I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re all finely tuned in to our parents’ failings and probably try not to replicate them… however, we’re all blind to our own new failings. Our kids will pick up on those.
Regardless of whether having four kids is good, bad, or indifferent, I’m pretty sure raising them once you have them—loving them, providing for them, setting a good example for them, and in general being good parents to them—is a good thing.
33, one kid 6, one kid 4, two kids -.5
Interestingly enough, my closest friends and I have pondered the question of whether people are doomed to get dumber with age. (May none of our dearly loved and mostly respected parents ever read this thread!)
This is interesting–my own experience is exactly the opposite. I thought my own folks were the very model of how people ought to be. Then I went to college, lived in a foreign country for a while, went to grad school etc–and, well, to be frank, I changed my mind. Which is not to say I think they’re bad parents, certainly not bad people. But my idealized understanding of them has completely disappeared. I now appreciate and enjoy their company as people. And I have a lot of respect for the obstacles they’ve overcome etc. But I’d never go to them seeking wisdom, let’s just put it that way.
Anyway, that’s my situation, but part of why I felt like making the (exaggerated but based in actual experience) claim in the OP is the fact that I have heard similar sentiments from others in my circle.
You’re right about this–I overstepped myself when I said that.
I am absolutely not. Sure, I’m better educated than they were, but I overcame a lot less to get the education I have, due to Mom and Dad’s help. Yeah, I have more money than they did at my age, but it was the things they taught me about work and education, combined with a stable background, that allowed that. I do have a “more enlightened” view of things like gender and race than they do, I suppose, but I was sufficiently sheltered that I was never really negatively affected by people differently from me in a way that would involve me forming prejudices at a young age.
So yeah, sure, you can say I’m more enlightened and successful than my parents, maybe. But every single reason for that is the direct result of their forethought and hard work. If I can do half as well for my kid, I’ll consider it successful.
As far as general kindness, charitable giving, and general pleasantness, we have different strengths in different ways. So no, there’s no way I’m better than my parents. It might look like it on paper, but it’s not true.
Well, there’s a certain shift in cognitive capacities that takes place in an aging brain, but I don’t think ‘getting dumber’ quite captures it – in fact, one could argue just the opposite. The thing is, young brains are very good at filtering – getting only the important information out of a situation, ignoring irrelevant distractions. This brings with it a capacity of very narrow and sharp focus – somewhat like a spotlight illuminating precisely one area, leaving the rest in comparative darkness.
By contrast, an old person’s brain tends to have less filtering capacity – leading to a diminished ability to concentrate on the spot, to precisely call upon only the information relevant to a given situation. However, the ‘irrelevant’ information the aged brain takes in is not just meaningless, not just noise – rather, there is recent research that suggests it is actually being put to good use, providing a wider picture, the ability to process information that would simply be discarded by a younger person’s brain. Consequently, older people perform better at cognitive tasks emphasizing the ‘bigger picture’. A little like a lightbulb, the aged brain may lack a sharp point of focus, but consequently leaves less in the dark.
Us young’uns, however, taking a precisely focused attention as indicative of high intelligence, and smiling quietly at grampa’s inability to remember the names of his grandkids or where he left the car keys, consider the decline of this faculty in the elderly a sign of diminishing intelligence.
Aw, c’mon now, don’t let me kill this thread, too… I’m starting to build up a bit of a bad track record here. 
What I was thinking, but never posted, was that the article you linked to seemed to me to be trying to put a positive spin on what is essentially a deficit. The people in the study suffered from a decreased ability to filter the relevant from the irrelevant. This did cause them to perform more accurately than others on a very particulra sort of test, but that was a test artificially designed to produce accurate results from just that sort of deficit. In other words, the test shows there’s something people with this deficit can do better than others–but the thing they can do better is not something that’s very likely to show any pattern of benefit in any “natural” setting. (The benefit required the very artificial setting of the experiment itself to show itself.)
In a “natural” setting, I’m dubious that the occasions on which one fails to filter the irrelevant but gets lucky and turns out to be able to do something good with this are anywhere near as numerous as the occasions on which one succeeds in filtering the irrelevant and is (naturally–since you’re just looking at what’s relevant) able to make good use of that.
They said something toward the end about the fact that creative people also have more trouble filtering relevant from irrelevant–but for that observation to have much meaning, I’d want to see direct measurements of creativity among the elderly.
They mentioned that we would be tempted to call the ability to synthesize information from multiple topics “wisdom,” but the research they mentioned didn’t seem to illustrate an ability to do that.
And now you see why I didn’t answer–it sounds like I have contempt for the elderly now! 
Well, actually, that was sort of my point – intelligence is always defined by the ability to solve certain problems; through the selection of which problems those are, we essentially select what we consider intelligent. So basically, who’s intelligent and who’s not is not really an outcome of an intelligence test, but something you put in, through an appropriate problem-selection. Different such selections result in different individuals achieving high-intelligence scores. It’s like considering mental arithmetic to be the sole metric by which to judge intelligence: on an intelligence test that tested people for the ability of doing mental arithmetic, those able to do it well would be considered most intelligent. But all we really got out of the test is that people able to do mental arithmetic well are able to do mental arithmetic well, which is kind of an empty result.
In order to curve back to the original topic, I think something similar is true wrt judgements of goodness – we judge those people good that conform to our value system. But again, that really just tells us that those that conform to our value system in fact conform to our value system, absent any objective criteria of ‘goodness’.
Of course, this faces the threat of sliding off into some moral (respectively intellectual) relativism; so typically, we try to find an appropriate ‘external’ metric of goodness, or intelligence – such as you propose in appealing to ‘natural’ problems/situations. People have pointed to the maximisation of the common good, or conversely the minimization of harm, as such standards in the moral sector; and those and similar ideas are all workable to some degree. But what we do then, to consider the problem essentially solved and bury it under the rug, pretending to ourselves that there is some objective notion of goodness, or at least an effectively objective one, I think is problematic, because ultimately, while we may have succeeded in supplying one level of foundations to our ideas of moral goodness, we’re still somewhat building on sand – since what the idea of goodness lacked in objectivity originally, is still absent from the foundations we found, no matter what they may be. So judgements of relative goodness always should come with the caveat that the metric used to make them is, in a certain sense, arbitrary.
Well, I’m not (here) arguing there’s an objective metric of goodness–but I am presupposing there’s one every SDMB reader would agree to. (Really not even that since the claim in the OP is intentionally exaggerated.)
Yes, sorry, didn’t mean to impose. It’s just that I got temporarily fascinated by the topic, and I’m not good at stopping myself when I get enthusiastic about something, and I tend to get overly enthusiastic about every (to me) new idea and feel the need to share my revelations with the rest of the world…
To be honest I’m not sure what the right view is about the objectivity of moral claims. On the one hand they certainly feel objective to me. On the other hand the problem of foundations you mentioned is a serious one for any objectivist account.
I seem to recall it’s called the “open question” problem–given any accout of an objective basis for morality, it seems like you could always reasonably ask “why should we say that’s ‘good’”?
My own proposal is that moral claims are objectively based on the “don’t be a jerk” principle. I have to argue that there’s an objective standard for "jerk"iness, though. I think there is, but it has so much to do with the internal mental states of the candidate for "jerk"iness that judgments are doomed to be hazy and practically unverifiable.
I’ve recently developed some sympathy for the ‘universal moral grammar’-school of thought, which of course jettisons any idea of objectivity from the start. The idea is that the way we make moral judgements is to a certain degree just an innate faculty, just as the way we make grammatical judgements is in Chomsky’s ‘universal grammar’. That means that there is no simple set of self-consistent rules from which in any situation one can deduce what is morally right, and so on, but that nevertheless our moral judgements have some degree of universality.
But I must confess that I like this in part because it gives an easy answer – generally, moral philosophy, like political or economic philosophy, seems much too complicated, muddled, high-level and poorly founded to me to make any really definitive statements about. So in practise I just go with what my gut tells me is the right thing to do, hoping that there’s a good reason for it somewhere.
I doubt you could get every Doper to agree the sky is blue without a lot of squabbling over what constituted “sky”, defining exact shades we’re counting as “blue”, and making exceptions for nighttime and bad weather. Presupposing we can all agree on one metric of goodness is just insanity.
Were your parents insane? Because if not, clearly your theory is shot to shit from the outset.
As for the intelligence thing, I’m not really seeing where your objection to HM, HW’s article is coming from. You criticize the study for only showing that people who are good at this kind of thinking do well on the kind of test that emphasizes that kind of thinking, but that’s exactly what you’re doing when you’re assessing people’s relative intelligence. You’re making up your own test criteria that emphasizes one sort of thinking, and lo and behold! People who are better at that kind of thinking do better on your test.
Broader-focus thinking and information gathering has a lot of real-world uses. Taking medical histories, for instance. People who want to talk about one symptom and only one symptom are much harder to get a good picture of what’s going on than people who will tell you about other things that aren’t as obviously relevant. Ask my narrow-focus husband how many times I’ve said “I saw it in X room on the Y/There was a sign for one of those a couple blocks back/She was nearly falling out of that blouse. Didn’t you see that??” And no, he didn’t see whatever it was because it wasn’t strictly relevant to what he was doing at that exact moment. If his narrow focus lets him find some bit of information 3 minutes sooner, but then he has to spend 3 minutes looking for some other bits of information I ran across and retained while doing the original search, he’s really no further ahead at the end of the day.
Not necessarily. I marked out a (admittedly hazy) distinction between artificial and natural conditions. In other words, conditions designed specifically to measure an ability, and conditions not so designed. I was claiming that the results mentioned in the link only convincingly applied to artificial conditions, and I claimed that under more natural conditions, the cognitive process measured by the study would more sensibly be thought of as a deficit.
As I mentioned before, though the article begins to talk about broad-focus thinking and information gathering, it doesn’t seem like that’s what the study actually measured.
Broad-focus thinking, to be reliably productive, still must stand on a relevance-filter of some kind. But what the study showed was that the people in it had an inability to filter for relevance. When given the quiz during the study, these people were lucky enough to be in an artificial circumstance which makes their inability to filter for relevance tend to get them the right answers. But in a natural setting, this inability will not make them so lucky.
Its as though I don’t have any hands, and so I have in almost any natural setting a profound disability–but if you test me for being able to get out of handcuffs, I’ll do better than anyone.
I guess if the inference is supposed to be “It’s what the universal moral grammar says, so it must be right” then that inference fails. But if moral claims turn out to mean “it’s what the universal moral grammar says” then the moral claims have turned out to have objectively evaluable truth conditions.
Here by the way is how I’d propose to start out on trying to figure out what “right” and “wrong” mean, if I were so inclined:
To do something wrong is to undertake an action motivated by self-interest in a way which someone in an identical* epistemological state could object to without themselves doing something wrong thereby.
You say circular, I say recursive.
*It’d have to be “relevantly identical” I guess, with all the messiness that implies.
Not in my case. My father is a retired mechanical engineer and foreman for one of the larger factories in the state who made a small fortune. He can seemingly fix or make anything. He’s both taller and more intelligent than I am.
I’m more intelligent and educated than my mother but she has this gregarious personality I’ll forever be jealous of. She can make friends anywhere or strike up 20 minute conversations with complete strangers. I’m more introverted and reserved.
They both have better work ethics than I do. The only improvement I can claim is more enlightened social views, but that’s just part of the zeitgeist.
Oh man, I can so relate to this. I consider myself quite the thread killer.
Yes, point taken. I merely meant that if universal moral grammar is right, then there’s no kind of ‘fundamental’ principle that determines objective moral rightness or wrongness, such as there’s no fundamental principle that determines grammatical correctness; things just shook out that way. That doesn’t mean they could be arbitrarily different; just as grammar, moral has a function. With grammar, it’s communication, with moral, well, it’s a bit more fuzzy, but it’s clear that morals that propose the killing of everybody at the first chance won’t be around very long (or rather, come up in the first place).
But how do you anchor that recursion? If each instance of wrongness has to be decided in this way, seems to me you’d be lead into the dreaded infinite regress, absent of some fiat definition of ‘such-and-such is wrong’, which every recursion eventually reaches…
Yeah, I know, I know.
I don’t actually think anyone (much less I) will ever be able to formulate an objective measure of morality, but I do think it’s fun and informative to try.
Have to skidaddle, though, and may not be back for some time. (It happens rarely that I get around to actually submitting to a conference, and even more rarely are they foolish enough to accept, but it has happened this time so I’ll be scarce for a couple days…)
I’ll ponder the anchoring while I’m out.