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novalis comments on Teaching Suggestions? - Less Wrong
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I have no idea how to teach "think before you act." It's the sort of nonsense that adults always say to kids (I myself have said it to a kid and when I did I died a little inside). If you could teach kids that, you would be a millionaire.
"Think before you act" is a simple way of saying that there are significant costs to not exercising impulse control. You teach it to kids through repetition and by pointing out the correlation between positive life outcomes and impulse control. "Think before you act" also means that most people devote sub-optimal amounts of time to thinking about major life decisions.
I wonder if instead, kids simply learn it as their brains mature. That is, maybe the repetition does nothing but annoy everyone. There are all sorts of studies that show that brains continue to mature even into the twenties. When, as a kid, I heard the phrase "Think before you act", it was usually not in the context of major life decisions -- it was in the context of measure-twice-cut-once situations. To be fair, some of these could turn out to be major life decisions (i.e. diving head-first into an insufficiently deep pool), but they aren't intended to be so.