As someone with pretty much the upbringing you described, I don't think this was the takeaway.

For me personally, I learnt adaptability, how to adjust to new situations and people quickly.

I saw what my parents did and said "I don't want to be like that".

The downside is, it's hard to answer "where are you from?", or to know where home is, and it's especially frustrating as an adult to see your parents continue to make bad decisions, to continue to be broke etc.

I know everyone is different, but anecdotally my sister and brother also seem to be doing relatively well.

Consider, life was far more unpredictable just a few hundred years ago. Literally stubbing your toe in the forest could go septic and then you were dead. Violently so. Bad harvests could happen with no forewarning at all.

You're equating psychological harm and learned patterns of behavior that are unresourceful with physical accidents, without explaining why we should see them as comparable.

Even if they were comparable, who's to say Neanderthal younglings with badly stubbed toes didn't also have skewed reward processing as adults?

My post is specifically in response to the one above me. It is framed with modern events and pushing that they are obviously going to seem unpredictable to people. My assertion is that they can be seen that way, sure; but don't think this is somehow a modern thing.

To your point, I would expect that reward processing is influenced by these events, sure. I would also expect any indoctrination that was happening at the same time to stick. My current bias is to expect indoctrination to stick more effectively than raw experiences. And yes, this is somewhat cheating because the indoctrination is almost certainly done to compliment experiences.

i'd rather think it was the demand for an explanation for those events. and just like any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so is any unexplainable event indistinguishable from an act of god.

While I think you can almost make the case that there are some commonalities between origin stories, I think you would be stretching credibility a fair bit there.

This also hits a pretty tough point with regards to other animals. Do they have religions?

given the dominance of monotheistic religions this is actually happening. there is no need for origin stories to have commonalities because the convergence can also happen through replacement. if every group comes up with their own explanation for the different experiences they have, their stories are naturally going to differ, and that is what we see in history. but also, commonalities are there. pretty much all stories have some kind of creator of the universe and many refer to someone who will come and bring salvation.

Yes, you can stretch some stories to say there are commonalities. But you are doing some heavy stretching. And you still don't address other social animals. Do they have religions? Why not?

how are the commonalities a stretch? they are self evident: somehow some entity created the universe. somehow this creator is communicating with us, not just once, but multiple times, and they will communicate again in the future. everything else is the content of that communication, and for that there is no need of any further commonality even though there still are many.

i am not addressing animals because that is completely out of scope. our understanding of the consciousness of animals is still very limited, and even if it is shown that animal are potentially capable of such higher order thinking, as long as we can't actually able to communicate with them, we won't know what they are thinking. the question if animals have a religion is therefore unanswerable for the time being.

Animals have absolutely been shown to be able to communicate. They are unable to persist this teaching in the wild. Which, again, is to my point.

speaking of commonalities, this subthread has diverged from the original topic quite a lot and in an odd way is actually converging with the discussion on "Life is not a story" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41876979

regarding animals, i don't get which point you are making there.

Point on animals is that it isn't just the story telling that propagates religion and similar, but persistent story telling. Writing things down and learning the symbols of previous generations is a fairly uniquely human activity.

to summarize the argument and bring it back to the main topic, i'd like to argue that adversity influenced storytelling which created religion and religion necessitated priests. so yes, without priests religions may not have persisted, but that's like saying without farmers farming would not have taken hold and we would still all be hunter/gatherers.

In fact in one of the interviews Elon talks about implementing structured adversity.

The main thing is that people have to learn that, paraphrased for brevity, life in the "ends" requires a different set of skills to life in the more civilised parts of society.

You have to relearn how to function. Some don't.

This is not true at all.

Some survive, but many die from the things you've described. Of those that survive, many fail completely to build a great life afterwards. They succumb to alcoholism, other addictions, and many die later from suicide.

Talk to any therapist and you'll find out that human fragility is the rule rather than the exception. After traumatic events, even those that "still manage to build a great life", as viewed from the outside, are often suffering greatly on the inside. Some of them manage to heal themselves with therapy and loving supportive relationships, but a great many don't. Which is why cycles of trauma unfortunately get passed on.

Certainly, I can be viewed as stereotypically successful by my buddies. Certainly, because the mask we wear should be strong and never come off. But in my nights alone, or even in my therapy sessions, who could possibly see that 'me'?

I have come to realize, though, that most people who didn't suffer much, refuse (implicitly, not explicitly) to empathize with those who have -- perhaps even I may be included in this group which 'refuse implicitly' at time. It's not that big of a deal, though. (Generalized) Empathy is a difficult skill to train.

The way you say 'look at all the people' implies that a lot of people survived and had good lives, but this needs to be weighed against the number of people total that entered concentration camps to know if this is actually a meaningful number of people to validate your assertion or not.

My guess is that someone who went into a concentration camp were much less likely to live a life worth living than people who did not simply because a large number of them lived a life of torture and then death.

That doesn't mean that such factors don't DRASTICALLY reduce the odds of this happening. Moreover, some people being able to build a good life after such trauma doesn't mean that said trauma isn't a hinderance.

I don't think we're claiming life isn't "worth living" after adversity. Just that it's somewhat obvious that they will make similar mistakes due to the challenges they face, at least more frequently than those who do not face such adversities.