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I do not believe emulating African tribes is a good idea when it comes to maturity rituals, either with this or your idea from the other post about getting beaten up by 10 guys in a row. Firstly, it doesn't seem correct to me that a ghetto thug should be ahead of a glass-jaw nerd on any maturity test in a first-world country (even if the thug is objectively more "fit" for life, the status is wasted on him). Secondly, immediate pain is not a well-optimized maturity test for a first-world country regardless. What brings prosperity in first-world countries is long-term thinking and the ability to lock in over months and years. Not enduring physical pain for half an hour.
Even if Gom Jabbar tests a necessary quality it is far from sufficient.
Fine, include a version of The Marshmallow Test if you want!
There's a plethora of ways to measure a person's understanding of the world and their ability to endure discomfort for future gain.
Under the current regime, the ghetto thug AND the glass-jaw nerd are granted "adulthood" status with all rights that entails by the mere fact of turning eighteen. Do we think this is optimal?
People generally accept that taking a driver's test and passing some arbtitrary standard is enough to get the stamp of approval to operate a 5000 lb vehicle on public streets. I'm mostly suggesting just an expansion of the existing system there.
Under my ideal system, too, anyone is free to transact with a non-adult, but they bear ANY losses that may result if the other non-adult party reneges.
If, for instance, you give $100k in student loans to an 18 y/o who hasn't passed the maturity tests, and they default on them years later, they can't be forced to repay because from a contractual standpoint, they lacked the ability to consent. So they can have the debt dismissed if the lender is stupid enough to give them money.
In modern urban society, the fundamental task of adulting is to cash a rent cheque against a pay cheque. If I was going to set up a test for adulthood, the main route to passing it would be to demonstrate that
I would also grant adulthood to anyone who completes 2x months of military service with a satisfactory disciplinary record (who otherwise would not be named on a lease) or to students who have reached a certain academic standard (whose income includes scholarships and financial aid which are effectively earned in that the money is paid out against demonstrated responsibility, but not taxed as earned income). The standard I am thinking is roughly completion of the standard maths sequence through linear algebra and multivariable calculus (for STEM students) or completing a course which requires reading a complete Great Book in the foreign-language original (for humanities students).
Whether adult privileges should be granted to married mothers who don't qualify under the other heads is a complication I won't discuss in public.
I am also open to the idea that access to the four boxes of full citizenship should be restricted to people who qualify as an adult under at least two of the above headings.
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I mean, the optimal test would exclude the thug while including the nerd. It would be nice if the incentives were aligned to teach the nerd some toughness that he is capable of learning along the way, but it shouldn't come at a cost of putting thugs ahead. That would be a perversion of what I believe a society of legal adults should look like (i.e. it shouldn't look like a hunter-gatherer tribe).
Agreed and endorsed.
I would certainly make the point that thugs will commit thuggery whether or not we give them the license to do so or not. I think the reason we want to toughen up the nerd is so they are capable of embracing ALL of the responsibility we might expect of an adult, including coming to the defense of their community if a bunch of thugs band together and try to take the things they feel they're being denied.
So yeah, we might want to have a test that exclude thugs from certain legal rights... but the larger question there is what do we do with them after the test, they're still around, and still able to act on their preferences, even if our legal system doesn't recognize their status.
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The Marshmallow Test is billed as a test of delayed gratification, but I suspect it is more a test of whether the subject trusts authority.
Given how small the marshmallows used in the experiment were, it is also a test of the intrinsic desire to pass tests - the reward for passing is the marginal difference between two tiny marshmallows and one, which would not be sufficient extrinsic motivation to get the average 6 year old to do something they don't want to do.
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Little of both.
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