It's not saying that the kids with poor self-control had low income or single-parent homes growing up, it's saying that kids with poor self-control are likely to grow into adults with low income and broken homes. The fact that lack of self-control can lead to divorce should surprise no one.
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>>It's not saying that the kids with poor self-control had low income or single-parent homes growing up, it's saying that kids with poor self-control are likely to grow into adults with low income and broken homes
Given that these sorts of issues are often hereditary (nature or nurture), I wouldn't be surprised if they came more often from single households or low income families as well.
>>The article claims that self-control predicts success, not that it causes it.
Sure, but self-control could be
Re:The article never said otherwise (Score:4, Insightful)
I think your second paragraph needs to have a little discussion with your first paragraph...
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There is no need to have a group where self-control is broken. A study where some "wild" children are taught self control compared to some who are not would be sufficient. Hard to do, though.
Oh, btw, there are no guarantees in life. The life is a gamble no matter what you do.
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You contradict yourself. First, you say that the article does NOT claim that self-control causes success (but merely that it predicts it) - then you go on to say that instilling self-control will likely help them in life (i.e. that self-control likely causes success.)
The theory is plausible, but uncertain. It's entirely possible that self-control is merely a proxy for some underlying mechanism that is the real cause of success, and that increased self-control-training as such has no effect.
Could be tested o
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There is more to the research than this, as well.
Executive function ("self control") is associated with imaginative play: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=76838288 [npr.org] for the pop summary. Imaginative play, in which kids grab relative raw "things" and make things out of them and make stories with those things (i.e., more like turning a stone into a building and a twig into a person than Legos or Playmobil toys) and unsupervised play are deeply on the decline.
The chilling fact: they recently
Re:Causation is not Correlia (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, the regression coefficients for the study are generally quite modest, but it's an interesting finding (one that's been replicated many times, actually). I would like to have seen better statistical analyses though (some multi-level modeling would have been more elegant).
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I don't know what Sibelius [google.com] has to do with it.
But I'd have thought that if there is causation, a correlation is quite likely to follow. Or is Ohm's law just a coincidence?
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Doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits. I'm half convinced it cures ADHD, too, from my personal experience.
Karate means never having to say you are sorry.
Re:Causation is not Correlia (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems to me that the "effectiveness" of any martial art has everything to do with the particular instructor's point of view. Some emphasize the "martial" more than the "art", and vice versa. The most striking example of this for me was a fencing class I took years ago where the instructor devoted half of each class to what was basically dirty street fighting with a rapier. Useless in a practical sense, and entirely contrary to the spirit of the sport, but it was exactly as much fun as it sounds.
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>>As someone who had martial arts forced on him as a kid
Well, that's the problem. Kids that don't want to be in martial arts are often the worst students in the class, anyway, and can disrupt the entire atmosphere of a school.
You can't punish them by sitting out of a class, because, well, they don't want to be there, and their parents are just using martial arts as an afterschool babysitting program.
That said, for kids that do want to be there, but have behavioral or attention problems, martial arts i
Self Control In Kids ... (Score:2)
TED - Marshmallow Experiment (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html
MOD PARENT UP! (Score:2)
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Looks familiar (Score:2, Informative)
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What is interesting to me is the contortions the kids go through while they resist. I wonder if it's possible to try that with kids strapped into an fMRI and see what exactly is going on in there that makes "wait 15 minutes" require so much physical activity.
Don't Eat the Marshmallow... Yet! (related) (Score:5, Interesting)
In this short talk from TED U, Joachim de Posada shares a landmark experiment on delayed gratification -- and how it can predict future success. With priceless video of kids trying their hardest not to eat the marshmallow.
Character (Score:4, Insightful)
Or maybe character matters?
Metabolism also linked to success (Score:3, Interesting)
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I call bullshit. Someone with a fast metabolism is going to have a lot easier time chasing down prey (and running from predators) than someone who takes two days to digest a single Twinkie.
Re:Metabolism also linked to success (Score:4, Insightful)
I call bullshit. Someone with a fast metabolism is going to have a lot easier time chasing down prey (and running from predators) than someone who takes two days to digest a single Twinkie.
Then why are there so many of us with famine-ready metabolisms walking around?
By the way, I just love eating 1700 calories a day and doing an hour of p90x just to keep from gaining 5 pounds a week. Thanks famine-survival-specialist ancestors!
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You don't need a fast metabolism to tend sheep or raise crops. You want to burn as little energy as possible while waiting for them to be ready to eat.
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In an expanding population, low birth age is an advantage. More generations: more tau growth multiples. In a declining population, delayed birth age is an advantage: fewer tau shrinkage multiples. Not for a long time has the western world experienced a consistently declining population due to high mortality (rather than family planning). We forget the other sweep of the pendulum.
A sunny day metabolism is not necessarily optimal for a rainy day. Clearly starvation has been a problem in the history of the
1037 children (Score:5, Funny)
The researchers had a very strong temptation to find another 300 children to study, but being successful scientists were able to exhibit self-control.
Baffling -- where did my story submission go? (Score:2)
Could someone take a sec and explain to me how this system works? I submitted this earlier today:
http://slashdot.org/submission/1455260/EPA-Broken-CFL-Bulb-Better-read-this#comments [slashdot.org]
Now it's nowhere to be seen on the "recent" page. It just seems to have evaporated.
To make matters worse, I can't see anywhere in the FAQ where this is explained.
- aj
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There's recently been an upgrade of the site. Well, the direction is still open for debate, but in an attempt to make it look more i lots of things have suddenly stopped working and/or looking weird.
Seems like taco and his gang didn't have the self control needed to actually test stuff before releasing it.
Self control == Intelligence (Score:4, Informative)
I can't comment on the study because I couldn't find a link to it in the linked article (wtf?).
One of the definitions of intelligence is the ability to put off an immediate reward for a long term benefit. Children are presented with a jelly bean and told "if you can wait until [the researcher] get back, you'll get 3 jelly beans", and then the researcher leaves.
Kids who can put off temptation the longest tend to score highest in IQ tests.
For example, smokers could give up smoking for 3 months and use the money to pay for a high-def TV. This never happens in practice, because of their inability to put off the immediate pleasure in order to get the long-term reward.
BTW, the links on Slashdot have no underlines? With no decoration, you have to mouse around the text in order to see if a link was included in the article.
Re:Self control == Intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
Self control is only part of intelligence if you expand the definition to include it. In my opinion we use the word "intelligence" as too much of a blanket term encompassing all the elements of success.
The truth of the matter is that someone who processes and retains information with the bottom 20% of the population but has the self control to do the extra work required for them to get the grades and/or do good work at, whatever their profession is, is very likely to be more successful than their peers.
Most of the 4.0 students(with engineering or noble science majors) I knew in college never left their rooms on weeknights. I realized a few years ago that they weren't necessarily smarter, some of them quite frankly seemed kind of dim, what they had was work ethic and a realistic assessment of how much time they had to put in to make the grades. And that is far more important than an IQ test.
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It should be very obvious that if you make the 2x2 matrix of (Lazy, Hard-working) and (Stupid, Smart) then (Lazy, Stupid) comes out on the bottom and (Hard-working, Smart) comes out on top. But does (Hard-working, Stupid) beat (Lazy, Smart)? It would be nice to answer yes, it's obviously the PC answer that you can be whatever you want to be and so on. Answering no is more of a surrender that you're only this smart, so you'll never get further than this in life.
But the hard fact is that I think the answer is
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Yep, in grad school we could always tell the ones we'd be graduating with. Those that had grit made it, those that didn't...no matter how they flashed their intelligence...did not.
Thanks for the responses (and fish) (Score:2)
I can't read *any* of the responses to my post for some reason, but I can see the 1st line and so can get a feel for what's being said.
Intelligence is not well defined, both in common usage and in the fields of psychology and (my field) AI. I agree that there are more aspects which contribute to an overall sense of intelligence.
One of the failings of AI in my mind is the lack of a good definition of intelligence.
As a mathematician, I know what a manifold is, can tell whether something is one, and can constr
Domestication? (Score:2)
Parents! (Score:4, Insightful)
Please beat your children.
Link to the Paper (Score:5, Informative)
Link to the paper "A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety" by Terrie E. Moffitt, Et Al.
The Abstract : http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108 [pnas.org]
The PDF Paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108.full.pdf+html [pnas.org]
The Journal Snippit: http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/highlights.shtml#control [pnas.org]
Though policy-makers have considered programs to enhance the nation’s health, wealth, and safety through interventions to improve children’s self-control skills, researchers had not previously shown that childhood self-control actually influences adult outcomes in large populations. Terrie Moffitt et al. analyzed assessments of more than 1,000 participants in the Dunedin, New Zealand Longitudinal Study who were followed from birth to age 32. Even after accounting for differences in social status and IQ, the researchers found that children as young as 3 who scored highly on measures of self-control were less likely than lower-scoring children to develop common physical health problems, abuse drugs, experience financial difficulties, raise a child in a single-parent household, or be convicted of a crime as adults. In a second sample of 500 nonidentical British twins, the sibling who scored lowest in measures of self-control at age 5 was more likely than the other twin to begin smoking, perform poorly in school, and engage in antisocial behaviors at age 12, the authors report. Children whose self-control improved during the study fared better as adults in measures of health, wealth, and criminal history than was otherwise predicted by their initial childhood scores. The results suggest that even small improvements in individuals’ self-control could improve the health, wealth, and safety of large populations, according to the authors. — J.M.
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Note: I Am A Criminologist.
The Dunedin study has been the source of a lot of research on the development of delinquency throughout the life-course (specifically by Terrie Moffitt). One of the arguments which has evolved from the study is that of a developmental taxonomy of delinquents, including the existence of what were termed "Life-Course-Persistent" offenders who are bound, due to a variety of deficiencies (familial, environmental, biological, social) to engage in a nigh unescapable life of delinquency
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An interesting point that I don't believe has been called out in comments yet: note that they tested some kids as young as THREE.
Not to say that there aren't some things that parents could do to help with self-control, but testing at that early age would lead me to believe that many of the elements of self-control are innate and not learned.
I know a family of four kids, and two of them are meticulous, careful, self-controlled individuals. Two are impulsive, whimsical, and NOT self-controlled at all. Same
Old news (Score:2)
The results were startling.
Unless you have even the most basic knowledge of the subject. In which case it's additional verification of previous studies. What's next slashdot, amazed gasps about this new thing called fire. And how it's apparently baffling scientists?
Is real science from Dunedin Longitudinal Study (Score:3, Informative)
Here is an interview about this in particular (not sure if available outside NZ!): http://www.radiolive.co.nz/Children-with-more-self-control-turn-into-healthier-and-wealthier-adults/tabid/506/articleID/18253/Default.aspx [radiolive.co.nz] or google http://www.google.com/search?q=Dunedin+Longitudinal+Study [google.com] for background information.
It is a very rigourous study that has been going for nearly 40 years (now on phase 38), producing 900 papers, and a superb data set because they still have an amazing 96% of the original sample set (now aged about 40) getting regularly tested. They go to extreme lengths to continue keeping the original people coming back - e.g. organising flights for all the people that have elsewhere including a large number that are spread around the world.
Definitely not causation. (Score:2, Insightful)
Lack of self control certainly does not prevent success:
List could continue for a very long time.
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You, sir, fail at statistics:
You hand-picked a few people out of the whole of the US population, and try to deduct some statistically relevant conclusions based on this. Unless you have some millions more people to add to this list, this proves exactly nothing.
Note that even the highest likelyhood in the summary was below 50%.
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Done by Stanford First (Score:2)
Confusing self-control for intelligence? (Score:3)
Well I'm... (Score:2)
Well I'm fucked then.
How strong an explanatory variable is "self control"?
How is "self control" measured?
Is this news? (Score:2)
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, the shocking thing is how early the amount of self control one has appears to be "set". Most of us have little to no awareness and certainly no control of how we are raised before we are 3, yet it appears that a major facility that determines how successful we will be for the rest of our lives is already well established by this age.
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Those with enough self control to not eat badly all the time and to exercise regularly are healthier. Those with enough self control to apply themselves to their schoolwork before playing are more successful. I would never have guessed.
You have an answer, don't you? What do you make of it?
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Then that chef Ramsey dude wouldn't be richer then dirt. /fail
Yeah, buddy, go ahead and, possibly, abuse everybody the way Ramsey does. Should be a behavior required for being successful - my manager seems to think so as well.
Just let aside the pesky control on yourself and, for God's sake, don't take any time to think what Ramsey actually controlled in himself to acquire his kitchen management skills; this is a too deep detail, can't be important if it is non-obvious.
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Also, the correlation is not 1. That is, a self-controlled kid co
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Yeah, when you're reheating ready meals [milescollins.com] it's important to get it *just* right.
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Then there was the “boil-in-the-bag” fiasco, when it was revealed that one of Ramsay’s restaurants, Foxtrot Oscar, in Chelsea, West London, used preprepared food that was heated and sold with mark-ups of up to 586 per cent. Ramsay tells me that there was pressure on him to apologise publicly. “Apologise for what?” he says, almost spluttering with indignation. “When I was working at the Gavroche all those years ago, the duck terrine wasn’t made there. It was made outside, then brought to the restaurant wrapped in plastic. This is standard practice. What on earth was the fuss about? That doesn’t make the food bad. We were doing wonderful navarins. It really annoyed me.”
It seems Ramsay doesn't see this practice as an imperfection ("We were doing wonderful navarins"). The food was also prepared specifically for Ramsay's restaurants--it's not TV dinner-style food, like your link sounds like it's implying.
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He'd made such a fuss about things being "freshly prepared". I suppose that means that it was fresh at the time it was prepared.
Worse, he'd criticized others for doing the same thing, the hypocritical scotch cunt.
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Re:Stupid correlation studies (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get why so many people on Slashdot like to harp on this. How exactly do you expect them to prove causation in a sociological study? Correlation is all they can show, and correlation can be interesting. And since they used the word "predicts" instead of "leads to", they can't even be accused of conflating the two.
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They harp on it, because it helps them to believe that they are superior. Other fun phrases are "liberty", "liberal", "personal freedom", "freedom of speech", and "libertarian". There are obviously more.
They don't know how to interpret data.
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That 43% seems a bit low to me. How do the other people without self-control manage to avoid doing wrong things? How do they manage to avoid the law?
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Huh? Whut? The number of traits is irrelevant when correlating two specific traits. The only argument you can make is that there isn't a causal relationship. 1,000 is MORE than enough to show correlation, especially when the variations between groups is so high.
Re: (Score:2)
The only argument you can make is that there isn't a causal relationship.
Or that the sampling wasn't properly randomized.
Re: (Score:3)
That's not what "Honors" programs in US schools have been telling us...
Re:Old and Bad study (Score:5, Informative)
You are talking complete bollocks.
This particular study is a sub-study of one of the most complete longitudinal studies [otago.ac.nz] of its kind and it is still continuing [otago.ac.nz]. It is run by real scientists, some of whom have made it their life work.
Re: (Score:2)
It means you're less likely to end up in prison. Hard to be successful (using any meaningful definition of the term) while locked up behind bars.
not getting caught (Score:2)
You can't measure 'law-abiding'. All you can do is measure 'not getting caught' and assume.
I can't even guess at how many years I'd be facing, yet I've never been arrested.
Re: (Score:2)
You expect any of us here on Slashdot to believe that?
Prisoners per capita: USA, No. in world, NZ no. 55 (Score:2)
The USA is the country that has the highest percentage of its own population in jail: 715 per 100,000. New Zealand is in 55th place with 160 per 100,000. Find your country here [nationmaster.com].