don't worry, rather than assume the worst i just guessed you were busy and might reply next weekend (if not today). i'll try gtalk then. good luck with snow thawing.

Parents are sometimes mistaken, so strategies that rely on the parent being right in all disputes result in some avoidable mistakes. I want policies for how to live that function reasonably well even for people who have flaws and sometimes act unreasonably (aka everyone). In other words, one of the major features I look for in a philosophy of education, or of life in general, is resilience to errors. So far, I think we are in agreement.

But you seem to have brought up your own imperfection as a point of possible disagreement. I'm guessing that has more to do with this other issue:

The fundamental issue is that if you can't persuade someone of your ideas, that is a bad reason to force him.

Here your comments about different ways people can be unreasonable are important. If a problem is due to someone's ignorance then it makes sense that good ideas can solve the problem. Ideas clearly are capable of reducing ignorance.

If it's a problem of akrasia, lack of self control, emotions run wild, or solidly entrenched bad ideas, then what to do is less clear. What if the person, adult or child, won't listen to reason? If what he wants isn't based a reasoned decision then why would reason change his mind?

I have some answers to those questions. But first I want to check in to see if you agree so far, and if this is the sort of question you are interested in.

PS FYI I might potentially be able to give a more helpful reply in private; I try to avoid personal comments in public about both myself and others.

Yes, that's an interesting question, and I think I agree so far. I won't promise quick or lengthy responses though, so if you've already written something up on your blog about this, feel free to just give me a link. I don't want you to waste your time if it turns out I'm not so interested after all.

It's good of you to warn me. But even if you never reply (or even read it) I'll be glad to have thought about something interesting to me, and (hopefully) to have written something good. If it turns out well enough, I can even reuse it elsewhere. There's no risk of wasted time. That said, there is a chance I won't get to this today, but I will sometime.

Please consider yourself to have no obligations to me, and continue things only if you want to.

First a note about ignorance, because I've sometimes had conversations with a somewhat opposite claim. People say things like, "We agree children have great ignorance. This sometimes causes disagreements when they don't know the answer to something, but think they do. And children can be very stubborn, so in those cases their ignorance requires that we force them to the right decision." Here rather than figuring that if the only thing present is ignorance there will be no problems, they have said that ignorance causes problems. And in particular, ignorance can cause a child to stubbornly disagree on a subject he knows little about. This is false, and perhaps important to how I see these issues. If a child thinks he knows enough to comment about something, let alone to be stubborn, that is not a matter of ignorance, that is an idea he has.

In fact, a lot of beliefs on parenting amount to trying to say both, "Children are so ignorant and gullible that they'll believe almost anything. They pick up bad ideas very easily." And, "Children are so stubborn that they never listen to my good ideas." But you can't have it both ways. If a child can pick up ideas causing him to disagree with his parent, there have also been opportunities for him to be persuaded of ideas in agreement with his parent. The parent is blaming his ideas' lack of appeal on the child's stubbornness, while denying the appeal of rival ideas based on the child's gullibility.

Here we have a different issue. We accept (or I do, and I'm clarifying, and if you don't we should probably discuss that) that ignorance is nothing to fear (indeed people face it all the time when exploring a new field.) And we further accept that ideas that are part of a truth seeking process are nothing to fear. Those will be amenable to criticism, improvement, persuasion. But what if a person has thoughts or preferences that are very unreasonable, or not even intended to be reasonable, or not created via a rational process? I will answer each of these cases separately.

'Very unreasonable' ideas are nothing more than ideas that the speaker strongly disagrees with. This isn't actually a comment on whether the process behind them is truth seeking, or whether they are held open to change.

Ideas that aren't intended to be reasonable are harder to address. But people aren't perfectly consistent, so sometimes it doesn't turn out to be much of a problem. Just because someone's philosophy isn't compatible with taking advice for good reasons (they deny their being such thing as truer reasons, say) doesn't mean they won't sometimes take your advice.

But if it is a problem, then we can focus on something else: why doesn't this person intend to be reasonable? He has a bad idea about how to approach life. He has little or mistaken understanding of what approaches will solve his problems, or will be enjoyable. Many people have an idea something like, "arguments are unpleasant" and avoid them. They can be! But there are ways of thinking and arguing which make them pleasant and helpful. One could begin by teaching/explaining those, and then the person could try using reason, find it's a good thing, and then intend to have reasonable ideas and make some effort to hold his ideas open to rational improvement. There is a rational path forward.

(Note for upcoming paragraph: By 'knowledge' I do not mean justified, true belief. What I mean is closer to 'understanding' or 'good ideas'.)

What about ideas that aren't created via a rational process? Well, like what? All knowledge is created via conjectures and criticism, aka evolution. If you actually left out criticism entirely it wouldn't be possible to get anywhere: very bad guesses would run amuck. You might think that some people are a bit like that. But that would underestimate how difficult daily life is. For example, having a conversation about the weather in English requires rational processes. You have to make guesses about whether the other person is talking to you, and what he means to say, and you have to criticize those guesses. If you don't, you won't create knowledge. In particular, you won't create knowledge of what he's trying to communicate. You won't understand and won't be able to reply coherently. Forming your own sentences is also a matter of knowledge creation. You must create knowledge of which words would express your intended meaning (not to mention what intended meanings should be said or not).

These conjectures and refutations that create knowledge mostly take place at a sub-conscious level. But we know they must be taking place or people would not be able to function at all for practical tasks or simple conversations. Whether there is a different way of creating knowledge is another can of worms, which we can discuss if you'd like, but I'll omit it for now.

The reason I went through each case of, "what if a person has thoughts or preferences that are very unreasonable, or not even intended to be reasonable, or not created via a rational process?" separately is that they are actually distinct claims. They are intended to be roughly synonymous descriptions of something, but they aren't. The question contains misconceptions about the types of situations it is intending to describe. When what's going wrong in each situation is understood more precisely, then it's easier to address.

We may still be wondering about those times people seem very unreasonable, agree they were unreasonable afterwards, and do intend to be truth seeking and rational. What could be going on there if they are, at least subconsciously, thinking with rational, knowledge-creating processes?

Part of the answer is that people make mistakes.

Part is that people generally have mistakes in their ideas about what their personality and ideas are. One consequences is that many mistaken ideas they "used to have" are actually still in their personality, but they don't realize it.

Part is memes, which really needs a separate post as well as a note that I think most published ideas about memes are terrible, so this may not be what you expect.

I'll stop here for now. Let me know what you think. No hurry.

PS I've bookmarked this thread and will check periodically unless you want to suggest another approach.