One hopes. I don’t know if it’s possible to generalize on this point though. With some education takes, with some, it doesn’t.
Court_Merrigan
Karma: 56
I’ve also found this very helpful in my initial surveys.
Saying you’re “Fine” to a doctor, when you are not, would be a little foolish, would it not? As opposed to your standard workaday white lies.
Thanks.
I certainly will. She’s only 18 months, though, so it’s going to be a while before the reports start flowing.
Me neither. My daughter’s going to be a test case, though.
That’s great stuff. I feel like I should be taking notes.
I’m talking about from the perspective of a child, MBlume. We live in a society where lots of folks teach their kids lots of silly myths. It isn’t your job to teach your kid to go around exposing them all the time. At least not unless you want to raise an intolerable pedant.
I also remember hearing of a community (wish I could remember which) in which it was absolutely forbidden to give negative feedback under certain circumstances
I am living (and about to leave) an Asian society very much like this. It yields some very odd results indeed: corruption, consumerism, lemming-like religious behavior, and vast—feudal—social gaps.
Me neither. Are the people around you really paying so much attention to you that they would go such effort? Ones who aren’t related to you?
That is a good point.
Nice link—thanks. My daughter’s going to be Santa Claus age soon enough. Maybe I’ll print this out for future reference. Probably unbearably saccharine to the childless, but hey, they may have some crumbgobblers of their own someday, and then it will make more sense.
Seems to me (maybe I’ll report back on this in, say, a decade) that the “Santa Claus shock” won’t be as bad as a “God shock” because people who lie to their kids about Santa Claus know they are lying and every kid finds out the truth sooner or later; whereas theists don’t think they are lying, and some people never come to believe they’re wrong. So the “God shock” is a double whammy, finding out your parents are both wrong, and well, liars. In that sense, then the Santa Claus shock is going to be less harmful, as it were. But I think it sets a good precedent with your kids to be as honest as you can with them on the Big Questions while at the same time teaching them a lesson in consideration—don’t go telling all the other kids at school that Santa Claus isn’t real. Part of teaching them to be members of a tolerant free society.
Some 4th grader did that at school when I was a believing kindergartener—that was may more painful than finding out my parents knew Santa Claus isn’t real.
This is ridiculous. A “truth twister”? This isn’t hypocrisy. This is lying. To yourself, mostly. Unless you live in a cave, you tell white lies every day. Ever say Good Afternoon when you didn’t feel like it?
This sort of moral highhorsing gets us nowhere. Stop it, please.
Big one for me: cutting the Gordian knot of the philosophical antimonies, e.g., those philosophical dilemmas with no answers. Someone somewhere at Overcoming Bias commented that the “useful” parts of philosophy evolved into the natural sciences; the rest became the muted academic wordgames we see today (or something like that—the poster was much more incisive).
And just like that, my interest in those endless philosophical dilemmas dissolved. What a timesaver.
If anyone can locate that post / commenter, I’d be grateful.