The analogy seems deeply flawed from my personal experience. I find that courage is strongly correlated with awareness, and that correlation is not linear.
Perhaps you have never plumbed the depths? I mean, he wrote of men's experiences in the trenches under continuous bombardment for days, and again in WWii. I don't mean to diminish anyone's personal experiences, but do you think absent being on the receiving side in raqqah or the like, current armed forces routinely undergo anything comparable?
I write as somebody quite timid. I am sure contextually informed or not, I do not have the resiliency others have in prologued states of stress and fear.
Being bombarded in a trench for days and still being partially functional as a soldier is pretty much the gold standard for courage. Nevertheless 'water behind a dam you call on [with different sizes for different people]' is a very arguable metaphor.
There are vanishingly few people stupid enough to subject themselves to stress and fear voluntarily just because. They either see themselves as having no choice (possibly correctly) or because they perceive a reward to be had (possibly one related to validating who they see themselves as). It basically follows (handwave) that courage is a combined ability to either not feel stress (or fear) in some situation - which does not run out - or to push or regardless of stresses in pursuit of some higher goal.
In the latter case, once someone decides that it isn't worth it they aren't going to come back again, acting a bit like a dam running out of water. But their ability to act courageously will change depending on the circumstance, and in some instances they may be significantly more courageous if they don't really see themselves as having a choice. Eg, a parent defending their child vs a parent defending random strangers would be completely different in terms of how much punishment they endure.
It evidently can be argued that people have different levels of resilience.
People with low resilience are going to fail often and early in all stressful situations.
Comparing the same person in different situations is probably not the best metric. Comparing different people across the same / similar situation is probably closer to experimentally valid.
> People with low resilience are going to fail often and early in all stressful situations.
This isn't an argument, though, just a restatement.
> Comparing the same person in different situations is probably not the best metric. Comparing different people across the same / similar situation is probably closer to experimentally valid.
It's not reasonable to assume the same relative value for success in two different people facing the same situation, no matter what criterion you use to choose the people, including if that criterion is what they self-report. Usually experiments like this are done for a token value, guaranteed to be close in absolute value between participants just because those valuations are insignificant. You can't do an experiment that could measure the amount of "courage" and how it drains, or even measure through natural observation without access to internal states that don't have organs called "courage" that we can examine.
What one patriot might call courage in a trench, an otherwise courageous person in that trench may call patriotism. They might run out out of "courage" to stand up to the army overrunning their position and decide to surrender, but never run out of "courage" defending their children.
There are many people in the world of climbing and mountaineering who voluntarily subject themselves to stress and fear just because, and they're not stupid, they just have different priorities.
The most well known outlier is probably Alex Honnold, and he's been conditioning himself mentally for El Cap since he first scaled the walls of his crib. In the years since he's logged thousands of hours free soloing, with many close calls and moments of panic along the way. Many climbers dabble in free soloing but don't get very far before they realize "holy shit, this is scary", but Honnold keeps going back, and overrides powerful hardwired instincts for self-preservation to do it.
It's also possible I've misunderstood what he said, and that since written 75+ years ago things have moved on in what we think. I just still believe we don't all have the same depths to call on, and that reserves of courage are not infinite and cannot replenish beyond a certain point.
fearlessness takes the agency out of it though. courage on the other hand is an affirmative action in the face of danger (and so it's more admirable to me).
Unrelated to the usefulness of the research (it sounds pretty interesting and novel to actually measure which brain networks are involved with resilience), but the title feels a bit like saying "air might be gaseous in nature". I mean, isn't all form of thought neurobiological in the end?
It might be written better as, "Cardiometabolic resilience may be neurobiological." Of course, mental resilience being neurobiological would be a banality, however, they are talking about the strength of a specific brain network breaking down an association between poorer cardiometabolic health and neighborhood violence. Definitely a little more interesting, that.
You're falsely presenting theory as fact, as is quite common in psychological/psychiatric discussions; social and environmental factors seem to have very strong effects/influences as well.
The cause of neuro-resilience might be explained by attachment theory. Unlike winning the hereditary lottery, better parent-child bonding is more attainable.
> Like previous studies, we find that youth living in neighborhoods with high levels of violence have worse cardiometabolic health than peers from safer communities.
I find these results intuitive and not hard to accept, but I see no mention of an attempt to rule out confounding elements that may correlate to violence, such as poverty. And with only 218 subjects there may well not be enough statistical power to do so.
Of course I can only see the abstract without paying $10, so it may be buried in the details.
TLDR version:
it's controlled for a few neighbourhood factors such as median household income, distance from nearest food outlet and ethnic mix and a few individual factors like personal experience of violence and behavioural evaluations. But ruling out all the confounding factors is hard.
The authors are cautious about causality in their summary though
23 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 55.3 ms ] threadIt's like water behind a dam you call on and not all people have the same sized dam wall and depth of stored courage.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/32453377?q&versionId=39449396
I write as somebody quite timid. I am sure contextually informed or not, I do not have the resiliency others have in prologued states of stress and fear.
There are vanishingly few people stupid enough to subject themselves to stress and fear voluntarily just because. They either see themselves as having no choice (possibly correctly) or because they perceive a reward to be had (possibly one related to validating who they see themselves as). It basically follows (handwave) that courage is a combined ability to either not feel stress (or fear) in some situation - which does not run out - or to push or regardless of stresses in pursuit of some higher goal.
In the latter case, once someone decides that it isn't worth it they aren't going to come back again, acting a bit like a dam running out of water. But their ability to act courageously will change depending on the circumstance, and in some instances they may be significantly more courageous if they don't really see themselves as having a choice. Eg, a parent defending their child vs a parent defending random strangers would be completely different in terms of how much punishment they endure.
People with low resilience are going to fail often and early in all stressful situations.
Comparing the same person in different situations is probably not the best metric. Comparing different people across the same / similar situation is probably closer to experimentally valid.
This isn't an argument, though, just a restatement.
> Comparing the same person in different situations is probably not the best metric. Comparing different people across the same / similar situation is probably closer to experimentally valid.
It's not reasonable to assume the same relative value for success in two different people facing the same situation, no matter what criterion you use to choose the people, including if that criterion is what they self-report. Usually experiments like this are done for a token value, guaranteed to be close in absolute value between participants just because those valuations are insignificant. You can't do an experiment that could measure the amount of "courage" and how it drains, or even measure through natural observation without access to internal states that don't have organs called "courage" that we can examine.
What one patriot might call courage in a trench, an otherwise courageous person in that trench may call patriotism. They might run out out of "courage" to stand up to the army overrunning their position and decide to surrender, but never run out of "courage" defending their children.
The most well known outlier is probably Alex Honnold, and he's been conditioning himself mentally for El Cap since he first scaled the walls of his crib. In the years since he's logged thousands of hours free soloing, with many close calls and moments of panic along the way. Many climbers dabble in free soloing but don't get very far before they realize "holy shit, this is scary", but Honnold keeps going back, and overrides powerful hardwired instincts for self-preservation to do it.
> because they perceive a reward to be had (possibly one related to validating who they see themselves as).
I think you're manufacturing a disagreement here.
> analogy seems deeply flawed from my personal experience.
Indeed.
You stated, or claimed, that people have varying degrees of resilience, and the reply by @colordrops was “in my experience”.
I was attempting to point out that “in my experience” doesn’t refute your claim, if anything it supports it.
I would have been better off writing a more extensive comment in the first instance; drive-by one-liners rarely enhance the conversation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_attachment
I find these results intuitive and not hard to accept, but I see no mention of an attempt to rule out confounding elements that may correlate to violence, such as poverty. And with only 218 subjects there may well not be enough statistical power to do so.
Of course I can only see the abstract without paying $10, so it may be buried in the details.
TLDR version: it's controlled for a few neighbourhood factors such as median household income, distance from nearest food outlet and ethnic mix and a few individual factors like personal experience of violence and behavioural evaluations. But ruling out all the confounding factors is hard. The authors are cautious about causality in their summary though