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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Why is Prof. Caplan's a noble cause? Is it because the type of people he's convincing are going to create smarter kids (eugenics) and we need more of those?
More power to him in attempting this, I suppose. I don't see it happening for similar reasons that you're discussing. Elite parents tend to want to send 2 kids to really great schools and after school programs, than to send 5 kids to public schools. And regression to the mean probably means most of your kids aren't going to be as smart as you, if you're positively deviant in intelligence.
or more briefly, adaption executors, not fitness maximizers.
The function of the adaptations is to be memetically successful. HOW they do that may differ, but helping kids and looking good are only two options out of many. Regardless, that is NOT a question parents ARE or think they SHOULD be asking.
Isn't it more likely that most parents simply don't know much about parenting? Sure they read about it, but how many really read and believe scientific studies? I'd bet most read hip parenting magazines and popular books.
Suppose a person's peers believe activity X is good for their kids, and force their kids to do X. They then read a scientific study indicating X is bad and Y is good. Most people will still feel inclined to do X, even if alone and away from any chance to signal anything. I don't think this is signaling as much as people just using the wrong heuristic.
In other words, I think we partially pick behaviors that look good to others because we aren't all smart enough to decide what is good and what is not on our own. Even if one spouse knows better they may be inclined to agree with the other for their own reasons.
"michael, yes we act out stereotypes, but what is the main function of those stereotypes, helping kids or looking good?"
I think the point is that things don't necessarily have to have functions. Things usually have functions of some kind at some point (whether explicit or not), but people continue imitating the form even after the function is long gone all the time. Heck, I'm sure many of us have *chosen* to continue imitating the form even though we *know* the function is long gone. How many of us have dated someone without ever intending to have children with them?
The examples you mention have very little to do with status: they are social scripts which have been experimentally found to smooth out interaction. None of the parties are "fooled"; they just go along with the script because that's how it's supposed to work.
Also, IMO you're not thinking beyond first-order effects. If you don't think that anyone should be embarrassed by farting, why draw attention to the incident at all? By contrast, if the other guy looked visibly mortified, saying something might be the best choice.
And yes, it's well established that people perform for an internal observer; we usualy call it our conscience.
I'm embarrassed to say I certainly seem to fit the signalling parent model.
My wife and I alternate taking care of our 8 month old son and both have different ideas on how to best care for a baby this age. I think he should spend more time in independent play and she thinks he should have more interactive play with us. However, when I think she might be watching I try to mimic her parenting style so I can signal that I'm a good father. As a result, I'm not giving my son the optimal amount of independent play time (as I see it) in order to make my wife like me. Although this might harm my son at the margin I think I gain so much from the trade off that I'm still behaving in an efficient way.
Of course, I can't really get his opinion on this so I might just be selfish. Or my parenting style might just be lazy and signaling this way helps counter my bad idea.
I suppose I can chose to feel guilty either way. Or I can just get another slice of pecan pie. Hmmm... I think I'm going to go with the pie.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,.
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?
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.
To rephrase, what mixture of pressures brought those behaviors into commonality, and what mixture keeps them there?
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.
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?
Why is Prof. Caplan's a noble cause? Is it because the type of people he's convincing are going to create smarter kids (eugenics) and we need more of those?
More power to him in attempting this, I suppose. I don't see it happening for similar reasons that you're discussing. Elite parents tend to want to send 2 kids to really great schools and after school programs, than to send 5 kids to public schools. And regression to the mean probably means most of your kids aren't going to be as smart as you, if you're positively deviant in intelligence.
or more briefly, adaption executors, not fitness maximizers.
The function of the adaptations is to be memetically successful. HOW they do that may differ, but helping kids and looking good are only two options out of many. Regardless, that is NOT a question parents ARE or think they SHOULD be asking.
Isn't it more likely that most parents simply don't know much about parenting? Sure they read about it, but how many really read and believe scientific studies? I'd bet most read hip parenting magazines and popular books.
Suppose a person's peers believe activity X is good for their kids, and force their kids to do X. They then read a scientific study indicating X is bad and Y is good. Most people will still feel inclined to do X, even if alone and away from any chance to signal anything. I don't think this is signaling as much as people just using the wrong heuristic.
In other words, I think we partially pick behaviors that look good to others because we aren't all smart enough to decide what is good and what is not on our own. Even if one spouse knows better they may be inclined to agree with the other for their own reasons.
"michael, yes we act out stereotypes, but what is the main function of those stereotypes, helping kids or looking good?"
I think the point is that things don't necessarily have to have functions. Things usually have functions of some kind at some point (whether explicit or not), but people continue imitating the form even after the function is long gone all the time. Heck, I'm sure many of us have *chosen* to continue imitating the form even though we *know* the function is long gone. How many of us have dated someone without ever intending to have children with them?
The examples you mention have very little to do with status: they are social scripts which have been experimentally found to smooth out interaction. None of the parties are "fooled"; they just go along with the script because that's how it's supposed to work.
Also, IMO you're not thinking beyond first-order effects. If you don't think that anyone should be embarrassed by farting, why draw attention to the incident at all? By contrast, if the other guy looked visibly mortified, saying something might be the best choice.
And yes, it's well established that people perform for an internal observer; we usualy call it our conscience.
I'm embarrassed to say I certainly seem to fit the signalling parent model.
My wife and I alternate taking care of our 8 month old son and both have different ideas on how to best care for a baby this age. I think he should spend more time in independent play and she thinks he should have more interactive play with us. However, when I think she might be watching I try to mimic her parenting style so I can signal that I'm a good father. As a result, I'm not giving my son the optimal amount of independent play time (as I see it) in order to make my wife like me. Although this might harm my son at the margin I think I gain so much from the trade off that I'm still behaving in an efficient way.
Of course, I can't really get his opinion on this so I might just be selfish. Or my parenting style might just be lazy and signaling this way helps counter my bad idea.
I suppose I can chose to feel guilty either way. Or I can just get another slice of pecan pie. Hmmm... I think I'm going to go with the pie.