Unrelated to gender, but related to inclusion: should we make LW, or some portion of LW, more accessible to teenagers somehow? It’s been argued that we’ll the best rationalists will be people who learn it young; but to judge by introductions in the new welcome thread, and by responses to the current survey, we seem to have few to no teenagers.
This is a very old thread, but I would still like to comment to make the point that I had assumed for a couple years (seriously, years) that, like so many other places on the internet, “open to anyone” actually meant “open to anyone over eighteen”. And then I had assumed that I would make an embarassment of myself here, like I did some years ago on the good old sl4 wiki.
Seriously, you want us to come along with our /argumenta ex silentium/ and all? …if this is really the community sentiment I have to wonder why the “popular Harry Potter fanfiction” angle isn’t being milked more for its recruiting potential. I suppose that’s what dignity is.
Fifteen right now, a sophmore at a magnet high school. Quite shallow (for instance, my biggest concern right now is my upcoming Haruhi Suzumiya cosplay). Too emotional (my AP Computer Science teacher makes me cry twice a week). Pitiably immodest (see aforementioned gratuitous reference to AP Computer Science and AP BC Calculus). I fooled around on the sl4 wiki when I was about twelve. Some people might still remember that.
Thanks for letting me know. If you want any help charting a good education, especially a good rationality education, I’d love to talk to you (I just sent you a PM also to that effect, which you can see by clicking on the red mailbox icon next to your name).
Are there any other teenagers on LW who care to reveal themselves?
More than a month too late, but I’m fifteen, and also a girl. Got here from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I found out about from TV Tropes. You really should milk that, you know. :)
A question that might trigger some ideas: When you first started looking around this site, what did you see that you found appealing, and what did you see that made you not want to stick around?
OnTheOtherHandle replied to this (below). Unfortunately, she is still not sure how the site’s various buttons work, so it got sent to me as a PM. I’m pretty sure she wanted it shared, so I am doing so. If you want to upvote her ideas, I suppose you will have to upvote the grandparent. Here is what she wrote:
Hi, um, I got your message from the envelope-shaped button on the sidebar. I don’t even know if it was private or on the comments, but I can’t seem to access that page to write a reply there, so I’ll just send you this. Sorry if this isn’t the right way to do things, it takes me a while to navigate a new site.
As for ideas, well, those are difficult, so I’ll start with what attracted me to LW. As I said, it was Methods of Rationality that brought me here, and what I liked about that was it was very scientific and logical without being The Spock—without shunning emotions as wrong or illogical, something I never really got. It made me laugh out loud many times and even cry once or twice.
Because of this, it worked as a story first and foremost. If a piece of fiction is overtly trying to promote a philosophy, then it earns HUGE bonus points for actually being a good story in its own right. I’d say it served as a nice, fun way to “ease into” the rationalist community. Plus, it really made me feel for the transhumanist cause, and made me think hard about the idea that death was inevitable or acceptable, even though I can’t say with certainty yet that I’m a transhumanist.
As for what made me stay, well, this is fascinating stuff. I love science and psychology. I was already an atheist and a huge nerd and had already read some Dawkins and Feynman before seeing this site, so I guess that helped me to not become so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of material here. I think a little background is important, because even though LW is pretty accessable, I can’t say it’s for beginners. (But of course, since I’ve been randomly article-hopping, it’s likely that I missed the material intended for newcomers.)
Another reason I want to stay is because LW hasn’t been purged of the emotionality of Methods of Rationality. I see here a community of people that cares deeply about their cause, and that helps a lot.
But this might be a deterrent for a lot of people actually. The debates get heated here, and you can feel tempers running high. I got the feeling, initially, that I would read an article, and then in the comments read a huge list of reasons why it was totally wrong, almost as long as the original piece itself. I don’t mind too much, but I think I have a higher tolerance for argument than most people (most teenagers and most female teenagers especially). I can see how someone could look at this and think “YouTube flame wars but wordier”, conclude you’re “immature”, and leave. Unfortunately, I can’t really think of a solution, except maybe hiding the comments unless someone clicks a specific button to read them.
This is a reply the comment that got accidentally sent to Perplexed.
I got the feeling, initially, that I would read an article, and then in the comments read a huge list of reasons why it was totally wrong
I, too, got that feeling when I first browsed here. My solution to it was to look at the karma of comments: if the edit: comment got up above 5 karma, it probably is a reason why the post is wrong. If the edit: comment was at neutral or negative karma, it probably isn’t a reason why the post is wrong. I don’t have much data on how effective this method is, but it seemed to work for me. That’s not a general solution, though.
The general cure to looking immature might be to further promote a community norm of resolving disagreements. I see many arguments ending with one person admitting/realising they were mistaken (this is something that I had never seen anywhere else on the internet), but I see more disagreements left hanging. I think if we saw lots of disagreements with the posts, and most of them were resolved by reading through the comment tree, new people would see disagreements being resolved on the internet and be very impressed!
I, too, got that feeling when I first browsed here. My solution to it was to look at the karma of comments: if a [comment] got up above 5 karma, it probably is a reason why the post is wrong. If the [comment] was at neutral or negative karma, it probably isn’t a reason why the post is wrong. I don’t have much data on how effective this method is, but it seemed to work for me. That’s not a general solution, though.
Are those comment/post substitutions what you intended to say? I was initially confused but that correction made sense of it. That policy seems to be a reasonable one. I use approximately the same interpretation except on topics that get political. “Correctness” becomes much less correlated to karma in such cases.
I see many arguments ending with one person admitting/realising they were mistaken (this is something that I had never seen anywhere else on the internet), but I see more disagreements left hanging.
Resolving disagreements on the internet is impressive, isn’t it? People just stopped being wrong on the internet! WTF? At the same time there is a place for leaving things hanging. Sometimes leaving aside disagreements without making a fuss or engaging in status battles can be good enough. Particularly in those (frequent) cases where the issue isn’t cut and dry. When there is merit in both points but this can’t be simply acknowledged without reconstructing and translating from not-quite-compatible models of reality.
I bother to mention this because I’ve noticed that sometimes trying to resolve differences can at times do more harm than good, despite the best of intentions. Some people actually get offended if you try to be conciliatory, bizarre as it may seem.
Yeah, thanks for correcting. And I definitely agree, disagreements are not universally solved by one party admitting fault—but I do feel that there are a large number of cases on LessWrong where I don’t know if one side made a mistake, or if the case doesn’t have a right answer, or whatnot. And I would like to see more of those cases, the ones floating in between, to be resolved in either one direction or the other.
Part of the problem is that any attempt at direct enforcement or pressure could deter people from commenting in the first place, knowing that if they did they’d be expected to see any disagreements through to the end. (That’s been mentioned in previous threads, I think.)
Random thought: Would individuals trying to shift the norm by setting an example work any better? Like, one person going through their comment history (possibly using the link here), and making a list in their profile page of unresolved disagreements and their current status (possibly including otherwise unvoiced ones), plus a list of resolved disagreements and how they were resolved, or a list of posts and comments that led them to shift their beliefs (incrementally or otherwise) on something?
Not volunteering either way, though. In the past I’ve occasionally killed time reading my old posts on forums, and on reading regrettable things I’ve tried to fix them by amending them in replies or putting notes about them my profile, but that doesn’t seem like the same thing.
Basically, it seems you(general) would need to make a deliberate effort to continue discussions even after it becomes pure work, because you value having a site where disagreements are resolved more than you value anything else you might be doing with that time.
Edit: I idealistically hope that when agreement is impractical, people who try long enough can still reach a better level of understanding than the standard “agreement to disagree” cliché.
(responding to perplexed’s copy)
When I came here from MOR, I just started by reading the sequences one by one, and then started going through new posts whenever they came up, and it seemed to work fairly well. There have been a couple of posts on the site which I did not completely agree with, but I still learned something from all of them, and it helped me get into the habit of updating my beliefs more easily.
Also, I am glad that there are other people my age out there who are interested by sites like this :p
I am 18 years old, somewhat new to LW and not as congruent/rational as desired. If your offer stands for others who are not under 18, I’d love to hear about that. I could use some help.
I do not think there is a need make LW more accessible to teenagers. I am not even sure I know what that means. Are we, those younger, that alien? (rethorical question) “Teenage” is a joke. Not as funny as religion, though. (A 12 years old is sitting at a bar with coworkers after a long day of work, 150 years ago: normal) As far as a I am concerned the differences between “teenagers” and adults are from age segregation. Differences in style, not principles.
Upvoted. I am always surprised how widespread discrimination against teenagers is, considering that everyone has to be one at some point. Every difference between people below the age of majority, and people above which an adult has been able to point out to me when I have discussed this seems to be a product of the culture we are raised in, not an inherent quality of humans within an arbitrary age range.
You might be interested in reading The Case Against Adolescence by Dr. Robert Epstein. (I believe the last edition is called Teen 2.0)
It is eye-opening on many aspects. There is a story in it that struck me. A twelve year old had an affair with his married teacher (who had two kids on her own). She went to prison for two-three years. Once out of the slammer, she had sex again with her ex-pupil. This time around 7-8 years of prison. While in prison she gave birth to a child. The child was raised by the father (the student) and that father’s mother.
Reporters asked the young man if the imprisoned woman had abused of him; he answered negatively, that love united them. Once the ex-teacher got out of prison for the second time she married the then adult lover, went into their car with their kid and rolled into the sunset.
How immature. Both of them. Love at teenage? Meh. Love is only for old people like Romeo (~16) and Juliet. (~14) Those crazy homo sapiens.
12 seems too young to me for a sexual relationship, but that may be due to social conditioning.
On average, males become capable of reproduction when they reach 12-13. (which probably is also when they become capable of enjoying it) If he was willingly involved there should not be an issue, but the general assumption seems to be that if someone in early puberty already is having sex, (particularly with an adult) they are being threatened or coerced into it.
To make matters more complicated, I have heard of cases where children willingly were in a relationship like what you mentioned, and then condemned the adult under parental pressure.
the flip side of the argument for protecting children is that since older teens and adults can also be forced to have sex against their will, how can we remove restrictions at any age? having stronger muscles and a bit more experience is of limited use if someone threatens you with a gun.
I don’t know if I can actually come to an opinion on whether we should have an age of consent to shelter children, (even the ones who may want to have sex) or assume that anyone who has reached puberty is mature enough to have a relationship, and tell someone if they are being abused. I probably have not collected enough information at this point :p
There are driver’s licenses how about sex’ licenses? (minus the minimal age requirement) You have to show your ability to have sane sex through a written test and a practical test. Or something.
My hope is that means “correct use of contraceptives.”
My problem with a ‘qualification’ to go through a rite of passage is that the rite of passage is what turns you from unqualified to qualified. When can we trust someone to make decisions about sex? When they’re not a virgin.
And so we either need hard control (no sex until your wedding night with the socially approved partner) or little-no control combined with acceptance of mistakes (regretting your choice for your first time is commonplace). The idea that a licensing agency could differentiate between people that will make good and bad choices about sex is as ridiculous as the idea that a licensing agency could differentiate between people that will make good and bad choices about driving. The future is too uncertain to have good predictive ability.
Errr.… I’m an not sure how exactly that would work. People already are taught how to use contraception from an early age, (maybe not young enough though), and the rest of what you need to know appears to be instinctive.
My question was how could you have a country with no age limit for consent which does not become a refuge for child predators.
If a child wants to have sex with someone older, it should not be an issue, and if the child is forced into it, then it is rape whether there is an age of consent or not. So as long as children are encouraged to speak out if they are being forced into sex, having an age limit may be unnecessary. Nobody here has actually argued in favour of an age of consent yet, which I find interesting. Does it have any benefits compared to only punishing adults who have been proven to act without a child’s consent?
I don’t know if I can actually come to an opinion on whether we should have an age of consent to shelter children, (even the ones who may want to have sex)
One option would be to allow it but require that the younger individual specify the desire publicly in a suitable manner.
A twelve year old had an affair [...] How immature. Both of them. Love at teenage? Meh. Love is only for old people like Romeo (~16) and Juliet. (~14) Those crazy homo sapiens.
I am a 16 year old. To be honest, most teens wouldn’t handle the site. The requirement for an understanding of mathematics, logic, and science are beyond the reach of most, and the desire of most of the rest. That said, I have introduced two friends of mine to HPMOR and they have taken to it, and I am leading them towards Less Wrong. On the other hand? I don’t know how many adults would handle less wrong either. If you want my advice on how to be more appealing to teenagers, it is relatively simple.
Link everything, so that someone who doesn’t understand can follow your links and find out. Useful more for teens than for adults, it is still good practice. Few intelligent teens will tolerate a teens area for long.
To be honest, most teens wouldn’t handle the site. The requirement for an understanding of mathematics, logic, and science are beyond the reach of most, and the desire of most of the rest.
I don’t feel quite comfortable admitting that I am only 18 over the internet. (But I’ll do it anyways, obviously.)
Irrational fear of internet predators is irrational >.>
It’s hard not to feel a little intimidated by the sheer sanity of what’s written here. For a long time I felt like I was obligated to at least get my GenEd done before I could sign up to comment. If I haven’t managed to pass society’s standard of intelligence yet, how can I expect respect and understanding here, where the standards are so much higher? There’s probably quite a few teen lurkers out there, waiting hopefully for some small sign to inform them when they are high enough on the sanity-waterline to converse with gods.
Edit: Oh yes! And I’m a female. Slightly relevant to the original posting :)
I’m 17, but have been reading LW for more than a year (and telling all my friends to do the same, of course.) I think that at least for the smart, nerdy, sciency type teenagers I hang out with, LW isn’t too scary to get into. I could certainly manage it.
It was a bit hard to get into, though. If I didn’t love Three Worlds Collide and philosophy so much, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. All the “initial reading” that LW provided at the time felt to me like the worst of Eliezer’s output: the Simple Truth, and so on. The first truly awesome post I saw on here was the one which introduced “Shut Up and Multiply” to my vocabulary.
And I think I might PM you about that good education, hoping you extend that offer more generally.
This is a little less than a year late, but oh well. I’m an almost-18 year old female who found LessWrong through HPMoR, which a friend of mine recommended to me (he is also interested in LessWrong and regularly reads the site). If you see this, I would love any advice you have to offer about “charting a good education, especially a good rationality education.”
Same! A good rationality education is extremely interesting to me. I would love to hear more information about that. I am also an 18 year old female who found Less Wrong through HPMoR, here, Naomi.
I am male and seventeen, started reading LW when I was sixteen after being directed to H:MOR from TV tropes. I recommended MOR to a few friends and they enjoy it, but don’t seem interested in rationality as much as I am. I generally find the site accessible and to have material which is easy to understand, but still teaches me new things regularly. I am working through the sequence about quantum physics right now, since the major sequences listed as 3.1-3.4 + 3.6-3.8 did not take long to read through.
also, seeing “disagreements being resolved on the internet” is honestly one of the most inspiring parts of this site to me :p
One of the reasons why I took the step from lurker to user—a month or so ago—was that I thought I should reply to this comment. I subsequently forgot where to find it, and stumbled upon it again just now.
I’m 18. Whether or not that makes me qualified for whatever help you had in mind I do not know, but I’m certainly interested.
Definition from Urban Dictionary: “A grown-up in the minority, finding themselves among younger people. Coined by Adrian Spies, writer of the Star Trek episode featuring a post-apocalyptic world where only teenagers survived.”
Which fits because I am on the far upper end of the age distribution here (which Eliezer knows because I attend meetups in the Bay Area).
Very old, but I wanted to post that I’ve found the exact same issue. I find it accessible, especially when I do some research, but so far no one I know has shown even the slightest interest. I’ve mentioned it to two friends, both of whom I consider very intelligent, but neither took the bait. My female friend loved HP MOR, though.
I’m another data point (16 when I first started reading) who found it very accessible.I’ve tried a couple different ways of getting my friends interested, with varying degrees of success. I think the problem with getting most people (regardless of age) interested in a site like this is that you have to expend a lot of time even to understand what everyone’s talking about, and it doesn’t seem worth it “just for a blog”.
Unrelated to gender, but related to inclusion: should we make LW, or some portion of LW, more accessible to teenagers somehow? It’s been argued that we’ll the best rationalists will be people who learn it young; but to judge by introductions in the new welcome thread, and by responses to the current survey, we seem to have few to no teenagers.
...
This is a very old thread, but I would still like to comment to make the point that I had assumed for a couple years (seriously, years) that, like so many other places on the internet, “open to anyone” actually meant “open to anyone over eighteen”. And then I had assumed that I would make an embarassment of myself here, like I did some years ago on the good old sl4 wiki.
Seriously, you want us to come along with our /argumenta ex silentium/ and all? …if this is really the community sentiment I have to wonder why the “popular Harry Potter fanfiction” angle isn’t being milked more for its recruiting potential. I suppose that’s what dignity is.
Are you under 18?
Fifteen right now, a sophmore at a magnet high school. Quite shallow (for instance, my biggest concern right now is my upcoming Haruhi Suzumiya cosplay). Too emotional (my AP Computer Science teacher makes me cry twice a week). Pitiably immodest (see aforementioned gratuitous reference to AP Computer Science and AP BC Calculus). I fooled around on the sl4 wiki when I was about twelve. Some people might still remember that.
Thanks for letting me know. If you want any help charting a good education, especially a good rationality education, I’d love to talk to you (I just sent you a PM also to that effect, which you can see by clicking on the red mailbox icon next to your name).
Are there any other teenagers on LW who care to reveal themselves?
More than a month too late, but I’m fifteen, and also a girl. Got here from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I found out about from TV Tropes. You really should milk that, you know. :)
Any suggestions how?
A question that might trigger some ideas: When you first started looking around this site, what did you see that you found appealing, and what did you see that made you not want to stick around?
Oh, and btw, Welcome to LessWrong.
OnTheOtherHandle replied to this (below). Unfortunately, she is still not sure how the site’s various buttons work, so it got sent to me as a PM. I’m pretty sure she wanted it shared, so I am doing so. If you want to upvote her ideas, I suppose you will have to upvote the grandparent. Here is what she wrote:
Hi, um, I got your message from the envelope-shaped button on the sidebar. I don’t even know if it was private or on the comments, but I can’t seem to access that page to write a reply there, so I’ll just send you this. Sorry if this isn’t the right way to do things, it takes me a while to navigate a new site.
As for ideas, well, those are difficult, so I’ll start with what attracted me to LW. As I said, it was Methods of Rationality that brought me here, and what I liked about that was it was very scientific and logical without being The Spock—without shunning emotions as wrong or illogical, something I never really got. It made me laugh out loud many times and even cry once or twice.
Because of this, it worked as a story first and foremost. If a piece of fiction is overtly trying to promote a philosophy, then it earns HUGE bonus points for actually being a good story in its own right. I’d say it served as a nice, fun way to “ease into” the rationalist community. Plus, it really made me feel for the transhumanist cause, and made me think hard about the idea that death was inevitable or acceptable, even though I can’t say with certainty yet that I’m a transhumanist.
As for what made me stay, well, this is fascinating stuff. I love science and psychology. I was already an atheist and a huge nerd and had already read some Dawkins and Feynman before seeing this site, so I guess that helped me to not become so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of material here. I think a little background is important, because even though LW is pretty accessable, I can’t say it’s for beginners. (But of course, since I’ve been randomly article-hopping, it’s likely that I missed the material intended for newcomers.)
Another reason I want to stay is because LW hasn’t been purged of the emotionality of Methods of Rationality. I see here a community of people that cares deeply about their cause, and that helps a lot.
But this might be a deterrent for a lot of people actually. The debates get heated here, and you can feel tempers running high. I got the feeling, initially, that I would read an article, and then in the comments read a huge list of reasons why it was totally wrong, almost as long as the original piece itself. I don’t mind too much, but I think I have a higher tolerance for argument than most people (most teenagers and most female teenagers especially). I can see how someone could look at this and think “YouTube flame wars but wordier”, conclude you’re “immature”, and leave. Unfortunately, I can’t really think of a solution, except maybe hiding the comments unless someone clicks a specific button to read them.
Hope this helped. :)
This is a reply the comment that got accidentally sent to Perplexed.
I, too, got that feeling when I first browsed here. My solution to it was to look at the karma of comments: if the edit: comment got up above 5 karma, it probably is a reason why the post is wrong. If the edit: comment was at neutral or negative karma, it probably isn’t a reason why the post is wrong. I don’t have much data on how effective this method is, but it seemed to work for me. That’s not a general solution, though.
The general cure to looking immature might be to further promote a community norm of resolving disagreements. I see many arguments ending with one person admitting/realising they were mistaken (this is something that I had never seen anywhere else on the internet), but I see more disagreements left hanging. I think if we saw lots of disagreements with the posts, and most of them were resolved by reading through the comment tree, new people would see disagreements being resolved on the internet and be very impressed!
Are those comment/post substitutions what you intended to say? I was initially confused but that correction made sense of it. That policy seems to be a reasonable one. I use approximately the same interpretation except on topics that get political. “Correctness” becomes much less correlated to karma in such cases.
Resolving disagreements on the internet is impressive, isn’t it? People just stopped being wrong on the internet! WTF? At the same time there is a place for leaving things hanging. Sometimes leaving aside disagreements without making a fuss or engaging in status battles can be good enough. Particularly in those (frequent) cases where the issue isn’t cut and dry. When there is merit in both points but this can’t be simply acknowledged without reconstructing and translating from not-quite-compatible models of reality.
I bother to mention this because I’ve noticed that sometimes trying to resolve differences can at times do more harm than good, despite the best of intentions. Some people actually get offended if you try to be conciliatory, bizarre as it may seem.
Yeah, thanks for correcting. And I definitely agree, disagreements are not universally solved by one party admitting fault—but I do feel that there are a large number of cases on LessWrong where I don’t know if one side made a mistake, or if the case doesn’t have a right answer, or whatnot. And I would like to see more of those cases, the ones floating in between, to be resolved in either one direction or the other.
Part of the problem is that any attempt at direct enforcement or pressure could deter people from commenting in the first place, knowing that if they did they’d be expected to see any disagreements through to the end. (That’s been mentioned in previous threads, I think.)
Random thought: Would individuals trying to shift the norm by setting an example work any better? Like, one person going through their comment history (possibly using the link here), and making a list in their profile page of unresolved disagreements and their current status (possibly including otherwise unvoiced ones), plus a list of resolved disagreements and how they were resolved, or a list of posts and comments that led them to shift their beliefs (incrementally or otherwise) on something?
Not volunteering either way, though. In the past I’ve occasionally killed time reading my old posts on forums, and on reading regrettable things I’ve tried to fix them by amending them in replies or putting notes about them my profile, but that doesn’t seem like the same thing.
Basically, it seems you(general) would need to make a deliberate effort to continue discussions even after it becomes pure work, because you value having a site where disagreements are resolved more than you value anything else you might be doing with that time.
Edit: I idealistically hope that when agreement is impractical, people who try long enough can still reach a better level of understanding than the standard “agreement to disagree” cliché.
I know what you mean. There isn’t always time to go and do the research oneself on each topic so as to judge between the positions.
(responding to perplexed’s copy) When I came here from MOR, I just started by reading the sequences one by one, and then started going through new posts whenever they came up, and it seemed to work fairly well. There have been a couple of posts on the site which I did not completely agree with, but I still learned something from all of them, and it helped me get into the habit of updating my beliefs more easily. Also, I am glad that there are other people my age out there who are interested by sites like this :p
Welcome aboard!
I am 18 years old, somewhat new to LW and not as congruent/rational as desired. If your offer stands for others who are not under 18, I’d love to hear about that. I could use some help.
I do not think there is a need make LW more accessible to teenagers. I am not even sure I know what that means. Are we, those younger, that alien? (rethorical question) “Teenage” is a joke. Not as funny as religion, though. (A 12 years old is sitting at a bar with coworkers after a long day of work, 150 years ago: normal) As far as a I am concerned the differences between “teenagers” and adults are from age segregation. Differences in style, not principles.
That said, I am new. To the Welcome page!
Upvoted. I am always surprised how widespread discrimination against teenagers is, considering that everyone has to be one at some point. Every difference between people below the age of majority, and people above which an adult has been able to point out to me when I have discussed this seems to be a product of the culture we are raised in, not an inherent quality of humans within an arbitrary age range.
You might be interested in reading The Case Against Adolescence by Dr. Robert Epstein. (I believe the last edition is called Teen 2.0)
It is eye-opening on many aspects. There is a story in it that struck me. A twelve year old had an affair with his married teacher (who had two kids on her own). She went to prison for two-three years. Once out of the slammer, she had sex again with her ex-pupil. This time around 7-8 years of prison. While in prison she gave birth to a child. The child was raised by the father (the student) and that father’s mother. Reporters asked the young man if the imprisoned woman had abused of him; he answered negatively, that love united them. Once the ex-teacher got out of prison for the second time she married the then adult lover, went into their car with their kid and rolled into the sunset.
How immature. Both of them. Love at teenage? Meh. Love is only for old people like Romeo (~16) and Juliet. (~14) Those crazy homo sapiens.
12 seems too young to me for a sexual relationship, but that may be due to social conditioning. On average, males become capable of reproduction when they reach 12-13. (which probably is also when they become capable of enjoying it) If he was willingly involved there should not be an issue, but the general assumption seems to be that if someone in early puberty already is having sex, (particularly with an adult) they are being threatened or coerced into it. To make matters more complicated, I have heard of cases where children willingly were in a relationship like what you mentioned, and then condemned the adult under parental pressure.
the flip side of the argument for protecting children is that since older teens and adults can also be forced to have sex against their will, how can we remove restrictions at any age? having stronger muscles and a bit more experience is of limited use if someone threatens you with a gun.
I don’t know if I can actually come to an opinion on whether we should have an age of consent to shelter children, (even the ones who may want to have sex) or assume that anyone who has reached puberty is mature enough to have a relationship, and tell someone if they are being abused. I probably have not collected enough information at this point :p
There are driver’s licenses how about sex’ licenses? (minus the minimal age requirement) You have to show your ability to have sane sex through a written test and a practical test. Or something.
Ummmmm.
Much like the job of ruler or king, anyone who wants the job is disqualified.
My hope is that means “correct use of contraceptives.”
My problem with a ‘qualification’ to go through a rite of passage is that the rite of passage is what turns you from unqualified to qualified. When can we trust someone to make decisions about sex? When they’re not a virgin.
And so we either need hard control (no sex until your wedding night with the socially approved partner) or little-no control combined with acceptance of mistakes (regretting your choice for your first time is commonplace). The idea that a licensing agency could differentiate between people that will make good and bad choices about sex is as ridiculous as the idea that a licensing agency could differentiate between people that will make good and bad choices about driving. The future is too uncertain to have good predictive ability.
Errr.… I’m an not sure how exactly that would work. People already are taught how to use contraception from an early age, (maybe not young enough though), and the rest of what you need to know appears to be instinctive. My question was how could you have a country with no age limit for consent which does not become a refuge for child predators. If a child wants to have sex with someone older, it should not be an issue, and if the child is forced into it, then it is rape whether there is an age of consent or not. So as long as children are encouraged to speak out if they are being forced into sex, having an age limit may be unnecessary. Nobody here has actually argued in favour of an age of consent yet, which I find interesting. Does it have any benefits compared to only punishing adults who have been proven to act without a child’s consent?
One option would be to allow it but require that the younger individual specify the desire publicly in a suitable manner.
Well, technically… ;)
I am a 16 year old. To be honest, most teens wouldn’t handle the site. The requirement for an understanding of mathematics, logic, and science are beyond the reach of most, and the desire of most of the rest. That said, I have introduced two friends of mine to HPMOR and they have taken to it, and I am leading them towards Less Wrong. On the other hand? I don’t know how many adults would handle less wrong either. If you want my advice on how to be more appealing to teenagers, it is relatively simple.
Link everything, so that someone who doesn’t understand can follow your links and find out. Useful more for teens than for adults, it is still good practice. Few intelligent teens will tolerate a teens area for long.
The same could be said about most adults.
I don’t feel quite comfortable admitting that I am only 18 over the internet. (But I’ll do it anyways, obviously.)
Irrational fear of internet predators is irrational >.>
It’s hard not to feel a little intimidated by the sheer sanity of what’s written here. For a long time I felt like I was obligated to at least get my GenEd done before I could sign up to comment. If I haven’t managed to pass society’s standard of intelligence yet, how can I expect respect and understanding here, where the standards are so much higher? There’s probably quite a few teen lurkers out there, waiting hopefully for some small sign to inform them when they are high enough on the sanity-waterline to converse with gods.
Edit: Oh yes! And I’m a female. Slightly relevant to the original posting :)
I’m 16.
(insert standard creepy late post disclaimer...)
I’m 17, but have been reading LW for more than a year (and telling all my friends to do the same, of course.) I think that at least for the smart, nerdy, sciency type teenagers I hang out with, LW isn’t too scary to get into. I could certainly manage it.
It was a bit hard to get into, though. If I didn’t love Three Worlds Collide and philosophy so much, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. All the “initial reading” that LW provided at the time felt to me like the worst of Eliezer’s output: the Simple Truth, and so on. The first truly awesome post I saw on here was the one which introduced “Shut Up and Multiply” to my vocabulary.
And I think I might PM you about that good education, hoping you extend that offer more generally.
I’m 17, if anyone’s still looking.
This is a little less than a year late, but oh well. I’m an almost-18 year old female who found LessWrong through HPMoR, which a friend of mine recommended to me (he is also interested in LessWrong and regularly reads the site). If you see this, I would love any advice you have to offer about “charting a good education, especially a good rationality education.”
Same! A good rationality education is extremely interesting to me. I would love to hear more information about that. I am also an 18 year old female who found Less Wrong through HPMoR, here, Naomi.
I am male and seventeen, started reading LW when I was sixteen after being directed to H:MOR from TV tropes. I recommended MOR to a few friends and they enjoy it, but don’t seem interested in rationality as much as I am. I generally find the site accessible and to have material which is easy to understand, but still teaches me new things regularly. I am working through the sequence about quantum physics right now, since the major sequences listed as 3.1-3.4 + 3.6-3.8 did not take long to read through. also, seeing “disagreements being resolved on the internet” is honestly one of the most inspiring parts of this site to me :p
I’m still a teenager! I think I’ve already mentioned it, but maybe not.
One of the reasons why I took the step from lurker to user—a month or so ago—was that I thought I should reply to this comment. I subsequently forgot where to find it, and stumbled upon it again just now.
I’m 18. Whether or not that makes me qualified for whatever help you had in mind I do not know, but I’m certainly interested.
Hi, I was wondering if you had any advice on education for LW’ers outside the US?
edit: That is, general education advice that applies to people even outside the US?
I’d take her up on that, kid :)
Don’t call her “kid”, grup.
Definition from Urban Dictionary: “A grown-up in the minority, finding themselves among younger people. Coined by Adrian Spies, writer of the Star Trek episode featuring a post-apocalyptic world where only teenagers survived.”
Which fits because I am on the far upper end of the age distribution here (which Eliezer knows because I attend meetups in the Bay Area).
I found LW as a teenager and it seems extremely accessible, at least to me, but nobody in my age group who I’ve shown it to has agreed.
Very old, but I wanted to post that I’ve found the exact same issue. I find it accessible, especially when I do some research, but so far no one I know has shown even the slightest interest. I’ve mentioned it to two friends, both of whom I consider very intelligent, but neither took the bait. My female friend loved HP MOR, though.
I’m another data point (16 when I first started reading) who found it very accessible.I’ve tried a couple different ways of getting my friends interested, with varying degrees of success. I think the problem with getting most people (regardless of age) interested in a site like this is that you have to expend a lot of time even to understand what everyone’s talking about, and it doesn’t seem worth it “just for a blog”.
If this can be done without significant compromise, it definitely should be.