Talking to Children: A Pre-Holiday Guide
Note: This is based on anecdotal evidence, personal experience (I have worked with children for many years. It is my full-time job.) and “general knowledge” rather than scientific studies, though I welcome any relevant links on either side of the issue.
The holidays are upon us, and I would guess that even though most of us are atheists, that we will still be spending time with our extended families sometime in the next week. These extended families are likely to include nieces and nephews, or other children, that you will have to interact with (probably whether you like it or not...)
Many LW-ers might not spend a lot of time with children in their day-to-day lives, and therefore I would like to make a quick comment on how to interact with them in a way that is conducive to their development. After all, if we want to live in a rationalist world tomorrow, one of the best ways to get there is by raising children who can become rationalist adults.
PLEASE READ THIS LINK if there are any little girls you will be seeing this holiday season:
How To Talk to Little Girls: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-bloom/how-to-talk-to-little-gir_b_882510.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false
I know it’s hard, but DON’T tell little girls that they look cute, and DON’T comment on their adorable little outfits, or their pony-tailed hair. The world is already screaming at them that the primary thing other people notice and care about for them is their looks. Ask them about their opinions, or their hobbies. Point them toward growing into a well-rounded adult with a mind of her own.
This does not just apply to little girls and their looks, but can be extrapolated to SO many other circumstances. For example, when children (of either gender) are succeeding in something, whether it is school-work, or a drawing, DON’T comment on how smart or skilled they are. Instead, say something like: “Wow, that was a really difficult math problem you just solved. You must have studied really hard to understand it!” Have your comments focus on complementing their hard work, and their determination.
By commenting on children’s innate abilities, you are setting them up to believe that if they are good at something, it is solely based on talent. Conversely, by commenting on the amount of work or effort that went into their progress, you are setting them up to believe that they need to put effort into things, in order to succeed at them.
This may not seem like a big deal, but I have worked in childcare for many years, and have learned how elastic children’s brains are. You can get them to believe almost anything, or have any opinion, JUST by telling them they have that opinion. Tell a kid they like helping you cook often enough, and they will quickly think that they like helping you cook.
For a specific example, I made my first charge like my favorite of the little-kid shows by saying: “Ooo! Kim Possible is on! You love this show!” She soon internalized it, and it became one of her favorites. There is of course a limit to this. No amount of saying “That show is boring”, and “You don’t like that show” could convince her that Wonderpets was NOT super-awesome.
I strongly suspect that what’s going on with “people who talk to children like they’re adults” is that they talk to children like they’re people.
The morality of convincing children of arbitrary stuff is questionable. Though less than usual, because children are designed to work that way (also changing their preferences in cartoons isn’t the end of the world). Do you know if the liking is sincere—i.e., if they enjoy cooking, or only believe they do and are surprised to find they didn’t after each time?
Regarding “convincing” children of things: this AI koan is relevant.
Children are input/output machines. What you put in, is what you get out. This is especially true of the younger ages. For example, an older child, say a 10 year old, already has 10 years of input going in, so it is much harder to work against all that previous input, than with a 3 year old.
Children’s beliefs are being formed by their environment all the time. Every waking second, every personal interaction, is forming them into their future selves. You can either acknowledge this, and use it to your advantage to help them be the best future self they can be, OR you can say that it is “manipulative” and instead leave their formation up to chance.
For example, if I convince a child they like helping me cook, it certainly isn’t for my benefit. Cooking takes three times as long, and causes more mess and trouble if you have a child “helping” you. You convince them they like cooking so that they grow up having a skill that is needed for coping in the world.
Also, in real life, the cartoon I convinced my charge that she like was “Higglytown Heroes”, which I like because it shows that everyone in town is important in their own way. It was just less embarassing to admit that I like Kim Possible (which I like, but actually encourage kids away from) than that I like Higglytown Heroes. So yeah....not noticing my own signalling attempts, FTL.
IMO, telling them what they like/dislike does actually change their liking/disliking of an item/task, so long as that item was neutral to begin with. You can get them to LOVE something they used to LIKE, but not something they used to DISLIKE.
Yeah, I did say that children were designed to work like that. Your dichotomy is false, though; adults influence each others’ opinions all the time. I’m significantly less bothered “This show is great” (it will have greater influence than on an adult, but that may be a feature) than by “You love this show” (a lie).
Okay. What measure did you use? (Hmm, I wonder if self-image consistency has a large effect in young children.)
My big problem is that children do work differently from adults, but there doesn’t appear to be a model for treating them like unusual people. It’s like if they were lots of blind people around, and most seeing people treated them like noisy decoration, used their sight to boss them around, refused to talk to them about visual phenomena, told them lies about what they saw to shut them up, treated sightedness as absolute authority, and found laughable the idea they could have valuable opinions, but the only sighted people who didn’t just ignored the blindness instead of occasionally telling them “There’s fresh paint on this bench”.
You might be interested in the Continuum Concept, then. The book describes the childcare practices of the Yequana and other indigenous cultures that treat children as if they’re differently-abled people rather than an underclass.
On first reading the continuum stuff, it’s easy to get caught up in the parts that have to do with physical contact, feeding, etc. of babies, as that’s where a lot of the discussion is. But the actual idea of “continuum” (at least as I see it), is that basically these cultures treated children as if they were “real people” from birth… as if they’re full members of the community, with the same needs for contact, participation, respect, trust, belonging, etc. as full-grown adults—and vice versa. (That is, adults aren’t deprived of play, empathy, touch, etc. either.)
Even as much as Eliezer speaks and writes about the subject, it’s still a bit of culture shock to see how fundamentally wrong our own culture is about the treatment of children, in ways that never occurred to me, even as a child.
For example, the whole permissive vs. strict dichotomy is irrelevant to a continuum culture: both permissiveness and strictness are too child-centric from the continuum viewpoint, because they both operate on an underlying assumption that children have to be treated differently from “normal” people, and that they’ll break or some other bad thing will happen if you don’t do something special to “fix” them (e.g. spoil them, punish them, spend time with them, whatever).
Increase and decrease of frequency of behavior (i.e. does the child ask for the preferred object more or less often) seems like a plausible candidate.
No. If you have a self-image that says you like cooking you may cook a lot more without enjoying it more.
I thought the question was how to measure the effect of the intervention.
This doesn’t sound right to me. I think you could find certain things “manipulative”, and so look at specifically doing/saying things that weren’t manipulative. For example, what if you told the children of their own bias, or you told them, “Don’t believe what I say just because I tell you that you believe it.” I’m sure your intentions are correct, but I would think the interaction could be consistent with “ordinary adult interaction” with regards to manipulation and so on.
This might be useful at a certain age. But for younger children, that just isn’t reasonable. They don’t have the development to understand that. For example, here is the basic script of the “False Belief” Test, that shows a lack of Theory of Mind.
Tester: [presents crayon box] What do you think is inside?
Child (2-3 year old): Crayons!
Tester: [opens box. shows that there are birthday candles inside box] Oh, look! What is actually inside the box?
Child: birthday candles!
Tester: [closes box] Before I opened the box, what did you think was inside the box?
Child: Birthday candles!
Tester: Your mom is outside the room. If she came in, and we showed her this [closed] box, what would your Mom think was inside the box?
Child: Birthday candles!
So good luck getting them to actually understand cognitive biases!
Then you are doing the exact same thing I am advocating for. You are manipulating their mind (by telling them what you want them to believe) to result in a positive outcome.
Does the child respond that way because they have no theory of mind, or because they don’t parse the questions well and are just hearing, “blah blah blah what’s inside the box?” (this interpretation still supports your point, this is just something I always wonder about when I hear that chlidren have no theory of mind.)
I would say that it is definitely that they do not have the cognitive/developmental abilities. There are MANY experiments, showing various fallacies at various ages. Here are some other examples:
Lack Conservation
Formal Operation
I’d read about those things before, but the videos were still cool, thanks.
Another possibility is a lack of sequencing events in time: if you’re not separating “what I see right now” from “what I thought before” consistently, you’re going to come up with funny answers.
This test is crap.
From Just Stimming
I don’t at all see how you can think that is a constructive comment. Downvoting.
Also, the quote you posted is from a non-neurotypical author. Saying that people with Autism (or other disorders) have trouble with the tests does not mean that they tests are “crap.” It more likely means that non-NTs have trouble with the concepts being tested, or with the testing methodologies.
The tests in question were designed to make autistics fail and defined as tests of theory of mind. Anyone even vaguely familiar with this will be very annoyed and likely to say things like “this test is crap” because it’s worthless at what it was ostensibly designed for.
Let me explain that again so you definitely understand why this makes people angry: Scientists wanted to be able to test autistics’ theory of mind. Scientists designed a test autistics failed and neurotypicals passed. Scientists called it a test of theory of mind. Scientists defined theory of mind ability as passing this test. Scientists claimed that autistics lack empathy. Scientists also claimed that sociopaths lack empathy. Some people got a little confused here, leading to some terrible misconceptions that have caused a LOT of harm.
Do you want links to show this really happened this way?
I have not heard this interpretation of the tests in question and I also did not have much prior knowledge of what exactly the tests hoped to prove and the subsequent conclusions, so I would greatly appreciate any links you could provide that may cause me to update my beliefs.
Specifically, I find both your explanation and the more mainstream explanation (something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test) plausible, so non-trivial evidence would lead me to put more certainty in a ‘position’.
Because this particular test is getting a lot of (possibly earned) flak right now, I think it would be useful for people to actually SEE this test in action. I don’t know if this is considered “trivial”, but to me watching these tests is decent evidence that it is testing Theory of Mind as much as, if not more than, language skills.
Here is a TED talk on the subject. The entire talk is on the subject, but the part with the experiments is at 3:55- 7:30 . This experiment goes on to show that event though Theory of Mind is understood at age 4, that it’s not until age 7 that it is used to decide moral judgements. (If the pirate ate the wrong sandwich because his got moved without his knowledge, is he being naughty/should he be punished?)
In this video the three year old is at the stage where she realizes that she USED to think that crayons were in the box, so she is starting to learn Theory of Mind. She still gets the second question wrong though. This is because this isn’t a concept that one day you don’t have, and all of a sudden you get it. Learning ToM is a process that takes time.
Finally, here is one that shows not understanding other’s point of view.
I don’t know the history of these tests, so I will concede the point that perhaps these tests are used on non-NT’s in a negative way, and that perhaps they were designed with some nefarious purpose of judging non-NTs.
However saying that because of this fact that these tests are “crap” is like saying that because people die in car accidents, that therefore cars are “crap”. I think the test can be BOTH useful in demonstrating Theory of Mind that occurs in children 4 and under AND that the test can (possibly) be used in a negative way with non-NTs.
Perhaps to pass the test you need BOTH Theory of Mind, AND language skills at a 4 year-old level.
Even if it is just language skills, it still stands to reason to me, that if a child can’t pass the test, that you won’t be able to explain cognitive biases to them with any great success. (I am sure you could teach them the “Teacher’s Passcode”.) That is the reason I posted the test, and I think whether or not I am completely wrong on WHAT it tests, that the test still stands as good evidence supporting the claim I was making (can’t teach them abstract material).
And I didn’t even have to use this test specifically. I just wanted to show any example of the fact that children’s minds don’t operate on a developed enough level to yet understand abstract ideas.
You are using this as if it should EXCUSE the extremely rude grandparent comment, when instead it is an EXPLANATION. The two are not the same. You can explain bad behavior, without considering it an excuse.
Example- “I am late because I overslept” is an explanation not an excuse. “I am late because my car got a flat” is an acceptable excuse.
Though I didn’t know the details, I already understood from the tone and the link, that the grandparent had some personal grudge/negative feelings towards the test in question. I assume it has been used on him/her to negative effect. I would guess, from your knowledge of this test, that it has also been used negatively on you or one of your loved ones. I am very sorry about this for the both of you. But that does not mean that it is an excuse to then leave rude and cryptic remarks, as the grandparent did.
Here’s a person who obviously has theory of mind. She fails the test. Thus the test isn’t testing whether someone has theory of mind.
Sure, maybe autistic people are special exceptions and the test usually works. But how do we know that? If we meet another false negative, we can always just add another special exception. (Well, “they were designed to justify saying autistics lack empathy” would explain why they would usually work but fail precisely for them.) Is there any group other than “people who go around saying ‘I have theory of mind’” for whom we can verify the test result using another method?
The test succeeds at identifying something important that most people consider obvious, but that (surprisingly) some people fail at. Whether the something that the test measures is best called “theory of mind” is debatable, but I’m not sure there is a better name that would have stuck.
Having names for things is useful for thinking about them, as long as the focus is on the thing (“how could we call the thing this test measures”), and not on the name (“how could we design a test for the presence of a theory of mind?”). There’s a delicate balance to reach between avoiding sneaking in connotations (“let’s call it the Soul Test!”), and not having obscure names that don’t suggest anything (“let’s call it Plasmeomorphic Synchronism!”). I don’t see any reason to think that they struck a particularly bad balance in this case.
daenerys is building an explanation for children’s behaviour based on the premise that children can’t have a model of the world that contains a person being wrong about a fact. I’m saying the test doesn’t show that they can’t.
I was responding more to your “This test is crap” and subsequent explanations—though I’d consider “children can’t have a model of the world that contains a person being wrong about a fact” as a reasonable first approximation for young enough children.
Because it doesn’t have a specificity of 1, or another reason? Even if we are judging the test based on just this datapoint, it seems to me the author has difficulty manipulating their mental model of others’ minds, to the point where their inability to pass the Sally-Anne tests is informative.
Because it works better as a test of language ability. People can model others’ minds but get lost in the many clauses. (Higher levels increase difficulty by increasing number of clauses and difficulty of phrasing.)
This is common knowledge in the autistic community, but I hardly blame you for not knowing it. Most people don’t, unless all their friends are autistic or Aspies.
That sounds plausible, but how would you determine that it’s language ability specifically that’s causing the issue? Do they pass the basic Sally-Anne test (“Where will Sally look for her marble?”) but fail more complicated versions? Do they pass clear versions but not wordy versions (passing “Where will Sally look for her marble?” but failing “Where would Sally tell us she believes the marble is?”)?
It seems to me that language failure could be because of theory of mind failure. For example, if I’m trying to trick someone trying to trick me, what I think he thinks I think he thinks is an unconsciously constructed object in my mental model. Describing it is a little tricky because there’s not a single word for it, but making predictions / planning actions based on it is not difficult. If someone doesn’t have that in their mental model, but has to construct it, then it seems to me the first place they’ll notice difficulty is parsing the question- they look inside for something with the tag “what I think he thinks I think he thinks,” find nothing, and conclude they probably didn’t hear / parse it correctly. But, this is speculation by a non-psychologist, and so evidence-driven opinions are more welcome.
Yes, people who pass the basic test fail on tests with more complicated language structures. (Hint: when your test is so poorly-designed that you can’t even be certain whether you’re testing a concept that exists, and even given that you are, whether your test is testing it, the test is crap even if it’s not biased against the people you purport to study.)
You have normal theory of mind, I would assume. This includes recursive theory of mind (I know you know I know). Do you think that you could still be confused by “Sally thinks that Harry thinks that Sally thinks that I think that Sally thinks that whatever” or something similar?
http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/daniel.nettle/liddlenettle.pdf Feel free to draw your own conclusions from an actual study using a theory of mind test. Here’s a critique of it: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp3314609.html#3314609
This is a critique of the test in its usual usage, which isn’t for neurologically normal three-year-olds.
It’s not my test, and I can’t comment on the certainty of people who devised it / administer it today, whose opinions I suspect are more informed than mine.
If spoken too quickly, sure. If the test were written (or spoken slowly), I think I would give the right answer to 6th order questions at least 90% of the time.
The paper they link to (here) doesn’t seem to be as strong as they present it in the post. I certainly agree that Baron-Cohen’s claim that ToM can’t be learned sounds wrong, unless he’s arguing about brain structure rather than performance (that is, they can learn how to answer the questions correctly but never as easily as a neurotypical).
I also followed the citation trail to come across this paper, which included picture-based tests. An example: A green apple was placed in front of the subject and they were given a green marker (with red ink). They drew the apple someplace they couldn’t see, and then the researcher put an identical red apple next to the green apple, then showed them their drawing, and asked “Which of these apples were you trying to draw?” and “When X enters the room, which apple will they think you were trying to draw?”
They tested normal 4 year-olds and deaf or autistic children (5 to 13, average age 9) on the false drawing task and a standard false belief task (what’s in the box? Not what’s on the label! What will X think is in the box? What did you think was in the box before I opened it?). The normals mostly passed the standard test and mostly failed the false drawing task; the deaf or autistic mostly failed the standard test and mostly passed the false drawing task. (Normal children of age average 9 were not tested; I presume they would mostly pass both tests.)
I now have a much better idea of what a non-verbal false belief test would look like, but I still think both varieties of test are useful at identifying ToM delays / deficiencies. That the normal 4 year olds do poorly on the pictorial false-belief tests suggests to me that it also is not just testing ToM, but something else as well.
Strongly seconded. I’ve long been certain that this is the reason I get along so easily with that kids older than about 4. I listen to what they’re saying, ask for more information about things they’re interested in, and enthuse about things I’m interested in. In general, I talk to them like I’d talk to friendly acquaintances.
From what I recall of childhood, people who aren’t obviously disingenuous towards kids are rare, and precious to kids.
Anecdote: sure works for me. I have zero personal interest in sticker dolly books or drawing pictures of dinosaurs, but my 4yo sure does and she lights up when I participate in her projects in a way that takes her interests seriously. We are blatantly and consciously encouraging her interests in art and music, and she’s getting commendations at school for it. She’s even allowed to touch mum’s Wacom graphics tablet …
I had a third-grade science teacher who said something very similar to me after getting a perfect score on the first test of the new school year. It did two things; it made me think she was an idiot, and it made me feel guilt. Because, see, I didn’t actually put in any study. I’d just paid basic attention in class, and then spouted it all back out.
Before I even read your comment I was going to post almost exactly the same story.
I was about 7 years old and I was praised by the teacher to the other kids in the class as an example of the value of hard work. “Listen how well Apprentice just read this page for us. You know how he can do this so well? Because he carefully practices the assigned reading at home every time. You guys need to do that too.”
This was wrong but I didn’t correct the teacher and, like you, I felt guilty about the lie by omission. I hadn’t actually read this text at home before the class—nor did I ever practice reading the assigned texts at home. I was a fluent reader before I started school and there was no point in me practicing at home.
Throughout compulsory education, the teachers made efforts like this to instill in students the idea of “you have good results in school if and only if you do hard work”. This did not fit with my experience but it seemed to be accepted by some of the other kids. I think they looked at it like this: “I put much more effort into schoolwork than I should like but Apprentice still gets far better results than I do. He must be truly torturing himself with work, I’m glad I’m not him.” When I tried to tell them that I didn’t spend that much effort on homework they thought I was lying for some bizarre reason.
My current model of good results in school is that it is a factor of: a) general intellectual ability, b) interest in the subject matter, c) discipline and diligence. Throughout compulsory education I had strong a), strong b) and a mediocre c). That was plenty to be on top of a class drawn from a random sample of the population. Throughout my educational path I’ve known people with various other permutations. In secondary school I knew a girl with strong a) and c) and (in most contexts) a weak b. She got good grades, slightly better than mine. I also remember a guy with so-so a) and b) and an extremely strong c). He got good grades, slightly worse than mine. But most people who get good grades aren’t like that.
So, what should we tell kids? It is certainly a true and useful thing to know that disciplined hard work can get you good results. It’s also useful to know that being passionate about something makes it much easier to become good at it (it will still take work but it isn’t hard work). Finally, it is true that general ability is important and varies a lot between people in a way that isn’t particularly fair. Our society* will happily tell kids the first two things but is more ambivalent about the third. I think knowing it earlier on would have saved me from some weird doublethink and possibly enabled me to make some better decisions. But maybe more widespread dissemination of this fact would be overall harmful to society? I don’t think so but I’m not sure.
* I mean modern Western society in general but I grew up in socialist / egalitarian Scandinavia in the 80s where obscurantism about the third fact may have been especially prevalent.
Yes: I think the point above was driving at the ‘praise effort not talent’, which I buy, but praising effort where there was none can be counter-productive. Possibly with younger children they will actually associate the success with ‘working hard’ or ‘talent’ based on how you present it to them, but I don’t think that works with older children or adults. There you’d have to actually identify what was hard work and praise that more than talents: or where something involved both, focus on the work.
I don’t understand, why guilt?
It’s about the difference between honor and reputation.
Lois Bujold, “A Civil Campaign”
It was pretty clearly a lie of omission when I didn’t correct the teacher, so eight-year-old me felt guilty for that.
Why didn’t I? Partly, because I couldn’t muster the courage, and partly because she’d gone on in the next sentence to use my “hard work” as an example for the class and I didn’t want to undermine the lesson.
Now, adult me can look back and say, “Kid, there was no need to feel any guilt; what you did was fine given the situation and pressures.” But that precocious third-grader knew Lying Was Wrong.
The advice to praise children for effort rather than for ability is based on research by Carol Dweck on growth mindset vs. fixed mindset. See this short article which she wrote, this longer article about her work, this video of one of her studies, or her book Mindset.
Thanks for that reminder. I’m still struggling to overcome the damage done to me by people telling me as a kid how smart I was. So please for the love of everything that is good in mankind, remember that you have a human’s life in your hand and treat it accordingly.
Would you be willing to describe the effect that had on you? If I had to guess, I’d guess that you ended up needing such praise to feel good about yourself, and that you ended up needing to live up to that praise. But it would help my understanding to read a true story.
I am also still working to overcome the consequences of my parents, other adults, and peers constantly telling me (up through high school) that I was so very smart. The effect is compounded when one grows up in a small American town in the south. It was not at all unusual for a high school peer to believe that because I skipped a grade in junior high school and was graduating high school a year early, that I was somehow on the path to curing cancer or destined for a Nobel Prize. The sanity waterline still has much room for improvement.
What ended up happening was that I was forced to transfer—and forgo a full scholarship—after a semester at a top-15 university (by US News and World Report). I realized there that I simply did not know how to study efficiently, or even at all. Essentially, early association of approval and accomplishments to innate talent led me to disregard the value of hard work and determination.
Another consequence is, of course, having an overblown sense of superiority. At many good, but not necessarily elite, universities, quite a few freshmen come in who were top of their class in high school and have to adjust to being in the middle of the pack.
It had a similar effect on me.
I didn’t learn how to form any study habits in college, and it really hurt me in graduate school. It concerns my development as a kid because I was unfortunate enough to graduate at 16. I tricked my parents and myself by telling them I was “studying” all the time on the computer, even though I was mostly recreationally programming and internet browsing, which I viewed as superior to studying. Most undergraduate work is rote and unchallenging, so I would usually procrastinate to the last moment without much detriment to my grades. Being much younger than my classmates means I didn’t have any peer guidance in the formation of study habits, either.
Such is the woe of “child prodigies.” Some students that zip through school have high intelligence and rationality (and extremely careful parents), and these usually earn a spot in history books.
I was never a child prodigy, but I took myself to be the smartest student in my junior high school class of 25 or so. Maybe I was, but if so it wasn’t by a huge margin. But I had some mildly precocious interests and was overpraised. I decided it was the natural order of life that I would always be able to coast by without effort and would always be the smartest guy in the room. In other words, I bound up my self esteem to my supposed intellectual superiority, and I had learned to be lazy. This is a very, very bad combination. My parents went to considerable trouble to send me to a high school with an excellent academic reputation. When I found out I wasn’t really all that relatively smart any more, my ego took a hit. Merely average grades were terrifying, a sign of failure. At the same time, having to work hard to get good grades seemed like a sign of failure, too. I felt like Charlie in the second half of Flowers for Algernon. I became far, far too overcautious, too ready to quit at the first hint of trouble. In LessWrong terms, I surrounded myself with ugh fields.
I see now that I was never really that smart. I wish I’d known that earlier. In the words of Jay Leno, “A little low self-esteem is actually quite good. Maybe you’re not the best, so you should work a little harder.”
I’m sometimes afraid that I’m in the middle of this process myself. I’m a high school student, and I’ve been told I was smart for as long as I can remember. I’ve never had to study to get good grades. I don’t know how much study is normal, but I suspect it’s more than I ever do. While I do study some I can’t really tell if it helps: I get As when I study, and I get slightly lower As when I don’t. I have a sense of superiority that I try to keep calibrated. I’m about to go to an elite college, where I will most likely be average and get average grades. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to handle the need to work hard and the experience of being in the middle of the pack, but I hope that expecting it will make it easier.
If I met you in person, I would probably be too embarrassed to say: don’t make my mistakes.
For what it’s worth, I suggest you first find something worth working hard on, and then work really, really hard on it. I’d further suggest that, even if you’re not quite sure that you’ve found the one true task that is your calling, maybe you should still take a bit of time busting your ass on whatever task may be in front of you. After a while, you could reasonably then step back and reflect on whether you’re using your talents wisely. Maybe you should then choose some other goal to bust your ass for. But don’t completely waste your time like I did.
I’ve seen some of your posts. I think you’re more talented than I ever was.* However, I also wouldn’t mean any offense by suggesting that you might not be quite as talented as Isaac Newton. The reason I bring it up is because I think everyone can agree that Isaac Newton had a lot of basic native talent, but also, he worked himself like a dog for years.
I offer this compliment through gritted teeth, but not with personal animosity. I envy you. I would give a lot to be as smart and as young as you. Too late for me, though. I really, really wish you the best. Don’t fuck it up.
Thank you for the advice. I’ll follow it.
Consciousness of this is likely to help, I think.
I relate, but as a genius and getting decent (but not exceptional) results from no work. At least, in some areas.
It’s annoying. It’s especially annoying to think about how I could’ve been Eliezer but probably couldn’t now.
And that gives me an idea for tomorrow.
My advice to anybody who says ‘I regret not doing X in the past, but it’s too late now’, is to reconsider very very carefully whether it is actually too late now, or whether you will in the future find yourself saying ‘I regret not doing X in the past because I thought it was too late; but now it’s really too late’.
-- Anonymous
That describes me pretty well too. Now I have yet another reason to stay out of graduate school! ;)
It wasn’t so much a need for praise, more a need to feel superior since I think I based my identity on being smarter than anybody else. And, as others have answered here, with that came a need to make my successes seem effortless so I too couldn’t form any habit of studying or even just thinking things through. Instead I formed a habit of jumping on to any first thought that would pop into my head and consider that to be correct until proven wrong beyond my capacity to rationalize. The third aspect is that I had a self image of having all the answers.
I think I’ve overcome all of these shortcomings to a point where they are no longer destructive. So even if we’ve been ruined as children we still have the ability to correct these mistakes as adults. Still, as ASpiringKnitter pointed out, to think where I could have been by now makes me sad.
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Sign me up for the club.
If you wanted to encourage efficient work as least as much as hard work, what would you praise?
How do those feel when one is doing them?
Macro efficiency is taking time to think and then having things well-organized. Micro-efficiency (moving well) feels easier and much more pleasant.
I’ll own my downvote. This article seems more directing us to a particular hypothesis of how to manipulate/teach children than really telling us anything informative about it.
Further, I somewhat disagree. Especially about not telling young women they look good. First of all, anything they put effort and resources in to that I genuinely enjoy the results of, I am going to tell them about. I am a human male, they are human females, they put a tremendous amount of mindspace, talent, and effort in to looking good, I’ll be gosh darned if I am not going to give them feedback on that emphasizing what it seems is working better and moving away from what may not be working as well.
And I mean with my daughters too. THere is an old expression about job interviews, the purpose is not to get a job you want, but to get offered the job you are interviewing for. You don’t have to take the job, but you certainly can’t if it is not offered. Guess what? Attractive girls (and boys) have a lot more offers of all sorts than less attractive girls and boys. Why would I want my daughter to work hard at math and then miss a job offer to do math because a competing interviewer was epsilon better turned out?
I compliment the hell out of their soccer and volleyball and math and other homework and schoolwork. I ask about it. I tell them stories about theirs and mine and strategies I thought of to do better. Those are all quite important to me and I’d love it if they were important to my girls as well.
But I’m sure as heck not going to blow smoke up their patooties about the value of looking good. We are the species that we are.
The OP is talking about very young children. Specifically, children so young that they don’t have a meaningful choice about what clothes they wear.
I’ll talk with my son about the possible existence of latent sexism in society and how he might react to it when he’s old enough to understand. Since he’s not yet two, I limit myself to not freaking out if he picks up and plays with a doll.
This is a false contradiction. It is totally possible to dress well as a woman without being “girly” or “sexy.” To the extent that woman are expect to put effort into dressing “feminine” when men are not expected to put in similar effort to appear “masculine” in order to achieve the same success, this is a bug and not a feature.
My anecdotal evidence (a very headstrong 4yo daughter) matches this post. Good one.
I was just about to say, my parents tried this quite often on my younger siblings and it didn’t seem very effective. Maybe there’s a hard age-limit—it stops working after 5 or so?
My parents also tried this quite a lot, and still do when they have the opportunity. I found that a statement of “you like/want X” caused me to have an opinion about X, I’m reasonably confident this caused me to have the opposite inclination at least as often as the intended one. I don’t think there’s an age limit on this tactic having some effect, though not necessarily the intended one (though there is at least some projection from my own experience going on there, so discount accordingly).
Yes, there is definitely an age limit to where this has less effect, but I think it works a little bit even on adults. Then you’re getting Dark Artsy.
The big point is that you can’t get them to like something they already dislike, or vice versa. But you can get them from neutral to like/dislike.
For example, if she LOVES Wonderpets, then saying that she doesn’t like Wonderpets is completely false, and ignored. But if she thinks Dora is decent, THEN saying that she loves Dora (maybe getting her some Dora games, if you REALLY want her to have that belief) is much more effective.
Something in here seems backwards!
Why is it dark arts only if you do it to adults? I’d say if anything, it’s even darker if you do it to children
It depends substantially on what we mean by “dark arts.” Generally, I think of dark arts as persuasion techniques that are effective at changing someone’s mind without relying on that person’s rationality. The important lesson is that deliberately circumventing the rational process of another is wrong.
But children (especially young children) just aren’t rational by adult standards. So, is it a kind of dark art to take advantage of some irrational thinking process for the purpose of improving little Johnny’s future rationality? It’s deliberately avoiding the (mostly non-existent) rational process of the child. But it doesn’t seem wrong.
That said, the example about changing aesthetic preferences is hard to justify on “improving future rationality” grounds. Which doesn’t necessarily make it wrong, but it certainly is a closer question.
Just thought I would comment on this:
Actually, I don’t think I would ever find this difficult. An adorable child is one who is using their toy dragon to level their toy castle. But I do agree that this is a behavior our society encourages, and that it is quite widespread. I feel a bit ambivalent about this kind of advice, though. I think there are benefits to discouraging this type of behavior in the adults, but mostly the benefits fall to those of us who are annoyed by it.
I remember being a child with zero interest in wearing dresses or being considered pretty. I am now an adult who feels much the same. This was not because my parents or the people around me were in any way atypical in their reinforcement of gender roles. So I think people could get the wrong impression and believe that this behavior has more impact than it really does. On the other hand, I am also somewhat dubious that people actually have any sort of innate reaction by gender to, say, pink frilly dresses specifically. I suspect there’s a very complex interaction going on between genetics and culture here. So while I agree that it is senseless to encourage or engage in behavior that you don’t approve of, regardless of its cause, I would also caution anyone you give this advice to that there are a lot of influences on children, and that they are by no means the only one.
I would add that if a person compliments a little girl’s ponytail, that will not annoy me if they also compliment a little boy’s ponytail in the same way.
Read this. Make sure not to miss the picture of little Franklin Roosevelt in his frilly dress.
Upvoted for your very relevant article selection.
Yes, I was aware of both the pink/blue reversal and the unbreeched boys practice. The insanely rapid (at least if considered on an evolutionary timescale) pink/blue reversal in particular indicates to me that some things are entirely culture.
I think the young Louis XV is even more apropos to illustrate the sentence you responded to from my post. In fact, I’ll go add that link in now...
Still, regardless of where my preferences come from, I don’t particularly want our culture to return to dressing all children in frilly little dresses. I see this as entirely consistent with my dislike of frilly little dresses. Even so, I understand that not everyone has my preferences, so my hope is to live in a society that increasingly doesn’t demand that people conform to whatever the majority preference is. Rather than, say, living in a world where wearing frilly little dresses is banned for people of any gender.
This seems to me roughly opposite to your earlier comment. They could both be true, but more specific information should be used to justify them. Yes, there is some evidence that it’s better to praise children’s work then innate explanations for their results, but it’s pretty weak evidence and it’s not clearly relevant to the other examples. (In fact, your link seems to claim the opposite about appearance: girls figure out what actions they can take to increase the compliments.)
I do not understand how you reached this conclusion. My earlier comment said that when people complement you (an adult), that you should accept their compliment. This post says that when you complement children, that you should do so in a way that is most beneficial to their development.
Can you explain how you reached the conclusion that these are opposite statements?
I specifically mention that this information is based on anecdotal evidence, personal experience, and general knowledge. I agree that I would like more evidence. If you know of any, please share!
I do not think that it is inconsistent to say that society teaches young girls that their appearances are of prime importance, so THEN girls take action to increase those complements. It is a cause and effect.
Think of it this way; if instead girls (and boys) grew up getting complements on their work-ethic, or on their , THEN they will still take action to increase those complements, but now those actions focus on , and not on looks.
I am downvoting your comment (I dislike random downvotes, so I try to “claim” mine), because I can’t make any rational sense of it. But if you clarify so that I can understand your argument, I will upvote!
Your earlier comment said to act normally. This post says not to act normally. Maybe the girls will notice your failure to provide expected praise and be hurt. Actually, you give two logically independent suggestions here: 1. not to talk about girls’ looks and 2. to talk about something else. It is only the first that is at odds with the previous comment.
Sure, in isolation the claim about praise of looks makes sense, but it is opposite to the claim about praise of intelligence. Why does praising children’s intelligence cause them to give up, while praising girls’ looks causes them to put effort into the looks?
I interpreted most of what you wrote as reflexive contrarianism with relatively little insight until I got to this part at the very end. Once you restated the claim in a very generic form “Praising X will induce more X, but praising Y will induce less Y” it called attention to the internal features of X and Y as being necessary to predict what will actually happen.
Once I understood the dichotomy here, I realized that I had no coherent theory about which trait-like surface features could be dropped in for X or Y to be suppressed or promoted by praise. My guess is that there’s something that’s actually pretty complicated going on here with cached selves, behaviorist conditioning, the fundamental attribution error, folk theories of human performance, and probably other stuff as well. I imagine I could have a somewhat evidence based working hypothesis for an answer 18 months from now if I keep my eyes and mind open but it seems clear to me that I don’t have an answer of that quality right now.
Thank you for pushing forward in the face of downvoting. It was educational to discover a new puzzle in such a common situation :-)
is not isomorphic to “praising x will cause less x and praising y will cause more y”. Praising intelligence causes kids to emphasize intelligence and de-emphasize competing explanations, e.g. hard work. Praising looks causes kids to emphasize looks and de-emphasize competing (for time) qualities, e.g. knowledge. In both cases praising x causes more x, and also less other stuff because of opportunity cost.
Thanks, but I’m pretty sure it was an error, both on LW and in real life. Moreover, responding to comments on LW is generally a bad idea because people will read them without reading the context.
It’s awfully hard to learn to be smarter. If you teach a kid that their success or failure is determined by how intelligent they are, then (according to Carol Dweck, whose research is linked elsewhere in this thread,) when they have difficulty completing a task, they will tend to conclude that they aren’t smart enough, which they are unlikely to be able to do anything about. If they’re conditioned to believe that success or failure is primarily dependent on effort, then if they encounter a task that they have difficulty with, they will be more inclined to believe that they aren’t trying hard enough.
Given that there are multibillion dollar industries focused on presentation and modification of personal appearance, there is no shortage of ways for a person to put effort into their appearance. Avenues for intelligence modification are pretty minimal by comparison.
There’s a lot of contested meaning in the word “normal.” Girls hardly need compliments on their looks in order to grow into well adjusted women.
There’s substantial debate about whether to praise children’s characteristics or effort. The OP is a brief discussion with anecdotes about that topic.
The last comment talked about how to accept praise, and this comment talks about knock-on effects of giving praise (to very young children). Receiving vs. giving doesn’t seem contradictory to me.
Looks like the author is overcompensating.
Well, it is the first thing you notice, so why pretend otherwise? You can certainly start by complimenting a girl’s appearance (tends to improve the mood of a girl of any age), without making a big deal out of it, before getting into a more soulful discussion. If you prefer, you can also frame your compliment in a way that emphasizes the effort she put into looking especially pretty, instead of her being naturally pretty, but this is a dicey path unless you know what you are doing.
I don’t think the author’s OVERcompensating. There may come a time when little girls are insufficiently told that they look adorable, but I seriously doubt that today is that time, nor that we have happened to stumble through memetic evolution onto the exactly correct amount to be complimenting little girls on their looks.
My own take is that if this is a little girl you see a LOT of (like, say, your daughter) then you might occasionally congratulate them on looking nice (especially if you know that they DID put some effort into it), but as a random stranger operating on timeless decision theory, the author’s advice is pretty sound.
(Edit: and no, you’re not being dishonest by telling them the first thing you notice, any more than you’d be lying to refrain from telling a below average child that they are stupid or ugly when you first meet them)
Your opinion makes sense to me, but I don’t really understand how it involves TDT. My thoughts would probably be more along the lines of “not enough people talk to little girls this way, and it would probably help them be happier in the future if I did so.”
The initial statement was off the cuff and not really well thought out. The followup statement in the next comment down is probably more accurate.
A person puts a lot of effort into something, you notice the good job they have done, but refuse to let them know that you have noticed it, and justify your actions with the (not-yet-formalized) TDT?
I believe that my post on blind spots would be relevant here, sorry.
My prior on cute little girls is that their parents put them in a dress, and that their work mostly consisted off putting up with it. (“Little girl” is ambiguous—as they grow up the prior on how much effort they’re personally putting in obviously goes up).
I believe there are negative consequences to to overcomplimenting them on looks, same way there are negative consequences to being told you’re smart. There may very well turn out to be consequences of being told too often that you’re hard working.
There are also, I’m sure, negative consequences to not being told you’re pretty often enough. A perfect agent probably spends some time figuring out how to tell when young girls looked good due to their own efforts, compares how often they instinctively compliment that over other ways they might begin the conversation (perhaps taking note of how often they begin conversations with young boys who look particularly well dressed with things like “Who’s this handsome little man!”) and then randomly decide whether to do so. Even without regarding how the rest of society also will impact the child, I doubt the ideal number comes out to more than 1 in 6 or so for the average person.
If you don’t have time to do all that, I think beginning conversations with “how are you?” and going from there is a perfectly good heuristic. If the girl is particularly proud of her clothes, I suspect it’ll come up, and you can compliment her then.
True, but it can still be a trial for someone that young.
I strongly suspect that you made this number up on the spot. If not, I would be interesting to hear how you arrived to it, and what the error bars are.
Oh the 1 in 6 number was totally made up, and was anchored by thinking about randomization which made me think about dice which made me think about 10 sided dice (because I’m a gamer and that’s what comes first time mind), which made me think about “1 in 100” chances as compared to “1 in 10″ chances, and the latter seemed like a reasonable upper bound on how often you shoud compliment a girl on her looks (based on intuition), and then in case 1 in 10 was still too high I went up to the next most recognizeable dice-size, which was 1-6.
I’m NOT a perfect agent with infinite time, and I haven’t thought about this particular instance of this problem before today. But I suspect the upper bound for how often girls need complimenting on their looks from strangers is somewhere in that order of magnitude. I don’t think that there’s much useful ground between using your intuition and doing a bunch of intensive research.
I could see the answer ranging from 1 in 20 to 1 in 6ish (I’m trying to imagine 1⁄5 as a viable answer and failing, but at this point I’m hopelessly anchored). That’s in the world where everyone in society is trying to do this at once, as opposed to a minority of agents operating against huge cultural biases.
This does not sound believable to me. I very much doubt that a perfect agent would find these sorts of questions to be well-defined. It sounds like you’re talking about the likelihood of a bulkhead failure or something completely technical … when this is not technical at all.
The amount of input my son puts into choosing his clothes is zero (because he’s not even two). When he’s older, the proportion of the clothing selection process that’s based on his input is highly likely to increase. An agent can’t measure or estimate the proportion for a particular child? An agent can’t (or shouldn’t) change her interaction with a child based on the estimate proportion?
From Lord Chesterfield, writing in 1747 (i.e. this advice is older than America), emphasis mine:
I once heard that Casanova once said that his secret to seducing women was to compliment the beautiful on their intelligence and the intelligent on their beauty.
You mis-quoted my post (I never wrote the second part of your “quote”), and I think that your paraphrase does not accurately represent the point I am trying to make.
A better paraphrase would be: “The world tells girls that their looks are more important than anything, and you shouldn’t reinforce this belief.”
Retracted- When your post first went up, the quotes were joined to look like a single quote. Now that they are separated, I can see that the second quote is from the article link. Sorry! Thanks for the fix!
To clarify- The first quote is mine, the second quote is from the article link.
Sorry about that, I should have been clearer as to the quotes’ origin. I tend to edit my comments for a few minutes after they are posted, because there is no preview feature.
By the way, if you ever want to delete a retracted comment, refresh the page, and the “delete” option will magically appear, provided no one replied yet.
Thanks for the info! I didn’t know that. Normally if I look at a comment again, it is because someone replied, so I never noticed a delete button that appears if there are no replies. Very useful!