Trying to learn rationality skills in my 20s, when a bunch of thought patterns are already overlearned, is even more frustrating.
I may be reading a non-existent connotation into this line, but to me it pattern matches with the belief that the human mind is a blank slate, as though you would have been rational if you hadn’t been corrupted by society.
Humans are, at bottom, animals, and structured around uncritical stimulus-response type behavior. It’s mysterious that humans are capable of transcending these things to achieve some sort of global rationality altogether. I think that learning to do so is inevitably going to be a lot of hard work, regardless of the stage of life at which one attempts it.
No no no. Not at all. I was obviously less rational as a baby than I am now. But childhood neuroplasticity is a thing; it’s easier to learn languages before age 10, and preferably before age 5. And kids have time. As a kid, when I did competitive swimming,I used to be in the pool >10 hours a week. Now, as an adult, I do taekwondo, and although there are 10 hours of class a week available, I only make 2-3.
I did learn some maladaptive thought patterns: i.e. my social anxiety spiral around “you just don’t have enough natural talent to do X”, and the kicker, “you aren’t good enough.” I know this is a pretty meaningless phrase, but it has emotional power because it’s been around so long.
I’m sympathetic to the points about neuroplasticity and time.
I teach math to exceptionally talented children. Something very exciting about it is that basically no such children have had the chance to be taught by a mathematician who’s a dedicated teacher, so the experiment hadn’t been performed. Some of these children are eager to and capable of learning advanced undergraduate level math at the age of 10 or so, and if they have to chance to as opposed to withering away in school, the results could be amazing.
I also had a recent shift in perspective such that I now believe that environmental factors when defined very broadly dominate genetic factors by far in determining behavior. I’m 2-4 standard deviations from the mean on a large number of ostensibly independent dimensions. Upon reflection, I realize that these may all be traceable to only ~3-4 ways in which I was unusual genetically, which then interacted and compounded over the course of my life, resulting in me being very different in so many ways. My home, school, etc. may not have been unusual, but I was interacting with the world through a different lens than other people were, with profound consequences.
So yes, I can see how learning rationality at an early age could make a big difference. For my own part, I don’t have the sense of having had to unlearn maladaptive thought patterns (even though I’ve had maladaptive thought patterns) – it’s hard to place a finger on why. I do wish that I had learned these things at a younger age. If I had learned many weak arguments style reasoning in my teens, my emotional well-being would have been significantly higher for ~10 additional years.
Wow. This article managed to surprise me. Not the fact that kids aren’t any better than adults at learning things deliberately, class-room style–I suppose I thought they would be worse at this, but better at unstructured learning-from-stuff-happening-around-them. (I suppose I thought this because the way that young children learn to speak a first language isn’t related to, or helped by, classroom instruction). But the fact that kids who started French Immersion in 7th grade are just as good as those who started in kindergarten surprised me a lot. This is a program that deliberately tries to teach less in a structured classroom way, and more the way you would learn a first language. (It doesn’t do it incredibly well, though–I went through French immersion, could read and write competently and speak stiltedly by the end of eighth grade, backslid a bit during high school due to limited class hours in French, and only became fluently bilingual in university when “immersed” among actual Quebecois Francophones.) I had massively more trouble trying to learn a third language, but this is probably mostly because a) it was Chinese (more linguistically unrelated), and b) the time thing–I thought an hour a day was a ridiculous and unrealistic amount of time to spend, and what I actually spent was more like fifteen minutes.
I may be reading a non-existent connotation into this line, but to me it pattern matches with the belief that the human mind is a blank slate, as though you would have been rational if you hadn’t been corrupted by society.
Humans are, at bottom, animals, and structured around uncritical stimulus-response type behavior. It’s mysterious that humans are capable of transcending these things to achieve some sort of global rationality altogether. I think that learning to do so is inevitably going to be a lot of hard work, regardless of the stage of life at which one attempts it.
No no no. Not at all. I was obviously less rational as a baby than I am now. But childhood neuroplasticity is a thing; it’s easier to learn languages before age 10, and preferably before age 5. And kids have time. As a kid, when I did competitive swimming,I used to be in the pool >10 hours a week. Now, as an adult, I do taekwondo, and although there are 10 hours of class a week available, I only make 2-3.
I did learn some maladaptive thought patterns: i.e. my social anxiety spiral around “you just don’t have enough natural talent to do X”, and the kicker, “you aren’t good enough.” I know this is a pretty meaningless phrase, but it has emotional power because it’s been around so long.
Ok, thanks for clarifying. I understand.
I’m sympathetic to the points about neuroplasticity and time.
I teach math to exceptionally talented children. Something very exciting about it is that basically no such children have had the chance to be taught by a mathematician who’s a dedicated teacher, so the experiment hadn’t been performed. Some of these children are eager to and capable of learning advanced undergraduate level math at the age of 10 or so, and if they have to chance to as opposed to withering away in school, the results could be amazing.
I also had a recent shift in perspective such that I now believe that environmental factors when defined very broadly dominate genetic factors by far in determining behavior. I’m 2-4 standard deviations from the mean on a large number of ostensibly independent dimensions. Upon reflection, I realize that these may all be traceable to only ~3-4 ways in which I was unusual genetically, which then interacted and compounded over the course of my life, resulting in me being very different in so many ways. My home, school, etc. may not have been unusual, but I was interacting with the world through a different lens than other people were, with profound consequences.
So yes, I can see how learning rationality at an early age could make a big difference. For my own part, I don’t have the sense of having had to unlearn maladaptive thought patterns (even though I’ve had maladaptive thought patterns) – it’s hard to place a finger on why. I do wish that I had learned these things at a younger age. If I had learned many weak arguments style reasoning in my teens, my emotional well-being would have been significantly higher for ~10 additional years.
On the other hand, you are probably have more raw intelligence now.
Yes. But I probably had close to my current raw intelligence at age 15-16, and I was definitely reading hard books at age 8-9.
Kids definitely have more time, but otherwise they don’t necessarily learn languages easier. Or at least, secondary languages.
Wow. This article managed to surprise me. Not the fact that kids aren’t any better than adults at learning things deliberately, class-room style–I suppose I thought they would be worse at this, but better at unstructured learning-from-stuff-happening-around-them. (I suppose I thought this because the way that young children learn to speak a first language isn’t related to, or helped by, classroom instruction). But the fact that kids who started French Immersion in 7th grade are just as good as those who started in kindergarten surprised me a lot. This is a program that deliberately tries to teach less in a structured classroom way, and more the way you would learn a first language. (It doesn’t do it incredibly well, though–I went through French immersion, could read and write competently and speak stiltedly by the end of eighth grade, backslid a bit during high school due to limited class hours in French, and only became fluently bilingual in university when “immersed” among actual Quebecois Francophones.) I had massively more trouble trying to learn a third language, but this is probably mostly because a) it was Chinese (more linguistically unrelated), and b) the time thing–I thought an hour a day was a ridiculous and unrealistic amount of time to spend, and what I actually spent was more like fifteen minutes.
Thank you for new information!