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Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 14th, 2019, 12:46 pm
by Alias
Intellectual_Savnot wrote: March 14th, 2019, 12:29 pm No I don't have kids I am fifteen
So, your pov is that of a child, not a parent. It's quite understandable, then, that you resent the idea of being misinformed.
But reflect. Would you really be a better person, or happier, or more successful, if all the adults in your life had told you the complete truth about everything?
Do you recall your passive listening attention span at age three or four? (the average for adults is 15 minutes) What was your vocabulary? Are you sure you would have been able to sit still for and comprehend the complete, accurate answers to all of your questions? In fact, can you now?

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 14th, 2019, 12:53 pm
by Intellectual_Savnot
I wish people told me more. I fully believe I could have figured out Integrated Mathematics 111 myself if someone had introduced it to me at age 9. Instead of giving me toy cars to play with, I would have heavily preferred a dictionary of a foreign language at age six. I much still prefer the intellectual form of any item and resent my lack of growth where it was so clearly possible. I could know much more and be much more progressed if anyone had tried a damn to progress me. But either way, I try not to take the POV of anyone but that person which can see the full idea and scope of a system. I would not agree that I see, as your CA 15 year old would traditionally see, this system in its own fallible form which I am able to comprehend, but rather as it completely is, and better, as it definitely could be.

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 14th, 2019, 12:56 pm
by Intellectual_Savnot
Yes, I still remember being four, it was not all that long ago. I took interest in only artistic values then, and still attempted to wrap my mind around basic quantitative form. I should be educated, for hell's sake. I can do not but resent the people who should have educated me when it was available. Now I am in my own hands for education, hands not fully grown, not fully stable, unable to carry myself to the destinations at which I should already reside.

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 14th, 2019, 3:52 pm
by Alias
Do you mean your parents forbade you to read textbooks and dictionaries? Kept no books in the house? Denied you a library card?
If that is the case, they probably didn't have the knowledge you craved and could only have given you incorrect information that you would later have to waste time unlearning, so you're lucky they didn't. Odds are, they also couldn't afford a private school for gifted children.
Nor is it reasonable to expect a Grade 3 public school teacher to instruct all of her students in high-school or college math, nor to double his working time by instructing the other students in the regular curriculum plus tutor one at a level he hasn't been trained to teach.

Fortunately, you still have some time. Take those unsteady immature little hands and grasp your own education.
So what if the Nobel has to wait until you're 25 - worse things could happen.

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 14th, 2019, 3:56 pm
by Alias
PS I don't recommend walking on your hands while learning Cantonese.
One thing at a time is safer.

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 14th, 2019, 8:58 pm
by h_k_s
jonathan wrote: March 13th, 2019, 11:21 pm
h_k_s wrote: March 13th, 2019, 6:34 pm

Great!

Brainwash the kids!

I suppose this is a case of the ends justifying the means.

That's pure sophism.
You haven’t offered any support for the claim I initially took issue with (that religion is junk) or addressed the point I offered as a potential hurdle in your doing so. Instead, you’ve merely offered two new ambiguous claims.

By “brainwash(ing)” it’s unclear whether you mean cultivating religious beliefs in particular or cultivating moral beliefs in general; either way, you’ve introduced a new claim — that one of these is tantamount to brainwashing — which now demands additional support. Furthermore, your comment about ends justifying means seems to imply that a parent need not have recourse to, nor the child need be inculcated with, beliefs of this order (whether religious or not is, again, unclear): another claim, in need of yet more justification, and which raises the question whether you think this to be the case because (1) you think there is a way to provide moral instruction to a child without instilling moral beliefs in him or (2) you think moral instruction to be avoidable altogether when raising a child.

Loaded language and exclamation points do not an argument make. Who’s the sophist here? Try again.
Religion is NOT scientific NOR is it philosophically sound.

Ergo religion is junk.

Q.E.D.

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 15th, 2019, 4:28 am
by Felix
jonathan said: the implication that all religion is junk may be controversial. Would you like to offer any support for this idea?
h_k_s said: Religion is NOT scientific NOR is it philosophically sound. Ergo religion is junk.
A flimsy rebuttal: Religion can be both philosophically sound and scientific (but not in the sense of requiring empirical proof).

You've listed Aristotle as your favorite philosopher, and yet he was religious, seems contradictory.

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 15th, 2019, 11:08 am
by Alias
Felix wrote: March 15th, 2019, 4:28 am Religion can be both philosophically sound and scientific (but not in the sense of requiring empirical proof).
Those are antithetical concepts. Science is precisely that which is empirically proven.
You've listed Aristotle as your favorite philosopher, and yet he was religious, seems contradictory.
And you think the putative contradiction of Aristotle's philosophy imaging of God as the perfection of idea is a problem when Aristotle was not cited in the present discussion? That's not a straw man - man, that's not even a straw!

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 15th, 2019, 3:30 pm
by Felix
Alias said: "Science is precisely that which is empirically proven."

I was thinking it was probably a mistake to add those last few words to that sentence. :)

However, I was thinking of the scientific method as commonly defined, i.e., "procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses."

One may take a similarly rigorous approach to examining subjective experience, that is what I meant. I realize it can be handicapped by observer bias but this is true in physical science too - say quantum mechanics.

Alias said: "And you think the putative contradiction of Aristotle's philosophy.... "

T'was only an observation, I found it ironic that h_k_s said that religion is junk and yet his favorite philosopher was known to collect it. :P

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 15th, 2019, 4:06 pm
by Alias
Felix wrote: March 15th, 2019, 3:30 pm However, I was thinking of the scientific method as commonly defined, i.e., "procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses."

One may take a similarly rigorous approach to examining subjective experience, that is what I meant. I realize it can be handicapped by observer bias but this is true in physical science too - say quantum mechanics.
the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses
What's the procedure for applying this to subjective experience? You'll run into problems with the peer review.
"Say quantum meachanics" (say any other scientific hypothesis?) Do you mean : "... that by the very act of watching, the observer affects the observed reality. ... When a quantum "observer" is watching Quantum mechanics states that particles can also behave as waves."
That is not a bias; that is a phenomenon.
Any endeavour can be compromised and its achievement diminished by bias, but no amount of bias can bring a subjective notion into existence; a thing that has never been observed behaves in no way at all.

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 15th, 2019, 4:27 pm
by Felix
"the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses"

Alias: What's the procedure for applying this to subjective experience?
The same - you've heard of psychological research?
Alias: Any endeavour can be compromised and its achievement diminished by bias
That's to what I was referring....

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 15th, 2019, 5:26 pm
by Alias
Felix wrote: March 15th, 2019, 4:27 pm The same - you've heard of psychological research?
Yes. So far, it has given many - even some plausible - explanations for the subjective experiences that may be collectively interpreted as "religious", but non at all regarding an external, or observable and testable, supernatural entity/event/phenomenon.
Which, of course, may put this research in the area of mental aberration and malfunction. But even if this particular cluster of mental states is not necessarily symptomatic of illness, psychological research is not observing the experiences, but only the subject experiencing them; it is not a study of
the supernatural, but of the human mind.
Incidentally, there are those who question including psychology among the sciences. I'm not one of those: it's closely enough to neurology as to be scientifically useful.
But it will never give you a scientific basis for deities.
[Any endeavour can be compromised and its achievement diminished by bias]

That's to what I was referring....
Ah, but not the other half: that bias can never stretch a science so far as to include imaginary beings.

This is irrelevant anyway: if you tell a child gobbledygook that you know is gobbledygook, it's story-telling, or embellishment or lying;
if you tell it gobbledygook you yourself believe, it's honest indoctrination.

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 16th, 2019, 3:58 pm
by Felix
Religion does not necessarily involve belief in a Diety, e.g., Buddhism does not.

We can study the mindset and psychological traits of those who have had so-called mystical experiences, the effects of practicing various meditation, etc. There is a neuroscientist and Zen meditation practitioner named James Austin who has done the latter and written a few books on the subject.

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 16th, 2019, 4:00 pm
by Felix
I omitted a word in this sentence:
We can study .... the effects of practicing various meditation techniques, etc.

Re: Lying to children

Posted: March 16th, 2019, 5:14 pm
by Alias
Felix wrote: March 16th, 2019, 3:58 pm Religion does not necessarily involve belief in a Diety, e.g., Buddhism does not.

We can study the mindset and psychological traits of those who have had so-called mystical experiences, the effects of practicing various meditation, etc. There is a neuroscientist and Zen meditation practitioner named James Austin who has done the latter and written a few books on the subject.
Yes, people do that. You can do that. How does it relate to the lies you tell to children?