At least in this scenario, I don’t think the lies are for your benefit, they’re for Civilization; and the adults involved do think it’s appropriate to compensate you financially for being put through it, which implies they do believe the costs it imposes on you exceed the benefits to you.
The other scenarios alluded to in Eliezer’s above comment… well, I’d be interested to see how they play out. I could believe that having multiple experiences of “being gaslit and eventually figuring it out” was a good thing on average… but I expect there’d be individual cases where it sucked pretty hard. (If dath ilan was really good at psychology, maybe they could tell who would respond well vs badly beforehand?) Details matter: exactly what is being lied about, how important it is, how long it goes, how pervasive it is (e.g. does the child have any completely trustworthy friends who haven’t been in on any of the scams?), and so on. For example, if it was “Here’s a once-a-year festival at which there will be the following cool physical event”, and the claimed event is physically impossible (say, it violates conservation of momentum) and faked (which the child is hoped to figure out after learning some physics), that seems relatively harmless.
A thing that feels a bit confused in this discussion is… currently the default state is that adults gaslighting kids… just happens all the time? One possible world you could try to engineer is a world where this never happens. Another world is one where it happens deliberately in a controlled fashion that teaches valuable life lessons and leaves children more resilient. The question is whether the former is actually tractable.
and the adults involved do think it’s appropriate to compensate you financially for being put through it, which implies they do believe the costs it imposes on you exceed the benefits to you.
False! It just means that Civilization is benefiting and considers itself obliged to share a fair portion of those gains.
Oh, I see. Perhaps something isomorphic to the following: we suppose Civilization gains $1 billion in value from the results, and we imagine the kids were in a position to negotiate a payment for their services rendered, and we figure they could have gotten $N hundred million, so we decide they deserve that much and divide it among the kids. (Maybe the parents did some actual negotiating, on their own behalves at least.)
At least in this scenario, I don’t think the lies are for your benefit, they’re for Civilization; and the adults involved do think it’s appropriate to compensate you financially for being put through it, which implies they do believe the costs it imposes on you exceed the benefits to you.
The other scenarios alluded to in Eliezer’s above comment… well, I’d be interested to see how they play out. I could believe that having multiple experiences of “being gaslit and eventually figuring it out” was a good thing on average… but I expect there’d be individual cases where it sucked pretty hard. (If dath ilan was really good at psychology, maybe they could tell who would respond well vs badly beforehand?) Details matter: exactly what is being lied about, how important it is, how long it goes, how pervasive it is (e.g. does the child have any completely trustworthy friends who haven’t been in on any of the scams?), and so on. For example, if it was “Here’s a once-a-year festival at which there will be the following cool physical event”, and the claimed event is physically impossible (say, it violates conservation of momentum) and faked (which the child is hoped to figure out after learning some physics), that seems relatively harmless.
A thing that feels a bit confused in this discussion is… currently the default state is that adults gaslighting kids… just happens all the time? One possible world you could try to engineer is a world where this never happens. Another world is one where it happens deliberately in a controlled fashion that teaches valuable life lessons and leaves children more resilient. The question is whether the former is actually tractable.
False! It just means that Civilization is benefiting and considers itself obliged to share a fair portion of those gains.
Oh, I see. Perhaps something isomorphic to the following: we suppose Civilization gains $1 billion in value from the results, and we imagine the kids were in a position to negotiate a payment for their services rendered, and we figure they could have gotten $N hundred million, so we decide they deserve that much and divide it among the kids. (Maybe the parents did some actual negotiating, on their own behalves at least.)