There is a certain cliche of a young child asking "why?", getting an answer, asking "why?" to that, and so on until the adult finally dismisses them out of frustration.
Simple miscommunication. Kids figure out that saying "why?" causes people to tell them interesting, related things. So they keep doing that. The adults who hear this, however, are applying an additional constraint - the things have to be related in a particular way - which the child probably doesn't care much about. Unfortunately, that constraint sometimes leads to dead ends; there are many concepts where all the answers to "why" are either unknown, or uninteresting, or built on prerequisite knowledge not available to small children. The graceless way to handle this is to get frustrated and dismiss them. The right way is to segue the conversation to something that isn't related by an is-cause-of or is-purpose-of relation, but which is interesting and worth talking about.
I define "real love" as the state of valuing another's quality of life more than your own quality of life.
I think this is a weird definition. As far as I can tell, "love" is an actual emotion. If you knew about hormones and endorphins and stuff you could probably measure it. Defining it in terms of someone's utility function misses that. Besides, it doesn't seem uncommon at all to value other people's quality of life more than your own. Doesn't this happen every time someone sacrifices something for the sake of politeness?
Valuing someone else more than yourself is problematic, as in "you have problems"; see Peter Breggin's discussion in The Psychology of Freedom. A better way of putting what I think you are trying to say is from Heinlein, "where the other person's happiness is essential to your own" (paraphrase from multiple sources, especially Stranger and Time Enough for Love).
As the parent of a 4yo, the annoying thing about "Why?" is that my daughter doesn't actually listen to the answer at all, so the chain of answers don't build up. This is when it just gets irritating. That and when "why?" doesn't make sense, e.g. "Why is it dinner?"
A lot of the time it seems to just be her saying something to achieve interaction with the parent, because she likes interaction even if it's meaningless. At which point I ideally try to get her actually thinking in some more meaningful way.
I have found "Why do you think?" to be an occasionally useful response, often producing an actual thoughtful response in turn (if one exists).
Have you had experience of parental responsibility for a small child? (not that such is required to post these questions, I'm just curious as to your perspective.)
On "Why?":
It would be better to teach children that this is a wrong question. After enough levels, this question simply stops having an answer and starts being an example of the mind projection fallacy (thinking the universe has a "reason" for X or somesuch, like a person would in that situation.) That's pretty clear-cut.
On accepting doom:
It is absolutely less psychologically painful to accept certain doom than to have a twinge of false hope. That is why non-transhumanists are okay with death; they think it is inevitable. The trouble here is that accepting something that isn't actually inevitable is far more harmful, for non-psychological reasons. Edit: I have a short essay about this now.
On abuse of the word "love":
There are many things to blame for this, but I'm going to point the finger at how many entirely distinct concepts this word points to in the English language, that other languages have individual words for, but ours doesn't. The love between friends, combat allies, pets and owners, family, romance, et cetera, are all very different feelings, but they get muddled together when you think about them. In other words, thinking about "love-in-general" makes no sense and is a compression fallacy.
Sometimes with small children, I get the impression they're asking "why?" for the social interaction rather than to actually get answers. I'm not sure I'm right about this, but it can be very tiresome to give serious answers to questions under those circumstances.
Any thoughts about how to tell whether a child wants real answers? If it is for the social interaction, what's a graceful way to handle it without squelching real curiosity?
I agree about the comfort of giving up hope , or at least that's a plausible explanation for why I'm seeing people so sure of their pessimism being correct when the future is so hard to predict.
"Because zebra donkey tomatillos."
I predict the answer is:
"No, that's silly!"
(I've tried something similar to this with a friend's kid.)
Re: The why questions- I am both a child therapist and the mother of jimrandomh. I don't remember him ever doing that and the children I work with ( I see about 18 on a regular basis) never do it to me. I think tetsuo55 is right in his observation that children tend to do it when they are being ignored. As an only child of older parents, jimrandomh was virtually never ignored, and, of course, the children I see for individual therapy sessions already have my attention.
Re: "Good parents"- A few observations- The age of puberty has been dropping, t...
...With alarming commonality, adults with maturing offspring go out of their way to stunt their children's sociosexual development, due primarily, I think, to a desire to conform to the current societal archetype of Good Parent. Despite ambiguous-at-best psychological evidence, parents fight to keep kids ignorant, unequipped, and chaste due to the social consensus that having sexually active children makes one a Bad Parent.
I would even go so far as to call such deliberate impediment of sociosexual development a form of abuse, despite its extreme prevalence a
Related to the first topic: people will do anything to avoid saying "I don't know" to someone they see as socially below them, whether it's a parent/child, boss/employee, customer/worker, or just a social hierarchy. Sometimes this gets patently ridiculous, which is one of the reasons I enjoy Not Always Right.
On love: I agree that a lot of people are too narrow minded about what counts as an valid reason to engage in an relationship/sex, so they end up deceiving everyone (including themselves) - but what I would like to point out though, is that intense romantic love only rarely lasts more than 2-3 years (I at least would find it quite sad that our definition for real love only last up to about 3 years), But that relationship bonds can consist of feelings of deep attachment. So maybe you could specify. Must "real love" be intense romantic love or any ...
I define "real love" as the state of valuing another's quality of life more than your own quality of life
Is this a common definition? I've not seen it before, and it seems both very strong and very limited.
Wikipedia notes:
...In English, love refers to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from pleasure ("I loved that meal") to interpersonal attraction ("I love my partner"). "Love" may refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love, to the sexual love of eros, to
I was that child constantly asking why, and getting substandard answers, or made-up stories, in place of real answers. For instance, when I asked about thunder and lightning, my parents told me that god was angry. Of course, that had me asking why he was angry, and how the newscaster knew when god was angry. That was when my parents lied again, explaining that was why the newscaster was wrong so often. Naturally, I was pretty confused. Then what is the point of a newscaster?
I think that if parents do not know the answer to a question, they should look it u...
I think that if parents do not know the answer to a question, they should look it up and learn it with the child. The whole internet is at their fingertips. It can become a learning experience for both the child and the adult.
I realize it's no longer a concern for parents now, but the vast majority of people who ever parented did not have access to the Internet. ARPA has been around since 1969, but the Internet has only been easily accessible to the masses since 1993 (when the Mosaic browser came out). This may seem shocking, but there are, in fact, Lesswrongers who did not have the Internet when they were children.
I recall my parents buying a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica around 1985 or so for a cost of around $400, which is about $840 dollars today -- not an expense everyone can afford.
So while it is, in general, a good idea not to provide mysterious answers to children's questions, it would not have been reasonable to expect parents to run to the library every time their child had a question they did not know the answer to, which is what this would actually have required only 1 generation ago.
Editing to add: Parents should also not be ashamed to answer "I don't know" to children's questions. This is much better than providing fake explanations.
I agree love is an abused term but not for the same reason. Mostly I just think it's a leaky and undefined category of feelings that isn't really distinct from "liking a lot". I agree it's different than lust, but only in that lust doesn't necessarily include anything other than physical attraction. I think it's mostly a waste of time to wonder whether or not you're really in love with your partner in the same way it's a waste of time to wonder whether obesity is really a disease.
On topic the second (behavior of hope), there has been research on how uncertainty amplifies the emotional impact of an event by preventing people from coming to terms with the event and adapting to it. This is true for both positive and negative events. Wilson and Gilbert (2008) have a review article on their model of adaptation which incorporates this effect. The abstract:
...We propose a model of affective adaptation, the processes whereby affective responses weaken after one or more exposures to emotional events. Drawing on previous research, our app
I downvoted this for making self-assured apodictic assertions about difficult and controversial topics, without any supporting argument and in a way that implies that reasonable disagreement is impossible.
[Retracted the second part of the comment, which asserted there was a contradiction between "firmly believ[ing]" and "ambiguous," i.e. not clearly false, evidence. See the discussion below.]
Is tenuous hope more emotionally taxing than certain doom?
Yes. Impending, but certain doom has no worries. The suspense is over. The worry is over. The struggle is over. And in general, people adjust to their doom quite nicely, and find the world hasn't come to an end, just as they don't find Shangri-la when they win the lottery.
It's the perception of a coming loss that's horrible. Once the loss is certain, it's no longer a loss, it's a new baseline.
I define "real love" as the state of valuing another's quality of life more than your own quality of life.
Interesting. I'd call that insanity. The first thing that popped in my mind when I read that was some poor soul in an abusive relationship sacrificing their quality of life to feed the abuser.
Regarding #2, there is a cliffhanger episode of Farscape where Ka D'Argo makes this point quite eloquently (though of course, D'Argo and Crighton end up not dying). Sadly, both Youtube and IMDB have let me down here, so I can't provide a verbatim quote, but it was something to effect of "Fear accompanies the possibility of death; calm comes with its certainty."
Your first point is substantially caused by the issues about sexuality that you highlighted. Sex can reasonably be explained a "special hug" to a two-year-old. But I'm not prepared to give truthful, coherent, useful answers to any followup questions, so I'm ready to say "ask when you're older." I think a young child can understand that their understanding of the world will increase over time. I agree that negative incentives for curiosity is not good child-raising, but that doesn't mean a parent is required to answer every question....
Topic the First - Asking "Why?"
There is a certain cliche of a young child asking "why?", getting an answer, asking "why?" to that, and so on until the adult finally dismisses them out of frustration. And we all smile and laugh at how ignorant the child is and pat ourselves on the back for being so grown up.
But I don't think this story is very funny. This story, told in countless variations, has the rather repugnant moral that it is rude and childish to ask that most important of questions. "Why?"
So why do parents near-universally admonish their children when they persist with the questions? What is motivating parents all over the world to teach their children not to ask "why?"? Do parents simply not want to admit to their ignorance? I thought so at first, but I suspect it is deeper than that.
It seems more likely to me, that this practice is a defense against acknowledging that one's answers are mysterious. It is easier for a parent to attribute a young child's lack of understanding to a lack of intelligence, than to comprehend that their own answer is a curiosity stopper and not an answer at all.
In essence, children are being trained to accept curiosity-stoppers without hesitation, by being reprimanded for continuing to ask "why?" I find this more than a little alarming; it would seem that for parents in particular, it is especially dangerous not to notice when they're confused.
Topic the Second - The Behavior of Hope
Is tenuous hope more emotionally taxing than certain doom?
I wouldn't think so, but whenever the subject of death comes up (among those who don't believe in an afterlife) I've noticed a very curious pattern.
I have only a guess, but it seems possible that when doom is certain, when there's no escape for you or anyone, it is easier to numb the emotions. Accepting the possibility of escape makes the doom not-certain, which forces fear of the doom to the surface.
Topic the Third - Abuse of the word "Love"
On another site I happened to be perusing, someone posted a bit of a rant about teenagers not knowing the difference between love and lust, to which I gave this response:
The word "love" is abused so much because we live in a society that looks down on pursuing relationships based on lust. A society that goes out of its way to make us feel bad about ourselves if we want to be intimate with someone we don't love. So of course the emotionally vulnerable try to convince themselves that love is involved even when it isn't, because they don't want to feel that misplaced guilt.
It's kind of sick, when you think about it. Real love* is quite rare, so believing that it is only proper to form a sexual relationship with someone you love, causes all kinds of problems. It is simply not healthy for the human animal to form sexual relationships that rarely, so due to this erroneous belief, you get people thinking they're SUPPOSED to be in love, or ASSUMING they're in love, or just TELLING themselves they're in love, because they've had it drilled into their heads that it's wrong to feel otherwise, and that what they're doing doesn't actually feel wrong so it MUST be love.
You want kids to stop abusing the word "love"? Stop teaching them that they need love as a justification for acting on their lust.
* I define "real love" as the state of valuing another's quality of life more than your own quality of life.
Topic the Fourth - A "Good" Parent
Let's take a moment to think about how modern parents are generally expected to treat the subject of their offspring's sexuality. This is one of those things that I firmly believe any good future for humanity will look back on in horror.
With alarming commonality, adults with maturing offspring go out of their way to stunt their children's sociosexual development, due primarily, I think, to a desire to conform to the current societal archetype of Good Parent. Despite ambiguous-at-best psychological evidence, parents fight to keep kids ignorant, unequipped, and chaste due to the social consensus that having sexually active children makes one a Bad Parent.
I would even go so far as to call such deliberate impediment of sociosexual development a form of abuse, despite its extreme prevalence and acceptableness in today's world.