Altruistic parenting
I just read this article about the felicific calculus of parenthood.
The average happiness worldwide is 5.1 on a one out of ten scale; Americans are at 7.1. Arbitrarily deciding that one year of a 10 life is equivalent to two years of a 5 life, the cost per QALY of having a child for total utilitarians is $5500.
However, NICE’s threshold for cost effectiveness of a health intervention is about $30,000 (20,000 pounds) per QALY. Therefore, for total utilitarians, having a child may be considered a cost-effective intervention, although not an optimal intervention.
...surrogacy is an underexplored way to do good. Rather than costing money, the first-time surrogate earns thirty thousand dollars, which can grow to forty thousand dollars for experienced surrogates– and it still creates 109 QALYs that otherwise would not exist. These children are likely to grow up in wealthy families who really, really want to have them, and are thus likely to be even happier than this analysis suggests.
In the comments section, the following grabbed my attention.
Estimates for the size of a sustainable human population appear to mostly range between 2 billion and 10 billion, and the meta-analysis here (http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/54/3/195) suggests that the best point estimate is around 7.7 billion. Meanwhile most estimates of population growth over the next hundred years suggest the total population will reach 10-11 billion. It seems likely that at some point in the next couple hundred years, the population will decrease substantially due to a Malthusian catastrophe. This transition is likely to cause a great deal of suffering. Surely even a total utilitarian would agree that it would be better for the necessary drop in population to be as small as possible.
And even if the population never rises above sustainable carrying capacity, it’s not obvious that total utilitarians should see a larger population as preferable. The drop in happiness due to increased competition for resources could outweigh the benefit of an additional person existing and having experiences.
Then, I read this article. Here are the highlights:
Bryan Caplan’s excellent book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids[7] reviews the evidence from 40 years of adoption and twin studies with a frankly liberating result: *barring actual deprivation or trauma, children are largely who they are going to be as a result of their genetic makeup. In long-term measures of well-being, education and employment, parental influence exerts a temporary effect which disappears when we are no longer living with our parents. So costly added extras (music lessons, coaching and tutoring, private school fees) are probably not going to change your child’s life in the long term. (However, data on the antenatal environment suggests benefit to taking iodine, but avoiding ice-storms and licorice during pregnancy.[8]) Sharing time together and finding common interests can build a good relationship and help a child develop without major costs.
In addition to straightforward financial outlay, parenthood comes with costs of time and opportunity. Loss of flexibility and leisure mean you won’t be able to take all opportunities (like taking on extra work to make more money or advance your career). Late notice travel is unlikely to be possible. You will probably be sleep deprived for a large part of the first year or more of your child’s life, and this may impact on your work performance. The work of parenting will take time, though some of it may be outsourced at the cost of increased financial outlay.
So, this baby is going to cost you about £2000 a year and take a variable but large amount of your time, which will equate in the end to another chunk of money. For parents taking parental leave or working less than full time to provide childcare, there may be delay to career progression as well as income. Does this represent an unacceptably large sum of money and time to be compatible with the goal of maximising our impacts for the good?
In the light of this reality, the rationalist suggestion I have encountered – that one guard against a desire to become a parent by pre-emptively being sterilised before the desire has arisen – seems a recipe for psychological disaster.
Finally we may ask whether parenthood – and the resulting person created – will benefit the wider world? This is a harder good to calculate or rely upon. The inheritance of specific character traits is difficult to predict. It’s certainly not guaranteed that your offspring will embrace all of your values throughout their lifetime. The burden of onerous parental expectations are extensively documented, and it would appear foolish to have children on the expectation they will be altruistic in the same way you are. However, your child is likely to resemble you in many important respects. By adulthood, the heritability of IQ is between 0.7 and 0.8,[13] and there is evidence from twin studies of significant heritability of complex traits like empathy.[14] This would give them a high probability of adding significant net good to the world.
That's rather confronting:
* a '5' on a scale of happiness ain't that bad
* don't stress too much when raising your biological kids, you can't do that much
* they're probably not worth having anyway
Just kidding. But, the evidence is quite fascinating.
Experiences in applying "The Biodeterminist's Guide to Parenting"
I'm posting this because LessWrong was very influential on how I viewed parenting, particularly the emphasis on helping one's brain work better. In this context, creating and influencing another person's brain is an awesome responsibility.
It turned out to be a lot more anxiety-provoking than I expected. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, as the possibility of screwing up someone's brain should make a parent anxious, but it's something to be aware of. I've heard some blithe "Rational parenting could be a very high-impact activity!" statements from childless LWers who may be interested to hear some experiences in actually applying that.
One thing that really scared me about trying to raise a child with the healthiest-possible brain and body was the possibility that I might not love her if she turned out to not be smart. 15 months in, I'm no longer worried. Evolution has been very successful at producing parents and children that love each other despite their flaws, and our family is no exception. Our daughter Lily seems to be doing fine, but if she turns out to have disabilities or other problems, I'm confident that we'll roll with the punches.
Cross-posted from The Whole Sky.
Before I got pregnant, I read Scott Alexander's (Yvain's) excellent Biodeterminist's Guide to Parenting and was so excited to have this knowledge. I thought how lucky my child would be to have parents who knew and cared about how to protect her from things that would damage her brain.
Real life, of course, got more complicated. It's one thing to intend to avoid neurotoxins, but another to arrive at the grandparents' house and find they've just had ant poison sprayed. What do you do then?
Here are some tradeoffs Jeff and I have made between things that are good for children in one way but bad in another, or things that are good for children but really difficult or expensive.
Germs and parasites
The hygiene hypothesis states that lack of exposure to germs and parasites increases risk of auto-immune disease. Our pediatrician recommended letting Lily playing in the dirt for this reason.
While exposure to animal dander and pollution increase asthma later in life, it seems that being exposed to these in the first year of life actually protects against asthma. Apparently if you're going to live in a house with roaches, you should do it in the first year or not at all.
Except some stuff in dirt is actually bad for you.
Scott writes:
Parasite-infestedness of an area correlates with national IQ at about r = -0.82. The same is true of US states, with a slightly reduced correlation coefficient of -0.67 (p<0.0001). . . . When an area eliminates parasites (like the US did for malaria and hookworm in the early 1900s) the IQ for the area goes up at about the right time.
Living with cats as a child seems to increase risk of schizophrenia, apparently via toxoplasmosis. But in order to catch toxoplasmosis from a cat, you have to eat its feces during the two weeks after it first becomes infected (which it’s most likely to do by eating birds or rodents carrying the disease). This makes me guess that most kids get it through tasting a handful of cat litter, dirt from the yard, or sand from the sandbox rather than simply through cat ownership. We live with indoor cats who don’t seem to be mousers, so I’m not concerned about them giving anyone toxoplasmosis. If we build Lily a sandbox, we’ll keep it covered when not in use.
The evidence is mixed about whether infections like colds during the first year of life increase or decrease your risk of asthma later. After the newborn period, we defaulted to being pretty casual about germ exposure.
Toxins in buildings
Our experiences with lead. Our experiences with mercury.
In some areas, it’s not that feasible to live in a house with zero lead. We live in Boston, where 87% of the housing was built before lead paint was banned. Even in a new building, we’d need to go far out of town before reaching soil that wasn’t near where a lead-painted building had been.
It is possible to do some renovations without exposing kids to lead. Jeff recently did some demolition of walls with lead paint, very carefully sealed off and cleaned up, while Lily and I spent the day elsewhere. Afterwards her lead level was no higher than it had been.
But Jeff got serious lead poisoning as a toddler while his parents did major renovations on their old house. If I didn’t think I could keep the child away from the dust, I wouldn’t renovate.
Recently a house across the street from us was gutted, with workers throwing debris out the windows and creating big plumes of dust (presumable lead-laden) that blew all down the street. Later I realized I should have called city building inspection services, which would have at least made them carry the debris into the dumpster instead of throwing it from the second story.
Floor varnish releases formaldehyde and other nasties as it cures. We kept Lily out of the house for a few weeks after Jeff redid the floors. We found it worthwhile to pay rent at our previous house in order to not have to live in the new house while this kind of work was happening.
Pressure-treated wood was treated with arsenic and chromium until around 2004 in the US. It has a greenish tint, though this may have faded with time. Playing on playsets or decks made of such wood increases children's cancer risk. It should not be used for furniture (I thought this would be obvious, but apparently it wasn't to some of my handyman relatives).
I found it difficult to know how to deal with fresh paint and other fumes in my building at work while I was pregnant. Women of reproductive age have a heightened sense of smell, and many pregnant women have heightened aversion to smells, so you can literally smell things some of your coworkers can’t (or don’t mind). The most critical period of development is during the first trimester, when most women aren’t telling the world they’re pregnant (because it’s also the time when a miscarriage is most likely, and if you do lose the pregnancy you might not want to have to tell the world). During that period, I found it difficult to explain why I was concerned about the fumes from the roofing adhesive being used in our building. I didn’t want to seem like a princess who thought she was too good to work in conditions that everybody else found acceptable. (After I told them I was pregnant, my coworkers were very understanding about such things.)
Food
Recommendations usually focus on what you should eat during pregnancy, but obviously children’s brain development doesn’t stop there. I’ve opted to take precautions with the food Lily and I eat for as long as I’m nursing her.
Claims that pesticide residues are poisoning children scare me, although most scientists seem to think the paper cited is overblown. Other sources say the levels of pesticides in conventionally grown produce are fine. We buy organic produce at home but eat whatever we’re served elsewhere.
I would love to see a study with families randomly selected to receive organic produce for the first 8 years of the kids’ lives, then looking at IQ and hyperactivity. But no one’s going to do that study because of how expensive 8 years of organic produce would be.
The Biodeterminist’s Guide doesn’t mention PCBs in the section on fish, but fish (particularly farmed salmon) are a major source of these pollutants. They don’t seem to be as bad as mercury, but are neurotoxic. Unfortunately their half-life in the body is around 14 years, so if you have even a vague idea of getting pregnant ever in your life you shouldn’t be eating farmed salmon (or Atlantic/farmed salmon, bluefish, wild striped bass, white and Atlantic croaker, blackback or winter flounder, summer flounder, or blue crab).
I had the best intentions of eating lots of the right kind of high-omega-3, low-pollutant fish during and after pregnancy. Unfortunately, fish was the only food I developed an aversion to. Now that Lily is eating food on her own, we tried several sources of omega-3 and found that kippered herring was the only success. Lesson: it’s hard to predict what foods kids will eat, so keep trying.
In terms of hassle, I underestimated how long I would be “eating for two” in the sense that anything I put in my body ends up in my child’s body. Counting pre-pregnancy (because mercury has a half-life of around 50 days in the body, so sushi you eat before getting pregnant could still affect your child), pregnancy, breastfeeding, and presuming a second pregnancy, I’ll probably spend about 5 solid years feeding another person via my body, sometimes two children at once. That’s a long time in which you have to consider the effect of every medication, every cup of coffee, every glass of wine on your child. There are hardly any medications considered completely safe during pregnancy and lactation—most things are in Category C, meaning there’s some evidence from animal trials that they may be bad for human children.
Fluoride
Too much fluoride is bad for children’s brains. The CDC recently recommended lowering fluoride levels in municipal water (though apparently because of concerns about tooth discoloration more than neurotoxicity). Around the same time, the American Dental Association began recommending the use of fluoride toothpaste as soon as babies have teeth, rather than waiting until they can rinse and spit.
Cavities are actually a serious problem even in baby teeth, because of the pain and possible infection they cause children. Pulling them messes up the alignment of adult teeth. Drilling on children too young to hold still requires full anesthesia, which is dangerous itself.
But Lily isn’t particularly at risk for cavities. 20% of children get a cavity by age six, and they are disproportionately poor, African-American, and particularly Mexican-American children (presumably because of different diet and less ability to afford dentists). 75% of cavities in children under 5 occur in 8% of the population.
We decided to have Lily brush without toothpaste, avoid juice and other sugary drinks, and see the dentist regularly.
Home pesticides
One of the most commonly applied insecticides makes kids less smart. This isn’t too surprising, given that it kills insects by disabling their nervous system. But it’s not something you can observe on a small scale, so it’s not surprising that the exterminator I talked to brushed off my questions with “I’ve never heard of a problem!”
If you get carpenter ants in your house, you basically have to choose between poisoning them or letting them structurally damage the house. We’ve only seen a few so far, but if the problem progresses, we plan to:
1) remove any rotting wood in the yard where they could be nesting
2) have the perimeter of the building sprayed
3) place gel bait in areas kids can’t access
4) only then spray poison inside the house.
If we have mice we’ll plan to use mechanical traps rather than poison.
Flame retardants
Since the 1970s, California required a high degree of flame-resistance from furniture. This basically meant that US manufacturers sprayed flame retardant chemicals on anything made of polyurethane foam, such as sofas, rug pads, nursing pillows, and baby mattresses.
The law recently changed, due to growing acknowledgement that the carcinogenic and neurotoxic chemicals were more dangerous than the fires they were supposed to be preventing. Even firefighters opposed the use of the flame retardants, because when people die in fires it’s usually from smoke inhalation rather than burns, and firefighters don’t want to breathe the smoke from your toxic sofa (which will eventually catch fire even with the flame retardants).
We’ve opted to use furniture from companies that have stopped using flame retardants (like Ikea and others listed here). Apparently futons are okay if they’re stuffed with cotton rather than foam. We also have some pre-1970s furniture that tested clean for flame retardants. You can get foam samples tested for free.
The main vehicle for children ingesting the flame retardants is that it settles into dust on the floor, and children crawl around in the dust. If you don’t want to get rid of your furniture, frequent damp-mopping would probably help.
The standards for mattresses are so stringent that the chemical sprays aren’t generally used, and instead most mattresses are wrapped in a flame-resistant barrier which apparently isn’t toxic. I contacted the companies that made our mattresses and they’re fine.
Ratings for chemical safety of children’s car seats here.
Thoughts on IQ
A lot of people, when I start talking like this, say things like “Well, I lived in a house with lead paint/played with mercury/etc. and I’m still alive.” And yes, I played with mercury as a child, and Jeff is still one of the smartest people I know even after getting acute lead poisoning as a child.
But I do wonder if my mind would work a little better without the mercury exposure, and if Jeff would have had an easier time in school without the hyperactivity (a symptom of lead exposure). Given the choice between a brain that works a little better and one that works a little worse, who wouldn’t choose the one that works better?
We’ll never know how an individual’s nervous system might have been different with a different childhood. But we can see population-level effects. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, is fine with calculating the expected benefit of making coal plants stop releasing mercury by looking at the expected gains in terms of children’s IQ and increased earnings.
Scott writes:
A 15 to 20 point rise in IQ, which is a little more than you get from supplementing iodine in an iodine-deficient region, is associated with half the chance of living in poverty, going to prison, or being on welfare, and with only one-fifth the chance of dropping out of high-school (“associated with” does not mean “causes”).
Salkever concludes that for each lost IQ point, males experience a 1.93% decrease in lifetime earnings and females experience a 3.23% decrease. If Lily would earn about what I do, saving her one IQ point would save her $1600 a year or $64000 over her career. (And that’s not counting the other benefits she and others will reap from her having a better-functioning mind!) I use that for perspective when making decisions. $64000 would buy a lot of the posh prenatal vitamins that actually contain iodine, or organic food, or alternate housing while we’re fixing up the new house.
Conclusion
There are times when Jeff and I prioritize social relationships over protecting Lily from everything that might harm her physical development. It’s awkward to refuse to go to someone’s house because of the chemicals they use, or to refuse to eat food we’re offered. Social interactions are good for children’s development, and we value those as well as physical safety. And there are times when I’ve had to stop being so careful because I was getting paralyzed by anxiety (literally perched in the rocker with the baby trying not to touch anything after my in-laws scraped lead paint off the outside of the house).
But we also prioritize neurological development more than most parents, and we hope that will have good outcomes for Lily.
Parenting Technique: Increase Your Child’s Working Memory
I continually train my ten-year-old son’s working memory, and urge parents of other young children to do likewise. While I have succeeded in at least temporarily improving his working memory, I accept that this change might not be permanent and could end a few months after he stops training. But I also believe that while his working memory is boosted so too is his learning capacity.
I have a horrible working memory that greatly hindered my academic achievement. I was so bad at spelling that they stopped counting it against me in school. In technical classes I had trouble remembering what variables stood for. My son, in contrast, has a fantastic memory. He twice won his school’s spelling bee, and just recently I wrote twenty symbols (letters, numbers, and shapes) in rows of five. After a few minutes he memorized the symbols and then (without looking) repeated them forward, backwards, forwards, and then by columns.
My son and I have been learning different programming languages through Codecademy. While I struggle to remember the required syntax of different languages, he quickly gets this and can focus on higher level understanding. When we do math learning together his strong working memory also lets him concentrate on higher order issues then remembering the details of the problem and the relevant formulas.
You can easily train a child’s working memory. It requires just a few minutes of time a day, can be very low tech or done on a computer, can be optimized for your child to get him in flow, and easily lends itself to a reward system. Here is some of the training we have done:
- I write down a sequence and have him repeat it.
- I say a sequence and have him repeat it.
- He repeats the sequence backwards.
- He repeats the sequence with slight changes such as adding one to each number and “subtracting” one from each letter.
- He repeats while doing some task like touching his head every time he says an even number and touching his knee every time he says an odd one.
- Before repeating a memorized sequence he must play repeat after me where I say a random string.
- I draw a picture and have him redraw it.
- He plays N-back games.
- He does mental math requiring keeping track of numbers (i.e. 42 times 37).
- I assign numerical values to letters and ask him math operation questions (i.e. A*B+C).
The key is to keep changing how you train your kid so you have more hope of improving general working memory rather than the very specific task you are doing. So, for example, if you say a sequence and have your kid repeat it back to you, vary the speed at which you talk on different days and don’t just use one class of symbols in your exercises.
Effective Sustainability - results from a meetup discussion
Related-to Focus Areas of Effective Altruism
These are some small tidbits from our LW-like Meetup in Hamburg. The focus was on sustainability not on altruism as that was more in the spirit of our group. EA was mentioned but no comparison was made. Well-informed effective altruists will probably find little new in this writeup.
So we discussed effective sustainability. To this end we were primed to think rationally by my 11-year old who moderated a session on mind-mapping 'reason' (with contributions from the children). Then we set out to objectively compare concrete everyday things by their sustainability. And how to do this.
Is it better to drink fruit juice or wine? Or wine or water? Or wine vs. nothing (i.e.to forego sth.)? Or wine vs. paper towels? (the latter intentionally different)
The idea was to arrive at simple rules of thumb to evaluate the sustainability of something. But we discovered that even simple comparisons are not that simple and intuition can run afoul (surpise!). One example was that apparently tote bags are not clearly better than plastic bags in terms of sustainability. But even the simple comparison of tap water vs. wine which seems like a trivial subset case is non-trivial when you consider where the water comes from and how it is extracted from the ground (we still think that water is better but we not as sure as before).
We discussed some ways to measure sustainability (in brackets to which we reduced it):
- fresh water use -> energy
- packaging material used -> energy, permanent ressources
- transport -> energy
- energy -> CO_2, permanent ressources
- CO_2 production
- permanent consumption of ressources
Life-Cycle-Assessment (German: Ökobilanz) was mentioned in this context but it was unclear what that meant precisely. Only afterwards was it discovered that it's a blanket term for exactly this question (with lots of estabilished measurements for which it is unclear how to simplify them for everyday use).
We didn't try to break this down - a practical everyday approch doesn't allow for that and the time spent on analysing and comparing options is also equivalent to ressources possibly not spent efficiently.
One unanswered question was how much time to invest in comparing alternatives. Too little comparison means to take the nextbest option which is what most people apparently do and which also apparently doesn't lead to overall sustainable behavior. But too much analysis of simple decisions is also no option.
The idea was still to arrive at actionable criteria. One first approximation be settled on was
1) Forego consumption.
A nobrainer really, but maybe even that has to be stated. Instead of comparing options that are hard to compare try to avoid consumption where you can. Water instead of wine or fruit juice or lemonde. This saves lots of cognitive ressources.
Shortly after we agreed on the second approximation:
2) Spend more time on optimizing ressources you consume large amounts of.
The example at hand was wine (which we consume only a few times a year) versus toilet paper... No need to feel remorse over a one-time present packaging.
Note that we mostly excluded personal well-being, happiness and hedons from our consideration. We were aware that our goals affect our choices and hedons have to factored into any real strategy, but we left this additional complication out of our analysis - at least for this time.
We did discuss signalling effects. Mostly in the context of how effective ressources can be saved by convincing others to act sustainably. One important aspect for the parents was to pass on the idea and to act as a role model (with the caveat that children need a simplified model to grasp the concept). It was also mentioned humorously that one approach to minimize personal ressource consumption is suicide and transitively to convice others of same. The ultimate solution having no humans on the planet (a solution my 8-year old son - a friend of nature - arrived at too). This apparently being the problem when utilons/hedons are expluded.
A short time we considered whether outreach comes for free (can be done in addition to abstinence) and should be the no-brainer number 3. But it was then realized that at least right now and for us most abstinence comes at a price. It was quoted that buying sustainable products is about 20% more expensive than normal products. Forgoing e.g. a car comes at reduced job options. Some jobs involve supporting less sustainable large-scale action. Having less money means less options to act sustaibale. Time being convertible to money and so on.
At this point the key insight mentioned was that it could be much more efficient from a sustainability point of view to e.g. buy CO_2 certificates than to buy organic products. Except that the CO_2 certificate market is oversupplied currently. But there seem to be organisations which promise to achieve effective CO_2 reduction in developing countries (e.g. solar cooking) at a much higher rate than be achieved here. Thus the thrid rule was
3) Spend money on sustainable organisations instead of on everyday products that only give you a good feeling.
How to deal with Santa Claus?
Related: The Santa deception Is Santa real On the care of young rationalists
All of the other takes on this topic start from a point, when a child (usually 5-9 years old) asks "Is Santa real?" Nobody yet asked "how to raise my child Santa-free?" What to say, when a two-year-old, who just noticed that there is this character on TV asks "will he come to me, too?" A toddler may not yet understand the concept of lie, of pretending, of things not physically existing. How to tell her, what will happen, what to expect, how and why other children behave differently?
My three-year-old daughter discovered Santa last spring, which finally forced me to think: how to deal with it? Ignoring the thing worked for three years, but what now? I live in an extremely catholic country (Poland), so I cannot be completely blunt about it.
In the end I decided to call it "the fairy-tale of [Santa] Claus." For me it has a lot of advantages: this is a story that can be told, retold, reinvented and everybody knows it. In addition, since the name includes the phrase "the fairy-tale", it has just as much validity as the tale of the Red Riding Hood or any TV character that she likes.
I tested some of her beliefs about "Miko". I opened the box with books intended for gifts in front of her. When she wanted to read some of them, I explained that she cannot yet read her book, because she'll get it on Christmas Eve. She asked "is it from Miko?" and I replied that in some way it is, but I bought it. She didn't insist on reading it right now. A few days ago she helped me wrap some of the gifts. She commented that action "Miko brought these so we can wrap them and give them as gifts from Miko."
Malcolm told me, that he likes best the strategy, when you say that Santa Claus is a game that everyone plays. People pretend that there's a big guy in a suit who does the thing, and if you ever let down the pretense to your friends, you lose the game. I'm not entirely convinced by this strategy - it may be too complicated for a 2- or 3-year old (since my daughter didn't wrap her mind around the information that I bought the books).
What are other strategies that you use? Or which ones you don't like? Why?
Book Review: Kazdin's The Everyday Parenting Toolkit
This is a review of The Everyday Parenting Toolkit: The Kazdin Method for Easy, Step-by-step, Lasting Change for You and Your Child by Alan E, Kazdin (all phrases in quotes below are from this book if not otherwise indicated). I was pointed to this book by tadamsmars comment on Ignorance in Parenting.
This is a post in the sequence about parenting. I also see some cross relations to learning and cognitive sciences in general. Kazdins advice also is not only applicable to children but to adults as well if you read the book with a mind open to the backing research (Kazdin actually gives some such examples to illustrate the methods).
Summary TD;DR
Define the positive behavior you do want. Communicate this clearly and provide events that make it likely to occur. Praise any occurrence of the positive behavior effusively. Think about and communicate consequences beforehand. Use mild and short punishments (if at all). Provide a healthy environment.
Soft Paternalism in Parenting
Reading the recently featured Beware of Trivial Inconveniences I realized that this is the method that makes Say Yes really work and thus this is Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories.
The trick of saying "yes" instead of "no" is *not* to say less often "no" at the cost at allowing things when you say "yes". That just trades the stress of saying "no" (staying consequent despite a clash of wills) against the effort to fulfill, monitor, pay or clean up after the "yes".
Soft paternalism applied to parenting means saying "Yes, but" or "Yes, later" or "Yes, if". This signals to the child that you understand his/her wish but also supplies some context the child may not be aware of. It reduces your cost of saying "yes" at the expense of a cost to cash in the "yes" for the child.
Teaching rationality to kids?
I'm finally getting around to reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow". Much of it I had already learned on LW and elsewhere. Maybe that's why my strongest impression from the book is how accessible it is. Simple sentences, clear and vivid examples, easy-to-follow exercises, a remarkable lack of references to topics not explained right away.
I caught myself thinking "This is a book I should have read as a kid". In my first language, I think I could have managed it as early as 11 years old. Since measured IQ is strongly influenced by habits of thinking and cognitive returns can be reinvested, I'm sure I would be smarter now if I had.
So I have decided to buy a stack of these books and give them to kids on their, say, 12th birthdays. Then maybe Dan Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" a year later - and HPMOR a year after that? I would like to see more suggestions from you guys.
It should be obviously better to start even earlier. So how do you teach rationality to a nine-year-old? Or a seven-year-old? Has anybody done something like that? Please name books, videos or web sites.
If such media are not available, creating them should be low-hanging fruit in the quest to raise the global IQ and sanity waterline. ELI5 writing is very learnable, after all, and ELI5 type interpretations of, say, the sequences, might be helpful for adults too.
Estimation as a game
Developing rational patterns of thought in children is very important and I'm glad Gunnar brought that issue up.
I wanted to share with you some thoughts I have regarding estimation games.
From an early age I've been constantly calculating various kinds of estimates - e.g. "how many people live in this building", "how long will it take to cross the US on foot", "what's the height of that tower", "how many BMWs are manufactured annually" and so on.
I believe that practising this technique is not only fun but also helpful. Sometimes one has no way or time to acquire accurate information regarding something and even a rough estimate can be very valuable.
People are often surprised when they see me do it whereas for me it is completely natural. I think the reason is that I do it from a very early age.
I think it's easy and natural for children to grasp if this method is introduced through everyday experiences. By making this into a game children can gain intuitive understanding of quantitative techniques. I suspect many children can enjoy this kind of games.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on the subject.
Do you remember yourself doing something like this? From what age? Do you practice anything similar with your children?
Ignorance in parenting
Followup to: Strategic ignorance and plausible deniability
My in-law always says: "For children it is easier be forgiven then to get permission."
EDIT: This post is superseeded by my Book Review: Kazdin's The Everyday Parenting Toolkit I recommend reading only that. The remaining insight of this post is: Children expend more brain power on their parents than the parents on them.
Bed time stories with clear concepts
Followup of: Raising numerate children
As promised I will now give one more parenting technique for raising a child as a rationalist.
This is about a special kind of bed time stories that I tell. The idea is to use clear concepts and pack them into a form accessible to small children (ages four to ten). I decided on the structure beforehand but the plot was mostly made up on the spot (based on available experiences of the day).
Endless story
This is the most well known and elementary form of a nested story. You could call it tail recursion without termination.
In German there is a well known song that goes as follow:
"Ein Hund lief in die Küche und stahl dem Koch ein Ei.
Da nahm der Koch den Löffel und schlug den Hund entzwei.
Da kamen alle Hunde und gruben ihm ein Grab,
und setzten einen Grabstein, worauf geschrieben ward:" (repeat)
I couldn't find an English translations of this (does anybody volunteer?) But I found a comparable song in English:
"This is the song that never ends."
(which has the nice additional benefit of being self-referential)
Now there are multiple ways to use and vary this basic pattern:
- Stop when you get bored. If done well this emphasizes certain aspects of infinity - that nothing new is added; everything stays exactly the same and would continue on 'ad inifinitum'.
- Introduce an explicit change breaking the loop with another explanation (e.g. "... und stahl dem Koch kein Ei" or "...because they like it").
- Vary (reduce) the number of participants each time until it gets to zero ("Viele Hunde", "Einige Hunde", "Ein Hund", "keine Hunde" or "a few people", "no people").
- Increase speed of singing it each time until it becomes noise (or if you do it well roughly doubling each time you can even 'solve' the infinite regress via Zeno) that's what my wife does.
- Talk about what is written on the stone and that the text has to be smaller each time (only suitable for cases where a picture can be imagined).
Strictly nested story
This developed from a story in which a boy reads a book. Neverbug mentioned the Neverending Story which is the 'classical' example. But you can find pictures of books with pictures of themselves a lot even in childrens picture books.
I adapted this pattern one evening when my son had refused to clean up his toys. It went like this:
"There was a boy called Anton who had cleaned up his room quickly and was in bed early. His mother came to say goodnight and complimented him and told him a long story of
"A boy called Bill who has played long and then cleaned up his room just in time for his mother to tell him a story of
"A boy called Charles who didn't like cleaning up and argued with his mother but in the end tidied up early enough for a short story of
"A boy called Dylan who had quite a heap in his room, raged when begged to clean up and thus had to put his pieces away together with his mother and just got a short hug and good night kiss."
Then the story of Dylen ended and the mother of Charles gave him a good night kiss."
That was the end of the story of Charles and the mother of Bill gave him a hug and kiss and left."
And that was the end of the story of Bill and the mother of Anton gave him a hug and a kiss and left."
And that is the end of the story of Anton and I give you a kiss and will go. Good night.
This can be varied in lots of ways:
- nesting depth
- topic - here the topic (cleaning up) is related on the meta level to the length of the story
- naming of the boy in the story (here I chose alphabetical)
- alternating between boys/girls mother/father (thus showning multiple recursion)
The general pattern is simple nested recursion with exit condition.
Nested story with interrupt
This varies the simple nested story with a fun element that at the same time allows reflection of the meta level and external effects. For comparison I will use the same story as before (of course I don't want to avoid typing):
"There was a boy called Anton who had cleaned up his room quickly and was in bed early. His mother came to say goodnight and complimented him and told him a long story of
"A boy called Bill who has played long and then cleaned up his room just in time for his mother to tell him a story of
"A boy called Charles who didn't like cleaning up and argued with his mother but in the end tidied up"""
(here I make a sudden motion or sound and say "interrupt")
""when suddenly the mother of Bill left" and the mother of Anton left"
and now I have to go too.
The pattern is recursion with interrupt or exception handling.
Parallel story
This is a method to train keeping track of multiple threads and their relation in simple settings.
There are two main variants:
- Both plots are in the same world and are coordinated or interact
- Both plots are in parallel universes and elucidate differences of action and results
The common aspect is that these stories use coordinated time. Time in both plots is advanced at the same rate and the plots are continuously alternated.
The stories were longer and I will try to give only a feel for them here:
Sandra is a strong girl but often angry she thinks that nobody likes her.
The other Sandra is also strong but calm and friendly.
Both have had their first day at school recently.
The first Sandra gets bumped into in turbulence in the morning. She gets angry and pushes back. A boy stumbles and cries and calls her names. Two other children try to moderate but scold her. She trudges to her place sadly.
The second Sandra also gets bumped into but smiles and makes a joke about the bumping and all laugh. She quickly reaches her place and can prepare for class.
This repeats with more typical school situations. Where the first Sandra gets more and more cast out. Then it ends with a situation where the anger of the first Sandra actually gives her the power to help some other girl which is attacked by some boys. This situation gives Sandra positive feedback and appreciation by the class.
This structure can use to compare the following aspects on the two threads:
- opposites (one actor acts positively while the other acts negatively and the consequences are elaborated as above)
- effect of small random perturbations (butterfly effect)
- coordination (the actors interact which each other (or a common third actors) to some end)
Forking stories
These are basically the same as the stories told by the game master in role playing or the story in a game book. The main differences are that choices are limited, highlighted and possibly discussed. The idea is to make the concept of a fork in the story or process clear.
I have told stories about
- being alone in the woods (exploring ways to get home; this developed in the end into two parallel tracks when at a choice point both ways were followed)
- conflict in school
- a quest with a dragon (where the dragon is found to be a large herbivore like in The Name of the Wind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Wind )
- a serial story which is modeled on simple computer games (navigate thru a labyrinth, fight transforming monsters, climb a hill, best a giant - actually the giant from Enders Game)
General remark about these stories
Stories are a way to avoid appearing indoctrinating by using an analog situation and leaving the choice to the child or even to explore both aspects of a choice.
Sure, children will learn most of the principles taught earlier or later anyway. But research (see e.g. the refs by Trevor_Blake) shows that the advantage of children acquiring these earlier (or more reliable) will help them at least until college.
Some concepts will not stick. Some are not necessary for normal adult life. But nothing is lost compared to 'standard' bed time stories (except possibly some culturally relevant stories like little red ridinghood; but you can still read these too).
Raising numerate children
How do you raise a child as a rationalist? I can't say that that was exactly what I had in mind but it seems to make for a fitting title here. A more precise title could have been: "How to deeply educate a child such that it fun and natural".
Today I'd like to tell you about the lullabies I sung and to what that led.
When my firstborn was very young I adapted a classic German lullaby "Schlaf kindlein schlaf" to numbers. It started with with only a few verses but grew over time (in part by the need to cover longer times until he slept).
I did sing it in German but I tried to translate it here to give you a better idea. It goes to the melody of "Schlaf Kindlein Schlaf which you may not know but can google easily (note that in German there are nicer rhymes for 100, million, googol):
Sleep, baby, sleep!
Thy father counts the sheep,
One, two, three and four
Little baby sleep some more
Sleep, baby, sleep!
The refrain repeats and the verses are replaced as follows:
Five, six, seven, eight - Tired at the dreamland gate.
Nine, ten and eleven - Sleeping in the number heaven.
Twelve, thirteen and fourteen - Sleeping babies have you seen.
Fifteen up to twentyone - Dreaming baby sleep is done.
Twentytwo to hundredtwo - Baby I will care for you.
Hundredthree to thousendfive - Caring for you all your life.
Thousandsix to millionthree - Of your dream you can break free.
Millionfour to one googol - Dreaming of a giant ball.
Googol-one to googolplex - Steaming in the dreamland tracks.
Googolplex to infinity - I will always care for thee.
I get slower during the song and very slow with infinity - mostly they slept then.
I have dreams of this song where sheep accumulate to larger and larger blocks until the block number thats raising in blocks and everything ends in white noise.
I do no longer sing it to my older sons but they accompany me sometimes when singing it to my youngest (two years old). And they do know what googol means already.
I also have a bed ritual where I let them give the number of times I put the blanket on their face (they like it). When they give too large numbers I use blocks. These tended to get high too.
One time I asked for lower numbers (that was when my second oldest already knew halfs and quarters) which led to gaming for unusual fractions and ultimately to his insight that "There is no larger fraction than one half that can divide one" (by a seven year himself).
It seems to have put numbers so deeply in their mind and interest that my seven year old can do simple fractions, exponentials and roots in his head. I tried hard to avoid too much arithmetic before school lest they bore of math in school and that worked for his older brother (who nonetheless tops his class in math) but he just asks and asks and I have just given up and keep just answering his questions and posing comparable return questions at his Zone Of Proximal Development.
There are dialogs that run like this (contracted):
He: "In school we had to give tasks to get 50. I was allowed to give 5*10"
Me: "Can you give some other examples?"
He: "2*20+10" thinking a bit "20 time 2 and a half equals 50"
Me: "What about division?"
He: "100 divided by 2 obviously. Or 50/1."
Or:
Me: "How long is the side of a cube containing one litre?"
He: "10?" (omitting centimeters)
Me: "How do you know that?"
He: "You have told me." (*I* can't remember when; must be month's)
Me: "And how long is the side of a cube with 27 liters?"
He (dividing 27 then adding or something like that): "18,5?"
Me: "No. How did you get there?"
He: "There must be some number multiplied to get 27" (or something like that)
Me. "Yes, the side time the side times the side." (expecting him to try some numbers)
He: "What is the root of 27?" (he has picked up that root is the reverse of times the same number)
Me: "Good idea. Here whe have three times or a number to the 3rd power - so we need the 3rd root."
He: "And what is the third root or 27?"
Me: "Try it."
He: "2*2*2 equals 16 no 8" (he seems to remember a few powers of 2)
Me: "Yes. That is too small"
He: "5^3? 5*5*5?"
Me: "That is 125 - too large"
He: "3?"
Me: "Yes."
Or:
He: "What is 10*10*10*10*10?"
Me: "You mean 10 to the 5th power? That's hundred thousand"
He: "What 10*10*... [lots of 10s)?"
Me: "You mean 10 to the 30th power? Thats nonillion."
He: "What is 10 to the 100th power?"
Me: "That is called googol. A 1 with 100 zeros."
He: "What is 10^100^100^100?"
Me: "Do you mean 10^100 and that to the 100th power or 10 to the 100^100th power?"
He: Somehwat confused asks differnt questions, dialog levels off.
(note that in German "to the xth power" is simply "hoch" thus much easier to concatenate)
I have to say that I am quite proud of my children and wouldn't be surprised when you called me overly so. I have to add that we, my wife and I, invest significant time into our children, so just singing this song may not be enough. And it also may be that I was lucky that they are (partly) gifted with math (like me). But I have to emphasize that we did no rote memoization or repeated training whatsoever (and left that to school).
There are other things we do for 'rationalist training' which I will try to post some time soon.
Teaser:
- Bed time stories with complex patterns (endless stories, simply nested stories, parallel stories, forking stories).
- Everyday Experiments for young children.
Less Wrong Parents
Less Wrong Parents
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!forum/less-wrong-parents
Recently the NYC LW/OB community had two babies and is expecting a third.
I created a google group as a way of sharing information, primarily thinking of the NYC community.
I posted my pre-baby purchase list and William Eden posted an extensive list of books on early parenting.
William suggested opening up the group so as to get insight from the larger LW community on parenting.
I think this is *probably* a good idea. Google groups are simple to set up but have limits.
For this reason I request that if you are going to have an extensive debate on a subject you create a new thread (aka: get a room)
The primary objective is to lower the cost of obtaining information on parenting.
I believe this overall goal to be more important then any particular "truth".
My hope is that this will primarily serve as a place for people to ask parenting question and post guides.
Perhaps if enough guides are posted they can eventually be consolidated into a wiki.
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