Parenting advice is an interesting example that might shed some light on what’s going on here. It’s 100% clear that as a parent you are “supposed” to care entirely for your kid’s long-term well-being, ignoring the short term, and short term considerations are only important as a kind of practical “you can only push so hard” issue. The more you manage to successfully optimize your kid for the long term, the better a parent you are in the eyes of society, and that’s all there is to it.
Humans do tend to favor the short term in most domains, sometimes to what seems like a stupid degree. It seems to me that in general, many direct effects are short-term effects, and many second-order effects are postulated long-term effects. So maybe exhorting about second-order effects and ignoring direct effects are really an attempt to get people to pay an appropriate amount of heed* to the long term. I certainly see that in some of your examples.
Because any rule that’s not labeled “absolute, no exceptions” lacks weight in people’s minds. So you have to perform that the “Don’t kill” commandment is absolute and exceptionless (even though it totally isn’t), because that’s what it takes to get people to even hesitate. To stay their hands at least until the weight of duty is crushing them down. A rule that isn’t even absolute? People just disregard that whenever.
I very much, personally, disagree with the parenting philosophy you’ve outlined! (I’m NOT also claiming that you share that philosophy. I hope you don’t!)
Children – and everyone is one! – only have one life! There is no ‘long-term’ – when does that start? At 30? 40? 50?
The long-term includes now! It started in the past actually. And the point really is (or should be) to ‘maximize the integral’ of ‘living a good life’, not preparing for some ‘future’ that never arrives.
As a parent myself, I want my child to live a great life, including today, tomorrow, both short-term, and long. I don’t want to reward them only because of a practical “you can only push so hard” limitation on the amount of unpleasantness they can bear.
I also want to push back on this being “100% clear … in the eyes of society”. There are others that disagree with this as I do. And I’d expect most people do too, to at least some extent. People’s ‘revealed preferences’ certainly don’t seem to match these supposed prescriptions – not generally and definitely not “100%”.
That’s fair, I might have been being a little hyperbolic, and I don’t mean to say that no other people care about kids’ short-term well-being. I was more pointing at the fact that if you look for discussions or advice about parenting decisions (e.g. what school to go to, how to interact with them, what activities they should do day-to-day) the majority of the focus will typically be on medium- and long-term effects (e.g. educational outcomes, behavioral training, physical and cognitive development) while ignoring the obvious direct effects on the kid, much like the example in the post about the benefits of tennis.
Yes, that’s a good point – and it’s probably, at least partly, a ‘selection effect’ too, i.e. parents that actively seek advice are probably those that are (overly) worried about medium and long term effects/consequences. And it’s certainly the case that some parents, or all parents some of the time, neglect important the medium and long term.
But there is parenting advice along the lines of what I endorse – and it’s great! And I think many people do support a lot of things along those lines, if only tacitly, e.g. ‘free range’ kids kinds of things.
(And of course I’m incredibly sympathetic to parents that are terrified of harming their children in any way, especially inadvertently. It really is an awesome responsibility!)
Parenting advice is an interesting example that might shed some light on what’s going on here. It’s 100% clear that as a parent you are “supposed” to care entirely for your kid’s long-term well-being, ignoring the short term, and short term considerations are only important as a kind of practical “you can only push so hard” issue. The more you manage to successfully optimize your kid for the long term, the better a parent you are in the eyes of society, and that’s all there is to it.
Humans do tend to favor the short term in most domains, sometimes to what seems like a stupid degree. It seems to me that in general, many direct effects are short-term effects, and many second-order effects are postulated long-term effects. So maybe exhorting about second-order effects and ignoring direct effects are really an attempt to get people to pay an appropriate amount of heed* to the long term. I certainly see that in some of your examples.
* As Eliezer memorably wrote in his meta-honesty post:
I very much, personally, disagree with the parenting philosophy you’ve outlined! (I’m NOT also claiming that you share that philosophy. I hope you don’t!)
Children – and everyone is one! – only have one life! There is no ‘long-term’ – when does that start? At 30? 40? 50?
The long-term includes now! It started in the past actually. And the point really is (or should be) to ‘maximize the integral’ of ‘living a good life’, not preparing for some ‘future’ that never arrives.
As a parent myself, I want my child to live a great life, including today, tomorrow, both short-term, and long. I don’t want to reward them only because of a practical “you can only push so hard” limitation on the amount of unpleasantness they can bear.
I also want to push back on this being “100% clear … in the eyes of society”. There are others that disagree with this as I do. And I’d expect most people do too, to at least some extent. People’s ‘revealed preferences’ certainly don’t seem to match these supposed prescriptions – not generally and definitely not “100%”.
That’s fair, I might have been being a little hyperbolic, and I don’t mean to say that no other people care about kids’ short-term well-being. I was more pointing at the fact that if you look for discussions or advice about parenting decisions (e.g. what school to go to, how to interact with them, what activities they should do day-to-day) the majority of the focus will typically be on medium- and long-term effects (e.g. educational outcomes, behavioral training, physical and cognitive development) while ignoring the obvious direct effects on the kid, much like the example in the post about the benefits of tennis.
Yes, that’s a good point – and it’s probably, at least partly, a ‘selection effect’ too, i.e. parents that actively seek advice are probably those that are (overly) worried about medium and long term effects/consequences. And it’s certainly the case that some parents, or all parents some of the time, neglect important the medium and long term.
But there is parenting advice along the lines of what I endorse – and it’s great! And I think many people do support a lot of things along those lines, if only tacitly, e.g. ‘free range’ kids kinds of things.
(And of course I’m incredibly sympathetic to parents that are terrified of harming their children in any way, especially inadvertently. It really is an awesome responsibility!)