It sounds to me like Nichlemn calling the bluff of those who do things "for your own good."

And it isnt really that "minor" of a problem for the person who accurately judges themselves mature enough to make decision X, accurately judges the risk of being caught breaking the law to be low, accurately judges their enjoyment from partaking in X to be high, and runs bad.

You think they will do a worse job than "you are 18, you cannot smoke?" How is that possible?

And further, if your argument is that no one could be reasonably expected to pass a test, then how can you be so confident that YOU know its wrong for them? You must be able to pass this test in order to support any law banning someone from doing something.

If you vote for something, then you are implicitly saying that all people at least as smart/mature/far-sighted as you are capable of deciding whether a thing is a good decision or not.

You are suggesting that it is prohibitively difficult to judge whether a 17 year old is able to understand the risks and benefits of smoking cigarettes, but it is self-evidently obvious to everyone that all 18 year olds are.

The cost benefit equation balances the number of people correctly sorted to the cost of the procedure to sort them. At an extreme end of the spectrum, we have decades long, in-depth psychological profiles of every human on Earth, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, but yielding what we will assume is the "best attainable" accuracy. On the other end we have randomly assigning people to groups. Somewhere in between there is "sort by age," which has the benefit of being extremely cheap, but has the drawback of an unknown though probably fairly low accuracy level. Sort by height, for example, would probably do just about as well.

You guys all think that this method was chosen because it is the optimal point on the cost benefit curve? Or we are just extremely lucky that it happens to be?

I'm sorry, you think there is a real-world impact to your discussions in other threads about whether what some random Republican said this week was racist?

I guess reading is hard? I'm saying that designing a test (which was Nichlemn's original proposal) to accurately assess whether a person of arbitrary age below 18 possesses some set of traits S considered by society to be indicative of that person's being "able to understand the risks and benefits of smoking cigarettes" is prohibitively difficult (especially given incentives to game the test), while having an arbitrary age cut-off although arbitrary has other incidental benefits.

Wow, a maddog2030 sighting! How are you? And vhawk! This is just like the old days. How's everyone doing these days?

I don't even mind good fantasy suggestions - but there's good fiction and there's terrible fiction. Good fiction yields valuable insight about reality - bad fiction merely indulges the author's (and in case of popular bad fiction, readers') delusions. On that note, here are some (ranging from moderately bad to terrible) suggestions off the top of my head that are still way better than Nichlemn's various suggestions:

1) Out of school for, say, 2 years, you're an adult.

2) Work more than 20 hours a week for, say, 3 years, you're an adult.

3) Pay more than, say, $10,000 in taxes for 3 years and your parents don't claim you as dependent (perhaps too US-specific), you're an adult.

4) Live permanently apart from your parents or legal guardians for, say, 2 years, you're an adult.

5) Your parents disown you, you're an adult.

6) Parents get to declare their child an adult up to a year earlier.

7) Parents get to declare their child a minor up to a year later.

8) Matriculation in a post-secondary institution delays adulthood by 2 years. Applying to such an institution delays it by 1 year, if it doesn't result in matriculation.

9) Have 1,000,000 twitter followers or facebook fans and you're over 16, you're an adult.

10) You win an adulthood lottery, you're an adult.

11) Join the military, you're an adult.

12) Between certain ages, you're an adult every other month.

It's okay not to care or whatever or write about things you don't care about, but typically what happens when you don't care about the truth, you don't care about the people and there are no consequences to being wrong, is that the discussion becomes a channel for your own fears and insecurities, a dishonest exercise in wishful thinking and sophistry. It's not simply inconsequential - it's actively harmful to the mind, because you're training your mind to deceive yourself.

If you guys cared about the kids whom the policy is meant to protect, you'd think more deeply about how the policy works, where the policy fails and think about practical ways to improve the system, instead of treating this as yet another opportunity to share your deep-seated resentment about not being suffiicently privileged in real life.

I wrote extensively about this phenomenon years ago (and I suspect you've read it) noting that generally speaking, intelligence, as comprehensively measured, has positive correlation with almost any other measure of well-being among adults. Most people would disagree with this claim because the smartest people they think they know have very obvious cognitive flaws. This is because most people don't know how to measure intelligence of others, the type of smart peope who readily come off as smart in social settings aren't as smart as you think because it's a social faux pas, and people's social circles are constrained by overall social worth and as such, people tend to know others with approximately the same social status. If I'm a totally average guy and have a friend that I know and everyone knows is extraordinarily intelligent, it's safe to say he probably has some compensating flaws. Not because all smart people do but because someone who's extraordinarily intelligent and is correspondingly amazing in other ways probably doesn't have time for me, an average guy.

But this is completely irrelevant here - your tests don't measure comprehensive intelligence. All tests measure arbitrary social conformance. Your test selects for troubled kids who conform to a view of sex that makes them vulnerable to predators. Teenagers who are seriously motivated to study for and take sexual freedom tests to be allowed to have sex with adults outside of their age are probably exactly the kinds of kids that age of consent laws were meant to protect.

Also you're completely wrong and have misunderstood everything even if comprehensive intelligence measures can be used in lieu of Nichlemn sexual freedom test. It's because you're using the wrong definition of maturity, which, as has been pointed out, is about one's development relative to their expected full potential. Which is, of course, an actual dictionary definition. It's also been explained why this definition is the more useful measure of whether someone's worth sheltering than the person's raw decision-making skills.

Generally speaking, if you have two kids, one of whom is smarter than the other, the smarter kid is going to learn more before he fully matures than the dumber kid. This means the smarter kid is cognitively less mature. This is literally what maturity means.

To elaborate further:

First of all, it's important to observe reality. Whether you contrast humans against less intelligent species, or more developed societies against less developed societies or wealthy, ambitious subsections of the population against the working class just getting by or even academic outperformers against academic laggards, the former spends much more time in the developmental stage of life as opposed to the mature stage. In earlier, less developed societies, people married earlier, had kids earlier and worked earlier. Better students and students with parents who have more resources and are more involved spend more time in school, being sheltered from consequences of the real world, whereas worse students and students with parents with fewer resources are thrown out into the real world earlier and deal with the real world. Even the instincts of the kids line up - worse students engage in adult vices earlier than better students.

Second, once the facts are clear, we must understand why. Why don't we do it the other way? Why don't we keep the worst students in school until they are 35 or however long it takes for them to reach parity with average students? Clearly, they must be less ready for the real world than better students and would take longer to become fit to do adult things? Why don't we have the brightest 13-year olds finish school early and start working? Aren't they more ready for the real world than most 18-year olds who start working after high school? Why don't smartest, best students choose to try out sex, alcohol, drugs, etc, at an earlier age, given that they are further along in their academic development? After all, they study calculus earlier than bad students, right? Why don't bad students wait until later to try those adult vices? Most of this seems absurd - but why?

I've given a slightly confusing account so far, but the most important thing is that learning can be accelerated in a sheltered, trusting environment with fewer threats and distractions. By far the biggest barrier in education is getting the child to trust the adults, trust the material, trust the system and accept the importance of education in the first place. And children who implicitly buy into the agenda, whether through outside social pressure, internal drive or lack of suitable social outlet, are labeled as gifted. But you can only cultivate the trust, if you create an environment where the child can easily distinguish between trustworthy adults and abusive, untrustworthy manipulators and predators. Otherwise, children will develop defensive mechanisms that interfere with learning significantly.

Ultimately, most of us eventually accumulate enough defensive mechanisms to protect us from the emotional consequences of vices, but generally most of those mechanisms aren't sufficiently nuanced enough not to interfere strongly without our ability to adapt and learn. We develop thicker skin, that ultimately constrains our growth. This is why bad environments for children are correlated with disciplinary issues and emotional problems, which in turn are correlated with lower academic achievement - they results in premature, maladaptive defensive mechansims that prevent the kid from trusting others and growing as a person. This is the fundamental reason behind limiting exposure to vices - they can lead to premature maladaptive defensive mechanisms.

Why does early exposure to vices lead to maladaptive defensive mechanisms? Because vices are transgressive by definition and are commonly connected to seedy motives. It's not so much that they are inherently maladaptive - they are maladaptive because they misrepresent reality to some degree, and in the direction leads to less reversible adaptation. They are forced to become more adult-like at an emotional level without the benefit of an adult's cognitive abilities and experience. They are maladaptive in the long run because the world is kinder and also because kids learn much faster in a kinder environment, even artificial.

What does this all mean? This means, emotionally troubled kids who struggle with intellectual tasks, even with their poor cognitive skills, are relatively well-positioned to deal with the seedy world of vices, because their lack of trust is more adaptive in this environment. They also have less to lose - their cognitive growth is already stunted to some degree, so they don't suffer as much from the hardening effects of vices. Even better, the world of vices is run by their kind. More legitimate institutions, while they may seem more trustworthy to high-achievers, are likely to give up on him as he becomes an adult and vindicate his lack of trust in the system.

On the contrary, the overly trusting, highly well-adjusted, "gifted" kid benefits from additional schooling and being sheltered a bit longer before being gradually eased him into the real world. And he has a lot more to lose by having the world of vices being unleashes on him. First of all, his disposition is a poor match for the environment. What allows him to excel in an artificially sheltered environment, trust and absorb information faster makes him more vulnerable in an environment full of threats. Second, he's likely to make adjustments to fit this world better, defensive mechanisms that would make him lose some of his gift to some degree. He becomes better-adjusted to the adult world and becomes less of a child, at the cost of stunting his emotional and intellectual development. Third, he's not likely to end up needing any of this experience.

Now this is a heavily caricatured view of an extremely complex, nuanced phenomenon. And contrary to what some here have expressed, that these laws and safeguards don't work perfectly and people fall through cracks and people fail to be protected, etc, etc, is what makes reality great. Individuals may want mechanisms to work for them, but the system has a whole requires that mechanisms fail and people cross barriers. As I mentioned in the consumer financial whatever thread, that Harvard's admission standards aren't objectively fair is a good thing for society. You want lots of little failures to ensure that people end up in places where they don't entirely belong, lead to cross-pollination of ideas and people, and a bunch of social "problems" which create adaptive solutions that are bigger than the problems they solve. That's how we roll as a species. Our president began his life as a failure in the eyes of most, as a result of questionable decisions of the sort that many people have spent lifetimes trying to discourage.

Nope. See what PB said re:good vs. bad fiction. He elaborated basically what my point was better than I could, that just because we all recognize we're discussing fictions doesn't mean there are no rules of engagement and that you can willy nilly construct the context to bend to your preferred biases and feign surprise when others challenge them b/c they are not shared (thus my references to unicorns vs Game of Thrones). Naturally Nichlemn will disagree that's not what he's doing but that's really what his opponents are doing, and around we go, life on the internets. The only escape hatch is intense self-awareness and honesty to see if we're using such fictions in good faith, but its tough to cross that chasm with words alone.

Good! I only come back to these forums to read threads from a handful of key posters so it's good to see you and Dr M posting again, gives me plenty of reading material.

Ignoring the word vomit itt... I'm totally down for a license requirement to have kids. Only stupid people are breeding if my Facebook feed is to be believed

From the perspective of an individual who has to pay a bribe for a test to avoid a dumb law, it's still an inefficiency. Is it not sophistry to claim that it's not a part of "government" if it's effect is to have significant impact to the rule of law the government enforces? "Safe harbor" provisions would be necessary, now: how are those defined?

Just fix the dumb laws and don't add a huge (quasi-private) bureaucracy. Even if I were to grant the entire framework, the likelihood that this would exacerbate the problem by causing even more paternalistic laws to be passed, because "you can just test out if it bothers you" seems pretty high.

I agree with your second paragraph, but first one is wrong. It cant be an inefficiency when the "individual who has to pay" still always retains the choice he CURRENTLY has, which is to do nothing and be prohibited. It can only be considered an inefficiency if you ALREADY grant that he should just be legally allowed to do it for free, in which case we move on to the next youngest group or whatever.

You use a lot of loaded words here, that make it hard to understand precisely what you are saying. For example, "accurately" is doing a TON of work in your post, and I'm not sure if you realize that. "Prohibitively difficult" can really only be a thing if "accurately" is also some discrete, defined end point. EVERY test will "accurately" measure something, depending on how poor of an accuracy you are willing to tolerate. So how can it be prohibitively difficult to achieve some approaching-zero accuracy?

I think you mean that it would be prohibitively difficult to design a test with PERFECT accuracy, which is of course true, but also less impressive rhetorically when stated that way. What you should be trying to show is that it is prohibitively difficult to design a test with MARGINALLY IMPROVED accuracy over "sort by age."

Or, failing that, that the marginal improvement bang isnt worth the buck. Which I think it what you are implying with the phrase "other incidental benefits."

In short, yes, reading is hard. I'm pretty good at it though.

I used efficiency in the market sense; you, relative to the status quo. Otherwise, we're in agreement; giving an isolated option to bribe here doesn't make things less efficient.

Actually, I wouldn't mind a number of those suggestions. You've complained about me supposedly waffling on how a test is to be implemented, but it's because I'm not particularly attached to any specific methodology. A "test" could, for instance, consist of simply weighting several objective criteria like these.

Wow, I haven't been keeping up with this thread but bravo. Notes incoming.

PB,

you should retire. This is absolutely horrible and nobody who thinks he is as good of a poster as you think you are should ever even come close to typing this. If you don't want to play the game then don't play it. Instead, you decide to play and then gripe about how dumb it is and how dumb the other players are the whole time.

Again, same thing. This post really should be the end of the thread. Basically you're mad that someone would point out a problem and think about ways of improving something because... well it's not really clear.

The "well the status quo isn't perfect but every system has flaws so just give it up and live with what we have now" argument is completely awful for what are total obvious reasons but you routinely lean on it (and variations).

This is the best argument in this entire thread against what nich has posted. I'm not sure it's right, but it's definitely better than the DrMod/PB flailing.

Hi PVN! I see that you've moved beyond those one-liners! They never suited you that well. The thing, you see, is that you care about form and I care about content. Say, if you wrote that about Fly or DrModern or Suzzer or DVaut or myself, it would indeed be horrible. Or even if I wrote that about you, it still would be pretty bad. But as it stands, it's fine, because it's applicable to Nichlemn and I mean what I say. I also don't know what game you're talking about. I would love to have someone give me honest feedback on my posting over the years (and I don't mean butthurt posters rationalizing away their lost arguments and hurt feelings).


I realize that you found a few words that seem to ring a bell, but did you read what I wrote? Well, to repeat myself, my criticism isn't that he's criticizing the status quo, but that everything he's said can be said about any status quo ever. Thus it's meaningless. He hasn't said anything specific about the current status quo in any particular jurisdiction. He also hasn't come up with any specific alternative that would improve status quo in any particular jurisidction.

He hasn't mentioned actual, concrete problems with the current system - he hasn't even specified an actual current system! He's provided something of an existential proof based on the fact that the system is arbitrary. But an arbitrary test written by an arbitrary testmaker is just as arbitrary as an arbitrary age cut-off. Thus his existential proof still applies. If he can imagine a mature teenager who's just below the age, I can imagine a mature teenager whose score was just below the cutoff. It's also much easier to fudge tests than it is to fudge age. And for you government-phobes, it's much more prone to corruption and abuse of power. Most importantly, it can be further Nichlemn-ed. In a hypothetical world we have a Nichlemn-1 test for sexual freedom, Nichlemn-2 can argue, well, there are all these things that test doesn't take into account, which leads to hypothetical people without the sexual freedom despite ldo being mature (and vice versa). So Nichlemn-2 can propose, here's a Nichlemn-2 test for sexual freedom to be taken in addition to Nichlemn-1 test. So now we can use age, Nichlemn-1 score, and Nichlemn-2 score and combine them meaningfully to do even better than that archaic, simple, arbitrary and error-prone combination of age and Nichlemn-1 score. But wait till you see Nichlemn-3 and Nichlemn-4! They take your entire being into consideration!

The point isn't that status quo is perfect or good or whatever, but that you have to find actual problems with the actual status quo, not imaginary problems that can be applied to any status quo ever. This requires careful observation and acceptance of reality, which granted isn't appealing to politards for whom political rhetoric is an attempt to run away from. Simply put, if you don't understand how things work presently, it's extremely unlikely that your proposal to improve is anything other than a projection of your fears and insecurities. If you genuinely cared about improving the system, you'd know how the system works right now. You'd know the boundary cases, how it fails, where it succeeds, why it fails where it fails, etc. You'd know why the system's structured the way it is, how it came about and what reasonable changes may be.

It's really funny - I stooped really low to argue AC stuff with you guys during my research project, accepting a lot of your nonsense for granted to take it to its absurd conclusion and it seems that you're mired in years-long confusion about what I've said. I'm not against trying to change the world through political means - all I was saying was that it's an incoherent position for a market fundamentalist. That is, either market forces are sufficient to govern the political reality, in which case the current system is a market outcome, or they aren't, in which case every actual system is and will always be a result of political, not purely economic bargaining, rendering ACism impossible. Trying to use political means to bring about ACism is a fallacy because it implies the acceptance of the insufficiency of market forces. I have no problem with trying to change the status quo - it's always changing whether you want it to or not.

So, are you in favor of written tests replacing age cutoff?

Meh, I don't think so. But so far all the arguments against Nich itt have been postively awful. And I'm not reading your wall of text dot doc so maybe boil down whatever zingers you buried in there to like, uh, three paragraphs each?

I don't care what you read but I'd point out that the latter is a lot shorter than the former, which includes even bigger walls of text.