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Lies We Tell Kids

paulgraham.com

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Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#71

Post by mynameishere »

mrtron wrote: post #49
dgabriel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There aren't suicidal turkeys; they get slaughtered and cleaned and cooked. Why is that so horrifying for a child?

Growing up in a farming community, death was common and not hidden from children. The more horrific thing for me as a kid was discovering: "Today’s domesticated turkeys are anatomically manipulated to be so heavy and large breasted, because breast meat is the most desirable and therefore commands the best price, that they are now incapable of breeding naturally." So, there are people who have to perform this artifici…

Watch and enjoy:

http://www.findinternettv.com/Video,item,1838332278.aspx

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#72

Post by ajju »

"Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don't think this is a coincidence. I think they've deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don't."

This is the most important paragraph of this essay. It's really important for anyone who is curious in general to understand this and I have never heard it expressed before.

"The bizarre half is what makes the religion stick, and the useful half is the payload."

This is actually a very effective marketing trick if you replace "bizarre" with unusual. Look at reddit - the alien makes it sticky, Google - unusual simplicity makes it sticky, Apple - unusually good looking devices.

I do think that with religion as with products, short term stickiness comes from the surface unusualness and long term stickiness comes from the payload - the actual utility (honesty and industriousness for religion, unsually intuitive interfaces for apple products, really good search algorithms for Google, and until recently at least, entertaining stories on reddit)

For people who don't find the long term utility in religion, the stickiness that comes from common unusualness is often not enough to maintain their 'belief'. This is truer for products than for religions though - which I'm sure is an evolutionary effect. It's a much harder decision to quit your group or clan than it is to abandon things. Clearly, Apple has managed to cross this product-religion boundary, making it stickier.

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#73

Post by projectileboy »

pg wrote: post #15
dgabriel wrote: post #4

My least favorite pg essay. It's too easy to generalize about parenting, and so little of this essay applies to me. 1. Raising a kid in the city, and quite happily. 2. No prohibitions on swears in my house. Just at Grandma's, and only because it would offend her, not because swearing is inherently bad. 3. He goes to a school where they only teach you how to read, write, and do basic math. Everything else is a child-l…

Lying to your kids is like the kind of intellectual fashion I wrote about in "What You Can't Say." No parent thinks they lie to their kids-- except of course in necessary or harmless ways -- just as no one thinks what they believe is an intellectual fashion. But in retrospect it turns out most parents do, just as in retrospect it turns out most people's beliefs are influenced by intellectual fashions. So if one has a…

I'm a parent of three children (girl, 6; two boys, 3 yrs and 9 mos), and your essay resonated very strongly with me. Thanks for a great piece of writing.

I've found that I've done a better job as a parent when I consciously thought about these things beforehand, so that I was prepared to discuss them with my kids when they came up (and they always seem to come up much, much earlier than I expect). For example, questions from my daughter about jail led to crime, which led to drug use, which led to recreational drug use. Fortunately I had thought about this one quite a bit, so I was able to give the carefully crafted answer that I had wanted to give. But I haven't always been so lucky, and sometimes the lies come streaming out.

Raising kids - especially more than one - is in some ways like an intense startup experience, where you're constantly trying to extinguish fires, and you're only partially prepared for any one of them. You just do the best you can with the amount of patience, knowledge and raw ability you have at the time, which is never perfect. It's difficult, and transformative, and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#74

Post by edw519 »

Adults may be able to lie to children with their words, but they can rarely pull this off with their actions.

Each of us can remember the many times when, as children, we witnessed the difference between "what I say" and "what I do".

We were told not to swear, drink, smoke, or lie by parents who swore, drank, smoked and lied, not to gossip by adults who gossiped, not to cheat by teachers who cut corners themselves, to do the right thing by leaders who didn't, and to be great by celebrities who weren't so great.

Who knows, if adults actually did what they said, maybe they would have been able to pull it off.

We children may have been a little slow, but we weren't that stupid. After all...

"What you do speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#75

Post by jamess »

jkkramer wrote: post #63
jamess wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For their own sake, don't let your kids be vegetarian until they're at least 16, that's the worst disservice you could ever do them. I speak as a vegetarian myself, but you've got to be pragmatic. Your kids need animal protein right up until their brains are done developing. It doesn't have to be very much animal protein, as little as a teaspoon a day does the trick, but there is no artificial or vegetable substitute…

Cite? I've never seen any evidence that kids need animal protein to develop. I was raised vegetarian from birth and have no mental or physical defects to speak of. I have siblings and cousins and friends that are the same. Vitamin B12 is the only thing that can be a challenge to get from non-animal sources, but that's only a concern if you're vegan. The whole "vegetarians don't get enough protein" thing is an overblo…

Yes, that's the thing. There's literally millions of people in Africa who get little or no animal protein, and they grow up just fine. The point is that study after study shows that with just a tiny portion of animal protein, they end up a whole lot smarter.

I'm not trying to suggest you aren't yourself a smart person, just that simply because you can't see the ill effects your actions cause doesn't mean they don't exist.

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#76

Post by danohuiginn »

robg wrote: post #69
hugh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, "lies we tell ourselves" doesn't sound like a very good essay. Since we don't know about the lies we tell ourselves, it would have to be "lies I see other people telling themselves". And that pretty much translates to "Things that other people believe that I disagree with", which is a fairly boring topic for an essay.

When's the last time you had an honest discussion with anyone about: a) Sex (e.g., Do you satisfy your partner?) b) Death (e.g., Was your life meaningful?) c) Formal Education (e.g., If not, then what?) d) Identity (e.g., Who are you?) e) Authority (e.g., Who tells you what to do?) I don't know, honesty seems much harder than settling on lies to tell ourselves.

I have these kinds of discussion fairly often. In fact, I probably wouldn't consider somebody a friend until we'd had that kind of conversation. I find it hard to judge if that's unusual - maybe it is in other social circles?

I take the point that avoiding self-deception is hard, maybe impossible. But that's no different from talking about science, or history, or just about anything else.

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#77

Post by Retric »

pg wrote: post #15
dgabriel wrote: post #4

My least favorite pg essay. It's too easy to generalize about parenting, and so little of this essay applies to me. 1. Raising a kid in the city, and quite happily. 2. No prohibitions on swears in my house. Just at Grandma's, and only because it would offend her, not because swearing is inherently bad. 3. He goes to a school where they only teach you how to read, write, and do basic math. Everything else is a child-l…

Lying to your kids is like the kind of intellectual fashion I wrote about in "What You Can't Say." No parent thinks they lie to their kids-- except of course in necessary or harmless ways -- just as no one thinks what they believe is an intellectual fashion. But in retrospect it turns out most parents do, just as in retrospect it turns out most people's beliefs are influenced by intellectual fashions. So if one has a…

As my father once said: “they can make you go to school but they can’t make you do anything there.” Lying to your kids is common but optional. At 28 I can't think of a single time my father ever lied to me and as far as I can tell he never lied to my 10 year younger sister. Granted plenty of other people lied to me, but he had no problem pointing out that religion was silly, drugs where fun and dangerous, and conformity was optional if you accept society’s response etc. Odd as it might seem his accurate responces where frequently less than useful such as trying to describe chemistry at the atomic level to a 3rd grader and recomending the joy of sex (a book) to a teenager but such is life.

PS: One extreme example was he was told to lie so he could get a clearance by the person giving the interview and he refused.

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#78

Post by pg »

iamwil wrote: post #14

"And after having spent their whole lives doing things that arbitrary and believing things that are false, and being regarded as odd by "outsiders" on that account, the cognitive dissonance pushing children to regard themselves as Xes must be enormous. " Typo: I think there's suppose to be an "are" in "lives doing things that ARE arbitrary"

Thanks, fixed.

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#79

Post by robg »

danohuiginn wrote: post #76
robg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When's the last time you had an honest discussion with anyone about: a) Sex (e.g., Do you satisfy your partner?) b) Death (e.g., Was your life meaningful?) c) Formal Education (e.g., If not, then what?) d) Identity (e.g., Who are you?) e) Authority (e.g., Who tells you what to do?) I don't know, honesty seems much harder than settling on lies to tell ourselves.

I have these kinds of discussion fairly often. In fact, I probably wouldn't consider somebody a friend until we'd had that kind of conversation. I find it hard to judge if that's unusual - maybe it is in other social circles? I take the point that avoiding self-deception is hard, maybe impossible. But that's no different from talking about science, or history, or just about anything else.

That self-deception is exactly what I was getting at. I have no doubt that many have these discussions but it's so much easier to lie during them. I'd argue it's different in kind from science or history exactly because there's no independent record that can be consulted. Indeed, I can't see many parents lying to their kids about science or history because it would be so straight-forward to identify the lie. No, the lies seem much more personal exactly because we're already telling them to ourselves. Thus the sequel essay.

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#80

Post by cia_plant »

jamess wrote: post #70
cia_plant wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American Dietetic Association, at least, disagrees: "Well-planned vegan and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood and adolescence." http://www.eatright.org/cps/rde/xchg/ada/hs.xsl/advocacy_933... Can you at least offer a source for your shocking claims?

Erm, hardly shocking. It has been established since at least the 80s that vitamin B12 is essential for brain development, and any number of large scale developmental studies have been carried out to that effect.There are no non-animal sources for vitamin B12. If you find any doctor of medicine who will recommend a vegan or vegetarian diet to either a breast feeding mother or to a child, then they ought to be struck o…

Unless you are a strict vegetarian (vegan), you can obtain B12 from eggs or dairy products. Most vegans are well aware of the danger of B12 deficiency, and either take supplements or eat foods fortified with B12. B12 supplements are inexpensive and widely available. So how exactly is B12 a serious problem for vegetarians?
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