Comment on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:39:16 GMT

No idea, actually. The following is possible stuff that my brain has produced, i.e. pure invented bullshit.

It could be that this discrepancy used to be less of a problem, when society was more constant from one generation to the next and most 'risky' behaviours were obviously rewarding to both teens and adults . Based on anecdotal conversations with my parents, it seems like some things that are considered 'cool' by most of my own peer group were considered 'just stupid' by the people my parents hung out with when they were teenagers.

There's also the factor that in the modern environment, as compared to the ancestral environment, most people don't keep the same group of friends in their twenties and thirties as in their teens. The same person can be unpopular in high school, when "coolness" is more correlated to risk taking, and yet be popular in a different group later when they have a $100 000-a-year job and an enormous house with a pool in it, and nobody remembers that back in high school they had no friends. Parents who have survived this phase may consider it okay for their children to be less popular as teenagers in order to prepare for later "success" as they define it, but to a teenager actually living through it day by day, the (http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/) in their brain will still rate their peers' approval as far more important than safety, and adjust their pleasure and pain in different situations accordingly...since, in an ancestral environment of small groups that stayed together, impressing people at age 14 would have a much greater effect on your later success as an adult.

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