Hacker News doesn't like Taking Children Seriously (TCS). My thoughts follow quotes.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=416432

If you substitute in someone with the same level of rationality and decision making skills as a young child.. let's say.. a meth addict, does it [TCS] still work?

Logical appeals on a young child would work as well as on a dog.

How ignorant children are, and how unable to make decisions, and how to deal with that, are perfectly legitimate and interesting subjects. But comparing children to dogs and meth addicts is not a way of delving into them.

Parents are meant to make decisions for their children and children are meant to do things they don't want ... That people think otherwise scares the bejesus out of me, but perhaps explains why kids are so pampered and spoiled nowadays.

Wow, is that [TCS] creepy.

thanks qqq [aka curi]. thanks for inflicting yet another monster on society, who thinks the world needs to justify itself to her. Hopefully the creature's teenage years will be a punishment enough for you.

TCS is unnatural, scary, and creepy, they say. And causes children to become stereotypical "spoiled" kids. "Spoiled" kids are commonly created by conventional parenting. TCS is different. Why expect it to have the same kind of results as parenting within the conventional spectrum? And if it would have conventional results, why is it especially creepy or scary or weird or anything?

Notice the hatred. The main theme of my comments was that I didn't want anyone to be hurt. In return someone hopes that I be punished.

Dr. Foster: Would you please tell your son to stop?
Ned's Dad: We can't do it, man! That's discipline! That's like tellin' Gene Krupa not to go [starts banging on the desk] "boom boom bam bam bam, boom boom bam bam bam, boom boom boom bam ba ba ba ba, da boo boo tss!"
Ned's Dad: We don't believe in rules, like, we gave them up when we started livin' like freaky beatniks!
Dr. Foster: You don't believe in rules, yet you want to control Ned's anger.
Ned's Mom: Yeah. You gotta help us, Doc. We've tried nothin' and we're all out of ideas.

This person hasn't made any attempt to understand what TCS does advocate.

My daughter is 7 and she will take your eyes out before she lets you poke her with a needle --- and that's after the inevitable well-reasoned, polite, non-patronizing conversation about why vaccinations are important, which she of course understands and appreciates.

Based on the outcome, we can conclude the daughter did not gain the necessary knowledge of how to get through a vaccination from the conversation. That means either the conversation didn't contain the knowledge, or the daughter didn't understand it. Either he has made the mistake of thinking his daughter understood his explanations, when she didn't, or he has not given good enough explanations. So from his own story, we see the parent was wrong about something. Somehow he concludes that children are irrational and must be controlled by their parents who are better at life, and also that children finding vaccinations distressing could not be avoided.

Please stop guys.
- Paul Graham (site owner)

Apparently there's a limit to how much discussion is allowed. I think the limit only applies in cases where not everyone agrees. I think it's sad how pessimistic people are about creating agreement. It's not just children they think can't be persuaded of anything. It's also adult forum posters.

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7mvms/israel_kills_hamas_leader_and_his_wife_children/

Israel killed a senior Hamas terrorist. Reddit is sad. Comments follow each quote:

"Is it an outrage if a Hamas suicide bomber kills 10-20 Jews in a restaurant or reception?"

No, because the Palestinian backlash is predictable and avoidable. What do you expect when you starve people, cage them in like animals, and deprive them of their land and natural resources? Any normal person would become violent under those circumstances. Israeli's backwards policy towards Palestine is what fuels Hamas and keeps them strong. So when a Hamas suicide bomber blows up an Israeli mosque I simply see that as a natural consequence of Israeli policy. I certainly don't blame the Palestinians for being as angry as they are; I would be too.

Do you also blame the lion when it is taunted by vistors and then one day gets lose and goes on a killing spree?

This guy says he would kill Jews too, and so would "any normal person". He says it's completely natural to kill Jews, and that being Jewish is equivalent to mercilessly taunting non-Jews, like poking a tiger with a sharp stick.

I don't think that if these guys were in Israeli territory they would be taking down entire apartment buildings for individual people. There is just no way.

The only reason they do it is because they consider all of lives of the people in Gaza to be worthless. They blame every single man, woman, and child for what is happening.

This guy says Israel takes no care to avoid killing Palestinians because it doesn't care about their lives at all. But this is demonstrably false. Israel is very careful with collateral damage. For example, sometimes lets important terrorists escape, which it could kill, because they sleep with their family that night. Israel waits and hopes for a chance to kill them with less human shields around. But even more importantly, if Israel didn't care about the lives of Palestinians, it could just kill them all. It has nukes. It has overwhelming air power. Israel could wipe out whatever it wanted to, but it doesn't. Consider the times Israel has sent in ground troops to clear terrorists out of an area. What for? Why not just bomb the hell out of the area? The only purpose to sending in ground troops, and risking their lives, is to reduce the collateral damage.

Are you fucking joking? Even soldiers have the right to return home, and not to expect that fact to be used as some pathetic excuse for killing their family and neighbours.

If the same thing happened to an Israeli it would be condemned as an atrocious act of terrorism.

This guy is commenting on how Israel gave a 30 minute warning before the strike, and the terrorist told everyone, including his family, "stay here, so if Israel kills me, you'll die too, and then the commenters on Reddit will scream about how evil Israel is killing innocent bystanders".

If Israel wants peace so bad, why do they keep settling Palestinian land? Why do they continue the blockade of Gaza? That is all Hamas wanted to continue the truce. Doesn't Israel realize that those moves are just aggrevating the situation? Why can't they see that killing people isn't the answer?

If "killing people isn't the answer" then why is he defending Hamas, which has a goal of killing Jews?

What is happening in the Gaza Strip should not be taken lightly. It should cause us to question what it really means to be human.

And this guy is wondering if Jews are humans.

The strategy the Israeli's are using bares resemblance to how the Nazi's enclosed the Warsaw Ghettos.

If anything, we can take that irony away from this situation.

And this one thinks the Jews are a lot like the Nazis.

Hey Israel, do you know what your bomb-hit score is called in Hamas?

Job opening and promotion.

Bomb and kill can't be the only solution.

This guy thinks Hamas is so powerful that bombs could never destroy them.

They killed a democratically elected official of a democratic country. Nice. How hypocritical is the US being?

This guy thinks if you were democratically elected that justifies being a terrorist and makes you immune from criticism.

Fucking Nazis.

This guy is hateful but not thoughtful.

This isn't WAR! THIS IS MURDER!

And this one too.

Feynman says a lot of people have very fragile knowledge, and gives a couple examples where they know the answer to a problem, but then you change the problem a little, and basically the same answer would work, but they don't realize it. they know it, but they don't know how to apply it very well, unless it's asked in exactly the same way as when they learned it.

This stood out to me especially because of the word 'fragile' applied to know. I've used that word too, but I've never heard it done anywhere else. My idea (which is probably due to David Deutsch or to Kolya Wolf) can be explained a couple different ways.

One manifestation is that if someone is really interested in something, when they learn it, and they think about it a lot, then they will understand it in depth, and from lots of different angles, and they will figure out how to use it in lots of different ways, and they will integrate it with all the other things they know, so it plays a useful role in their overall way of thinking about the world. That's knowledge that *isn't* fragile, it's robust. Towards the opposite end of the spectrum is when you learn something the day before a test, and just try to remember the exact question that is likely to be on the test, and the answer. If you learn it like that, you'll probably forget after a couple days, and you never learn how to apply the idea to other issues -- that's fragile knowledge. I call it 'fragile' because it breaks very easily. You just change the problem situation a little and suddenly it stops working. It's not robust.

One way fragile knowledge gets created is when people are forced to learn something. Maybe you can make them learn the specific answers to the exact questions you ask, if they are scared enough of displeasing you. But that's never going to make them think about it, on their own time, for fun, and integrate the ideas into their personality, and make it a part of how they see the world. Quite the opposite. They are going to have really bad feelings attached to it, and avoid it when they can, and not see any of the ways to apply it to more of life.

Another way fragile knowledge gets created is when people do work purely for the money. Then they solve the exact problem their employer wants solved, and that's it, and they don't think about how they could use the stuff they are doing in more ways, cause they only care about the money and not the knowledge.

Another idea is that this connects to structural epistemology, and different knowledge structures can be more or less fragile. Almost no one knows what structural epistemology is, except computer programmers, but they aren't philosophers, so they don't know what epistemology is, but they do understand the idea. So when I give examples of knowledge structure, I usually give programming examples, cause it's the only field where people know much about the difference between different ways of structuring the same knowledge, and discuss it all the time, and even write books about it. So let's say you want a program to add up 2+2 for you. Now one way you could do this is write a calculator program that can add up any numbers, and also multiply and do other operations. Then it can add up 2+2, but it's also robust, it can add up 3+3, and all sorts of other numbers. It has knowledge in it that lets it apply to lots of questions besides just 2+2. Now suppose you wrote this program:

print 2+2

It's a lot more fragile. When you want to add 3+3, you need to write a new program. This old one is no good. It can't solve any other problems except 2+2. It's not adaptable to other situations except the exact one its designed for. So it's just like studying only for the test tomorrow, and what you learn isn't adaptable to any other situations. Of course, this fragile program is really easy to write, so sometimes it's good enough. The point isn't the fragile way is always worse. But it's different, and it is *fragile*, and it's a good thing to be aware of. And for a lot of people, most of their knowledge of the world is fragile, and that's a big problem! Some people never create much robust knowledge, and that's sad.

There are many common myths about Godwin. One is that he was a socialist (or even a communist). Another that he was a revolutionary (actually there is an anti-revolutions chapter in Political Justice). Another that he was an opponent of Burke (actually he praised Burke several times). Here is one of the more offensive myths:

A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell, p. 28

Thomas Paine's equally polemical reply, The Rights of Man (1791), anticipated in many ways the more systematic unfolding of the unconstrained vision by Godwin two years later [in Political Justice].

Paine's book is in favor of violence, which Godwin detested, and is fully unserious and hateful. The quality of argument is extremely low. Paine simply did not understand Burke's arguments, and so replied with insults and vague utopian grandeur. Godwin, who appreciated Burke and tradition both, and wrote serious and thoughtful arguments, was nothing like Paine.

I don't think Sowell believes this myth due to a political bias. When he says "equally polemical" the other book in question is _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ by Edmund Burke. That is a horrible libel directed at Burke, who Sowell considers a conservative like himself. In fact, Burke's book was not a polemic, and is not comparable to Paine's. Burke wrote a thoughtful, well-argued, objective, serious, and fair book.

Popper was very interested in how athens became so great. his first explanation was culture clash. people like xenophanes and pythagoras came and brought with them different ideas, and this led to questioning conventions and fruitful disagreements. but he did not think this was a full explanation.

today i found out another part of the story, which Popper worked out late in life. it is that Pisistratus (a tyrant of athens) had homer written down as books. before that, homer was an oral tradition, and books were individual things guarded by priests. well, homer got written down in lots of copies, and athens became literate, and everyone read it. then private individuals had some other poetry written down, and sold it, and that was popular too. this paved the way for people to write books for the purpose of commercial publication (the first being, Popper thinks, _On Nature_ by Anaxagoras). and so Athens had the first *book market*, where many books could be purchased cheaply. this also led to competition among writers to make better books.

Popper mentions a nice confirming fact. He found records of large shipments of papyrus from egypt to athens, starting in a year when Pisistratus was in power. he also found several mentions of the book market in surviving books from the time.

You can find this theory in _In Search of a Better World_. look for the chapter title mentioning books *and* the one after it.

_In Search of a Better World_ by Karl Popper, p. 109

When two or more different cultures come into contact, people realize that their ways and manners, so long taken for granted, are not 'natural', not the only possible ones, neither decreed by the gods nor part of human nature. They discover that their culture is the work of men and their history. It thus opens a world of new possibilities: it opens the windows and it lets in fresh air. This is a kind of sociological law, and it explains a lot. And it certainly played an important role in Greek history.

_The Meaning of It All_ pp. 114-115

Who are the witch doctors [of today]? Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, of course. If you look at all of the complicated ideas that they have developed in an infinitesimal amount of time, if you compare to any other of the sciences how long it takes to get one idea after the other, if you consider all the structures and inventions and complicated things, the ids and the egos, the tensions and the forces, and the pushes and the pulls, I tell you they can't all be there. It's too much for one brain or a few brains to have cooked up in such a short amount of time.

_In Search of a Better World_ by Karl Popper, p 87

Most philosophers are incapable of recognizing either a problem or a solution, even when they are staring them in the face: these things simply lie outside their field of interest.