I’m sympathetic to the points about neuroplasticity and time.
I teach math to exceptionally talented children. Something very exciting about it is that basically no such children have had the chance to be taught by a mathematician who’s a dedicated teacher, so the experiment hadn’t been performed. Some of these children are eager to and capable of learning advanced undergraduate level math at the age of 10 or so, and if they have to chance to as opposed to withering away in school, the results could be amazing.
I also had a recent shift in perspective such that I now believe that environmental factors when defined very broadly dominate genetic factors by far in determining behavior. I’m 2-4 standard deviations from the mean on a large number of ostensibly independent dimensions. Upon reflection, I realize that these may all be traceable to only ~3-4 ways in which I was unusual genetically, which then interacted and compounded over the course of my life, resulting in me being very different in so many ways. My home, school, etc. may not have been unusual, but I was interacting with the world through a different lens than other people were, with profound consequences.
So yes, I can see how learning rationality at an early age could make a big difference. For my own part, I don’t have the sense of having had to unlearn maladaptive thought patterns (even though I’ve had maladaptive thought patterns) – it’s hard to place a finger on why. I do wish that I had learned these things at a younger age. If I had learned many weak arguments style reasoning in my teens, my emotional well-being would have been significantly higher for ~10 additional years.
Ok, thanks for clarifying. I understand.
I’m sympathetic to the points about neuroplasticity and time.
I teach math to exceptionally talented children. Something very exciting about it is that basically no such children have had the chance to be taught by a mathematician who’s a dedicated teacher, so the experiment hadn’t been performed. Some of these children are eager to and capable of learning advanced undergraduate level math at the age of 10 or so, and if they have to chance to as opposed to withering away in school, the results could be amazing.
I also had a recent shift in perspective such that I now believe that environmental factors when defined very broadly dominate genetic factors by far in determining behavior. I’m 2-4 standard deviations from the mean on a large number of ostensibly independent dimensions. Upon reflection, I realize that these may all be traceable to only ~3-4 ways in which I was unusual genetically, which then interacted and compounded over the course of my life, resulting in me being very different in so many ways. My home, school, etc. may not have been unusual, but I was interacting with the world through a different lens than other people were, with profound consequences.
So yes, I can see how learning rationality at an early age could make a big difference. For my own part, I don’t have the sense of having had to unlearn maladaptive thought patterns (even though I’ve had maladaptive thought patterns) – it’s hard to place a finger on why. I do wish that I had learned these things at a younger age. If I had learned many weak arguments style reasoning in my teens, my emotional well-being would have been significantly higher for ~10 additional years.