Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Looking for anti-woke books on parenting, preferably secular. How does raise children to not be woke? How does one teach them the gospel of success through hard work and mastery through practice? How does one handle the hypergamy question? How to balance tolerance with an appropriate level of caution around "inner-city youth"?
I think a good start on both aspects is through personal metrics. Being better than you were last week, or last year, or even last night is a better model of success than comparing yourself to others, and it's simple enough for a child to understand. Alongside comes instilling the wisdom - or at least the habit - of choosing good metrics.
The same mindset might also guide and inform broader aspects of their life, like whether it's better to have 5/15/50 crazy lovers who make your life difficult or one loyal partner that you can trust and rely on, or whether it's better to have 50/150/5000 fake internet friends than five real life close friends who will be there for you in hard times, or good neighbours, and so on. It also provides a functional heuristic for gauging other people's trajectories. Is that "inner city youth" working to improve their life and someone who represents a positive contribution, or are they presenting an appearance of success by exploiting others? What about that business district executive?
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Is your goal primarily to
A) maximize the odds of raising a little Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney-Barrett
or
B) minimize the odds of your kid going off the woke deep end and turning into a little Robin DiAngelo or Viv Musk
Those goals are somewhat in tension. A lot of the most straightforward religious conservative figures I know were raised in very restrictive and ideologically indoctrinating households by domineering patriarchs, but so were a lot of the most off-the-deep-end wokies.
The bisexual onlyfans type girls I've dated, the absolute nightmare of the manosphere, were all universally the product of religious upbringings, often bundled off to Liberty or Oral Roberts after high school, and broke bad as soon as they were out from under daddy's thumb if not sooner. I know of precisely one trans kid from my high school circle, her parents stopped talking to my parents during the Bush administration because my parents were too liberal.
If you want to prevent your kids from being crazy wokescolds, don't take politics too seriously. Horseshoe theory: the opposite of the wokescold isn't the religious conservative, that's just a switch in valence. The opposite of the wokescold is the normie who shrugs and just kind of gets on with their life and ignores everything else going on around them.
If you seek to indoctrinate your kids via weekly Dread Jim readings, you're as likely to end up not talking to your gay son or blue haired thot daughter as you are to buy them a lot on your compound to raise your seven grandkids in the Truth. Don't overcommit, don't overpromise your ideology. So many religious conservatives tell their kids that everyone in the faith is good and everyone outside the faith is bad, this is so manifestly untrue that it is obliterated by contact with reality the moment the child steps outside the bubble.
So teach them to grill?
Yes. Teach them to play sports, make money, have appropriate levels of romantic relationships, go to parties, play appropriate amounts of ordinary video games, read great books, go to church and feel guilty about some of the things they did in the other activities above.
Be the right level of nice to them. I'm convinced that 90+% of political extremism is downstream from poor parental relationships. Freud is much reviled, but he was right about a lot, there's a reason he hit Europe and America like a thunderbolt.
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Unironically -- woke-ism doesn't survive contact with the practical world, so teach them to grill, fix cars, build houses -- stuff like that.
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media which increases the positive valence of western culture at a young age (Little House on the Prarie), decreases positive valence of other cultures (old YouTube documentaries on foreign savagery), or makes fun of wokes (no idea where you’d find this, maybe there are some old cartoons out there )
This is not real and this is also not a gospel. Why would you want them to internalize the unhappiness-generating myth that their personal effort leads to success, by which you mean income? There is no study that shows this. It’s a mix of genetic factors (personality, IQ, beauty, height), social factors outside one’s immediate control (where one is raised, early peer group), social factors in one’s immediate influence but unrelated to effort per se (networking), and luck. The notion that “hard work” is a toggleable feature in humans which has a role in their success may be a useful glue to keep poor people quiet and make the wealthy feel even prouder, but it is the least proven of all the possible factors of socioeconomic success. Terence Tao is a funny example of this mythmaking. He obviously loves math, he was raised to love it, he has the genetic features for it (including a likely +1 Racial Trait), and has a social life which revolves around math that administers all the right social reinforcements. He will tell you to work hard, but when you actually look at what that means, it involves only working when he wants to, and not working when he is tired or unmotivated. It’s, like, an hour of hard work followed by a nap and a pleasant stroll. And you look at his interviews and he has no stress while working and clearly loves it. But of course, when a person loves his work and its accompanying frustrations he often calls it “hard work”, even when the whole thing was pleasant and a preferable experience (even gamers and climbers do this). And it is the socially-ascribed way of taking about one’s productivity. Similarly you can look at Magnus Carlsen: little toggleable effort that he pressed to succeed, it’s in his DNA, and when truly stressful “hard work” actually became required to win competitions he gave up competing.
That was the mainstream position prior to circa 1960; Western white people Could Do No Wrong, and everyone else was seen as half-beast. Then people realised that that view wasn't entirely accurate, assumed¹ that the opposite of a false claim must be the truth², and adopted the position that people of colour Could Do No Wrong, and white people were half-demon.
The truth of the matter is that cultures both in and out of the 'western' cluster have done both good and bad things.
"There are very few black or white hats in history; most are in the charcoal or slate range." --A. J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All
¹...and do you know what happens when you ass u me?
²"A car with a broken engine cannot drive backward at 200 mph, even if the engine is really really broken." --E. Yudkowsky
That’s not what happened in the 60s. There was a movement that actively sought to make Western culture seem worse than it was through propaganda. The entire civil rights movement was based on the idea that White people were acting irrationally for not wanting to be around a group that was more violent and disordered, for instance. And when reality gets in the way of someone’s preconditioned beliefs, they are more apt to doubt reality rather than their social conditioning, which we see in all manner of political topics. Somebody raised to believe that everyone is absolutely equal will look at racial crime data across three continents and adjusted for income and conclude that reality is wrong, and their media-driven conditioning is correct. That’s just how conditioning works.
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I don't think you need a study to show this. Try:
And see how you compare to people who put the work in.
Or take the time to speak to someone who's worked at a test prep center - contrary to what you might hear in the IQ reductionist space, test prep works (or at least that is what I have been told by someone in the biz). Similarly, look at professional classical musicians or Olympians: they don't succeed without practicing a lot.
Certainly there might be exceptions (savants, people with unnatural size and strength, etc.) but for most people your odds of success improve via hard work.
Isn't it correct that Carlsen's father was a chess fan who introduced him to the game at 5 and he's been competing since he was 8?
I definitely think that something like innate talent or genius matters, particularly around the tails, but if you can choose to be a person with an internal locus of control who believes in hard work you should prefer this as long as you can temper it with the understanding that there is not a linear connection between hard work and success.
Deliberate practice is the necessary condition for success across domains, but there’s no compelling evidence that activating “hard work” (in contrast to simply work) is a key determinant in performance. When you squint at what an elite performer means by hard work, you don’t often see a level of stress or endurance or extra care which a normal person would intuit is meant when they hear that they must “work hard” or “put more effort in”. They do not typically sustain a state of willful effort and instead there are just other factors involved. Even with SAT test prep, there are social and genetic factors which inform a person’s ability to sit down and study for long hours which seems totally uncorrelated to any manifestation of stress or vigilance or care which characterizes “harder work”. Those with the ability can sit in place for six hours with little stress; those without cannot, despite how hard they attempt it. (Usain Bolt eating 1000 chicken McNuggets in the week leading up to his Olympic Gold, where he turned around mid-win to smile always sticks out in my mind as an example of this).
Okay. I'm not really sure we have any real difference of opinion here, since by "hard work" I don't necessarily mean "psychologically difficult." For instance, in my example above, Carlsen probably likes chess, people who shoot in rifle tournaments typically like shooting rifles, etc. But the truth remains that for lots of things (like, to use another one of my examples, test prep) people often don't like doing it, but they will be better off if they do.
I mean, I don't really know why the bar here is "elite performer." The OP said he wanted his kids to learn about achieving success through hard work. He didn't say "I want my kids to learn that through hard work they could achieve anything they want."
Usain Bolt is at an extreme tail and we shouldn't teach our kids to emulate him (at least not specifically, unless they also show extremely rare promise as athletes). I want my kids to be able to sit down and do test prep (even if they don't want to) to get a better grade than the one they could already have gotten. I don't particularly care if they are a world-class marathon runner.
Right but there’s scant evidence that hard work, as some communicated message or “gospel” or internalized value, through its enacting or though its belief, modifies a person’s ability to do this. The ceiling of the influence of grit etc when genetics are controlled is 4.4% on school performance, but even this doesn’t tell us to what extent that can be modified anyway. Some studies find very little effect / barely significant findings on GPA for interventions aimed at increasing grit / hard work. No effect longterm when a student self-learns grit in a module.
As a gospel this is a very poor gospel indeed, quite bad news in fact, because you are damning the vast hordes of the relatively unsuccessful to endless self-criticism under the false belief that it was their fault they failed — when it likely was never in their hands to begin with.
I think these sorts of studies are really interesting but "giving kids a module on grit" is going to give you only limited information on the effects parents will have on their children over the course of a childhood.
But hey, let's get into them. Your first study I think is shaky in the sense that it relies purely, as far as I can tell, on subjective teacher ratings rather than even a cursory objective standard - and the study itself notes this problem. But regardless, it controls for environmental effects:
So if OP is trying to create a rearing environment that is "conducive to both cognitive and non-cognitive influences on school performance" this study, if it managed to control properly, would screen it out. Or in other words, if I'm reading it correctly, it doesn't say much if anything about the question at hand.
(It also says "it is well established that self-control and grit predict academic outcomes" so I stand by my claim that if you can choose this, you should.)
Finally, I think that 4.4% is not bad. If someone gave you a button and said "push this and you'll score four percent better on every test you take for the rest of your life, no downsides or other side effects" it would be obvious to push it.
Your second link says that grit is associated with positive life outcomes and can be influenced through school interventions:
Needless to say, the OP's intervention is going to be implemented in a very small group; presumably he has no need for it to scale, unlike the people who wrote the study:
Regardless, the study found small impacts for students at large and substantial impacts to Roma minorities. I agree with the authors:
(I will confess I only read through the end of the second section of this paper before posting because it is 44 pages long and I only had to read 5 pages to see that it was saying that at a very minor classroom intervention had lasting positive effects particularly for students whom could be expected to do poorly.)
Just like the other finding, this is a no-brainer if there are no downsides. Nor do either of these studies suggest that self-control and grit cannot be taught, particularly by parents over an extended period of time. For the state, there are probably going to be trades offs or financial costs to teaching these to children.
But OP is going to have to raise his kids one way or another. It seems to me that he might as well raise them to believe in grit and self-control. Even if the benefits on GPA and income are minor, developing a healthy internal locus of control can hedge against depression and anxiety, which is a good enough reason to encourage it in children.
The teacher assessment was a survey on their grades, so not quite subjective. Re the second study:
Unfortunately, if the teachers of the Roma students are more likely to be Roma themselves (likely), then they would lie on both grades and teacher surveys, which explains their unique results. A researcher can’t come out and say “we found a significant finding, but only among Roma, therefore it should be ignored”, sadly, as there’s political correctness which prevents an academic from noting that the entire Roma culture is based on scheming and cheating and stealing. Really, Roma populations should be excluded from most studies. But if you look at this:
There are just not many studies that have measured the effect of a grit intervention (or any proxy for “hard work” ideology) on academic performance, .
This study in Germany finds a “4% improvement in GPA”: https://media-api.suub.uni-bremen.de/api/core/bitstreams/69dec0aa-d690-4c4e-94ab-a82b460fbdc7/content
And there’s this one: https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/Alan%20Boneva%20Ertac%20Grit%202019.pdf which finds
A 0.23 SD change in a typical high school GPA is a change of 0.14, which translates to 1.7% higher annual earnings. That kind of sucks! Because there’s a significant wellbeing cost if somebody believes that they have an obligation to always “try their hardest” for optimal results under the belief that this secures their success. And if all that this can do is bring a 70k yearly salary up to 72k, it’s just not worth it. If you told a youth that their hardest work will only move the needle by 1.7% annual earnings, he would probably conclude in himself that it’s not worth it to be faithful to the “gospel of hard work”. Maybe there’s another study that finds a greater effect and I haven’t seen it?
Yes, but they also asked the teachers to evaluate their grit and self-control, if memory serves.
Interesting.
Right - if these minor efforts had good effects, it seems likely that a more prolonged effort earlier in life would have stronger impact.
Again, you aren't addressing the point that studies that screen out environmental effects will screen out the effort OP wants to do.
If I told a youth this he would probably laugh at me for suggesting that getting lectured in class from time to time had that much of an impact on his life choices.
I would happily accept a lecture telling me to work hard in exchange for an extra $100,000 over the course of a 50 year career! I would accept a lecture from you in exchange for $2000 right now! A monthly lecture, even!
Again, unless any of these studies you've dug up are looking at home life, we can assume that school intervention studies will control for home environment which means they tell us nothing about OP's plan.
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The contention is that:
are not actually factors under your control. In short you cannot "choose to be a person with an internal locus of control who believes in hard work". You are or you aren't, depending on genetics and early life and other stuff that you can't toggle on and off.
Not entirely sure this is true, I've veered both ways.
Well I know of at least one study which demonstrates that exposure to socialist ideology results in (materially) worse life outcomes. They note that it doesn't affect the underlying personality traits, so to me looks a bit like merely externalizing your locus of control ("bad things happen to me because of my social class and the existence of The Rich, only The Revolution can help me and others") can screw you up for life, ceteris paribus. Which in turn means that not externalizing it leads to if not better, then at least not worse results.
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The OP is specifically asking for advice on how to influence someone's early life, so (in theory) even if it's entirely correct that 100% of one's ability to do hard work is unchosen, OP could still succeed at giving his kids the ability to do hard work.
I think, intuitively, that it is common sense that you can choose to work hard, at least to a limited degree. I think most people have the experience of buckling down on an important or time-sensitive project, and easing up or even slacking off when things are less urgent (or when there's less external pressure), even if there's still work to be done. And so if you conceptualize "working hard" as choosing to buckle down relatively more and ease up relatively less, I think it's hard to argue that you can't "choose to work hard."
The question of whether or not choosing to do that consistently pays off commensurate to the effort is a much more interesting one and I think sort of depends on your goals. But it seems fairly clear that below a certain threshold of hard work (failing to study at all, to show up to work, etc.) you will suffer. And I think above a certain threshold of hard work, you will probably suffer too (if for no other reason than you need to sleep!)
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Anti-anything is a bad way to raise children. Pro-something is a better.
In my experience, lead by example. In my extended family, a cousin's likelihood to stay in committed relationships is directly related to the health of their parent's marriage.
Exposure. Take them around the city. Let them see the city. They'll start pattern matching. The most sheltered are the most delusional.
Set up increasingly demanding loops of challenge -> struggle -> gratification.
At a personal level, figure out if you want to indoctrinate your kids with your opinion or give them the tools to form their own.
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Nature abhors a vacuum. Instead of deciding what your child will not be, decide what you want your child to be. This is endorsed by the bible and common sense, but it also means that you can pick parenting books based on what you want for your child- that should help you pick one.
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Like stock investing, raising children not to be woke and/or shielding them from the hustle and bustle of the urban youth is likely better done passively instead of actively. So more choosing the right place to live and leading by example, less John Derbyshire speeches and reciting FBI crime statistics before dinner every night.
While not as highly heritable as height or IQ, political views are still fairly heritable, so if you and your wife are naturally chuddy yourselves a lot of the work may already be done.
Live in countries, regions, and/or neighborhoods with few low information voters and with minimal lunchtime rowdiness. Aspiring rappers and Michael Jackson impersonators cannot culturally enrich your children where they can’t reach them. Normies think and refer to this as living in an area with a good school district. House prices discriminate so you don’t have to.
Similarly, live in countries, regions, and/or neighborhoods with limited wokeness. One way better-off Western families can accomplish this is by living in a non-Western country and sending their children to international schools. It can be a good solution if one has overseas family, especially after fat- or chubby-FIREing. While some teachers may be woke if they're Westerners or Western-influenced, at least your kids' classmates families' would less likely to be.
After wife and living location have been picked:
Make friends with other households where the husband is a crime-thinker too, and your families can hang out. Your families can be a positive reinforcers for each other.
Spend time with extended family starting from when the kids are babies. It's more difficult to believe in blank slatism when you can see how much more similar your nuclear family is to your extended family, and your extended family is to everyone else. While it may vary depending on one's circumstances, spending time with extended family is also good in and of itself.
Abstain from movies and TV shows that serve as girlboss and/or non-Asian minority propaganda. This might mean abstaining from most Hollywood products, but addition by subtraction.
If you watch sports in the house, keep it to the NHL and maybe MLB instead of the NBA or NFL. Don’t be one of those fathers who fawns over Ngubu scoring some fackin goals.
Be a man unapologetic of who you are. Maintain your physical and psychological strength even if life can be all_so_tiresome.jpg. Demonstrate the principles of sexual dimorphism and hypergamy through leading by example.
Regardless of what you do, for the foreseeable future daughters are more likely than sons to follow the Cathedral’s doctrine and simp for alphabet and racial minorities, eventually do stuff like post rainbows and black squares, vote for more third world immigration and wealth redistribution. As teenage girls and young women, many daughters learn that what they want can just be given to them, thus creating a disconnect between hard work and success.
There is likely greater potential for a treatment effect when it comes to boys, as they tend to be more open to crime-think in the first place and there are more developmental/environmental pathways for boys to gain exposure to chuddiness and the connection between hard work and success:
Get your boy(s) into weightlifting as a teenager. He can see his physique progress with work, and it's harder to believe in gender egalitarianism when the mirror and Lived Experience illustrate otherwise.
Think of the team sports the modal Reddit woman would seethe at for being too pale, too fratty, and/or too toxically masculine, such as lacrosse or hockey. Have your boy(s) join a team, or multiple of them, so he can grow in his journey with other chuds-to-be.
Play sports with your boy(s) starting from when they’re young. Just playing with them will help with their development so they can make the more elite toxically masculine sports teams (no need to get all tiger dad). Plus, it’ll make for fond memories. They can also see the ability gap narrow between them and their old man over time (hopefully not due to decline of the latter).
A lot of the above also has a virtuous cycle. For example, if your son plays a chuddy sport, you can meet other chuddy fathers and your families can hang out.
I come from a long line of racists. Many of my ancestors were even bigoted towards their spouses. I married a fellow non-Hajani (Mexican). Just as my grandfather held prejudice, my father held prejudice, I shalt hold prejudice and create the genetic baseline for my children, and my children's children to hold prejudice. We differ in the object of our distaste, but we shall be united by our holding of distaste.
Don't be a virgin who IQ-maxxxes or Nordic-maxxxes; be a chad who ethnocentrism maxxxes. That is the only way.
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I have never met an international school kid who isn’t a turbolib. Half your suggestions are about shielding the kid from the racial underclasses, not from wokeness which is the English speaking world’s current elite ideology. You cannot shield from it by coming closer to the educated elite.
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I have to say, this list has gotta be one of the textbook examples of Arson, Murder and Jaywalking.
"Be an example of a strong, non-feminine man... check... family values... check... and no matter what you do, don't let them see a nigger ball. They might just think he's actually better at something!"
I'd say it's more Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick.
Shame on me, I haven't been ruining my life with tvtropes for nearly enough recently.
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Once bitten, twice shy; is there a way to engineer scenarios where they get bullied or otherwise mistreated by diverse and inclusive wokescolds?
Most of the advice given in this thread seems like a pretty good way to accomplish that.
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Reality check: You can stand against society alone, but to raise kids, as one wise stateswoman said, you need a village.
Your kids need peer group of people with the same beliefs who will stand with them and support them.
Otherwise, it is just all media, school and society telling them W, while dad alone is rambling non-W. Why should they follow the old dodgering dodger?
Just one sad example: case of Adrienne Black.
Born as Don Black in racist family and raised as racist. Not some Klansman primitive, but devoted scientific HBDIQ aware racist. Little Don knew his IQ tables and bell curves as soon as he learned to read.
Dad was prominent white supremacist and Internet pioneer.
He did everything he could to raise Junior in racism and white supremacy.
And all his efforts were undone on New College of Florida by power of Jewish friendship and love.
Wikipedia:
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Well, knowing group average IQ scores might prime someone to be favourable to Jews.
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To tell the truth, maybe one white supremacist called Black would be spared the law of nominative determinism. An entire dynasty of black-hating Blacks, though?
Comedy is prophecy
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I find that rather wholesome, even if it would be too unrealistic for a TV movie. “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”
Normally I would too, but...
Is not the most fortunate look.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree here, provided you have the right (meta) frame of reference.
In this case, witness the results of genetics predicting a higher likelihood of "latching hard onto the dominant counter-cultural-but-actually-not-really social issue of the day and holding onto it throughout the rest of one's life".
In the '70s, that narrative was white supremacy; in the modern day (late '10s), that narrative is gyno/trans supremacy.
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I guess if you really drill your kids in bell curves they start to wonder why they'd believe their dad (midwit gentile European) instead of their Jewish friends (+1SD Ashkenazim). Then the whole edifice falls down.
Be careful what you wish for!
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Raising non-woke kids is probably easy. The question is how do you turn them into non-woke adults through the teenage years of thinking mom and dad are stupid. Bryan Caplan seems to have managed it.
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