Comments on: Parenting Is Not About Kids

By: Julian Morrison

Julian Morrison — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:44:06 +0000

Exactly such a health win that makes you look like a bad parent exists: teaching your kids safe sex pre-puberty and providing them with no-questions-asked contraception. You could easily save their life, but to society it looks you’re encouraging them to get laid.

By: Jackson

Jackson — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:57:51 +0000

I read something recently about an anxious mother, anxious about her daughter self harming. What came across to me, to my bias, was that she was angry at her daughter because she was feeling like a failure as a parent. Well, she may have done her best as a mother but my suspicion is that most probably she failed as a mother mainly in the years before her marriage. For instance, she said something about her daughter’s boyfriend being trouble – the relationship went sour and was apparently a major catalyst of her self harming.

My guess is that the mother being of the sixties (or post sixties) generation, she was probably quite promiscuous and that sort of behaviour, in spite of the ideological libertinism of people in power doing all they can to buffer their electorate against the consequences, will always have destructive repercussions. For the few that do seemingly get through it okay i.e. marry into wealth – if they’ve failed to truly regret past behaviour then they likewise well have failed to developed and therefore instil healthy self respect, moral discrimination in their off-spring. Unfortunately so bad have things become that having such a moral compass can single you out for spiteful attacks from people who don’t like having their failings exposed by contrast.

By: Ray Gardner

Ray Gardner — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 03:20:50 +0000

So the basic question is how much of the hyper-parenting is due to genuine efforts at making their children better overall, and how much of it is mere signaling to the outside world of what great parents they are.

My first thought was that the percentage of parents guilty of this behavior is relatively small in the population. Hot-housing kids is preferable to Johnny not being able to read at the appropriate grade level which is the far more common problem today.

So perhaps the hyper-parenting has more to do with concerned parents trying to offset the larger problem in the population of a spiraling down of intellectual abilities? Signaling or otherwise.

By: TGGP

TGGP — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:28:42 +0000

Hanson is a total-utility utilitarian. He regards the creation of more entities which view their own lives as worth living as a noble act. Personally, I would prefer to drop all talk of “nobility”. We’re not in the middle ages any more! On the other hand, feudalism gets a bad rap.

By: Hopefully Anonymous

Hopefully Anonymous — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:13:03 +0000

I folded in the part about him telling his audience to have more kids. I’m trying to get a concrete sense of why that’s noble.

I get that it’s a good idea to tell people to engage in less wasteful effort on kids and more time making existential risk minimizing widgets,.

By: Greg Lee

Greg Lee — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:08:31 +0000

Ignoring the intervention could be perfectly rational:

“Mausezahl and colleagues found that children in families that used the SODIS method had on average 3.6 episodes of diarrhea per year, compared with 4.3 annual episodes in the control group.

The result is not statistically significant enough to show that the small reduction was due to the SODIS method, the authors say. ” http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/08/090818-clean-water-sunlight.html

If someone were to ask you to do something with obvious costs, but couldn’t demonstrate the benefit by either his rules of evidence or by yours, what would you do?

By: michael vassar

michael vassar — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:21:00 +0000

I would guess that for many memes the dynamics of the landscape’s evolution involves biases in salience that makes it easier to address and criticize some behavior than its absence or vice versa. Noise or fossilized noise are possible, as well as frequently dependent selection pressures.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:33:10 +0000

To rephrase, what mixture of pressures brought those behaviors into commonality, and what mixture keeps them there?

By: anon

anon — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:29:05 +0000

Why is Prof. Caplan’s a noble cause?

Assuming that he’s right about most parenting effort being wasteful, why wouldn’t it be a noble cause? His work could be picked up by others and these useless actvities would then become less popular. This woud help kids across the general population, not just the smartest ones.

By: Thomas M. Hermann

Thomas M. Hermann — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:06:35 +0000

You place too much emphasis on signaling. Your worldview is skewed by poor metrics. Without personally knowing you, it’s hard to tell whether this is projection of your own signaling insecurities or just obsession with the concept. Here’s an idea, though, is it possible that signaling seems more prevalent than it really is because by definition we aren’t observing the multitudes of people that aren’t basing actions on the signals sent to others?