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SforSingularity comments on Solutions to Political Problems As Counterfactuals - Less Wrong
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Oh, very clever. This is a much better explanation for why proposing changes to unchangeable nodes is so well accepted.
I do sometimes wonder what proportion of people who think about political matters are asking questions with genuine curiosity, versus engaging in praise for the idea that they and their group have gone into a happy death spiral about.
I suspect that those who ask with genuine curiosity are overwhelmingly chlidren.
EDIT: Others disagree that children are more genuinely curious. Perhaps it's just the nerds who ask genuine questions then?
And what proportion of that genuine curiosity is an adaptation for gaining information and what proportion is an adaptation that encourages signalling a willingness to absorb the happy death.
What makes you believe that? It's as good a theory that they're just trying to find out what Big Idea group they belong to so they can give the right answers / political suggestions when they grow up.
A priori we should expect children to be genuine knowledge seekers, because in our EEA there would have been facts of life (such as which plants we poisonous) that were important to know early on. Our EEA was probably sufficiently simple and unchanging that once you were an adult there were few new abstract facts to know.
This "story" explains why children ask adults awkward questions about politics, often displaying a wisdom apparently beyond their age. In reality, they just haven't traded in their curiosity for signalling yet.
At least, that is one possible hypothesis.
I do expect children to be knowledge seekers in a sense. When they see their parents avoid a plant, they learn to avoid it also. When they hear them say that binge drinkers should go to church more, they learn to say this also. In both cases it is the same behavior.
The difference between our descriptions is that calling them "knowledge seekers" implies some kind of deliberate rationality, whereas they are really just executing the adaptation of copying their parents. Most children who repeat their parents' political views won't try to understand what the words actually mean, or check different sayings for consistency.
Of course this is a generally good adaptation to have. Even if children had better innate rational skills and even if they could fact-check their parents' words, there's little benefit to a dependant child from ever disagreeing with its parent on politicized issues.
But the greater vulnerability of children means that we should also expect them to be more clannish. They should be all the more eager to demonstrate their loyalty to a group, because they rely more on support from others to remain alive.
I've observed far more clannishness among children than political perspicuity. I don't see that there's much displaying of "wisdom apparently beyond their age" in need of explanation.
but what about the relative amounts in children vs adults?
Of course children are more clannish than adults. But the "clan" of a child is that of its parents, not of its friends and peers.
Adults can move to a new clan, band together to start a clan or sub-clan, replace or influence a clan's leadership. Children are pretty much powerless and are tied to their parents' clan. If anything ever really threatens that bond, I expect "clannishness" to completely override other priorities.