[homefree]

It's more about resilience and what sets the stage for it.

He argues resilience is created through suffering (which plays into the idea that if you want to know who will be a good founder, ask about their childhood).

It makes me curious though about the direction of the causality - how much is resilience actually about temperament and genetics vs. the environmental experience of suffering. Why do some people become resilient from suffering and others become unable to succeed in life. Maybe suffering just reveals the types of people that are already resilient?

My hypothesis is there's some baseline and people have different predispositions based on their personality, but that resilience can also be improved by learning how to handle difficult situations better (and what kinds of thought patterns you allow yourself to have) - a kind of emotional observation/regulation/understanding. The opposite of what current identity politics/seeing yourself as a perpetual victim of 'trauma' plays into (imo this makes people a lot less resilient).

It's possible that's something you can only really develop through suffering (maybe this is Jensen's point), but it might also be able to be something that can be learned even without suffering - though people may have less reason to truly internalize it until it's tested.

[JohnMakin]

Traumatic early childhood experiences (suffering) can cause profoundly negative, irreversible effects on a child's brain development that will have issues persist well into adulthood and beyond - I don't think his take is scientific.

edit: not sure why downvoted, here's a source if you don't believe me: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3968319/

[sanderjd]

Yep, I'm with you. I think this "suffering is necessary" point Huang is making is his weakest point. Maybe a more nuanced version of it that I think would be a stronger point is that there is a "sweet spot" of life challenges - not too much, but also not too little - that increase the odds of positive outcomes for people.

But as you say, people who experience extreme suffering are much more likely to experience a lifetime of profound difficulty than to become a great auteur, entrepreneur, or leader.

[tpmoney]

The only universal truth is that no thruths are universal. And I think “suffering builds character” in this and its other forms is a perfect example. Yes, extreme suffering will cause long term problems. And yet at the same time, we’re all probably familiar with or know someone who experienced “the gifted student wall” where their natural talent was good enough to carry them to success, right up until the point it wasn’t and they suffered a major setback because they’d never built up the skills or resiliency to overcome that obstacle.

Like you said there is probably some sweet spot that we should try to hit. I suppose the hard part is there’s no good way to know how much suffering society should allow or encourage, and probably more importantly no good mechanism by which we can turn off suffering once you’ve “had enough”

[homefree]

Even (maybe especially) extreme suffering can create resilience - I suspect it’s not optimal for happiness, but that’s not what this is about. This is about resilience.

A less resilient person may have a perfectly happy and content life doing things that aren’t as hard, that’s true of most people.

But someone who has something extreme happen to them will have a way higher fucking bar for bad. If you lost your family in war the stress of a startup is nothing to you.

[JohnMakin]

> If you lost your family in war the stress of a startup is nothing to you.

But respectfully this isn’t really how PTSD works. It seems intuitive to say this, but in reality, stressful situations will often trigger an exaggerated flight or fight response than is warranted due to changes in the brain’s structure, especially the hippocampus. Repeated, prolonged trauma makes the person even less resilient, not more so.

[homefree]

Not everybody develops PTSD, I think that’s the core point.

[JohnMakin]

Survivorship bias seems heavily at play here though. You don’t hear about all the people that just die way too young.

[sanderjd]

Well put. Also, just to make it even harder, the "sweet spot" is probably very individual-specific.

[Ancapistani]

> Traumatic early childhood experiences

While it sounds like this would describe Huang's experience, I don't think that's what he intended to convey.

As others have said, it seems to be about resiliency. You don't develop that unless you have a reason to do so - "pain and suffering", to me, sounds like a synonym for "struggle".

My childhood was pretty much uniformly excellent. I saw my parents struggle a bit, but I was too young for it to really mean much to me at the time, and it didn't directly impact me. My personal struggle didn't really begin until after high school; I ran head-first into undiagnosed ADHD and chronic depression.

Recognizing those issues and overcoming them was the process that defined who I am as an adult. I fully believe it has made me a better and more resilient person. It wasn't until then that I was able to look back and really understand what my parents went through.

It has also informed the way I parent my children. I make it a point to be transparent about what I'm thinking, the struggles I'm facing now, and the ways I'm dealing with them. That's tempered by constantly reinforcing that those things are my stresses, not my kids'... because my kids aren't my therapist :P.

My hope is that by being transparent, my kids don't enter the adult world expecting everything to go according to plan. I'm trying to model not only "correct" behaviors, but how to emotionally deal with and overcome hardship.

[homefree]

I think a lot of this psych science is bullshit - I’m generally skeptical of it given the problems in the replication crisis (and that a lot of modern psychotherapy seems to be making things worse for kids).

[JohnMakin]

Ok, sure, but that doesn't really apply here. This is a well known neurological change that can be seen in brain scans - for instance the hippocampus will shrink/be underdeveloped.

[watwut]

If you are low key insulting your child regularly, they won't de better then kids of parents who treat them well. Kids who think low of themselves usually don't even try.

So, I am skeptical.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

I think the truth is more subtle than that. I think suffering can act as a filter; some people able to build resilience while others are trapped by it and never improve. But I DO NOT think that suffering is necessary to build resilience, nor that suffering is necessarily the best filter to use. I think it is better to build resilient habits, such that if suffering is encountered one won't be filtered out, but not to seek out suffering in the hope that experiencing it will force resilience.