When the Culture War Comes For the kids | Hacker News Reader

When the Culture War Comes For the kids

theatlantic.com

32 pointsbkohlmann24 comments

Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is worth a read for anyone who is taking parenting too seriously.

Developmental psychologists have brainwashed the public into thinking children can be ruined by insufficiency dedicated parenting. But for generations developmental psychologists were Lysenkoist hacks who didn’t realize their studies were confounded by basically all mental traits being extremely heritable.

The most important influence parents have on their children is at conception. If you want a smart kid, choosing a very smart mate is far more effective than any amount of mostly ineffective enrichment activities.

If you really care so much about the social status of your future children, marry well to a person high in the traits you value, preferably from a family high in said traits. Then have a lot of kids. Chances are one of them will achieve something!

Don’t get caught in the extracurricular signalling racket/cargo cult. Let the kids do what they want within reason. Public school will be fine. If you don’t want to ferry your kid around to various enrichment activities, don’t. Your time has value too. You care for your children; you do not serve them.

In most cases the kids don’t want to to do them anyway and will develop their own interests they will be far more enthusiastic about.

Neither of my parents are particularly "bright" and today I work as a computer programmer. I'm skeptical of this premise.

High heritability does not mean that there's a formula that you can apply to predict what a child "inherits". It's about probabilities in great numbers, not about individuals, hence the advice from ZhuanXia on what to do to increase the odds and then roll the dice a lot (have a lot of children) to increase the odds for a perfect roll in one of them.

Who can afford it though? Environment matters too. But if you can afford it, why not. Few can though, kids are expensive in time and money, and to get money you spend time...

A source for the heritability claim, to allay your scepticism: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/06/heritability-...

It shows the heritability of intelligence at age 26 as 88%. Perhaps you're one of the 12% (forgive the statistically meaningless phrase - you get the idea). Or perhaps you underestimate your parents.

Likely the latter. Do not conflate renumeration or political views with intelligence, curiosity or just street smarts.

All of these forms of intelligence are genetically valid, but phenotype is determined by environment. You may get a great farmer, or you might get a researcher depending on environmental conditions...

So yes, they do matter a lot on outcome. If you haven't found a computer early, there could be a problem of you being outmatched and not proceeding alongside that path.

Being employed as a computer programmer does not mean you are bright.

The first thought that came to mind here was that emphasizing heritability will lead to racism, nepotism, sexism, inherited classism, etc. This is merely an observation independent of how strong heritability actually is.

Then I realized that the developmental / nurture model favored by most of today's intellectuals combined with brutal meritocracy does the same thing, but with a layer of personal blame and a huge quacky market for developmental aids of dubious effectiveness.

The fundamental issue is that society has become much more competitive and stratified, with the easier middle class path vanishing. That is going to create brutal competitive stratification regardless of what model (heritability or nurture) best characterizes the rules of the game.

Yet paradoxically we are in an age of extreme abundance where goods, services, and money itself (low interest rates) are cheaper than ever before.

Abundance is creating scarcity. Something is very very wrong.

We’re not wired for “enough”. Our evolutionary past never had abundance, so we we evolved to compete, so we compete. Don’t worry, though, our material abundance will soon come to an end as population increases. And then we’ll be well adapted to our level of material prosperity again.

We're extremely adaptable, and in some cases can re-wire ourselves to appreciate abundance and ease up on the competition at least to some degree. Maybe it's possible to learn to live better.

When people come to me with this kind of preoccupation I remember them Steve Jobs dropped out of college. Heck, my BIL dropped out of high school and makes twice as much as me as a commercial pilot. The most difficult way to suceed is trying to go the same "proven" path as everybody else. And crying over your privilege instead of putting it into good use doesn't help anybody, either. The racist that helped put a man on the Moon helped more people than a million SJWs.

It seems like the educated, power-couple types who obsess about pre-schools, private schools for young children would be capable of and better served by one parent not working full time and participating in their child's education themselves.

This does not work, a parent rarely has skill in enough of the curriculum to do it. It is extremely hard even in one subject for a qualified teacher...

Right. Yep, confirmed. There are no parents on Earth who have skills enough to teach elementary children 1 on 1 as well as the average teacher can teach 20 kids at once.

yea, yes. Indeed, the more kids the better. 25, 30, or even 35 kids to a single teacher is far better than 1-on-1. It's like homeopathic drugs... sometimes just the barest infinitesimal trace of a medicine is better than than a full dose.

What an incredible article.

I'm really stunned at the depths of lunacy of NY educators- I guess the problem is worse than I thought when kids themselves are asking parents wtf the educators are doing (and why they are focusing on anything but knowledge of how things are).

Read long enough for this:

> “Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading,” [our son] asked us one day, “not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?”

The power couple / private school saga was only the first part of a very long article. Keep reading - it gets worse. Way worse.

This obsession with childhood min-maxing is not helping them. Stop worrying about getting your kid into the most private school and getting them a career where they make the most money and start thinking about how you can make them the happiest, and how you can raise them so they make other people happy too. There are enough ambitious assholes who had to wear a necktie to elementary school in the world. We need more kids who like themselves and more adults who don't hate everyone else.

If those parents stopped obsessing over their offspring's social and institutional metrics, they'd likely have to confront their own psychological and existential voids.

"[C]onfront[ing] their own psychological and existential voids" is a luxury in which parents should indulge only after making sure their children are all right.

When you have a kid, the first duty is for the kid to be alright. Navel-gazing is only constructive for the kid when it improves the kid's situation.

What's the deal with the use of brackets in [C]onfront[ing]?

I don't disagree with your comment, but I think you're taking something that was said descriptively as if it were prescriptive.

Ah, my bad, I'd read prescriptive. The brackets were because I couldn't figure how else to make the quote read sensibly in a sentence.

That's what you need, but not what the often sociopaths at the top who control money and power need.

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