Gwern wrote "You wish to defer to the cop's expertise on whether it breaks the law? Excellent! I wish to defer to teens' expertise on what they enjoy. I'm glad we could come to agreement that teens overestimate risk but enjoy risky behavior much more than older people."
I've been comfortable all along with accepting what teens find enjoyable, I do not agree that teens overestimate risk and frankly I'm surprised you could glean that from what I've written. Let me be clear, the article reveals that teenagers underestimate risk.
Dobbs wrote - "It was the brain scans she took while people took the test. Compared with adults, teens tended to make less use of brain regions that monitor performance, spot errors, plan, and stay focused—areas the adults seemed to bring online automatically. This let the adults use a variety of brain resources and better resist temptation, while the teens used those areas less often and more readily gave in to the impulse to look at the flickering light—just as they're more likely to look away from the road to read a text message."
Estimating risk is about planning, monitoring performance, spotting errors and staying focused, whilst the final comment quoted above provides a suitable anecdote highlighting another situation where teens are more likely to underestimate risk. Further teens more readily give in to impulse - that reveals that teens readily don't estimate risk (at all), do you see that? Estimating risk is in opposition to giving into impulse, an impulse is a sudden urge - estimation isn't something that's done suddenly, estimation is calculated by examining the context.
Gwern continues with "'fairness' does not enter into it. As a transhumanist, I do not think death is a fair price for much of anything."
I used the term "fair" in the context of the gain outweighs the cost, it's a colloquialism you obviously understand since you use it yourself, hence your comment "fairness' does not enter into it" is false. However, you're quite right that death isn't a fair price for much of anything, providing support for the risk of death not being much of a fair price for anything either... again you just keep destroying your own argument.
So on one hand we've got teens who are shown in your quoted article to anecdotally underestimate risk and also shown in research to utilise less brain processes that estimate risk and on the other hand its been shown in other research presented in the same article that teens place a higher value on rewards - all of that leads to the inescapable conclusion that some teens are overconfident in their decision making ability.
It's become apparent to me that this discussion is an example of the disconfirmation bias. Perhaps you'd care to follow the procedure for minimizing/removing disconfirmation bias before you make another post, I have already done so several times.
Since gwern is, well beyond what I thought was typical of him, refusing to call a horse a horse, I'm going to say it: man, you're so lame.
First understand that I noticed a disagreement going on between someone I've never seen before, a Mr. Peacewise, and a Mr. Gwern, whom I despise ever so lightly. He's a jerk on IRC, you see. It would have made me feel better for him to be wrong and you to be right, you see. I wanted that, in my gut (though not by Tarski).
But man. Gwern posts an article with a perfectly reasonable conclusion attached, and you take a slice...
When I first read the words above—on August 1st, 2003, at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon—it changed the way I thought. I realized that once I could guess what my answer would be—once I could assign a higher probability to deciding one way than other—then I had, in all probability, already decided. We change our minds less often than we think. And most of the time we become able to guess what our answer will be within half a second of hearing the question.
How swiftly that unnoticed moment passes, when we can’t yet guess what our answer will be; the tiny window of opportunity for intelligence to act. In questions of choice, as in questions of fact.
The principle of the bottom line is that only the actual causes of your beliefs determine your effectiveness as a rationalist. Once your belief is fixed, no amount of argument will alter the truth-value; once your decision is fixed, no amount of argument will alter the consequences.
You might think that you could arrive at a belief, or a decision, by non-rational means, and then try to justify it, and if you found you couldn’t justify it, reject it.
But we change our minds less often—much less often—than we think.
I’m sure that you can think of at least one occasion in your life when you’ve changed your mind. We all can. How about all the occasions in your life when you didn’t change your mind? Are they as available, in your heuristic estimate of your competence?
Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera, et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it’s probably going to stay there.
1Dale Griffin and Amos Tversky, “The Weighing of Evidence and the Determinants of Confidence,” Cognitive Psychology 24, no. 3 (1992): 411–435.