= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
JoshuaFox comments on Don't rely on the system to guarantee you life satisfaction - Less Wrong Discussion
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 (64)
The lesson I derived from Amy Chua's first Tiger Mom book (to the extent that we can get any real information from the public image) was that if you frog-march your children through all the "right" school and extracurricular activities, they'll end up with the confidence and opportunity to seize all of life's many possibilities -- not depressed, neurotic, hating their parents, or whatever else is thought to afflict such children,
As her daughters reached adolescence, they rebelled a little -- by dropping some extracurriculars and adopting others, for example. Not through crime and drugs, and not by dropping out of high school to carve out their own way of life . They went to Harvard and now the world is open to them, and as far as we can tell they also have a rich social life.
Is this the right lesson to draw? I hope not.
Amy Chua's kids have two Yale law school professors for parents. Genetically and in terms of social capital they rolled a natural 20. I suggest reading Judith Rich Harris's "The Nurture Assumption" and/or Bryan Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" if Chua is getting to you.
And Amy's father was a super-genius, even compared to Ivy league professors.
Sure, but note that the the type of advice Jonah is giving is disproportionately aimed at gifted kids.
So, Chua's technique and Jonah's are indeed aimed at the same population and so we can look at the results that each offers. Chua's two daughters are not a big data sample, however.
Certainly, kids who are pushed to "play the game" succeed in life along all relevant parameters more than those who are not (those Upper East Side kids whose parents prep them for Harvard are going to end up with above average outcomes as compared to the US population). But there are some major confounding variables there, of course.