I seem to be way too late for anyone to be interested, but I just wanted to put something out there when it comes to good fiction for kids. Most people here seem to be talking about books, so I wanted to mention a TV show—Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’s not perfectly rational (they play the “everything is connected” card a couple of times) but it’s really good about passing down smart morals. It both encourages altruism and discourages stupid ways of trying to be altruistic—characters like Sokka emphasize the importance of having a plan and being smart about your strategies. The most important thing, though, is that people learn from their mistakes in that show. Not in the sense of most cartoons, where they declare something like “In this episode, I learned that it is wrong to steal!” and then promptly forget about it the next episode, but in the sense of really questioning deeply held beliefs and prejudices. Plus it’s action-packed, fun, and interesting, and remains interesting even for adults.
OnTheOtherHandle
Hello!
Age: Years since 1995
Gender: Female
Occupation: Student
I actually started an account two years ago, but after a few comments I decided I wasn’t emotionally or intellectually ready for active membership. I was confused and hurt for various reasons that weren’t Less Wrong’s fault, and I backed away to avoid saying something I might regret. I didn’t want to put undue pressure on myself to respond to topics I didn’t fully understand. Now, after many thousands of hours reading and thinking about neurology, evolutionary psychology, and math, I’m more confident that I won’t just be swept up in the half-understood arguments of people much smarter than I am. :)
Like almost everyone here, I started with atheism. I was raised Hindu, and my home has the sort of vague religiosity that is arguably the most common form in the modern world. For the most part, I figured out atheism on my own, when I was around 11 or 12. It was emotionally painful and socially costly, but I’m stronger for the experience. I started reading various mediocre atheist blogs, but I got bored after a couple of years and wanted to do something more than shoot blind fish in tiny barrels. I wanted to build something up, not just tear something down (no matter how much it really should be torn down.)
The actual direct link to Less Wrong came from TV Tropes. I suspect it’s one of the best gateway drugs because TV Tropes, while not explicitly atheist or rationalist, does more to communicate the positive ideals and emotional memes of LW-style rationality than most of the atheosphere does. For the first time, I got the sense that “our” way of thinking could be so much more powerful than simply bashing religion and astrology.
One important truth beyond atheism that I have slowly come to accept is inborn IQ differentials, between individuals and groups of individuals. I had to face the fact that P(male| IQ 2 standard deviations above mean) was significantly higher than 50%. I had to deal with the fact that historical oppression probably wasn’t the end-all be-all explanation for why women on average hadn’t done as much inventing and discovering and brilliant thinking as men. I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.
I further learned that my brain was modular, and the bits of me that I choose to call “I” don’t constitute everything. My own brain could sabotage the values and ideals and that “I” hold so dearly. For a long time I struggled with the idea that everything I believed in and loved was fake, because I couldn’t force my body to actually act accordingly. Did I value human life? Why wasn’t I doing everything I possibly could to save lives, all the time? Did I value freedom and autonomy and gender equality? Why could I not help sometimes being attracted to domineering jerks?
It took me a while to accept that the newly-evolved, conscious, abstractly-reasoning, self-reflecting “I” simply did not have the firepower to bully ancient and powerful urges into submission. It took me a while to accept that my values were not lies simply because my monkey brain sometimes contradicted them. The “I” in my brain does not have as much power as she would like; that does not mean she doesn’t exist.
Other, non-rationality related information: I love writing, and for a long time I convinced myself that therefore I would love being a novelist. Now, I recognize that I would much rather compose a non-fiction or reflective essay, although ideas for fiction stories still flood in and I rarely do much about it due to laziness and/or fear. I fell in love with Avatar: The Last Airbender for its great storytelling and its combination of intelligence and idealism. I adore Pixar and many Disney movies for the sweetness and heart. I like somewhat traditional-sounding music with easily discernible lyrics that tells a story; I can’t get into anything that involves screaming or deliberate disharmony. Show-tunes are great. :)
I don’t want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me able to in-ironically enjoy Disney and Pixar and Avatar; I consciously cultivate it and am lucky to have it. If this disposition will be “destroyed by the truth”...well, I have a choice to make then.
I know that it’s not particularly rational to feel more affiliation with women than men, but I do. It’s one of the things my monkey brain does that I decided to just acknowledge rather than constantly fight. It’s helped me have a certain kind of peace about average IQ differentials. The pain I described in the parent has mellowed. Still, I have to face the fact that if I want to major in, say, applied math, chances are I might be lonely or below-average or both. I wish I had the inner confidence to care about self-improvement more than competition, but as yet I don’t.
ETA: I characterize “idealism” as a hope for the future more than a belief about the present.
I haven’t read Ayn Rand, but those who do seem to talk almost exclusively about the politics, and I just can’t work up the energy to get too excited about something I have such little chance of affecting. Would you mind telling me where/how Ayn Rand discussed evolutionary psychology or modular minds? I’m curious now. :)
PG is awesome, but his ideas do basically fall into the category of “easier said than done.” This doesn’t mean “not worth doing,” of course, but practical techniques would be way more helpful. It’s easier to replace one group with another (arguably better?) group than to hold yourself above groupthink in general.
There is almost no average IQ differential, since men pad out the bottom as well.
Sorry, you’re right, I did know that. (And it’s exasperating to see highly intelligent men make the rookie mistake of saying “women are stupid” or “most women are stupid” because they happen to be high-IQ. There’s an obvious selection bias—intelligent men probably have intelligent male friends but only average female acquaintances—because they seek out the women for sex, not conversation.)
I was thinking about “IQ differentials” in the very broad sense, as in “it sucks that anyone is screwed over before they even start.” I also suffer from selection bias, because I seek out people in general for intelligence, so I see the men to the right of the bell curve, while I just sort of abstractly “know” there are more men than women to the left, too.
I don’t know that I would call that “objective.” I mean, the laws of physics are objective because they’re the same for rabbits and rocks and humans alike.
I honestly don’t trust myself to go much more meta than my own moral intuitions. I just try not to harm people without their permission or deceive/manipulate them. Yes, this can and will break down in extreme hypothetical scenarios, but I don’t want to insist on an ironclad philosophical system that would cause me to jump to any conclusions on, say, Torture vs. Dust Specks just yet. I suspect that my abstract reasoning will just be nuts.
My understanding of morality is basically that we’re humans, and humans need each other, so we worked out ways to help one another out. Our minds were shaped by the same evolutionary processes, so we can agree for the most part. We’ve always seemed to treat those in our in-group the same way; it’s just that those we included in the in-group changed. Slowly, women were added, and people of different races/religions, etc.
Thank you! I’ll look for that.
Honestly, I was disappointed with the ending of Season 1 Korra: (rot13)
Nnat zntvpnyyl tvirf Xbeen ure oraqvat onpx nsgre Nzba gbbx vg njnl, naq gurer ner ab creznarag pbafrdhraprf gb nalguvat.
I’m not necessarily idealistic enough to be happy with a world that has no consequences or really difficult choices; I’m just not cynical enough to find misanthropy and defeatism cool. That’s why children’s entertainment appeals to me—while it can be overly sugary-sweet, adult entertainment often seems to be both narrow and shallow, and at the same time cynical. Outside of science fiction, there doesn’t seem to be much adult entertainment that’s about things I care about—saving the world, doing something big and important and good.
ETA: What Zach Weiner makes fun of here—that’s what I’m sick of. Not just misanthropy and undiscriminating cynicism, but glorifying it as the height of intelligence. LessWrong seemed very pleasantly different in that sense.
Now I want an ATLA fanfic infused with Star Trek-style pensive philosophizing. :D
I would argue that it has even more potential than HP for a rationalist makeover. Aang stays in the iceberg and Sokka saves the planet?
Sorry, I dumped it into Briangle and forgot to change the setting.
Gung’f na vagrerfgvat jnl gb chg vg, naq V guvax V’z unccvre jvgu gur raqvat orpnhfr bs gung. Ubjrire, V jnf rkcrpgvat Frnfba Gjb gb or Xbeen’f wbhearl gbjneq erpbirel (rvgure culfvpny be zragny be obgu) nsgre Nzba gbbx njnl ure oraqvat. Vg’f abg gung V qba’g jnag ure gb or jubyr naq unccl; vg’f whfg gung vg frrzrq gbb rnfl. V gubhtug Nzba/Abngnx naq Gneybpx’f fgbel nep jnf zhpu zber cbjreshy. Va snpg, gurve zheqre/fhvpvqr frrzrq gb unir fb zhpu svanyvgl gung V svtherq vg zhfg or gur raq bs gur rcvfbqr hagvy V ernyvmrq gurer jrer fvk zvahgrf yrsg.
Va bgure jbeqf, vg’f terng gung gur fgbel yraqf vgfrys gb gur vagrecergngvba gung vg jnf nobhg vagevafvp jbegu nf n uhzna orvat qvfgvapg sebz bar’f cbjref, ohg gurl unq n jubyr frnfba yrsg gb npghnyyl rkcyvpvgyl rkcyber gung. Nnat’f wbhearl jnf nobhg yrneavat gb fgbc ehaavat njnl naq npprcg gur snpg gung ur vf va snpg gur Ningne, naq ur pna’g whfg or nal bgure xvq naq sbetrg nobhg uvf cbjre naq erfcbafvovyvgl. Xbeen’f wbhearl jnf gb or nobhg npprcgvat gung whfg orpnhfr fur vf gur Ningne, naq fur ybirf vg naq qrevirf zrnavat sebz vg, qbrfa’g zrna fur’f abguvat zber guna n ebyr gb shysvyy. Vg sryg phg fubeg. Nnat tnir vg gb Xbeen; fur qvqa’g svaq vg sbe urefrys.
I did. :) I was so happy to see a mother-daughter movie with no romantic angle (other than the happily married king and queen).
Unfortunately, intelligence in areas other than math seem to be an “I know it when I see it” kind of thing. It’s much harder to design a good test for some of the “softer” disciplines, like “interpersonal intelligence” or even language skills, and it’s much easier to pick a fight with results you don’t like.
It could be that because intelligence tests are biased toward easy measurement, they focus too much on math, so they under-predict women’s actual performance at most jobs not directly related to abstract math skills.
The SAT doesn’t seem to be calibrated to make sure average scores are the same for math, at least. At least as late as 2006, there’s still a significant gender gap.
You’re right; my explanation was drawn from many PUA-types who had said similar things, but this effect is perfectly possible in non-sexual contexts, too.
There’s actually little use in using words like “stupid”, anyway. What’s the context? How intelligent does this individual need to be do what they want to do? Calling people “stupid” says “reaching for an easy insult,” not “making an objective/instrumentally useful observation.”
Sure, there will be some who say they’ll use the words they want to use and rail against “censorship”, but connotation and denotation are not so separate. That’s why I didn’t find the various “let’s say controversial, unspeakable things because we’re brave nonconformists!” threads on this site to be all that helpful. Some comments certainly were both brave and insightful, but I felt on the whole a little bit of insight was brought at the price of a whole lot of useless nastiness.
I understand your critique, and I mostly agree with it. I actually would have been even happier if Merida had bitten the bullet and married the winner—but for different reasons. She would have married because she loved her mother and her kingdom, and understood that peace must come at a cost—it would still very much count as a movie with no romantic angle. She would have been like Princess Yue in Avatar, a character I had serious respect for. When Yue was willing to marry Han for duty, and then was willing to fnpevsvpr ure yvsr gb orpbzr gur zbba, that was the first time I said to myself, “Wow, these guys really do break convention.”
Merida would have been a lot more brave to accept the dictates of her society (but for the right reasons), or to find a more substantial compromise than just convincing the other lords to yrg rirelbar zneel sbe ybir. But I still think it was a sweet movie.
One thing that disappointed me about this whole story was that it was the one and only Pixar movie that was set in the past. Pixar has always been about sci fi, not fantasy, and its works have been set in contemporary America (with Magic Realism), alternate universes, or the future. Did “female protagonist” pattern-match so strongly with “rebellious medieval princess” that even Pixar didn’t do anything really unusual with it?
Even though I was happy Merida wasn’t rebelling because of love, it seems like they stuck with the standard old-fashioned feminist story of resisting an arranged marriage, when they could have avoided all of that in a work set in the present or the future, when a woman would have more scope to really be brave.
All in all, it seems like their father-son movie was a lot stronger than their mother-daughter movie.
Now that I think about it, very few movies or TV shows actually teach that lesson. There are plenty of works of fiction that portray the whiney teenager in a negative light, and there are plenty that portray the unreasonable parent in a negative light, but nothing seems to change. It all plays out with the boring inevitability of a Greek tragedy.
More than a month too late, but I’m fifteen, and also a girl. Got here from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I found out about from TV Tropes. You really should milk that, you know. :)