# Contra Nina Panickssery on advice for children

I recently read [this post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cqriGHCwmKZa2v862/11-pieces-of-advice-for-children) by Nina Panickssery on advice for children. I felt that several of the recommendations are actively harmful to the children they are aimed at. I am going to assume that this advice is targeted at children who are significantly more intelligent than average and maybe 7-12 years of age? It may be worth reading the original post beforehand, or maybe having it open in another tab while you read through this one.

We'll go through the points one by one:

1.  **"Don't be a sheep."** There's a difference between noticing when other people are wrong and actively assuming everyone else is dumb. This leans towards the second.  
      
    There is a huge amount of evolutionary pressure that has gone into designing kids' behaviour; survival past childhood is pretty important if you want to have kids of your own.  
      
    Simple examples of childhood behaviour, such as playing, are good illustrations of this design, but even seemingly idiotic activities like eating dirt can help you develop the antibodies you need as you grow up. As a kid, even a smart one, I would basically expect following the crowd to produce better results than figuring everything out from scratch, especially given the criticality to humans of social interaction.  
      
    Modified rule: Follow the crowd, but understand why they are doing what they are doing, but don't do it if it seems obviously dumb.  
    
2.  **"Don't delude yourself. Sometimes it's useful to pretend to believe a falsehood, but don't go so far as to actually believe it yourself."** I think this implicitly assumes that you know what is true or false, and everyone around you will believe dumb things. This may be true for some things, but I think that this framing pushes you towards too easily dismissing other opinions and away from truth-seeking.  
      
    Often if people think something is just wrong, it is because it is just wrong.  
      
    Modified version: Keep an open mind. The world is confusing, and sometimes you're confused; sometimes others are. Notice where you're confused and try to reduce your confusion there.  
    
3.  **"Think freely."** Broadly agree with this?  
    
4.  **"Be realistic about your (and others') natural/genetic qualities."** I think this advice is in precisely the wrong direction.  
      
    There seems to be an opinion difference between myself and a large portion of this community, where I basically expect that a large amount of the observed genetic variance in, e.g., IQ is down to coding for something like curiosity or willingness to learn, as opposed to raw computational capacity[^l65z0hrb7va].  
      
    Nevertheless, even ignoring this, it seems to me that thinking too hard about your potential limits is far more likely to result in you limiting yourself than in any benefit coming from it.  
      
    As an example, I have a friend from high school who never played in sports, as, lacking one eye, he didn't have depth perception. Towards the end of high school I found out I also didn't have depth perception. I could already juggle 5 balls, and by the end of university I was playing ice hockey with the Team Great Britain University team.  
      
    Modified version: Try everything, do your best, and don't believe limits people place on you. If you want to be better at something, practise it and do your best to improve. If you decide to not do a particular activity, check first that it's not because you believe you can't do it.  
    
5.  **"Keeping (4) in mind, consider whether common advice applies to you. If you are very capable, advice for the less capable is bad for you. If you are less capable, advice for the very capable is bad for you."** Sure, this is fine, I guess. I'd add that you should probably store advice you think is bad away somewhere to check again later?  
    
6.  **"Value yourself intrinsically."** Yup, happy with this.  
    
7.  **"Focus on what's important to you."** I think this is definitely directionally correct for a decent class of people, probably including readers. I would potentially add the caveat of "check if the other thing is worth caring about first."  
    
8.  **"Respect yourself in the past, present, and future. Don’t make excuses for being young."** Again, not completely against this, although there is an element of you making more mistakes as a kid, by your very nature. Directionally correct.  
    
9.  **"Recognise myths as they are."** My response here is similar to #2. The world is confusing, even more so as you're growing up. I think the original post places too much confidence in easily identifying these when they are topics which have been debated for centuries. I'm not against recognising them so much per se, as I am against confidently declaring that morality is a myth at age 8.  
    
10.  **"Argue with people":** I think I'd probably use the word "debate" rather than argue. Figure out how to do this in a way that doesn't upset people. As a cute kid, the socratic method can work particularly well. You have agency over your social capabilities as well 🙂.  
    
11.  **"You don’t need to make 'rite of passage'-style mistakes":** Agreed

  

Overall, I think that the main issue I took with this post was the adversarial stance it took – reading it, I felt like everyone was dumb and this was my route to navigating a world full of idiots. Possibly my upbringing was less full of idiots than Nina's, but I broadly feel like in most cases the correct thing to do as a high-intelligence child is to understand that there is some decently high chance that you are wrong in some way. Your capabilities are probably very jagged as compared to the adults around you, and as such, you are going to be right in some circumstances and not in others. It is difficult to figure out which those are.

[^l65z0hrb7va]: I expect raw computation to have been heavily optimised within the constraints of brain size and resource availability, while excessive curiosity can have disastrous side effects in the ancestral environment.