Teenage Rationalists and Changing Your Mind

LWer since 13, atheist since I can remember. I'm seriously embarrassed by my younger self's posts. I am glad there are not more of me around. LessWrong is certainly good for teens, but can teens be good for LessWrong? Keep in mind our current bunch of teens are of higher quality than what we'll get if we actually recruit some.

edit: btw i'm 15

This is a very good thread with a lot of excellent points, and more show up in the comments. I'd like to revive it.

One obvious explanation for teenagers having malleable minds that, to me, is strikingly missing, is status. Teenagers have low status, pretty much the lowest in society. People tell them they're annoying all the time, and they're alotoftimes depressed, which causes them to perceive themselves as low-status.

It's the inverse of this great speculative article. If high status makes you unable to change your mind, then maybe low status makes it easy to change your mind. Maybe if you have low status, the strategy to get high status is to prove that a formerly high-status belief is wrong. If beliefs are as attached to status as people like Planck suggest, this makes actual truth-seeking a viable strategy in low-status hunter gatherers.

Metadata: I am 19 and perceive myself as low-status. I also find that I change my mind very easily most of the time, but that could just be self-serving bias causing me to think that.

Your points on this issue are excellent. And this is potentially a very productive approach to raising sanity waterline, however my concerns are more or less covered by this comment I made to a similar proposal.

But I will add that I fear you may be implicitly overestimating the cognitive capacity of say the average 12 year old. I'm pretty sure many children in primary schools can get a lot of out of learning the "methods of rationality", but I'm not that sure they would be the majority. For most at that age I believe you would get more people just internalizing right answers rather than fixing their thinking. It was Aristotle I think who said that often the people with the most correct opinions don't make the most correct decisions.

Kids have less invested in their beliefs. If you're married to a theist and raising your kids in the tradition of a particular religion, it's a lot harder to suddenly change your mind about the foundations of your life. Similarly, people who've already experienced the loss of people close to them seem to have a lot more invested in the idea that death is the natural cycle of life.

Your opinions converging with those of someone who is above average in rationality on a number of particular issues, such as say Atheism or P-zombies will probably be a net boost, but its hard to figure out if this is getting us anywhere at building skills that let people make their own better maps rather than just trusting or being impressed by someone more capable than themselves . School is nominally partially about teaching kids a whole bunch of true beliefs. But does it markedly improve rationality?

Also on a unrelated note, I hope what you learned here will produce practical benefits for you as well as that you will continue to try and be well... less wrong. :-)

The reason I say this is because we live in a pretty insane society, and we're pretty crazy ourselves. So I wanted to warn you that eventually you will hit on something that will cause you quite a bit of mental anguish or at least risk the socially approved self image you have of yourself... or you most likley are not trying to be as strong as you can be.

Upvoted. Great post, and I agree completely. I'm somewhat new here, and don't have a great feel for this type of thing, but might this belong on the main page? If not, can someone explain why? I'm still not really clear on what makes that distinction, and there doesn't seem to be consistent posting on the matter.

I'm 21, and my experience was that I changed my mind a lot as a teenager. I would go through large shifts in belief on a great number of things very fundamental to real life. So consider me another data point (although your data points aren't really collected randomly) in your study.

I'm a fellow teenager (though I'm 19, so not for long) and I also share your experiences. I hope I can still keep up with mental flexibility when I'm older.

Rapid change in teenager belief may be due to changes in brain hardware and processing systems. In short, hormones.

The chemicals in a brain are significant and can vastly modify reasoning functions. On testosterone, people will ignore risks, discount competitor behavior, make quick decisions, and make choose based on short term results. On estrogen, people will care much more about the decisions of their peers and value more risk averse decisions. Serotonin levels will have an effect on decision making, particularly fairness judgments and desire to take action. Cortisol, GH, Norepinephrine, Oxytocin, Adrenalin. Every chemical in the brain fluctuates during teenage years and each one of them effects decision making in their own way.

To say that teenagers change their minds easily and often is true but perhaps inaccurate. I think it might be more accurate to say that teenagers have their minds changed for them constantly. Each week, they're given different hardware to use the same software, and sometimes the calculations come out differently. This means that the static friction of having set decisions is partially negated. It can cause good results such as being able to decide on less wrong decision systems and abandon irrational beliefs. It can also cause bad results, like temporarily choosing to take actions one would normally be precommitted against such as committing suicide, trying certain drugs, or figuring you don't need a condom just this once.

It's both a blessing and a curse. In the shifting sands of the teenage mind, no harmful thought can entrench itself as a fortress against logic for long, but neither can helpful ones act as a bulwark to your benefit.

(I suppose the falsification/verification of this theory would involve shooting people up with different hormone cocktails each week, and seeing if it allows rapid adoption of new beliefs and belief systems. It would be highly unethical on others, but my own experience with drugs and medications implies that such chemicals do have a massive effect.)

I haven't asked my friends to specify the probability they'll make a given decision (typical people find this annoying for some reason), but I've routinely heard them express high levels of confidence in a choice, only to have made a totally different decision the next day.

From what I've noticed, if someone has two options and they can identify the one that they are more likely to choose, then they usually end up choosing that one even if they think they are only slightly more likely to (like Eliezer points out in the sequences), but that if they express high confidence in their choice, this does not translate into very much higher probability that they will actually make that choice than if they only expressed slight confidence. (This is assuming that they seriously considered both options. If you ask a mentally healthy person how likely he is to jump off a bridge tomorrow, he will tell you that he won't, and he will be right.)

As a teenager I entirely agree with this.

I became an atheist when I took physics. I tried to think about free will, considered the implications of God, then realized that there is definitely no room for the judeo-christian God, given how the world seems to work.

This seems to capture a lot of the mental flexibility I have around new ideas. Never thought to put it in this perspective, neat :)

Gosh, all us teenagers just coming out of the woodwork over here! We should all get together and play, I don't know, online Monopoly or something. ~Rationally.~ Since I figure it would take less long and be a more teen-appropriate game than Diplomacy was.

As a teen myself I just enjoy being an intellectual hipster. Ok and maybe trolling as my persona.