= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
HungryHobo comments on Feedback on promoting rational thinking about one's career choice to a broad audience - 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 (45)
To the contrary, they want to appear and feel super smart, at little effort! This is why most teenagers love Dawkins et al. as it sounds like being smarter than your parents, or this is why Ayn Rand and Nietzsche are typical teenager heroes. The trick is to not make them think hard - they will call that boring stuff - but help them feel smug about their intellectualism and then they will listen.
Caveat: my current self absolutely hates my smug-ass teenage self that I used to be so I may be a bit pessimistic about other teenagers :)
You may have a slight sampling bias.
A large portion of the population don't attach a great deal of status to smartness. In the slightly geekier subgroups sure but scoring goals, scoring with attractive members of the opposite sex, being invited to lots of social events, knowing the gossip. All these things are far more important to a huge portion of the population than smartness and there's nothing particularly wrong with that.
personally I'd much prefer to one day hold a nobel than to hold the FIFA world cup and I'm willing to bet so would you but we're almost certainly in the minority on that score in the general population.
I do very little offline communication with young people anymore and tend to think Reddit is representative. I mean, it is big, right?
Reminds me of this essay by Scott/Yvain where he mentions a reddit thread of over 10,000 comments specifically looking for people who opposed gay marriage, but with practically nobody who opposed gay marriage participating.
A great reminder that while increasing sample size decreases random bias, it does nothing to reduce systemic bias.
True. Hmm...