The Disadvantages of Youth (and why chronological adults don't understand them as well as they think)

 

There’s no such thing as maturity, only varying degrees of immaturity. 

 

Progress doesn’t always lead to competence or cure, and immaturity is never shed, only lessened and managed. Many attribute their personal development to life learning when, in reality, they mostly get older and have an emotional system less poorly suited for judgment (more on this in a bit). It’s naïve to think young people simply lack knowledge and that growing older necessarily means growing wiser. Intelligence and learning don’t guarantee wisdom; judgment isn’t purely intellectual; and exposure to the lessons doesn’t guarantee they’re learned. And these are amongst the most important lessons. Since they’re rarely learned, wisdom comes in part from realizing why it DOESN’T come with age.   

 

In the post The Epistemology of Irrationality, I examined the dynamics of irrationality as a means of studying RATIONALITY. Similarly, to understand maturity--or “non-immaturity,” as I call it--one must study immaturity. Hence this post. 

 

One: Insufficient time learning to use a thinking organ poorly suited for their environment but designed to convince them otherwise 

 

At least two thirds of what’s called “commonsense” is its bastard brother “natural intuition.” Disregarding all their ambiguities and impurities, what most people think of as natural intuition is something akin to the common thinking machinery designed to understand the World as it is. But anyone who understands evolution knows it’s much closer to the common thinking machinery used to MAKE SENSE OF a much SIMPLER ENVIRONMENT for SURVIVAL. Naturally, this is a rather flawed design imperative for understanding the modern World, resulting in the need for greater time to learn how to use it. 

 

Because confusion, inhibition, and distractions can be as detrimental to a person or animal’s dealings with reality as understanding it is beneficial, the feeling or belief in understanding and rationality can be almost as important as the real thing. Evolution knows that most of the time, it’s better to have a belief, outlook, strategy, model of reality, etc. that’s just good or right enough but one you feel comfortable with and know how to use than one’s that much better in theory that you don’t feel comfortable with. This is true both on the individual and group levels. 

 

To ensure confidence and resolve, animal thinking organs twist correlated events into causational relationships, turning reality into a “harmonious narrative.” Artificial Resonance, as I call it, is the cognitive “editing” process that doctors subconscious and sensory inputs into the coherent experience known as “reality.” It’s a brilliant compromise, but it comes at the cost of self-delusion and most fallacious reasoning (a much better explanation of Resonance, universal epistemic weaknesses, and their consequences are given in the summary intro and, especially, part three of the original intro). 

 

Its consequences include the causation bias, the natural assumption that the relationship between cause and effect will always be ascertainable and satisfying; correlational fallacies; the confirmation bias; ineptitude at probability and statistics; blurring observation and interpretation/the tendency to jump to conclusions; rationalization; the cognitive and emotional reflex to reinforce beliefs; the linear illusion, the illusion that things tend to change linearly; the hindsight bias; and the Sham, the widespread con/delusion that rational human agency predominates society. Since Resonance is a reflexive, cognitive phenomenon, these traits are, as well. It’s only here where emotional and social traits start to take effect, tremendously reinforcing them.

 

Resonance also works ex post facto: When new information comes in about past events, Resonance is automatically employed to make causal connections, imparting the past with an artificial sense of simplicity and predictability. This results in what extralogical reasoning calls the hindsight paradox. In theory, the advantage of hindsight is clarity, having a clearer understanding of the information available at the time of the events, not future information; but because of Resonance, future information always provides reinforcement. Resonance doesn’t just act to fallaciously twist events into harmonious relationships, either; it SUPPRESSES information that threatens them, biasing memory even more toward confirmatory information as well as interpretations over observations.  

 

Because the past is always simpler than the present, when chronological adults imagine themselves as teenagers, they imagine themselves with exaggerated educability; they then, in turn, project this into younger people.    

 

Ultimately, Resonance is a major cause for people’s overestimation of human capability, especially as relates to judgement and what they can and cannot know. This is the core of hubris. Hubris isn’t so much overestimating oneself relative to others so much as overestimating human capability in general, thinking you can know and understand things no one with your experience and knowledge can know or understand--if anyone period. Since judgement means making decisions with limited information, so long as one has the minimally necessary information, being good at accounting for what you don’t know is more important than knowledge. As I often ram down the readers’ throats, hubris is more dangerous than ignorance. But then again, as the core of hubris tells you, hubris is a form of ignorance. 

 

As you can infer, a major part of growing wiser is gaining a sense of what you don’t know, including things you need not have an opinion one way or the other.  

 

To appreciate this, one must have experience getting burned by hubris, Resonance, and their correlates. Sadly, chronological adults fail to discover Resonance and most of its effects. They might gain a better appreciation for the fact that the common thinking machinery isn’t nearly AS WELL designed for this environment as they once thought, but few appreciate that it isn’t designed for it AT ALL. 

 

Two: Insufficient EMOTIONAL experience

 

Evolution doesn’t integrate. It assimilates. It only adds functions to the extent to which it complements or enhances what was already there. What was already there, prior to the rise of sentience, was mostly primitive and reflective. And this shouldn’t be surprising given that the thinking organ is, crudely speaking, ninety-percent primitive, unconscious, and self-inconsistent. The emotions are intended to work with the intellect, not too much, not too little—which it never is. It’s well established that people are disproportionately affected by failure than success, and life-related judgment is more about being good at avoiding mistakes and wrongness than being correct. Therefore, many lessons can’t be truly learned without support from the emotions that accompany personal failures.

 

Society’s social infrastructure is bottomed on an exaggerated sense of human rationality as well as how much individuals can influence the course of societal events. ER calls this The Sham: the widespread con/delusion that rational human agency predominates society—which, in turn, predominates society. To some extent, The Sham can be thought of society’s delusionary collective Free Will. Conscious beliefs poorly supported by emotions and unconscious beliefs have little effect on people’s decisions and general perspectives, and no one’s promoted the opposite more than academia, despite being responsible for proving it. 

    

Three: Having an emotional system poorly suited for judgment 

 

Given that the emotions work—and must work--with the intellect, having an emotional system poorly suited for judgment means their judgment is all but fucked. 

 

Young people have an “energy” that older ones don’t. Though highly motivating, it couldn’t lend itself much worse to judgment. Whether the changes are more due to physiological or psychological factors is unclear, but what is clear is that younger people have bigger egos and stronger ambitions and a resultantly greater need for beliefs and achievements that satisfy them (however petty). This complicates the criteria beliefs are subjected to, leading to otherwise unnecessary beliefs and delusions, which, in turn, lead to more of the same.

 

A central axiom of ER is that wrong beliefs are more dangerous than correct beliefs are beneficial, and it recommends people be particular about the beliefs they choose to take on. There are more than enough things in the World to be opinionated about; you can afford to be picky. Being in the habit of being needlessly wrong cultivates undisciplined thinking. Secondly, because everyone has a cognitive and emotional reflex to reinforce their beliefs in mutually supporting packages (however riddled with contradictions they may be), it should, therefore, be assumed that the more a belief or model of reality deviates from the truth, the more the beliefs or models of reality that will come to support it will also deviate from it, including future belief and models, which can only be guessed. 

Young people’s psychologies inevitably lead to high opinion to fact ratios, impairing their overall thinking. I opened my article on the difficulties of judging talent saying, “I know a thousand times as much as I did when I was young, and I THINK I know one thousandth as much.”    

 

Oftentimes, young people reveal their lack of non-immaturity by the very fact they insist on having an opinion on how “mature” they are. As mentioned, part of grower wiser is gaining a sense of what you don’t know, including on matters you need not have an opinion one way or another. Another important lesson is that you should always be wary of thinking you understand the advantages and disadvantages of viewing the World from a vantage point you’ve never had the luxury of possessing, including on matters where no opinion is necessary. This is reinforced by the ease of mistaking progress for cure and/or improvement for competence. When you’re trying to correct problems in your thinking and psychology, it’s almost always way easier to know when you’re making progress than it is to know whether you’ve been cured or whether you’ve become competent in ways you weren’t previously. You’ve only been you; you’ve only been one species and only one member of that species. It’s hard, if not impossible, to have perspective. Such problems include immaturity.    

 

Additionally, being centered more on the ability to avoid mistakes than aptitude for high-power deductive reasoning, good judgment is unglamorous, and the grandiosity inherent to “youthful energy” obscures this.    

 

Are young people doomed to fail? Yes—but they must in order to learn. Because of the need for emotional experience and developing an appreciation for avoiding mistakes, it’s an inevitable and indispensable part of personal development. This must be something that’s allowed to happen, and although it needs to be made clear you don’t have to agree with someone to take their advice, encouraging young people to unconditionally obey authorities inhibits learning and discourages freethinking. An advisee that can’t learn is no advisee at all. Even still, everyone is both the best and worst source of knowledge about themselves. They may be the most biased—in addition to whatever other weaknesses they may have—but they also have the most information (about themselves). I don’t see the prudence of eliminating the best source of contextual information from the decision-making process.    

 

Does this mean you shouldn’t attempt to teach young people? Of course not. Any one worth advising will have at least some educability, and a lesson doesn’t have to be learned immediately. Oftentimes, all you’re really doing is planting seeds. But in the end, life—and learning--can’t exist without them.