Might it be a good way, in general, to ensure that children grow up instinctively distrustful of authority? I realize that may be a negative trait in an ideal world, but in this corrupt one I think it's essential.
H. Keith Henson says he grew up with a family tradition of telling really obvious whoppers to small children so that they would learn to think. He hypothesizes that this would help immunity against bad memetic infections:
It is possible that lie detection is like language; there is a learning window. Telling “whoppers” to small children seems to be a family tradition in many families. (There were some great examples in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbs.) Generally the tradition is to tell lies so blatant that even small children spot them. A study of the outcome of this variation in child raising might be of great interest.
My family had that tradition via my mother's father. He had a whole series of crazy lies that were super fun. For years I was told that lifesavers candies were actually "bear pills" that would make my brother and I strong and brave enough to wrestle bears into submission.
Once, when my brother and I were really little, we visited our grandparents the week before Easter and Grandpa came out to the front porch with his shotgun, shouting about how he had just missed the Easter Bunny, and he put such a scare into the bunny with his near miss that the bunny dropped some candy as he made his escape. Sure enough, running over to where the bunny was supposed to have made off into the wilderness we found still-wrapped candy scattered around on the ground, with a trail of less and less candy that we followed for about 50 feet before it tapered off.
And then there was the "live rock" and the "medfly killer" and "eek eek eggs" and the trick where pouring salt on a deer's tail it will cause it to become tame...
If you search LW for Santa Claus you'll find a lot of people here who find that particular systematic lie disturbing, but I've always thought it was the same basic idea as part of western culture, and very healthy for that reason. When I was little my parents actually hid an audio playback system in the attic that made "reindeer on the roof" sounds and had a carefully constructed "interview" with Santa. It caused me to believe in Santa for years longer than otherwise. When it happened I already knew that there were microphones that could broadcast to simple clock radios and I thought that my parents might be using one of those so I "talked to Santa" while watching them to try and see if they pulled out such a microphones or if their lips moved when Santa talked. I couldn't detect the trick I thought might be happening, so I was "forced by logic" to accept the data as proof of Santa's existence. This experience helps me to understand why scientists are so easy for stage magicians and people who are good at cold readings to trick...
Good times :-P
It seems fitting that my first post here be an origin story, of sorts. Like any origin story, it is overly reductionistic and attributes a single cause to an overdetermined phenomenon. There's an old Spider-Man comic that claims that even if he hadn't been bitten by a radioactive spider, and even if he hadn't caused his uncle's death through inaction, Peter Parker would still have become a superhero thanks to his engineering talent and strong moral fiber. Nevertheless, I find it compelling to say that I became a skeptic (and from there a rationalist and consequentialist) because from an early age I attended two different religious schools at the same time.
From age six, I spent my weekdays at a Christian independent school. From around the same time, I went to a Jewish "Sunday school" (and to Jewish religious services some Saturday evenings). I imagine this is a rare, bizarre-sounding way to grow up. In Jewish communities in rural Pennsylvania it's quite common.
This led to a predictable phenomenon. Adults, teachers in similar positions of respect and authority, were (confidently and earnestly!) making different, contradictory assertions about extremely important subjects. People whom I respected equally had vastly different concepts of how the universe worked, and I was constantly reminded of this. The inference was inescapable: teachers were often wrong and I would have to use my own judgement. I remember briefly theorizing that there were simply two different gods, the Old Testament one and the New Testament one (who was also Gaia), which would certainly help reconcile everything.
By the time I was ten, I questioned everything a teacher said, in any subject, to a fault (e.g., I refused to learn the backhand in tennis because I couldn't see the point). By the time I was twelve, I confidently identified as an atheist. My parents were still religious Jews, but they didn't really care as long as they could bully me into performing the rituals. We spent more time arguing about AI, as it happened, than the existence of God (my parents were both Searle-ists). By the time I was fifteen, I had decided to drop out of school and educate myself, etc.
I think I would have gotten there anyway. But I find it appealing to speculate that I got there much faster than I would have if I'd received a secular education. I'm curious whether anyone here had a similar upbringing. Might this be a good way for atheists to deliberately inoculate their children? Might it be a good way, in general, to ensure that children grow up instinctively distrustful of authority? I realize that may be a negative trait in an ideal world, but in this corrupt one I think it's essential.