Teenage rebellion (was: BBC article on why Ayn Rand is so popular)

[Rami Rustom]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 1:47 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "Can't argue with children" is also thought to apply equally if not more to
> teenagers. There's a meme that teenagers are worse than younger children in
> some key respects like this. People say that the teenage years are the most
> difficult, both for the teenagers and the parents. At least so far (my
> oldest is 14) I have found the opposite to be the case.

Its common for parents to believe that the teenage years are a
rebellious phase. Why is this the case?

What is rebellion? Its testing the limits (aka coercion) created by
the authority (aka parents). Its rebelling against that authority. Its
taking control back from the one who controlled you.

So, if a kid wasn't coerced, didn't have boundaries, and didn't feel
that he was controlled, then what would they be rebelling against?

-- Rami Rustom
http://ramirustom.blogspot.com

[Jordan Talcot]

On Oct 12, 2012, at 4:59 PM, Rami Rustom <rom...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 1:47 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> "Can't argue with children" is also thought to apply equally if not more to
>> teenagers. There's a meme that teenagers are worse than younger children in
>> some key respects like this. People say that the teenage years are the most
>> difficult, both for the teenagers and the parents. At least so far (my
>> oldest is 14) I have found the opposite to be the case.
>
> Its common for parents to believe that the teenage years are a
> rebellious phase. Why is this the case?
>
> What is rebellion? Its testing the limits (aka coercion) created by
> the authority (aka parents). Its rebelling against that authority. Its
> taking control back from the one who controlled you.

A lot of what people call rebellion in teenagers isn't that at all. It is simply that the teenagers aren't doing exactly what the parents want. They are things that, if an adult did them, would not be considered "rebellion" or anything else special.

People call lots of things "rebellion" if done by a teenager. For example smoking, drinking alcohol, swearing, becoming a vegetarian (if the parents eat meat), eating meat (if the parents are vegetarian), being an atheist (if the parents are religious), joining a religion (that the parents aren't members of), wearing clothes that the parents don't like, dying their hair, getting piercings, quitting school, starting school (if they were previously homeschooled). There are lots and lots of other examples.

Basically anything a teenager does that is different from what his parents want him to do can be called rebellion. The term is disrespectful and dehumanizing. The implication is that the choices the teenager is making aren't his real choices - they are simply the teenager trying to oppose the parent.

>
> So, if a kid wasn't coerced, didn't have boundaries, and didn't feel
> that he was controlled, then what would they be rebelling against?

Even children who weren't coerced will do many things that conventional people would see as "rebellion".

Jordan

[Richard Fine]

On 10/13/2012 4:51 AM, Jordan Talcot wrote:
> On Oct 12, 2012, at 4:59 PM, Rami Rustom <rom...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 1:47 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> "Can't argue with children" is also thought to apply equally if not more to
>>> teenagers. There's a meme that teenagers are worse than younger children in
>>> some key respects like this. People say that the teenage years are the most
>>> difficult, both for the teenagers and the parents. At least so far (my
>>> oldest is 14) I have found the opposite to be the case.
>> Its common for parents to believe that the teenage years are a
>> rebellious phase. Why is this the case?
>>
>> What is rebellion? Its testing the limits (aka coercion) created by
>> the authority (aka parents). Its rebelling against that authority. Its
>> taking control back from the one who controlled you.
> A lot of what people call rebellion in teenagers isn't that at all. It is simply that the teenagers aren't doing exactly what the parents want. They are things that, if an adult did them, would not be considered "rebellion" or anything else special.

I think that it's not just that the teenagers aren't doing what the
parents want, but that the parents don't understand why they're doing
what they *are* doing.

Relationships in which explanation features heavily (even coercive ones,
which I think is still possible), such that the teenager has a habit of
explaining why he's doing what he's doing to the parent, is viewed less
as 'rebellious.'

In most relationships, though, I think it's underpinned by a view of
children as being irrational and of decisions they make (i.e. that the
parent doesn't make for them) being arbitrary. Parents get freaked out
because they think they're trying to direct the child to have a good
life, but now the child isn't responding to direction, and so they'll
have a bad life because without direction their decisions will be
thoughtless.

- Richard

[Rami Rustom]

Its weird that this is called "teenage rebellion" when those same
teenagers will act the same way as adults. Do their parents call it
"adulthood rebellion"? No. I guess its because when they are
considered adults, their social role doesn't include the rule of
obeying parents.

[Richard Fine]

Adult children are still expected to obey their parents sometimes, I
think; but yeah it's not called 'adult rebellion' when they don't.

It's more that the traditional view says that adults *are* capable of
making their own decisions. There's a common thing in media around young
adults where the child pleads with the parent, "I'm an adult now! I can
make my own decisions!" The parent almost always responds by challenging
the first part; they don't challenge the idea that the first part
implies the second part.

- Richard

[Rami Rustom]

On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 4:33 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Friday, October 12, 2012 5:00:44 PM UTC-7, Rami Rustom wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 1:47 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > "Can't argue with children" is also thought to apply equally if not more
>> > to
>> > teenagers. There's a meme that teenagers are worse than younger children
>> > in
>> > some key respects like this. People say that the teenage years are the
>> > most
>> > difficult, both for the teenagers and the parents. At least so far (my
>> > oldest is 14) I have found the opposite to be the case.
>>
>> Its common for parents to believe that the teenage years are a
>> rebellious phase. Why is this the case?
>
>

> It is common to say teenagers are rebellious, but I did not use the word
> rebellious because rebelliousness is only one aspect of the alleged
> "difficulty" of teenagers. Some other aspects:
>
> Teenagers are commonly interested in sex whereas younger children are not.
> So they may ask questions about sex or just want to talk about it. Some
> parents find the subject of sex difficult to discuss, which makes the
> teenage years difficult for those parents.
> Teenagers know more than younger children, and are more likely to ask (and,
> especially, press for answers to) hard questions that parents don't know the
> answer to. Some parents have difficulty looking up answers they don't know,
> or even admitting when they don't know or are wrong about something. That
> makes the teenage years difficult for those parents.
> Teenagers eat a lot more food than younger children and sometimes even more
> than adults. For a family without a lot of economic resources, that can make
> the teenage years difficult to pay for.
> Older teenagers are allowed by law to drive cars. Some parents don't have an
> extra car for their teenager, which can mean that now the parent has to
> share something (their car) that they never had to share before. And the
> cost of insurance as well as extra gas and maintenance, like extra food, may
> place a strain on the family budget which makes the teenage years difficult.
>
> ...and so on.

>
>>
>>
>> What is rebellion? Its testing the limits (aka coercion) created by
>> the authority (aka parents). Its rebelling against that authority. Its
>> taking control back from the one who controlled you.
>>
>> So, if a kid wasn't coerced, didn't have boundaries, and didn't feel
>> that he was controlled, then what would they be rebelling against?
>>
>

> I don't accept the TCS definition of coercion as a particularly useful one
> nor the total elimination of TCS-coercion as a worthwhile goal.

TCS is about bringing the tradition of freedom to another group of
people that haven't yet been awarded this natural right. Doing
otherwise is ageism, which is as bad as racism and sexism.

Racism and sexism were predicated on the idea that those non-white
races and the female sex are inferior with respect to rational
faculty. And ageism is the same. We learned that we were wrong about
other races and the female sex and now we know we were wrong about
children.

We don't discriminate by race nor by sex, so why should we discriminate by age?


> However, supposing that someone did accept those things as many on this list
> do, and supposing that they were able to completely eliminate all
> TCS-coercion from their family relationships, that doesn't mean there would
> be nothing for teenagers in their family to rebel against.
>
> As an example, I think smoking marijuana should be legal. However, smoking
> marijuana currently isn't legal. So, teenagers could rebel against the
> marijuana laws by smoking marijuana even if there was no TCS-coercion from
> their parents.

I wouldn't call that rebellion. Sometimes I don't make a complete stop
at stop signs. I wouldn't call that rebellion. Would you? If not, is
this analogous to smoking marijuana?


> The answer to this objection might be that if there were no
> TCS-coercive laws then there would be nothing to rebel against. Probably
> true...but I have very limited control over the level of coercion in our
> legal system. Like everyone else, I have to live with it even if it makes
> raising teenagers "difficult".

Wait how does government laws make raising teenagers more difficult?


> However, all that said I think there is less desire on the part of teenagers
> to rebel when parents have had a policy of:
> - choices rather than dictates

This is vague. It sounds like non-coercion but its vague on who
created the choices. Did the parent dictate which things are not part
of the set of options to choose from?


> - truth seeking rather than authority

Ok but restricting options is using authority.


> - tolerance of differences
> - fallibility
> etc.
>
> I have found that the older my kids get the easier it is to talk to them,
> reason with them, and arrive at mutually agreeable solutions to problems. In
> TCS terms there is less TCS-coercion going on the older they get, which is
> good. I also don't mind discussing topics related to sex, and I don't mind
> hard questions or admitting when I don't know the answer and helping to find
> it. My family is not on the edge economically either so the considerations
> of the cost of food, space, etc. don't bother me like it seems to bother
> other parents. That's why I say that, at least so far, I have not found
> teenagers to be difficult and in fact I have found the opposite to be true.

[Jordan Talcot]

This is a non-sequitur. TCS-coersion has nothing to do with age.

Jordan

[Rami Rustom]

Right but the context of Jason's statement about TCS-coercion was that
parents find teenagers difficult and he mentioned rebellion as one the
difficulties. So "rebellion" introduced the coercion idea and
"teenagers" introduced the age idea.

[Rami Rustom]

On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Saturday, October 13, 2012 6:23:33 PM UTC-7, Rami Rustom wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 4:33 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I don't accept the TCS definition of coercion as a particularly useful
>> > one
>> > nor the total elimination of TCS-coercion as a worthwhile goal.
>>
>> TCS is about bringing the tradition of freedom to another group of
>> people that haven't yet been awarded this natural right.
>
>

> That's a good sounding slogan.

>>
>> Doing
>> otherwise is ageism, which is as bad as racism and sexism.
>>
>>
>> Racism and sexism were predicated on the idea that those non-white
>> races and the female sex are inferior with respect to rational
>> faculty. And ageism is the same. We learned that we were wrong about
>> other races and the female sex and now we know we were wrong about
>> children.
>>
>> We don't discriminate by race nor by sex, so why should we discriminate by
>> age?
>
>

> This is where TCS goes seriously off the rails in my opinion. You want to
> have your cake and eat it too - or rather, to create a world in which
> children get to have their cake and eat it too. That was not true in the
> case of racial or sexual or even commonly defined age discrimination.
>
> If ageism is assigning human beings different rights bases solely on their
> age, and that's bad in all cases and the equivalent of racism and sexism,
> then young offspring should not have a right to live in their parents'
> house, eat their parents' food, and drive their parents' cars - rights that
> older offspring do not have.

Not true. Parents are responsible for their children because they
brought them into this world without child's consent and with the
clear understanding that the child is born with complete dependency on
the parents. So the child has all these problems that he is incapable
of solving and all these problems the parent created for the child. So
the parent is responsible for the child's problems. These qualities
don't exist with blacks nor with women.


>
> Yet we do recognize that younger offspring - children - have a right to
> receive such goods from their parents. When they reach a certain age (18 by
> convention) those rights legally cease and other rights legally begin. I
> think this is largely correct, though the precise age of 18 is arbitrary and
> should be treated more fluidly than it is. The fundamental correctness of
> this approach is because a fact of reality: children do not emerge as fully
> functional self sufficient entities, either physically or mentally,
> instantaneously. It happens over time. What we think of as the full
> complement of human rights are accorded in conjunction with the full
> complement of self responsibility.
>
> You obtain full adult rights when you assume full adult responsibilities.
> That could theoretically happen at any age. And there are instances
> (appropriately termed "emancipation") where adult rights and
> responsibilities are conferred at an age younger than the conventional
> standard. So "adult" and "child" in this context is not ageism. "Adult"
> means someone who accepts (voluntarily or by statute) all the rights and
> responsibilities of adulthood, and "child" means someone who has not. If a
> 6-year-old could and wanted to accept adult rights and responsibilities then
> by all means they should.

Are there any legal systems that give children this right? No.


> But in common experience they can't, don't want
> to, or perhaps we just don't know how to teach them how yet.

We can't teach them. Teaching doesn't work. All we can do is provide
an environment that is conducive to learning. Part of that means
helping children solve their problems and help them learn to solve
their own problems.


> It's not racist to say that in order to actually be free ("emancipated"), a
> slave must leave the plantation or otherwise reach agreement with the
> plantation owner to pay for his own food, clothing, and shelter. Nor is it
> ageist to say that a child must leave the house or otherwise reach agreement
> with the owner to pay for his own food, clothing, and shelter. Rights come
> with responsibilities.

Not true. For one thing, children should have the legal right to be
parented by any consenting adult (or any person that is capable of
raising children). Right now, I don't think any country gives children
this right.


> If children are presumed to have exactly the same rights as adults, then
> they are merely house guests of their parents.

No. As the owner of my house, my relationship with house guests is
different that my relationship with my kids. For one thing, I am not
responsible for the problems of my house guests. They can leave when
they want to. My kids on the other hand, I am responsible for taking
care of them, i.e. help them solve their problems.


> I would think it unwise for
> parents to exercise dictatorial control over such a household, just as it's
> unwise to exercise dictatorial control over any house guest. But that
> wouldn't change the fundamental status of the relationship where the guest's
> sole remedy to assert their rights is to leave the house.
>
> But, I don't think children are mere guests of their parents. I think they
> have a different set of rights. They have rights to some things that adults
> don't have rights to (like food, clothing, and shelter), and they lack
> rights to some things adults do have (like complete personal autonomy).

What sorts of rights within the set of "complete personal autonomy" do
you think kids shouldn't have?


> Furthermore, you responded to a statement that was specifically about
> coercion, and the TCS definition thereof (which I call "TCS-coercion"). Even
> adults don't have a natural right not to be TCS-coerced! So it's not a
> question of rights or ageism to reject the elimination of all TCS-coercion
> as a worthwhile goal.
>
>>

>> > However, supposing that someone did accept those things as many on this
>> > list
>> > do, and supposing that they were able to completely eliminate all
>> > TCS-coercion from their family relationships, that doesn't mean there
>> > would
>> > be nothing for teenagers in their family to rebel against.
>> >
>> > As an example, I think smoking marijuana should be legal. However,
>> > smoking
>> > marijuana currently isn't legal. So, teenagers could rebel against the
>> > marijuana laws by smoking marijuana even if there was no TCS-coercion
>> > from
>> > their parents.
>>
>> I wouldn't call that rebellion. Sometimes I don't make a complete stop
>> at stop signs. I wouldn't call that rebellion.
>
>

> Depends. If you don't make a complete stop because you're in a hurry or
> distracted or whatever, it's not rebellion.
> If you don't make a complete stop to prove to yourself, your friends, or
> whoever that "the man" ain't gonna make you stop, then it's rebellion.

Right. And smoking marijuana because one wants to feel a certain way,
is fine. Smoking it to "stick it to the man" is bad.


> FWIW I've seen evidence of both types of motivation in relation to people
> not stopping at stop signs.

>
>>
>> Would you? If not, is
>> this analogous to smoking marijuana?
>>
>>
>> > The answer to this objection might be that if there were no
>> > TCS-coercive laws then there would be nothing to rebel against. Probably
>> > true...but I have very limited control over the level of coercion in our
>> > legal system. Like everyone else, I have to live with it even if it
>> > makes
>> > raising teenagers "difficult".
>>
>> Wait how does government laws make raising teenagers more difficult?
>>
>

> I would not want to prohibit my teenagers from smoking marijuana (though I
> would advise against it). But if my teenagers choose to smoke marijuana as a
> form of rebellion against the government, the government might find out. One
> of the things governments can do when the find out about the presence of
> illegal drugs in a house, or a car, is to seize the asset.

Ah yes. Then I would add to your argument to your kids "not in my
house" and explain the reasons.


> So I could lose
> my house or my car because my teenagers smoked marijuana. That would be
> difficult.

>
>
>>
>> > However, all that said I think there is less desire on the part of
>> > teenagers
>> > to rebel when parents have had a policy of:
>> > - choices rather than dictates
>>
>> This is vague. It sounds like non-coercion but its vague on who
>> created the choices. Did the parent dictate which things are not part
>> of the set of options to choose from?
>
>

> Yes it is vague. Sometimes there is no parental constraint on the choice set
> at all.

What sort of non-parental constraints are you thinking of? Like one
dictated by laws of physics? Or government laws? Some examples maybe.


> Sometimes there are parental constraints on the choice set, along
> with explanations as to why.

And if the child disagrees with the "why"? How should that be treated
by the parent?


> An important contrast I was trying to draw in this statement is with parents
> who routinely don't give their children any choice set at all - they say it
> will be such-and-such a way only, simply because they can. Our approach is
> to give the widest possible choice set consistent with our other
> responsibilities as parents.

And this comes down to what happens when child disagrees with the
choice restrictions and the parent's reasons for those restrictions.


> Another important contrast is with parents who won't give an explanation.
> "Because I said so..." is a shockingly common phrase in child raising. My
> wife and I have consistently avoided using that and similar phrases.
>
> The difference from TCS is that I reject the TCS assertion that parents
> should not constrain any of their childrens' choices.

What sort of situations are you thinking require parent to constrain
children's choice. I'll give an example:

If kid runs in street and if cars are coming (or expected to come),
parent should go *save* kid from harm because he expects that the kid
wanted to be saved. Kid's choice was wrong. But kid didn't know it was
wrong. And parent stepped in and solved the problem without first
getting kid's opinion. Also kid agrees with parent's choice to step in
without kid's opinion.

So what sort of example do you mean?

>>
>> > - truth seeking rather than authority
>>
>> Ok but restricting options is using authority.
>
>

> Not in the context of rights I discussed above. What I intended to contrast
> here is with an approach of authority in the sense of the assertion of
> authoritative correctness. When we constrain choice sets, and explain why,
> we do not claim to be authoritatively correct. We admit to our children that
> we could be wrong, and if the children convince us that we are wrong, then
> we change.

Ah. So if kid helped you change your mind, then why do you say that
you are restricting choice set? I think you're saying that there are
times when kid disagrees with parent's choice set, and parent hasn't
convinced him and he hasn't convinced parent. And in these cases
parent restricts choice set. Is that what you mean?


>
> There's a saying about the Supreme Court: They're not "supreme" in the sense
> that their judgement is always correct, just that their judgement is always
> final. We don't consider our judgement to be either correct or final, it is
> merely operant in our household until we are convinced to change it.

And how long should a parent be willing to change his mind before
closing the subject and coercing the kid to do (or not do) X?


>
> The difference with TCS is that we do not feel obligated to always convince
> the children that our constraints are correct prior to implementing them. We
> attempt to do so and sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail.

And when a parent fails to succeed in convincing the child, how does
the parent determine who (parent or child) is right?

[Rami Rustom]

On Oct 18, 2012 12:53 AM, "Jason" <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> On Monday, October 15, 2012 3:06:43 PM UTC-7, Rami Rustom wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > If ageism is assigning human beings different rights bases solely on their
>> > age, and that's bad in all cases and the equivalent of racism and sexism,
>> > then young offspring should not have a right to live in their parents'
>> > house, eat their parents' food, and drive their parents' cars - rights that
>> > older offspring do not have.
>>
>> Not true. Parents are responsible for their children because they
>> brought them into this world without child's consent and with the
>> clear understanding that the child is born with complete dependency on
>> the parents. So the child has all these problems that he is incapable
>> of solving and all these problems the parent created for the child. So
>> the parent is responsible for the child's problems. These qualities
>> don't exist with blacks nor with women.
>
>

> The talk of consent here is complete nonsense. To consent or withhold consent requires a mind. Before the moment of conception, when the parents are deciding whether or not to create a child, the child does not even exist let alone have a mind to give or withhold consent. The concept of consent is meaningless and irrelevant in the context of an entity that doesn't yet exist. It's even worse than asking if a dead person consents to having their grave moved. At least with the dead person, at one time they were alive and could possibly have left advance directives about how important (or unimportant) they considered their grave location to be.

Quick tangent: I don't agree with the idea of honoring dead people's
preferences. They don't exist anymore. They are dirt now. Imagine
honoring the preferences of dead people who died in 2012 while we're
living in the year 10,000 or 10,000,000.


> Regarding the rest: Rights don't come from god; and they're not self-evident (highly revered documents to the contrary notwithstanding). Rights arise out of the facts of nature.

Right. And the fact is that people have preferences and those
preferences should not be trampled on by adults.


> It is a fact of nature that children are born completely dependent. Parents have no more choice about that than children do.

No. Parents chose to create their dependency by creating the child.


> Parents do have a choice about whether or not to create a child, but not about the child's level of dependency.

Right.


> The way I read the facts of nature with regard to rights and children is: Children have a right to certain goods and services from their parents, including food, clothing, shelter, education, care and comfort, medical assistance, etc. due to their parents' choice to create them.

You said "certain" things. Who gets to decide which things? It should
be a mutual agreement (CP) between parent and child.


> However, childrens' dependency on others for these goods means that they do not have the full autonomy rights that an adult has. An infant has essentially zero autonomy rights - an infant goes where its parents want, when its parents want, all the time.

Consider this: Parent wants to go to a football game with his 1 week
old baby. Its loud and cold. Baby cries, indicating that he prefers
not to be in that situation. Should parent disregard baby's
preference? No. So baby has the right to not have his preferences
disregarded. What do you think?


> The autonomy rights of children grow in direct proportion to their ability to take care of themselves. When they're ready willing and able to take full care of themselves they become adults and get full autonomy rights.

>
>>
>>
>> > You obtain full adult rights when you assume full adult responsibilities.
>> > That could theoretically happen at any age. And there are instances
>> > (appropriately termed "emancipation") where adult rights and
>> > responsibilities are conferred at an age younger than the conventional
>> > standard. So "adult" and "child" in this context is not ageism. "Adult"
>> > means someone who accepts (voluntarily or by statute) all the rights and
>> > responsibilities of adulthood, and "child" means someone who has not. If a
>> > 6-year-old could and wanted to accept adult rights and responsibilities then
>> > by all means they should.
>>
>> Are there any legal systems that give children this right? No.
>
>

> Yes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_of_minors

That is not sufficient to meet my definition. It says:

> Minors must prove financial self-sufficiency. In some states, free legal aid is available to minors seeking emancipation, through children's law centers. This can be a valuable resource for minors trying to create a convincing emancipation petition. Students are able to stay with a guardian if necessary.
>
> Emancipations are not easily granted because of the subjectivity and narrowness of the definition of "best interest." Some are minors who have been victims of abuse. In most cases, the state's department of child services will be notified and the child placed in foster care. Others are minors who are seeking emancipation for reasons such as being dissatisfied with their parents' or guardians' rules.

end quote

It should be easy. The child shouldn't have to defend his right to
leave his parents.

>> > It's not racist to say that in order to actually be free ("emancipated"), a
>> > slave must leave the plantation or otherwise reach agreement with the
>> > plantation owner to pay for his own food, clothing, and shelter. Nor is it
>> > ageist to say that a child must leave the house or otherwise reach agreement
>> > with the owner to pay for his own food, clothing, and shelter. Rights come
>> > with responsibilities.
>>
>> Not true. For one thing, children should have the legal right to be
>> parented by any consenting adult (or any person that is capable of
>> raising children). Right now, I don't think any country gives children
>> this right.
>
>

> Not explicitly or practically. Courts do quite often consider the wishes of the child in the context of adoption, but it's not the only consideration and the involuntary severance of parental rights from the existing parents which must occur prior to adoption is almost never initiated at a child's request.
>
> That said, I don't have any strong objections to that principle. I just think it's an edge condition. It's not ever likely to be as common or relevant as the question of whether a parent (whether biological or adoptive) has the right to require their children to study reading, for example.

Lets say the child is not persuaded that he should study reading. Then
what? How should parent proceed?

>
>>
>>
>>
>> > If children are presumed to have exactly the same rights as adults, then
>> > they are merely house guests of their parents.
>>
>> No. As the owner of my house, my relationship with house guests is
>> different that my relationship with my kids. For one thing, I am not
>> responsible for the problems of my house guests. They can leave when
>> they want to. My kids on the other hand, I am responsible for taking
>> care of them, i.e. help them solve their problems.
>
>

> Correct - which means they don't have the same rights as adults.

I disagree. I think you are saying that there is a hard link between
rights and responsibilities. I think your argument is that as a person
takes on responsibilities, then he is also awarded rights.

But I'm saying a person has rights even before he has any
responsibility. Do you agree on this part?

If yes, then your idea that there is a hard link between rights and
responsibilities is false. Right?

>>
>>
>> > I would think it unwise for
>> > parents to exercise dictatorial control over such a household, just as it's
>> > unwise to exercise dictatorial control over any house guest. But that
>> > wouldn't change the fundamental status of the relationship where the guest's
>> > sole remedy to assert their rights is to leave the house.
>> >
>> > But, I don't think children are mere guests of their parents. I think they
>> > have a different set of rights. They have rights to some things that adults
>> > don't have rights to (like food, clothing, and shelter), and they lack
>> > rights to some things adults do have (like complete personal autonomy).
>>
>> What sorts of rights within the set of "complete personal autonomy" do
>> you think kids shouldn't have?
>>
>

> Suicide is a clear one: I don't think a child at any stage of development has a right to commit suicide. I think that only adults have a right to commit suicide.

What if the parent was raping the child for years. And child tried
everything he knows how to get away, but failed each time. Is it moral
for child to end his suffering? I say yes.


> Others are subject to more gradation. I think children have a right to study whatever subjects they are interested in, but not a right to refuse a reasonable amount of study in certain subjects (like reading) parents believe are very important to their future self sufficiency.

Parents can be wrong about any of their ideas. So they could be wrong
about which subjects are important (I agree with you that reading is
important, but which subjects we're agreeing on is irrelevant). Lets
say the parent believed that physics is of utmost importance. But
child doesn't like physics. Should parent force child to learn
physics?


> Some are just related to the necessities of coexistence and are largely reflexive: Neither parents nor kids have a right to engage in activities that endanger each other (like building a bonfire in the living room) or interfere with a reasonable life (like staying up all night playing the drums).

Agreed. So why do you think its the parent's right to force his child
to learn a certain subject? You mentioned that the knowledge is
something that the parent believes is required for self-sufficiency.
But that is not the parent's problem. Its the child's (future)
problem. Child's disinterest in a subject (that parent believes is
required for self-sufficiency) does not endanger (or have any effect)
on parent. Right?

>>
>>
>> > I would not want to prohibit my teenagers from smoking marijuana (though I
>> > would advise against it). But if my teenagers choose to smoke marijuana as a
>> > form of rebellion against the government, the government might find out. One
>> > of the things governments can do when the find out about the presence of
>> > illegal drugs in a house, or a car, is to seize the asset.
>>
>> Ah yes. Then I would add to your argument to your kids "not in my
>> house" and explain the reasons.
>
>

> Yes. Our disagreement is not about whether parents should offer the best possible arguments and explanations to their kids. We agree - they should. Our disagreement is about what to do if, despite parents' best efforts to convince the child and child's best efforts to convince the parents, agreement is not reached.

How does the parent know that he applied his "best" efforts? Could he
have improved his persuasive skill (like by joining these philosophy
lists and posting a lot for external criticism)?

IF agreement is not reached, THEN parent did not apply his "best efforts".


> Such as, in this example, child wants to smoke marijuana anyway even knowing the risk to the house.

What is the risk to the house? (I'm not aware of anything like that.)

>
>>
>> >> This is vague. It sounds like non-coercion but its vague on who
>> >> created the choices. Did the parent dictate which things are not part
>> >> of the set of options to choose from?
>> >
>> >
>> > Yes it is vague. Sometimes there is no parental constraint on the choice set
>> > at all.
>>
>> What sort of non-parental constraints are you thinking of? Like one
>> dictated by laws of physics? Or government laws? Some examples maybe.
>
>

> No parental constraints means the only constraints are the laws of physics + whatever others impose without our input.
> For example, we set no constraints on the video games our kids can have. If they're out alone or with friends and want to buy a game that the store won't sell them due to the store's age restrictive policies, that's a constraint but not one we imposed. If they still want the game when we're with them, we'll buy it for them.

>
>>
>> > Sometimes there are parental constraints on the choice set, along
>> > with explanations as to why.
>>
>> And if the child disagrees with the "why"? How should that be treated
>> by the parent?
>
>

> We'll discuss it as long as the child wants, and if the child is correct in our judgement we change the constraints. This is subject to a couple of things:
> (1) If whatever choice must be made is time sensitive, the constraints apply when the time the decision must be made arrives. We can still (and sometimes do) continue to discuss it afterwards though.

If its true that a choice must be made within a specified time frame,
then there is an explanation that would persuade child to postpone the
discussion to a later time. And its the parent's responsibility (if he
believes it) to create that explanation to persuade child.


> (2) If the discussion is going in circles with no new information being presented, we can take a break and come back to it later.

And that could be a CP (to postpone till later).

>
>>
>>
>> > An important contrast I was trying to draw in this statement is with parents
>> > who routinely don't give their children any choice set at all - they say it
>> > will be such-and-such a way only, simply because they can. Our approach is
>> > to give the widest possible choice set consistent with our other
>> > responsibilities as parents.
>>
>> And this comes down to what happens when child disagrees with the
>> choice restrictions and the parent's reasons for those restrictions.
>>
>

> Yes, that's the rub, and where I disagree with TCS.

>
>>
>>
>> > Another important contrast is with parents who won't give an explanation.
>> > "Because I said so..." is a shockingly common phrase in child raising. My
>> > wife and I have consistently avoided using that and similar phrases.
>> >
>> > The difference from TCS is that I reject the TCS assertion that parents
>> > should not constrain any of their childrens' choices.
>>
>> What sort of situations are you thinking require parent to constrain
>> children's choice. I'll give an example:
>>
>> If kid runs in street and if cars are coming (or expected to come),
>> parent should go *save* kid from harm because he expects that the kid
>> wanted to be saved. Kid's choice was wrong. But kid didn't know it was
>> wrong. And parent stepped in and solved the problem without first
>> getting kid's opinion. Also kid agrees with parent's choice to step in
>> without kid's opinion.
>>
>> So what sort of example do you mean?
>
>

> Studying reading. It is reasonable for parents to require children to spend some time learning how to read even when they don't want to.

As Alan said in his reply:

If reading is important to self sufficiency, then it is important to
be able to do it well and to like doing it. And taking steps that
could endanger a preference for reading would be bad, such as coercing
the child into reading.

And if reading is important to self sufficiency then there will be
lots of problems the parent could point out that the child could solve
with reading. So the child will want to learn to read if its benefits
are properly explained.


> One way to view this is like the running in street example above, only on a longer time scale. I expect children who learn to read are glad they did (mine are) and children who don't learn to read and have to do it as adults wish they'd done it as children.

But with a longer time scale, the parent has plenty of time to
persuade the child of the truth (if in fact the parent's idea is the
truth).


> Or not...there are differences like that being hit by a car can easily kill you whereas not learning to read probably won't.
>
> Key is - as a question of rights I don't think a child has the right to completely refuse to study reading.

But the parent has the responsibility of persuading. And if parent
fails, its not the fault of the child. Its the fault of the parent (as
Alan's explanation implies). Do you agree?

>
>>
>> >
>> > Not in the context of rights I discussed above. What I intended to contrast
>> > here is with an approach of authority in the sense of the assertion of
>> > authoritative correctness. When we constrain choice sets, and explain why,
>> > we do not claim to be authoritatively correct. We admit to our children that
>> > we could be wrong, and if the children convince us that we are wrong, then
>> > we change.
>>
>> Ah. So if kid helped you change your mind, then why do you say that
>> you are restricting choice set? I think you're saying that there are
>> times when kid disagrees with parent's choice set, and parent hasn't
>> convinced him and he hasn't convinced parent. And in these cases
>> parent restricts choice set. Is that what you mean?
>
>

> Yes.

So, in the case of a parent who chose that he wants kid to learn to
read, and he hasn't yet persuaded child to want to learn to read, then
you're saying parent has the right to coerce child. But, what is the
harm is the parent in continuing to try to persuade child to want to
learn to read? Lets say it took another year of discussion before
child is persuaded. Is that bad and why?

>>
>>
>> >
>> > There's a saying about the Supreme Court: They're not "supreme" in the sense
>> > that their judgement is always correct, just that their judgement is always
>> > final. We don't consider our judgement to be either correct or final, it is
>> > merely operant in our household until we are convinced to change it.
>>
>> And how long should a parent be willing to change his mind before
>> closing the subject and coercing the kid to do (or not do) X?
>
>

> Depends on the time scales involved. With regard to reading, most what we heard/read said kids who don't have a basic mastery of reading by age 8 have a much harder time in academic subjects for the rest of their life.

That is scientism and false. It conflicts with DD's theory of mind.
And it has no explanation of its own. So why trust explanationless
science? Popper already refuted explanationless science.


> So the closer kids get to age 8, the more studying reading became a constraint and less a matter of choice.

But the parent chose age 8 citing explanationless science, which is bad.


>
> Now, I do recognize that perhaps the idea of a critical period for learning reading is completely bogus. Some on this list have argued that it is bogus. I haven't pursued it because my kids already learned to read. But I recognize we could have been wrong. But in our best judgement at the time, we weren't. Our kids learned to read by age 8, and most but not all of the study to accomplish that was by their own choice. Now that they know how to read, they don't regret having studied it even though sometimes they didn't want to study it at the time.

That is not a criticism of the idea that parents shouldn't coerce
children to read.

>
>>
>> > The difference with TCS is that we do not feel obligated to always convince
>> > the children that our constraints are correct prior to implementing them. We
>> > attempt to do so and sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail.
>>
>> And when a parent fails to succeed in convincing the child, how does
>> the parent determine who (parent or child) is right?
>
>

> Epistemologically we can't determine that. As I said before, we try not to assume that the parents' position is either correct or final.

Better to *never* assume that.

> The parents' position is, however, operant until something changes (new argument, different circumstances, or whatever).

But parent could be wrong and child right. So why not seek a common
preference without assuming that the parent is right?

-- Rami

[Rami Rustom]

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 12:24 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I had quite a long response to this mostly done, but Google timed out & then
> I've been busy and haven't gotten back around to it. In the mean time I came
> across an article by Wendy McElroy on this topic:
>
> http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/09/11/the-grayness-of-childrens-rights/

Note that Wendy assumes that TCS is a libertarian philosophy. It isn't.


> I disagree with Wendy's title about chidrens' rights being "gray". I don't
> believe that any rights are "gray", which by context means unspecified,
> subjective, and subject to some degree of whim. Rights are objective and
> while our knowledge about them is fallible it is a mistake to imply (as
> "gray" does) that such knowledge is impossible.
>
> That said, I agree with some of Wendy's actual positions, including her
> rejection of TCS's idea of complete child autonomy and the idea of children
> as parental property.

I read the article but I don't understand exactly what about TCS she
disagreed with.


> [Parental responsibilities are to] care for the infant or child to the best of their ability. Neglect and cruelty are morally intolerable and should be discouraged by every possible peaceful sanction, such as peer pressure, shunning and shaming.

That is so conflicted. I think she's saying that peer pressure,
shunning and shaming is good. So I think she'd say that using these
tools with children is good too (like instead of hitting them). But...

Peer pressure, shunning, and shame *are* cruel and morally
intolerable. These are social pressures. If a parent does this, he is
teaching his child that should decide whether an idea is right or
wrong by whether or not his parents and society thinks that idea is
right or wrong. This is one of the worst anti-rational memes.

One should decide whether an idea is right or wrong by judging the
idea by its own merits, not by who the source is. Is the idea good? Is
it useful? Does it solve a problem of mine? What is a rival idea? Does
that idea solve a problem of mine? Do I have any criticisms of these
ideas?


Consider this hypothetical. Child has an idea to get a toy from a
cereal box. He decided to dump the cereal out on the floor and does
it. Dad sees this happening and does what?

Option 1 (using Wendy's philosophy): Dad gives dirty look showing that
he disapproves. Dad thinks this will teach child that dumping cereal
on floor is bad. (please provide a better example if you think her
philosophy is better than this.)

Option 2 (TCS philosophy): Dad says, "Wacha doing there? Oh, you did
that to get the toy. Well let me show you a better way that still gets
you the toy, but it doesn't have the problem of ruining the cereal...
you know, because now we have to throw away the cereal cause it
touched the floor, so now its dirty and we can't eat it. So, the
better way is to get a huge bowl like this... then dump the cereal out
into the bowl, then get the toy, then put the cereal back in its box.
This way we can still eat the cereal... what do you think?"


> I can only hope that a libertarian society would share my deep moral and emotional discomfort at neglectful or cruel parents and, so, use every private alternative (including new ones) to protect children.

No, she doesn't use *every* private alternative to protect children.
She thinks its good to use social pressures to "mold" children. That
hurts children! It teaches irrationality. It teaches that knowledge
should be justified by the authority of parents and society.

[Rami Rustom]

On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 6:14 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Saturday, October 27, 2012 6:19:37 AM UTC-7, Rami Rustom wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 12:24 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > I had quite a long response to this mostly done, but Google timed out &
>> > then
>> > I've been busy and haven't gotten back around to it. In the mean time I
>> > came
>> > across an article by Wendy McElroy on this topic:
>> >
>> > http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/09/11/the-grayness-of-childrens-rights/
>>
>> Note that Wendy assumes that TCS is a libertarian philosophy. It isn't.
>>
>

> What do you think defines "a libertarian philosophy"?

Not sure. But I do know that Objectivist and Popperian philosophy
contains ideas that conflict with libertarian philosophy.

[Elliot Temple]

On Oct 14, 2012, at 4:46 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Saturday, October 13, 2012 6:23:33 PM UTC-7, Rami Rustom wrote:

>>
>> On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 4:33 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com <javascript:>>
>> wrote:
>>> I don't accept the TCS definition of coercion as a particularly useful
>> one
>>> nor the total elimination of TCS-coercion as a worthwhile goal.
>>
>> TCS is about bringing the tradition of freedom to another group of
>> people that haven't yet been awarded this natural right.
>
>

> That's a good sounding slogan.
>
>

>> Doing
>> otherwise is ageism, which is as bad as racism and sexism.
>>
>
>> Racism and sexism were predicated on the idea that those non-white
>> races and the female sex are inferior with respect to rational
>> faculty. And ageism is the same. We learned that we were wrong about
>> other races and the female sex and now we know we were wrong about
>> children.
>>
>> We don't discriminate by race nor by sex, so why should we discriminate by
>> age?
>>
>

> This is where TCS goes seriously off the rails in my opinion. You want to
> have your cake and eat it too - or rather, to create a world in which
> children get to have their cake and eat it too. That was not true in the
> case of racial or sexual or even commonly defined age discrimination.
>

> If ageism is assigning human beings different rights bases solely on their
> age, and that's bad in all cases and the equivalent of racism and sexism,
> then young offspring should not have a right to live in their parents'
> house, eat their parents' food, and drive their parents' cars - rights that
> older offspring do not have.

So let's assign that "right" (I wouldn't call it a right, but that doesn't matter) based on something other than age, such as lack of independence. Problem solved?

(That's not a perfect criterion. You'd have to add in a clause that if they intentionally avoid independence they also lose the right. And no doubt there's other nuances. But the point is there are various differences other than age.)

Why did you assume it could only be assigned based on age?

>
> Yet we do recognize that younger offspring - children - have a right to
> receive such goods from their parents. When they reach a certain age (18 by
> convention) those rights legally cease and other rights legally begin. I
> think this is largely correct, though the precise age of 18 is arbitrary
> and should be treated more fluidly than it is.
>
> The fundamental correctness
> of this approach is because a fact of reality: children do not emerge as
> fully functional self sufficient entities, either physically or mentally,
> instantaneously. It happens over time. What we think of as the full
> complement of human rights are accorded in conjunction with the full
> complement of self responsibility.
>

> You obtain full adult rights when you assume full adult responsibilities.
> That could theoretically happen at any age. And there are instances
> (appropriately termed "emancipation") where adult rights and
> responsibilities are conferred at an age younger than the conventional
> standard. So "adult" and "child" in this context is not ageism. "Adult"
> means someone who accepts (voluntarily or by statute) all the rights and
> responsibilities of adulthood, and "child" means someone who has not. If a
> 6-year-old could and wanted to accept adult rights and responsibilities

> then by all means they should. But in common experience they can't, don't

> want to, or perhaps we just don't know how to teach them how yet.
>

> It's not racist to say that in order to actually be free ("emancipated"), a
> slave must leave the plantation or otherwise reach agreement with the
> plantation owner to pay for his own food, clothing, and shelter. Nor is it
> ageist to say that a child must leave the house or otherwise reach
> agreement with the owner to pay for his own food, clothing, and shelter.
> Rights come with responsibilities.
>

> If children are presumed to have exactly the same rights as adults, then
> they are merely house guests of their parents.

The same rights is not the same thing as the same status in every way.

When we say children should have equality before the law, and full human rights, it doesn't mean you treat every person on Earth exactly the same. Just as adult people differ and are treated according to their situation, the same goes for people including children.

Besides we're not complaining about kids having *extra* human rights. We're complaining about them being *deprived* of human rights. No one is trying to abolish the parental duty to feed/house/etc their kids. We're not advocating that. Why are you even talking about it? Seriously, it's 100% straw man. No one wants to get rid of it. You're just attacking stupid stuff no one is saying at great length for no reason. It's not a rational, productive discussion.

Children are deprived of some basic human rights and then when we complain about that your response is children need a special status so they don't starve to death. How do you get from there to defending the denial of basic human rights to children? How the hell do you come up with the notion that having basic human rights means no one can have any duties to you anymore? That's not a TCS position, it's not close to any TCS position, it's an unreasonable straw man.

> I would think it unwise for
> parents to exercise dictatorial control over such a household, just as it's
> unwise to exercise dictatorial control over any house guest. But that
> wouldn't change the fundamental status of the relationship where the
> guest's sole remedy to assert their rights is to leave the house.
>
> But, I don't think children are mere guests of their parents.

We don't either. You know damn well we aren't advocating that. So what's your problem? Why are you being such a jerk?

> I think they
> have a different set of rights. They have rights to some things that adults
> don't have rights to (like food, clothing, and shelter), and they lack
> rights to some things adults do have (like complete personal autonomy).

This is the package deal fallacy Ayn Rand criticized. You're just taking two separate things and arbitrarily tying them together. And you're ignoring what we actually advocate. You aren't discussing our actual position. Our position is that those things don't come as a package deal. You've never engaged with that.

>
> Furthermore, you responded to a statement that was specifically about
> coercion, and the TCS definition thereof (which I call "TCS-coercion").
> Even adults don't have a natural right not to be TCS-coerced! So it's not a

> question of rights or ageism to reject the elimination of all TCS-coercion
> as a worthwhile goal.

Adults do have a right to self-defense against coercion. In what example situation do you think they don't?

For example if someone tries to shoot a gun at me, being shot would coerce me and I can't defend against that.

If someone says mean things, I can ignore them to avoid coercion. If I get coerced it's my fault. So he's not the one coercing me. In all cases where the coercion is his fault, he's violating my rights and defense is appropriate.

>
>
>>> However, supposing that someone did accept those things as many on this
>> list
>>> do, and supposing that they were able to completely eliminate all
>>> TCS-coercion from their family relationships, that doesn't mean there
>> would
>>> be nothing for teenagers in their family to rebel against.
>>>
>>> As an example, I think smoking marijuana should be legal. However,
>> smoking
>>> marijuana currently isn't legal. So, teenagers could rebel against the
>>> marijuana laws by smoking marijuana even if there was no TCS-coercion
>> from
>>> their parents.
>>
>> I wouldn't call that rebellion. Sometimes I don't make a complete stop
>> at stop signs. I wouldn't call that rebellion.
>
>

> Depends. If you don't make a complete stop because you're in a hurry or
> distracted or whatever, it's not rebellion.
> If you don't make a complete stop to prove to yourself, your friends, or
> whoever that "the man" ain't gonna make you stop, then it's rebellion.

> FWIW I've seen evidence of both types of motivation in relation to people
> not stopping at stop signs.
>
>

>> Would you? If not, is
>> this analogous to smoking marijuana?
>>
>>
>>> The answer to this objection might be that if there were no
>>> TCS-coercive laws then there would be nothing to rebel against. Probably
>>> true...but I have very limited control over the level of coercion in our
>>> legal system. Like everyone else, I have to live with it even if it
>> makes
>>> raising teenagers "difficult".
>>
>> Wait how does government laws make raising teenagers more difficult?
>>
>>

> I would not want to prohibit my teenagers from smoking marijuana (though I
> would advise against it). But if my teenagers choose to smoke marijuana as
> a form of rebellion against the government, the government might find out.
> One of the things governments can do when the find out about the presence

> of illegal drugs in a house, or a car, is to seize the asset. So I could

> lose my house or my car because my teenagers smoked marijuana. That would
> be difficult.
>
>
>

>>> However, all that said I think there is less desire on the part of
>> teenagers
>>> to rebel when parents have had a policy of:
>>> - choices rather than dictates
>>
>> This is vague. It sounds like non-coercion but its vague on who
>> created the choices. Did the parent dictate which things are not part
>> of the set of options to choose from?
>>
>

> Yes it is vague. Sometimes there is no parental constraint on the choice

> set at all. Sometimes there are parental constraints on the choice set,

> along with explanations as to why.
>

> An important contrast I was trying to draw in this statement is with
> parents who routinely don't give their children any choice set at all -
> they say it will be such-and-such a way only, simply because they can. Our
> approach is to give the widest possible choice set consistent with our
> other responsibilities as parents.

> Another important contrast is with parents who won't give an explanation.
> "Because I said so..." is a shockingly common phrase in child raising. My
> wife and I have consistently avoided using that and similar phrases.
>
> The difference from TCS is that I reject the TCS assertion that parents
> should not constrain any of their childrens' choices.

It's hard to tell what you mean. For example, suppose I get a job paying $100,000 per year. But I do not get a job paying 5mil/yr. This constrains what housing options are available to my children. If they want that $10mil mansion i've constrained them by my choice of job. If this is what you mean, absolutely no one is saying parents must never constrain their kid's choices. It's unavoidable.

Presumably that's not what you mean, you have some limits or rules on what you count as constraining or not. What are they? By what method do you determine what counts as "constrain any of their childrens' choices" or not? How can we figure out what examples qualify or not?

And, btw, again you are criticizing something that isn't what TCS said. You aren't expressing it the way TCS does. To be a rational critic you should try a lot harder to express TCS positions you criticize in ways typical TCS people would actually endorse (rather than reply, for example, that it's ambiguous and they have no idea if what you mean is a TCS position or not).

>
>>> - truth seeking rather than authority
>>
>> Ok but restricting options is using authority.
>>
>

> Not in the context of rights I discussed above. What I intended to contrast
> here is with an approach of authority in the sense of the assertion of
> authoritative correctness. When we constrain choice sets, and explain why,
> we do not claim to be authoritatively correct. We admit to our children
> that we could be wrong, and if the children convince us that we are wrong,
> then we change.
>

> There's a saying about the Supreme Court: They're not "supreme" in the
> sense that their judgement is always correct, just that their judgement is
> always final. We don't consider our judgement to be either correct or
> final, it is merely operant in our household until we are convinced to
> change it.
>

> The difference with TCS is that we do not feel obligated to always convince
> the children that our constraints are correct prior to implementing them.
> We attempt to do so and sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail.

So you're saying you force unwanted constraints on your kids without persuading them it's good?

Why would you do that? Wouldn't it be nicer for the kid if he knew why it was good? Can't you at least offer that courtesy?


The rejection of persuasion, in favor of force, is nothing but pure irrationality and evil. Why would you do that? What do you have against persuasion?

-- Elliot Temple
http://elliottemple.com/

[Elliot Temple]

On Oct 17, 2012, at 10:53 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Monday, October 15, 2012 3:06:43 PM UTC-7, Rami Rustom wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com <javascript:>>

>>> The difference with TCS is that we do not feel obligated to always
>> convince
>>> the children that our constraints are correct prior to implementing
>> them. We
>>> attempt to do so and sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail.
>>
>> And when a parent fails to succeed in convincing the child, how does
>> the parent determine who (parent or child) is right?
>>
>

> Epistemologically we can't determine that. As I said before, we try not to

> assume that the parents' position is either correct or final. The parents'

> position is, however, operant until something changes (new argument,
> different circumstances, or whatever).

So if the parent is wrong, the error doesn't get corrected.

So this system is irrational.

So it's very bad.

So stop doing it.


You basically just posted "I am evil (only towards my kids)" and didn't even feel the need to elaborate on how you think that could possibly be OK.

-- Elliot Temple
http://curi.us/

[Elliot Temple]

On Oct 17, 2012, at 10:53 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Suicide is a clear one: I don't think a child at any stage of development
> has a right to commit suicide. I think that only adults have a right to
> commit suicide.

Basically you're saying you don't respect his mind. His ideas don't count like real ideas, they don't really matter. If he thinks he wants to die, too bad, other people know best and should control him. You're advocating just the sort of paternalism you would reject in the case of stupid adults.

You didn't say mind/intelligence was the criterion, but what else could it be? If someone was age 10 but had my mind, my wisdom, my knowledge, surely that'd be adequate that he ought to be able to make decisions like suicide just as much as I can.


To sum up, you think children aren't fully human. And what makes a person fully human is his mind. And why do you think that? No good reason given. Maybe your parents ordered you to believe it for the rest of your life before you were allowed to think for yourself or disobey. I don't know, just guessing.

[Elliot Temple]

On Oct 17, 2012, at 10:53 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes. Our disagreement is not about whether parents should offer the best
> possible arguments and explanations to their kids. We agree - they should.
> Our disagreement is about what to do if, despite parents' best efforts to
> convince the child and child's best efforts to convince the parents,

> agreement is not reached. Such as, in this example, child wants to smoke

> marijuana anyway even knowing the risk to the house.

So basically, if your arguments are high enough quality to persuade your children, you assume they are true.

And if they are low enough quality not to persuade your children, you also assume they are true.

What the fuck is this but pure irrationality and evil?


William Godwin covered this:

> The right of the parent over his offspring lies either in his superior strength, or his superior reason. If in his strength, we have only to apply this right universally to drive morality out of the world. If in his reason, in that reason let him confide. It is a poor argument of my superior reason that I am unable to make justice be apprehended and felt, in the most necessary cases, without the intervention of blows.

and

> Let us consider the effect that coercion produces upon the mind of him against whom it is employed. It cannot begin with convincing; it is no argument. It begins with producing the sensation of pain, and the sentiment of distaste. It begins with violently alienating the mind from the truth with which we wish it to be impressed. It includes in it a tacit confession of imbecility. If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because his argument is weak.

When your arguments are weak you use force and blame the victim for not being persuaded.

How could it be otherwise?

Sometimes you'll have weak arguments. You're not perfect, sometimes you're wrong. It happens. And whenever you do have a bad argument, what happens next is (sometimes) your kid isn't going to be persuaded by it, and then you'll force him.

What the fuck kind of system is that?

Heads I win, tails you lose.

It's a system that doesn't correct errors. That's like the worst thing there is.


The entire philosophical goal of parenting should be the following:

the parent has some bad ideas. don't pass all of them on. if you pass them all on, then they get repeated next generation. and it keeps going. each parent passes on all his bad ideas and then when the kid who has them becomes a parent, he does it too, and so on. the only way to break this cycle is error correction. that's what it comes down to. error correction is a beginning of infinity, and non-error-correction (irrationality) perpetuates mistakes forever.

-- Elliot Temple
http://fallibleideas.com/

[Elliot Temple]

On Oct 17, 2012, at 10:53 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think children have a right to
> study whatever subjects they are interested in, but not a right to refuse a
> reasonable amount of study in certain subjects (like reading) parents
> believe are very important to their future self sufficiency.

So the more the *parent* feels or believes a certain way, the more the *child* is subject to being bossed around, controlled and coerced?

What a recipe for tyranny. The parent simply has to have certain thoughts and that justifies force!!

Can you see how that would be a super bad idea?

Basically what will happen -- and what does happen -- is the parent uses force whenever he wants. He didn't want to use it anyway when he thought it wasn't needed, was inappropriate, etc... You're justifying all parental force anyone ever uses since no one ever does it violating the condition of believing it's important.

Justifying the unlimited use of force, and defending all uses of force by all parents in history, is evil!! Seriously, that's really damn fucked up.

When you're going to defend the use of force, you've got to think "This is something to be careful with" and then proceed with caution. If you don't think it's something to be more cautious with, that's awful. And if you did think it was important to be cautious with justifying force, and really thought about it, you'd never advocate "believe [is] very important" as a criterion to justify force. I know if you thought about that criterion in another context -- e.g. if that was the criterion that justified government force -- you'd immediately see how pure evil it is. But when it comes to children, your standard of argument and reasoning drops so much that what is objectively pure evil, and what you would recognize as pure evil in other contexts, is now something you think is worth advocating, endorsing, and actively arguing for!

That you've done such a thing should shock you into rethinking your attitudes, distrusting your existing ideas about parenting, researching TCS extensively, and otherwise trying to do something about it.

[Elliot Temple]

On Oct 19, 2012, at 7:43 AM, Rami Rustom <rom...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Oct 18, 2012 12:53 AM, "Jason" <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Monday, October 15, 2012 3:06:43 PM UTC-7, Rami Rustom wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> If ageism is assigning human beings different rights bases solely on their
>>>> age, and that's bad in all cases and the equivalent of racism and sexism,
>>>> then young offspring should not have a right to live in their parents'
>>>> house, eat their parents' food, and drive their parents' cars - rights that
>>>> older offspring do not have.
>>>
>>> Not true. Parents are responsible for their children because they
>>> brought them into this world without child's consent and with the
>>> clear understanding that the child is born with complete dependency on
>>> the parents. So the child has all these problems that he is incapable
>>> of solving and all these problems the parent created for the child. So
>>> the parent is responsible for the child's problems. These qualities
>>> don't exist with blacks nor with women.
>>
>>
>> The talk of consent here is complete nonsense. To consent or withhold consent requires a mind. Before the moment of conception, when the parents are deciding whether or not to create a child, the child does not even exist let alone have a mind to give or withhold consent. The concept of consent is meaningless and irrelevant in the context of an entity that doesn't yet exist. It's even worse than asking if a dead person consents to having their grave moved. At least with the dead person, at one time they were alive and could possibly have left advance directives about how important (or unimportant) they considered their grave location to be.
>
> Quick tangent: I don't agree with the idea of honoring dead people's
> preferences. They don't exist anymore. They are dirt now. Imagine
> honoring the preferences of dead people who died in 2012 while we're
> living in the year 10,000 or 10,000,000.

Rami you don't agree with wills? Once the guy is dead, who cares about his preference for what is done with his stuff?

>> Others are subject to more gradation. I think children have a right to study whatever subjects they are interested in, but not a right to refuse a reasonable amount of study in certain subjects (like reading) parents believe are very important to their future self sufficiency.
>
> Parents can be wrong about any of their ideas. So they could be wrong
> about which subjects are important (I agree with you that reading is
> important, but which subjects we're agreeing on is irrelevant). Lets
> say the parent believed that physics is of utmost importance. But
> child doesn't like physics. Should parent force child to learn
> physics?

Even if the parent was right about what subjects are important, that wouldn't make them important to learn by a particular person at a particular time. And even if parent got that right, it'd still totally miss the point that we must approach life with rational methods. You can't assume you're right, you have to use methods that could correct errors if you were wrong, b/c sometimes you will be wrong.

And this is all disregarding that it's completely implausible that child (or anyone) should learn anything at any time when he thinks that subject is crap and doesn't want to learn it. People don't learn by pouring knowledge into them like water into a bucket or sponge. Learning requires an active process, it therefore works much much much better with willing, interested, voluntary learners.

>
>> Some are just related to the necessities of coexistence and are largely reflexive: Neither parents nor kids have a right to engage in activities that endanger each other (like building a bonfire in the living room) or interfere with a reasonable life (like staying up all night playing the drums).
>
> Agreed. So why do you think its the parent's right to force his child
> to learn a certain subject? You mentioned that the knowledge is
> something that the parent believes is required for self-sufficiency.
> But that is not the parent's problem. Its the child's (future)
> problem. Child's disinterest in a subject (that parent believes is
> required for self-sufficiency) does not endanger (or have any effect)
> on parent. Right?
>
>
>>>
>>>
>>>> I would not want to prohibit my teenagers from smoking marijuana (though I
>>>> would advise against it). But if my teenagers choose to smoke marijuana as a
>>>> form of rebellion against the government, the government might find out. One
>>>> of the things governments can do when the find out about the presence of
>>>> illegal drugs in a house, or a car, is to seize the asset.
>>>
>>> Ah yes. Then I would add to your argument to your kids "not in my
>>> house" and explain the reasons.
>>
>>
>> Yes. Our disagreement is not about whether parents should offer the best possible arguments and explanations to their kids. We agree - they should. Our disagreement is about what to do if, despite parents' best efforts to convince the child and child's best efforts to convince the parents, agreement is not reached.
>
> How does the parent know that he applied his "best" efforts? Could he
> have improved his persuasive skill (like by joining these philosophy
> lists and posting a lot for external criticism)?
>
> IF agreement is not reached, THEN parent did not apply his "best efforts".

Or maybe the parent needed to be more open minded. Maybe he was wrong and that's why persuading the kid wasn't working.

And this "maybe" situation is bound to happen sometimes. One needs to use a method of parenting that gets this situation right in the cases it does happen. And you don't know when they will be, so you have to use that method at all times. That's called a rational non-evil method of parenting, aka TCS. All other approaches to parenting get that situation wrong and therefore perpetuate mistakes for generation after generation and sabotage the beginning of infinity.

[Elliot Temple]

On Oct 19, 2012, at 1:03 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thursday, October 18, 2012 1:25:51 AM UTC-7, david....@qubit.org wrote:
>>
>> On 18 Oct 2012, at 06:53, Jason <auv...@gmail.com <javascript:>> wrote:

>>
>>> On Monday, October 15, 2012 3:06:43 PM UTC-7, Rami Rustom wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> If ageism is assigning human beings different rights bases solely on
>>>> their
>>>>> age, and that's bad in all cases and the equivalent of racism and
>>>> sexism,
>>>>> then young offspring should not have a right to live in their parents'
>>>>> house, eat their parents' food, and drive their parents' cars - rights
>>>> that
>>>>> older offspring do not have.
>>>>
>>>> Not true. Parents are responsible for their children because they
>>>> brought them into this world without child's consent and with the
>>>> clear understanding that the child is born with complete dependency on
>>>> the parents. So the child has all these problems that he is incapable
>>>> of solving and all these problems the parent created for the child. So
>>>> the parent is responsible for the child's problems. These qualities
>>>> don't exist with blacks nor with women.
>>>>
>>>

>>> The talk of consent here is complete nonsense. To consent or withhold
>>> consent requires a mind. Before the moment of conception, when the parents
>>> are deciding whether or not to create a child, the child does not even
>>> exist let alone have a mind to give or withhold consent. The concept of
>>> consent is meaningless and irrelevant in the context of an entity that
>>> doesn't yet exist. It's even worse than asking if a dead person consents to
>>> having their grave moved. At least with the dead person, at one time they
>>> were alive and could possibly have left advance directives about how
>>> important (or unimportant) they considered their grave location to be.
>>
>>

>> I don't think this can be complete nonsense.
>>
>> Suppose that a malevolent person, knowing that his neighbours are planning
>> to have a child, invites them to his house for tea, takes some of their DNA
>> from the teacups, and manufactures a poison that is capable of harming only
>> their offspring. And he spreads this poison around in the neighbours' house
>> when they return his tea invitation. Then he himself dies. A year later,
>> the neighbour's child is born and, ten years later, happens to touch a
>> surface still contaminated with the poison and dies, just as the malevolent
>> person had planned.
>>
>> According to your argument, the malevolent person was guilty of only
>> criminal damage at most. But I think it's unreasonable to deny that it was
>> murder.
>>
>>
> Arguments that equate everyday moral decisions with extreme situations are
> problematic. The decision to create a new person in the common and (at
> least for now) necessary way for the continuation of our species bears
> little moral resemblance to the decision to enact an elaborate plot
> designed to kill a person in an odd way a long time in the future.

David did not say that one resembled the other.

He was making a specific argument which did not rely on non-specific resemblance.

This reply misses the point. It's a really common way of missing the point. Can you explain why people do it and resist being corrected about it? That'd be really helpful so we could figure out how to communicate better to the many people who make mistakes like this a lot.



Specifically, Jason said "The talk of consent here is complete nonsense. To consent or withhold consent requires a mind."

David's reply began, "I don't think this can be complete nonsense." and then he talked about dead people (who don't have minds).

David said what point he was going to make, but Jason still ignored that and just interpreted the post as non-specific discussion.

Why do people do that? That level of being terrible are reading comprehension, thinking and discussion is more than enough to sabotage persuasion (e.g. how the hell do you persuade Jason of TCS when he fails at something like this which is 1000x easier?). Jason can you provide any insight into why you make mistakes like this and what it would take to get you to stop doing it? Or why people find it appealing to live this way, or anything useful?



> Furthermore,

After this furthermore, Jason says some stuff that's more relevant and better tries to have a discussion. But why would he lead with the completely wrong comments, and then categorize his better discussion as an extra thing?


> this example fails to address the criticism that a person who
> doesn't yet exist can neither give nor withhold consent. To hold the lack
> of pre-existential consent as morally relevant to this situation, we would
> have to conclude that the malevolent person has committed murder only
> because the as yet un-conceived offspring didn't consent to being poisoned
> 10 years in the future. As if - had the malevolent person only somehow been
> able to know that the offspring-to-be really wanted to die in 10 years -
> creating and planting the poison could have been a morally permissible act
> of assisted suicide.

Wouldn't it have been? If you know someone wants to die and you help them out, what's the problem? Why are you rejecting that as absurd?

I see absurdness here which is the idea of knowing that 10 years in advance. But the idea that if poison was wanted and consensual it wouldn't be murder is not absurd.

The quality of argument here is still not very good. Jason thinks something is absurd but doesn't say why it is. He expects his readers to already agree with him and doesn't know how to deal with lists where they don't. No wonder he can't persuade his kids of much and resorts to forcing them...

>
> Consent of a person to an act that occurred prior to his/her existence is
> just as irrelevant in this example as it is to the responsibility of
> parents and the rights of children.
>
> The malevolent person's criminality rests instead on the consent of the
> offspring *after* he/she was born, and the legal and common sense
> presumption that, once living, a person will wish to continue to live. In
> an ordinary murder case it is not necessary for the prosecution to
> demonstrate that the person who was killed wanted to live. That's assumed,
> unless there are very strong arguments and evidence to the contrary.
>
> The wish-to-live presumption can be refuted if a person clearly states they
> wish to die or takes an action knowingly designed to kill themselves, but
> that's not what happened in your example. It couldn't have, because the
> person who got killed didn't exist when the events resulting in his/her
> death were set in motion. So the only legal and moral presumption the
> malevolent person could make is that the offspring, once in existence,
> would wish to live. Ending the life of a person who wishes to live is
> murder, but there is no opposite crime. There is no crime for starting the
> life of a person who wishes not to live. That's because a non-existent
> person can't have a preference.
>
> Thus the wish-to-live presumption is morally relevant to an act which
> terminates an existing person's life, even an act as time-convoluted as the
> one you described. The wish-to-live presumption is not morally relevant to
> the parental act of conceiving a child. Before the child exists there is no
> person to wish one way or the other, and after the child exists the
> presumption of a wish to live is entirely consistent with the child's
> existence.
>
> Lastly, I don't understand why you chose as your example a situation in
> which the perpetrator died many years before the victim. That seems to
> render the whole example not only irrelevant to the question of parenthood,
> but generally irrelevant. Whether we conclude it was an act of murder, or
> criminal damage, or invasion of privacy, or whatever - the perp is already
> dead. We can't change his ideas, or lock him up for the safety of others,
> or take any other morally relevant action based on our judgement about what
> happened beyond condemning it. There is no moral argument I'm aware of that
> would say what he did ought to be touted as a good example for others to
> replicate.


David didn't say it was a good way of life. This is, like some other stuff, a completely irrelevant remark about a straw man. Jason, why do you spend so much of your time discussing stuff no one here said or would say? What could we do differently so you'd stop doing that?

[Elliot Temple]

On Oct 27, 2012, at 6:18 AM, Rami Rustom <rom...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 12:24 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I had quite a long response to this mostly done, but Google timed out & then
>> I've been busy and haven't gotten back around to it. In the mean time I came
>> across an article by Wendy McElroy on this topic:
>>
>> http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/09/11/the-grayness-of-childrens-rights/
>
> Note that Wendy assumes that TCS is a libertarian philosophy. It isn't.

She also calls TCS a children's rights organization. It isn't. She hasn't understood it and then undertakes to comment on it. And the main theme of her commentary is about children's rights which isn't what TCS is about so the commentary misses the mark.

the article says:

> Beginning with the obvious: an infant is an autonomous individual with the same rights against aggression as an adult possesses. Killing an infant is murder in precisely the same moral and legal sense as killing an adult. In short, infants have what libertarianism calls “negative rights” which impose a duty upon others to notaggress.

well, great.

SO STOP ENDORSING PARENTAL AGGRESSION.

jason **explicitly** endorses parental aggression (when the parent believes it's important and gives up on persuasion). yet he linked this article. wtf is going on?


i don't really get it. the article just **conceded everything**. and then didn't. it's a contradiction. so here's my advice: don't take self-contradictory positions on this.

the article continues

> But do infants have “positive rights” which impose obligations for assistance upon others?

Well, maybe i spoke too soon. maybe it only conceded everything any reasonable person would dispute. but it didn't concede that children should be fed... fucking rothbard.

the article even quotes rothbard.

jason, how about you don't link endorsements of evil? do you want to be associated with rothbard? if not, stop linking such awful crap. if you do want to endorse rothbard, then how about you post an explanation of how that's not evil and why you shouldn't be banned as a troll (as we would ban any nazis who didn't begin by acknowledging that everyone thinks nazism is awful so they better explain themselves instead of just quote nazis in passing).

>
>
>> I disagree with Wendy's title about chidrens' rights being "gray". I don't
>> believe that any rights are "gray", which by context means unspecified,
>> subjective, and subject to some degree of whim. Rights are objective and
>> while our knowledge about them is fallible it is a mistake to imply (as
>> "gray" does) that such knowledge is impossible.
>>
>> That said, I agree with some of Wendy's actual positions, including her
>> rejection of TCS's idea of complete child autonomy and the idea of children
>> as parental property.
>
> I read the article but I don't understand exactly what about TCS she
> disagreed with.

without reading much, i think it's nonaggression against kids who get fed that she disagrees with. that's what jason disagrees with and it looks like the article was setting up to say it too, and jason endorsed the article.

seriously that's all it takes. if you accept that parents should do non-aggression *and* feed their kids, both at the same time, that what's left to discuss?

(answer for what's left: their excuses for how using force when they can't think of persuasive arguments doesn't count as aggression).

-- Elliot Temple
http://beginningofinfinity.com/

[Elliot Temple]

On Oct 27, 2012, at 8:02 AM, Alan Forrester <alanmichae...@googlemail.com> wrote:

> On 26 Oct 2012, at 18:24, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I had quite a long response to this mostly done, but Google timed out & then I've been busy and haven't gotten back around to it. In the mean time I came across an article by Wendy McElroy on this topic:
>>
>> http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/09/11/the-grayness-of-childrens-rights/
>>

>> I disagree with Wendy's title about chidrens' rights being "gray". I don't believe that any rights are "gray", which by context means unspecified, subjective, and subject to some degree of whim. Rights are objective and while our knowledge about them is fallible it is a mistake to imply (as "gray" does) that such knowledge is impossible.
>>
>> That said, I agree with some of Wendy's actual positions, including her rejection of TCS's idea of complete child autonomy and the idea of children as parental property.
>

> The McElroy article cites this speech transcript by Sarah Fitz-Claridge:
>
> http://www.fitz-claridge.com/?q=node/10
>
> I haven't found any relevant arguments in the McElroy article against the arguments given in Sarah's speech. McElroy never mentions common preferences or critical discussion or anything like that. Instead she tacitly assumes that parents should set up rules and that the child should leave if he doesn't like the rules. She doesn't mention that any alternative to this idea has been proposed and so doesn't argue against TCS. A statement of agreement with some of the positions taken in the article doesn't give any explanation of why any person who currently agrees with TCS should change his position.

Why do libertarians do worse than convention on this particular issue? Were they way worse than convention about it pre-Rothbard or did they just follow him off some cliffs or what? I don't see any logical connection between the core libertarian ideas and being stupider about children than most of the population.

[Elliot Temple]

On Nov 2, 2012, at 3:22 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Monday, October 29, 2012 1:59:11 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Oct 17, 2012, at 10:53 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com <javascript:>>

>> wrote:
>>
>>> Suicide is a clear one: I don't think a child at any stage of
>> development
>>> has a right to commit suicide. I think that only adults have a right to
>>> commit suicide.
>>
>> Basically you're saying you don't respect his mind. His ideas don't count
>> like real ideas, they don't really matter. If he thinks he wants to die,
>> too bad, other people know best and should control him. You're advocating
>> just the sort of paternalism you would reject in the case of stupid adults.
>>
>> You didn't say mind/intelligence was the criterion, but what else could it
>> be? If someone was age 10 but had my mind, my wisdom, my knowledge, surely
>> that'd be adequate that he ought to be able to make decisions like suicide
>> just as much as I can.
>>
>

> If someone was age 10 but had your mind, your wisdom, your knowledge,
> surely that'd be adequate that he ought to be able to support himself
> independently of his parents. And then, yes, such a person would indeed be
> able to make decisions like suicide.
>
> The criterion is being independent, not age.

Have you ever met a person who is independent in some ways, but not others?

I don't see how independence can work as a single yes/no criterion.


And why exactly should I have to figure out how to get a job to be permitted (by you..?) to kill myself? Those aren't related.

And consider whatever big problems are motivating me to kill myself. What if they also prevent me from holding a job? Are only people without any big problems like that supposed to kill themselves? That doesn't make much sense.

>
>> To sum up, you think children aren't fully human. And what makes a person
>> fully human is his mind. And why do you think that? No good reason given.
>> Maybe your parents ordered you to believe it for the rest of your life
>> before you were allowed to think for yourself or disobey. I don't know,
>> just guessing.
>
>

> Good guess. They did. It's in The Bible and they quoted it often:
> "When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when
> I grew up, I put away childish things." 1 Corinthians 13:11
>
> I have no problem rejecting teachings from The Bible when I think they're
> wrong. Most of The Bible is total rubbish! In this case, however, I don't
> think it's wrong if "as a child" and "childish" are viewed in terms of
> dependency. I do think that in order to become fully autonomous, fully
> human, one must become independent. It's the job of parents to help their
> children get there, but it's a process and not an instantaneous light
> switch.

Suppose the parents do that job very badly. Suppose it's not working, there is no reasonable expectation it will ever work, and every day is torture. Then what?

Then, perhaps, Jason rules out the only escape available. Suicide is the last bastion of autonomy, liberty and freedom when all else fails, and that is precisely why it's under attack in general, and that's also why it's important to defend.


For the non-Objectivists out there: Note the lesson here. You might expect more from a libertarian on an issue of this type (about liberty). You'd be wrong. This is a nice example of why not to overestimate libertarianism. Ayn Rand wasn't joking around when her statements on the matter were very harsh.

[Elliot Temple]

On Nov 2, 2012, at 6:51 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Monday, October 29, 2012 2:19:28 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
>>
>> What a recipe for tyranny. The parent simply has to have certain thoughts
>> and that justifies force!!
>>
>>

> As with our discussions before it is important to distinguish "force" from
> "TCS-exclusive-coercion".
>
> Force is things like physical restraint, hitting, biting, etc. or threats
> of those actions.

How does the parent get his way, once he decides the discussion is over?

>
> TCS-exclusive-coercion is things which cause enacting one idea while a
> conflicting idea is still active, *but are not force*. This includes things
> like dirty looks, yelling, turning off the TV, etc. or threats of those
> actions.

When the parent wants the child to do his homework, and the child disagrees, and the parent decides the discussion is over, what happens next is not a dirty look and leaving the child alone while he continues to not do his homework.


Turning off the TV, in context, *is* force because it's backed up by force (like tax collection is done by force because the tax collectors are backed up by the use of force if disobeyed). What do you think happens if the child turns the TV back on? The parent turns it off again. And if the child turns it on again, the parent takes away the remote. And if the child holds on to the remote, the parent pulls it away from him, by force. And if the child gets up to turn on the TV manually, the parent will block his way, or unplug the TV and then physically hold the cord, or force the child to leave the room.

Typically it doesn't come to such things. Just as, typically, IRS auditors don't have to call in enforcers with guns. But it's no less force.

>
> Also, don't you reject justification? It's not a matter of certain parent
> thoughts justifying either force or TCS-exclusive-coercion. It's a matter
> of having a conjecture to use TCS-exclusive-coercion and having no
> criticisms of it.

So basically you're saying as long as a child can be controlled with dirty looks and yelling -- and as long as the tax payer can be controlled with politely worded letters -- there is no force?


Those dirty looks and yelling are just phase 1. If disobeyed, the parent escalates. The chain of things the parent is threatening to escalate to, if the child persistently disobeys, does include force.

You've misconstrued this issue. It's nothing to do with counting coercion as force. I'm objecting to the actual use of force (including the usual clarifications like that threats count).

I'm saying disagreements must never be resolved by force. Forget about coercion, let's start there. This isn't some fancy philosophical dispute about coercion; we're actually disagreeing about more concrete matters like turning off TVs.

>
> With those preliminaries out of the way, I can then clarify:
>
> If a parent has certain conjectures and no known criticisms of them, then
> TCS-exclusive-coercion (NOT FORCE!) in achieving their goals is moral.

There are known criticisms. E.g. if it's such a good idea -- and you have adequate knowledge to know that -- why not rely on persuasion?

Also what you're saying is basically that it's good to control people by strategically causing them to suffer (TCS-coercion is suffering), as long as no force is used. I disagree. But I don't particularly expect to agree on this before we agree on simpler matters like turning off TVs, so I suggest focussing on stuff like that instead of trying to make the debate about coercion.

>
> Force is much more limited. I used the example of suicide - I think it is
> not only morally permissible but morally required for a parent to
> physically restrain a child from committing suicide.

So now you're openly admitting to advocating the use of force against children when they disagree, and the parent fails to get what he wants with reasoned discussion (let alone to learn something and change his own mind), and the parent decides it's important to force them to obey.


So forget coercion. TCS objects to resolving disagreements by force. Ever. You advocate it (sometimes. not every single disagreement). Let's focus on that!


> More broadly, force is
> morally permissible only in protecting the child's life / health / safety
> or the life / health / safety of others.

So, based on whatever the parent deems to be "health" or "safety of others", you're offering him the use of arbitrary and unlimited force against his child. Whatever he thinks is important to health or safety, the method you advocate is he then use force. Not coercion, force.

>
> You may consider this position evil, but I don't. I might be wrong. Or you
> might be wrong. Or maybe we both are.
>
> However, comparing people you disagree with to Nazis seriously cheapens how
> evil Nazism is. I don't think anything that's been posted or linked on this
> list is morally similar to systematically rounding up and killing millions
> of people. Why do you think that?

If you want to make a complaint like this, what you have to do is quote the part of the discussion you're complaining about. You deleted the text you wanted to attack and its context. That's not a reasonable way to discuss.


You're advocating the use of essentially unrestricted force against children. I do think that's evil. It is a commonplace evil, but evil none the less.

You also defend the entirely unrestricted use of force against children in common situations by denying force is being used against those children. I do think that's evil too (and commonplace again).



For anyone who doubts the importance of ideas and of philosophy, take note. They are the difference between being good and being evil.

And for anyone who doubts the importance of critical discussion, take note. It is the best opportunity to stop being evil.

[Elliot Temple]

On Nov 2, 2012, at 2:39 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Monday, October 29, 2012 1:52:16 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Oct 17, 2012, at 10:53 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com <javascript:>>

>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Monday, October 15, 2012 3:06:43 PM UTC-7, Rami Rustom wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com<javascript:>>
>>
>>>>> The difference with TCS is that we do not feel obligated to always
>>>> convince
>>>>> the children that our constraints are correct prior to implementing
>>>> them. We
>>>>> attempt to do so and sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail.
>>>>
>>>> And when a parent fails to succeed in convincing the child, how does
>>>> the parent determine who (parent or child) is right?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Epistemologically we can't determine that. As I said before, we try not
>> to
>>> assume that the parents' position is either correct or final. The
>> parents'
>>> position is, however, operant until something changes (new argument,
>>> different circumstances, or whatever).
>>
>> So if the parent is wrong, the error doesn't get corrected.
>>
>

> How do you get that? If the parent is wrong, the error can get corrected
> because we don't close off discussion / reconsideration.

Your willingness to revisit issues in the future doesn't do much good when

1) the issues will be revisited using the same techniques that fail to correct some errors in the first place

2) irreversible things happen, such as time is spent on one thing rather than another


> Maybe I haven't been clear about the ways we are different from convention
> even though we're not TCS: "Because I said so" and "No backtalk" and silent
> obedience to authority are big parts of conventional child raising that my
> wife and I reject and did / do not use. We were this way long before I ever
> heard of Popper or had any explicit understanding of epistemology. We
> thought it was dumb to do things without being able to explain why, or to
> tell our kids that they couldn't say what they thought. So from their
> birth, we never used those methods with our kids. Instead we say "Question
> everything." This drives some of our extended family members bonkers
> because they see questioning on some subjects as disrespectful.

That is wholly inadequate.

>> So this system is irrational.
>>
>> So it's very bad.
>>
>> So stop doing it.
>>
>>
>> You basically just posted "I am evil (only towards my kids)" and didn't
>> even feel the need to elaborate on how you think that could possibly be OK.
>
>

> I do not understand how you could take what I wrote to mean that we reject
> error correction. What I was trying to say was the opposite. We do want to
> correct errors, and we invite our children to help in that process. We just
> don't say (as I believe TCS does) that we must always reach full agreement
> prior to taking any action.

When it comes down to it, when your arguments/explanations/ideas aren't good enough, your response is "proceed anyways, by force". That is irrational. That is rejecting error correction.

[Elliot Temple]

On Nov 3, 2012, at 7:42 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Monday, October 29, 2012 2:05:36 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
>>
>> The entire philosophical goal of parenting should be the following:
>>
>> the parent has some bad ideas. don't pass all of them on. if you pass them
>> all on, then they get repeated next generation. and it keeps going. each
>> parent passes on all his bad ideas and then when the kid who has them
>> becomes a parent, he does it too, and so on. the only way to break this
>> cycle is error correction. that's what it comes down to. error correction
>> is a beginning of infinity, and non-error-correction (irrationality)
>> perpetuates mistakes forever.
>>
>

> That's a really interesting and provocative conjecture.
>
> I think the topic of why someone should have children is an extremely
> important one. I thought about it a lot before we had kids.
>
> It concerns me that religious people, and people who don't know much in
> general, have plenty of kids but meanwhile among people with ideas I
> respect more, like: atheists, scientists, libertarians, objectivists, (and
> I suspect but don't know about Popperians too), etc. having kids is much
> rarer.
>
> I don't have hard statistical data, but I'd be shocked if the birth rate
> among any of the aforementioned groups is above half of the population
> replacement rate. It sometimes seems like having good ideas is a potent
> form of birth control!
>
> Lest I be misconstrued I'll state up front: No one ever has a duty to have
> kids, whether because the prospective parents are smarter than average or
> for any other reason. I never thought that, and we did not have kids out of
> any sense of duty.
>
> That said, when my wife and I were deciding whether or not to have kids we
> thought explicitly in terms of the importance of passing on things that we
> value in terms of both our genetics and our ideas.

As you get to later, the desire to pass on your ideas is incompatible with what I was saying above.

The goal should be to offer up your ideas to your kid as options, and let him decide which ones he agrees with.


Note that you can also offer ideas to people who are not your children. If you want to influence the future on a big scale, selling thousands of books is more effective than parenting. So philosophers having fewer kids does not concern me.


Ultimately what we should be seeking is not that our ideas win. That is irrational and evil. What we should be seeking is that our ideas get a hearing, and that there is truth-seeking going on. We should not assume in advance that the ideas we have now will win the debate. We should expect to sometimes change our mind. What's important for the future is there is a process of improving ideas, not that we see our current ideas repeated in the next generation.


> We saw having kids as an
> affirmation of our values. We valued having a human race that continued to
> have people like us in it.
>
> Once we had kids we thought of our job as parents in terms of imparting the
> parts of our knowledge we can to them, and helping them find out things on
> their own too, in order for them to become independent and successful. We
> saw that as our responsibility & not government's, which is why we chose to
> homeschool.
>
> We always recognized that our kids might very well choose to reject some or
> all of the ideas we consider important. Given my history in particular (son
> of a minister, became an atheist) we used to joke that one of our kids
> might well end up hating technology and going Amish. But we viewed this in
> the same basket as other unavoidable risks

But what risk is there? That he should discover *good reasons* to do something similar to Amish (Amish is already refuted)? If he does, why wouldn't he persuade you? Why wouldn't you *learn from him and be better off*?

I don't think you're fully taking into account the concept that you might be mistaken.

If your kid disagrees with you there is a reason and you can discuss it and learn from each other in a mutually beneficial way. Disagreement is not a risk. Whatever you think is bad about being Amish, if he did something like being Amish he would have worked out all the problems and *would not suffer any of those problems*. It wouldn't be bad for him, or else why would he choose it? It would be better than the life your familiar with, in his judgment, or he wouldn't do it (since he has your sort of life easily available).

(The above has a notable exception which is coercion. He might choose to be Amish and be coerced if every other option he saw also meant coercion too.)

Prima facie if your kid does stuff significantly different from you, instead of assuming that's a disaster you should figure he's made large improvements. Respect his mind instead of considering deviance to be prima facie bad/harmful.

> of having kids: maybe one of
> them would end up with downs syndrome, or spina bifida, or an insatiable
> longing for horses, buggies, and dark clothing. It never occurred to us to
> consider the possibility as _a_ purpose of parenting, let alone _the_
> purpose of parenting.
>
> One of the ideas we wanted to pass on was the idea of making progress,
> particularly scientific and technological progress. So we never saw our
> kids repeating our lives exactly. We hoped they'd be better, with more
> scientific knowledge and more technology and less superstition and religion.

Right. Tolerating dissent, disagreement, deviance and non-coformity *within limits of an authority's choosing* is essentially the same thing as not tolerating dissent, etc...

>
> Still, your conjecture is not only fundamentally different from the one we
> explicitly used in deciding to have kids, it's pretty much opposite.
>
> I can see how your statement makes sense in the context of Popper & BoI. Of
> course we hadn't even heard of Popper or Deutsch until over a dozen years
> after we decided to have kids. And right now is the first time I ever heard
> this particular conjecture from anyone.
>
> Seeing the goal of parenting as the creation of a person that does not have
> your bad ideas, instead of the creation of a person that has your good
> ideas, is far reaching. I can understand how that mindset would drive you
> to TCS. What the parent is supposed to get out of the deal isn't the
> satisfaction of passing on his values, but error correction.
>
> I'll need to think on that one a while. I don't have any criticisms of it
> at the moment. It's a very different argument from the ones that I've heard
> up to now (about rights, and what parents owe kids due to lack of consent
> of the kids to their creation, etc.)

To be clear, sharing one's good ideas matters. That has value. You don't want your knowledge to be forgotten for no reason. Your current knowledge is something you can be proud of. But parents (or anyone) should offer it on a voluntary basis and use persuasion, not force.


This is similar to Popper's take on politics (repeated in BoI). He says the most important thing is to set up government so that mistakes can be identified and fixed quickly. He does value existing political knowledge, but he expects it to contain mistakes, so he wants to make sure progress can and does happen. This differs from most political debate which focusses more on which ideas should be deemed the good ones and therefore granted authority/status/rulership/etc... Lots of people try to figure out which political ideas are right and then take steps to make them hard to challenge or change.

Some people think that by entrenching their best current ideas they are safeguarding against error. They fear change as a source of error, not realizing that lack of change is an absolute guarantee of perpetual error (we're only at the *beginning* of infinity, which is a terrible place to halt progress).

All this stuff about error correction is really a general purpose theory in epistemology, rather than being specific to parenting or politics. Parenting is the field where it matters the very most. And it's rather important in politics too.


FYI here's an example of a similar argument from 2003:

http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/node/81

It's nothing new to TCS. I think you tried to argue with TCS without first spending much time asking about what it is.

Popper's take on these issues is approximately 50 years old. Before that, I don't think much understanding of this kind of stuff existed. William Godwin knew some of this in the 1790's but he's been misunderstood and ignored.

[Elliot Temple]

On Nov 10, 2012, at 1:30 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Friday, November 2, 2012 10:34:51 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>> I don't think there's a logical connection. A person can accept many
>> libertarian ideas and be okay. Not all libertarians are worse than
>> convention about children: David Friedman is a notable example.
>>>>
>>>> What/where did he say about children? I'm not familiar with it.
>>>
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9yO7TlCa7A
>>
>> Looks long. I listened to 2.5 minutes and already he's talking about how
>> he does stupid shit to manipulate his kids.
>>
>> Now, admittedly, he can do a lot of stupid shit without being worse than
>> convention. But the combination of substantially departing from convention
>> (unschooling), plus being clueless, is dangerous and typically leads to
>> doing worse than convention.
>>
>>
> Are you saying that people like David Friedman should not substantially
> depart from convention - meaning they should force their kids to go to
> school - instead of unschooling?

No. What he should do is think more carefully.

What I said is that the combination of departing from convention, plus not thinking about it well, is dangerous.

If one is not going to think, then yes he should stick to convention, because it's better than random mistakes.

Most possible deviations from convention/tradition are mistakes. The only way for deviation to work out well is when there's error correction: thinking which rules out many of those mistaken deviations.

[Elliot Temple]

On Nov 11, 2012, at 7:13 AM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Monday, October 29, 2012 2:46:04 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Oct 19, 2012, at 1:03 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com <javascript:>>

> It triggered a heuristic I have for avoiding altruism.
>
> A lot of people in freethought circles promote altruism.

FYI I've never seen David Deutsch promote altruism.


> However, they
> don't say it's altruism, they say its just being consistent about one's
> values. Their argument goes along the lines of:
> Suppose you're walking along and see a child fall into a lake. The child
> starts flailing around and calling for help, and he's probably going to
> drown unless you help him. You're a strong swimmer and you are trained in
> water rescue techniques. You'd jump in and save the child, right? You'd
> consider it the moral thing to do.
> Even if you were on your way to work, and saving the child would make you
> late, you'd still save the child. Even if you were dressed in an expensive
> suit, which jumping in the lake would ruin, you'd still save the child.
> Even if you'd never seen the child before, and the child was a different
> race from you, you'd still save the child, right?

Yes, I would.

> Well, you can save
> children in Africa right now for much less than the cost of a suit or being
> late to work. So if you don't do it, you're being morally inconsistent.

First of all, the situations are totally different. For saving the child in the lake I can get media coverage that will translate into more website views. And I can tell that story at parties, or when I give paid inspirational lectures. It's valuable. There's plenty of tangible benefits. I have a good chance to also get a reward, at least for the price of my suit. I will not be fired for being late for that reason, and if I was then I would have benefitted: I would have learned that was the wrong place to work.

It's not an accident or lucky fact that I could benefit in various concrete ways from doing it. Living morally has real benefits. That's the typical case.



Regarding those charities, I think it's a lot trickier than that. A large portion of charity to Africa is corrupt. A lot is corrupt (morally, not literally stealing money) and wasteful on the Western end of things. A lot is corrupt (with e.g. aid money being taken by force) on the African side of things.

I don't know offhand the name of any Africa related charity that I'd feel morally safe giving a dime to. I don't think I could give a dime, in good conscious, without doing research on how it will be spent.

Further, the reason people in Africa are dying is not for lack of a dime. It's basically because they're being murdered (somewhat indirectly) by those in power (who destroy the economy and use force for various purposes). I don't think donating to victims of that sort is the proper response. If I was going to help them I'd want to provide them first with defense, not with money. Giving people money who are ruled by thugs who aren't shy about taking their money is never going to work great. They need protection from violence and then they'll be able to create their own wealth. I'm not aware of any charity which understands this that I could donate to.

PS lots of charities give things like food aid, or other specific goods, rather than cash. That is immoral and disgusting. Their goal is to keep the Africans living a particular type of primitive life -- to "preserve their culture" or whatever. They don't want to give the Africans the power and freedom of choice that cash allows. Basically they treat Africa as a human zoo, and they are racist.

>
> My response to this argument is that there's a difference in the morality
> of extreme/emergency situations and the morality of everyday life. The
> morality of an extreme situation is mainly focused around ending the
> extreme situation and returning to everyday life. The morality of saving a
> child who is drowning in a lake (whether here or in Africa) is
> fundamentally different from the morality of saving a child who is
> chronically malnourished (again, whether here or in Africa). So it's not
> inconsistent to say you'd save the drowning child but not donate all of
> one's disposable income to African relief charities.

I don't agree. Why make a special exception? Moral thinking should be principled, not exception riddled.

And what emergency? It's not *my* emergency. It could only become *my* emergency if I chose to care. So the relevant moral decision making happens when there is, for me, no emergency.


> There's more depth to this argument if you're interested, but that's the
> high level outline. I believe the altruistic arguments I use this to
> counter originate mainly from Peter Singer.

Singer is awful. And, btw, you won't find DD praising him.

>
> The example above is just one of a larger class of arguments, wherein
> someone makes a case for altruism predicated on the need for consistency
> between one's everyday life and extreme/rare situations. So I generalize my
> response as well, perhaps too much in this case. Basically, whenever
> someone's talking about everyday morality and then makes an argument
> claiming the need for consistency with some odd/extreme/emergency
> situation, it triggers this heuristic.

None of this really addresses the issue: DD was making a narrow argument directly related to something you said. How is one to discuss with someone who isn't responsive to specific, narrow arguments regarding specific things he said?

[Elliot Temple]

On Nov 15, 2012, at 3:03 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sunday, November 11, 2012 3:19:06 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Nov 11, 2012, at 1:17 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com <javascript:>>

>> wrote:
>>
>>>> What I said is that the combination of departing from convention, plus
>> not
>>>> thinking about it well, is dangerous.
>>>>
>>>

>>> What is your standard for thinking about it well enough not to force
>> your
>>> kids to go to school?
>>
>> I don't know a good rule of thumb for this. But one can figure it out with
>> guesses and criticism, as usual. That'll get the best answer he knows how
>> -- and better than that if he gets external criticism, e.g. on TCS list
>> (David Friedman, by the way, has met and chatted with some TCSers and could
>> know about it and be a subscriber, if he wanted to be).
>>
>
> My best guess so far is: if you strongly dislike being with your kids for
> long periods of time (surprisingly common), or you dislike learning things
> (also common), or you can't spare the time to help your kids learn due to
> economic reasons or health reasons or whatever (very common), then its
> better to force your kids to go to conventional school than try to
> homeschool because you will likely do worse than school. You should work on
> changing those factors as doing so will improve both your life and your
> child's and give you a realistic option of homeschooling. But if/once you
> like being with your kids, you like learning, and you have the time then
> you should not force your kids to go to school. You should give them the
> option to go to school if they want, or to learn at home. I never advocate
> forcing kids not to go to school if they want to go.
>
> As a vocal homeschooling advocate, I get asked about this fairly frequently.
>
> You seem to be offering a criticism of my guess, by your assertion that
> "not thinking about it well" is dangerous and worse than convention and
> using the example of David Friedman.

David Friedman is an unschooler not a homeschooler.

Unschooling is a specific term that does *not* refer to homeschooling in general. The youtube video description specifically says he's an unschooler.

Typical unschoolers and homeschoolers do not offer their kid the choice to attend school if they want to. Doing that makes things a *lot* better. (Some say they do, but don't really give a free choice. They discourage it and do not provide much help doing school.) I think giving the option is an example of the sort of good thinking that's important when deviating from tradition.


Modern school is relatively recent, not such a major tradition. It still matters but older traditions matter more. Unschoolers typically grossly violate many old parenting ideas. For example, many unschoolers think learning happens naturally/automatically, and they are quite hostile to many things homeschoolers do. I think the traditional attitude is more along the lines of learning takes work, and that this is better -- closer to the truth -- than typical unschooler attitudes.

Unschoolers typically seem to think that if children follow their whims then things will work out great, and a lot of the parent's job is to get out of the way. This has some truth to it, but it's pretty false, and overall it's worse than a more typical attitude that parents do need to do stuff and many of children's whims are ignorant mistakes.


> It's fine to say people should think
> better, but that's vague and doesn't address the person who asks, "should I
> try to homeschool or not?" You seem to be saying that more parents ought to
> force their kids to go to school than I have been saying ought to. But I'm
> not clear on how it would specifically affect the recommendations I make.

If someone wants to homeschool, in a regular way, not unschool, and they give their kid the genuine option to attend school if he wants to, then I'm not too worried. They may well mess things up, but so may any parent.

If they fancy themselves an intellectual and start trying more radical things, but don't know what they are talking about too well, then I'd be more concerned.

(Again, note I only watched the start of the video so I don't have a strong opinion about DF in particular for this issue.)

>
> You have said that TCS is hard to learn and I agree that it is. As
> consequence of that, it would seem that a recommendation for parents to
> learn TCS before departing from educational convention is tantamount to a
> recommendation that most people who currently homeschool should instead
> force their kids to go to school for a significant period of time.
>
> Can you state your criticism(s) of my best guess more clearly, in a way
> that could help improve it?

I don't think this is taking into account incremental progress and small steps. Someone who wants to learn TCS can start making little changes quickly.

>
>>
>>> Do you think that, presented with such a standard, people like David
>>> Friedman would recognize that they haven't thought about it well enough
>> to
>>> not force their kids to go to school?
>>
>> I don't know what "people like David Friedman" means in this context.
>>
>> DF has a reputation as a particularly smart, knowledgeable person. He's an
>> author.
>
>
> Right. DF seems to be much smarter than the average person who asks me
> about homeschooling. So if DF shouldn't homeschool, most of the people I
> have been recommending to homeschool shouldn't homeschool either.
>
>
>> But he has really bad ideas about morality. He's not a typical person.
>
>
> In what way(s) are his ideas about morality worse than a typical person's?

To start with, he's a utilitarian. That is not a majority mistake.

I don't really know what to do with questions like this. You provided no information about what you know or think on the topic. It's not clear if you know what his ideas about morality are but think they are good, or if you don't know what they are, or you know what they are but don't know if they are good or bad, or what.


>> I don't know what sort of discussions he's interested in but I suspect
>> maybe he's too much of an academic (with respect for academic status) and
>> that'd cause problems.
>>
>
> Yes, I agree that a focus on academic status is problematic. But is that
> more problematic than, say, a parent who thinks anything beyond basic math
> is just way too hard for anyone without the "math gene" to learn and
> conveys that attitude to their child? (That's common) Or, a parent who
> thinks the only things that are really important to learn come from reading
> the Bible, and so requires the child to spend a great deal of time on Bible
> study? (That's also common).
>
> I don't think those problems are less severe than academic status. If DF
> shouldn't be homeschooling then neither should the people with those other
> two problems, or the majority of people who are homeschooling today for
> that matter.
>
> Yet I think there are too few people homeschooling, rather than too many. I
> think that forcing a child into conventional school is worse than
> homeschooling with a parent like DF. You seem to disagree.

Since he's not a homeschooler, and homeschooling was not really what concerned me much, this doesn't really apply.


>
>> I don't think the truth of these ideas depends on who would recognize
>> their truth.
>>
>
> Correct - it doesn't. However, when you're being proscriptive it's more
> effective to do so in a way that people can recognize the boundaries of
> your proscription. Then they can either accept or criticize your
> proscription, instead of wondering, "does this even apply to me?"
>
> What I mean by "proscriptive" is that when you consider someone like DF,
> who seems significantly smarter than average and is homeschooling,

that isn't what he's doing

> and you
> say that what he's doing is worse than convention because he doesn't think
> well enough, that seems to imply that tons of people who homeschool ought
> to force their kids into conventional school instead.
>
>
>>
>>> Presuming that your standard for thinking about it well enough cannot be
>>> met by people like David Friedman instantaneously, do you recommend that
>>> while they are working on thinking well enough such people should force
>>> their kids to go to school?
>>
>> I can't make generic recommendations about temporary measures to deal with
>> situations one has already messed up. People in messed up situations need
>> to look at their specific situation and come up with a customized way
>> forward.
>>
>> In general, their way forward will focus on the specific problems most
>> urgent for them, which isn't the same as everyone else, and use resources
>> they have which most people don't have (most people have some resources
>> available that you couldn't generically expect everyone to have). And it
>> depends on their ideas, and they have to do something they think makes
>> sense.
>>
>
> Compared to your usual moral pronouncements this sounds like a cop-out.

Questions of the form "suppose someone doesn't understand what you're advocating (e.g. TCS) and isn't doing it. then what should they do?" are extremely hard to give a typical answer to.

you basically asked what i recommend people do when they aren't doing what i recommend, because they do not yet understand my recommendations. i don't think you can expect any sort of strong answer to that. my first level recommendations are stronger, but my second level recommendations on what to do when *ignoring my recommendations* are more of a "whatever, do your best, what are you asking me for?"

>
> You didn't waffle like this on whether it is immoral to force a child to
> study reading if he doesn't do so on his own by a certain age. Yet, that's
> exactly what conventional schools *always* do, and they do it at a much
> younger age than most homeschooling parents do, and with much harsher
> methods than most homeschoolers use.
>
> Of course what DF is doing could be better. Same goes for me and for every
> other parent, homeschoolers or not. People are fallible, and we should all
> try to learn and do better and come up with the best way forward given our
> unique situation and past mistakes.
>
> You went further than that. You made a statement that what DF and, by
> implication, most homeschoolers

that was not the implication.

> are doing is dangerous and worse than
> convention. We know what convention is: force your kid to go to school. Yet
> you seem uncomfortable clearly stating what seems the logical implication
> here: That for most homeschoolers, you think forcing their kids to go to
> school instead of homeschooling would constitute a moral improvement. Do
> you not think that, or do you just not want to say it?

i do not think that.

[Elliot Temple]

On Nov 17, 2012, at 5:20 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thursday, November 15, 2012 5:42:20 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Nov 15, 2012, at 3:03 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com <javascript:>>

> We have a misunderstanding over definitions again.
>
> With the homeschooling community, unschooling is viewed as a *method* used
> by some homeschoolers. It is not viewed as something distinct from
> homeschooling.

I think maybe you misread "in general" as applying to the whole sentence, when it was meant to apply to "homeschooling".

I was saying unschooling does not refer to all homeschooling.

You seem to agree, so I don't know why you ever thought I was talking about all homeschooling, and replied as such. Originally I thought you simply hadn't noticed that DF was an unschooler in particular, or didn't realize I considered that important. Now I don't really get it.

I don't see how definitions are relevant since I don't see how your reply (that took me as talking about all homeschoolers) makes sense with your definition (that says unschoolers are a fraction of homeschoolers, which I don't have a problem with).

You took me as commenting on *all homeschooling* when I wasn't. Now you blame definitions but I don't see how that explains it.

>
> Unschooling is viewed as one end of a continuum, the other end being
> "school-at-home" in which all of the structure and curriculum of a
> conventional school are replicated in the home. Being at either end of this
> continuum is not as common as being somewhere in between. Most parents,
> including me, provide more choice about what to study, when, and how much
> than a conventional school would - but we also do not leave the matter
> completely up to our children.

And I'm saying the far unschooling end, plus bad thinking, combined, is cause for concern.

>
> The only distinguishing characteristic of homeschooling is regarded to be
> that your child is physically at home with the parent providing *some* sort
> of assistance, rather than at school or at home with, say, a drugged out
> parent or home alone.
>
> But this difference is minor; you can think of unschooling as distinct from
> homeschooling if you like. What's more important is the morality of the
> situation, which I had percieved you thought differently than these
> messages indicate (more below)...

In my understanding, unschoolers do not like to be called homeschoolers. I agree this terminology thing isn't important to our discussion, so I don't know why you're so concerned about it.

>
>
>>
>> Typical unschoolers and homeschoolers do not offer their kid the choice to
>> attend school if they want to. Doing that makes things a *lot* better.
>> (Some say they do, but don't really give a free choice. They discourage it
>> and do not provide much help doing school.) I think giving the option is an
>> example of the sort of good thinking that's important when deviating from
>> tradition.
>>
>

> We tell our kids they can go to school if they want. If they said they
> wanted to go we'd help them.
>
> We treat it a lot like church. We tell our kids they can go to church if
> they want. When they want to it's not us helping them, it's other family
> members, but the same general idea. And they've actually done that.

Parental help isn't needed to visit church, but it becomes important if one wants to get more involved and do things like study the Bible. Only being able to ask questions about Biblical interpretation of other people, but not one's parents, would be a significant handicap, especially for younger children.

So it's important that such help could be available.

The situation with school is similar: child may not need much parental help (just signing him up and maybe transportation) to casually try it for a week. But if child is more serious about school, and wants to try it more rigorously, then more help is going to be needed, and parent is going to need to provide it. And it should be available.


I have no idea if you're saying it's never come up or that you would actually refuse if it did. I don't mean to comment on you, simply to state the moral approach.

>
> In both cases they know our thoughts on the matter are not positive

I assume this is shorthand for telling them actual arguments, not just whether you approve or disapprove.

> but
> we're more favorable towards school than church. We do our best to make the
> choice as free as possible without hiding our own opinions from them. The
> biggest impediment to trying school isn't us; the state requires them to
> take pre-entry tests and such.

eww :(

> If they could just attend for a day or few
> without all the bureaucratic rigamarole (like they can church) then they
> would probably try it.
>
> My perception is that giving kids a real choice to attend school is common
> among the homeschoolers I know. One reason is that a lot of the kids
> actually do try it, and I don't hear the parents discouraging it or
> complaining about it.

A lot of TCSers are familiar with a lot of homeschoolers in multiple communities and have said that a large amount of them don't really give a free choice about attending school (including providing full and proper help with child's school project, not just sitting back and saying "you're on your own" or something with more equivocation).

I believe they often relax by highschool and commonly even advocate school for university.

>
>> Modern school is relatively recent, not such a major tradition. It still
>> matters but older traditions matter more. Unschoolers typically grossly
>> violate many old parenting ideas. For example, many unschoolers think
>> learning happens naturally/automatically, and they are quite hostile to
>> many things homeschoolers do. I think the traditional attitude is more
>> along the lines of learning takes work, and that this is better -- closer
>> to the truth -- than typical unschooler attitudes.
>>
>

> This is where I'm more than a little lost. Everything I've specifically
> discussed with you that I do with my kids that's *not* unschooling, you've
> strongly objected to. Making a certain amount of reading, math, etc.
> mandatory is precisely the way in which our practices differ from
> unschoolers. Both you*, and the unschoolers, say that I shouldn't make
> those things mandatory. If I didn't make them mandatory, as you suggest,
> then the unschoolers would regard me as one of their own!
>
> Yet above you seem to be saying that what I do is better than unschooling?

First, I do not advocate the same things as unschoolers. I'll tell you a little story. I actually have tried to join a large, prominent unschooling email list and talk to them. They rather disliked me. I don't think you would like them.

One issue we argued about is math. I asked what they thought about how to learn math without attending school, because most math books I'm aware of kinda suck (e.g. lots are textbooks), so I wondered if they might know anything about it. It seems like the kind of thing they ought to know, right? How do you unschool if you haven't got any ideas about where to learn math besides school or textbooks? And I specifically asked how they would go about learning math beyond high school calculus level, or helping their kid learn it, without school. I'm sure they can figure out how to teach counting without a school or textbook, but some people want to learn more math than that!

The response was basically: why would anyone learn that? Don't learn it. Kids don't need advanced math. No kid would be interested in that, they thought, and if the person isn't a young kid then they don't even care about the issue.

Fuck that, fuck them.



Non-mandatory is totally not the same thing as unschooling. I advocate voluntary, consensual relationships with one's child. Those are important, that's the principle, the principle is not rejecting resembling school in form, or rejecting any policy used by a school.


Also to try to make sure things are clear, my comments about DF weren't talking about you. That's separate.

Further, what I advocate is that people do various things *and do them thoughtfully and well*. If they only do half of this suggestion -- do something kind of like what I said, but do it badly without proper understanding -- then in some cases that'll be worse than nothing.


> How is that?
>
> * Here's what you said that I'm referring to:
> <BEGIN QUOTE>

> On Oct 17, 2012, at 10:53 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I think children have a right to
>> study whatever subjects they are interested in, but not a right to refuse
> a
>> reasonable amount of study in certain subjects (like reading) parents
>> believe are very important to their future self sufficiency.
>

> So the more the *parent* feels or believes a certain way, the more the
> *child* is subject to being bossed around, controlled and coerced?
>

> What a recipe for tyranny. The parent simply has to have certain thoughts
> and that justifies force!!
>

> Can you see how that would be a super bad idea?

> <END QUOTE>

Is a word I said there false? Which?

>
>> Unschoolers typically seem to think that if children follow their whims
>> then things will work out great, and a lot of the parent's job is to get
>> out of the way. This has some truth to it, but it's pretty false, and
>> overall it's worse than a more typical attitude that parents do need to do
>> stuff and many of children's whims are ignorant mistakes.
>>
>

> I agree that parents need to do stuff and many children's whims are
> ignorant mistakes. This is part of why I'm not an unschooler and also why I
> have resisted TCS.

But TCS is nothing like "do nothing". It's strongly criticized and rejected neglectful parenting. TCS is about how to parent, it's not a claim that no parenting is necessary! It differs in its suggestions on what sort of actions parents should be taking and what's helpful, but it does say to do actions.

> Yet you originally seemed to be criticizing DF for *not*
> getting out of the way; he was manipulating his kids into studying things
> he thought were important.

Yeah I think it's a contradiction with unschooling (can be hard to tell, b/c unschooling isn't very principled). You seem to be concluding that maybe he isn't much of an unschooler. I don't know. I didn't research him in depth, but my initial takeway was that he's confused and has contradictory ideas, and that that isn't going to go well.

> <BEGIN QUOTE>

> Looks long. I listened to 2.5 minutes and already he's talking about how he
> does stupid shit to manipulate his kids.

> <END QUOTE>
>
> This seems to conflict with your criticism of unschooling above it. And, in
> my experience, the manipulation is more common in unschoolers than is pure
> whim worship.

Well, that wouldn't really surprise me at all. Get rid of all the rules, do not replace them with anything good, and then what happens? A common thing that happens next is arbitrary power, non-objective decision making, and so on fills the void.

If anything I'd say you're now agreeing with my basic point: that going to some non-traditional extremes like unschooling, combined with bad thinking, is dangerous. You give the example that, having lost traditional controls, they may just start using other forms of control. I agree they may well do that. And that's bad! Better to use the traditional ways of controlling children than ones you made up last year which are full of new mistakes you made that the traditional ways don't make.

> Most unschoolers I know don't seem to think that children
> only following their whims is great; they just think that when persuading
> them fails it's better to use subtle manipulation to get children to learn
> things the parent considers important, rather than explicit mandates.

you're not selling me on unschooling being any better than homeschooling or convention! what are we arguing about?

>
> To be clear, I do understand that you regard explicit persuasion as better
> than either subtle manipulation or outright mandates. (I do too; our
> disagreement has been over what to do when persuasion fails).
>
> If you're saying that subtle manipulation is worse than explicit mandates,
> I'd agree with that too. And if all you're saying here is that unschoolers
> / DF are worse than homeschoolers and conventional school because subtle
> manipulation is worse than explicit mandates and some unschoolers are whim
> worshippers which is bad, I get it and I agree. But I have the sense
> there's something else important that I'm missing.

I wouldn't limit my complaints about them to subtle manipulation. But I agree with the point, yes. This is one of the practical, concrete consequences of the more abstract mistake I criticized. Violating tradition combined with bad thinking leads to bad results. this is one example. When you get rid of some traditional ways of living, and you don't replace them with well thought out stuff, then what's going to fill the void? Don't expect the answer to that to be anything good!

> OK, what's your opinion of this:
> If you strongly dislike being with your kids for long periods of time, or
> you dislike learning things, or you can't spare the time to help your kids
> learn due to economic reasons or health reasons or whatever,

this is not a fun premise, and not one that lends itself to any reasonable conclusions or any advice a better person would want to follow. It's going to get answers replying to this awful situation trying to cope with it, that won't be what better people need to do. But ok let's see where this goes...

> then its
> better to force your kids to go to conventional school than try to
> homeschool because you will likely do worse than school.

Oh man. So basically you hate your kids. Is it better to make them be around you, which is awful, or make them go to school, which may be pretty awful too? Uhh. The problem with this question is the person in this situation damn well doesn't want my advice and won't listen to me anyway.

So, let's pretend he's really religious and he's confused me with Jesus, and he finds this odd and won't talk to me at any length but only asks me brief questions and accepts brief answers and then runs away again. Something like that...

So he comes up to me and asks if he should send his kids to school, or have them stay home even though he doesn't want them there.

Then I might answer: well, if you make them stay home then everyone in the family will definitely be unhappy. If you send them to school, maybe you'll be happy and get along with them better when they are at home, and hell some people actually like school so they have a fighting chance I guess.


But I'd find the question bizarre. He doesn't want them at home and he isn't wise enough to know any real benefits of them being at home. So he won't ask about this issue, he won't see any reason to have them stay home, it won't come up. It would only come up if he was a different person, if the premises were different.

> You should work on
> changing those factors as doing so will improve both your life and your
> child's and give you a realistic option of homeschooling.

Oh God. He's open to improvement? Really? Maybe I misread who he is. But I'm skeptical. I think he's not going to improve his parenting and isn't any good as a thinker.

I don't think this whole thing makes much sense. But, hell, I already guessed maybe he should send them to school even when I didn't think he was ever going to improve. Why? Because I figured he'd torture them at home just as much as their teachers would. More. He doesn't want them there and will resent it.

I also don't really imagine children in such a situation actually wanting to stay home. I for one disliked school, quite a bit, and would have liked to stay home instead, but I still can't imagine that I would have wanted to stay home if my parents had hated me.


If the kid actually wants to stay home, and just be left alone with internet, books, TV and video games all day -- and driven a few places -- then maybe even a parent who hates his kid could manage that. Realistically he will choose not to manage it. But if for some reason he was obeying my advice, and if for some reason I was willing to give advice to be obeyed not rationally evaluated, then in that case I guess he should just leave the kid alone, not make him go to school. so what?

> But if/once you
> like being with your kids, you like learning, and you have the time then
> you should not force your kids to go to school. You should give them the

> option to go to school if they want, or to learn at home. If they do learn
> at home, don't unschool and either way, try to learn TCS and make changes
> as you learn it.

I think you're asking the wrong thing and I don't know what you want to know. I do not think commenting on these extreme, unrealistic situations is very productive and i don't really get the point.

[Jason]

On Saturday, November 17, 2012 7:44:17 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:

On Nov 17, 2012, at 5:20 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

> We tell our kids they can go to school if they want. If they said they
> wanted to go we'd help them.
>
> We treat it a lot like church. We tell our kids they can go to church if
> they want. When they want to it's not us helping them, it's other family
> members, but the same general idea. And they've actually done that.

Parental help isn't needed to visit church, but it becomes important if one wants to get more involved and do things like study the Bible. Only being able to ask questions about Biblical interpretation of other people, but not one's parents, would be a significant handicap, especially for younger children.

So it's important that such help could be available.

It would be, at least from me. My wife never studied the Bible much so she wouldn't be able to give much help. I think it would actually be pretty fun to do if they were interested. But once church got out of the cookies and juice, duck-duck-goose playing stage they haven't wanted to go or read the Bible. I can't blame them. :-)
 

The situation with school is similar: child may not need much parental help (just signing him up and maybe transportation) to casually try it for a week. But if child is more serious about school, and wants to try it more rigorously, then more help is going to be needed, and parent is going to need to provide it. And it should be available.


I have no idea if you're saying it's never come up or that you would actually refuse if it did. I don't mean to comment on you, simply to state the moral approach.

It's never come up, but neither my wife nor I would refuse if it did. Helping with schoolwork and supplementing would be less work than homeschooling is.

 

>
> In both cases they know our thoughts on the matter are not positive

I assume this is shorthand for telling them actual arguments, not just whether you approve or disapprove.

Yes
 

> but
> we're more favorable towards school than church. We do our best to make the
> choice as free as possible without hiding our own opinions from them. The
> biggest impediment to trying school isn't us; the state requires them to
> take pre-entry tests and such.

eww :(

> If they could just attend for a day or few
> without all the bureaucratic rigamarole (like they can church) then they
> would probably try it.
>
> My perception is that giving kids a real choice to attend school is common
> among the homeschoolers I know. One reason is that a lot of the kids
> actually do try it, and I don't hear the parents discouraging it or
> complaining about it.

A lot of TCSers are familiar with a lot of homeschoolers in multiple communities and have said that a large amount of them don't really give a free choice about attending school (including providing full and proper help with child's school project, not just sitting back and saying "you're on your own" or something with more equivocation).

I believe they often relax by highschool and commonly even advocate school for university.

There's always a risk in presenting binary "there's two kinds..." type categorizations, and I don't intend to say that all homeschoolers fall cleanly into one of two categories. That said, there are two classes of motivation prevalent in the homeschool community at large and within specific families:
- Homeschooling for more: more subjects, more freedom, more one-on-one time, more advanced information, more help, etc.
- Homeschooling to protect, which I sometimes call homeschooling for less: less exposure to ideas like evolution and sex, less peer pressure, less bullies, etc.

Every homeschooler has a little of each motivation, but one of the two tends to predominate.

Among those of the "more" variety, like us, a child wanting to try school isn't threatening. We can still do most of our "more" things outside of school hours if the child wants to go to school. At worst we just have somewhat less time with the child to do them, but we have more time to plan them.

But among those of the "less" variety, school is probably really threatening because it pretty much destroys their entire motivation in homeschooling.

The secular homeschool groups seem to be dominated by "more" motivations, whereas my impression is that the religious homeschool groups are dominated by "less" motivations.

Among the people in our secular homeschooling group, I think most are "more" people and offer their children a real choice to attend school. But I'm also aware that our group is the only secular group in town, whereas there are six religious groups of equal or greater size. So its possible there is no conflict between my observations and those of the TCSers you mentioned.
  

>
>> Modern school is relatively recent, not such a major tradition. It still
>> matters but older traditions matter more. Unschoolers typically grossly
>> violate many old parenting ideas. For example, many unschoolers think
>> learning happens naturally/automatically, and they are quite hostile to
>> many things homeschoolers do. I think the traditional attitude is more
>> along the lines of learning takes work, and that this is better -- closer
>> to the truth -- than typical unschooler attitudes.
>>
>
> This is where I'm more than a little lost. Everything I've specifically
> discussed with you that I do with my kids that's *not* unschooling, you've
> strongly objected to. Making a certain amount of reading, math, etc.
> mandatory is precisely the way in which our practices differ from
> unschoolers. Both you*, and the unschoolers, say that I shouldn't make
> those things mandatory. If I didn't make them mandatory, as you suggest,
> then the unschoolers would regard me as one of their own!
>
> Yet above you seem to be saying that what I do is better than unschooling?

First, I do not advocate the same things as unschoolers. I'll tell you a little story. I actually have tried to join a large, prominent unschooling email list and talk to them. They rather disliked me. I don't think you would like them.

One issue we argued about is math. I asked what they thought about how to learn math without attending school, because most math books I'm aware of kinda suck (e.g. lots are textbooks), so I wondered if they might know anything about it. It seems like the kind of thing they ought to know, right? How do you unschool if you haven't got any ideas about where to learn math besides school or textbooks? And I specifically asked how they would go about learning math beyond high school calculus level, or helping their kid learn it, without school. I'm sure they can figure out how to teach counting without a school or textbook, but some people want to learn more math than that!

The response was basically: why would anyone learn that? Don't learn it. Kids don't need advanced math. No kid would be interested in that, they thought, and if the person isn't a young kid then they don't even care about the issue.

Fuck that, fuck them.



Non-mandatory is totally not the same thing as unschooling. I advocate voluntary, consensual relationships with one's child. Those are important, that's the principle, the principle is not rejecting resembling school in form, or rejecting any policy used by a school.


Also to try to make sure things are clear, my comments about DF weren't talking about you. That's separate.

Further, what I advocate is that people do various things *and do them thoughtfully and well*. If they only do half of this suggestion -- do something kind of like what I said, but do it badly without proper understanding -- then in some cases that'll be worse than nothing.

Until this exchange if someone familiar with the homeschooling community had asked me what TCS was I'd have said that it's kind of like unschooling, only about everything in life instead of just school.

And I guess that a lot of unschoolers would read about TCS at a cursory level and say, "yeah, that's exactly what we're already doing."

So when you criticized unschooling I figured you'd hate homeschooling even more since it is, at least explicitly, a less voluntary approach than unschooling.
 

> How is that?
>
> * Here's what you said that I'm referring to:
> <BEGIN QUOTE>
> On Oct 17, 2012, at 10:53 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I think children have a right to
>> study whatever subjects they are interested in, but not a right to refuse
> a
>> reasonable amount of study in certain subjects (like reading) parents
>> believe are very important to their future self sufficiency.
>
> So the more the *parent* feels or believes a certain way, the more the
> *child* is subject to being bossed around, controlled and coerced?
>
> What a recipe for tyranny. The parent simply has to have certain thoughts
> and that justifies force!!
>
> Can you see how that would be a super bad idea?
> <END QUOTE>

Is a word I said there false? Which?

It never occurred to me that a TCS advocate would consider unschooling, which at least nominally avoids exactly what you called a "super bad idea" above, to nevertheless be an even worse idea. So is unschooling a "really extra super bad idea?"
 

>> Unschoolers typically seem to think that if children follow their whims
>> then things will work out great, and a lot of the parent's job is to get
>> out of the way. This has some truth to it, but it's pretty false, and
>> overall it's worse than a more typical attitude that parents do need to do
>> stuff and many of children's whims are ignorant mistakes.
>>
>
> I agree that parents need to do stuff and many children's whims are
> ignorant mistakes. This is part of why I'm not an unschooler and also why I
> have resisted TCS.

But TCS is nothing like "do nothing". It's strongly criticized and rejected neglectful parenting. TCS is about how to parent, it's not a claim that no parenting is necessary! It differs in its suggestions on what sort of actions parents should be taking and what's helpful, but it does say to do actions.

In terms of a continuum:
DO LESS <----> DO MORE
I see that TCS isn't like unschooling.

But in terms of a continuum:
MORE VOLUNTARY <-----> MORE MANDATORY
TCS is more like unschooling at least in terms of explicit mandates than homeschooling, right? That's the continuum I was thinking of.
 

> Yet you originally seemed to be criticizing DF for *not*
> getting out of the way; he was manipulating his kids into studying things
> he thought were important.

Yeah I think it's a contradiction with unschooling (can be hard to tell, b/c unschooling isn't very principled). You seem to be concluding that maybe he isn't much of an unschooler. I don't know. I didn't research him in depth, but my initial takeway was that he's confused and has contradictory ideas, and that that isn't going to go well.

> <BEGIN QUOTE>
> Looks long. I listened to 2.5 minutes and already he's talking about how he
> does stupid shit to manipulate his kids.
> <END QUOTE>
>
> This seems to conflict with your criticism of unschooling above it. And, in
> my experience, the manipulation is more common in unschoolers than is pure
> whim worship.

Well, that wouldn't really surprise me at all. Get rid of all the rules, do not replace them with anything good, and then what happens? A common thing that happens next is arbitrary power, non-objective decision making, and so on fills the void.

If anything I'd say you're now agreeing with my basic point: that going to some non-traditional extremes like unschooling, combined with bad thinking, is dangerous. You give the example that, having lost traditional controls, they may just start using other forms of control. I agree they may well do that. And that's bad! Better to use the traditional ways of controlling children than ones you made up last year which are full of new mistakes you made that the traditional ways don't make.

OK, that makes sense, just wasn't at all what I expected. While I won't claim we thought about it in exactly this way, my wife and did think about, talk about, and reject unschooling. We rejected it because we weren't convinced the children would learn what they needed to learn using a pure unschooling method. And to some extent that's behind my uneasiness with TCS as well. I don't want to throw out the old method until I'm sure the new method will be better.
 

>
> OK, what's your opinion of this:
> If you strongly dislike being with your kids for long periods of time, or
> you dislike learning things, or you can't spare the time to help your kids
> learn due to economic reasons or health reasons or whatever,

this is not a fun premise, and not one that lends itself to any reasonable conclusions or any advice a better person would want to follow. It's going to get answers replying to this awful situation trying to cope with it, that won't be what better people need to do. But ok let's see where this goes...

> then its
> better to force your kids to go to conventional school than try to
> homeschool because you will likely do worse than school.

Oh man. So basically you hate your kids. Is it better to make them be around you, which is awful, or make them go to school, which may be pretty awful too? Uhh. The problem with this question is the person in this situation damn well doesn't want my advice and won't listen to me anyway.

Sad, but common. Most parents won't say it explicitly, though I have heard a few parents casually refer to their kids with terms like "hemorrhoids," as if every parent feels that way. But if you scratch the surface of the parents who say things like "oh, I could never homeschool" quite often it's because they hate being around their kids for long periods of time.
 

So, let's pretend he's really religious and he's confused me with Jesus, and he finds this odd and won't talk to me at any length but only asks me brief questions and accepts brief answers and then runs away again. Something like that...

So he comes up to me and asks if he should send his kids to school, or have them stay home even though he doesn't want them there.

Then I might answer: well, if you make them stay home then everyone in the family will definitely be unhappy. If you send them to school, maybe you'll be happy and get along with them better when they are at home, and hell some people actually like school so they have a fighting chance I guess.

Here's what goes on: People hear about reasons to hate public schools:
- The quality of education is bad (true, especially in Arizona)
- There's a lot of bullying and peer pressure (true, all over)
- Kids learn things there that parents don't want them to learn, like evolution, sex, pop culture, other religions, etc. (true, but I don't consider it bad)

Some religious denominations have gone so far as to make explicit pronouncements that good Christian parents must pull their kids out of public school. Atheists commonly look at standardized test scores and global competitiveness rankings (and usually say the system is just terribly underfunded...another issue)

So many of these people that hate public schools for one reason or another start looking at private schools. Big problems there are:
- It's expensive, especially for families with low income / more than one child (common in religions)
- Finding one that's reasonably close, competent, and consistent with one's religious views is often impossible
  - The only atheist friendly schools are Montessori's, there aren't many & they tend to stop after elementary
  - Most religious private schools are Catholic, which the Protestants and Jews generally can't tolerate
  - The protestant ones tend to be of really low academic quality (not that it matters to the hard core fundamentalists)

At which point many of them will start thinking about homeschooling. If one parent is unemployed, or in a relatively low pay job and there's more than one kid, homeschooling is more economically viable than private school. Arizona has a really permissive homeschooling law. You fill out a half-page form, say you agree to teach the standard subjects, send it in, and that's it. Forever. No certification, no curriculum, no review, no testing, etc. Unless you homeschool and then you wants your kid in public school later - then they must be tested "for placement".

So the context of my intro is really: Just because someone doesn't like public school & can't find a good private school & homeschooling is "cheap" doesn't mean they should homeschool!

Maybe they don't want my advice and won't listen, but since I'm a homeschool advocate it's important to make clear that I'm not going on record as saying that *every* parent ought to homeschool.
 
 

But I'd find the question bizarre. He doesn't want them at home and he isn't wise enough to know any real benefits of them being at home. So he won't ask about this issue, he won't see any reason to have them stay home, it won't come up. It would only come up if he was a different person, if the premises were different.

Maybe his pastor just told the congregation to pull their kids out of public school.
Maybe he just saw the latest school rankings where Arizona is second from the bottom.
Both are dumb - but fairly common - reasons people think of homeschooling.
 

> You should work on
> changing those factors as doing so will improve both your life and your
> child's and give you a realistic option of homeschooling.

Oh God. He's open to improvement? Really? Maybe I misread who he is. But I'm skeptical. I think he's not going to improve his parenting and isn't any good as a thinker.

I don't think this whole thing makes much sense. But, hell, I already guessed maybe he should send them to school even when I didn't think he was ever going to improve. Why? Because I figured he'd torture them at home just as much as their teachers would. More. He doesn't want them there and will resent it.

I also don't really imagine children in such a situation actually wanting to stay home. I for one disliked school, quite a bit, and would have liked to stay home instead, but I still can't imagine that I would have wanted to stay home if my parents had hated me.


If the kid actually wants to stay home, and just be left alone with internet, books, TV and video games all day -- and driven a few places -- then maybe even a parent who hates his kid could manage that. Realistically he will choose not to manage it. But if for some reason he was obeying my advice, and if for some reason I was willing to give advice to be obeyed not rationally evaluated, then in that case I guess he should just leave the kid alone, not make him go to school. so what?

Another bit of context: There's a tiny in number but sensational batch of cases of parents who "homeschooled" just as a cover for child abuse or extreme neglect. It's important not to be on record in a way that could be construed to support that sort of behavior, while also not saying anything that would give the impression that it's common.
 

> But if/once you
> like being with your kids, you like learning, and you have the time then
> you should not force your kids to go to school. You should give them the
> option to go to school if they want, or to learn at home. If they do learn
> at home, don't unschool and either way, try to learn TCS and make changes
> as you learn it.

I think you're asking the wrong thing and I don't know what you want to know. I do not think commenting on these extreme, unrealistic situations is very productive and i don't really get the point.

It's not extreme for me to get asked who I think should and shouldn't homeschool. It comes up at least once a month in random conversations. The first thing strangers usually ask about is your family, and once you say you have kids they ask what grade they're in, which always leads to homeschooling because we don't have unitary grades. About 25% of the time homeschooling comes up I'll get asked some form of the "who should homeschool?" question.

Because of your criticism of unschooling, I'm curious what criticisms you'd have of my response to these queries.

It's true that I don't tend to get asked "should I homeschool" directly, especially by idiots who really shouldn't be homeschooling anyway. It's people who want to find out if I'll say something that gives cover to the child abusers, or teachers who see homeschoolers as a threat to their livelihood, or grandparents/relatives who know a parent who they think should/shouldn't be homeschooling, or humanists who think public education is mankind's savior and homeschooling is a threat, or parents who didn't/don't want to homeschool and want validation that they made the right choice.

--Jason

[Elliot Temple]

Some of the things from the separate lists go togther, though. More freedom at home is sort of like protection from being bossed around and coerced by the school authorities.

>
> Among those of the "more" variety, like us, a child wanting to try school
> isn't threatening. We can still do most of our "more" things outside of
> school hours if the child wants to go to school. At worst we just have
> somewhat less time with the child to do them, but we have more time to plan
> them.
>
> But among those of the "less" variety, school is probably really
> threatening because it pretty much destroys their entire motivation in
> homeschooling.
>
> The secular homeschool groups seem to be dominated by "more" motivations,
> whereas my impression is that the religious homeschool groups are dominated
> by "less" motivations.
>
> Among the people in our secular homeschooling group, I think most are
> "more" people and offer their children a real choice to attend school. But
> I'm also aware that our group is the only secular group in town, whereas
> there are six religious groups of equal or greater size. So its possible
> there is no conflict between my observations and those of the TCSers you
> mentioned.

I think a lot of them are actually familiar more with secular than religious groups, and found hostility to letting kid go to school there (sometimes open hostility, sometimes not admitted but present). Maybe some of them are tending towards the radical side though like unschooling, attachment parenting, etc

Unschooling is more radical. Radical + bad thinking = good way to cause a disaster.

If you're going to do something radical, you have to actually learn how to think, learn some philosophy, otherwise you're not doing it right. If you don't know how to think, you cannot judge if the radical thing you're doing is a good or bad idea. And the majority of radical options available are mistakes, so if you do not know how to judge them and pick one at random then the odds you're doing something OK are not 50/50, they're a lot worse than that.

I could criticize some stuff common to homeschoolers. But what for? If typical regular homeschoolers range from 20% worse to 30% better than average, they are doing OK, whatever, I don't care.

If unschoolers range from 80% worse to 40% better than average, then the best case scenario is better -- for the people doing it really thoughtfully -- but that's really dangerous, most of them are messing up badly.


TCS and ARR are sort of on the radical side except they are philosophical and they can be integrated with many traditions. Check out this chart:

http://fallibleideas.com/parenting-and-tradition

It's important to understand the value of tradition, and the rational ways to respect tradition, if one is going to deviate much.

There is a right way to improve on tradition, and a wrong way. In a superficial analysis, TCS makes more changes than unschooling so it's more radical, more dangerous. However, it uses a different methodology. Lots of reforms, but done according to good methodologies, is less dangerous than fewer attempted reforms done according to bad methodologies.

>>
>>> How is that?
>>>
>>> * Here's what you said that I'm referring to:
>>> <BEGIN QUOTE>
>>> On Oct 17, 2012, at 10:53 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think children have a right to
>>>> study whatever subjects they are interested in, but not a right to
>> refuse
>>> a
>>>> reasonable amount of study in certain subjects (like reading) parents
>>>> believe are very important to their future self sufficiency.
>>>
>>> So the more the *parent* feels or believes a certain way, the more the
>>> *child* is subject to being bossed around, controlled and coerced?
>>>
>>> What a recipe for tyranny. The parent simply has to have certain
>> thoughts
>>> and that justifies force!!
>>>
>>> Can you see how that would be a super bad idea?
>>> <END QUOTE>
>>
>> Is a word I said there false? Which?
>>
>
> It never occurred to me that a TCS advocate would consider unschooling,
> which at least nominally avoids exactly what you called a "super bad idea"
> above, to nevertheless be an even worse idea. So is unschooling a "really
> extra super bad idea?"

It can be.

Suppose someone doesn't think much.

If he does normal stuff, he can do get somewhere around average results. Lots of normal stuff can be done competently without much thought because people are so familiar with how to do it, they see examples on TV all the time, their friends do it and can offer advice, their parents did it, and so on. So it's not too hard for them to do.

But if he doesn't think much, and then he does other stuff that he doesn't know how to do, and doesn't know if it's any good or not, then that's a really bad idea. That's a worse idea than being normal.

Either think critically or be kinda normal. It's important to do at least one of those to avoid disaster.


More abstractly, change always introduces error. So, change + error correction is good, it allows for reform and improvement. Change + no error correction does more harm than good. It introduces new errors, breaks stuff that used to work and doesn't fix anything.

>>>> Unschoolers typically seem to think that if children follow their whims
>>>> then things will work out great, and a lot of the parent's job is to
>> get
>>>> out of the way. This has some truth to it, but it's pretty false, and
>>>> overall it's worse than a more typical attitude that parents do need to
>> do
>>>> stuff and many of children's whims are ignorant mistakes.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I agree that parents need to do stuff and many children's whims are
>>> ignorant mistakes. This is part of why I'm not an unschooler and also
>> why I
>>> have resisted TCS.
>>
>> But TCS is nothing like "do nothing". It's strongly criticized and
>> rejected neglectful parenting. TCS is about how to parent, it's not a claim
>> that no parenting is necessary! It differs in its suggestions on what sort
>> of actions parents should be taking and what's helpful, but it does say to
>> do actions.
>>
>
> In terms of a continuum:
> DO LESS <----> DO MORE
> I see that TCS isn't like unschooling.
>
> But in terms of a continuum:
> MORE VOLUNTARY <-----> MORE MANDATORY
> TCS is more like unschooling at least in terms of explicit mandates than
> homeschooling, right? That's the continuum I was thinking of.

I don't think voluntary vs mandatory is a continuum. It reminds me of the concept of partial freedom. In some sense at least, there is no such thing. One is free, or one isn't. Similarly, an action can be voluntary or involuntary. Isn't that a boolean classification?

I would put it more like this: TCS is for rational, voluntary ways of interacting with children at all times. All other approaches are mixed: they have some voluntary and some involuntary interactions. TCS says those involuntary ones are a bad idea.

Is that an extreme position? I don't think so. The position that *all* violation's of a person's freedom or autonomy are bad isn't so extreme, is it? The position that *all* deviations from scientific integrity are mistakes isn't so extreme, is it?

There is a logic to why scientific integrity is good. All deviations violate that logic. It's not extreme to recognize that the reasoning for the value of scientific integrity applies to all science, that it has large reach. Ideas about freedom, liberty, voluntary action, reason, persuasion, and so on also have a lot of reach. They should not be arbitrarily restricted for the sake of hurting children.

On that topic: anything worth learning, a person can be interested in learning and want to learn. Do you agree?

Also: if something is worth learning, that doesn't mean it's right for a particular person to learn it today or even this year.

>>
>>>
>>> OK, what's your opinion of this:
>>> If you strongly dislike being with your kids for long periods of time,
>> or
>>> you dislike learning things, or you can't spare the time to help your
>> kids
>>> learn due to economic reasons or health reasons or whatever,
>>
>> this is not a fun premise, and not one that lends itself to any reasonable
>> conclusions or any advice a better person would want to follow. It's going
>> to get answers replying to this awful situation trying to cope with it,
>> that won't be what better people need to do. But ok let's see where this
>> goes...
>>
>>> then its
>>> better to force your kids to go to conventional school than try to
>>> homeschool because you will likely do worse than school.
>>
>> Oh man. So basically you hate your kids. Is it better to make them be
>> around you, which is awful, or make them go to school, which may be pretty
>> awful too? Uhh. The problem with this question is the person in this
>> situation damn well doesn't want my advice and won't listen to me anyway.
>>
>
> Sad, but common. Most parents won't say it explicitly, though I have heard
> a few parents casually refer to their kids with terms like "hemorrhoids,"

Mainstream, popular TV shows, on the other hand, will say explicitly how awful kids are. People think it's funny to mention this, or something. They seem to act like it's mostly true, and that kids are inconvenient, but when you have your own kid you love him so it becomes different for you.

> as if every parent feels that way.

I think the large majority of parents do feel that way at least a little. So it's a pretty safe thing to say in a lot of social groups.

> But if you scratch the surface of the
> parents who say things like "oh, I could never homeschool" quite often it's
> because they hate being around their kids for long periods of time.

Yeah. Ugh.

>
>
>> So, let's pretend he's really religious and he's confused me with Jesus,
>> and he finds this odd and won't talk to me at any length but only asks me
>> brief questions and accepts brief answers and then runs away again.
>> Something like that...
>>
>> So he comes up to me and asks if he should send his kids to school, or
>> have them stay home even though he doesn't want them there.
>>
>> Then I might answer: well, if you make them stay home then everyone in the
>> family will definitely be unhappy. If you send them to school, maybe you'll
>> be happy and get along with them better when they are at home, and hell
>> some people actually like school so they have a fighting chance I guess.
>>
>
> Here's what goes on: People hear about reasons to hate public schools:
> - The quality of education is bad (true, especially in Arizona)

While I agree this is actually true, I think the reasons most people have for this opinion are false.

A lot of their reasoning is focussed on test scores. But I don't think those standardized tests are in fact testing for high quality of education.

> - There's a lot of bullying and peer pressure (true, all over)
> - Kids learn things there that parents don't want them to learn, like
> evolution, sex, pop culture, other religions, etc. (true, but I don't
> consider it bad)
>
> Some religious denominations have gone so far as to make explicit
> pronouncements that good Christian parents must pull their kids out of
> public school. Atheists commonly look at standardized test scores and
> global competitiveness rankings (and usually say the system is just
> terribly underfunded...another issue)

The underfunded position is dumb. Funding has been increased a ton and it hasn't fix it. The problem looks a lot more like bad management (of funds and other things) than lack of funds.

>
> So many of these people that hate public schools for one reason or another
> start looking at private schools. Big problems there are:
> - It's expensive, especially for families with low income / more than one
> child (common in religions)
> - Finding one that's reasonably close, competent, and consistent with one's
> religious views is often impossible
> - The only atheist friendly schools are Montessori's, there aren't many &
> they tend to stop after elementary

Montessori is quite bad, FYI.

For example, one of their ideas is you can't tell kids what to do (or something like that) so you have to control them indirectly and then for some reason that's good. They do this by leaving things out where the kid will be, so the kid will discover them "freely, on his own" (or something).

Of course they leave out some things, but not others. And they do not do it according to their best guesses about what the kid would like. They're trying to control the kid according to some agenda of their own.


Yes I am aware of the positive position on Montessori by Ayn Rand, though I don't think she published much about it. I think she was mistaken and that she did not publish any refutations of my criticisms of Montessori. Perhaps they could even have persuaded her, if she was alive to read them.

That one is easy: he should not do it simply because someone told him to. He shouldn't obey authority. He should live his life using reasons he understands, not obedience. If the pastor gave no arguments, he shouldn't do as he's told. If the pastor did give an argument, the source is not even relevant.

> Maybe he just saw the latest school rankings where Arizona is second from
> the bottom.
> Both are dumb - but fairly common - reasons people think of homeschooling.

If the question is, "I don't want to homeschool but for some bad reason I think I'm supposed to. Should I make myself do it?" then the answer will typically be "no".

People are dumb and ask dumb questions. I'd suggest answering a different question than they actually asked. Say something like, "If you're interested, I think it's a great option to look into. I can give you information if you want." or "If you want to do it, it can work really well" or that kind of thing.

Or say, "I think you (and everyone else) should learn a little bit about it and then tell your kids what it is, and see if they like the idea. If they do, then I think you should look into it more and see if you might be able to do it."

>
> Because of your criticism of unschooling, I'm curious what criticisms you'd
> have of my response to these queries.
>
> It's true that I don't tend to get asked "should I homeschool" directly,
> especially by idiots who really shouldn't be homeschooling anyway. It's
> people who want to find out if I'll say something that gives cover to the
> child abusers, or teachers who see homeschoolers as a threat to their
> livelihood, or grandparents/relatives who know a parent who they think
> should/shouldn't be homeschooling, or humanists who think public education
> is mankind's savior and homeschooling is a threat, or parents who
> didn't/don't want to homeschool and want validation that they made the
> right choice.

I think my suggestions above are safe enough in reply to those people.

But if you think a person isn't asking out of interest in doing it themselves, then you might want to give a more philosophical reply. E.g. you might say, "Schools make teachers authorities and expect students to obey. This is an irrational system that settles conflicts based on the status of the people involved, rather than the merits of the conflicting ideas. That's an awful thing. If you're thoughtful enough to recognize how bad that is, then I think you should have some interest in alternatives."

(Or don't imply that if they disagree they aren't thoughtful, if you don't want to. That part is optional. But it will typically be true of whoever you're speaking to, which I consider a good reason to say it. Not all disagreements are totally honest and symmetrical; pretending they are is being too generous to badness.)

[Jason]

On Wednesday, November 21, 2012 9:42:28 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:

Is that an extreme position? I don't think so. The position that *all* violation's of a person's freedom or autonomy are bad isn't so extreme, is it? The position that *all* deviations from scientific integrity are mistakes isn't so extreme, is it?

There is a logic to why scientific integrity is good. All deviations violate that logic. It's not extreme to recognize that the reasoning for the value of scientific integrity applies to all science, that it has large reach. Ideas about freedom, liberty, voluntary action, reason, persuasion, and so on also have a lot of reach. They should not be arbitrarily restricted for the sake of hurting children.

This reminds me of something I came across when browsing the TCS archives or intro pages that I unfortunately can't seem to locate again. It was written by David Deutsch and said something to the effect of (paraphrasing): medical doctors don't benefit from allowing any superstition in their method. It doesn't matter if people would be "happier" with a little superstition - it's irrational and so it can only make things worse.

What you said and what I remember (but can't find) David saying is true, and relevant, but I believe its also incomplete in what it sets out to do. What it sets out to do is convince someone who's not already convinced, that a particular method (TCS) should be implemented exclusively, for the same reason that good science and good medicine implement their methods exclusively.

So someone like me, who *is* already convinced that science and medicine ought to use their methods exclusively, asks himself how he arrived at that conclusion and whether the same path leads the same place with regard to TCS.

And that's where I run smack into a problem. I didn't come to respect the methods of science and medicine via philosophical arguments. As I've said I had a pretty low opinion of philosophy much of my life.

What happened is, I had a theory about what "good" things are. Things like health and comfort. For whatever reason, the religious virtue of suffering crap hadn't really taken hold - had it done so I might never have gotten away from religion. Anyway, I could see that scientists and doctors using the scientific method did what they said they could do and produced good things - things that I valued like comfort and health. Religion and superstition didn't.

I don't think you can arrive at TCS that way - at least not that I've seen so far. TCS is a method like science, but it doesn't (yet?) have a set of publicly verifiable results that someone who isn't yet convinced can compare against their existing ideas of "good" and see that TCS delivers good where conventional parenting does not. TCS seems to ask in fundamental ways that a person change their idea of "good", to see a life free of TCS-exclusive-coercion as good, based on philosophical arguments alone.

Despite my improving opinion of philosophy I've never made a major life change based on philosophical arguments alone, and I'm wary of doing so. I like to see results.
 

> OK, that makes sense, just wasn't at all what I expected. While I won't
> claim we thought about it in exactly this way, my wife and did think about,
> talk about, and reject unschooling. We rejected it because we weren't
> convinced the children would learn what they needed to learn using a pure
> unschooling method. And to some extent that's behind my uneasiness with TCS
> as well. I don't want to throw out the old method until I'm sure the new
> method will be better.

On that topic: anything worth learning, a person can be interested in learning and want to learn. Do you agree?

Yes.
 

Also: if something is worth learning, that doesn't mean it's right for a particular person to learn it today or even this year.

Or some parts of it might be right to learn now, but not others.

In our prior discussions you said something to the effect that perhaps I'm not very good at persuading my kids of things. Well "very good" may be relative  - I think I'm better at it than most parents - but I could certainly improve it. And more importantly, I'm convinced there's no downsides at all to working on that skill, and lots of upsides. So I will, and it's why I joined the TCS list.

I'm still thinking about the idea that the purpose of having children is error correction rather than passing on one's values - haven't made up my mind about that yet. And for now I still don't buy that the TCS definition of coercion is all that useful. And I still don't buy the idea that I owe my children things because I created them without their consent. But I don't think I have to agree with any of that, to see value in learning how to persuade better. Do you?
 
--Jason

[Elliot Temple]

On Nov 22, 2012, at 7:58 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wednesday, November 21, 2012 9:42:28 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
>>
>> Is that an extreme position? I don't think so. The position that *all*
>> violation's of a person's freedom or autonomy are bad isn't so extreme, is
>> it? The position that *all* deviations from scientific integrity are
>> mistakes isn't so extreme, is it?
>>
>> There is a logic to why scientific integrity is good. All deviations
>> violate that logic. It's not extreme to recognize that the reasoning for
>> the value of scientific integrity applies to all science, that it has large
>> reach. Ideas about freedom, liberty, voluntary action, reason, persuasion,
>> and so on also have a lot of reach. They should not be arbitrarily
>> restricted for the sake of hurting children.
>>
>
> This reminds me of something I came across when browsing the TCS archives
> or intro pages that I unfortunately can't seem to locate again. It was
> written by David Deutsch and said something to the effect of
> (paraphrasing): medical doctors don't benefit from allowing any
> superstition in their method. It doesn't matter if people would be
> "happier" with a little superstition - it's irrational and so it can only
> make things worse.

Yes, I remember that he posted something like this. I believe he also gave a science example.

>
> What you said and what I remember (but can't find) David saying is true,
> and relevant, but I believe its also incomplete in what it sets out to do.
> What it sets out to do is convince someone who's not already convinced,
> that a particular method (TCS) should be implemented exclusively, for the
> same reason that good science and good medicine implement their methods
> exclusively.

No, what this argument sets out to do is defend TCS from the charge of bad radicalism/extremism (in particular, the charge it's extremist because it doesn't allow exceptions, compromises, etc... that it's extremist because if you look at things as a continuum then it's on the very far end not anywhere near the middle).

TCS has other arguments for why it's the right method.

The reason everyone should do TCS, in short, is that it's the *rational* method of parenting. It's rational epistemology applied to parenting. Deviations from TCS are deviations from rationality. That can do no more good than doing some superstition. It's incapable of helping anything and quite capable of causing big problems.

One reason people don't understand this is because they don't understand the connections between reason and voluntary interaction, reason and persuasion, reason and freedom, reason and (no) force.

> So someone like me, who *is* already convinced that science and medicine
> ought to use their methods exclusively, asks himself how he arrived at that
> conclusion and whether the same path leads the same place with regard to
> TCS.
>
> And that's where I run smack into a problem. I didn't come to respect the
> methods of science and medicine via philosophical arguments. As I've said I
> had a pretty low opinion of philosophy much of my life.
>
> What happened is, I had a theory about what "good" things are. Things like
> health and comfort. For whatever reason, the religious virtue of suffering
> crap hadn't really taken hold - had it done so I might never have gotten
> away from religion.

For what it's worth, religion also preaches opposite sentiments: that man is good and powerful.

e.g. from genesis 9:

> Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.

...

> "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man. As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.

i expect there's lots more going both ways.

> Anyway, I could see that scientists and doctors using
> the scientific method did what they said they could do and produced good
> things - things that I valued like comfort and health. Religion and
> superstition didn't.
>
> I don't think you can arrive at TCS that way - at least not that I've seen
> so far. TCS is a method like science, but it doesn't (yet?)

I think never. It's not good to put oneself forward to be examined in that way. I don't think anyone raised TCS should want to. Further, there will be tons of debate about which parents really followed TCS or not, and it would take extensive documentation to sort that out plus, worse, only people who already understood TCS would be able to judge which parental actions actually qualified or not.

There's other problems too. People attribute a lot of intelligence to genetics. People will claim that maybe the two TCS rolemodels who don't insist on privacy are cherry picked and the *average* result is nothing special.


Besides, no one is going to do TCS well if he doesn't respect philosophy.

> have a set of
> publicly verifiable results that someone who isn't yet convinced can
> compare against their existing ideas of "good" and see that TCS delivers
> good where conventional parenting does not. TCS seems to ask in fundamental
> ways that a person change their idea of "good", to see a life free of
> TCS-exclusive-coercion as good, based on philosophical arguments alone.
>
> Despite my improving opinion of philosophy I've never made a major life
> change based on philosophical arguments alone, and I'm wary of doing so. I
> like to see results.

You can never change your mind about what counts as a good result by the results. That sort of empirical method is very limiting at best.

>>
>>> OK, that makes sense, just wasn't at all what I expected. While I won't
>>> claim we thought about it in exactly this way, my wife and did think
>> about,
>>> talk about, and reject unschooling. We rejected it because we weren't
>>> convinced the children would learn what they needed to learn using a
>> pure
>>> unschooling method. And to some extent that's behind my uneasiness with
>> TCS
>>> as well. I don't want to throw out the old method until I'm sure the new
>>> method will be better.
>>
>> On that topic: anything worth learning, a person can be interested in
>> learning and want to learn. Do you agree?
>>
>
> Yes.

So why make anyone learn anything at a time they aren't interested or don't want to? As, I believe, you've advocated?

If you know it's the right time, communicate that knowledge to them so *they* know it's the right time too (aka persuade them).

You might be mistaken. If you fail to persuade, your knowledge of something isn't good enough. And even if you're right, the learner needs to understand it too instead of just obey. Psychologically, being forced to do something you think is wrong is the same whether it's actually right or wrong. The psychology of the situation for the learner depends on his current knowledge.

>
>> Also: if something is worth learning, that doesn't mean it's right for a
>> particular person to learn it today or even this year.
>>
>
> Or some parts of it might be right to learn now, but not others.
>
> In our prior discussions you said something to the effect that perhaps I'm
> not very good at persuading my kids of things. Well "very good" may be
> relative - I think I'm better at it than most parents - but I could
> certainly improve it.

The important thing is that if you want your kid to learn X, now, you explain that to him instead of force him. You should be relying on your persuasion not your force.

Typical parents in the US try persuasion first. But then if the kid isn't persuaded, they assume that's b/c there is something wrong with him and move on to using force. That is one of the big things TCS rejects. Your failure of persuasion does not mean there is something wrong with the kid, it means there is room for improvement in you persuasive skills, arguments, explanations, clarity of communication, etc, and that *you* should try to improve instead of blaming the kid and using force (that you think of with some euphemism).

> And more importantly, I'm convinced there's no
> downsides at all to working on that skill, and lots of upsides. So I will,
> and it's why I joined the TCS list.
>
> I'm still thinking about the idea that the purpose of having children is
> error correction rather than passing on one's values - haven't made up my
> mind about that yet. And for now I still don't buy that the TCS definition
> of coercion is all that useful. And I still don't buy the idea that I owe
> my children things because I created them without their consent. But I
> don't think I have to agree with any of that, to see value in learning how
> to persuade better. Do you?

The idea of (large) parental obligations to children is not a weird idea of TCS. It's the dominant, accepted idea by over 90% of US parents. Pretty much everyone takes it for granted in practice (including you, I bet). It's just talking about it philosophically that seems to trip people up.

Parents typically extort token payments in return, such as chores. But those, while they may cause a lot of fights and misery, are tiny in terms of actual material/monetary/time/effort value compared to what parents give children.

Parents also typically extort some emotional payments in return.

But even if a child refuses to do his chores, and is emotionally cold to his parents, they will normally still come through for him if there's something important. The parents may start fighting with their kid and screwing him on small stuff, but not the really important stuff.


I find this line of argument a bit weird. People are like, "TCS sounds like so much work. Why should I do all this stuff for my kid?" But what most parents do is a ton of work, too. Sure there are parents who largely ignored their kids on weekdays, but for a lot of people TCS doesn't really mean more work, it just means interacting differently. So it's bizarre for them to object so much on these grounds. I don't see why it should be a contentious point in the first place.

[Jason]

On Thursday, November 22, 2012 9:46:19 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:

> Anyway, I could see that scientists and doctors using
> the scientific method did what they said they could do and produced good
> things - things that I valued like comfort and health. Religion and
> superstition didn't.
>
> I don't think you can arrive at TCS that way - at least not that I've seen
> so far. TCS is a method like science, but it doesn't (yet?)

I think never. It's not good to put oneself forward to be examined in that way. I don't think anyone raised TCS should want to.

Why? People who are successful in their field get interviewed. It doesn't matter the field - musicians, politicians, doctors, investors, technologists - the people at the top, or the people who have a lot of success, or a lot of success for their age or starting position, are asked about their life. And its common for such people to talk about their childhood. Not in ways that compromise privacy, but in broad strokes.

What would be privacy compromising about someone successful in their field saying, "My parents thought children had all the same rights as adults from day 1, and tried never to do anything to me without my consent. I think that was really good, they made mistakes but were far less controlling than most parents and yet gave me lots of help. I think their approach to parenting helped me get where I am today"?
 

Further, there will be tons of debate about which parents really followed TCS or not, and it would take extensive documentation to sort that out plus, worse, only people who already understood TCS would be able to judge which parental actions actually qualified or not.

No (at least not from me). Convention is to coerce your kid. Heck, there are laws on the books in most states *requiring* parents to coerce their kid in some situations like send them to school, standardized testing, etc. TCS isn't cool or hip or trendy - which, BTW, is just fine and no mark against it. But it means there aren't hoards of parents trying to "fake" TCS or coaching their kids to say they were TCS when they weren't.

If a child who is successful says "My parents did their best to implement TCS", then it's highly likely they did. Of course they made mistakes - everyone's fallible. Maybe they made a lot of mistakes. Not the point - they diverged from convention in the TCS direction and their kid:
(1) Ended up highly successful in his field
(2) Credited TCS (said it helped, didn't hurt, in the long run).

There's other problems too. People attribute a lot of intelligence to genetics. People will claim that maybe the two TCS rolemodels who don't insist on privacy are cherry picked and the *average* result is nothing special.

That's true, they might. But people also tend towards cargo cult thinking: If intelligent people give their kids full adult rights, and I see myself as an intelligent person, then I should give my kids full adult rights too.
 

Besides, no one is going to do TCS well if he doesn't respect philosophy.

OK, couldn't the same be said about science and medicine? Shouldn't it be possible to decide to *want* to do TCS well, even if one doesn't (yet) respect philosophy? That's possible with medicine and science; why would TCS be different?
 

> have a set of
> publicly verifiable results that someone who isn't yet convinced can
> compare against their existing ideas of "good" and see that TCS delivers
> good where conventional parenting does not. TCS seems to ask in fundamental
> ways that a person change their idea of "good", to see a life free of
> TCS-exclusive-coercion as good, based on philosophical arguments alone.
>
> Despite my improving opinion of philosophy I've never made a major life
> change based on philosophical arguments alone, and I'm wary of doing so. I
> like to see results.

You can never change your mind about what counts as a good result by the results. That sort of empirical method is very limiting at best.

Which is my point. Science and medicine demonstrably deliver results that I *already considered* good, even when I still believed in superstition. I didn't come to respect science and medicine by changing my mind about what counts as a good result. I'd like to get to TCS the same way.
 

Where are good places to read TCS articles about how a parent can improve their persuasive skills?
 

> And more importantly, I'm convinced there's no
> downsides at all to working on that skill, and lots of upsides. So I will,
> and it's why I joined the TCS list.
>
> I'm still thinking about the idea that the purpose of having children is
> error correction rather than passing on one's values - haven't made up my
> mind about that yet. And for now I still don't buy that the TCS definition
> of coercion is all that useful. And I still don't buy the idea that I owe
> my children things because I created them without their consent. But I
> don't think I have to agree with any of that, to see value in learning how
> to persuade better. Do you?

The idea of (large) parental obligations to children is not a weird idea of TCS. It's the dominant, accepted idea by over 90% of US parents. Pretty much everyone takes it for granted in practice (including you, I bet).

What I don't buy is TCS's stated reason for it (because you created the child without their consent)

 

It's just talking about it philosophically that seems to trip people up.

Parents typically extort token payments in return, such as chores. But those, while they may cause a lot of fights and misery, are tiny in terms of actual material/monetary/time/effort value compared to what parents give children.

Parents also typically extort some emotional payments in return.

But even if a child refuses to do his chores, and is emotionally cold to his parents, they will normally still come through for him if there's something important. The parents may start fighting with their kid and screwing him on small stuff, but not the really important stuff.

Right. The question is why do they do this?

I've criticized TCS's explanation: I don't think consent matters prior to child's existence, and after child's existence begins absent evidence to the contrary the only reasonable presumption is a desire to continue existing. So saying that parents owe child stuff *because parents created child without consent* is nonsensical. It presumes the act of child creation without consent is a tort, for which damages are due in the amount of whatever it takes for the child to reach independence. I think that's wrong.

Here's what I think instead:

Parenting is a project, voluntarily undertaken by the parents. However, parenting is unlike most other projects in at least the following way: Once begun, early termination of the parenting project naturally results in the death of a human being with a mind (the child). Absent intervention by others who are not morally obligated to intervene, a child who is abandoned by its parents will die. Parents knew this before undertaking the parenting project. So, parents morally owe their child support until child becomes independent (or could reasonably be expected to) because they started the parenting project knowing a human life would be depending on their successful completion, and terminating the project early will indeed naturally cause child's death, and presumption is the child wants to live and has a right to live.

I say most projects above, because there are a few other projects that are kind of similar to this. Consider a heart surgeon undertaking an open heart surgery project on a patient. Mid-way through the surgery, with patient's chest open and heartbeat halted, surgeon cannot morally say "Y'know, this whole heart surgery project really isn't working out so well. I think I'll quit. Patient can keep his money, I'm outta here." Once begun, the surgeon has a moral duty to finish the project, and finishing the project requires him to provide certain things to the patient. This is true if the patient signed a consent form prior to the surgery. It is also true if the patient was wheeled in unconscious having suffered a cardiac event for which the surgery is necessary to prevent death (in which consent is reasonably presumed). Surgeon had no moral obligation to begin the open heart surgery project. But, once begun, doing what it takes to finish the project successfully to the best of surgeon's ability is morally required. Parenting is like that.

That's where I think parental obligations come from. They have nothing to do with whether child consented to being created. Parents voluntarily undertook a project wherein they knew child's life depends on successful completion, so they are morally obligated to complete the project.

This view of parental obligation requires us to establish what the moral purpose of the parenting project is in the first place, and what successful completion means.

That's why your statement about the moral purpose of parenting is important. I was operating under the presumption that the purpose of the parenting project is to pass on one's values to an independent human being. You say it's error correction. We can't both be right. I just haven't worked out yet which of us (or, perhaps, both of us) is wrong.

I find this line of argument a bit weird. People are like, "TCS sounds like so much work. Why should I do all this stuff for my kid?" But what most parents do is a ton of work, too. Sure there are parents who largely ignored their kids on weekdays, but for a lot of people TCS doesn't really mean more work, it just means interacting differently. So it's bizarre for them to object so much on these grounds. I don't see why it should be a contentious point in the first place.

It's not about the amount of work. I think we agree that parents have a moral obligation to complete the parenting project to the best of their ability, and doing that requires them to provide their children with stuff and help and protection, etc. It's about why that work is morally required of a parent, and what its moral purpose should be.

--Jason

[Elliot Temple]

On Nov 23, 2012, at 6:39 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thursday, November 22, 2012 9:46:19 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Anyway, I could see that scientists and doctors using
>>> the scientific method did what they said they could do and produced good
>>> things - things that I valued like comfort and health. Religion and
>>> superstition didn't.
>>>
>>> I don't think you can arrive at TCS that way - at least not that I've
>> seen
>>> so far. TCS is a method like science, but it doesn't (yet?)
>>
>> I think never. It's not good to put oneself forward to be examined in that
>> way. I don't think anyone raised TCS should want to.
>
>
> Why?

Privacy, irrelevancy, that the reason people want to know it is to use it in incorrect arguments, the misunderstandings it will cause about you, the danger some of the information harms you (including, for example, being popular for the wrong things and this distracting from the right things. a little like Wynand by accident. except it's not exactly by accident if you choose to speak about a bunch of irrelevant (at best) stuff in public).

> People who are successful in their field get interviewed.

They get interviewed *about their field*.

When they are particularly well known, sometimes they get interviewed about their personal life too. But why?

I have no problem with giving interviews to explain the field of TCS: the philosophy, the ideas. I do have a problem with it being about one's personal life.

There are reports of Popper and Rand having bad personalities. So what? Suppose for a moment that it's true and they did. Still, so what? Now suppose they told everyone in a bunch of interviews and that got a lot of attention. That's bad, isn't it?

> It doesn't
> matter the field - musicians, politicians, doctors, investors,
> technologists - the people at the top, or the people who have a lot of
> success, or a lot of success for their age or starting position, are asked
> about their life. And its common for such people to talk about their
> childhood. Not in ways that compromise privacy, but in broad strokes.

They do compromise their privacy all the time because they are philosophically unsophisticated and do not know better.

Whether any good whatsoever comes of it is less clear.

I think such interviews often have some value because they are interviewing someone cool and no matter the questions they get him talking and you can maybe learn something from his way of thinking about whatever he talks about. They could have asked about something else impersonal and gotten that same positive result.

>
> What would be privacy compromising about someone successful in their field
> saying, "My parents thought children had all the same rights as adults from
> day 1, and tried never to do anything to me without my consent. I think
> that was really good, they made mistakes but were far less controlling than
> most parents and yet gave me lots of help. I think their approach to
> parenting helped me get where I am today"?

That's pretty close to impersonal. It's about what people *thought* -- their ideas and merely claims they "tried" to follow their ideas which might avoid a debate about whether they succeeded. "They made mistakes" is dangerous because it invites follow up questions about example incidents but by itself it's vague and doesn't give people much information, and it can be defended on general principles without giving any personal example (it was also known to the audience, on general principles, before you said it, if they were wise).

The end part is aiming the discussion at approaches to parenting, not any kind of personal examples of any parental actions. It invites discussion of the philosophy of how other people could use that approach, not of you or your parents. So again it's pushing things towards impersonal.

>
>> Further, there will be tons of debate about which parents really followed
>> TCS or not, and it would take extensive documentation to sort that out
>> plus, worse, only people who already understood TCS would be able to judge
>> which parental actions actually qualified or not.
>>
>
> No (at least not from me). Convention is to coerce your kid. Heck, there
> are laws on the books in most states *requiring* parents to coerce their
> kid in some situations like send them to school, standardized testing, etc.
> TCS isn't cool or hip or trendy - which, BTW, is just fine and no mark
> against it. But it means there aren't hoards of parents trying to "fake"
> TCS or coaching their kids to say they were TCS when they weren't.

There are not hoards of people trying to fake it, but a significant percentage of the people who do come to TCS do fake it in some ways.

One thing that happens is they think it sounds nice or good, and coercion is bad, and then they announce they already do most of it and always have.

Or people just stick around on the list for a bit and start calling themselves TCSers without ever understanding it super well. Because, again, they think it's good or nice or something, so they want to identify as being/doing it.


So, yes, there are not very many people trying to TCS. But of the ones who think they are trying to do TCS (or the majority of TCS), more than 50% of those people aren't even close.


For one thing, hardly anyone actually knows what is or isn't coercion. So trying to define TCS as non-coercion does not allow them to differentiate what is TCS or not.

>
> If a child who is successful says "My parents did their best to implement
> TCS", then it's highly likely they did.

And also quite possible that whatever they did hasn't got much in common with TCS.

The thing is, you can't get anywhere near TCS without learning philosophy, posting questions, having critical discussions, and that kind of stuff. If someone just reads a book, a few articles, a few hundred list posts, and writes a dozen posts of their own, then it's very doubtful they understand what TCS is accurately enough to do anything similar.

> Of course they made mistakes -
> everyone's fallible. Maybe they made a lot of mistakes. Not the point -
> they diverged from convention in the TCS direction and their kid:
> (1) Ended up highly successful in his field
> (2) Credited TCS (said it helped, didn't hurt, in the long run).

None of that changes whether TCS ideas are true or false, so this shouldn't be how people judge it. If they want to make that mistake, that is not something I should play along with or encourage.

>
>> There's other problems too. People attribute a lot of intelligence to
>> genetics. People will claim that maybe the two TCS rolemodels who don't
>> insist on privacy are cherry picked and the *average* result is nothing
>> special.
>>
>
> That's true, they might. But people also tend towards cargo cult thinking:
> If intelligent people give their kids full adult rights, and I see myself
> as an intelligent person, then I should give my kids full adult rights too.
>
>
>> Besides, no one is going to do TCS well if he doesn't respect philosophy.
>>
>
> OK, couldn't the same be said about science and medicine?

Both of those fields have *huge* problems due to lack of philosophy and/or bad philosophy.

They could be doing 10x better or more.

> Shouldn't it be
> possible to decide to *want* to do TCS well, even if one doesn't (yet)
> respect philosophy? That's possible with medicine and science; why would
> TCS be different?

You can't really know what TCS actually is without respecting philosophy, because how will you learn advanced philosophical ideas otherwise?

>
>>
>>> have a set of
>>> publicly verifiable results that someone who isn't yet convinced can
>>> compare against their existing ideas of "good" and see that TCS delivers
>>> good where conventional parenting does not. TCS seems to ask in
>> fundamental
>>> ways that a person change their idea of "good", to see a life free of
>>> TCS-exclusive-coercion as good, based on philosophical arguments alone.
>>>
>>> Despite my improving opinion of philosophy I've never made a major life
>>> change based on philosophical arguments alone, and I'm wary of doing so.
>> I
>>> like to see results.
>>
>> You can never change your mind about what counts as a good result by the
>> results. That sort of empirical method is very limiting at best.
>>
>
> Which is my point. Science and medicine demonstrably deliver results that I
> *already considered* good, even when I still believed in superstition. I
> didn't come to respect science and medicine by changing my mind about what
> counts as a good result. I'd like to get to TCS the same way.

And you can't. You cannot improve your moral philosophy by that limited method. You'll have to use better methods in order to be able to learn more things.

The issue here is not really "persuasive skills" (if that means anything like rhetoric) but thinking skills. Good ideas, critical thinking and clear communication is the proper method of rational persuasion.

A good place to start for those things is reading Popper or BoI. There are no shortcuts to good thinking. It basically requires learning to think, aka learning philosophy. Philosophically unsophisticated parents will often be mistaken in disagreements with their children, and will often give poor arguments even when they are right.

You can find some articles at:

http://fallibleideas.com
http://fallibleliving.com
http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com

>
>
>>
>>> And more importantly, I'm convinced there's no
>>> downsides at all to working on that skill, and lots of upsides. So I
>> will,
>>> and it's why I joined the TCS list.
>>>
>>> I'm still thinking about the idea that the purpose of having children is
>>> error correction rather than passing on one's values - haven't made up
>> my
>>> mind about that yet. And for now I still don't buy that the TCS
>> definition
>>> of coercion is all that useful. And I still don't buy the idea that I
>> owe
>>> my children things because I created them without their consent. But I
>>> don't think I have to agree with any of that, to see value in learning
>> how
>>> to persuade better. Do you?
>>
>> The idea of (large) parental obligations to children is not a weird idea
>> of TCS. It's the dominant, accepted idea by over 90% of US parents. Pretty
>> much everyone takes it for granted in practice (including you, I bet).
>
>
> What I don't buy is TCS's stated reason for it (because you created the
> child without their consent)

That's not quite the stated reason. The stated reason is more like: it was your choice that you're responsible for, that you created the situation. If you cause a situation, if you bring it about, then it's your problem.

>
>> It's just talking about it philosophically that seems to trip people up.
>>
>> Parents typically extort token payments in return, such as chores. But
>> those, while they may cause a lot of fights and misery, are tiny in terms
>> of actual material/monetary/time/effort value compared to what parents give
>> children.
>>
>> Parents also typically extort some emotional payments in return.
>>
>> But even if a child refuses to do his chores, and is emotionally cold to
>> his parents, they will normally still come through for him if there's
>> something important. The parents may start fighting with their kid and
>> screwing him on small stuff, but not the really important stuff.
>>
>>
> Right. The question is why do they do this?

Because it's moral, and they know it.

And they don't reject their traditional moral knowledge just because they don't know how to defend it from philosophical first principles. They don't fancy themselves super awesome philosophers who know how to do such things, so they don't figure their inability to do so means their moral knowledge is false. It's not like they could defend much of anything to that standard, but that certainly doesn't mean all their ideas are false.

>
> I've criticized TCS's explanation:

I don't recall you ever asking TCS's explanation and then writing it in your words and soliciting endorsement as accurate. Or anything like that to reasonably know what TCS's explanation actually is. Nor do you provide a quote for where you're getting the idea that the TCS view on this matter centers around consent.

> I don't think consent matters prior to
> child's existence, and after child's existence begins absent evidence to
> the contrary the only reasonable presumption is a desire to continue
> existing. So saying that parents owe child stuff *because parents created
> child without consent* is nonsensical. It presumes the act of child
> creation without consent is a tort, for which damages are due in the amount
> of whatever it takes for the child to reach independence. I think that's
> wrong.

The TCS position has certainly never been that it's a tort to have a kid. That says more about your thinking than TCS's.

>
> Here's what I think instead:
>
> Parenting is a project, voluntarily undertaken by the parents. However,
> parenting is unlike most other projects in at least the following way: Once
> begun, early termination of the parenting project naturally results in the
> death of a human being with a mind (the child). Absent intervention by
> others who are not morally obligated to intervene,

Morality is not a list of obligations. That is an idea typically associated with religion. I don't think you are as far from religious thinking as you think you are.

Actually, those other people in our society are doing well to intervene. For them to stop, depending on their reasoning, could easily be immoral. They don't have to violate an actual obligation to make a moral mistake.

> a child who is abandoned
> by its parents will die. Parents knew this before undertaking the parenting
> project.

yes, parents knew what was up in advance (or could and should have), chose it on purpose, and now ought to follow through. if they do not, they've messed up at some point. why are we even debating this when you seem to know it?

> So, parents morally owe

you're trying to make morality about obligations again which is not the best way to look at it.

> their child support until child becomes
> independent (or could reasonably be expected to)

Note that if child is not independent at the time he could reasonably have been expected to, there are typically parental actions involved in that happening. Those further actions after the child's birth give the parents further responsibilities.

> because they started the
> parenting project knowing a human life would be depending on their
> successful completion, and terminating the project early will indeed
> naturally cause child's death, and presumption is the child wants to live
> and has a right to live.
>
> I say most projects above, because there are a few other projects that are
> kind of similar to this. Consider a heart surgeon undertaking an open heart
> surgery project on a patient. Mid-way through the surgery, with patient's
> chest open and heartbeat halted, surgeon cannot morally say "Y'know, this
> whole heart surgery project really isn't working out so well. I think I'll
> quit. Patient can keep his money, I'm outta here." Once begun, the surgeon
> has a moral duty

Morality isn't like a boss (or God) that tells you what to do, and in some situations it's got you (you have a duty or obligation and have to obey) and in others you're free of it (not obligated, no duty, can do whatever you want).

One is never free of morality, and there's no reason to want to be. (People who think they want freedom from morality are typically mixing up morality with bad ideas about morality taught by their preacher or trendy intellectual). Morality is about figuring out how to live well, about useful helpful guidance, about figuring out how to make good choices instead of bad ones. It's always good.

It's not that he has to do the rest of the surgery and if he doesn't want to he's a sinner. It's that doing it will be better for everyone involved, including him. He'll be better off that way, it's the right thing to do, it's not a compromise, it's not something that should require forcing him to do it b/c he can want to do it b/c it's best.

> to finish the project, and finishing the project requires
> him to provide certain things to the patient. This is true if the patient
> signed a consent form prior to the surgery. It is also true if the patient
> was wheeled in unconscious having suffered a cardiac event for which the
> surgery is necessary to prevent death (in which consent is reasonably
> presumed). Surgeon had no moral obligation to begin the open heart surgery
> project.

Wrong way of looking at life.

> But, once begun, doing what it takes to finish the project
> successfully to the best of surgeon's ability is morally required.
> Parenting is like that.
>
> That's where I think parental obligations come from. They have nothing to
> do with whether child consented to being created.

you shouldn't argue at such length with something so specific with no quote or anything.

> Parents voluntarily
> undertook a project wherein they knew child's life depends on successful
> completion, so they are morally obligated to complete the project.

that's fairly similar to what i said the TCS view is, above...

>
> This view of parental obligation requires us to establish what the moral
> purpose of the parenting project is in the first place, and what successful
> completion means.
>
> That's why your statement about the moral purpose of parenting is
> important. I was operating under the presumption that the purpose of the
> parenting project is to pass on one's values to an independent human being.

that is the attitude of treating children as dolls, not as independent people.

if you want to pass on ideas, persuade people, anyone. if you think someone should accept your ideas just because he has your genes, then you are irrational.

> You say it's error correction. We can't both be right. I just haven't
> worked out yet which of us (or, perhaps, both of us) is wrong.
>
>>
>> I find this line of argument a bit weird. People are like, "TCS sounds
>> like so much work. Why should I do all this stuff for my kid?" But what
>> most parents do is a ton of work, too. Sure there are parents who largely
>> ignored their kids on weekdays, but for a lot of people TCS doesn't really
>> mean more work, it just means interacting differently. So it's bizarre for
>> them to object so much on these grounds. I don't see why it should be a
>> contentious point in the first place.
>>
>
> It's not about the amount of work. I think we agree that parents have a
> moral obligation to complete the parenting project to the best of their
> ability, and doing that requires them to provide their children with stuff
> and help and protection, etc. It's about why that work is morally required
> of a parent, and what its moral purpose should be.

Why would you have a kid in the first place if you didn't want to parent him (do all the "work" involved)? I can't think of any *moral* answer to that question, only immoral ones.

[Rami Rustom]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 8:15 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, November 17, 2012 7:44:17 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:

On Nov 17, 2012, at 5:20 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Unschoolers typically seem to think that if children follow their whims
>> then things will work out great, and a lot of the parent's job is to get
>> out of the way. This has some truth to it, but it's pretty false, and
>> overall it's worse than a more typical attitude that parents do need to do
>> stuff and many of children's whims are ignorant mistakes.
>>
>
> I agree that parents need to do stuff and many children's whims are
> ignorant mistakes. This is part of why I'm not an unschooler and also why I
> have resisted TCS.

But TCS is nothing like "do nothing". It's strongly criticized and rejected neglectful parenting. TCS is about how to parent, it's not a claim that no parenting is necessary! It differs in its suggestions on what sort of actions parents should be taking and what's helpful, but it does say to do actions.

In terms of a continuum:
DO LESS <----> DO MORE
I see that TCS isn't like unschooling.

But in terms of a continuum:
MORE VOLUNTARY <-----> MORE MANDATORY
TCS is more like unschooling at least in terms of explicit mandates than homeschooling, right? That's the continuum I was thinking of.
 

Elliot already disagreed with these two continiums, but I'll introduce another one anyway.

RATIONAL <-----> IRRATIONAL

TCS is on the left side of that. Unschooling is on the extreme right.

Many unschoolers believe that a person's whims are moral primaries -- they are whim worshippers. These people would not criticizes a kid's whims.

TCS on the other hand does not consider whims to be important. TCS advocates criticizing all flaws, and a person's whims are fallible just like everything else about a person is fallible.

[Rami Rustom]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 8:39 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Thursday, November 22, 2012 9:46:19 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
> What I don't buy is TCS's stated reason for it (because you created the
> child without their consent)

That is not the take away from my argument (you got that idea from me).

The take away was that certain persons are responsible for certain
problems. How does one determine who is responsible for which? You ask
these questions: (1) Who created the problem? (2) Who is currently
being affected by the problem?

If you answer yes to question (1), then *you* are responsible for
solving that problem. In the case of parenting, the parent created the
kid's problem of dependence.

If you answer yes to question (2), then *you* are responsible for
solving that problem. In the case of an adult who is poor, he is
responsible for solving his problem of earning money.

[Jason]

On Friday, November 23, 2012 9:31:50 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:

Morality is not a list of obligations. That is an idea typically associated with religion. I don't think you are as far from religious thinking as you think you are.

Actually, those other people in our society are doing well to intervene. For them to stop, depending on their reasoning, could easily be immoral. They don't have to violate an actual obligation to make a moral mistake.

I didn't mean to imply that morality is a list of obligations. Here are my thoughts on moral obligations. Where in this do you think there is religious (or just incorrect) thinking?

Morality is about making choices that will result in living a good life - things you should do, or not do, to make your life better than it would be if you made different choices.

Because life is long, and the long term consequences of various actions are not always clear or easy to work out, there are sets of shorthand moral rules which help you to make moral decisions quickly and thus live a better life. Memorizing and following moral rule sets is somewhat like memorizing times tables. It's not that it's impossible to work out the moral answer "by hand" each time in absence of a rule, it's just that moral rules make the process much faster.

One of these shorthand rule sets is about things you should do that in the short run may appear to be only for the benefit of others, and when you should do them. Altruism is not moral, and these actions that appear to benefit others will also benefit you in the long run, but you may not be aware of exactly how they will benefit you when you're doing them. These actions are called moral obligations.

So saying that you have a moral obligation to finish a project you begin if someone's life depends on the successful completion of it is a shorthand. It means that if you finish the project, you will ultimately have a better life than if you abandon it, even if you haven't worked out exactly how that will come about at the time you're making the choice.

Intervening when someone else has abandoned a project they should have completed may also be moral. It just doesn't fall under the same "moral obligation" shorthand rule set that applies to the initiator of the project. It falls under other shorthand rule sets like, you should value human life, and do what you can to save innocent lives if doing so doesn't compromise your other values. 

--Jason

[Rami Rustom]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 4:27 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Friday, November 23, 2012 9:31:50 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
>>
>> Morality is not a list of obligations. That is an idea typically
>> associated with religion. I don't think you are as far from religious
>> thinking as you think you are.
>>
>> Actually, those other people in our society are doing well to intervene.
>> For them to stop, depending on their reasoning, could easily be immoral.
>> They don't have to violate an actual obligation to make a moral mistake.
>
>
> I didn't mean to imply that morality is a list of obligations. Here are my
> thoughts on moral obligations. Where in this do you think there is religious
> (or just incorrect) thinking?
>
> Morality is about making choices that will result in living a good life -
> things you should do, or not do, to make your life better than it would be
> if you made different choices.
>
> Because life is long, and the long term consequences of various actions are
> not always clear or easy to work out, there are sets of shorthand moral
> rules which help you to make moral decisions quickly and thus live a better
> life. Memorizing and following moral rule sets is somewhat like memorizing
> times tables.

Like "Don't coerce people.". Its a general rule that applies to all
situations except the ones that have the quality of "Someone is
coercing me".

> It's not that it's impossible to work out the moral answer "by
> hand" each time in absence of a rule, it's just that moral rules make the
> process much faster.
>
> One of these shorthand rule sets is about things you should do that in the
> short run may appear to be only for the benefit of others, and when you
> should do them. Altruism is not moral, and these actions that appear to
> benefit others will also benefit you in the long run, but you may not be
> aware of exactly how they will benefit you when you're doing them. These
> actions are called moral obligations.
>
> So saying that you have a moral obligation to finish a project you begin if
> someone's life depends on the successful completion of it is a shorthand. It
> means that if you finish the project, you will ultimately have a better life
> than if you abandon it, even if you haven't worked out exactly how that will
> come about at the time you're making the choice.
>
> Intervening when someone else has abandoned a project they should have
> completed may also be moral. It just doesn't fall under the same "moral
> obligation" shorthand rule set that applies to the initiator of the project.
> It falls under other shorthand rule sets like, you should value human life,

That is not a rule. The moral rules are rules for actions. You just
said "value human life", which is not an action.

> and do what you can to save innocent lives if doing so doesn't compromise
> your other values.

In other words: Save innocent lives as long as you don't coerce yourself.

[Alan Forrester]

On 24 Nov 2012, at 22:27, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Friday, November 23, 2012 9:31:50 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>
>> Morality is not a list of obligations. That is an idea typically associated with religion. I don't think you are as far from religious thinking as you think you are.
>>
>> Actually, those other people in our society are doing well to intervene. For them to stop, depending on their reasoning, could easily be immoral. They don't have to violate an actual obligation to make a moral mistake.
>
> I didn't mean to imply that morality is a list of obligations. Here are my thoughts on moral obligations. Where in this do you think there is religious (or just incorrect) thinking?
>
> Morality is about making choices that will result in living a good life - things you should do, or not do, to make your life better than it would be if you made different choices.

Yes.

> Because life is long, and the long term consequences of various actions are not always clear or easy to work out, there are sets of shorthand moral rules which help you to make moral decisions quickly and thus live a better life. Memorizing and following moral rule sets is somewhat like memorizing times tables. It's not that it's impossible to work out the moral answer "by hand" each time in absence of a rule, it's just that moral rules make the process much faster.

Wrong.

(1) The long term consequences of a particular action aren't predictable at all because they depend on the growth of knowledge.

(2) Following moral rules sounds mechanical. What you have to do is come up with moral explanations and come up with ways to enact them in a particular situation.

(3) There are some things that you should avoid doing but those actions will benefit you now. If you lie to somebody then you create a problem you have to deal with now and every time you deal with that person in the future. Not lying benefits you now not in the future. Even if that person would give you money if you lied to them or something like that you're still not benefiting by lying because you're opening yourself up to charges of being a con man or fraudster.

(4) When it comes to something like investing you should do stuff that benefits you now. It might also be the case that in the long term making many of those decisions will benefit you a lot.

> One of these shorthand rule sets is about things you should do that in the short run may appear to be only for the benefit of others, and when you should do them. Altruism is not moral, and these actions that appear to benefit others will also benefit you in the long run, but you may not be aware of exactly how they will benefit you when you're doing them. These actions are called moral obligations.
>
> So saying that you have a moral obligation to finish a project you begin if someone's life depends on the successful completion of it is a shorthand. It means that if you finish the project, you will ultimately have a better life than if you abandon it, even if you haven't worked out exactly how that will come about at the time you're making the choice.

So let's say that Jim is giving money to a charity that provides money to pay for food for starving African people. And let's say that he reads Ayn Rand and decides he shouldn't subsidise incompetence. If Jim stops giving the money, then some people will die as a result of that decision. Should he keep giving the money?

Suppose that Jack is a surgeon who is going to perform a new kind of operation to save Peter's life. It might be the case that he should go through with doing this but he should do it because he's interested in doing the operation and the techniques required. Jack might benefit from having Peter around, but he shouldn't do the operation solely because he likes having Peter around.

> Intervening when someone else has abandoned a project they should have completed may also be moral. It just doesn't fall under the same "moral obligation" shorthand rule set that applies to the initiator of the project.

Intervene is vague. Does it mean TCS-coerce?

If somebody abandons a project you thought was a good idea you might want to ask why and critically discuss the reasons he gives if you're interested.

> It falls under other shorthand rule sets like, you should value human life, and do what you can to save innocent lives if doing so doesn't compromise your other values.

This is very vague.

You should read what Godwin has to say about promises and oaths. Political Justice, which is available on the web has criticisms of promises and oaths many of which apply to the idea of obligations.

Alan

[Elliot Temple]

On Nov 24, 2012, at 2:27 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Friday, November 23, 2012 9:31:50 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
>>
>> Morality is not a list of obligations. That is an idea typically
>> associated with religion. I don't think you are as far from religious
>> thinking as you think you are.
>>
>> Actually, those other people in our society are doing well to intervene.
>> For them to stop, depending on their reasoning, could easily be immoral.
>> They don't have to violate an actual obligation to make a moral mistake.
>
>
> I didn't mean to imply that morality is a list of obligations. Here are my
> thoughts on moral obligations. Where in this do you think there is
> religious (or just incorrect) thinking?
>
> Morality is about making choices that will result in living a good life -
> things you should do, or not do, to make your life better than it would be
> if you made different choices.
>
> Because life is long, and the long term consequences of various actions are
> not always clear or easy to work out, there are sets of shorthand moral
> rules which help you to make moral decisions quickly and thus live a better
> life.

The concept of "rights" is one such shorthand approximation.

Thinking of morality in terms of rights is pretty good, pretty often. If done at the right times, it can be a time saver. But as with other shorthand, it's not always perfect, one has to be careful.

> Memorizing and following moral rule sets is somewhat like memorizing
> times tables. It's not that it's impossible to work out the moral answer
> "by hand" each time in absence of a rule, it's just that moral rules make
> the process much faster.

It's not the same. With the times tables, if you do it by memorization your answer is still exactly correct. With morality, the memorized rules are not exactly correct, they are approximations.

And how correct the moral shortcuts are depends on using them in the right contexts/situations. So you memorize lists of situations that each is appropriate to. But life is never exactly like those. So you have to make judgments about how close a real situation is to one of the memorized ones. But if you don't understand the issues involved well, how are you to decide what differences are relevant or small?

The result is that if you do moral decision making this way, you'll sometimes make moral mistakes, possibly large ones. (Plus some of the moral ideas you memorized we're already mistaken in the first place.) If you do multiplication using times tables, that won't (to the best of my knowledge) make you get the wrong answers to any math problems.

>
> One of these shorthand rule sets is about things you should do that in the
> short run may appear to be only for the benefit of others, and when you
> should do them. Altruism is not moral, and these actions that appear to
> benefit others will also benefit you in the long run, but you may not be
> aware of exactly how they will benefit you when you're doing them. These
> actions are called moral obligations.

Follow our moral rules now, and good things will come later. This is a typical religious idea.

Sacrifice now, and benefit later by mechanisms you don't fully understand. Sounds similar to religion.

The short term vs long term conflict is actually a misconception. Which is here being used to get people to accept badness in their life, now. That will typically result in even more badness later, not something good later.

At the very least, such things should be done with full understanding, not on faith. Then they could have some hope of being a mix of bad and good, instead of just lots of bad.


Life is actually, properly, an integrated whole. One needs to get the whole thing fitting together nicely, not sacrifice one part for some other part.

>
> So saying that you have a moral obligation to finish a project you begin if
> someone's life depends on the successful completion of it is a shorthand.
> It means that if you finish the project, you will ultimately have a better
> life than if you abandon it, even if you haven't worked out exactly how
> that will come about at the time you're making the choice.

That way of thinking about morality looks to me like it has a lot in common with typical American Christians. It's not something new and different, it's old and normal and wouldn't be confusing or bizarre to regular religious people.

And it allows for the demanding of sacrifices (now), with promise of future benefit (that you might not even understand just how it will come about), just as their religion does.

And it's implicitly working by a system of authority. If you haven't worked out the longhand, then you must be taking the longhand on authority from someone/somewhere. Just like when you memorize your multiplication tables without understanding multiplication, you're taking their correctness on authority from the school.


The structure of moral thinking that looks at life in terms of obligations is a standard Christian structure that predates atheism, and I'm not seeing substantive deviation from it here despite this post being intended to illustrate non-religious, different thinking. Do this, don't do that, follow our moral rules. And if you don't like it now then think of the better future you're creating by living by these moral rules, and think of how awful it is to be a sinner who feels guilty and is alienated from the community of moral people (carrot and stick both present).


You don't have to reject every religious idea, btw. You're the one, not me, who makes a thing out of how important atheism is, how awful religion is, etc etc

Not all religious ideas are false. But this one is. Rules are not a very good shorthand for morality. Doing things without understanding is not a good way of life. Sacrificing now for future benefit is the wrong way to live (even if that benefit were more concrete).


It's better to continue making these traditional religious mistakes than to replace them with whatever you can think of in the next 20 minutes. If you try do so something else, and it isn't quite well thought out, with good philosophy, then it's going to be worse. You wouldn't want to leave a man to die on an operating table because you were confused about morality. Nor because you thought you were wiser than the accumulated knowledge of centuries and so whatever ideas you carelessly come up with must be superior. Respect for tradition in various ways is important, including religious traditions you remain a part of (the bulk of moral knowledge our culture has is religious, btw).

But all that said: the moral rules ideas, despite being better than nothing overall, are still mistaken. They are an old mistake, made by religious people, still taught by religious people (and by atheists who think they've made a complete break with religion). I don't really care if you're making a *religious* mistake in particular, but I think you do, so there it is.

>
> Intervening when someone else has abandoned a project they should have
> completed may also be moral. It just doesn't fall under the same "moral
> obligation" shorthand rule set that applies to the initiator of the
> project. It falls under other shorthand rule sets like, you should value
> human life, and do what you can to save innocent lives if doing so doesn't
> compromise your other values.

Moral shorthands are a big mistake too, if you don't know the longhand. The right way to use shorthands is to first understand the full thing, and then to create some shorthands, habits, rules of thumb, guidelines and whatever other practical things one finds useful to living quickly.

And then, as one uses them, one needs to be checking now and then that they are working correctly. How does one do that? By thinking through the full thing, the longhand, and seeing if whatever shorter thing you were doing got the same answer. You can check actions you took using a shorthand, in retrospect, against the full longhand and see if they match. If you ever find they do not match, you have to change the shorthand (or perhaps sometimes the longhand -- you can try to criticize either or both of them, but you have to change something).

If you don't fully understand the longhand, you can never check if your shorthands work right. You have no way to correct errors in them. Then they become (as they are for many people, religious or not) an abdication from thinking -- living by faith and obedience to authority. And they can also be a source of persistent errors, a blight on your life (as, again, they are, one way or another, for pretty much everyone).

It's also important to have an understand of what situations the shorthands don't work so well in (no shorthand works universally or it wouldn't be a shorthand, it'd be a full version), to keep an awareness of signs things aren't working, to keep a lookout for problems, and to think through things in more detail in such cases (using fuller longhand knowledge). But, again, if one doesn't have a full understanding to fall back on, then one cannot do this.

And how is one to evaluate if the shorthand is any good, or what is moral, without actually understanding what's going on? It's like if you're walking somewhere, you can't evaluate what is a good shortcut unless you actually know where you're going. Similarly, you can't evaluate what is a moral shorthand unless you already know what's moral.

The idea of living without understanding, and excusing that, and thinking somehow it could work is just the sort of thing a typical atheist might complain is why religion sucks -- but then do himself at other times.

[Jason]

On Friday, November 23, 2012 9:31:50 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:

On Nov 23, 2012, at 6:39 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

> People who are successful in their field get interviewed.

They get interviewed *about their field*.

When they are particularly well known, sometimes they get interviewed about their personal life too. But why?

I have no problem with giving interviews to explain the field of TCS: the philosophy, the ideas. I do have a problem with it being about one's personal life.

There are reports of Popper and Rand having bad personalities. So what? Suppose for a moment that it's true and they did. Still, so what?

So one of the things we could learn from that is having a "bad" personality does not stand in the way of spreading good ideas: influencing people in a positive way.

This would constitute a criticism of some of the ideas in, for example, Dale Carnegie's popular book "How to Win Friends and Influence People".

By "bad" I am assuming you mean attributes which are conventionally viewed as bad: abrasive, blunt, unconcerned with accommodating others' emotions, etc. If you meant something else you'll need to explain it.

A "bad" personality in that sense is one who does not suffer fools quietly, does not accommodate badness, and is focused on making other people feel good and winning their approval. Viewing these personality attributes as "bad" is something a great many people could benefit from changing.

Now suppose they told everyone in a bunch of interviews and that got a lot of attention. That's bad, isn't it?

I don't think it's bad. It's good! It means, you shouldn't dismiss a person's ideas just because their personality is blunt and abrasive. 

> It doesn't
> matter the field - musicians, politicians, doctors, investors,
> technologists - the people at the top, or the people who have a lot of
> success, or a lot of success for their age or starting position, are asked
> about their life. And its common for such people to talk about their
> childhood. Not in ways that compromise privacy, but in broad strokes.

They do compromise their privacy all the time because they are philosophically unsophisticated and do not know better.

Whether any good whatsoever comes of it is less clear.

I think such interviews often have some value because they are interviewing someone cool and no matter the questions they get him talking and you can maybe learn something from his way of thinking about whatever he talks about. They could have asked about something else impersonal and gotten that same positive result.

>
> What would be privacy compromising about someone successful in their field
> saying, "My parents thought children had all the same rights as adults from
> day 1, and tried never to do anything to me without my consent. I think
> that was really good, they made mistakes but were far less controlling than
> most parents and yet gave me lots of help. I think their approach to
> parenting helped me get where I am today"?

That's pretty close to impersonal. It's about what people *thought* -- their ideas and merely claims they "tried" to follow their ideas which might avoid a debate about whether they succeeded. "They made mistakes" is dangerous because it invites follow up questions about example incidents but by itself it's vague and doesn't give people much information, and it can be defended on general principles without giving any personal example (it was also known to the audience, on general principles, before you said it, if they were wise).

The end part is aiming the discussion at approaches to parenting, not any kind of personal examples of any parental actions. It invites discussion of the philosophy of how other people could use that approach, not of you or your parents. So again it's pushing things towards impersonal.

That's fine. I wasn't looking to puruse the diary of a TCS kid or interrogate him about the details of his daily life. It's more about demonstrating that having parents who made sincere efforts in a TCS direction didn't result in children who failed to become independent and successful adults.

The shorthand moral rule is that productiveness and independence are moral virtues. Perhaps the reason I'm seeking the kind of examples I am is that I don't know how to "do the longhand" on the morality of becoming independent, apart from obtaining freedom from the controls that others impose concurrently with one's dependence (which I think TCS says are bad).

Meaning - to the moral question:
Why should a child choose to develop and implement the skills to support himself instead of depending on his parents for as long as he can (as long as they will allow, or until they die)? Why not continue to live in his parents' house, eat his parents' food, etc. and either work less or have more money to spend on hobbies?

The only answer I know is:
You want to become independent because living in your parents' house and eating your parents' food gives them the right to impose some types of rules on you whether you agree with the rules or not (since it is their house, their food, etc.). Having rules imposed on you is bad. Even considering the work you'll have to do to support yourself, your life will be better if you're able to live free of parental rules. That's why you want to do the work required to become an independent adult.

That's probably not the best answer but it is the only one I know.

There are stereotypical examples of parents who are permissive (don't impose many rules) and as a result of this children lack motivation to develop marketable skills, take responsibility for their lives and move out. The spectre of a 30-year-old living in the basement playing video games all day because his parents "never made him grow up" looms large in popular culture.

Reality is much more complex than a pop culture stereotype, and I'm not advocating for the stereotype. However, there really are children who don't become independent; that's an outcome that as a parent that I want to avoid; and TCS appears to deny the best tool that I know of to keep that from happening.

What is TCS' answer to this?
 

>
>> Further, there will be tons of debate about which parents really followed
>> TCS or not, and it would take extensive documentation to sort that out
>> plus, worse, only people who already understood TCS would be able to judge
>> which parental actions actually qualified or not.
>>
>
> No (at least not from me). Convention is to coerce your kid. Heck, there
> are laws on the books in most states *requiring* parents to coerce their
> kid in some situations like send them to school, standardized testing, etc.
> TCS isn't cool or hip or trendy - which, BTW, is just fine and no mark
> against it. But it means there aren't hoards of parents trying to "fake"
> TCS or coaching their kids to say they were TCS when they weren't.

There are not hoards of people trying to fake it, but a significant percentage of the people who do come to TCS do fake it in some ways.

One thing that happens is they think it sounds nice or good, and coercion is bad, and then they announce they already do most of it and always have.

Or people just stick around on the list for a bit and start calling themselves TCSers without ever understanding it super well. Because, again, they think it's good or nice or something, so they want to identify as being/doing it.


So, yes, there are not very many people trying to TCS. But of the ones who think they are trying to do TCS (or the majority of TCS), more than 50% of those people aren't even close.


For one thing, hardly anyone actually knows what is or isn't coercion. So trying to define TCS as non-coercion does not allow them to differentiate what is TCS or not.

I'm still not sold on the TCS definition of coercion. For one thing, I don't think it's useful because I'm not convinced that TCS-exclusive-coercion (coercion that is not coercion by any definition other than TCS's) is always bad. I think the example of an alarm clock is relevant: When the alarm clock sounds, I am TCS-exclusive-cocerced by it: I'd prefer to keep sleeping, but the alarm sound prevents sleeping. However, both the night before and in the morning by the time I get up and turn off the alarm, I'm glad for the alarm clock and that it sounds when it does.

Maybe like the others you mention I just don't properly understand the definition of TCS coercion and alarm clocks don't really count as TCS-exclusive-coercion. If so, it's hard not to see that as still a strike against it because I have made a sincere and diligent attempt to understand what is and isn't coercion by the TCS definition.
 

>> Besides, no one is going to do TCS well if he doesn't respect philosophy.
>>
>
> OK, couldn't the same be said about science and medicine?

Both of those fields have *huge* problems due to lack of philosophy and/or bad philosophy.

They could be doing 10x better or more.

But when you first mentioned Popper on the ARR list, you said he's more popular among scientists than among academic philosophers.

If that's true, wouldn't the scientists who like Popper be doing much better than the scientists who don't?

Wouldn't they be doing enough better that people would notice? I wouldn't think it would take even 10x better - 2x better would get noticed. 2x average productivity will get noticed in just about any profession.

When these scientists who were doing better were asked why, wouldn't many of them cite Popper or at least a difference in philosophy as the reason?
 

> Shouldn't it be
> possible to decide to *want* to do TCS well, even if one doesn't (yet)
> respect philosophy? That's possible with medicine and science; why would
> TCS be different?

You can't really know what TCS actually is without respecting philosophy, because how will you learn advanced philosophical ideas otherwise?

Again, wouldn't the same be true of science and medicine, yet I'm able to recognize their benefits without learning advanced philosophical ideas first? Maybe I don't really know what "science" is without advanced philosophical ideas, but I do know that the people who produce stuff that I like say that science is indispensible to their production.
 

>
>>
>>> have a set of
>>> publicly verifiable results that someone who isn't yet convinced can
>>> compare against their existing ideas of "good" and see that TCS delivers
>>> good where conventional parenting does not. TCS seems to ask in
>> fundamental
>>> ways that a person change their idea of "good", to see a life free of
>>> TCS-exclusive-coercion as good, based on philosophical arguments alone.
>>>
>>> Despite my improving opinion of philosophy I've never made a major life
>>> change based on philosophical arguments alone, and I'm wary of doing so.
>> I
>>> like to see results.
>>
>> You can never change your mind about what counts as a good result by the
>> results. That sort of empirical method is very limiting at best.
>>
>
> Which is my point. Science and medicine demonstrably deliver results that I
> *already considered* good, even when I still believed in superstition. I
> didn't come to respect science and medicine by changing my mind about what
> counts as a good result. I'd like to get to TCS the same way.

And you can't. You cannot improve your moral philosophy by that limited method. You'll have to use better methods in order to be able to learn more things.

Then can you explain why science and medicine are morally different from TCS, such that it's possible to easily recognize the benefits of science and medicine without advanced philosophy but not the benefits of TCS?
 
--Jason

[Rami Rustom]

On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 5:49 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> The shorthand moral rule is that productiveness and independence are moral
> virtues. Perhaps the reason I'm seeking the kind of examples I am is that I
> don't know how to "do the longhand" on the morality of becoming independent,
> apart from obtaining freedom from the controls that others impose
> concurrently with one's dependence (which I think TCS says are bad).
>
> Meaning - to the moral question:
> Why should a child choose to develop and implement the skills to support
> himself instead of depending on his parents for as long as he can (as long
> as they will allow, or until they die)? Why not continue to live in his
> parents' house, eat his parents' food, etc. and either work less or have
> more money to spend on hobbies?
>
> The only answer I know is:
> You want to become independent because living in your parents' house and
> eating your parents' food gives them the right to impose some types of rules
> on you whether you agree with the rules or not (since it is their house,
> their food, etc.). Having rules imposed on you is bad. Even considering the
> work you'll have to do to support yourself, your life will be better if
> you're able to live free of parental rules. That's why you want to do the
> work required to become an independent adult.
>
> That's probably not the best answer but it is the only one I know.

Whats needed is an understanding of responsibility and of problems.

In adulthood, the ideal situation is for a person is to take
responsibility for all of his problems -- because being dependent on
other people can lead to being helpless when those people move on.
Meaning that he'll have problems that he doesn't know how to solve and
those problems will cause suffering. The independent adult doesn't
rely on his parents, nor the government, nor anyone else, except
through mutually-beneficial trade transactions with other people in
society. How does someone achieve this?

Well how does he start out? At birth, he starts out taking ownership
of a few problems -- crying when he's uncomfortable and sucking when
he is presented with a nipple, among other things. And that means that
his parents are responsible for his other problems, which aren't that
many as compared to the number of problems he'll be responsible for in
adulthood. So how does he go from being responsible for only a few
problems to being responsible for a seemingly infinite number of
problems in adulthood?

The answer lies in the more general idea of how all knowledge is
created. All knowledge evolves in a gradual, step-by-step way. And
each piece of knowledge that we create, is a solution to a problem.
Learning is a process of solving problems one by one -- each one
revealing one or more new problems, then solving those, and those
revealing more, and so on.

So the next question is, at what rate should children assume
responsibility of their problems? The answer is straightforward. You
do it at the rate that they choose, meaning according to their
preferences -- and you'll have lots of opportunities to persuade him
to change his preferences when you disagree. This is an important
issue because often parents push responsibility on to their kids
against their preferences and similarly parents also don't give up
responsibility to their kids again against their preferences. Both of
these involve TCS-coercion on the part of the parent. And TCS-coercion
is the cause of anti-rational memes, memes that cause people to shield
certain ideas from criticism (including their own criticism). This
means that those shielded ideas are not being exposed to the person's
error-correction methods, so if those ideas are mistaken, then they
stay mistaken. And its these mistakes that result in suffering.

> There are stereotypical examples of parents who are permissive (don't impose
> many rules) and as a result of this children lack motivation to develop
> marketable skills, take responsibility for their lives and move out.

That sounds like the parent doesn't give criticism. Horrible.

> The
> spectre of a 30-year-old living in the basement playing video games all day
> because his parents "never made him grow up" looms large in popular culture.
>
> Reality is much more complex than a pop culture stereotype, and I'm not
> advocating for the stereotype. However, there really are children who don't
> become independent; that's an outcome that as a parent that I want to avoid;
> and TCS appears to deny the best tool that I know of to keep that from
> happening.
>
> What is TCS' answer to this?

Criticism! Also creativity in applying that criticism.

I also have an alarm, and I value (and thus want) it, even at the
moment that it rings and wakes me up. I suspect that you actually want
it to. In which case its not TCS-coercion.

> Then can you explain why science and medicine are morally different from
> TCS, such that it's possible to easily recognize the benefits of science and
> medicine without advanced philosophy but not the benefits of TCS?

Can you also tell the difference between science and scientism? If
not, you need Popperism.

Do you know the difference between the medical field and the
psychiatric field -- and that psychiatry is not medicine even though
they claim that it is? If not, you need Popperism. Also Thomas Szasz
explains this too.

[Elliot Temple]

On Dec 4, 2012, at 3:49 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Friday, November 23, 2012 9:31:50 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>
>>

>> On Nov 23, 2012, at 6:39 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com <javascript:>>

>> wrote:
>>
>>> People who are successful in their field get interviewed.
>>
>> They get interviewed *about their field*.
>>
>> When they are particularly well known, sometimes they get interviewed
>> about their personal life too. But why?
>>
>> I have no problem with giving interviews to explain the field of TCS: the
>> philosophy, the ideas. I do have a problem with it being about one's
>> personal life.
>>
>> There are reports of Popper and Rand having bad personalities. So what?
>> Suppose for a moment that it's true and they did. Still, so what?
>
>
> So one of the things we could learn from that is having a "bad" personality
> does not stand in the way of spreading good ideas: influencing people in a
> positive way.

"Bad personality" is pretty ambiguous. But yes for many values of "bad personality". Where "not stand in the way of" means "the person can still have substantial success". However, it could be they would have had considerably more success otherwise and that it got in the way.

BTW, in both cases I don't mean to say the reports are true. So, logically, it could be that they both only had success b/c the reports were false. I do agree with your main point that life works that way but I don't think we exactly learn it *from* these examples.


Popper reportedly got angry or emotional during discussions (I am skeptical and believe the reports contain internal flaws hinting its the people claiming Popper was emotional who were themselves emotional and not judging objectively. But I think there isn't enough information to be very confident about what happened). Both Popper and Rand reportedly offended people with harsh criticism. Popper reportedly did this to students which I think is not OK (it's OK with people who come on a fully voluntary basis and can leave at any time, it's different when you have power over someone). Rand got mixed up in some sexual stuff that I don't think was a good idea.

> This would constitute a criticism of some of the ideas in, for example,
> Dale Carnegie's popular book "How to Win Friends and Influence People".

Yes I agree. BTW I think there's better examples for this purpose. Wittgenstein was definitely a rotten, violent bastard. He's famous and respected (he was also very bad at his profession!). Shelley and Byron had bad personalities in some ways. Lots of famous rich people have been "eccentric" but still had friends and influence.

>
> By "bad" I am assuming you mean attributes which are conventionally viewed
> as bad: abrasive, blunt, unconcerned with accommodating others' emotions,
> etc. If you meant something else you'll need to explain it.
>
> A "bad" personality in that sense is one who does not suffer fools quietly,
> does not accommodate badness, and is focused on making other people feel
> good and winning their approval. Viewing these personality attributes as
> "bad" is something a great many people could benefit from changing.

That's *one* of the issues claimed about Popper and Rand but not the only one.

>
>> Now suppose they told everyone in a bunch of interviews and that got a lot
>> of attention. That's bad, isn't it?
>
>
> I don't think it's bad. It's good! It means, you shouldn't dismiss a
> person's ideas just because their personality is blunt and abrasive.

When I wrote that, I had in mind genuinely bad things claimed about Rand and Popper such as yelling at students. I do not think Popper yelling at students (assuming he did, I don't really know) should be the focus of his reputation and of discussion about him. It follows that if he took steps that substantially helped cause such a mistake, that'd be bad.

I think it's important to have some understanding of this question in order to do TCS well. So people have to learn this, if they were just persuaded by some example and never learned this then their own attempts at TCS might run into problems due to them not knowing enough about this.

In particular, if parent doesn't know the answer to this question, then he won't be able to explain it to his kid. So unless the kid figures it out himself, there is potential for things to go wrong. That some other family got past this issue doesn't mean you can try to do TCS and also get past it -- maybe they knew something (e.g. the answer to this question) that you didn't.


Also, to TCS well, people need some confidence in their mind. Like Rand advocates. They need to be willing and able to use their own judgment, think for themselves, not just believe as they are told. They ought to have some optimism and confidence that if problems come up -- and unexpected problems will come up -- that they can use their mind (and their kid use his mind to help) and figure something about to address it.

So if one is hung up because he's worried about some potential problem, and he wants to have the solution *in advance, before it happens*, that's potentially not the right attitude. You can't map everything out in advance, and need to rely on be able to solve many problems as they come up.

I guess you think maybe this particular problem is special or harder in some way, which merits advanced consideration. I don't think so. And many problems are easier to solve in the actual situation than in advance because then you have much more information about it.

> The only answer I know is:
> You want to become independent because living in your parents' house and
> eating your parents' food gives them the right to impose some types of
> rules on you whether you agree with the rules or not (since it is their
> house, their food, etc.). Having rules imposed on you is bad. Even
> considering the work you'll have to do to support yourself, your life will
> be better if you're able to live free of parental rules. That's why you
> want to do the work required to become an independent adult.
>
> That's probably not the best answer but it is the only one I know.

Parents have no such right! What is the defensible moral philosophy which works that way? Why should they have such a right? Why would rights work that way? What is the explanation of how rights work which is compatible with that?

> There are stereotypical examples of parents who are permissive (don't
> impose many rules) and as a result of this children lack motivation to
> develop marketable skills, take responsibility for their lives and move
> out. The spectre of a 30-year-old living in the basement playing video
> games all day because his parents "never made him grow up" looms large in
> popular culture.

> Reality is much more complex than a pop culture stereotype,

And much more complex than pop psychology explanations like this. The people giving such examples do not have a halfway decent understanding of the causes and effects involved.

What they are doing is more along the lines of coming up with a conclusion first and then an explanation to justify it second, than any rational analysis.

> and I'm not
> advocating for the stereotype. However, there really are children who don't
> become independent; that's an outcome that as a parent that I want to
> avoid; and TCS appears to deny the best tool that I know of to keep that
> from happening.
>
> What is TCS' answer to this?

First, acting immorally and hurting children under your roof is not a tool to promote independence. Mistreating your children is not how you achieve anything good. That cannot and will not work. You have cause and effect wrong. Evil is impotent, as Atlas Shrugged says. It certainly is not a great tool for creating/causing good stuff.

To the extent acting badly promotes independence it works like this: your children want to get the fuck away from you, so they do. That is not a good approach to parenting.


It's similar to the typical way school "promotes learning": it hurts people who don't figure out how to learn stuff themselves. So students try to figure out how to learn to avoid being hurt. All the homework, lessons, lectures, textbooks, tests, and other stuff is all window dressing next to this fundamental issue. Much of it is counter-productive, but kids figure out how to learn something on their own anyway because they don't want to be hurt by the people with power over them.

I can imagine someone asking how kids will ever learn at home without the best known educational tools such as textbooks, homework, tests, curriculums, etc... They have misunderstood what educational tools are any good and how and why kids learn anything at school.


Next, I can imagine you asking: well, how will kids learn anything without the *real* tool of school: power, threats, coercion, punishments? TCS seems to be saying to get rid of the only tool schools have that actually does much. Won't kids then not learn anything?


The answer is that learning is a good lifestyle, learning is valuable and useful, children have every reason to want to learn things. No motivation-by-threat-and-coercion is necessary.

You have to coerce kids if you want them to learn things at the wrong time, or things they don't want to ever learn. But if you don't do this, they can be interested in learning stuff relevant to their problems. They can, in this way, learn enough for a good independent life.

They can develop this interest both by having problems and trying to solve them, and by persuasion and being given information about some stuff they might be interested in to help them consider it.

Nothing compares to being self-motivated, having interests, and learning in that way. It's worlds better than power and coercion. It's much more effective for learning, and a much nicer lifestyle. It also results in much more flexible, adaptable knowledge and flexible, adaptable problem solving and learning skills that can continue to be used through life.

Schools routinely get inflexible, brittle knowledge out of students that is designed to narrowly avoid punishment and pain. Once the child graduates, he finds that knowledge is not much use in life. It was created for the purpose of solving a particular problem -- meeting some arbitrary criteria to avoid being hurt -- instead of any useful real life problems.

In other words, school knowledge has the wrong *structure*. Structural epistemology is not a very developed field but it looks like more than half of what matters about knowledge is the structure, and the content is the remaining less than half.

And not just school knowledge: all knowledge created by threats, power, coercion, etc, instead of interest and problem solving has the wrong structure. The quality of the content is quite often crap, but the structure is *even worse than that* and *matters even more*.


When you choose to create knowledge in order to solve non-arbitrary problems, you get things like it being much more general purpose -- or much easier to change to be general purpose later.

Knowledge more like that is the only way to be really good in intellectual fields. School does not create any top notch people in any intellectual fields. Some top notch people attend school but what happened is more along the lines of them being great *despite* school rather than because of it. Even in the cases where they credit school (which many do not. e.g. i don't think Einstein, Popper, Deutsch, Feynman, Szasz, Mises, Rand, Steve Jobs give much credit to school for their high quality knowledge).


TCS advocates not unschooling or homeschooling in particular but non-coercive learning. Which is different than either movement explains and advocates. (There is overlap, such as agreement that books are value and worth consideration. But as far as the really important philosophy stuff, neither the unschooling nor homeschooling movements understands or has much to offer.)



Now let's go back to the original question about independence. It has parallels to the school issues I discussed.

Coercion is not a useful tool for fostering independence anymore than it is for education.

The right approach is that people solve problems in their lives and pursue their interests. This does not lead to disaster because morality is objective, there are truths in these areas, people do not just reach random arbitrary conclusions.

People can make mistakes. They can reach wrong conclusions. But that is a problem with all systems and methods. People who are being coerced may make mistakes trying to do whatever they are ordered to in order to stop being hurt. They may fail. That's a common result. Either way, they are basically on their own, the parent or teacher is not helping.

If you're concerned about mistakes (as you should be) it's important to help. Sometimes kid will make a mistake but you know the answer (and sometimes vice versa), so if you're helping then in those cases your help can make a big difference. The help must take the form of persuasion or other voluntary methods. Sometimes you'll both get an issue wrong. In that case, if you realize there is a problem, you can try to get help from friends, books, the internet or something. If you still can't find a right answer, then there is no system or method which could fix it. Maybe in the future after you learn something else it will help.


As to the details of why independence is nice, it's sort of like asking why it's nice to be a powerful, effective, competent person. It's honestly a kinda bizarre question coming from someone who isn't like a corrupt lefty. Any even one-quarter-Objectivist is going to admire industrialists and Steve Jobs and other effective people, they are going to think it'd be great to personally be a great man like that, that it isn't a chore or burden to be productive, it's actually nicer than wasting your life being unproductive. Not everyone will want to be an industrialist in particular, they might pursue some other field, but having no field at all sucks, what the hell do you do with your life then, what is the point?

Living isn't pain, misery, work. Living is wonderful. People can and will want to live if they have halfway decent ideas and the coercers get the hell out of their way.

Atlas Shrugged:

> The camera moved to Galt. He remained still for a moment. Then, with so swift and expert a movement that his secretary's hand was unable to match it, he rose to his feet, leaning sidewise, leaving the pointed gun momentarily exposed to the sight of the world—then, standing straight, facing the cameras, looking at all his invisible viewers, he said: "Get the hell out of my way!"

end quote

Being a person of merit is nicer *for you* than being a worthless person. This is a major theme in Rand's books.

No one said it's always bad. TCS has always maintained you can coerce would-be murderers and rapists, for example. You can even coerce them in ways that aren't force. I think this has been clarified to you before.

It's similar to how Objectivists do not say using force is always bad. As you know, that is not an Objectivist claim.


Also why don't you say "force" instead of "TCS-exclusive-coercion"? What's the difference? I do not see the need for the word "coercion" outside the TCS context, I don't see what it's for. I think the word "force" is better.

(Force, properly understood, to include fraud and threats without having to keep mentioning them as extra categories all the time. Regardless of what you think of that issue, I do not think saying "coercion" means "force plus everything else that should be included", I don't think it helps with that problem.)

> I think the example of an alarm clock is
> relevant: When the alarm clock sounds, I am TCS-exclusive-cocerced by it:
> I'd prefer to keep sleeping, but the alarm sound prevents sleeping.

Maybe you are. Some people aren't. You shouldn't be. It's irrational to be. It's a mistake.

> However, both the night before and in the morning by the time I get up and
> turn off the alarm, I'm glad for the alarm clock and that it sounds when it
> does.

Sounds like you're doing what you think is best -- living by your rational judgment -- but have some emotions or ideas which, for short periods of time, contradict that. Those are a (common) problem, something to fix and solve, not an inevitable part of life. They are bad. It'd be better to change your personality not to feel bad briefly each morning for no rational reason.

That TCS-coercion has highlighted this issue, and identified it as a problem when other philosophies do not, is a merit. That other philosophies fail on this issue is a refutation of them.

> Maybe like the others you mention I just don't properly understand the
> definition of TCS coercion and alarm clocks don't really count as
> TCS-exclusive-coercion.

TCS coercion is about *state of mind*. It's about ideas, not clocks. Two people can both use alarm clocks, but have different ideas about alarm clocks, so those situations are different as far as TCS-coercion is concerned. Understanding this would be a good step towards understanding the definition of TCS coercion which *explicitly is focussed on ideas*, so not noticing that is pretty much not getting it at all.

> If so, it's hard not to see that as still a strike
> against it because I have made a sincere and diligent attempt to understand
> what is and isn't coercion by the TCS definition.

Have you?

http://fallibleideas.com/coercion

> Coercion is the psychological state of enacting one idea or impulse while a conflicting impulse is still active in one's mind.
>
> Coercion is the state of two or more personality strands being expressed in different options of a single choice such that one cannot see a way to choose without forsaking some part of his personality.
>
> A state of coercion is one in which a person has two active theories that conflict, and is being forced to enact one prior to resolving the conflict.

Take your pick, all of them have to do with a person's mind, and cannot be expected to give a single answer for all alarm clock morning wakeup usage.

>>
>>>> Besides, no one is going to do TCS well if he doesn't respect
>> philosophy.
>>>>
>>>
>>> OK, couldn't the same be said about science and medicine?
>>
>> Both of those fields have *huge* problems due to lack of philosophy and/or
>> bad philosophy.
>>
>> They could be doing 10x better or more.
>>
>
> But when you first mentioned Popper on the ARR list, you said he's more
> popular among scientists than among academic philosophers.
>
> If that's true, wouldn't the scientists who like Popper be doing much
> better than the scientists who don't?

Yeah. Not in every way but it makes a difference.

Here are some scientists who like Popper and know a significant amount about his ideas (not necessarily full Popperians):

Einstein, Feynman, Deutsch, Eccles, Medawar, Wheeler.

I cannot list for you offhand a lot of the people without much reputation and analyze how they compare to their peers. I think analyzing that would be a difficult, large research project.

> Wouldn't they be doing enough better that people would notice? I wouldn't
> think it would take even 10x better - 2x better would get noticed. 2x
> average productivity will get noticed in just about any profession.
>
> When these scientists who were doing better were asked why, wouldn't many
> of them cite Popper or at least a difference in philosophy as the reason?

They have been asked, and have said such things, yes. That is one of the reasons Popper remains somewhat well known among scientists.

e.g. type "medawar popper" (no quotes) into google and see this in the snippet text:

> 'I think Popper is incomparably the greatest philosopher of science that has ever been', writes Sir Peter Medawar, winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine and ...

end quote

>>> Shouldn't it be
>>> possible to decide to *want* to do TCS well, even if one doesn't (yet)
>>> respect philosophy? That's possible with medicine and science; why would
>>> TCS be different?
>>
>> You can't really know what TCS actually is without respecting philosophy,
>> because how will you learn advanced philosophical ideas otherwise?
>>
>
> Again, wouldn't the same be true of science and medicine, yet I'm able to
> recognize their benefits without learning advanced philosophical ideas
> first?

no.

TCS *is* advanced philosophy, and has philosophical merits. medicine has simple merits.

medicine and science provide many things people already wanted. TCS provides a significant amount of stuff people did not already want, but should have. to appreciate that requires learning, thinking, changing one's mind.

the barrier for entry is higher for things that involve changing your mind. but the potential benefits huge: your mind currently has many mistakes, you have to change it sometimes to live well.

> Maybe I don't really know what "science" is without advanced
> philosophical ideas, but I do know that the people who produce stuff that I
> like say that science is indispensible to their production.

you can use a computer while being an idiot, but you cannot use TCS while being an idiot.

not the same thing. not supposed to be the same thing. not everything good should work the same way science does. i don't get why you think everything should work that way and if it doesn't it must be bad or wrong. just because that way is convenient doesn't mean it's possible to get everything good that way, no matter how much you want it.

they provide stuff people already wanted, TCS has criticisms of what people already want which can provide moral and intellectual improvement.

actually, benefits of TCS and other philosophy are very simple: being a better, smarter person. by an order of magnitude. who doesn't fight with his family or friends. who has the merit to be successful in life in pursuits of his choosing (merit can be *created*). not hurting your kids, helping your kids be awesome people too with all sorts of conventionally desirable characteristics.

what's more controversial is:

1) will these ideas achieve this? are the explanations of how they do it correct or incorrect? to evaluate this competently requires understanding tcs and philosophy.

2) in addition to benefits, TCS and other philosophy provide things many people would consider negatives. and explains why they are not actually negatives. evaluating these explanations again requires good thinking and knowledge.

[Elliot Temple]

That's not a good reason in all cases. Sometimes maybe you could be pretty confident the person or people won't move on.

The important reasoning for being an effective, autonomous person is positive: it's a better lifestyle, more fulfilling, nicer, etc... Not negative that not doing it has possible risks.

Should focus more on how to live well, not how to avoid disaster. Most of morality is not about avoiding disaster, dealing with extreme cases, etc... Morality is most importantly about what to do with a non-disastrous life. How *to* live, not what to avoid. Yes there are things that are important to avoid but merely avoiding those won't make your life wonderful.

>
> Well how does he start out? At birth, he starts out taking ownership
> of a few problems -- crying when he's uncomfortable and sucking when
> he is presented with a nipple, among other things. And that means that
> his parents are responsible for his other problems, which aren't that
> many as compared to the number of problems he'll be responsible for in
> adulthood. So how does he go from being responsible for only a few
> problems to being responsible for a seemingly infinite number of
> problems in adulthood?
>
> The answer lies in the more general idea of how all knowledge is
> created. All knowledge evolves in a gradual, step-by-step way. And
> each piece of knowledge that we create, is a solution to a problem.
> Learning is a process of solving problems one by one -- each one
> revealing one or more new problems, then solving those, and those
> revealing more, and so on.

You're trying to talk about what could happen if people wanted it to and chose it. The question was about why to want to make it happen.

People could also *not* do what you say. There is an issue of whether they should or not, which is what the question was about.

>
> So the next question is, at what rate should children assume
> responsibility of their problems? The answer is straightforward. You
> do it at the rate that they choose, meaning according to their
> preferences

The answer is not straightforward. As we've been talking about in other threads, the truth is not obvious.

It's a complicated issue that's being discussed. By denying this, you insult everyone who doesn't know the answer, such as Jason.

I think the answer you give is not very good. It fails to address the issue of: what should their preferences be? What preferences are objectively right? Why? Which I think is one of the things Jason was asking about, and which is important regardless.

> -- and you'll have lots of opportunities to persuade him
> to change his preferences when you disagree.

When should you disagree? Which ones are right or wrong? What are the criteria to judge mistakes? You aren't explaining the important stuff here.

I think that's not a very good suspicion. I think your method will conclude that most stuff isn't coercion, even, often, when it is.

A major way coercion happens is people aren't being totally rational and sensible about something. So when you assume people are actually being reasonable, you underestimate coercion.

>> Then can you explain why science and medicine are morally different from
>> TCS, such that it's possible to easily recognize the benefits of science and
>> medicine without advanced philosophy but not the benefits of TCS?
>
> Can you also tell the difference between science and scientism? If
> not, you need Popperism.
>
> Do you know the difference between the medical field and the
> psychiatric field -- and that psychiatry is not medicine even though
> they claim that it is? If not, you need Popperism. Also Thomas Szasz
> explains this too.

Szasz liked Popper's ideas FWIW.

[Elliot Temple]

On Nov 1, 2012, at 3:09 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote on RP list:

> Elliot wrote:
>
>> Children are deprived of some basic human rights and then when we complain about that your response is children need a special status so they don't starve to death. How do you get from there to defending the denial of basic human rights to children? How the hell do you come up with the notion that having basic human rights means no one can have any duties to you anymore? That's not a TCS position, it's not close to any TCS position, it's an unreasonable straw man.
>
> You switched terminology here. You switched from "full human rights" at the top to "basic human rights" here. That's a very important difference! Children do have "basic human rights" - you cannot kill them, you cannot assault them, you cannot rape them, etc. I'm not defending denying children basic human rights. By "full human rights" I'm talking about things like the right to play drums at 4am, or to dump a box of cereal on the floor, or sign binding contracts. These are among the rights an independent adult human would have, that I don't think children to have.
>
> I've noticed you doing that (changing contexts) a lot. I'm not sure if you just don't realize that you're doing it, or if you think it helps your argument to couch alternatives to TCS in language that implies non-TCS people support commonly recognized forms of child abuse. Either way I don't think it's helpful.

i think jason misread. this is notable because he took the time to write meta accusing me of doing nasty tricks. (i would have quoted more but jason wrote an HTML post, so it's too much work for the personal benefit i'd get)

jason even said i do nasty tricks "a lot" but did not give any other examples for me to learn from or refute.

first, there's no switch here. the topic was human rights the whole time. i consistently wrote about that, and used the same phrase ("human rights").

in this place i qualified it with the word "basic" because that served my purposes in that paragraph. sometimes adding relevant adjectives isn't a context switch or trick.

not only are children denied some human rights, they are denied some basic human rights. this emphasizes how bad it is. they are denied really basic ones, so that's like extra bad! writing like this is mundane, not dirty.

jason thinks it's a switch because somewhere else i used the adjective "full" for the phrase "full human rights". "full" means ALL of them. if children are denied any human rights, basic or not, then they are being denied full human rights. so i'm talking about the same thing in all cases (denial of human rights), and in one case i emphasized children are denied any human rights (don't have full human rights) and in another i emphasized they are actually denied basic human rights (some of the excluded rights are basic). where is the problem?

part of why jason is confused is that my writing doesn't take into account his mistakes (IMO) about nighttime drum playing, and his mistaken interpretation of how rights work. children and adults have (or should have) the same rights regarding nighttime drum playing. (human rights are the same for everyone, what varies is their application in different contexts/situations. in other words, if Joe has a right in some situation, Bob would have it were Bob in that same situation. this is true for all correct rights)

anyone has a right to free action – well, something along those lines plus qualifications/exceptions. they can live their life how they want when that doesn't cause various types of problems. that would include playing the drums at night if they have drums and a place where it won't disturb others. it's also fine if the others who are disturbed can be told, "if you don't like it, you're free to leave. you're just a guest on my property". and there's various other factors that can make it OK, or not. there's various excuses for disturbing others that would be correct or incorrect. none depend on age. they depend on things like property rights, reasonable standards for noise at times of day in a culture and location, reasonable expectations of guests, type of guest (house guest vs hotel guest), etc

children have the right to kick guests out of houses they own just as much as adults do. anyone has the same right to kick guests out of houses they own (which isn't absolute, it depends on circumstances a bit, but it's very common that people can rightly non-violently kick out guests). there is no difference in rights just because most children do not own houses and do not get the opportunity to make use of that right.

there's confusion here (with the drum example) about something like equality of rights vs equality of outcomes. people have (or should have) the same rights, but different people may get different opportunities to use them. for more on that see below.


and jason, you have effectively advocated denying children basic rights such as freedom from force. because sometimes children are forced and instead of saying that's super bad, you sometimes deny it's force. that's a really common way to legitimize and defend children being denied basic human rights. it is in some way, arguably, partially unintentional, but that doesn't change the resulting suffering, and leaves plenty of moral responsibility in tact.

further, it is the TCS position that people routinely do things to children which are child abuse. so that's why we say stuff like that. because it's our position. as jordan recently posted, many things done to children would be recognize as "spousal abuse" if done to a spouse. so we consider that abuse and don't have much sympathy with defenses of it. similarly if some mistreatment of children would be a crime to do to a stranger, we don't think there's much excuse for doing/advocating it to children and saying how you don't advocate anything bad and TCS should stop being so harsh in its judgments.




On Nov 1, 2012, at 3:09 PM, Jason <auv...@gmail.com> wrote on RP list:

>
>
> On Monday, October 29, 2012 1:48:04 PM UTC-7, Elliot Temple wrote:
>
>> The same rights is not the same thing as the same status in every way.
>>
>> When we say children should have equality before the law, and full human rights, it doesn't mean you treat every person on Earth exactly the same. Just as adult people differ and are treated according to their situation, the same goes for people including children.
>>
> Can you explain the difference between:
> - People have the same rights but should be treated differently according to their situation (in the extant example, the situation of being dependent)
> -versus-
> - People in different situations have different effective rights

Rights are basic minimal things like not to be punched (this is also a good example of how "rights" are typically approximate concepts, a little like rules of thumb or shortcuts. the more precise thing is moral explanations). Rights don't cover all ways people are treated, they basically cover the serious stuff. you can't decide which halloween costume to wear by thinking about rights but you CAN think about moral explanations to help make that decision. (yes you can make an exception if one of the costumes involves wearing sewn-together murder victims. everything always comes down to explanations and criticisms if people want to be picky or don't interpret it a friendly way)

An example situation would be a store. People willing to pay for an item can leave the store with it. People who are not willing to pay for something are not allowed to leave the store with it. These different people have the same rights, but are treated differently.

Both people have the right not to be punched while browsing the store. They have the same legal rights about what it takes to get them in big trouble if they are accused of stealing from the store. They have equal rights. But they are treated differently according to the situation they are in.

Another example would be a person treating his wife and his neighbor differently.

Another example of different treatment would be if you have two dependent kids, and one likes fantasy books and the other likes sci fi books. So you treat them differently – get them different books. As this example shows, it makes no difference to the principle (equal rights, differential treatment by context/situation) whether the people are dependent or not.

In no way does any of this mean the people have "different effective rights".




> Fair enough, but then don't turn around and accuse me of depriving children of their basic human rights, which are legal rights, when I disagree with TCS over whether it's ever moral for me to turn off my TV contrary to my kids' wishes. Our disagreement is not about basic human rights. It's about whether or not kids have a moral right to do things like watch unlimited TV.

TV deprivation, as practiced in the US, typically involves force. It's not reasonable to say how anti-force one is, advocate TV deprivation, and not address this. It seems to imply Jason is unaware of these uses of force (which would make him a rather poor opponent of them, possibly even a doer of them, and not such a good anti-force advocate as he thinks).

Next point: because of children's situation, parents have various responsibilities. This is a general principle – basically when Bob is responsible for a problem existing, Bob is responsible for solving it. If Bob doesn't do that, he could easily be violating someone's rights by causing someone else a problem then not dealing with the consequences. That scenario isn't always a rights violation but it easily can be. In many cases, Bob could be taken to court over it. The responsibilities of parents along these lines are substantial because parents made a very important and consequential choice. Something like this is generally acknowledge and accepted by even conventional parents, who think the responsibilities of parents include providing food and education. TV is an important part of education. Whether a particular parent knows that his actions are harming his child's education doesn't prevent it from violating his responsibilities *in fact*. Ignorance like that is relevant in some ways, but the problem of the child not getting the stuff he's owed would still exist. For now I'll leave it up to the reader to work out the rest.







>> > Furthermore, you responded to a statement that was specifically about
>> > coercion, and the TCS definition thereof (which I call "TCS-coercion").
>> > Even adults don't have a natural right not to be TCS-coerced! So it's not a
>> > question of rights or ageism to reject the elimination of all TCS-coercion
>> > as a worthwhile goal.
>>
>> Adults do have a right to self-defense against coercion. In what example situation do you think they don't?
>>
>> For example if someone tries to shoot a gun at me, being shot would coerce me and I can't defend against that.
>
> Shooting a gun is ordinary coercion. That's not what I meant.
>
> What label should I use when I mean "The behaviors that TCS calls coercion, but which are not coercion (force) in the ordinary sense"? Would "TCS-exclusive-coercion" be OK?


here jason gets super hung up even though he knows i use the word "coercion" to mean "TCS-coercion". if he rereads the text with that in mind, instead of freaking out because i gave an example where that's so clearly *true*, maybe the discussion could get somewhere.

i think jason is so shocked that i could possibly mean what i said that he's invented some interpretation where i instead mean something else that i didn't say and which would be stupid. and he's so focussed on that that he ignored the direct question.

jason even says "that's not what i meant" about the example i gave. yes, i know it isn't an example making his case. but he doesn't give an example that does make his case.

jason said something of the form "for some X, Y".

I gave an example where X and Y do NOT go together. so i refuted, "for all X, Y". i'm well aware this does not refute jason's claim. it simply illustrates how X and Y might not go together. it's really up to jason to give an example where X and Y do go together. so i asked. but he didn't do it.

it's hard to have discussions when people react like this. i said something straightforwardly true and asked a straightforward question, and jason wasn't able to deal with that and explain his claim more.


also, think about it this way: TCS-coercion = suffering. TCS-coercing another person = making them suffer. So the idea that people have a right to defend against other people making them suffer is not so strange. so maybe jason should stop thinking his position is so uncontroversial that he finds it hard to believe i'd contradict it and actually mean what i said. (rather than meaning what i said, he thinks i decided to talk about *force*, by the word "coercion", in reply to jason talking about "TCS-coercion", which would be stupid as fuck if i did that)

i also btw went on to explain my point more in the original email. jason went on to reply that he does not understand what TCS-coercion is. (he still doesn't, today). so how can he be reasonably making claims about stuff like, "Even adults don't have a natural right not to be TCS-coerced!" when he still hasn't learned what TCS-coercion is? one has to discussion in more rational ways for it to be very productive.


> Communication is difficult. When you criticize libertarianism you don't express what you're criticizing the way that libertarians do either. It's not intentional in either case.

this is super unfair. there is basically no such thing as canonical libertarianism. i can't mimic what how most libertarians would express something because they vary in their positions and expression styles so much. as opposed to with stuff like TCS and Objectivism where there is recognizably Objectivist or TCS ways to approach a topic.

libertarianism has a very minimal bare bones amount of stuff that is canonical, but i do express that right. e.g. "It's bad to initiate force or threat of force or fraud" is a libertarian position that i am able to express in terms libertarians would endorse because it's one of the few things libertarians can agree on – at least they agree on that phrase, but the full detailed meaning is a point of tons of disagreement


> We don't reject persuasion. We only use TCS-exclusive-coercion when persuasion is unsuccessful.

using coercion as a "last resort" is how ALL IRRATIONAL THUGS DO IT. that is THE standard rejection of persuasion. pretty much no one uses coercion as a first resort. if they could persuade, they would.

jason can you see this for violence?

what if someone said, "I don't reject persuasion. I only use violence when persuasion is unsuccessful". see the problem? that person is a violent thug, not a rational persuader.

as a general point, how people handle *conflict* is extremely defining. how they handle the easy no-conflict cases is often minor.

when everyone agrees, typically they happily do that. when they don't agree, now you have a harder case and how people handle that will differentiate them.

today, many many people are willing to try persuasion more than zero. that's super common. it doesn't set you apart. but what if they try persuasion more than zero and there is still a conflict? now what? *this* defines people a lot. and if your "now what" is violence, then you're a violent thug, and NOT a liberal persuader. if your "now what" is TCS-coercion, you're a coercing-bastard, NOT a liberal persuader.


This is, btw a very very standard TCS position. maybe you should put more effort into learning TCS and less into arguing with it (badly – e.g. here explicitly saying you're what TCS considers a very terrible parent, and thinking that would be persuasive to any TCSer that you you're a liberal persuader type parent. you know so little about TCS you don't even know when you're openly confessing to being a total rotten bastard who very badly mistreats his children. you don't know the arguments TCS has on these topics, or even some of its well known conclusion statements. and yet you're really resistant to TCS in these non-productive ways and don't focus on learning something so that, if you wanna reject TCS, you could do it knowingly-intentinoally, and have some criticisms of it that make any sense, which currently you aren't close to being able to do.)