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Miller comments on The Santa deception: how did it affect you? - Less Wrong
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Unfortunately my memory of this has faded. I know I had broken the charade by 6 or 7, but I can't recall my thoughts about it at the time. I recall playing along with it for rather Pascal's wager type reasons (more downside to risking the presents).
I take my poor memory of it as implying that it seemed less of a big deal to me. Same goes with the tooth fairy and Easter bunny. In comparison, unraveling the God story had a much longer and more significant timeline. Although the seeds of that were planted about the time of Santa's destruction I can't recall how the two are intertwined.
I would be surprised if the consensus here was that the story of Santa is a good parenting practice. We have a status quo bias potential here, so turn it around. If there was no such thing as Santa currently, would it be a good idea to invent him?
Or to further abstract it from reality, make up a whole bunch of stories. Would a child be better off with a pantheon of artificial creatures that want us to behave in certain ways? How about magical elves that make sure your schoolbus doesn't crash if you brush your teeth every night, or crows that poop in your milk carton if you tell a lie to a teacher. Seems all bad to me. There's enough challenge dealing with reality and our psychological bugs (like thinking that it's quite plausible that a crow pooped in your milk because you are an unlucky or bad person).
The reason why the reversal test so often defeats status-quo bias is that the defender of the status-quo inevitably thinks that we currently have just the right level of whatever (they don't want it to move in either direction) and therefore has to provide some plasible mechanism as to how we arrived at a local optimum.
However here there is an obvious such mechanism, society just added fictions until parents decided we had enough. Note that there are several such fables: the Tooth Fairy, the Bogeyman, the Easter Bunny, and the various superstitions people often teach to children, such as not stepping on the cracks in the pavement.
However, were the parents optimizing for what it is we'd actually want them to optimize for regarding that?
Yes I can imagine someone defusing my challenge that way. Good point. I'll get you yet Santa Claus!
So what if we removed all such fable stories (in the sense that we allow our kids to believe them)? Would it be a good idea to add them back into society?
I am enough of a consequentialist to be reluctant to answer ethical questions about counterfactuals so different from reality that they destabilize my intuitions about likely consequences.
This strikes me as such a counterfactual: not only can I not imagine any way of removing such "fable stories" in the first place, I can't imagine any way of preventing humans from creating a new set of myths.. at least, not without altering human social cognition in sufficiently major ways that the removal of fable stories became inconsequential by comparison.
I'd be convinced otherwise by a credible account of a culture that had no such stories, though.
So all I can really say is, it would be a good idea to add them back in if doing so made life better for people, and not otherwise, and I have no idea which would be the case.
I infer from the question, perhaps incorrectly, that you have a firmer ethical belief about this than I. If I'm right: is that because you have a clearer belief about the likely consequences (if so, I'm interested in your model), or because you're a deontologist on the matter, or for some other reason?
I was honestly just curious to hear you expand on the topic. I don't have an answer that's better than yours. Thank you.
Some adults specifically told me not to say that I didn't believe in Santa, because if I didn't believe, I wouldn't get presents.
Same. Not my parents, but parents of other children who had discussed Santa with me. That would have been those kids' first introduction to motivated cognition - "You must be wrong, or else I won't get presents!" and "I don't care if you're right and I'm wrong, as long as I believe anyway, I get presents!".
The Santa deception as a whole might be neutral, but don't let anybody get away with saying "presents iff you believe". That aspect is irredeemably evil.
Yet also a valuable lesson in status, signalling and courtiership. Human behavior is evil like that. DHTP;HTG.
I am of the mind that status, signalling, courtiership, and most other sociocultural systems like them should be taught as game rules, to be played as a game, and to be gamed if at all possible. Threats like "believe or we'll take away your presents" should be introduced only on the explicit understanding that it's part of a game, and only then should the children be taught that most people don't know they're playing a game, and even more consider that failing to pretend it's real is an infraction punishable under the rules of the game. Otherwise you run the risk of actually believing that belief gets you presents, and you run the risk of suffering real emotional damage and responding badly when someone steals your status.
Most people are able to learn social rules without having things declared explicitly. Yes, it sucks for those of us who learn best when they understand what is going on abstractly. We would get a massive advantages if we could get everything declared explicitly. Yet there are others who actually learn these things better when the game isn't made open. They can maintain the whole internal plausible deniability thing.
Is the act of the parents - that of going along with cultural norms of faux-deceit - still evil if it actually makes their children better able to succeed socially? Where does the 'evil' lie? In what the parents do, the DNA of humanity or maybe even in the abstract nature of competition?
Yes. Other-optimising and deliberately changing someone's map so that it doesn't reflect the territory are hard to make a case for. "Cultural norms" is not such a case. I am not convinced there are people who actually learn how to play better when they don't know the rules of the game.
Assuming your position holds given the language I used as well as with your framing then we have an unambiguous disagreement in matter of fact. If you see things the way they actually are you have to lie. People are just not that good at double talk. I will not begrudge those who work best at navigating a world of bullshit by immersing themselves in it the opportunity to play to their strengths.
I am pretty sure we do disagree. Just to be sure, I don't hold that nobody can learn how to function well in society without the rules being made explicit; but that everyone would do better when given the rules to interpret the experience as a game.
We do. Ironically I consider your position just one more ideal that can be helpful to believe for game purposes despite being inaccurate.
...isn't that just what we want to train the kids to spot, though?
Before they've even figured out that beliefs can be wrong? I say parents teach them that beliefs can be wrong with Santa, and teach them that desperate desire to believe is not truth with God.
In a perfect world (and the way I would like to raise my kids) it would be the other way around, because God is more obviously wrong than Santa (Santa might break the rules of physics, but he gives you presents; God breaks the rules and does nothing), and Santa actually rewards belief where God doesn't. So I would introduce them to the God hypothesis, let them test prayer, and decide that beliefs can be wrong. Then try them out on Santa, see if they can find the truth despite being offered presents to believe a falsity.
But the important distinction, the critical distinction, is teaching them. When you teach them about motivated cognition, they've got to have the option of getting it right. If a parent withholds presents from a child because they refuse to believe in Santa, and Christmas comes and goes, and the child sees all their friends with presents and they have none themselves, next year they will lie for presents. Social pressure, parental pressure, just wins at that age. Kids usually start deconverting themselves later than single digits.
The day I take the dollar, the game is over.
Indeed.
Wow, that is extremely cruel.
I was 8 or 9 and angrily demanded to know whether it was true or not. My mother found the experience uncomfortable, because I was suggesting I'd be devastated if I found out I'd been lied to all these years but wanted to know the truth. She tried to suggest it wasn't lying, just a story, but to me it was black and white.
My Grandma once tried to suggest that I would only get presents if I believed in God, at a time when my sister was going through a theistic phase, because that was the reason for the celebration, the implication being that my sister should get presents and I shouldn't. I think at the time I found this blatant and ridiculous.