Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
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Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
So I want to know what you think. Would be better to tell young people that not everyone who works hard makes it in life but, to try the best they can because life does not give anyone insight to who makes it in the end Or to lie to them too until they find it out themselves and then the cycle continues?
Whether you agree or not, disappointments caused by cut expectations can lead to depression and/or suicide.
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
I think rather that some people misunderstand the idea as saying, "You can be/achieve anything without too much effort, without needing to make sacrifices." But that's not what it's saying.
At that, of course, not everyone is going to be a Cy Young winner, an Oscar winner, etc.--there aren't enough of those sorts of accolades given out for everyone who does everything they can to win them, but as someone who has managed to make a lifelong career in an entertainment industry, I think that people who consider "You can be/achieve anything" a lie are people who tend to not want to put in the work and make the sacrifices needed to achieve what they'd ideally like to achieve. And sometimes that work requires making personality adjustments that folks don't want to make.
Definitely luck can be a factor--being in the right place at the right time can be very important, but if you're not lucky, you can still make it happen if you make the right moves, persistently put in the right work, and make the right sacrifices. It winds up being a question of how badly you want whatever it is. A lot of people wind up valuing other things more.
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
There's nothing better than a good habit and nothing worse than a bad one.
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
I returned and saw under the sun that— The race is not to the swift, Nor the battle to the strong, Nor bread to the wise, Nor riches to men of understanding, Nor favor to men of skill; But time and chance happen to them all.
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
I'm taking a wild guess you are from the USA???Pages wrote: ↑June 5th, 2020, 7:18 am We have been lied to. By our parents, teachers, religious leaders, public figures, motivational speakers etc. They used to tell us that you have what it takes to achieve anything irrespective of your family background or whatever factor you are been faced with as long as you work hard enough. Well, now we are older and have realized that that isn't remotely close to the truth. Life is random and it takes luck to be successful. Luck to be born into a privileged home, luck to be raised in a good environment, luck to have the intelligence, luck to be born healthy etc.
So I want to know what you think. Would be better to tell young people that not everyone who works hard makes it in life but, to try the best they can because life does not give anyone insight to who makes it in the end Or to lie to them too until they find it out themselves and then the cycle continues?
Whether you agree or not, disappointments caused by cut expectations can lead to depression and/or suicide.
LOL
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
A chance to overcome grave difficulties can be seen by some of the perceived 'lucky' ones as the greatest gift of life.
As a child I used to dream concepts of the nature of things and when I woke I had complete comprehension of a concept and could explain it in detail to my parents. My dream as a child was to solve the absolute most difficult problem in the world with my mind.
My idea is that luck is created. Expectations can be set. If ones intention were to be to be nice or sincere to others, one can discover fulfillment and one can achieve something that can be perceived as luck by others.
Philosophy can be used to change one's expectations. An example is stoicism. By using stoicism, people experience life differently and can even think pain away.
(2019) Is it possible to think pain away?
https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/201 ... -pain-away
People who practice stoic philosophy may withstand a flu while others may take it to bed and be sick for weeks.
How Stoicism helped me fight the flu by Monil Shah
https://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/stoic ... fight-flu/
From the perspective of the bedridden patient, the stoic philosopher could be perceived as 'lucky'. But how would that concept be applicable or experienced by the stoic philosopher? Would the term 'luck' apply?
Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius stated the following about luck:
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
“I was once a fortunate man but at some point fortune abandoned me. But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.” (Meditations)
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
That would be far and away better than telling them that people are fundamentally good, that there's a supreme deity whose making sure that no human goes through excess harm, that your life experience will have symmetry to your morality or even level of political awareness, etc.. Let them unpack their own relationship with random chance without some bright-eyed adult whose just dying to sell them their own religion or their own politics.
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
We all think inculcating our children with our own values and teaching them the truth about the world is important. You suggest "selling" YOUR values, while arguing that other parents shouldn't "sell" theirs. (Of course we all think our values are and our world view are better than others. We would change our world view and values if we didn't.)Papus79 wrote: ↑June 6th, 2020, 11:23 am It might be simply time to tell them a more accurately informed story. It's one thing not to tell children under ten much about death camps, gullags, drugs, or sexuality while their minds are still making their own maps to base reality from but it might be better to offer a different framing of the goals of life such as 1) Your life, from this time until your die of old age, will be primarily about the quality of your relationship with yourself - all else extends from there and 2) Life is competitive, so as a child if you'd rather play videogames or do something immedately satisfying rather than spend long hours on guitar, piano, boyscouts/girlscouts knot tying, or whatever else, this is about you gaining the skills that you'll need as an adult.
That would be far and away better than telling them that people are fundamentally good, that there's a supreme deity whose making sure that no human goes through excess harm, that your life experience will have symmetry to your morality or even level of political awareness, etc.. Let them unpack their own relationship with random chance without some bright-eyed adult whose just dying to sell them their own religion or their own politics.
I think your "selling points" are iffy. What you mean by "your relationship with yourself" is unclear, but perhaps one's relationships with others are equally important. Life is competitive -- but it is also cooperative. Children are naturally competitive: effective cooperation is a learned skill.
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
I'm not 100% sure whether you're making the argument that it's all subjective (which I'd strongly disagree with) or whether I don't sound informed enough or like I've thought about this kind of thing long enough to merit an opinion - which is something I could unpack but either way I don't think this is one of those 'taste in music' or 'taste in art' kind of things. People should be given enough leeway, and clearly if some parents want people to functional in the world but also take seriously the idea that there might be a bigger 'game' than this life consists of then - done right - that can actually help stabilize people. I think my biggest objection is when parents set their kids up for both culture-shock and failure later in life because they never get the idea of what speed they're supposed to be running at in order to make successful contact with society.Ecurb wrote: ↑June 6th, 2020, 12:02 pm We all think inculcating our children with our own values and teaching them the truth about the world is important. You suggest "selling" YOUR values, while arguing that other parents shouldn't "sell" theirs. (Of course we all think our values are and our world view are better than others. We would change our world view and values if we didn't.)
So I can add a caveat - if someone is something like a pure extrovert where they have little in the way of sensed interiority and there's nothing they can do with that advice aside from damage themselves - I'd exempt that. For people who do have interiority - it's critical that they get to know themselves as well as they can and that includes their ethics, the sources of their wants and needs, and as a result of that get extremely skilled at drawing all of that into a higher and higher frame of competence where one learns how to manage their emotions, manage their handling of upsets, tragedies, etc. in such a manner that they can be truly resilient and get stronger by life's traumas rather than wrecked by them. People can do that through introspection, they can do that through journalling, they can do it - if they know they're medically and neurologically equiped - through responsible use of either psychedelics, western / eastern mystery tradition techniques, but the point is - get as close as you can to seeing the fillament of your own lightbulb or projector metaphorically speaking, ie. your unconscious / subconscious.
The reason I consider all of this so important - I can't escape the observation that so much of the barbarism we're seeing in our culture is a rather gainful disconnect between people's rational minds and subconscious minds where they'll let their subconscious minds do all of the work, unfortunatly most of what an untrained or unevaluated subconscious mind wants is along the lines of Darwinian evolution, zero sum games, winning status races at the expense of others, the conscious mind of that person will either abdicate reason and responsibility or spend all kinds of time backward-rationalizing and explaining why they not only took actions completely out of line with their surface-reported values but seem to do so incredibly often and incredibly gainfully (ie. never having a slip of reason that isn't starkly beneficial to them).
The further reason why having fewer people in this position is critical IMHO - we're all children handling deadlier and deadlier weapons by the increase of technology. Without a lot more adults in this world we're not likely to make it. Unfortunately it's in advertiser's interests to keep people limbic and unthinking (parting a fool from his/her money is like taking candy from a baby), with markets there's an unfortunate baseline told in the Fable of the Bees where the idea is that a nation's wealth relies on it's vanity and addiction to fripperies and fads which then keeps people employed (we're now seeing quite serious environmental limitations to how far that can go), and then it's in the interest of party politics to keep people uncritical because persuasion's a much easier game where they can use emotional appeal or buying votes to get around the actual issues, and then bureaucrats love a purile populace because it's great for business. These aren't evil conspiracies, they're just incentive structures actualizing themselves toward the kind of forever-21 culture that we have and the good news for us, bad news for them - we're hitting the limits of peak vanity and outward-pointing, virtue-signalling, etc. where we either pull back from that or we'd be a weak enough society to not be maintainable by liberal democracy much longer (out of zero love of authoritarianism - it's just that any reliable civil sense making would be so broken there'd be no alternatives).
They seem to unlearn that for the most part by their teens and figure out that the literally are their performance - nothing more. For us to pull back from a culture that says that a person's internal values mean practically nothing and that it's only some combination of performance, conformity, and social shibboleths that they know how to filter all of their thinking along (to designate where they are in the meritocratic caste system) we'd have to get our game theory and incentive structures properly straightened out. At this point you do have a few freaks and savants making sense on these sorts of things - like David Sloan Wilson, Bret Weinstein, Robert Sapolsky, etc. - people who are willing to look at human beings as evolved animals, operating quite perfectly within the lines of Darwinian game theory albeit with one feature few if any other animals have which is a massive cultural layer to outsource information to.
The other part of this problem I'm noticing - it seems like as a culture we're absolutely terrible at identifying salient features of crisis and we're great at sidelining anyone who does. For example the race riots in the US over the last few weeks - how many people are certain to their core that the whole story of the riots was a racial tragedy in Minnesota with an abuse of state force, and then how many people would look at the social and economic climate as draught-striken forest that just needed one match thrown - whether there, whether in an ICE holding facility, it could have been anything with memetic or cultural mytho-poetic bells and whistles that would have kicked this reaction off. There's also then the degree to which how great this kind of crisis is for media $$, how great it is for politicians, how great it is for the rioters, how great it is even for peaceful protesters who just wanted to get out of their house after having been locked in for several months and additionally get to look wonderfully virtuous. That's not to say that all of this is cynical, it's to say that almost anything people want to sell you at face value tends to be a bit of a grift - not always but you have to inspect it very carefully before buying the goods hook, line, and sinker. Similarly we can't make good decisions when we can't even think our way to the bottom of causes - and maybe I'd add this to my first two as 3) *** teach children critical thinking skills in school ***.
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
One of my pet peeves is the notion that the powerful are manipulating the hoi palloi, and that a puerile public is somehow brainwashed into buying things they don't really want, and voting for candidates who won't actually help them. The reason this peeves me is that I've never met anyone who thinks that he or she is being manipulated or brainwashed. NO! Everyone who mentions these manipulative tactics sees through them and acts rationally. It's all those silly OTHER PEOPLE who are manipulated (since they were never taught critical thinking skills in school). But why should you and I be immune, Papus?
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
Well, I can at least offer some tools to peel that apart.Ecurb wrote: ↑June 7th, 2020, 10:44 am One of my pet peeves is the notion that the powerful are manipulating the hoi palloi, and that a puerile public is somehow brainwashed into buying things they don't really want, and voting for candidates who won't actually help them. The reason this peeves me is that I've never met anyone who thinks that he or she is being manipulated or brainwashed. NO! Everyone who mentions these manipulative tactics sees through them and acts rationally. It's all those silly OTHER PEOPLE who are manipulated (since they were never taught critical thinking skills in school). But why should you and I be immune, Papus?
On one hand if someone likes to arrogantly call other people 'sheeple' they're's a good chance, not 100% but strong nonetheless, that this is just their own game-theorhetic behavior trying to get self-appointed status at a discount, and it's part of why some people love conspiracy theories.
To the last thought - conspiracies themselves, to the degree that they are an actual think they're reactionary and motivated by incentive structures. For example there'd be no grand cabal capable of organizing much of anything because it's simply not possible, the world is too complex and the capacity to persuade people into knots too small. For example allowing an enemy attack through to get public support for a war is an example of a conspiracy with ample plausible deniability and one could note it's not a group of people breaking their backs to propagandize, it's simply a strategic act of acquiescence. Similarly in the Covid crisis there were similar acts of incentive-grabbing or accountability-avoidance, whether it was hospitals inflating cause of death by Covid when cause of death was some other issue (increase funding perhaps?), nursing homes trying maneuvers to hide that people in those nursing homes had gotten Covid, and there was the concern about essentially 'baked' experiments that would look like science but be too poorly designed or overlook significant details in what was assigned placebo (like using vitamin C) to bunk off-patent drugs and make certain that whatever drug was used to treat Covid was on-patent.
The one thing that seems to be more powerful than individual people is incentive structures. People are trying to live, trying to get from one day to the next, they're trying to support themselves or a family, and quite often when they go to work it's just a job. If the numbers or performance metrics weren't designed well then they have to assume they're too far down the chain of command to be bothered. You have some degree of this up to the professional level and I get the impression that professionals or even tradesmen/tradeswomen whose actions are getting direct feedback from reality have to say some scathing things back to their managers or whoever's a layer or two detached from the action what's actually happening and what needs to be done differently, however I get the impression that our service sector - where it's just people dealing with people and the brute force of nature is abstracted off, there's no push or motivation. For example I remember in high school working at Little Caesers or Taco Bell - a lot of things just aren't your problem and you only have a store that's doing well if your manager actually gets what's happening, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.
So this is where I'd have to argue what I think one of the biggest faults in our system - as far as I can see it - lies. I get the impression that we just haven't figured out how to do technocracy well. Data-driven approaches to businesses and systems, making sure they're efficient, etc. is important but at the same time you have to know what the full color-depth of that function or role is and if you evaluate various businesses, NGO's, or charitable organizations on too few metrics then the range of what they do for people can easily dry up against those metrics.
I had a while, after graduating college, where I bounced around as a temp (had an auditing job for 6 or 7 years and found out - regardless of how much I knew about accounts payable, purchasing, and receiving - people wanted exact-match experience and it meant nothing on a resume). I saw a common thread with a lot of these companies that I worked with. They'd start off as strong and thrifty family businesses, they grew in the community for decades, maybe somewhere around the late 1980's or early 1990's they made their first acquisition of another company, then by the early 2000's it started going like gangbusters, and eventually these balloon into holding companies. Holding companies, IMHO, are a bit like the 'red giant' phase of a business quite often before it goes supernova and other companies are there to scrape up what assets they can. The sense I get of this problem is as follows - the real whip-hand of the company is people who are far too divorced from the realities of daily operations. Thinking of a company I went to work at for a while who did sheeting for a whole bunch of different auto manufacturers - it's not the foremen who are making the decisions, it's not the plant managers, they might get some say in daily operations but they don't get to say much in terms of steering. The people in the front office are buried in the cold-data which gives them a sense of profitability but they might need more. Then you get to the CEO, someone whose running around like crazy trying to sync it all up, ultimately the real power is in the board of directors. What bothers me about this model is when I see so many companies refusing to think outside of a three-month window. They can't / won't think long-range. It's run full-speed at monthly / quarterly profitability targets or bust. The problem with that - it's too efficient for innovation, too efficient for R&D, too efficient to sniff the environment to see what's changing and shift product lines much, it's that company, with hundreds or thousands of employees flying by the seat of its pants and running too fast to look around.
Another thing I've noticed, with people, is that it's very easy to end up on the social out if you spend a lot of time reading and educating yourself beyond what they have in a practical sense. When I've talked to other people who've seen the same thing (typically people older than myself who've had a longer view of it) their suggestion is that a lot of these people are extremely hard working but that their ego is deeply anchored to the idea that their college education made them a deeply educated person, I see some reflection of this in that my dad took karate a bit back in the 1960's and while I'm sure he can handle himself okay it's a bit like he knows everything he needs to know and while he's never been a guy to look for conflict I don't think he necessarily realized just how many people around him had supremacy over him in that area. Similarly for people who collapse against the sunk costs in their lives and take the stance that 'I know everything I need to know because I sunk years of effort into it - I can't possibly be wrong and the people who sent me there can't possibly be wrong' gets factored into their thinking.
Ecurb - I'd be curious as to which region or what kind of culture you live in, mainly because I live in the midwest US and it's very nose-to-the-grindstone and anyone whose looking up or around is showing signs of laziness, autism, or both. It's probably not like that in places like Silicon Valley but here, and many other places, it's a bit like if you're not doing exactly what everyone else around you is it's deemed that there's something wrong with you. Heck, for me in that case if trying to read Sir Roger Penrose to learn the current state of mathematical physics, if listening to long-form discussions like Eric Weinstein's The Portal, Sam Harris's Waking Up / Making Sense, or reading a lot and getting engaged in depth psychology and Hermetic philosophy from the Renaissance onward is what most people would see as tantamount to smoking weed, playing videogames, and shirking responsibility (I have to hope that's not true but I see a lot of evidence to the contrary) - then I have to accept the likelihood that I'm in a world where people are addicted to mismeasuring each other, mismeasuring themselves, mismeasuring what it is they're supposed to be doing, and to the degree that vanity and shallowness seem to quite often personify the run at social status I think we have to be careful that our incentive structures as a society aren't destroying us. The problem with the wealthiest (take a listen to Daniel Markovits on Sam Harris's Making Sense #205 - I've heard this before and he's reiterating it) - they're running like hell too! The sense right now is that anyone who stops running gets eaten, and in some sense that means falling out of consideration as a human being under the consternation of all of the people who are still running full speed in what's really gotten to be an idiotic self-perpetuating social Darwinist monoculture where you're either in it or you've joined something akin to the untouchable caste.
That last part is also why I think the very worst form of incentive is an arms race where it's a deal most people can't refuse and thus it constantly reinforces itself through coercion. That seems to be exactly what we have. That's not to say we don't have incredibly complex problems on the other side of that - like making sure we don't breed ourselves to extinction if things get easy or go bankrupt because without any coercion there's no professionalism, it's just that - at a given threshold - that coercion starts ripping society apart and children get the sense that they're coming into a world of total war where it's every man and woman for themselves (and the breakup of extended families strongly points to the likelihood of that). Those children won't grow up to seed a culture, their values will likely be too zero-sum and sadder still, those among them who weren't thinking zero-sum either may not make it to adulthood or will be irrelevant because their elbows weren't sharp enough to take the lead.
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
We protect children from the horror of the world by telling them lies and fantasies.Pages wrote: ↑June 5th, 2020, 7:18 am We have been lied to. By our parents, teachers, religious leaders, public figures, motivational speakers etc. They used to tell us that you have what it takes to achieve anything irrespective of your family background or whatever factor you are been faced with as long as you work hard enough. Well, now we are older and have realized that that isn't remotely close to the truth. Life is random and it takes luck to be successful. Luck to be born into a privileged home, luck to be raised in a good environment, luck to have the intelligence, luck to be born healthy etc.
So I want to know what you think. Would be better to tell young people that not everyone who works hard makes it in life but, to try the best they can because life does not give anyone insight to who makes it in the end Or to lie to them too until they find it out themselves and then the cycle continues?
Whether you agree or not, disappointments caused by cut expectations can lead to depression and/or suicide.
For example, regarding the deaths of relatives, we say "they are sleeping." But we don't clarify that they will never awaken and also that their bodies will now dissolve into terribly stinky fluids and gasses and even their bones will eventually crumble and disappear given enough time, say a few decades or centuries.
And regarding where babies come from, we don't tell them about sex until they are much older.
We often don't mention crime to them at all, nor war, nor economic disasters such as unemployment or homelessness.
We lie, and we tell these lies to them to protect them while they are still very young.
Is it moral? It would be immoral not to.
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
LOL Do you really believe that it would be immoral to tell the truth?h_k_s wrote: ↑June 9th, 2020, 7:41 pmWe protect children from the horror of the world by telling them lies and fantasies.Pages wrote: ↑June 5th, 2020, 7:18 am We have been lied to. By our parents, teachers, religious leaders, public figures, motivational speakers etc. They used to tell us that you have what it takes to achieve anything irrespective of your family background or whatever factor you are been faced with as long as you work hard enough. Well, now we are older and have realized that that isn't remotely close to the truth. Life is random and it takes luck to be successful. Luck to be born into a privileged home, luck to be raised in a good environment, luck to have the intelligence, luck to be born healthy etc.
So I want to know what you think. Would be better to tell young people that not everyone who works hard makes it in life but, to try the best they can because life does not give anyone insight to who makes it in the end Or to lie to them too until they find it out themselves and then the cycle continues?
Whether you agree or not, disappointments caused by cut expectations can lead to depression and/or suicide.
For example, regarding the deaths of relatives, we say "they are sleeping." But we don't clarify that they will never awaken and also that their bodies will now dissolve into terribly stinky fluids and gasses and even their bones will eventually crumble and disappear given enough time, say a few decades or centuries.
And regarding where babies come from, we don't tell them about sex until they are much older.
We often don't mention crime to them at all, nor war, nor economic disasters such as unemployment or homelessness.
We lie, and we tell these lies to them to protect them while they are still very young.
Is it moral? It would be immoral not to.
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Re: Would it be moraly right to tell young people the truth about life?
There is a difference between 'really wanting some thing' and just 'wanting some thing'.Pages wrote: ↑June 5th, 2020, 7:18 am We have been lied to. By our parents, teachers, religious leaders, public figures, motivational speakers etc. They used to tell us that you have what it takes to achieve anything irrespective of your family background or whatever factor you are been faced with as long as you work hard enough. Well, now we are older and have realized that that isn't remotely close to the truth. Life is random and it takes luck to be successful. Luck to be born into a privileged home, luck to be raised in a good environment, luck to have the intelligence, luck to be born healthy etc.
So I want to know what you think. Would be better to tell young people that not everyone who works hard makes it in life but, to try the best they can because life does not give anyone insight to who makes it in the end Or to lie to them too until they find it out themselves and then the cycle continues?
Whether you agree or not, disappointments caused by cut expectations can lead to depression and/or suicide.
If you 'really' want some thing, then what is there stopping you from getting/achieving it?
Will you provide examples of you not being able to get what you 'truly' want?
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