Several Topics that May or May Not deserve their own Post

There is a certain cliche of a young child asking "why?", getting an answer, asking "why?" to that, and so on until the adult finally dismisses them out of frustration.

Simple miscommunication. Kids figure out that saying "why?" causes people to tell them interesting, related things. So they keep doing that. The adults who hear this, however, are applying an additional constraint - the things have to be related in a particular way - which the child probably doesn't care much about. Unfortunately, that constraint sometimes leads to dead ends; there are many concepts where all the answers to "why" are either unknown, or uninteresting, or built on prerequisite knowledge not available to small children. The graceless way to handle this is to get frustrated and dismiss them. The right way is to segue the conversation to something that isn't related by an is-cause-of or is-purpose-of relation, but which is interesting and worth talking about.

I define "real love" as the state of valuing another's quality of life more than your own quality of life.

I think this is a weird definition. As far as I can tell, "love" is an actual emotion. If you knew about hormones and endorphins and stuff you could probably measure it. Defining it in terms of someone's utility function misses that. Besides, it doesn't seem uncommon at all to value other people's quality of life more than your own. Doesn't this happen every time someone sacrifices something for the sake of politeness?

As the parent of a 4yo, the annoying thing about "Why?" is that my daughter doesn't actually listen to the answer at all, so the chain of answers don't build up. This is when it just gets irritating. That and when "why?" doesn't make sense, e.g. "Why is it dinner?"

A lot of the time it seems to just be her saying something to achieve interaction with the parent, because she likes interaction even if it's meaningless. At which point I ideally try to get her actually thinking in some more meaningful way.

I have found "Why do you think?" to be an occasionally useful response, often producing an actual thoughtful response in turn (if one exists).

Have you had experience of parental responsibility for a small child? (not that such is required to post these questions, I'm just curious as to your perspective.)

On "Why?":

It would be better to teach children that this is a wrong question. After enough levels, this question simply stops having an answer and starts being an example of the mind projection fallacy (thinking the universe has a "reason" for X or somesuch, like a person would in that situation.) That's pretty clear-cut.

On accepting doom:

It is absolutely less psychologically painful to accept certain doom than to have a twinge of false hope. That is why non-transhumanists are okay with death; they think it is inevitable. The trouble here is that accepting something that isn't actually inevitable is far more harmful, for non-psychological reasons. Edit: I have a short essay about this now.

On abuse of the word "love":

There are many things to blame for this, but I'm going to point the finger at how many entirely distinct concepts this word points to in the English language, that other languages have individual words for, but ours doesn't. The love between friends, combat allies, pets and owners, family, romance, et cetera, are all very different feelings, but they get muddled together when you think about them. In other words, thinking about "love-in-general" makes no sense and is a compression fallacy.

Sometimes with small children, I get the impression they're asking "why?" for the social interaction rather than to actually get answers. I'm not sure I'm right about this, but it can be very tiresome to give serious answers to questions under those circumstances.

Any thoughts about how to tell whether a child wants real answers? If it is for the social interaction, what's a graceful way to handle it without squelching real curiosity?

I agree about the comfort of giving up hope , or at least that's a plausible explanation for why I'm seeing people so sure of their pessimism being correct when the future is so hard to predict.

Re: The why questions- I am both a child therapist and the mother of jimrandomh. I don't remember him ever doing that and the children I work with ( I see about 18 on a regular basis) never do it to me. I think tetsuo55 is right in his observation that children tend to do it when they are being ignored. As an only child of older parents, jimrandomh was virtually never ignored, and, of course, the children I see for individual therapy sessions already have my attention.

Re: "Good parents"- A few observations- The age of puberty has been dropping, the average age of marriage (or settling into committed relationships) has been rising. Not too long ago people got married shortly after they reached puberty.

There were no birth control pills until the 1960's. The early birth control pills were of higher doses and had more side effects. Condoms existed but were not as reliable as they are today. Abortions were not legal in the U.S. until the early 1970's. Aid to Families of Dependent Children, otherwise known as welfare, now modified into Transitional Assistance, didn't exist in most states until the 1960's. In other words, prior to the late 1960's, the chances were good that if you were sexually active, you would get pregnant. If you did, your options were much more limited.

Then came the sexual revolution. There were birth control pills. Abortions became legal. Visitation restrictions in dorms were eliminated. Herpes Simplex 2 was pretty much unknown until the late 1970's, AIDS was first identified in the U.S. in 1981. I had the good fortune to turn 18 in 1970- except for the Vietnam War, it was a great time and I had fun.

Parents today, however, worry about their teens not only getting pregnant, but AIDS, herpes and other venereal diseases that weren't around in my youth. In addition, with younger puberty, the worries come at a younger age, when teens are less able to handle it. (I had a 12 year old girl tell me that she was thinking of having sex with her boyfriend, a Caucasian 4th or 5th generation American girl from a working class community.) I don't think it's just to conform to the societal archetype of Good Parent, there are real things to worry about.

With alarming commonality, adults with maturing offspring go out of their way to stunt their children's sociosexual development, due primarily, I think, to a desire to conform to the current societal archetype of Good Parent. Despite ambiguous-at-best psychological evidence, parents fight to keep kids ignorant, unequipped, and chaste due to the social consensus that having sexually active children makes one a Bad Parent.

I would even go so far as to call such deliberate impediment of sociosexual development a form of abuse, despite its extreme prevalence and acceptableness in today's world.

If you look at history you will find that the current time period is one of, if not the, most sexually permissive in history. So are you arguing that all children who grew up before say the 1960s were "abused"? Given that most of them seem to have turned out alright, I'd like to know how this could qualify as "abuse" under a reasonable definition. If you have a personal definition of "abuse" under which it does, I would question why something falling under it obviously qualifies as bad.

Related to the first topic: people will do anything to avoid saying "I don't know" to someone they see as socially below them, whether it's a parent/child, boss/employee, customer/worker, or just a social hierarchy. Sometimes this gets patently ridiculous, which is one of the reasons I enjoy Not Always Right.

Topic the fourth is very US-centric, or at least, non-Scandinavia-centric.

On love: I agree that a lot of people are too narrow minded about what counts as an valid reason to engage in an relationship/sex, so they end up deceiving everyone (including themselves) - but what I would like to point out though, is that intense romantic love only rarely lasts more than 2-3 years (I at least would find it quite sad that our definition for real love only last up to about 3 years), But that relationship bonds can consist of feelings of deep attachment. So maybe you could specify. Must "real love" be intense romantic love or any love as long as "the state of valuing another's quality of life more than your own quality of life.".

I'm basing this on Helen Fisher's work.

I define "real love" as the state of valuing another's quality of life more than your own quality of life

Is this a common definition? I've not seen it before, and it seems both very strong and very limited.

Wikipedia notes:

In English, love refers to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from pleasure ("I loved that meal") to interpersonal attraction ("I love my partner"). "Love" may refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love, to the sexual love of eros, to the emotional closeness of familial love, or the platonic love that defines friendship, to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love. This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.

Definitions are hard, but often if you look at the underlying phenomena you are trying to explain you don't need them. In this case it seems the whole issue is disagreement and confusion about the meaning of the word "love", in which case I suspect it just doesn't matter to anyone but a lexicographer.

With my own kids I try to systematically emulate the attitude of Calvin's dad.

I was that child constantly asking why, and getting substandard answers, or made-up stories, in place of real answers. For instance, when I asked about thunder and lightning, my parents told me that god was angry. Of course, that had me asking why he was angry, and how the newscaster knew when god was angry. That was when my parents lied again, explaining that was why the newscaster was wrong so often. Naturally, I was pretty confused. Then what is the point of a newscaster?

I think that if parents do not know the answer to a question, they should look it up and learn it with the child. The whole internet is at their fingertips. It can become a learning experience for both the child and the adult.

I agree love is an abused term but not for the same reason. Mostly I just think it's a leaky and undefined category of feelings that isn't really distinct from "liking a lot". I agree it's different than lust, but only in that lust doesn't necessarily include anything other than physical attraction. I think it's mostly a waste of time to wonder whether or not you're really in love with your partner in the same way it's a waste of time to wonder whether obesity is really a disease.

On topic the second (behavior of hope), there has been research on how uncertainty amplifies the emotional impact of an event by preventing people from coming to terms with the event and adapting to it. This is true for both positive and negative events. Wilson and Gilbert (2008) have a review article on their model of adaptation which incorporates this effect. The abstract:

We propose a model of affective adaptation, the processes whereby affective responses weaken after one or more exposures to emotional events. Drawing on previous research, our approach, represented by the acronym AREA, holds that people attend to self-relevant, unexplained events, react emotionally to these events, explain or reach an understanding of the events, and thereby adapt to the events (i.e., they attend less and have weaker emotional reactions to them). We report tests of new predictions about people’s reactions to pleasurable events and discuss the implications of the model for how people cope with negative events, experience emotion in different cultures, and other topics.

You can search their paper for the keyword "certain" to find the relevant portions. Gilbert, Wilson, and their colleagues also have several recent studies on the emotional impact of uncertainty, although they have tended to focus on relatively minor events and on positive emotions more than negative ones. Here are the references for their recent articles; you can find the papers on Google Scholar or Gilbert's website.

Wilson, T. D., Centerbar, D. B., Kermer, D. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). The pleasures of uncertainty: Prolonging positive moods in ways people do not anticipate. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 5-21.
Kurtz, J. L., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert. D. T. (2007). Quantity versus uncertainty: When winning one prize is better than winning two. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 979-985.
Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2008). Explaining away: A model of affective adaptation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 370-386. pdf
Bar-Anan, Y., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2009). The feeling of uncertainty intensifies affective reactions. Emotion, 9, 123-127.
Whitchurch, E. R., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2011). He loves me, he loves me not: The effects of uncertainty on romantic attraction. Psychological Science, 22, 172-175.

I downvoted this for making self-assured apodictic assertions about difficult and controversial topics, without any supporting argument and in a way that implies that reasonable disagreement is impossible.

[Retracted the second part of the comment, which asserted there was a contradiction between "firmly believ[ing]" and "ambiguous," i.e. not clearly false, evidence. See the discussion below.]

Is tenuous hope more emotionally taxing than certain doom?

Yes. Impending, but certain doom has no worries. The suspense is over. The worry is over. The struggle is over. And in general, people adjust to their doom quite nicely, and find the world hasn't come to an end, just as they don't find Shangri-la when they win the lottery.

It's the perception of a coming loss that's horrible. Once the loss is certain, it's no longer a loss, it's a new baseline.

I define "real love" as the state of valuing another's quality of life more than your own quality of life.

Interesting. I'd call that insanity. The first thing that popped in my mind when I read that was some poor soul in an abusive relationship sacrificing their quality of life to feed the abuser.

Regarding #2, there is a cliffhanger episode of Farscape where Ka D'Argo makes this point quite eloquently (though of course, D'Argo and Crighton end up not dying). Sadly, both Youtube and IMDB have let me down here, so I can't provide a verbatim quote, but it was something to effect of "Fear accompanies the possibility of death; calm comes with its certainty."

Your first point is substantially caused by the issues about sexuality that you highlighted. Sex can reasonably be explained a "special hug" to a two-year-old. But I'm not prepared to give truthful, coherent, useful answers to any followup questions, so I'm ready to say "ask when you're older." I think a young child can understand that their understanding of the world will increase over time. I agree that negative incentives for curiosity is not good child-raising, but that doesn't mean a parent is required to answer every question.

I also think you underestimate the parents' unwillingness to say "I don't know." That answer shows a lack of curiosity. Since curiosity is mostly a virtue, revealing lack of curiosity to a child is drawing back the veil of omniscience and perfection of the parents. Retaining that veil is useful for controlling the child. Many parents lack the capacity to develop a more sophisticated system for controlling their child, so they stick with what works even though it should be obvious that it could stunt their child's intellectual growth.