(no subject)

[moominmolly]

From the NurtureShock article Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today:

Here’s a Twilight Zone-type premise for you. What if surgeons never got to work on humans, they were instead just endlessly in training, cutting up cadavers? What if the same went for all adults – we only got to practice at simulated versions of our jobs? Lawyers only got to argue mock cases, for years and years. Plumbers only got to fix fake leaks in classrooms. Teachers only got to teach to videocameras, endlessly rehearsing for some far off future. Book writers like me never saw our work put out to the public – our novels sat in drawers. Scientists never got to do original experiments; they only got to recreate scientific experiments of yesteryear. And so on.

Rather quickly, all meaning would vanish from our work. Even if we enjoyed the activity of our job, intrinsically, it would rapidly lose depth and relevance. It’d lose purpose. We’d become bored, lethargic, and disengaged.

In other words, we’d turn into teenagers.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Comments

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

I have to say, parts of it trigger my bullshit detector:

The newer explanation is that their brains simply aren’t developed yet: their prefrontal cortex hasn’t converted from gray matter to white matter, their amygdalas have a surfeit of oxytocin receptors, and their reward centers have a paucity of dopamine receptors. Few can say for sure yet how these anatomical features actually interact and create modern teenagers, but the gist of it is quite simple – until their brains are finished, they’re not ready for real life.

“Most parents will tell you that this idea of the immature teen brain is one of the few notions that truly provides them comfort,” says Allen. “They feel like it gets them off the hook – that it’s biological, not a fault of parenting.” But Allen speculates that our parenting style may indeed be causing their brains to be this way. Brains of teens a hundred years ago might have been far more mature.

I mean, maaaaaaybe, but there's a pretty massive burden of proof to be shouldered there - and if he's just speculating with no evidence whatsoever, as he seems to be, then I for one am prepared to fervently disbelieve.

All that said, I do agree with his larger point. High schools are terrible environments which exist purely due to social inertia. And I've long argued that North America should import the UK notion of a "gap year" in the late teens, generally immediately after high school, during which you work or travel or both, and acquire a few life experiences, before commencing the next phase of your life.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

if he's just speculating with no evidence whatsoever, as he seems to be, then I for one am prepared to fervently disbelieve.

Yeah, and that would be pretty simple to test: find a society where people take on "real life" responsibilities in their teens -- or hell, just round up a bunch of teenage runaways, who've had to deal with life hard and fast, like the "good old days" -- and see what their brains are like. I mean, besides tasty. But all brains are tasty, so that's not really a way to distinguish them.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. Please violently disregard any sentence in that article that says either 'cortex' or 'brain'. But still! I think the gist is accurate. I love gap years, too, or exchange, or... Anything but the standard script for those years.

[harimad.livejournal.com]

The newer explanation is that their brains simply aren't developed yet: their prefrontal cortex hasn't converted from gray matter to white matter, their amygdalas have a surfeit of oxytocin receptors, and their reward centers have a paucity of dopamine receptors. Few can say for sure yet how these anatomical features actually interact and create modern teenagers, but the gist of it is quite simple – until their brains are finished, they're not ready for real life.

It triggered mine also. Two thousand years ago world-wide life expectancy at birth was - dredging memory - 30? And humans brains weren't finished till 2/3 way through that? Doesn't hold water.

Most societies recognize a rite of passage at about 13. For females it was easy: menarche. For males its a little harder. Jews have bar mitzvahs, Christians confirmation, Masaai at 12. The Masaai are particularly interesting. For males they recognize childhood till 12; then manhood till 25 when they grow their hair long and dye it red, raid and war, maybe sow wild oats (but that wasn't an official part of my 4th grade curriculum), and generally do the reckless things; at 25 they shave their heads and become elders, expected to have the experience and calm reason to give good advice.

One major difference between modern industrialized society and an agricultural one is how much one needs to know to be productive. The more advanced the economy, the more one needs to learn to be productive. In many professions now one must study till about age 25, which a few millenia ago was life expectancy at birth. No wonder it doesn't always work out well.

[ectropy.livejournal.com]

For the love of intellectual honesty, please don't use the term "life expectancy at birth". It's a meaningless statistically-derived value, like trying to tie heart-attack rate to blue-jean-wearing rate (which, btw, aligns quite nicely).

Better determinants would be the separated values for "live births that live to age 12" and "average life-expectancy from age 12".

[harimad.livejournal.com]

I can't use a different term, those are the data that I'm reporting.

Why do you consider that term (or is it the data, I can't tell) intellectually dishonest? I can see how another datum would more useful in some contexts, but not how this datum (or term?) is dishonest.

rezendi, if you made it past one year life expectancy goes up. Past five years, up again. Past 60, way up again.

Bad statistics

[ectropy.livejournal.com]

It's merging two different statistical blocks that are not related.

The younger one has a decreasing "percent chance of dying each year" because infants are more likely to die of any number of conditions (including bad genetic lottery: being not capable of maintaining life outside the womb) - pre-adolescents have the lowest mortality rate.

The older group has an increasing chance of dying each year due to such causes as teenage low-impulse control, giving birth, progressively weakening immune system, cancer, war, etc.

In other words: They die for different reasons, and taking a total average instead of separating out the populations is like saying "The average American has one ovary and one testicle" - which is statistically very close to true, but doesn't describe the experience or reality of any real person. Or like saying, "The average person has fewer than 2 but more than 1 hands" - also true, but meaningless - where a better analysis would be "X% of Americans have fewer than 2 hands, and of those, Y% have no hands at all."

Similarly, the standard "life-expectancy at birth" is useful only for whole-population averages, as in "Estimate number of children born live per woman in France in 1752". And that still doesn't take into consideration such factors as nuns or old maids who never give birth, or the birth-count disparity between peasants and nobility.

If you want to trot out examples of how long people lived, you have to focus on a single distinct population - only count population after the inflection point in the "percent chance of dying this year" curve, or better yet, separate out men from women, and separate out women who died in childbirth and men who died in warfare, separate out instances of widespread plague or famine, etc. The more you generalize, the less you know.

Re: Bad statistics

[harimad.livejournal.com]

The more you generalize, the less you know.

This makes sense to me, but the rest of what you say seems to be more along the lines of "life expectance at birth is a very general measure that hides a lot of variation and therefore isn't very exact." Which is different than "life expectancy at birth has no statistical validity" which is how I interpreted your original statement.

Similarly, the standard "life-expectancy at birth" is useful only for whole-population averages,
I was talking about whole populations so, er, where's the problem?

Re: Bad statistics

[ectropy.livejournal.com]

LEaB is bad statistics because it takes an average of two separated datasets - it's a bimodal distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimodal), and the "average" is not representative of a typical person.

If, in pre-modern times, the true life expectancy was 30 (that is, most people could be expected to live until 30 but not much longer), then that puts humans (with steady food supply, language and the ability to negotiate, medical practices) at worse than wild chimpanzees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee#Anatomy_and_physiology)! How did this discrepancy arrive? Because we don't count the mortality of young chimps in the same group as the expected lifespan of grown chimps, which gives a better indicator of how long a grown chimp is likely to live.

Mostly, see Life Expectancy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy) and note the distinction that even in the Upper Paleolithic, life expectancy for an adult was 54 years old. But you only get that number if you exclude infant mortality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality).

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

What ectropy said about life expectancy at birth. If you made it as far as 12, life expectancy went way up.

You could make some entertaining arguments about how impulsiveness and lack of consideration of consequences during one's teenage years are very good things from the point of view of genes desiring to reproduce themselves.

[underwatercolor.livejournal.com]

Mmm. I firmly believe young people can handle so much more than they are generally expected to. "Students will rise to the level of expectations" :)

*hugs* :)

[dancingwolfgrrl.livejournal.com]

I don't think that was how I felt about being a teenager! Among other things, I was doing a lot of real-life experimenting with relationships and identity and other big shit like that. But also, even things I can look back at and think "yeah, I was practicing X/replicating Y" were actually things that were, at the time, new to me. Long division is not news to anyone, but I remember being super-excited when I suddenly grasped how it worked :)

[bloodstones.livejournal.com]

I recently had cause to make almost the same comment on a completely different post.
One of the few true regrets I have is that I did not do more to help a friend who was in an abusive relationship our senior year of high school. I don't know that I could have helped her more than I did, and I don't blame myself for what happened, but I do think that if anyone had given me the novel idea that it was okay to take myself, my friends, and our problems seriously before the age of 22 I would have tried harder.
Bullshit about physical brain development (which is fantastically plastic, but which probably hasn't changed that much in the past couple thousand years) aside, we do teenagers a disservice both by sheltering them, and by telling them they're sheltered and letting them believe that life doesn't start until later.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I want to say some stuff, but I haven't formed solid concepts yet. I like the idea of transforming secondary-level education.

I'd be happier if we had not only a gap year but a gap five. You could get out of high school with your hormones raging and instead of spending that time partying punctured by cramming sessions and all-night essay binges, you'd work as a journeyman.

This would be modern apprenticeship. If you're interested in the sciences, you'd work at a lab or a hospital. If you're into engineering, you'd schlep with surveyors. If you want to write, you'd work at... oh wait, we don't have newspapers anymore. Maybe you'd work at a firm as a technical writer or web author.

We did something like this when I was in high school and it really made a difference for me. Unfortunately it was too short -- one summer right before senior year. I learned that I didn't like civil engineers but I really liked computers and new tech. If I could have spent the next couple years just working with computers in the real world, I would've saved myself nearly a decade. Instead I had to do it on the sly until I gathered a crazy number of skills but had no paper proof.

What about all of those hormones? Work doesn't involve cramming when you're off the clock. Youth would be able to go out but not incur hundreds of thousands in debt for the privilege. Let's have them live in dorms but not at schools. The dorm life is vital for mature development (you have peers instead of parents, for example).

Summary: After high school move out after high school and live in a dorm with other young adults. Perhaps that move-out age should be 16. Go to work, hang out after work, do some volunteering. It'd still be a little more supervised than normal adult work: the job slots would be transitional and involve orientation, the dorm fees would come from the work, you could transition to a different career if you find one doesn't suit you, et cetera.

If after a couple years you find a real match, then you'd go to college. You'd be a little more mature, you'd've worked out some of your issues and you'd know exactly whey you're in school.

This is just a loose theory and it needs beating up. Thank you for getting me thinking about this.