The author is clearly taking the time to reflect on the world around them and I genuinely see a curious mind. However, I also see a product that touches on an already established idea and how the gap between this writing and other reflects a gap between "hard" and "soft" sciences.<p>The idea here is that of <i>habitus</i>. Habitus is an Aristotelian term that was expanded upon by Bourdieu in the field of sociology. It is the way in which people perceive and respond to the world through a durable transposeable disposition, set of skills, symbolic capital and doxa that is shaped by the environment and in particular the material conditions of the individual[1].<p>Habitus plays a role in how individuals are perceived in ways, that like the author illuminates, can form a virtuous circle re-enforcing disposition, skills, and outlook in a way that can be positive for an individual.<p>What the author doesn't allude to, and this is where I see a gap between hard and soft sciences and where they would benefit from being able to connect this idea to a broader body of work, is how habitus is reinforced - usually unconsciously - in ways that reproduce class, racial, disability, and gender habitus under the terms laid out by the dominant ideology - that is to say the ideology of the dominant class.<p>An example in education would be how the education system perceives individuals possessing middle and upper class habitus as being ready and prepared for education, and those who lack that habitus as being lazy, disruptive, or unwilling to learn. On one hand you might be thinking "Of course that's obviously true," and I'd like to take a pause to point out that "obvious truths" are often a signal of our own habitus and should be critiqued as such.<p>They touched on the concept of reinforcement learning[social systems] acting upon individuals in a way that shapes their habitus, but it's crucial to point out that these reinforcement learning systems aren't free-standing disembodied mechanisms. They are situated in a social landscape and are constituted from of social relations which are themselves a product of economic relations. Furthermore, the systems of reinforcement are self-replicating. They are essentially social quines[2] - or more specifically oroborus programs ie: they plant the seeds of their own replication by encoding those relations into the habitus of individuals.<p>There's obviously a bunch of writings expanding on the idea of habitus, how it's formed, reinforced in different social arenas, and the effects it has on individuals and groups. I'd expect the author would be interested in soaking up these related perspectives and perhaps you as a reader would be too.<p>1. Obviously not black and white, there are other factors which can influence habitus - disability is an obvious one, for example.<p>2. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Ouroboros_programs" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Ouroboros_pr...</a>