curi

please spare yters. take me instead.

still wish you were a pygmie?

edit: btw this thread wasn't a representative example. disagreeing with pg increases downmods. if it'd been someone else it might not have happened.

and i was getting some downmods by people who didn't like the link or title but who can't downmod the submission itself so downmod comments intead.

edit: heh, the thing i was replying to was removed by an edit

I'm not saying all children are good at concentration. I doubt most of the kids who stand still well are very good at concentration. It's just not what is being tested for and not what schools really care about.

Most of the rest seemed to consist of saying that lack of obedience in modern children indicates something is wrong with them. And finding things to blame this on, like toys.

I don't think the issue was self-discipline because the example of how they studied it was about whether the children would stand still when someone else told them to.

In fact, a lot of beliefs on parenting amount to trying to say both, "Children are so ignorant and gullible that they'll believe almost anything. They pick up bad ideas very easily." And, "Children are so stubborn that they never listen to my good ideas." But you can't have it both ways. If a child can pick up ideas causing him to disagree with his parent, there have also been opportunities for him to be persuaded of ideas in agreement with his parent. The parent is blaming his ideas' lack of appeal on the child's stubbornness, while denying the appeal of rival ideas based on the child's gullibility.

Here we have a different issue. We accept (or I do, and I'm clarifying, and if you don't we should probably discuss that) that ignorance is nothing to fear (indeed people face it all the time when exploring a new field.) And we further accept that ideas that are part of a truth seeking process are nothing to fear. Those will be amenable to criticism, improvement, persuasion. But what if a person has thoughts or preferences that are very unreasonable, or not even intended to be reasonable, or not created via a rational process? I will answer each of these cases separately.

'Very unreasonable' ideas are nothing more than ideas that the speaker strongly disagrees with. This isn't actually a comment on whether the process behind them is truth seeking, or whether they are held open to change.

Ideas that aren't intended to be reasonable are harder to address. But people aren't perfectly consistent, so sometimes it doesn't turn out to be much of a problem. Just because someone's philosophy isn't compatible with taking advice for good reasons (they deny their being such thing as truer reasons, say) doesn't mean they won't sometimes take your advice.

But if it is a problem, then we can focus on something else: why doesn't this person intend to be reasonable? He has a bad idea about how to approach life. He has little or mistaken understanding of what approaches will solve his problems, or will be enjoyable. Many people have an idea something like, "arguments are unpleasant" and avoid them. They can be! But there are ways of thinking and arguing which make them pleasant and helpful. One could begin by teaching/explaining those, and then the person could try using reason, find it's a good thing, and then intend to have reasonable ideas and make some effort to hold his ideas open to rational improvement. There is a rational path forward.

(Note for upcoming paragraph: By 'knowledge' I do not mean justified, true belief. What I mean is closer to 'understanding' or 'good ideas'.)

What about ideas that aren't created via a rational process? Well, like what? All knowledge is created via conjectures and criticism, aka evolution. If you actually left out criticism entirely it wouldn't be possible to get anywhere: very bad guesses would run amuck. You might think that some people are a bit like that. But that would underestimate how difficult daily life is. For example, having a conversation about the weather in English requires rational processes. You have to make guesses about whether the other person is talking to you, and what he means to say, and you have to criticize those guesses. If you don't, you won't create knowledge. In particular, you won't create knowledge of what he's trying to communicate. You won't understand and won't be able to reply coherently. Forming your own sentences is also a matter of knowledge creation. You must create knowledge of which words would express your intended meaning (not to mention what intended meanings should be said or not).

These conjectures and refutations that create knowledge mostly take place at a sub-conscious level. But we know they must be taking place or people would not be able to function at all for practical tasks or simple conversations. Whether there is a different way of creating knowledge is another can of worms, which we can discuss if you'd like, but I'll omit it for now.

The reason I went through each case of, "what if a person has thoughts or preferences that are very unreasonable, or not even intended to be reasonable, or not created via a rational process?" separately is that they are actually distinct claims. They are intended to be roughly synonymous descriptions of something, but they aren't. The question contains misconceptions about the types of situations it is intending to describe. When what's going wrong in each situation is understood more precisely, then it's easier to address.

We may still be wondering about those times people seem very unreasonable, agree they were unreasonable afterwards, and do intend to be truth seeking and rational. What could be going on there if they are, at least subconsciously, thinking with rational, knowledge-creating processes?

Part of the answer is that people make mistakes.

Part is that people generally have mistakes in their ideas about what their personality and ideas are. One consequences is that many mistaken ideas they "used to have" are actually still in their personality, but they don't realize it.

Part is memes, which really needs a separate post as well as a note that I think most published ideas about memes are terrible, so this may not be what you expect.

I'll stop here for now. Let me know what you think. No hurry.

PS I've bookmarked this thread and will check periodically unless you want to suggest another approach.

Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hoftstadter

Karl Popper's books (too many to list)

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

you want to know if 8765 is divisible by 7. take the one's digit and multiply by 21. this gets a number that is divisible by 7 so you can subtract it. this will clear the last digit because we're subtracting this:

last digit * 1 + last digit * 20.

now we have a number that ends in a zero. in this case: 8660

now divide by 10. we can do that because that's dividing by 2 and 5 and that won't affect whether or not 7 can go into the number.

now we have a number to deal with that's at least one digit shorter. repeat until it's obvious if the remaining number divides by 7 or not.

PS Have you read any Edmund Burke? Got an opinion of him?

Are you saying maybe he took away voting because I wrote annoying comments?

This, on the other hand, is a public thread where it's relevant to the topic in the parent comments. I haven't asked pg to read this thread, so it's not my problem if he chooses to.

rms for example is apologetic and offered to do what you wanted. a new user from reddit probably wouldn't do that. but despite this, you still lead in a way that alienates rms.

in my case, i haven't apologized or offered to change my behavior because you never notified me of doing something wrong or asked me to change any behavior. that's bad leadership too. if you want me to follow some rules you have to tell me.