16 Comments

What's wrong with this explanation of paternalism? https://www.overcomingbias....

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It's unfortunate that the filthy racist democrats put minorities at a disadvantage.

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If you have eight children, you can let them live dangerously and you will still have six. Especially if infant mortality and suchlike is already dangerous enough.

If you have one child, you want that child to be safe.

This is r/K, but culture, not genetics. Here in Europe the genetically same peasants in 1900 had this attitude that losing one child or two is not the end of the world. They had many. Their great-grandchildren with only one child are helicopter parents.

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It's unsurprising that it would be about status. Paternalism is a violation of self-determination rights. High-status people are generally more likely to get away with violating the rights of low-status people than vice versa.

I'm also not surprised that there's no correlation with competence. "Protecting others from themselves" is not about protecting people. I've seen grotesque incompetence in medical professionals - including getting medical doses wrong by three orders of magnitude - and yet the unquestioned assumption was always that their decisions should be mandatory for patients. This can legally include "patients" who never even consented to be patients.

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Thanks. I knew that some at least were but not sure if that was pretty much universal.

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Many of these areas of individual choice carry social consequences and costs. Regulations have costs but so too does lack of regulation. I am sure status plays a role, I am not sure it plays a larger role then their pocketbooks.

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Thanks for the clarification.

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I'm focused on explaining the variation we see. Status works there a lot better than does helping.

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"...we justify paternalism in terms of how it will help A, but actually support paternalism mostly for status reasons..."

If you really mean "mostly", I don't see how this post justifies the assertion. Clearly *some* paternalism support is overwhelmingly for help & not for status reasons (e.g. bystanders' approval of your grabbing the wrist of that 2-year-old launching himself into a busy intersection); so a convincing argument for the above claim must presumably include at least some rough reasoning about magnitudes.

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Thanks; fixed.

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Robin,

if your doctor bans a practice, you can always leave him and go to a different doctor. If your religion bans a practice, you can always convert to a different religion. If the legal system bans a practice, you can always move to a different country. In all these situations, you can just ignore the ban and choose to live unhealthily, heretically, or illegally, respectively (from the point of view of the paternalistic authority). They are bans nevertheless.

The above is more often pertinent to (a) than to (b). But a good friend of mine from elementary school, junior high school, and high school wanted to go to the High School of Music and Art in NYC. She was offered admission, and she also got into the Bronx HS of Science. Both involved competitive exams, and in the case of Music & Art, an audition. Her father told her that if she chose Music and Art, he would disinherit her. Therefore, she went to Science and resumed her career as a musician later. Still, it was a ban.

Coda (the "human interest" part): She graduated from Bronx Science as salutatorian. Ironically, her father, rather a martinet, as you might infer, was a Juilliard graduate whose day job was a position in the NYC school system. He played gigs in the evening. The entire family were superachievers. Her father didn't believe that women should become professional musicians. I asked my friend how she became such a happy and lovely person, given the above. She said, "Because I inherited my mother's personality, not my father's."

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Your link for "schools" has nothing to do with schools, and your link for "pursuing" seems similarly irrelevant and is identical to the one used for "tend to".

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Foragers are famously egalitarian, and so quite averse to any overt acknowledgment of status. That fits with their not doing things to mark kids as lower status.

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If paternalism and social status are closely related as suggested would that not suggest that foraging societies, given the more permissive/very low paternal nature of parenting, would be low status type (status not an important feature) society?

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The key difference is between giving advice and forcing outcomes. We give lots of advice re sex and careers, but much less often force outcomes.

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I agree with your final paragraph, but I don't think your #5 is completely right: "Yet we see little inclination for paternalism regarding (a) lovers and marriage, ..., or (b) pursuing risky careers such as in music, art, or acting." [My insertion of indices (a) and (b).]

(a) I think we see lots of paternalism in this area. The traditional religious and legal prohibitions around sex and marriage seem to me to be among the most pervasive and strongly paternalistic sets of do's and don'ts in most societies. E.g., pressure to have an arranged marriage; pressure to marry within one's own religious and/or ethnic group; prohibition of homosexuality and extramarital sex; illegality of polygamy and polyandry, and, in the past, even interracial marriage. In some cases, "honor killings" and death by stoning punish transgressions to this day.

(b) I think active discouragement by parents of children who seek such careers is very widespread, or at least was when and where I was growing up. Anyone I knew who wanted to be, say, an actor or a musician was told by their parents to do it as a hobby but seek a more stable career. The argument was that only maybe one in a hundred is going to turn out to be good enough to make a living in these "creative" careers, so better set your sights on something more predictable and, umm, respectable.

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