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Men: Would You Marry an American Woman?[W:771]

Men: Would you marry an American Woman?


  • Total voters
    83
Yes and hopefully not.

What's the difference? Where does jealousy come from if it's not taught?

If a moral compass is taught, then what principles underlie the differing conclusions we see from this thought experiment:

A trolley is coming down a track, and it’s going to run over and kill five people if it continues. A person standing next to the track can flip a switch and turn the trolley onto a side track where it will kill one but save the five. Most people think that’s morally permissible—to harm one person when five are saved. Another case is when a nurse comes up to a doctor and says, “Doctor, we’ve got five patients in critical care; each one needs an organ to survive. We do not have time to send out for organs, but a healthy person just walked into the hospital—we can take his organs and save the five. Is that OK?” No one says yes to that one. Now, in both cases your action can save five while harming one, so they’re identical in that sense.​

Orphanages that do no harm are great, I am even sure a few probably exist somewhere for a few lucky children.

The key point here is - "do no harm." This applies to parents, to foster parents, to orphanages. Don't work to retard what nature is developing within the child. Orphanages differ from family life with either parents or foster parents in that they lack parental figures instead substituting adults who provide care but don't have the time to develop the close relationships with the children which enable the supposed tutoring of a moral conscience.

In 1952, ten-year-old Richard and his 12-year-old brother were delivered to the Home, a Presbyterian orphanage in rural North Carolina, after their mother committed suicide and their father was found too chronically drunk to care for them. They remained there until they graduated from high school. McKenzie's remembrance of those years is neither whitewashed nor nostalgic; he gives evidence that orphanages can be "a refuge and a source of inspiration" to neglected children. McKenzie, an author and professor of economics, has prefaced this work with responses from a survey of over 1000 living "alumni" of the Home supporting the positive attributes of institutional care: security, stability, permanence, direction, and a value system. McKenzie presents a compelling argument in favor of giving abused or homeless children an opportunity to begin a new life by escaping both their sordid past and their hopeless present. Highly recommended for both lay readers and policymakers.​

I am sure for some children this is true, but not 70% of them. which is the incarceration rate.

Please, I show you respect by reading what you write and I try to engage your points, so could you return the favor? Your response completely neglects the selection effect I detailed in my comment. If you want to isolate the effect of "no parents" and see how it affects incarceration rates, then you need to control from kids who are already troubled, already carrying the baggage of mental illness, etc.

You are arguing from an absolute, why?

You need to come up with an explanation for how a moral conscience can develop in children when no parents are present to instill it. That's a pretty big point, don't you agree?
 
The only true way to understand something is to experience it yourself. I can tell you not to touch fire or you will get burned, but you will never truly understand the nature of fire until you have experience with it. While certain beliefs are either picked up by children or otherwise taught that can in turn change the make up of their moral character, the majority of what they understand as morality comes from personal experience and how they personally see the world around them. Personal growth is not found in the lessons of society, but in the understanding of the nature of things around you and of yourself.

Home | moralfoundations.org

This is the most complete explanation of human moral behavior I have ever seen. It goes into the biological mechanisms of the formation of moral behaviors and strategies (and morality is, in the end, a survival strategy just like any other primate).

I think your primary mistake is that you think morality can be based on reason. Thats not how humans evolved.
 
What's the difference? Where does jealousy come from if it's not taught?

If a moral compass is taught, then what principles underlie the differing conclusions we see from this thought experiment:

A trolley is coming down a track, and it’s going to run over and kill five people if it continues. A person standing next to the track can flip a switch and turn the trolley onto a side track where it will kill one but save the five. Most people think that’s morally permissible—to harm one person when five are saved. Another case is when a nurse comes up to a doctor and says, “Doctor, we’ve got five patients in critical care; each one needs an organ to survive. We do not have time to send out for organs, but a healthy person just walked into the hospital—we can take his organs and save the five. Is that OK?” No one says yes to that one. Now, in both cases your action can save five while harming one, so they’re identical in that sense.​

Children aren't a blank slate, that theory is long dead since the age of actual science. Jealousy is innate to humanity.

The key point here is - "do no harm." This applies to parents, to foster parents, to orphanages. Don't work to retard what nature is developing within the child. Orphanages differ from family life with either parents or foster parents in that they lack parental figures instead substituting adults who provide care but don't have the time to develop the close relationships with the children which enable the supposed tutoring of a moral conscience.

In 1952, ten-year-old Richard and his 12-year-old brother were delivered to the Home, a Presbyterian orphanage in rural North Carolina, after their mother committed suicide and their father was found too chronically drunk to care for them. They remained there until they graduated from high school. McKenzie's remembrance of those years is neither whitewashed nor nostalgic; he gives evidence that orphanages can be "a refuge and a source of inspiration" to neglected children. McKenzie, an author and professor of economics, has prefaced this work with responses from a survey of over 1000 living "alumni" of the Home supporting the positive attributes of institutional care: security, stability, permanence, direction, and a value system. McKenzie presents a compelling argument in favor of giving abused or homeless children an opportunity to begin a new life by escaping both their sordid past and their hopeless present. Highly recommended for both lay readers and policymakers.​

I can speak from personal experience. I tried the hands off, do no harm approach and my kids turned into spoiled brats. When I got strict with them and started actively teaching them and communicating firm expectations, they became good children who are empathetic and highly emotionally intelligent for their age. My oldest boy has autism and I have not only gotten him out of his shell with this method but he actually got himself a date.

Children learning from other children is good to an extent, but remember, the pre-frontal cortex doesn't actually stop developed until a person is around twenty. The pre-frontal cortex is key for emotional control at an adult level and key to effective behavioral modelling. Children cannot provide this to other children as a fact of biology.

Please, I show you respect by reading what you write and I try to engage your points, so could you return the favor? Your response completely neglects the selection effect I detailed in my comment. If you want to isolate the effect of "no parents" and see how it affects incarceration rates, then you need to control from kids who are already troubled, already carrying the baggage of mental illness, etc.

I haven't seen enough merit in your anecdotes to warrant a response. I am responding with facts while you are using morality questions and stuff like that. Much of this stuff has been studied and is backed up by really good data, I will go with that.

You need to come up with an explanation for how a moral conscience can develop in children when no parents are present to instill it. That's a pretty big point, don't you agree?

Umm, my point was that parents are key in developing that. Teaching children how to behave civilly. Have you seen tribes of children and how they behave? Its pretty scary stuff.
 
Home | moralfoundations.org

This is the most complete explanation of human moral behavior I have ever seen. It goes into the biological mechanisms of the formation of moral behaviors and strategies (and morality is, in the end, a survival strategy just like any other primate).


I noticed how he gave compliments to liberals, but insulted every other group. :lol:

I will even quote the insult:

6) Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor. We report some preliminary work on this potential foundation in this paper, on the psychology of libertarianism and liberty.

What utter garbage. What kind of moron thinks the reason people want to be free is because they feel hatred for bullies and dominators? Jesus.
 
I don't believe that. You make it sound as if empathy and concern for others was just a creation of society, but if that was the case why would it even cross the human brain to start teaching such things to children? It is the lack of brain development and experience which are the reasons for the behavior.

There is really no validity to the argument that morality and basic human capabilities like empathy are the creation of society. There is however much to support the argument that society is damaging to these basic capabilities.

Ok, first off, I don't think that anyone is arguing that there is no genetic component to various personality disorders including anti-social personality disorder. However, no psychologist would argue that you cannot have any influence over the type of person your child grows up to be. For example, lets say that 80% of sociopaths have gene A. That does not mean that everyone with gene A grows up to be a sociopath, it just means that hypothetical gene predisposes them to it. The differences between someone with that gene that ends up a sociopath and someone with that gene that doesn't is largely early childhood development.
 
Yes, but there are cases of feral children.

Fascinating, this particular child lived just like an animal. Do you think he possessed qualities like empathy?

Interesting link here.

10 Modern Cases of Feral Children - Listverse

Another thing to keep in mind here is that the vast majority of "feral child" stories are either grossly exaggerated or completely made up. In most legitimate cases, the child is not raised in the wild from infancy to adulthood, but rather young childhood (5 or 6 years of age) onwards. Even then, they usually only live in that state for a few years before being rescued by someone.

Frankly, the damage that even such a short period of time cut off from human contact is capable of causing to a child's brain should more than speak to the necessity of social interaction in human development all by itself.
 
I noticed how he gave compliments to liberals, but insulted every other group. :lol:

I will even quote the insult:



What utter garbage.

yes, it grates against what you would like to see. How you feel about it is irrelevant. If you go further into Haidt's work, he tends to lean conservative in his praising. For example liberals tend to strongly emphasize 1 and 2 while ignoring 3-5. Conservatives tend to put equal weight on all five.

And honestly, as a liberal, when I read 3-5 I kind of go WTF, those have no value! but the reason is simply my brain is not formed in a way that I have the structures built for that kind of thinking. This is both good and bad for various reasons (but then again EVERYTHING in life is both good and bad for various reasons, so thats not a very insightful statement)

Number 6 was added because people complained, I will admit (I am not sure Haidt fully agrees with it), but liberty is a human want (we all want more freedom), just like people want more candy and nice cars. Its something we have to work to get (because life hands us nothing for free and the default state is deprivation of everything), so I am not sure it qualifies either.
 
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Another thing to keep in mind here is that the vast majority of "feral child" stories are either grossly exaggerated or completely made up. In most legitimate cases, the child is not raised in the wild from infancy to adulthood, but rather young childhood (5 or 6 years of age) onwards. Even then, they usually only live in that state for a few years before being rescued by someone.

Frankly, the damage that even such a short period of time cut off from human contact is capable of causing to a child's brain should more than speak to the necessity of social interaction in human development all by itself.

Right, well in my link it acknowledges that some of these children were abandoned by parents or just went missing during war time. No one is really SURE of their ages when they were left to fend for themselves.
 
Have you read "The Nurture Assumption" by Judith Rich Harris? She does a nice job of demolishing positions that were widely held by psychologists.

Here's my point - all anyone needs do is find an instance which falsifies a widely held hypothesis and then the hypothesis crumbles. Did American orphanages turn out armies of sociopaths? The industrial or factory type of "parenting" from American orphanage caregivers was far different from that of parents, in terms of quantity and quality, and yet children raised in American orphanages in the past weren't all sociopaths.

Frankly, thats absurd. Who would argue that every orphan ended up a sociopath? The question would be did children growing up in orphanages have a higher statistical likelihood of developing anti-social personality disorder than children that grew up in traditional homes.

Secondly, what exactly is the precise technique which parents must use to instill conscience building? What if a parent doesn't know how to do this, does this doom the child to being a sociopath?

Of course not, who said that it did. Neurologists have long known now that sociopaths brains look different in terms of activity compared to normal individuals. You can read about it here:

Sabbatini, RME: The Psychopath's Brain. Tormented Souls, Diseased Brains

What makes a sociopath is a mixture of a physiological predisposition to it and in most cases a deprived childhood (from the link above):

One interesting aspect of Dr. Raine's research is that he correlated the PET brain images to the murderer''s personal history, in order to ascertain whether they were subjected to trauma, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, poverty, when they were children (a deprived environment for the development of personality). Of the murderers, 12 had suffered significant abuse or deprivation. It was discovered that murderer's coming from non-deprived households had much larger deficits in the orbitofrontal area of the brain (14 % on the average) than normal people and murderer's coming from deprived environments (see figure below).


What's really going on is a child following a developmental path which is largely determined by their genetic inheritance. Negative environmental influences can certainly have an effect and knock them about, sometimes inducing sociopathic traits, but a "neutral" environment of benign neglect, which is the default mode for most of human history, doesn't harm children.

As I stated and sourced above, its a combination actually. As an adoptive parent I can tell you that benign neglect in orphanages certainly can result in psychological and developmental issues.
 
Children aren't a blank slate, that theory is long dead since the age of actual science. Jealousy is innate to humanity.

Wait, what? Now you've turned the tables and you're arguing against the Blank Slate when you were previously arguing in favor of it? Did I miss that ju-jitsu move? When did I switch roles and begin arguing in favor of Blank Slatism?

I can speak from personal experience. I tried the hands off, do no harm approach and my kids turned into spoiled brats. When I got strict with them and started actively teaching them and communicating firm expectations, they became good children who are empathetic and highly emotionally intelligent for their age.

It looks to me like you're sending out ranging fire - going from extreme to extreme. A "hands off" approach isn't what is usually employed in orphanages. They all have rules, they all enforce behavior. The kids aren't free to do as they please. What the orphanages strive to do is "No Harm."

My oldest boy has autism and I have not only gotten him out of his shell with this method but he actually got himself a date.

That's fantastic but to extrapolate from an autistic child to all children is an invalid logical leap.

I am responding with facts

Is that what you kids call it these days? Back in my day we called what you were doing "argument by assertion." Facts, huh? OK.
 
Wait, what? Now you've turned the tables and you're arguing against the Blank Slate when you were previously arguing in favor of it? Did I miss that ju-jitsu move? When did I switch roles and begin arguing in favor of Blank Slatism?



It looks to me like you're sending out ranging fire - going from extreme to extreme. A "hands off" approach isn't what is usually employed in orphanages. They all have rules, they all enforce behavior. The kids aren't free to do as they please. What the orphanages strive to do is "No Harm."



That's fantastic but to extrapolate from an autistic child to all children is an invalid logical leap.



Is that what you kids call it these days? Back in my day we called what you were doing "argument by assertion." Facts, huh? OK.

I am beginning to think you misunderstood my original position and warped some of my statements out of proportion. Your debate style is a bit nit picky and I tend to be a big picture style thinker, so you bog me down in the minute details, which in the process of explaining those, I tend to forget my larger point until I switch my thinking mode back to what I tend to be good at. so the end result is a series of unlinked statements. If you want to understand my point, from my perspective, we need to stay big picture and with a mostly associative thought process.

I do my concrete style thinking when I am wearing my engineering hat at work mostly, when I am building systems :)

Lets start over, but this time I will state my reasoning. Children are by default selfish and self centered.

because:
Children start off with the task of learning themselves. Babies come out of the womb needing to learn how to perform basic motor functions such as grab things they want to and other functions such as distinguishing shape and color. They are self centered out of necessity because we all gotta start somewhere in the path to learning. So at a young age, they get good enough to learn to walk, speak, and engage in other social behaviors. However, they are still self centered because this is the only experience they have to go on thus far.

The parent's job is to begin socializing them. while other kids can, children who are not fully socialized (and the vast majority are not, look at the majority of teenagers out there) make poor parents. There are exceptions of course, my girlfriend basically had to raise her sister at the age of 8, but they are exceptions and not generally the case. So as children mature, parents tend to have to be the ones to say things like "stop kicking your brother!" or "we need to learn to share" which are lessons in morality.

This is not to say that your position cannot be true, children can find their way on their own, and sometimes this happens, but again, its not generally the case. Without parents or other role models to say things like "stop kicking your sister" children may not become aware that kicking their sister actually causes their sister pain. And in cases where they do, they may enjoy causing their sister pain (kids get in fights all the time and often for predatory reasons). Kids who are like this tend to be viewed as needing help growing up "that child needs discipline". If an adult acts like that "punching some guy out in a bar fight", they tend to be viewed as flawed. Its far more normal for children to behave in unsocial ways is my point.

At some point, usually around the teenage years, the influencing of behavioral modeling from parents wears off, by then, its like the bird's first flight, will they apply the lessons they were taught or not? results tend to be mixed and often teenagers, once they get a bit of life experience tend to go back to those lessons and realize that they are important. However, if those lessons were never taught, any number of other reactions become far more likely to occur, but more often than not tend to still be self centered and unsocial.
 
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Recently. Was pregnant and could not give birth. Operation cost of $ 1200.:shock: But for a pet cat it is not sad.:2sick1:

Yikes!
 
yes, it grates against what you would like to see. How you feel about it is irrelevant. If you go further into Haidt's work, he tends to lean conservative in his praising. For example liberals tend to strongly emphasize 1 and 2 while ignoring 3-5. Conservatives tend to put equal weight on all five.

And honestly, as a liberal, when I read 3-5 I kind of go WTF, those have no value! but the reason is simply my brain is not formed in a way that I have the structures built for that kind of thinking. This is both good and bad for various reasons (but then again EVERYTHING in life is both good and bad for various reasons, so thats not a very insightful statement)

Number 6 was added because people complained, I will admit (I am not sure Haidt fully agrees with it), but liberty is a human want (we all want more freedom), just like people want more candy and nice cars. Its something we have to work to get (because life hands us nothing for free and the default state is deprivation of everything), so I am not sure it qualifies either.

I really have no interest in going further into his work after reading his trash he put down there. Psychologists have a tendency to piss me off because they bull**** endlessly and this guy is a great example of that.
 
The question would be did children growing up in orphanages have a higher statistical likelihood of developing anti-social personality disorder than children that grew up in traditional homes.

When you seek to address that question you need to account for the condition of the children entering orphanages. Comparing an anti-social kid whose parents can't control him any longer and lose custody of him to a normal child in a traditional home and then assigning life outcomes for these two classes of children to their rearing environment is an invalid comparison.

As an adoptive parent I can tell you that benign neglect in orphanages certainly can result in psychological and developmental issues.

As can a number of other factors, ranging from irresponsible parental behavior, unrecognized predispositions, to outright harm to children via actions in the orphanage system. When an adoptive parent adopts, it's very difficult to pinpoint the root cause of a child's psychological and developmental issues. In contemporary America we no longer see middle and upper class (class here being used as a shorthand proxy for women who are not dealing with psychological issues of their own) girls being sent away to visit an aunt for 9 months where they can have a baby and turn it over to an orphanage.
 
I really have no interest in going further into his work after reading his trash he put down there. Psychologists have a tendency to piss me off because they bull**** endlessly and this guy is a great example of that.

This is what always amuses me about you. You have one of the strongest information filters I have ever seen.
 
This is what always amuses me about you. You have one of the strongest information filters I have ever seen.

He didn't provide me anything of value. He passed judgments, made observations that are obviously biased judging by number six and then goes I understand everyone. It's crap.
 
I am beginning to think you misunderstood my original position and warped some of my statements out of proportion. Your debate style is a bit nit picky and I tend to be a big picture style thinker, so you bog me down in the minute details, which in the process of explaining those, I tend to forget my larger point until I switch my thinking mode back to what I tend to be good at. so the end result is a series of unlinked statements. If you want to understand my point, from my perspective, we need to stay big picture and with a mostly associative thought process.

this is the only part (bold) I would argue. he is the minutia master
 
He didn't provide me anything of value. He passed judgments, made observations that are obviously biased judging by number six and then goes I understand everyone. It's crap.

case in point.
 
When you seek to address that question you need to account for the condition of the children entering orphanages. Comparing an anti-social kid whose parents can't control him any longer and lose custody of him to a normal child in a traditional home and then assigning life outcomes for these two classes of children to their rearing environment is an invalid comparison.

As can a number of other factors, ranging from irresponsible parental behavior, unrecognized predispositions, to outright harm to children via actions in the orphanage system. When an adoptive parent adopts, it's very difficult to pinpoint the root cause of a child's psychological and developmental issues. In contemporary America we no longer see middle and upper class (class here being used as a shorthand proxy for women who are not dealing with psychological issues of their own) girls being sent away to visit an aunt for 9 months where they can have a baby and turn it over to an orphanage.

Why on earth are you choosing to argue a subject that you obviously know so little about? Many children in orphanages arrived there as infants. It is actually fairly rare for children that are taken from their parents to end up in orphanages or the foster system because in most cases there is another member of the family that can take them such as grandparents or aunts and uncles.

Children in orphanages commonly have issues with bonding with their adoptive parents, making friends, many times they are sensitive to touch, have difficulties with social norms, have a hard time with empathy, can have anger issues, and a whole host of issues including a higher statistical likelihood of developing personality disorders. Obviously genetic factors come into play as well. Moreover, some personality types have better coping mechanisms than other types and thus are less likely to have issues (ISFJs are less likely to have personality disorders than INTJs for example). However, all things being equal, kids growing up in neglected environments are statistically more likely to develop personality disorders.
 
I really have no interest in going further into his work after reading his trash he put down there. Psychologists have a tendency to piss me off because they bull**** endlessly and this guy is a great example of that.

I'd suggest that you give Haidt's work more attention. It maps pretty damn well to observable reality. This puts him into a different league than most psychologists who do bull**** endlessly. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

If you want to piss off liberals, quoting Haidt's work can be beneficial, it just depends on how harshly you can get the point across. For instance, look at how tacomancer phrased the distribution of morality and now watch this: liberals lack two moral values - they're simply deficient and they overcompensate by going through the roof on issues like equality, which means that conservatives can well understand the views of liberals because we overlap with their moral compass but liberals are completely baffled by how conservatives think because liberals are morally stunted. That will insult most liberals. The trick is to phrase it correctly, but still honestly report the findings.
 
case in point.

His conclusion is wrong.

Our results suggest that libertarians are a distinct group that places lower value on morality as typically measured by moral psychologists

Libertarians are morally consistent as they form a foundation to build from. That is the entire reason they are in between conservatives and liberals on pretty much everything he comes across. If he even bothered to look up the philosophy he would know that. Yes, it's a philosophy built on reason, but the non-aggression principle is very much a moral principle.
 
I'd suggest that you give Haidt's work more attention. It maps pretty damn well to observable reality. This puts him into a different league than most psychologists who do bull**** endlessly. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

If you want to piss off liberals, quoting Haidt's work can be beneficial, it just depends on how harshly you can get the point across. For instance, look at how tacomancer phrased the distribution of morality and now watch this: liberals lack two moral values - they're simply deficient and they overcompensate by going through the roof on issues like equality, which means that conservatives can well understand the views of liberals because we overlap with their moral compass but liberals are completely baffled by how conservatives think because liberals are morally stunted. That will insult most liberals. The trick is to phrase it correctly, but still honestly report the findings.

We don't need "how to be a hack lessons" on this forum please. We need less of that behavior.
 
His conclusion is wrong.



Libertarians are morally consistent as they form a foundation to build from. That is the entire reason they are in between conservatives and liberals on pretty much everything he comes across. If he even bothered to look up the philosophy he would know that.

again, you seem to think morality is an exercise in logic, this is your first fundamental flaw in your reasoning.
 
I'd suggest that you give Haidt's work more attention. It maps pretty damn well to observable reality. This puts him into a different league than most psychologists who do bull**** endlessly. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

If you want to piss off liberals, quoting Haidt's work can be beneficial, it just depends on how harshly you can get the point across. For instance, look at how tacomancer phrased the distribution of morality and now watch this: liberals lack two moral values - they're simply deficient and they overcompensate by going through the roof on issues like equality, which means that conservatives can well understand the views of liberals because we overlap with their moral compass but liberals are completely baffled by how conservatives think because liberals are morally stunted. That will insult most liberals. The trick is to phrase it correctly, but still honestly report the findings.

That predisposes though that respect / submission to tradition is a moral value and that loyalty to one's group is a moral value. I think care / harm, fairness / cheating, and liberty / oppression are certainly moral values that just about everyone would agree on as being moral values. The other two are much more subjective though. For example, I think you should be loyal to your family, but I don't understand why respect for tradition is a moral value at all.

Maybe they are moral values, but as a moral value they are certainly off my radar screen. Its kind of like how some people sense and perceive while others feel and judge. The latter group is far more prone to having gut feelings. I can honestly say that i don't think I have ever had a gut feeling in my life. So I suppose we are all wired up quite differently.
 
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