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shminux comments on How to Build a Community - Less Wrong
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Interesting term, haven't heard it before. I'd venture to say, however, that immediate and extended families with or without children range all over the democracy spectrum.
EDIT: by "democracy spectrum" I meant the complete range of structures from anarchy to tyranny, an unfortunate choice in retrospect. Wikipedia uses the term "democratic continuum".
Hrm? My wife and I run the family with an eye towards my son's welfare. But we ain't no democracy, and I can't imagine a functional family that was a democracy - there are some choices that are removed from consideration before the children's preferences are considered at all.
My 9 year old came to me a few months ago after I told him to go brush his teeth. He said (without any acrimony or contempt, it was just an observation) that if he well and truly refused to brush his teeth, there'd be nothing I could do about it. He said 'When you tell me to do things, I instinctively do them, but I don't think you could actually make me do anything. You're in charge of me because of me, not you.' He noted, however, that the instinct is a good one because there's a lot he doesn't know.
Our house isn't a democracy either, but it's no kind of dictatorship. He's absolutely right: the guy with the biggest gun is him, and more and more everything is a negotiation. That's my experience anyway.
If your family is fairly normal, there are lots of interventions you could implement to change his behavior.
1) Positive reinforcement ("Here's a dollar for brushing")
2) Negative reinforcement ("You are free from other chores since you brushed")
3) Positive punishment (SMACK)
4) Negative punishment ("No more video games for you.")
There are reasonable considerations about the ratio of parental effort to child compliance. But if it was important enough, you could cause your child to brush if you wanted to.
That will just lead into meta-level negotiation. It's not about whether or not the kid brushes their teeth at some point, but setting what costs the parents are willing to and expect to pay in order to gain compliance (and, of course, what costs the child is willing to and expects to pay in order to do what they please). Once you start bribing your kid into doing things, the obvious next step for an adversarial opponent is to not do anything unless bribed into it. Similarly, threatening and punishing them into compliance is going to result in a willingness-to-punish testing.
The last actually happened with me - I had some emotional hangups with schoolwork, and I procrastinated often. My parents were completely clueless though, and decided that the right course of action was to take away the things that I happened to procrastinate on until I "improved". This did not go well for them - at some point I was down to just fiction books and homework, and I'd procrastinate by reading books, and they weren't willing to take away books from me.
Really, I think that the control-your-kids is a pretty bad paradigm to operate in. I mean, to some extent, yeah, they're better off if they brush their teeth. The meta-level skill of getting positive-value unpleasant tasks done is much more valuable, though - and if you make your kid do those things by negotiation, then you rob them of the chance to develop that skill on their own.
I'm sorry your parents were clueless. Just because there is some intervention that can get a child to change a behavior doesn't mean that any intervention will work, or that the most obvious intervention will work. If one misunderstands the purpose of the behavior, then one is extremely likely to apply an intervention that won't work.
I'm sorry you had difficulties growing up, but that isn't an argument against behavioral interventions.
It is important for parents to decide in advance what behaviors are worth what level of effort. Forcing my son to brush his teeth now when he is three is different than forcing some other behavior change when he is a teenager.
I don't think anyone would argue that behavioral interventions are always a bad idea, but I agree (I think I agree) with Thrust that behavioral interventions are generally a treatment of symptoms as opposed to a treatment of the disease. My kid needs to brush his teeth, sure, but the point is ultimately to get him to respond to long term considerations about his own good and the good of others. Behavior interventions generally get someone to respond to immediate considerations of their good, and in order to be effective they generally have to be calibrated so as to reduce or eliminate consideration on the part of the kid as to whether or not to comply. With a young child, that's what you have to do to build up good habits. But as the kid gets older, my sense is that one has to switch over to conversations about what reasons the kid can see for doing the right thing, instead of creating more immediate reasons that require less reflection.
Anyway, what my boy observed, correctly, was that there was no forcing him to do anything. I could adjust the incentives around brushing his teeth, or I could force a situation where his teeth are brushed, but it's entirely impossible for me to force him to do anything.
In the examples of your son and mine, what is the difference between symptom (socially inappropriate behavior) and the disease (occurrence of socially inappropriate behavior?
Regarding ThrustingVector, it is pretty clear that his parents misunderstood the function of the problematic behavior (not completing school work) and targeted a stimuli that was not closely related to the problem behavior. And so they didn't have much success.
This is an important point, but it's a more abstract point that the one I was making about families as dictatorships. Certainly it is important for any manager of any organization to recognize that there is no Imperius Curse.
Yes, this is the ultimate goal, and it is an important factor in analyzing what behaviors to try to change. But in my defense, I think that this question is a be beyond the scope of my family-as-dictatorship metaphor.
I was thinking of the 'disease' as an irrational indifference to the long-term good, a disease of which no one is entirely cured.
Fair point. Dictators can't force anyone to do anything either, so that point hardly pulls agains the dictatorship metaphor. I think even if there were an Imperius Curse it would be impossible. Come to think of it, this seems like a point of metaphysics: nothing could be the case such that forced action would be possible. Wait, that seems crazy. Am I getting something wrong here?
Yes.
(My standard response to such statements is that it doesn't matter who makes decisions, only what the correct decisions are. Focus on figuring out the answer instead of on who names which answer why.)
And he figured this out at age 9? I'm impressed. I didn't reach that point until quite a few years later.
Really? Never tried screaming "You can't make me!" or asked "Why should I?!" Seems to be an insight most children have to me.
There's a difference between saying something (or screaming it) and understanding it.
This seems perfectly normal if the parents don't make unfair or unexplained requests, and the kid follows fair requests.
Don't know what the prevalence of reasonable parents is.
(You were making that assumption with a rhetorical "Really?", so I've pointed it out.)
You don't point out every assumption. The contrary assumption is equally implicit in the other person mentioning it at all. Which doesn't seem any better justified.
Do you have any better info or ... ? I mean I can see why people wouldn't want to know that things they find happy-causing are surprising to some others - so there's that I suppose. But I doubt you'd want to see yourself that way, so what're you trading for here?
The "guy with the biggest gun" is the one with most leverage, and short of your son calling child services it is the parents. That said, he must be unusually bright for a 9yo.
It's not that cut and dry. The child can institute a policy of attrition to get bargaining power. Sure, in any individual situation the parents have a lot more power - but as a general rule they aren't willing to follow a policy of spending significant amounts of time to get their child to do anything.
It's complicated by the parents generally caring about their child's welfare, too. Getting compliance at any cost is a losing strategy for raising a successful kid.
Let me elaborate. There are certain lines which parents aren't willing to cross - spending tens of hours a week, or over a certain amount of money in bribes, or punishment inflicted. The parents mostly care about rewards and punishments in terms of how it affects the child's behavior. So, a general strategy of "do not let my behavior change by any reward or punishment that the parents are willing to give me for compliance or noncompliance" is a good enough position to get any reasonable compromise that the child wants. The parents are stuck with either not getting what they want, crossing the line into child abuse, or negotiating with the kid.
Is this sort of thing not standard in democracies?
Imagine a family with five children. In a pure democracy "Candy for dinner" wins 5-2. In a real family, there's no vote because candy ain't for dinner.
Not that our actual governments are pure democracies. I don't argue they should be, but there is a veil-of-ignorance / Schelling point / first-they-came-for-the-trade-unionists argument for most anti-majoritarian laws. I don't think the argument would work with children.
I 100% agree that in a real family, candy ain't for dinner.
And I suppose I agree that in a "pure democracy" (insofar as such a thing is even a cogent thought experiment) whether candy is for dinner or not is, as you suggest, subject to a one-mouth-one-vote kind of decision procedure.
But, as you say, there are no pure democracies in the real world. My point was that in the real governments which we ordinarily refer to as "democracies," not only are some people (including minors) not permitted to vote in the first place, but even among adults some (most!) choices are removed from consideration before voting commences at all.
So it seems no more wrong to say "Sam's family is a democracy" (even though the children don't get a vote, and some choices are not even subject to vote) than to say "Canada is a democracy" (ibid).
I was mostly reacting to shminux's assertion that a family with children might be just about anywhere on the scale between democracy and tyranny. Whereas I think a functional family is about 3/4 tyranny, and Canada is much closer to 3/4 democracy.