Do you mean how to teach them critical thinking skills? Or how to get them to prize the truth over fitting in?
I’m going to assume you’re not a radical leftist. What if your 16 year old kid started sharing every leftist meme because they’ve really thought about it and think it’s true? What if they said “it doesn’t matter if there’s pressure to hold these political opinions; they’re as true as gravity!”
Would you count that as a success, since they’re bold enough to stand up to an authority figure (you) to honestly express their deeply-considered views? Or a failure? If the latter, why?
I’m going to assume you’re not a radical leftist. What if your 16 year old kid started sharing every leftist meme because they’ve really thought about it and think it’s true?
I don’t think that most people who really think issues through agree with every leftists meme and think the meme is true. Part of modern leftish ideology is that you should say certain things even when they are not true, because you want to show solidarity. There’s also a belief that certain values shouldn’t be “thought through”. They are sacred and not supposed to be questioned.
It sounds like you’re setting the bar for epistemic hygiene (i.e. not being infected by a mind virus) at being able to justify your worldview from the ground up. Is that an isolated demand for rigor, or would you view anyone unable to do that as an unreasonable conformist?
I think you ignore that plenty of people do believe in epistemics that value not engaging in critical analysis in the sense of critical thinking but only in the sense of critical theory.
In leftish activism people are expected to be able to approve at the same time of the meme “homophobia should always be challenged” and “Islam shouldn’t be challenged”. Explicit discussions about how those values should be traded of against each other are shunned because they violate the underlying sacredness.
Frequently, there’s an idea that beliefs should be based on experience or trusting people with experience and not based on thinking thing things through. Valuing thinking things through is not universal.
I’m just not convinced that the radical left has epistemic norms or value priorities that are unusually bad. Imagine you were about to introduce me to five of your friends to talk politics. One identifies as a radical leftist, one a progressive moderate, another a libertarian, the fourth a conservative, and the fifth apolitical. All five of them share a lot of memes on Facebook. They also each have a blog where they write about their political opinions.
I would not be particularly surprised if I had a thoughtful, stimulating conversation with any of them.
My prior is that intellectual profiling based on ideology isn’t a good way to predict how thoughtful somebody is.
So for me, if Wei Dei Jr. turned out to be a 16 year old radical leftist, I wouldn’t think he’s any more conformist than if he’d turned out to be a progressive, libertarian, conservative, or apolitical.
That might just be a crux of disagreement for us based on differing experiences in interacting with each of these groups.
A 16yo going into the modern school system and turning into a radical leftist is much more often than not a failure state than a success state.
Young leftist conformists outnumber the thought-out and well-reasoned young leftists by at least 10 to 1 so that’s where our prior should be at. Hypothetical Wei then has a few conversations with his hypothetical, radical leftist kid and the kid reasons well for a 16yo. We would expect a well-reasoned leftist to reason well more often than a conformed leftist so that updates our priors, but I don’t think we’d go as far as saying that it overcomes our original 10 to 1 prior. Well-reasoned people only make arguments sound well-reasoned to others maybe 90% of the time max and even conformists can make nice-sounding arguments (for a 16yo) fairly often.
Even after the conversations, it’s still more likely that the hypothetical radical leftist kid is a conformist rather than well-reasoned. If hypothetical Wei had some ability to determine to a high degree of certainty whether his kid was a conformist or well-reasoned then that would be a very different case and he likely wouldn’t have the concerns that his children will be indoctrinated that he expressed in the original post.
You’re neglecting the base rate of 16 year old conformity. I think this is some pretty silly speculation, but let’s run with it. Isn’t the base rate for 16 year old conformity at least 10 to 1? If so, a 16 year old who’s a leftist is no more likely to be a conformist than any other.
In the end, what we’re looking for is a reliable signal that, whatever the 16 year old thinks, it’s due to their independent reasoning.
Widely shared reasonable beliefs won’t cut it, because they wouldn’t have to think it out for themselves. Outrageous contrarian views won’t work, because that’s not reasonable.
You’d have to look for them to hold views that are both reasonable and contrarian. So, a genius. Is that a realistic bar to diagnose your kid as uninfected by mind viruses?
Ideological conformity in the school system is not uniform. A person turning left when everybody else is turning right is much less likely to be a conformist than someone else turning right.
ETA: Without metaphor, our priors for conformist vs. well-reasoned is different for young rightists or non-leftists in the school system.
Do you mean how to teach them critical thinking skills? Or how to get them to prize the truth over fitting in?
I’m going to assume you’re not a radical leftist. What if your 16 year old kid started sharing every leftist meme because they’ve really thought about it and think it’s true? What if they said “it doesn’t matter if there’s pressure to hold these political opinions; they’re as true as gravity!”
Would you count that as a success, since they’re bold enough to stand up to an authority figure (you) to honestly express their deeply-considered views? Or a failure? If the latter, why?
I don’t think that most people who really think issues through agree with every leftists meme and think the meme is true. Part of modern leftish ideology is that you should say certain things even when they are not true, because you want to show solidarity. There’s also a belief that certain values shouldn’t be “thought through”. They are sacred and not supposed to be questioned.
It sounds like you’re setting the bar for epistemic hygiene (i.e. not being infected by a mind virus) at being able to justify your worldview from the ground up. Is that an isolated demand for rigor, or would you view anyone unable to do that as an unreasonable conformist?
I think you ignore that plenty of people do believe in epistemics that value not engaging in critical analysis in the sense of critical thinking but only in the sense of critical theory.
In leftish activism people are expected to be able to approve at the same time of the meme “homophobia should always be challenged” and “Islam shouldn’t be challenged”. Explicit discussions about how those values should be traded of against each other are shunned because they violate the underlying sacredness.
Frequently, there’s an idea that beliefs should be based on experience or trusting people with experience and not based on thinking thing things through. Valuing thinking things through is not universal.
I’m just not convinced that the radical left has epistemic norms or value priorities that are unusually bad. Imagine you were about to introduce me to five of your friends to talk politics. One identifies as a radical leftist, one a progressive moderate, another a libertarian, the fourth a conservative, and the fifth apolitical. All five of them share a lot of memes on Facebook. They also each have a blog where they write about their political opinions.
I would not be particularly surprised if I had a thoughtful, stimulating conversation with any of them.
My prior is that intellectual profiling based on ideology isn’t a good way to predict how thoughtful somebody is.
So for me, if Wei Dei Jr. turned out to be a 16 year old radical leftist, I wouldn’t think he’s any more conformist than if he’d turned out to be a progressive, libertarian, conservative, or apolitical.
That might just be a crux of disagreement for us based on differing experiences in interacting with each of these groups.
A 16yo going into the modern school system and turning into a radical leftist is much more often than not a failure state than a success state.
Young leftist conformists outnumber the thought-out and well-reasoned young leftists by at least 10 to 1 so that’s where our prior should be at. Hypothetical Wei then has a few conversations with his hypothetical, radical leftist kid and the kid reasons well for a 16yo. We would expect a well-reasoned leftist to reason well more often than a conformed leftist so that updates our priors, but I don’t think we’d go as far as saying that it overcomes our original 10 to 1 prior. Well-reasoned people only make arguments sound well-reasoned to others maybe 90% of the time max and even conformists can make nice-sounding arguments (for a 16yo) fairly often.
Even after the conversations, it’s still more likely that the hypothetical radical leftist kid is a conformist rather than well-reasoned. If hypothetical Wei had some ability to determine to a high degree of certainty whether his kid was a conformist or well-reasoned then that would be a very different case and he likely wouldn’t have the concerns that his children will be indoctrinated that he expressed in the original post.
You’re neglecting the base rate of 16 year old conformity. I think this is some pretty silly speculation, but let’s run with it. Isn’t the base rate for 16 year old conformity at least 10 to 1? If so, a 16 year old who’s a leftist is no more likely to be a conformist than any other.
In the end, what we’re looking for is a reliable signal that, whatever the 16 year old thinks, it’s due to their independent reasoning.
Widely shared reasonable beliefs won’t cut it, because they wouldn’t have to think it out for themselves. Outrageous contrarian views won’t work, because that’s not reasonable.
You’d have to look for them to hold views that are both reasonable and contrarian. So, a genius. Is that a realistic bar to diagnose your kid as uninfected by mind viruses?
Ideological conformity in the school system is not uniform. A person turning left when everybody else is turning right is much less likely to be a conformist than someone else turning right.
ETA: Without metaphor, our priors for conformist vs. well-reasoned is different for young rightists or non-leftists in the school system.