= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on Science: Do It Yourself - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (205)
This was the kind of thing I had in mind when I suggested a broken definition of 'rational'. Hitler was more rational than average, not more all round virtuous.
When suggesting exercises I have two in cache.
I) Compare the antisemitic policies of the 3rd Reich with those of other 1st world nations from the same time. Also see what policies where used regarding treatment of permanently ill.
II) take a look into what their view of the world was actually based on. Try to understand what made a person of sound mind subscribe to that belief. Also interesting to do with current interest groups.
One more exercise: spot the excess 'h'.
The question deserves at least a thorough looking at. Something happened that made the unsuccessful painter into a dictator of one of the most developed countries in the middle of europe. That might be that he did something right, or maybe he got lucky. But probably both.
For fellow dictatorship researchers it might be good to know that there are others with similar stories that also deserve to be looked at.
Hard to test, but there's Alice Miller's theory in For Your Own Good. She researched the advice about child-rearing which was popular among the parents of the generations that wanted Hitler.
The advice was for the parents to demand extreme obedience starting at six months old, and Miller's claim is that those generations were primed to want an authoritarian leader.
I recommend the book for rationalists-- even if Miller is wrong about Hitler's rise, it's still important to have examples of how much authoritative sounding advice is just people making things up.
One of the hard questions for understanding extreme success is figuring out how much of a success is a matter of generalizable traits like hard work, and how much is happening to have a personality which fits well into a particular situation.
There's also the intermediate possibility of having a personality which is a pretty good fit plus the generalizable trait of being perceptive and flexible enough to make a pretty good fit into an excellent fit.
More theory about fit: The Money Game, which claimed that a lot of stock market success was happening to have a personality which fit the condition the market was in for a few years.
Parenting advice of earlier generations is terrifying. They used to tell people not to cuddle their babies! That they'd be actively harming the kids by encouraging dependence!
Fortunately, it seems that in practice caregivers (read: mothers) largely ignored this advice. They still cuddled their babies; they just felt weak and ashamed as they did so.
For all we know, it's not that unlikely that they were right, or at least that cuddling isn't strictly better than not cuddling (either it doesn't make a difference, or each has consequences we would consider as beneficial and consequences we would consider harmful).
(disclaimer: I cuddle my baby. So far he hasn't killed millions of jews, but he's only a few months old, so it may not be a significant datapoint)
No, actually, we have substantial evidence now that babies need skin-to-skin contact to thrive. Because the maternal instinct is very strong in this direction (for a good reason) the data about what happens to babies who are not cuddled mostly comes from orphanages. It's a very sad answer.
OK, that probably should have been "for all I know" :P
Well, not touching babies will cause serious issues; I don't know if cuddling per se is required.
I read lots of Miller, and also some of the Psychohistory stuff (Basically the history of child raising and its influence on the society of the next generation)
It is however important to notice that both are highly controversial, and maybe simplify complicated issues.
In case you want to raise a dictator it is not enough to severely abuse the kid and let it grow in absolute despair. I would expect there is something else that plays a role. And I am curious to know what it is.
The point wasn't about how to raise a dictator, it was about how to raise a population which would want a dictator.