So my brother was watching Bullshit, and saw an exorcist claim that whenever a kid mentions having an invisible friend, they (the exorcist) tell the kid that the friend is a demon that needs exorcising.

Now, being a professional exorcist does not give a high prior for rationality.

But still, even given that background, that's a really uncritically stupid thing to say. And it occurred to me that in general, humans say some really uncritically stupid things to children.

I wonder if this uncriticality has anything to do with, well, not expecting to be criticized. If most of the hacks that humans use in place of rationality are socially motivated, we can safely turn them off when speaking to a child who doesn't know any better.

I wonder how much benefit we'd get, then, by imagining ourselves in all our internal dialogues to be speaking to someone very critical, and far smarter than us?