Pod Insights Dwarkesh Podcast Sarah Fitz-Claridge - Taking Children Seriously About this episode Sarah Fitz-Claridge is a writer, coach, and speaker with a fallibilist worldview. She started the journal that became Taking Children Seriously in the early 1990s after being surprised by the heated audience reactions she was getting when talking about children. She has spoken all over the world about her educational philosophy, and you can find transcripts of some of her talks on her website.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 What children should be learning is what they want, is what interests them, is how to solve problems. They don't learn that by being institutionalized for 12 years and bossed about by an authoritarian teacher who doesn't know very much. They just, it's, it's, it's an insane idea.
0:24 Dwarkesh Patel? Hey folks, and welcome to the Lunar Society Podcast. Today, I had the great pleasure of talking with Sarah Fitzcleridge. Sarah is a writer, coach, and speaker with a fallible worldview. She started a journal that became Taking Children Seriously in the early 1990s, after being surprised by the heated audience reactions that she was getting when talking about children. She has spoken all over the world about her educational philosophy, and you can find transcripts of some of her talks on her website at fitz-claridge.com, and the link to that will also be in the description. So, we had a very interesting conversation. I'm broadly sympathetic with Sarah's worldview, though I do have my differences. So, I had a lot of fun playing devil's advocate. But whether you agree with her or not, Sarah
1:05 Dwarkesh Patel? is an incredibly original and first principles thinker about how our society treats children. So, without further to do, here's Sarah Fitzcleridge.
1:23 Dwarkesh Patel? So, Sarah, can you explain what Taking Children Seriously is?
1:26 Speaker 00 Yes. Taking Children Seriously is an educational philosophy that takes seriously the idea that human beings are fallible, and that includes parents. So, instead of interacting with our children coercively, we are trying to...
1:50 Speaker 00 Create consent with them. We're trying to find solutions to problems that don't involve coercion. Because coercion decides issues under an irrational institution. It embodies the theory that might makes right, which is false. So we don't do that. It's actually a new view of children in that the standard view of children is a bit like the view of women before they were emancipated, or say, black people when they were slaves in America. It's, it's not that they're not people.
2:33 Speaker 00 They are people. This is the, the standard view. But they're not quite able to control their own lives. You know, they need a benevolent patriarchal
2:48 Speaker 00 parent, husband, slave master to just make sure that, you know, nothing goes wrong for them.
2:57 Speaker 00 And of course, it's, it's not that parents are trying to be dictators over their children. It's just, that is the view that really the whole world has about children, that they are not quite the same as the rest of us. They're not quite rational and creative. And so we need to manage and control them to make sure that they turn out to be citizens who can be responsible for themselves. So I think instead that children are creative and rational. And that they're creative and rational from birth. You know, we're born with human minds, not
3:40 Speaker 00 just animal minds, but we have this human mind as well. And it, it just doesn't make sense to think in terms of Rationalität und Kreativität wurde auf ein späteres Stadium aufgelegt. Und so ist es von Anfang an. Wie lernt ein Kind Sprache? Ein Baby lernt Sprache, wenn er nicht kreativ und rational ist?
4:09 Speaker 00 Also, um es ernst zu sagen, könnte man sagen, es ist eine non-konduzierende educational Theorie. Es geht um Kinder zu ernähren, in einer Weise, die keine Konzessionen enthalten.
4:20 Dwarkesh Patel? Ja. Nur für die Publikum, meine Position ist aktuell zwischen deinem und der konventionellen Position. Also hoffentlich kann ich dir näher zu deiner Position nennen. Also, jetzt ist ein offener Argument, dass, wenn es um Frauen oder andere Rassen ging, wir sie als eine andere Art von Ding betrachten. Aber Kinder sind tatsächlich eine andere Art von Ding, richtig? Wie sie biologisch von Ärzten unterschiedlich sind. Hat das nicht bedeuten, dass sie unterschiedliche Rechte haben? Vielleicht weniger Rechte?
4:51 Speaker 00 Das ist das gleiche cirkuläre Argument, das im Vergleich zu Frauen und Schwarzen verwendet wurde. Well, ihre Haut ist schwarz, also sind sie natürlich nicht die gleichen wie der Rest von uns. Well, sie sind Frauen, also ist es natürlich eine tatsächliche Unterschiede da. Sie sind keine Männer, sie sind keine weißen Männer. Es ist das gleiche cirkuläre Argument. Es...
5:13 Dwarkesh Patel? Ja.
5:13 Speaker 00 Es macht keinen Sinn. Und ich denke...
5:16 Dwarkesh Patel? Allerdings...
5:16 Speaker 00 Entschuldigung.
5:17 Dwarkesh Patel? Nein, geh weiter.
5:19 Speaker 00 Ich denke, dass es in der Zukunft ein Zeit kommt, wenn die Menschen sich zurückblicken, wie wir Kinder jetzt betrachten. Und sie werden so gefangen sein, wie es uns erscheint, wenn wir uns zurückblicken an die Argumente, die die Menschen in der Vergangenheit gemacht haben, über Schwarze und Frauen.
5:37 Dwarkesh Patel? Ja, nein, ich stimme eigentlich mit dir darüber. Besonders weil es um die Schulleitungssysteme geht. Aber jetzt, hier ist, um das Argument fortzuführen. Mit, zwischen verschiedenen Rassen, diese sind superficialen Unterschiede, richtig? Und zwischen verschiedenen Generationen, sie sind nicht völlig superficial, aber sie sind minimal, wenn es um die Unterschiede zwischen, du weißt, einem zwei-jährigen und einem 18-jährigen ist. Wie es scheint, gibt es eine solche Unterschiede im Geschlecht, über das wir reden. Es ist völlig wahrscheinlich, dass ein Kind, der smarter ist als ein zwei-jähriger, richtig? Jetzt, warum ist ein Kind nicht an den gleichen Rechten als Konzessionen?
6:14 Speaker 00 Nein, nein, das ist, das ist, das ist falsch.
6:19 Speaker 00 In the in the relevant sense, children of whatever age are the same because we have creativity and rationality. If you if you're talking about a baby who's just been born and knows nothing except genetic knowledge, like an animal has genetic knowledge, but basically that's all they have. But that child, by the time the child is two years old or so, the child will be speaking and doing many other things that a chimp or any other animal will never be doing. And that's because of this creativity and rationality. You know, something has happened in those two years.
7:01 Speaker 00 And it's that the child has been forming inexplicit conjectures about what words mean, about what we call different things, and about a huge number of other things. It's not just language, obviously. Whereas a chimp or whatever animal is doing none of those things.
7:21 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
7:21 Speaker 00 So in case in case what your question is sort of suggesting that I'm saying, leave a baby to its own devices, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is coercion versus not coercion. I'm not saying that we don't assist our children. Of course, we do. And we do know, we do know more than a baby. So the question is, what do we do with this greater knowledge? Do we think that it justifies coercing the child or not?
8:00 Speaker 00 And when you're coercing, that is, you're you're basically saying might makes right, and it doesn't.
8:09 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah. So I guess it would be useful to define coercion in this context. How do you think about the coercion of children? What does that mean?
8:15 Speaker 00 Well, coercion is is causing someone to.
8:23 Speaker 00 Do something or not do something against their will, roughly speaking, that's that's a way of putting it. I mean, it there is more to it than that. I I think that we can look at more subtle issues than that. But basically, you're you're talking about imposing your will on someone else against their will. So that's what I would say for coercion.
8:47 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. So I I remember vaguely that chimps, they did like an experiment where chimps and children were given like something like an IQ test, but it was like a very basic one. And it turned out that chimps actually had higher working memory. So I but they obviously have a lower capacity to learn. And you know, learning requires creativity and we could talk about that as well. So the reason that children are entitled to a right against coercion is because of the fact that they can learn, right? As opposed, it's not just their pure intelligence. It just like what they could become.
9:23 Speaker 00 It's that they are creative and rational beings. And a chimp is not. A chimp, a chimp has genetic knowledge, which allows a certain range of behaviors and things it can learn. But it's it's limited, whereas human creativity is not limited. And that applies equally to children as it does to adults.
9:51 Dwarkesh Patel? Although, I mean, a two year old is limited, right? It it's not as if a two year old can do anything that an adult human can do. And why don't these limits entail certain sorts of limitations on the rights that child has as well?
10:04 Speaker 00 Well, I would say that children actually are more creative and rational than adults, not less. And especially young children. If you look at the enormous amount of stuff that young children learn and how difficult it is for many adults to to learn things. I if anything, they have more creativity and rationality, not less.
10:31 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, yeah. Although if we're going to apply that criteria on, I mean, there are many things that adults can do that children can't do. One of them is just having like formal verbal arguments about and like reasoning through different different possibilities. You know, you can talk to an adult and say, you know, is this career choice the best career choice for you? And you can go through reasons, pros and cons. You really can't do that to a toddler. And what people would say that this is the basic definition of rationality, right? Like, can we engage in a conversation where we're both able to make explicit our positions and go through the, you know, the different parts of our argument? We can't do that with children.
11:12 Speaker 00 Well, actually, we can. But if you just define rationality to exclude young children, then obviously you're going to say, look, therefore, young children are irrational. But rationality means your ability to actually learn, create new knowledge. And so, as I said, babies are clearly rational because they they learn language. That's clear evidence of rationality.
11:44 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. So we'll have to come back to that because that's that's that's going to be a longer discussion. Let's talk about something we probably both agree on, which is the treatment of people who are teenagers or younger than teenagers. The impact that mandatory schooling has on people within this age range. Because I would say that actually, people in this age range should have a presumption against coercion and that the schooling system is a real affront to their rights against coercion.
12:16 Speaker 00 Well, one thing I just want to say about that is if you're imagining that you can raise a child from birth with a coercive, top-down authoritarian dictatorship sort of relationship, and then suddenly switch at whatever age you think that they become rational in your sense, by that time, you've already wrecked your relationship with your child. And I don't know how how it's going to go well. It's
12:52 Speaker 00 We need to start from the beginning with a view of children that they are rational, they are creative, they are reasonable, rather than thinking that you can just change course at some later state, later stage.
13:10 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, although is that, is that true? I mean, you know, most parents, I would say almost all parents raise their kids, at least to a certain age, as if they are inferior to them and they must obey them. And, you know, most kids have a healthy relationship with their parents, maybe not healthy in the way you would define it probably, but they don't resent them in any sort of explicit sense, right? There's not an animosity there.
13:34 Speaker 00 I think that there is actually a lot of resentment and
13:42 Speaker 00 I'm not sure that I would say animosity, but I think that there is a lot of resentment between parents and children both ways. And there is, people are, and it's, and it's the parents as well, because they have this view of children that is not, at least as far as I'm concerned, is not correct. It does create friction and it does pit parents and child against each other. So it does cause problems.
14:11 Dwarkesh Patel? Right.
14:12 Speaker 00 Instead of solving problems, you're coercing the child. And, and then of course, sometimes, parents who have this authoritarian mindset are also tend to be self sacrificial with their children, like they're thinking, right, I've got to do this for my child. But it's, it's not that the child is requesting something and they are sacrificing in that way. There's just a lot of, with coercion tends to come self sacrifice. And the whole thing is not rational. And problem, when problems aren't solved, people, it hurts people. And that includes the parents as well, not just the children.
14:55 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah. Can you talk about what education would look like if you were, when you're parenting somebody, or when you're within a, I guess, a school-like context? How should children be educated?
15:10 Speaker 00 Children should, children should be supported to learn whatever they want to learn and how they want to learn it. And very few children actually would want to go to school. That school is such an inefficient way of learning anything. And it's so, it's so authoritarian. The, the whole structure of the school system is, is this incredibly authoritarian structure. So I, I think the vast majority of children, if not under psychological or other pressure to, to lie, would say that they definitely wouldn't choose to go to school.
15:55 Speaker 00 They might choose to go to some kind of formal education later when they have decided that they want to become a doctor, say, then obviously they're going to go through formal education. But it, that might not happen until later.
16:12 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah. And it, it's not mandatory in the same sense.
16:15 Speaker 00 Absolutely not, no.
16:16 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, the child gets to choose.
16:18 Speaker 00 The school system is, is, I think it's a sort of throwback to the past when people were trying to turn out good factory workers. It's, you know, we, we, in our knowledge-based society now and moving forward, that's not, we're not looking for good factory workers who will obey and just do, do the, the mindless task that someone is setting them. We're looking for people who are creative, who come up with new ideas that will solve problems so that the world will be improved and will make progress and suffering will be ended and, you know.
17:04 Dwarkesh Patel? Right.
17:05 Speaker 00 System is just damps down people's creativity. It's stultifying for
17:11 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
17:12 Speaker 00 The rest of your people.
17:14 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. The objection people have to this view is even if you want people to be creative and come up with their own ideas, there's a certain base of knowledge of the need to be able to engage with problems on the frontier in the first place. And that you need children are just not going to want to go through the preliminary steps of that are necessary to get up to that high level where they can get to solving their own problems. And therefore you need to course them at a younger age to learn the basics so that they can eventually become creative.
17:44 Speaker 00 The problem with this body of knowledge idea is that if everyone has the same body of knowledge, where are the new ideas going to come from? If you think about it in the past, before schools,
18:02 Speaker 00 the new ideas came from people whose history was completely different from other people's history, who had learnt something for the sheer joy of learning that thing. They didn't think, oh, I have to do this. I have to study this body of knowledge, these this foundation of knowledge. And then I'll have all the ideas I need to come up with something new. No, it's a new ideas are more likely to come from people who's who haven't got the same body of knowledge as everyone else. So I I just think that's that idea is a mistake.
18:38 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. And furthermore, even if that idea was true, the idea that the modern schooling system or anything that even closely resembles it gives you a useful body of knowledge in the first place is it it's it's rebutted by an experience of just like visiting school for one day, right? You're memorizing the difference between like alliteration or and assinants or you know, what date was this battle fought? And you know, some person is droning on and also the idea that then they get to decide when you can use a bathroom or when you can eat. Like somehow that this this level of coercion is necessary to give people just a basic foundation to be able to interact with the world.
19:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
19:19 Dwarkesh Patel? That seems improbable to me.
19:21 Speaker 00 Absolutely. I I'm hundred percent with you.
19:24 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
19:25 Speaker 00 Yeah.
19:26 Dwarkesh Patel? So Brian Kaplan, who was actually my first guest on this podcast, he wrote a book called Cases Against Education. And he homeschools his own kids. The basic idea is that people are much less educated than you would expect, given the 12 years of mandatory schooling they have. You know, people don't know the basics about how government works, how the basics about math or science or anything once they leave college. To astonishing degree. The one thing he did say, though, was when he homeschools his kids. The one thing he courses his children to learn is mathematics, because he has noticed that people who are in the unschooling movement, that the children who are raised up this way, they seem fine in every way, except for the fact that they struggle with even basic arithmetic.
20:10 Dwarkesh Patel? And so he supposes that children are just not going to want to go through the basic steps of math. And math is actually an important subject that is required in many problem areas. So it's important to course your children to learn math.
20:22 Speaker 00 Well, for a start, I don't think it's true that children taken seriously don't know how to do arithmetic. I think that's ridiculous. I don't know. I don't know which unschoolers he's talking about. Some of them do have some strange ideas, such as not allowing children to learn or trying to stop them learning stuff until later. So I don't know. But in terms of the mathematics idea that we must coerce our children to learn mathematics. Well, for a start, I disagree that most people need mathematics. I don't think that's true.
21:04 Speaker 00 To the extent that it is true, it's people learn it naturally anyway. But also, I think it's this idea is patently false, if you think about it.
21:17 Speaker 00 Every new idea in mathematics, every discovery in the field of mathematics, was discovered by someone who was not being coerced to learn maths. It was discovered by someone who who was found mathematics a joy, a delight, fascinating. And that is, that's how they came to discover it. And so, yes, it might be the case that most people don't feel like that about mathematics. Probably a lot of that is to do with the horrendous coercion in school about mathematics. It's enough to give anyone a lifelong aversion to it.
21:55 Speaker 00 But even apart from that, assuming that it's true that most people just are not into maths. Well, most people don't need maths. I just don't think it's true that we have to coerce anyone to learn anything. It's just not true. People who haven't been coerced, who've been taken seriously, have no trouble at all learning whatever they need to learn when they realise that they need it. It's, it's, we don't need to go through 12 years of torture or even, you know, a year or two of torture at home with with home education under coercion to learn mathematics.
22:39 Speaker 00 That's ridiculous.
22:41 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. I'm of, I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I think you're right in the sense that I remember reading there was some superintendent who in his or her district decided that children would not be required to learn maths before the seventh grade. And it turned out that the children who learned maths in the seventh grade were no more behind after eighth grade in mathematics than the people who had been learning maths since, you know, first grade. So maybe it is true that you can pick it up at a later date. But I worry, so, you know, there's, there will always be people like, you know, Gauss or Newton, who just are intrinsically motivated to learn maths.
23:21 Dwarkesh Patel? And, you know, maybe for them, maybe for these people who are going to make the advancements in their mathematical knowledge, they'll be able to do that without a course of education system. But what about the people who are would want to become programmers, but they realize by the time they become eighteen that they they just don't have a strong enough grasp on mathematical concepts to be able to take further steps in and towards becoming an engineer, or just towards even balancing their budget, right?
23:51 Speaker 00 I I don't think that's true. I think that when people are pursuing their own interests, it it just all happens naturally, and it is in no way, if someone wants to be a programmer or an engineer or a doctor, and they and maybe they only suddenly realize this later on in their childhood, although I think in many cases, people have this kind of drive earlier on in their childhood. But even if it is later in their childhood, people can learn later. I mean, for example, not not that this is about mathematics, but Karl Popper's PhD thesis was not in philosophy,
24:35 Speaker 00 it was in psychology, education, educational psychology. And yet, he became one of the most important philosophers ever. So there is an example of someone who changed his direction late in his life, relatively speaking. And I I think the same is true for maths. I I just don't agree with Brian Kaplan about this.
25:00 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. And I do agree with you that the presumption, you shouldn't just course children just in case it happens to help them.
25:07 Speaker 00 Exactly.
25:08 Dwarkesh Patel? Like you my my position is probably a little bit milder than yours. But I I think there should be like a very good reason with to course children, not just like in case they happen to need this skill.
25:19 Speaker 00 Well, if there's a very good reason, surely you can persuade your child of that reason. If it is a good reason.
25:29 Dwarkesh Patel? Right, although children are not are not known for being easily persuaded.
25:32 Speaker 00 Well, maybe that's because of the way that they are thwarted left and right throughout their childhood. And so then they don't trust the adults around them because they they how how is a child who's been thwarted and coerced their whole childhood to know when you're saying something that actually is important, that is actually in their interest, rather than just another thwarting for this for some silly reason.
26:01 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. So now another worry about this way of raising children is the view that school teaches people, even if the knowledge itself is not useful or necessary, just the act of just like getting instruction and following it that teaches people self-control, discipline, executive function, it lets them know how to engage with authority and with hierarchy when they enter the real world. So they'll know how to interact with their boss or how to, you know, exist within the company, within the community, and so on.
26:35 Speaker 00 That's that's ridiculous. To the extent that they will encounter authority, work situations, that kind of thing later on, they can they can learn, they can learn how to navigate that kind of thing. Then the idea, this idea of teaching children self-discipline by coercing them by by disciplining them is is an equivocation on the word discipline. It's it's it's making a it's suggesting that the discipline, the self-discipline that,
27:12 Speaker 00 say, a concert pianist or an MMA fighter has is is the thing that that self-discipline is what you instill by coercing children. That's that's rubbish. In in the case of the Olympic athlete or the MMA fighter or the concert pianist, this is something that they that they live for. And it's it's their own passion. And so they are pursuing it fully, wholeheartedly. That is a completely different thing from disciplining children. Disciplining children says, don't pursue your passions wholeheartedly. You need to do what I say.
27:58 Speaker 00 So it's it's like the opposite. It's actually training children not to be able to follow their passions with full heart and really going for it.
28:08 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, that's a good point. Now, there's a concern that why should we expect that passions that children have to reflect the actual skills and knowledge they will they should have to be able to function well in the world. You know, people have plenty of passions, but maybe maybe there's certain things that children need to learn regardless of what their passions are. And that the child is not in a good place to understand what what these things are that he must he or she must learn. Because he has not been he or she has not been exposed to the world yet to know what problem situations will arise.
28:44 Speaker 00 Well, if you have a non coercive relationship with your children, then you can talk about these things and you can and you can express your your concerns about, you know, that you need to know this because of this and and you can have a conversation. You can you can persuade by reason. If you if you just impose it, then the child probably is still not agreeing with you. And you don't the effect of that is is not predictable. So you might find that these little bits of coercion that you want to get in there because you're worried about some future thing that might never happen, but sort of
29:27 Speaker 00 make everything go wrong in the present. And really, what matters is how we're living in the present. Not that we can't have goals and things that we think are important for the future and we can have those conversations. But if you're making life miserable in the present, then what you're teaching the child is that life is miserable and that you that in life you can't actually solve problems. You can't get what you want. So you might as well just give up.
30:02 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
30:02 Speaker 00 That is not conducive to anything important that the child will want to do.
30:10 Speaker 00 You know, doing something important. It it doesn't help to have coercion added to that. It just doesn't help. It just it it uh it's telling the child to that he can't trust himself, that he has to just live for the approval of someone else. That's not, that's not the the kind of state of mind that that concert pianist is in or or that Olympic athlete. That's
30:40 Speaker 00 that's not how it is.
30:41 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, yeah. Uh no, that's a very good point. Now, um is there where we can actually know the psychological impact of this kind of uh the the the conventional way of raising children? I I am skeptical that it does have the um on most people, it has a traumatic, a very traumatic effect. Because um it just generally, just changing people's personality or their um the the way they interact the world. It it's uh it it's just very hard to do that. Uh parents, uh you you can, for example, there's a lot lot of literature with twin studies where, you know, twins that are separated at birth and are adopted by different parents. Um regardless of how different the parents are, usually most of the difference, usually the twins are actually pretty similar,
31:25 Dwarkesh Patel? even if they're raised in different households. And so I'm skeptical of the idea that raising children this way will significantly uh will make them significantly different than they would have been otherwise. Now, that doesn't mean that justifies the current uh treatment of children, right? Like you don't, you're not changing adults by coercing them, but that still me, that still doesn't make the coercion of adults okay. But it does mean that I doubt that there's some sort of deep psychological harm that's done by the conventional approach.
31:52 Speaker 00 Does the, does suppose you're right that there's, it makes no difference. Does that make immoral behavior unobjectionable?
32:03 Dwarkesh Patel? No, they, yeah, so that just just as I said, yeah.
32:05 Speaker 00 When it comes to adults, we're not, we're not looking at the adult and saying, well, um, there's no ill effect from coercing my wife, you know, if I think she needs to be kept under control. And you you show me the studies that show me, show that there's a, there's a bad effect. So it's fine. Obviously, when it comes to adults, we don't use those arguments. We, you know, we don't say, oh, uh, the the research shows that um.
32:38 Speaker 00 The corporal punishment of of children causes a problem, you know, later and therefore you probably shouldn't do it. We're not, we don't say that when it comes to adults. We say it's wrong to, it's wrong to hit someone.
32:54 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
32:56 Speaker 00 It's thinking about the effects is not the point. That's, that is an example of this different view that we have of children, this, this, this view of children that is, I think, a mistake.
33:13 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. Yeah. You don't get to lock somebody up for 11 years in an institution and say that it's not a big deal because it doesn't, we can't tell if there's any long lasting effects from that.
33:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's, that's a, so an immoral, it's an immoral argument. You wouldn't make the same argument of an adult, about an adult.
33:29 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. So now, how do you respond to the needs and demands, not the demand, sorry, but the, like the needs and wants of a, a, a very young child who might have unreasonable demands? Or even a nonverbal toddler who it's even hard to know what the needs and desires are.
33:46 Speaker 00 Well, for a start, I don't think it's unreasonable. As I said, I think that children have reason, just like we do. So it, so with, with pre-verbal, I think that this is another example of, of the difference in view, actually. Because most people have this view of babies, say, as just being unreasonable and, and just crying and, and so on. They're not paying attention to the signals that the baby is giving. And so the baby is, the baby's signals are ignored. And so the baby starts really screaming. And then parents do things like, right, I'm going to
34:30 Speaker 00 force the child to learn to sleep through, through the night by ignoring her cries.
34:38 Speaker 00 The problem with that is, number one, you're you're you're teaching the baby that the baby can't have an effect on the world, that problems are not soluble.
34:49 Speaker 00 But also, as I say, you're you are causing this conflict-ridden relationship to be created. Whereas if you're taking your baby seriously, then you're paying attention and you are trying to make conjectures about what it is that the baby might be wanting or not wanting. And so you're responding positively at a much earlier stage. And so you don't have the screaming, you know, the sort of terrible stuff that you get in in most
35:30 Speaker 00 homes, like this idea of the terrible twos and temper tantrums. That doesn't happen if you're taking your children seriously. It just doesn't happen because you're never, it's never getting to where it's that kind of a problem. You're actually responsive to your child.
35:52 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. So you have more experience with children than I do. So I'll defer to you there. So I just don't have a strong position on how children turn out based on how they're raised. My, I guess my null hypothesis is that until I see the evidence that it makes a difference, or the evidence that like the kids won't have temper tantrums if they're raised this way. I'll, it seems safe to assume that they will. But you probably just experience in life will let me know otherwise.
36:22 Speaker 00 Yeah.
36:25 Speaker 00 Why, why would someone end up
36:30 Speaker 00 end up that upset if they weren't, if their needs weren't being ignored at a much earlier stage?
36:40 Dwarkesh Patel? I guess you're gonna ask the same thing of, okay, so let's take a person who is an adult, but is mentally ill, right? Now, he might have tantrums, and but you would never suggest that, or you could suggest that it's because, well, actually, that's just a response to what's going on in this world. But you could say, well, a better explanation for what's going on is that he's just mentally ill, right? And there's probably some things that are upsetting him. The proximal cause of his tantrums is the fact that he's mentally ill. And you could say the same thing about a two-year-old. It's like, okay, so there might be things that are upsetting him or her. But like, the proximal explanation is just that these are the terrible twos.
37:17 Speaker 00 Well, it's not true. That is, that's a myth that if you do raise children non-coercively, you will discover that that's just a myth.
37:30 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
37:32 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, I'll have to find out for myself at some point.
37:35 Speaker 00 When you're paying attention to your very young child, then you're noticing when, you know, when people are not completely happy, when there's, when a problem, when there's a problem, you see it in their eyes. Why is, why is the parent not noticing that there's a problem until the child is in a screaming, traumatic, you know, traumatized state on the floor? Like, why is that happening?
38:05 Dwarkesh Patel? Right.
38:06 Speaker 00 It doesn't need to happen. It just doesn't need to happen. And children who, who have experience of their needs being met and not being thwarted, they trust that there's, you know, that their needs are going to be met.
38:22 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, so I think my parents' philosophy on this was, they explained it to me at some point, and you'll disagree with this very much. But their idea was, if you respond to tantrums, you're teaching the child that the way you get a response is by throwing a tantrum. Whereas if you ignore the tantrums and then respond to the child when he or she is being more reasonable, then you're teaching the child that, you know, tantrums are not the way you get what you want. And but that if you're in another mood, then that's the way you should interact with the world.
38:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, using dog training techniques on children is, I think, is just immoral. And if you think about it from a young child's perspective.
39:06 Speaker 00 What that is doing when you are shunning them, ignoring them, you're basically withdrawing love. And for a child, a young child, that is absolutely terrifying. So I, I think that if parents could put themselves in their young children's minds and see how it is for those children, I don't think that they would want to do that. And, you know, we are not animal, I mean, we are animals, but we have a human, a human mind. So the, the question is whether you want to be training your children by dog training techniques, by behaviorist
39:48 Speaker 00 operant conditioning or classical conditioning, or whether you want to use reason.
39:56 Dwarkesh Patel? Right.
39:56 Speaker 00 Coercion decides issues under an irrational institution. And so you can't get the right answer that way.
40:05 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah. Now, one objection that I've encountered people, oh, sorry, go ahead.
40:09 Speaker 00 No, no, carry on.
40:11 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah. One objection people seem to have when I talk about these ideas, they worry that children in their natural state are uncurious, lazy, or not necessarily lazy, but just unmotivated by the kinds of things that would probably make them have a better life when they're adults. So they, they would probably spend all day like watching TV or playing video games or something like that. They aren't going to do the things that we would optimistically hope they would do with their free time if we just let them non-coercively spend their days. So they're not going to be, you know, exploring and learning and reading and all those things.
40:44 Speaker 00 Well, speaking as one who was raised in the standard way, not the way I'm suggesting,
40:52 Speaker 00 I tried to do everything I could to escape from the, the coercion and the fighting and the endless.
41:02 Speaker 00 Stuff that was my time was, you know, school and homework and ballet lessons and piano lessons and violin lessons and ballet lessons, acrobatics and all the other stuff. And I would escape to my room whenever I could. And in my case, this was before computers and computer games. So in my case, it was reading. But I, I think it's in no way surprising if children raised in the standard way need an escape into things like video games. Who wouldn't? It's, it's, it helps people to relax and to calm down.
41:44 Speaker 00 And it's, so I think that a lot of that, a lot of what you, what you might see as laziness and um doing something that you might think is mindless, although actually I don't think it's mindless at all. I think it's very educational to play video games. Is, is just needing to just calm down from all the stress of life in the, in the coercive family and the, with all the schooling and everything. So, so there is that. So for a start, I don't think it's true that children, well, it's not true. Children left to their own, I mean, it's not left to their own devices, but not coerced,
42:27 Speaker 00 would do nothing but play video games. But even if they wanted to do that, I think that that might well be a, a positive thing. Now, it is possible that it could be a negative thing. It could be that a child has no other real options, in which case, obviously that's a mistake. The parent is, is not um giving the child enough real options that are interesting, that are engage the child's interests and attention. But apart from that, with that caveat, I think that doing things like playing video games and watching television are incredibly educational. I mean, if you think about it,
43:11 Speaker 00 if an alien came from outer space, what would the quickest way to learn about our culture be? Well, it would probably be doing things like watching soap operas on television, rather than someone trying to teach them in a school situation. They would learn much more inexplicably from watching television than they would get from lessons about it.
43:37 Dwarkesh Patel? Right.
43:38 Speaker 00 So I think that people are mistaken about how educational these things are. And it's completely mistaken to think that that children who aren't coerced are not curious. It's the it's entirely the opposite. Do do we not notice how children's curiosity when they're a young child seems to just disappear in their later childhood? Can it not be something to do with with the the way that they're educated and raised?
44:09 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. Yeah, it would be astonishing if millions of years of evolution resulted would decided that the best way to produce a survival machine would be to have something that lays around for eighteen the first eighteen years of its life and does nothing, right? Just like from first principles, you can anticipate that there's probably a reason that we spend the first part of our life as children and that, you know, you would just expect evolution to have trained us to be curious and to explore because, you know, that's probably the reason we're children in the first place.
44:38 Speaker 00 Yeah.
44:40 Dwarkesh Patel? And as far as the video games go, I always tell my friends when they make this objection that they're just gonna play video games all day. It's like, where's the evidence that this is any worse a time way to spend time than going to school, right? If you just look at the studies on the efficacy of school, you know, they're wasting their time there anyways. But the fact is that they're getting they're suffering while they're spending their time there. So at least they're not suffering while they're playing video games, right?
45:05 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, I think it's I think it's more positive than that. But yes. And what what children should be learning is what they want, is what interests them is how to solve problems. They don't learn that by being institutionalized for 12 years and and bossed about by an authoritarian teacher who doesn't know very much. They they just it's it's it's an insane idea.
45:34 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, yeah, I I think back to, you know, uh, like my years in schooling and it just the amount of not only wasted time that I was bored or uh uh uh or just didn't want to be there, but also the opportunity cost, just the things I could have learned at a much younger age.
45:51 Speaker 00 Yes.
45:52 Dwarkesh Patel? Um, right, like this time in the child's uh uh there's first of all, the fact that, you know, children have a different sleep cycle than adults. And so you're they're sleep deprived, and that's probably messing them up.
46:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
46:03 Dwarkesh Patel? Messing up their development.
46:04 Speaker 00 Yeah.
46:05 Dwarkesh Patel? There's also the fact that you're using um all their time with homework and with schoolwork. I think in the US, it's like average of three hours a day of homework. That's after eight hours of schooling. Um, so where's the time for the child to do the kinds of things that uh would make them grow and would help them develop?
46:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, as Pollyanna said in in the book of the same name, when will I have time to live? And that was after she'd her aunt had told her that she was going to be having lessons in the morning. And when will I have time to live?
46:38 Dwarkesh Patel? Right.
46:39 Speaker 00 So.
46:40 Dwarkesh Patel? Uh, the another point of that, um, you know, twin studies of literature. So it actually also um makes the case against the sort of coercion of children, right? Because if if, you know, forcing your kid to take taekwondo lessons and then, you know, making them go to school and, you know, getting them extra tutoring and homework. If this stuff doesn't make a difference anyways, like why are you making your child suffer in this way?
47:03 Speaker 00 Yes, but of course, I think all these expedient arguments and trying to make a science of it are a mistake. Because, you know, we didn't end slavery because the studies said such and such. We didn't emancipate women because the studies said such and such. It would, the arguments were moral and philosophical.
47:27 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
47:28 Speaker 00 And I think people can get into some very dark territory when they start thinking that they can turn everything into a science that isn't science. It's scientism.
47:40 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, and then speaking of the treatment of women, that, one question to ask is,
47:47 Dwarkesh Patel? how could it be that every society that has ever existed has been wrong on this very basic moral question, right? But then the response is, you know, every society before the Enlightenment, before like a hundred years ago, was very wrong on the treatment of women. So it's not that surprising that societies would universally get a moral question wrong. Now, the response is, well, at least there was a way there where one part of the population could, did not have to experience the pain of another part of the population, and so could, you know, oppress them in this way. But when it comes to children, we've all been children. So it's, if we all realize the, if we all experienced the coercion and the trauma of this,
48:27 Dwarkesh Patel? of the conventional way of raising children, why are we not realizing that as adults?
48:33 Speaker 00 Yeah. With regard to how this could have evolved, you might want to read David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. I think it's chapter sixteen, The Evolution of Creativity. I think that the interesting thing is how we, how we got from a static society to...
48:57 Speaker 00 The enlightenment and creativity and all the rest of it. So I I think of taking children seriously as like the final phase of the enlightenment, or maybe not the final phase, but it is certainly um one area that we haven't applied enlightenment thinking to. So, yeah, uh, I I I think that, as I said, I think that in time, people will look back on twenty twenty one and how the people view children, and they will be as horrified as we are when we look back at how women were viewed in the past.
49:32 Dwarkesh Patel? All right. Uh, but do you have an idea for why, um, despite having been children ourselves, we still, when we grow up to become adults, most people still adopt the same authoritarian uh authoritarian practices that they experience themselves and to which they presumably suffered from.
49:48 Speaker 00 Yes. And again, this is something that is in The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, which is the idea of anti-rational memes. So, um, whereas rational memes replicate themselves with criticism, like criticism doesn't hurt a rational meme. It's it's it's wonderful for a rational meme to be in a in an under critical scrutiny. But anti-rational memes
50:17 Speaker 00 disable their holders' ability to criticize them. And so people brought up with these with in this way, in this anti-rational way, develop the same hangups, the same anti-rational memes that cause them to do the same thing to their children. I mean, not that it's a hundred percent, you know, that you can, if you're aware of the idea of anti-rational memes, you can, you can criticize and and and using creativity, uh, at least to some extent, overcome them. And that's how we have, over the years, things have have liberalized
50:57 Speaker 00 somewhat for children. But we still have this view of children that is that is pre-enlightenment, I think. So, but yes, anti-rational memes uh is a is an explanation, I think, for why people grow up and do the same thing to their children.
51:15 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, I do. Do you, um, is there a way you expect the evolution of these ideas will go? Will it be enabled by, uh, for example, in the United States and maybe elsewhere as well? There's a growth of something called Montessori schools, um, which kind of approximate this philosophy of children where they can and will learn just by their own curiosity. Uh, how, how, how do you expect this movement to grow?
51:38 Speaker 00 I think that, that, that, that the shift will come in a similar way to the shift that came uh, when women were emancipated. It wasn't all in one go. You know, the women got the vote. Um, I don't know which order things happened in actually, but it didn't all happen at once. And people, and the, the idea of women in the culture changed gradually. And then there were certain things that happened, like women got the vote that, that did make a difference. But for example, even in nineteen thirty-three, my own grandmother lost the job that she loved when she told her boss that she was getting married.
52:22 Speaker 00 And she said, that's just the way it was. If you were, if you were married, you couldn't, you couldn't have a job. So even, you know, in my grandmother's lifetime, uh, things were still changing uh, quite some time after women had got the vote in England. So I think it's going to be a similar kind of thing. I think, um, I hope that my book might, might make a difference, you know? That I, because once you see, once you see this view, how the view of children is like the, our view of women was in the past and black people in the days of slavery. Once you see that, you can't unsee it, you know, it's
53:03 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
53:04 Speaker 00 It's sort of, wow. And I, I think that people are going to start to see it. And then that's going to start making a difference and it's, it'll just be, you know, a sort of domino effect. And, and then gradually, children will be being taken seriously more and more.
53:26 Dwarkesh Patel? So this book coming out soon?
53:30 Speaker 00 Well, I keep thinking it's nearly finished, but I'm I'm I'm doing a re another rewrite. So I'm not sure when it will be, but I hope not too long.
53:41 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, I'm excited to read it. I'd love to have you back on once this is published, so we can talk about it.
53:45 Speaker 00 Absolutely, love to.
53:47 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. Oh, I just a question that occurred to me while you were talking about the treatment of women. You know, one of the ways, obviously, that society coerced women, I know, for instance, was they weren't allowed to work, right? Because they were seen as incapable of making the decision to work or to be able to perform well. Should we get rid of child labor laws if the similar kind of coercion is also similar kinds of rights are also to be expected of children?
54:11 Speaker 00 I I suspect, and this is just a conjecture, I although I am a libertarian, I'm not a utopian libertarian. I'm a Popperian libertarian, so I don't actually know what the future will look like. But I would imagine that at some point in the future, some of these things will change. The child labor laws definitely do cause problems for, for example, young entrepreneurs. I I've met someone who was a brilliant person and started a business at the age of, I think it was 11.
54:52 Speaker 00 And and he had to lie about his age and and so now he's been banned from that the particular financial online financial service that he was using because he lied about his age. But, you know, those those laws are are do make it very difficult for children. Although it's weird, because when I was a child, lots of children worked, not not in full time jobs, because obviously they were at school, but lots of children worked a lot more than they do now, especially in America. So I don't know. I think that that will I think that that's one of the things that will change. Yeah.
55:33 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, people have this idea because because of when child labor laws were banned of like the kind of danger of jobs that children are doing, that that's the kind of jobs that 11 years, 11 year olds would be doing if they were allowed to now. Except you can just imagine the job that a 14 year old does when he's allowed to, like he's a clerk at HEB or Walmart or something. He would just do that, be allowed to do that at 11. I wouldn't expect that that is far more. Oh, let me just connect my battery. I would expect that that's far more pleasing to the child than to be forced to stay in an institution, whereas he gets to choose to work and he gets paid for his labor. And you know, he has a voluntary relationship with his boss and so on.
56:12 Speaker 00 Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously, in the past, parents forced their children to work in dangerous conditions, you know, out of desperation for survival. So, you know, I the people who who brought in those labor laws obviously had very good intentions. It's just, we're in a different problem situation now. And certainly going into the future, things, things will be different. So I'm sure that that will change.
56:44 Dwarkesh Patel? Oh, and how about sexual consent laws, so age of consent laws?
56:48 Speaker 00 Well, at the moment, because children, because people have this view of children that is problematic, those, those laws do at least try to protect children. But I can imagine some time in the distant future when children are taken just as seriously as everyone else is taken, when they might also not be needed. I think that any kind of, any kind of sexual relationship where there is a different, a differential of power and authority is going to be dangerous. And so I don't know what, what it will be like in the future. So I'm
57:32 Speaker 00 just speculating. But many of these laws, obviously.
57:37 Speaker 00 Were needed to protect children. And maybe still are in some respects, but may not in the future when children are taken seriously. The
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