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ilzolende comments on Open thread, Feb. 23 - Mar. 1, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Tell Alex that swearing a lot weakens the value of your swearing as a signal. If you get a reputation for not swearing, then the one time you do, people will take you more seriously than if you used profanity on a daily basis. Also, swearing is a much cheaper signal than any alternatives you might want to signal with if you'd made your swearing meaningless.
This is the actual reasoning I (high verbal IQ, boundary testing 16-year-old) end up swearing < once/month.
Not sure if this will get the result you want, but it will approach what you want.
I just did this. He responded by saying that this means if I want him to be less offensive he should swear more, and then he said f---- you. My laughing in response probably didn't help my efforts to get him to swear less.
Sorry, hope my suggestion wasn't too counterproductive.
I don't think the signal value of swearing is "how much I want to offend this person" but rather "how strong my opinion on this subject is". Swearing at someone more will probably only make them more offended (if they get offended by swearing in that context at all). However, when the person who swears every day says that Policy X is f---ing scary, people will take them less seriously when the person who swears about once/year does.
Don't worry, it wasn't.
This is surely true. On the other hand, there are other ways to convey how strong your opinion is, and if I feel once-per-year-strongly that Policy X is scary, maybe I should be conveying that by some more informative and costly means than just dropping in the word "fuck". I tend to think that swearing works better as a mild intensifier, for relatively frequent use, than as a once-per-year thing.
I remember reading somewhere that swearing has a mild painkiller effect (e.g. stub your toe and go "fuck!", less painful stubbed toe), but only if the person doing it rarely swears. I don't remember where I read this, though.
Was the control group silence or yelling non-profanities? Because saying/yelling "ow" tends to be fairly effective.
This paper compared repeating a profanity to repeating an alternate arbitrary word, not "ow." (first hit searching "swearing pain" on google scholar)
I don't remember anything else about the thing I read.
It may only be personal, but in my experience it is the opposite, because that is like telling yourself "oh, how terrible this is," which of course does not make you feel better, but worse.
If I recall correctly, it increases tolerance for pain which isn't quite the same as "mild painkiller." The experiment measured how long you could submerge your hand in freezing water, which participants who were allowed to swear could do for a longer period of time.
All you need to do is be sure that the 10 year old will understand that, and you're done. Good luck.
("I did this as a 16 year old" is not really very informative about 10 year olds. And even then you were probably atypical for one.)
I think this can be explained to kids, and I don't think Alex is the average 10-year-old. "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is basically a story about "don't weaken your cheap signals by misusing them", so a general case is clearly already explainable to kids. I'm pretty sure that Alex is smart enough to understand the concept if explained well, and that James Miller has the teaching skills to explain the concept. I've been using this as the reason why I don't swear before turning 16. I am absolutely atypical for a teenager, but Alex has been described as being more similar to the average LW reader than to the average member of the general population, so this may be applicable.
If the kid is smart enough to understand that, he can also reason as follows: I can tell that you really don't want me to swear anyway, regardless of that. And if I'm trading off frequency for impact, it's awfully hard for you to know the exact amount of swearing that optimizes impact. Both of these factors make it especially likely that what you're telling me is motivated reasoning, so I should ignore you.
Again, a kid wouldn't phrase it that way, but he might say something like "that isn't really why you want me to stop!" and basically mean that.
He may even be right. Unless you actually want the kid to swear to a degree that maximizes impact, rather than less than that.