Kaj, Jeremy, your objection contains the seeds of its own refutation—if you can both teach children about Santa and supply them with science fiction, it hints that the number of possible different ways to supply wonder is exponentially huge, whereas your available time is linear at best. Thus my dilemma is not false; the best is still the enemy of the good, even if you pick the top five instead of the top one.
If you still doubt, consider that Santa-ism has an explicit downside, namely that it bribes the child to be moral, which has been demonstrated to interfere with internalization of morality—Santa-ism may not even satisfice. False dilemmas are often used to justify downsides, and in such cases, if we find a strategy without the downside, it will generally substitute rather than accumulate, even before taking resource bounds into account.
So is Santa-ism specifically the version of the Santa belief where you use Santa and presents for behavior modification? As in you are telling children they won’t get presents if they are bad, or they get more presents if they are good?
Kaj, Jeremy, your objection contains the seeds of its own refutation—if you can both teach children about Santa and supply them with science fiction, it hints that the number of possible different ways to supply wonder is exponentially huge, whereas your available time is linear at best. Thus my dilemma is not false; the best is still the enemy of the good, even if you pick the top five instead of the top one.
If you still doubt, consider that Santa-ism has an explicit downside, namely that it bribes the child to be moral, which has been demonstrated to interfere with internalization of morality—Santa-ism may not even satisfice. False dilemmas are often used to justify downsides, and in such cases, if we find a strategy without the downside, it will generally substitute rather than accumulate, even before taking resource bounds into account.
So is Santa-ism specifically the version of the Santa belief where you use Santa and presents for behavior modification? As in you are telling children they won’t get presents if they are bad, or they get more presents if they are good?
That’s one large part of the traditional approach to the Santa-ism, yeah. But, it doesn’t have to be, as Eliezer describes in the top comment.