When the social norms consider it well within your rights to do so, when should you trust people to make their own decisions for the sake of their own interests vs. when should you "paternalistically" extrapolate their desires and make decisions such as what you think they would want if they were smarter/wiser/disciplined comes about instead" is one that happens to me a surprisingly large number of times.

This often but doesn't necessarily imply positions of authority. If your good buddy who isn't very financially savvy is willing to freely give you large sums of money with no obligations attached, do you accept? A strict Mormon who just arrived at college feels peer pressure and impulsively asks you for a drink, and while you do not think it's immoral you know they'll feel guilt later-do you give it to them?

More succinctly: My respect for autonomy and my consequentialism conflict in all cases where I think I know what someone wants better than they do and have any measure of power over what happens. Paternalistic attitudes are also very lonely, there are some analogues to "heroic responsibility" here.

My current position is that consequentialism wins, and what feels like moral uncertainty is actually more a "but what if the other person really does know better?" risk which must be calculated. Respect for autonomy is not usually a fundamental value (except for sometimes, we might intrinsically value the choice) but in practice it is a heuristic which usually leads to the best consequences because people are usually best at knowing what they want.

My suggestion would be to downvote anything factually misleading, and to upvote anything for which you personally learned something from or had insight from. (Not agreement or disagreement). There are exceptions, as some threads (such as this one) are actually measuring agreement/disagreement, but that should be easy to determine.

I’m pretty sure I’m more proud of them than of all the work I did in high school put together.

I don't think that's not a good thing...there have been people in this community who attempted to drive out those they didn't like by downvoting everything they posted. The community would probably be better off without the downvote, since those who aught to use it do not and those who aught not to use it do. (Not to mention that some people unfortunately attach negative emotion to being downvoted, even though they haven't actually harmed anyone)

The gifted child asks a question he doesn't know the answer to, but the teacher lacks the meta-cognitive ability to realize that he doesn't know the answer and before he can stop it his brain just made something up.

Few people are willing to say "I don't know" when asked a question about a subject they're supposed to know. To sound smart, one can give a vague answer full of jargon, leaving the details as an exercise. I've also seen people complicate things, go off on a tangent, and then point out that they went off on a tangent and resume the lecture as though the question was never asked. Others just say "It's complicated" and leave it at that. The idea is to give a non-answer that sounds enough like an answer to quash further inquiry.

The point is that most people are lazy and just want to get through the day. The average teacher just wants to get through the lesson as smoothly as possible. The path of least resistance is to intimidate students into a passive role. It's not just teachers of average intelligence--even world-class scholars have done some extremely lazy things in the classroom.

A student who constantly asks questions or makes a game of trying to trip up the teacher can come to be seen as a problem to be dealt with, depending on the teacher's disposition.

The difference is, that if the teacher was aware of what he was doing, he wouldn't do it.

Eh, no, I don't think so. I'm not buying into the "if only people were more self-aware, they would be a lot nicer" theory. Especially with "it's not his fault, he just doesn't know any better" overtones.

because of typical-mind fallacy the smart person will then assume everyone's just kinda alien and terrible in their intentions rather than just slightly worse at carrying intentions out.

No, I still don't think so. A smart person should be able to figure out Hanlon's Razor. I don't know any smart kids who actually had the "all of them are as smart as me, just much more mean" attitude towards others.

I model the other person as accidentally doing 2x3=6.

That's a weird model. If it's "accidental", do you the predict that the next time it will be 4, or 7, or 11, or something random?

My usual starting model for other people is "What are their incentives? What are they trying to do to the best of their ability?" and only in the fairly rare cases of a major mismatch, I start to consider the possibilities that these people might be really clueless or really mean or something like that.

I understand that it's fighting the hypothetical, but

...she thinks that children are not people, they do not have rights. She has status and she is willing to use it. Other human beings are conformist, they dislike those who question authority.

all look like entirely correct conclusions to me :-)

the child just more self aware

The child is not only self aware, she is smarter and that affects a lot more things than just "meta-cognitive ability". The basic cognitive infrastructure is indeed the same (in most cases), but motivation and intention do not have to be the same at all, and that's even before we start to consider how different people think of the consequences of the same action...

I was an atypical child with very noticeable unusual traits, yes, but as I've grown older I've "normal-ed out". If someone really gets to know me they might still be puzzled why there are certain normal-person things I cannot do and certain things I can do that most people can't, but for the most part I'm fairly close to baseline, with most of the deviation due to the hyper-WEIRD culture practically everyone on Lesswrong shares rather than unusual mental architecture. To the extent that my actual cognition is unusual, I consider most of the deviations from typicality to be a net negative.

I think the alienation and self-labelng of oneself as extremely atypical is paradoxically due to typical mind fallacy - when a person at first fails to accurately model other people and assumes others are like oneself, and then tries to figure out under what conditions would I behave like those people and do what they did, they very quickly start looking like fundamentally different aliens.

For example, people who are smart sometimes feel alienated from society because others around them are not able to respond appropriately to the nuanced conversational cues they are emitting. Others are unable to accurately express their feelings and thoughts and are generally more clumsy and fuzzy about everything. Others make bad decisions which they would not make if they understood what they did. The smart person attributes these differences to differences in intention and core mental architecture, rather than skill.

For example, picture a teacher of average cognitive ability worn down after a long day. He doesn't have sufficient mental control to keep his emotions in check. He also lacks the meta-cognitive ability to notice he is stressed. The gifted child asks a question he doesn't know the answer to, but the teacher lacks the meta-cognitive ability to realize that he doesn't know the answer and before he can stop it his brain just made something up. The child says "No, that doesn't make sense", and the teacher fails at social cues and takes it literally as "I didn't fully process what you just said" rather than a euphemism for "your explanation is not satisfying to me" and so they repeat themselves. Truth be told the teacher doesn't really know what it means for something to make sense, the way the gifted child does. The child sighs in frustration. The teacher feels resentful about that, but doesn't notice they feel resentful. Later on, when the child speaks out of turn the teacher snaps and gives them detention for interrupting. The teacher truly believes the detention was for interrupting.

The gifted child thinks to herself: "Even though I meant her no harm or disrespect, she has decided to find a small excuse to punish me after I questioned her knowledge. That teacher is punishing me because she thinks that children are not people, they do not have rights. She has status and she is willing to use it. Other human beings are conformist, they dislike those who question authority."

The ordinary child in the same situation would have thought, "Ugh, I didn't do anything really, what's her problem" and not analyzed the situation further. It's the same thought, but only the gifted child takes it to the logical conclusion that the teacher must be fundamentally alien to do such a thing. She'll project her mind upon the teacher, take the teacher's behavior, and then grossly miscalculate his intentions.

These would all be valid interpretations of the teacher's behavior if the teacher had the self-awareness of the child, but as it stands they are not actually true. The teacher and the child are identical in their basic cognitive infrastructure and share motivation and intention, it's just that the child just more self aware.

If the gifted child does not figure out how to accurately model the teacher, this will very quickly develop into "every single person except me and maybe that one other dude is absolutely batshit insane, and I am alone." Every knee jerk political reaction, every instance of blatant injustice, every bad decision, and every rationalization will feed this misconception further, when really differences in meta-cognitive ability are entirely to blame. They subsequently grow up to become contrarians and the word "typical" becomes vaguely insulting to them.

I listed intelligence because that's why I think lesswrongers think they are atypical at a far higher rate than could possibly be true, but another example: most college students might say that most people pressure others drink while simultaneously saying that they,themselves, would not pressure anyone to drink. They're looking at their own mental state, the behaviors of others, seeing a disparity, and concluding that others are mentally different. Like the gifted child, they are simply failing to model other people's failure to act the way that they would like to act, unable to realize that behavior isn't a direct reflection of internal state.

maybe most of the money and psychology involved in this whole business is about buying hope,

I really think it just didn't occur to them. It's certainly about buying hope - but we'd like to purchase hope effectively!

Let me disclose first that I have no idea how to fix this problem... the problem of getting them to take information from the world of science and biomedicine and applying it to themselves.

Well, I do! Create a trustworthy central hub which analyses and disseminates this type of practical information. If such a hub exists, figure out why it missed this solution. There is a lot of information concerning how to stay alive for longer, and even someone trained in the biological sciences would have to put in huge time investments to separate the signal from the noise and seek out the creative, off-the-radar solutions.

There are people who are exercising their butts off, taking questionable hormones, intermittent fasting, and all kinds of extremely effort-full and sometimes paradoxically risky activities in the quest to stay alive, so if you truly know of an effective thing that people don't know about and aren't pursuing, it's a flaw in information dissemination techniques...because there's a ton of people trying.

Agreed. "hypoglycemia" is really the symptom, not the cause.

What I have appears to be a genetic disorder (my father and his father had it) that doesn't seem to be associated with any other health impacts. I recently realized that I should probably actually get the specifics pinned down, and that's something I'm going to work on in the future.

My understanding (through my father, who had his hypoglycemia tested when he was younger) is that my pancreas overreacts, putting out more insulin than is necessary for any given blood sugar level. It's particularly problematic when I consume simple sugars, as my pancreas drastically overshoots. The consequence is that, unless I eat slow-digesting foods every few hours, I feel cranky/exhausted/sad/impatient, get the shakes, and have general weakness in my muscles. If I continue to not eat, my emotional state stabilizes and I simply get really really tired. Not life threatening, but a serious interference with happiness/productivity.

But I will be looking more specifically into the causes, instead of my father's interpretation of his own diagnoses from forty years ago.

That seems quite a bit more restrictive than what currently gets posted, no? (I ask because I don't follow the site that closely.)

How is my new summary?