Re: Taking Children Seriously

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Jul 10 2003 - 20:44:33 MDT

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    Peter C. McCluskey wrote:
    > I generally agree that children should be treated as rational beings,
    > and that disagreements between adults and children should cause us to
    > suspect a disagreement in goals rather than that the children are being
    > foolish and need to have the adults' opinions forced on them.

    Really? Children are rational? Puts 'em one up on adults, if so.

    Children are not rational, and are indeed quite foolish. So are parents.
      An unusually rational child can easily make wiser judgments than their
    parents, regardless of the difference in experience, especially if the
    parents are using their experience only to rationalize the mistakes they
    started out with. Intelligence must be applied in order to work.

    -- 
    Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
    Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
    


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