[Mz]

Sophiaellis.co. Remote working (currently Barcelona, Spain), jumping between three continents. Two-time Amazon best-selling coauthor. 22.

TLDR:

"I'm 22 and wildly successful. I have zero appreciation for the fact that 98% of my success can probably be attributed to my parents being awesome. I am here to piss on you and tell you what a loser you are for not brilliantly choosing to be born to awesome parents too. Because beneath the thin veneer of material success, I have zero respect or compassion for anyone."

Also, originally posted here (and says so at the bottom of the piece): https://www.sophiaellis.co/blog/2017/10/11/the-majority-of-t...

HN guidelines ask for the original source.

[sophiaellis]

Hahaha someone's mad :) Glad you liked it!

By the way, I give a percentage of what I make away to women's charities because I know I'm lucky and I can use what I have to help people who have been through the same sexual abuse crimes I have.

My parents had me too young and struggled and failed for years trying to build their own dreams. I've worked and studied full time since I was 15 and couldn't even legally drive my ass to work.

I just don't tell everyone that. Just you.

Do you feel complete? Adequate? Satisfied? A sense of justice?

Ok, fantastic.

[Mz]

Hahaha someone's mad :) Glad you liked it!

Nope. I didn't like it at all and I don't appreciate this kind of self serving BS wherein you twist my words to promote yourself as some clever life hack because you think you are so much smarter than the rest of the entire planet.

[sophiaellis]

I "fixed" my comment for you.

Hope this is more satisfying.

[Mz]

Nope. It is still contemptuous towards me personally and self serving. It is all about trying to make you look good at my expense.

All you are doing is digging your grave deeper in my eyes.

[sophiaellis]

...How was your first comment not contemptuous and self serving?

As long as it satisfied you :)

[Mz]

If you only want everyone to agree with you and squee at you about how awesome you are, don't self post to a forum aimed at critical thinking.

I am done here.

Also, FYI to other people here, a quick check of her posting history suggests she has probably only ever posted her own writing. She has three websites and reposts her own writing across all three, then posts multiple copies here. Beyond that, she does not appear to participate at all.

Conclusion: She is just here as a shill for her own work. That's it.

[User23]

"98% of my success can probably be attributed to my parents being awesome"

All traits are heritable.

[Mz]

Yes, but, there is more to it than that. No matter what shortcomings the parents may have, you don't get to be a functional adult without someone feeding you, making sure you have the opportunity to attend school, etc.

Some years back, I read an article about sexism in India and how first born male children were fed slightly better, taken to the doctor slightly quicker, etc. The outcome could be measured in terms of higher death rates for daughters.

I am not talking about girls being beaten, starved or otherwise abused. I am talking about, for example, boys being taken to the doctor in the evening, girls being given a "wait and see" attitude where they get taken the next morning if they aren't better.

Just getting a child to live to adulthood takes substantial commitment of resources. There are a billion different ways that parents can fuck a child over completely without trying to do so and with no malice aforethought.

Most people who cannot make their lives work had multiple seriously bad things happen to them as children. This is not a case of "If you just try hard enough, you can readily put that behind you." If you aren't in prison, homeless, a junkie, dead, etc, a lot of things went right right in your life that are completely outside of your control.

This does not negate the effort it takes to make life work. But if you think you are the greatest thing since sliced bread, you are taking credit for a helluva lot of stuff you had no control over at all.

[User23]

Good nutrition actually increases the heritability of traits. For example height is roughly 80% heritable in first-world countries but only 60% heritable in third-world countries. Why? Because reducing deleterious environmental effects like malnutrition, neglect, and so on actually increases the relative contribution of genetic factors.

[Mz]

Stunting is very much a thing and there are complex factors that contribute to it, not just good nutrition. They are finding that lack of proper infrastructure for disposing of wastes and keeping people clean contributes as well. In areas where cleanliness is just not attainable due to lack of infrastructure, you can see stunting in even relatively well fed kids.

The incredibly good health that so many modern peoples enjoy which has been generally extending human life arises out of a long human history of progress and development and depends on enormous amounts of infrastructure and public resources that are basically "gifts" to us from the world. People really shouldn't go taking that for granted as some baseline given. It really is not. It doesn't take that much for a person's life to come completely unraveled. Once that happens, putting it back to together is generally a lot harder than taking it apart was.