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Comment by cromulent | Hacker News Reader

The point of the article - that kids have a bullshit detector - reminds me of a great article in The Age that I read years ago.

The writer was given a hard time for bullshitting his young nephew and his response was that "It's important to bullshit kids, so that they don't grow up trusting adults". He maintained that you had to tell kids stuff they would find out later was fake, so that they developed scepticism. Otherwise, they would swallow adult dogma as fact.

He was honest with kids once they pushed past the first barrier (Uncle Joe, you say you landed on the moon, but I checked and you are aren't on the list) and he said that was his duty to teach them to not accept things at face value, no matter what the authoritative source.

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I don't think kids have a bullshit detector (but maybe you agree and that's why you are quoting that article - if you need to develop a bullshit detector, that implies you don't already have one). Kids are completely gullible, and trust anything you tell them about Santa Claus, ancient Assyria, the continent of Lemuria, chemistry, God, traffic laws, the Easter Bunny, poisons, Jesus etc.

That makes perfect sense, since they spend so much time being taught true things - they have a lot to learn (think about the infamous 'why' question, or the general progress of AI), they can't afford to disbelieve and question unless something seems really out of whack.

The listed examples seem more like exceptions proving the rule, possibly combined with a bit of naivete and 'beginner's mind'.

"the general progress of AI"

Out of curiosity, what are you referring to here?

A lot of what we perceive as obvious common sense relies on a huge amount of background knowledge that we don't really think about when performing them. Take for example the seemingly simple action of pouring a glass of water. This relies on knowing the glass has to be oriented the right way up, that liquid is subject to gravity, the general behaviour of liquids, viscosity and lots of little things that we take for granted.

For some good writing on the subject have look at Douglas B. Lenat's essays about knowledge pumps and Cyc.

Knowledge and hardwiring. Consider the feather-and-cannon-ball experiment in counter-intuitive gravity. Our unphysical hardwired heuristic assumes that heavy things go faster (and with air drag, they do). But also experience. We know water stays in upturned but not overturned glasses because we've seen it do so.

A lot of knowledge seems hardwired. Infants who can barely see already knows things like inertia and persistence of invisible objects, and then there's the whole Chomskyian linguistics argument that kids learn language too fast and well.

> Infants who can barely see already knows things like inertia and persistence of invisible objects

No, they do not. Object permanence is a good example of how even fundamental principles about reality are learned. In this case, it happens when a child is about a year old:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence

It's quite possible that if you dropped a newborn into a simulated reality that has completely different rules from our world, this child would learn the "fake" rules without knowing the difference.

A year old? Try 3 months old: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence#Contradicting...

And in the vein of hardwired preferences, notice the mention in the later section of that article of 7 minute old babies preferring faces - unless you want to suggest that unbiased algorithms would learn the importance of faces in that little time?

> Infants who can barely see already knows things like inertia and persistence of invisible objects

Do you have evidence / references for that? (Genuine question; I'd like to see it if you do.)

As far as language learning goes... there are plenty of linguists who disagree with Chomsky on that point. Among others. In particular, the cognitive linguistic school is fairly at odds with the generative grammar school.

There's a lot of research on infants these days. There's a great deal of discussion on what infants do and don't know in _The Philosophical Baby_ (because the issue has obvious philosophical relevance to Kant's categories and Locke's tabula rasa).

Just yesterday I read of new research covering probability: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110526141357.ht...

Yes, Cyc was what I was thinking of. A 3 year old knows an awful lot.

A proud moment for me was when my then-six-year-old daughter wrote a letter to Santa that said, "Dear Santa, I know that you can't exist because you would have to go faster than light to deliver all those presents." I don't know where she got it from, but I was impressed by her skeptical attitude!

Could these lessons be taught without the negatives here? For example, could Uncle Joe tell the kids about his uncle who said he landed on the moon?

I think so. I try to tell my kids the truth, including when I am not sure of my answers and why.

However, the point resonated with me, mainly due to my memories of what I believed simply because an adult told me so. I'm a little ahead of my kids in understanding the world, but not so far, and probably in the wrong direction. I try to remember that I need to make my position as clear as my answer.

What's the negative? He's teaching them that not only do you need to call people out when they're wrong, but especially when they have something on the line, or because they might be offended.

I’m not an expert on affect or children, but it does seem kind of mean. That would be the negative: the youth’s possible feeling of betrayal or a negative effect on the relationship with the kid.

As a kid, it was frustrating to be BSed, but not really to the point of feeling betrayed. There was a big difference in how I felt when someone was just having fun at my expense vs. when they lied to me "for real".

At the same time, if you go too far in the opposite direction, you start banning games in school that not everyone can win, everyone starts getting A's, etc.

Sometimes life sucks, and children should be carefully exposed to this fact, lest they grow up to be useless little doe-eyed innocents.

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