Comment by foofie
1 year ago
I wouldn't say irrational. They are inexperienced. They don't know the risks, and they don't know what they are risking with some kind of behavior.
If you place someone who never set foot outside of a major urban center and place them in a forest, they will do a lot of stupid things that can get them killed. If you take someone who always lived in a temperate climate and place them in either subzero temperatures then they won't even know what to wear without risking at least frostbite. If you place them in a hot environment they won't even know they are risking their life with heatstroke or dehydration.
> I wouldn't say irrational. They are inexperienced. They don't know the risks, and they don't know what they are risking with some kind of behavior.
“Inexperienced” is the wrong word. That suggests that what they lack is experiential knowledge. That’s incorrect. Instead, children and adolescents have lower capacity for acting rationally even based on the same knowledge, because the frontal cortex isn’t fully developed until age 25: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...
Mixing up those two things leads you to the erroneous view that you can facilitate young people making good decisions by presenting them information to analyze and process rationally. They have lesser capacity to do that. That’s why every society has various approaches to regulating the behavior of young people, such as stories about sea monsters.
That link is strangely misleading for a medical authority. Yes, the prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped in youth, but saying its responsible for rational decision making is wrong - our current knowledge is that it handles long-term decision making and impulse regulation. While children generally are fundamentally more impulsive than adults, rationality and impulsivity aren't inversely related. For example, dogmatic thinking is a very common form of non-impulsive, attentive, yet irrational decision making.
And yes, children obviously are inexperienced. It takes ALOT of sensory data to achieve general intelligence, and gathering that data (or what the kids these days call "touching grass") simply takes alot of time.
> "Inexperienced” is the wrong word. That suggests that what they lack is experiential knowledge. That’s incorrect.
For your hypothesis even to begin to hold water, first you would have to prove that babies are fully aware of facts such diving in freezing water can cause sudden death, drowning, or hypothermia. Only then would you be in a position to even start claiming that they are not ignorant and just have poor judgement.
This being HN, it's worth noting explicitly:
All humans, including children, live with irrational tendencies which they never become fully aware of, much less fully control.
Moreover, our hardware/software is probably many orders of magnitude better at identifying irrational patterns in others vs. ourselves.
Moreover moreover, we've all seen how nearly anyone's attempt to change those patterns in themselves happens at a glacial pace measured in decades or-- if they're lucky-- years.
So you'd better carry around a queue of recent cases where your own irrational tendencies caused you to make sizable errors in judgment. Or some kind of static analysis tools that can constantly remind you of this truism.
Otherwise, this being HN, you're going to get roped in to a discussion where the implication is that adult humans can avoid irrational tendencies by spending a few minutes reasoning our way out of them from first principles. (Well, unless the implication in the comment you're responding to is that adults should also be told and accept lies as a means to some end.)
Edit: clarification