12 ms·

Adolescents’ rich and nuanced relationship with risky behaviour

119 points by wizzard0 9y ago

stcredzero 9y ago
When I was 5, I knew it all. But I was wrong, and I realized how stupid I was at 5 when I was 10. Then, I thought I had it all figured out and I knew I was way smarter than the adults. Except, I realized at 15 how much of a stupid kid I was at 10, but I knew I had everything figured out by then... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#Cultural_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#C...
- ergothus 9y ago
  Mark Twain did NOT say (apparently) this, but it remains a moving quote: > When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. That said, I'm always bothered about "you think you know everything" speeches given to children, particularly teenagers. (Note to poster: You triggered this semi-rant, but not because you are guilty of this. You just started the chain of logic that led me here) I remember clearly getting that "think you know everything" speech often when I'd point out something was "stupid" or "why can't we just...". What I didn't get was any real attempt to disprove my arguments. Instead of learning "Wow, I thought this and I was legitimately wrong, I should be more cautious" I was taught "wow, adults don't listen and are content to look down on me and my ideas". It's like the whole puberty speech. Don't tell me I have hormones raging and a changing body and I suddenly getting interested in a particular gender - I have no context for the first part and the last part is not a change but something that was true for my entire conscious life (though the importance may have changed). Instead understand that a teen has spent their life as a child and has only been asked to be a child. Trying to be an adult is something totally new. The risk of failure (loss of status among peers, loss of respect of superiors, loss of closer companionship) is high, the experience to help decide what to do is minimal, even the experience of seeing others face these challenges and NOT suffer is minimal to non-existent. Every adult that forgets their personal experiences when they were a teen and gives the above speech is just proving, not disproving, the common accusation that parents "just don't understand". Kids aren't dumb, they're actually smarter (in the sense of capability to learn) than most of us. Blaming them for their lack of experience is not our best move. Telling them they'll "understand when (they're) older" is moronic if we don't give support to our claim. (NB: Concepts like the "it gets better" movement to encourage teens with non-traditional sexuality seem dramatically better at trying to do the right thing to me, though any teens involved might correct me - I'm cis-straight male, never heard such attempts when I was a kid, and haven't been a teen for decades) Nothing will make the teenage years without drama for most people, but actually trying to relate, offering support that doesn't rely on having experiences they don't have, and dropping our own "I know everything" attitudes can do a lot. (/me steps off soapbox)
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    Instead understand that a teen has spent their life as a child and has only been asked to be a child. Trying to be an adult is something totally new. Supposedly, childhood was invented quite recently in our evolutionary history by our culture: http://a.co/34eSXPC http://a.co/34eSXPC I have read that children were once treated more like little adults who didn't know anything. Kids aren't dumb, they're actually smarter (in the sense of capability to learn) than most of us. Blaming them for their lack of experience is not our best move. Kids aren't dumb, they're actually smarter? I would agree. This is why kids should use their superior brain plasticity to get their heads around the implications of their lack of experience, and try to benefit from indirect experience and the store of human knowledge. Some kids are smart enough to do this. Some kids instead convince themselves of a narrative of superiority, as if they're the first truly "real" humans on the planet. It's precisely because kids are so smart and imbued with so much potential, that I have to call them out. With great power, comes great responsibility.
    - ergothus 9y ago
      > it's precisely because kids are so smart and imbued with so much potential, that I have to call them out. If you're providing them with the tools to learn from, I'm all for it. When I'm learning something, I want to be told when I mess up, but the best advice also comes with an explanation, or at least counter evidence to examine. Just saying "WRONG!" and "You think you know this? Bah, you're an idiot" all the time makes me less likely to learn from you specifically AND less likely to learn in general. There's nothing wrong and a lot right with giving these people with little experience the benefit of your own, to preventing them from making mistakes. We just need to make sure that's what we're doing. While the teen years will (literally) naturally involve a lot of questioning authority and testing boundaries and establishing a pecking order, I think we've magnified this by blaming the teenager rather than their lack of experience, by blaming their attitude while ignoring our own. Every "why do I have to..." and "Can't we just..." and "this isn't FAIR!" is an opportunity to engage them. Every "because I said so" and "you don't know what you're talking about" that involves no other data is teaching them there's no point in consulting us. Put another way - I don't think most teens think they know everything. They just know little else, and too often we're telling them that they think they know everything, while not showing that they don't.
- tbirrell 9y ago
  It's not so much that you learn something, it's that the lightbulb moment is so massive and sudden that you think "I finally understand everything!". Then the process repeats itself in 4-5 years. I thought I had it all figured at around the age of 16-17, then when I was 22 I looked back and realized I was still very young and stupid at 16.
- nicoburns 9y ago
  Interestingly I still consider myself to have been quite capable/rational from age 4 onwards.
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    I was at my best at age 4. It has been all downhill from there.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    This is also generally true. Human beings are wicked smart in a global, trans-species context.
tristanj 9y ago
wizzard0, why didn't you use the original title, as per HN guidelines? Your title doesn't match what I read from the article at all. Environment is only mentioned once and culture isn't mentioned at all.
- sctb 9y ago
  We've just updated the title from ‘A lot of teen risk-taking is environment/culture influence, not just “age”’ to part of the subtitle, which hopefully represents well the article without the “Sex and drugs...” bait.
  - wizzard0 9y ago
    Yep, I decided to submit under a more neutral tone because the "Sex and drugs" part felt too sensational, but the result got too opinionated. Will try better next time. UPD: Also... isnt "when Steinberg told the adolescents that their friends were watching from an adjacent room, they took significantly more risks" an environment/culture influence? I don't mean environment like "nature", but the social one, and that includes peer pressure.
- jonathanyc 9y ago
  Yeah, the moderators should probably change the title. It would be one thing if the original title were more sensationalized than the title here, but it’s the opposite.
John_KZ 9y ago
I like how they compare a teenager's risk of contracting AIDS with a 10 year old, but not with a 30 year old. Nice cherry-picking. All I see is an article trying to explain risk-taking of the youth as a pathology. You might agree with that, but I think it's just retarded.
ergothus 9y ago
When I was a pre-teen, my mother once told me "I never want to hear about you...". I expected to hear a sweeping restriction and my brain was already primed to file the next tidbit with other adult "advice" - material that had no supporting context in my experience (largely because my experiences were so few, though I didn't know that then). Instead she finished with "...committing any crime you can't retire on". It was a game-changer for me. This advice...had context. It wasn't a absolute "no", nor did it rely solely on experiences I didn't have. It extended on experiences I _did_ have into a broader area. Throughout most of my teenage years I avoided all the worst situations that peer pressure was steering me towards, not because I suddenly properly calculated the risks - I could no more visualize the impact on my life that any kind of conviction would have than I could before - but because I was better weighing the _gains_. Instead of "doing this will prevent me from losing ranking in my social hierarchy" it was "doing this will not gain me material improvement". Instead of "if I fail I will get in trouble" it was "I will be disappointing because I tried, regardless of success". Eventually, of course, I built my own ethics structure about why crime/rudeness/unnecessary risk-taking were undesirable, but this one statement gave me time to do so that I might not have had. I highly recommend it to all parents.
- jcsnv 9y ago
  >I never want to hear about you committing any crime you can't retire on This is pretty interesting "advice", but curious how on that would have impacted my younger self
  - ergothus 9y ago
    I think it had a big (and net positive) impact on me, but anecdote is not data - If you think the advice would have been bad for you, I'd love to hear how - not because I think it's impossible or that you'd be wrong, but because I have no idea what is probable without more people weighing in.
    - dllthomas 9y ago
      I mean, if instead of smoking pot with friends you decided to rob a bank, that sounds like a bad outcome in line with the advice...
GuiA 9y ago
Original title is ”Sex and drugs and self-control: how the teen brain navigates risk”, and seems better than the editorialized HN title.
njarboe 9y ago
Being able to engage and succeed in high risk endeavors was much more useful in the past than today. Getting pregnant and giving birth was a high risk/reward proposition, much less so today. For men there were other avenues to engage high risk for high reward activities. Being in the hunting party for your tribe and being the one to go in close with a spear to make the killing thrust on a large animal. A bit closer to today: a poor young man with no prospects goes off on a two-three year whaling voyage. If he makes it back he would have enough experience to sign up from another two-three year voyage and get a decent share. If he returned from that one he would have enough capital to set himself up with a home and family. These days taking risk in the physical realm is highly discouraged and there is almost no highly rewarding outcomes for taking physical risk in wealthier countries. A crew hand on a crabbing boat can make good money, with low skills for high risk, but that is so strange we televise them on TV for entertainment. And even that type of work is going away as people decided it is too high risk and introduce individual fishing quotas instead of short open fishing seasons. Many more people do high risk activities unrelated to any productive endeavor (mountaineering, BASE jumping, wingsuit flying, etc). Maybe human space travel with open up high risk/high reward opportunities for people again.
- seibelj 9y ago
  Oil rigs are a similar situation today - high pay, relatively high risk, and you'll be away from family living on the ocean for weeks or months at a time.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    The difference is a lot of jobs in oil are manual labor that do not require a college degree and can be high paying if one is willing to go to where the jobs are, even on land.
- alexpetralia 9y ago
  I would really hesitate to make sweeping generalizations comparing the risk-return profiles of different periods in history. This is like trying to summarize all uncertainty (risk) of the entire world at a point in time into a single number: futile and meaningless.
bitL 9y ago
Reinforcement Learning: Exploration vs Exploitation with epsilon-decreasing strategy. I am wondering if we are indeed some kind of optimization algorithm ran for somebody else to validate some model they need in their "real" universe.
artur_makly 9y ago
As a parent of a budding 5yr old.. I am starting to think about this upcoming phase in terms of where to raise him. Currently the two options we are contemplating between is staying in a large major urban city (population ~10M) or moving to Bariloche, Patagonia (population ~150k) I only have my own childhood experiences to work from growing up in NYC..and remembering vividly how I yearned to always play in nature. Going to summer camp was my only joy to escape the intensities of the city. I noticed how pre-teens and teens are here in the big cities, and the kinds of activities they do ( which are quite varied naturally ) vs the kinds that Bariloche will have to offer. On one side the kids from big cities never get bored.. but seem to always grow up very fast..and get into all sorts of night-life very early on. On the other side, if you are teen bored in a small town then getting into trouble there with less stuff around that will kill you is very appealing to a parent. What are your stories??
- kraftman 9y ago
  I lived in the countryside and envied the kids that could walk home from school, walk to each others houses and hang out after school etc. I think you just always want what you don't have.
- draugadrotten 9y ago
  Grew up in the countryside, population 3K. Very happy about it, it has given me deep friendships, safety and a deep love of all things nature. Moved to a big city to attend a good University. Worked for global corporations 15+ years, got more airmiles than I imagined possible and loved every second of it. Now I've got kids and live in a mid-size city, work is 30 minutes walk, and I'm starting to think that I should move to the countryside to give the same chances I had to learn to love nature.
- quasse 9y ago
  >if you are teen bored in a small town then getting into trouble there with less stuff around that will kill you is very appealing to a parent I don't know what small towns you've been around, but at least where I grew up those things were: A: Drinking and driving B: Heroin/Meth My friends from the countryside generally got into waayyy riskier stuff than the city kids, and it often seemed to be boredom / hopelessness related.
kaycebasques 9y ago
There was nothing nuanced about my risky adolescent behavior. I give thanks about once a month for the good fortune of not ending up in a dumpster.

119 points by wizzard0 9y ago

When I was 5, I knew it all. But I was wrong, and I realized how stupid I was at 5 when I was 10. Then, I thought I had it all figured out and I knew I was way smarter than the adults. Except, I realized at 15 how much of a stupid kid I was at 10, but I knew I had everything figured out by then... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#Cultural_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#C...

ergothus 9y ago
Mark Twain did NOT say (apparently) this, but it remains a moving quote: > When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. That said, I'm always bothered about "you think you know everything" speeches given to children, particularly teenagers. (Note to poster: You triggered this semi-rant, but not because you are guilty of this. You just started the chain of logic that led me here) I remember clearly getting that "think you know everything" speech often when I'd point out something was "stupid" or "why can't we just...". What I didn't get was any real attempt to disprove my arguments. Instead of learning "Wow, I thought this and I was legitimately wrong, I should be more cautious" I was taught "wow, adults don't listen and are content to look down on me and my ideas". It's like the whole puberty speech. Don't tell me I have hormones raging and a changing body and I suddenly getting interested in a particular gender - I have no context for the first part and the last part is not a change but something that was true for my entire conscious life (though the importance may have changed). Instead understand that a teen has spent their life as a child and has only been asked to be a child. Trying to be an adult is something totally new. The risk of failure (loss of status among peers, loss of respect of superiors, loss of closer companionship) is high, the experience to help decide what to do is minimal, even the experience of seeing others face these challenges and NOT suffer is minimal to non-existent. Every adult that forgets their personal experiences when they were a teen and gives the above speech is just proving, not disproving, the common accusation that parents "just don't understand". Kids aren't dumb, they're actually smarter (in the sense of capability to learn) than most of us. Blaming them for their lack of experience is not our best move. Telling them they'll "understand when (they're) older" is moronic if we don't give support to our claim. (NB: Concepts like the "it gets better" movement to encourage teens with non-traditional sexuality seem dramatically better at trying to do the right thing to me, though any teens involved might correct me - I'm cis-straight male, never heard such attempts when I was a kid, and haven't been a teen for decades) Nothing will make the teenage years without drama for most people, but actually trying to relate, offering support that doesn't rely on having experiences they don't have, and dropping our own "I know everything" attitudes can do a lot. (/me steps off soapbox)
- stcredzero 9y ago
  Instead understand that a teen has spent their life as a child and has only been asked to be a child. Trying to be an adult is something totally new. Supposedly, childhood was invented quite recently in our evolutionary history by our culture: http://a.co/34eSXPC http://a.co/34eSXPC I have read that children were once treated more like little adults who didn't know anything. Kids aren't dumb, they're actually smarter (in the sense of capability to learn) than most of us. Blaming them for their lack of experience is not our best move. Kids aren't dumb, they're actually smarter? I would agree. This is why kids should use their superior brain plasticity to get their heads around the implications of their lack of experience, and try to benefit from indirect experience and the store of human knowledge. Some kids are smart enough to do this. Some kids instead convince themselves of a narrative of superiority, as if they're the first truly "real" humans on the planet. It's precisely because kids are so smart and imbued with so much potential, that I have to call them out. With great power, comes great responsibility.
  - ergothus 9y ago
    > it's precisely because kids are so smart and imbued with so much potential, that I have to call them out. If you're providing them with the tools to learn from, I'm all for it. When I'm learning something, I want to be told when I mess up, but the best advice also comes with an explanation, or at least counter evidence to examine. Just saying "WRONG!" and "You think you know this? Bah, you're an idiot" all the time makes me less likely to learn from you specifically AND less likely to learn in general. There's nothing wrong and a lot right with giving these people with little experience the benefit of your own, to preventing them from making mistakes. We just need to make sure that's what we're doing. While the teen years will (literally) naturally involve a lot of questioning authority and testing boundaries and establishing a pecking order, I think we've magnified this by blaming the teenager rather than their lack of experience, by blaming their attitude while ignoring our own. Every "why do I have to..." and "Can't we just..." and "this isn't FAIR!" is an opportunity to engage them. Every "because I said so" and "you don't know what you're talking about" that involves no other data is teaching them there's no point in consulting us. Put another way - I don't think most teens think they know everything. They just know little else, and too often we're telling them that they think they know everything, while not showing that they don't.
tbirrell 9y ago
It's not so much that you learn something, it's that the lightbulb moment is so massive and sudden that you think "I finally understand everything!". Then the process repeats itself in 4-5 years. I thought I had it all figured at around the age of 16-17, then when I was 22 I looked back and realized I was still very young and stupid at 16.
nicoburns 9y ago
Interestingly I still consider myself to have been quite capable/rational from age 4 onwards.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  I was at my best at age 4. It has been all downhill from there.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  This is also generally true. Human beings are wicked smart in a global, trans-species context.

tristanj 9y ago

wizzard0, why didn't you use the original title, as per HN guidelines? Your title doesn't match what I read from the article at all. Environment is only mentioned once and culture isn't mentioned at all.

sctb 9y ago
We've just updated the title from ‘A lot of teen risk-taking is environment/culture influence, not just “age”’ to part of the subtitle, which hopefully represents well the article without the “Sex and drugs...” bait.
- wizzard0 9y ago
  Yep, I decided to submit under a more neutral tone because the "Sex and drugs" part felt too sensational, but the result got too opinionated. Will try better next time. UPD: Also... isnt "when Steinberg told the adolescents that their friends were watching from an adjacent room, they took significantly more risks" an environment/culture influence? I don't mean environment like "nature", but the social one, and that includes peer pressure.
jonathanyc 9y ago
Yeah, the moderators should probably change the title. It would be one thing if the original title were more sensationalized than the title here, but it’s the opposite.

John_KZ 9y ago

I like how they compare a teenager's risk of contracting AIDS with a 10 year old, but not with a 30 year old. Nice cherry-picking. All I see is an article trying to explain risk-taking of the youth as a pathology. You might agree with that, but I think it's just retarded.

ergothus 9y ago

When I was a pre-teen, my mother once told me "I never want to hear about you...". I expected to hear a sweeping restriction and my brain was already primed to file the next tidbit with other adult "advice" - material that had no supporting context in my experience (largely because my experiences were so few, though I didn't know that then). Instead she finished with "...committing any crime you can't retire on". It was a game-changer for me. This advice...had context. It wasn't a absolute "no", nor did it rely solely on experiences I didn't have. It extended on experiences I _did_ have into a broader area. Throughout most of my teenage years I avoided all the worst situations that peer pressure was steering me towards, not because I suddenly properly calculated the risks - I could no more visualize the impact on my life that any kind of conviction would have than I could before - but because I was better weighing the _gains_. Instead of "doing this will prevent me from losing ranking in my social hierarchy" it was "doing this will not gain me material improvement". Instead of "if I fail I will get in trouble" it was "I will be disappointing because I tried, regardless of success". Eventually, of course, I built my own ethics structure about why crime/rudeness/unnecessary risk-taking were undesirable, but this one statement gave me time to do so that I might not have had. I highly recommend it to all parents.

jcsnv 9y ago
>I never want to hear about you committing any crime you can't retire on This is pretty interesting "advice", but curious how on that would have impacted my younger self
- ergothus 9y ago
  I think it had a big (and net positive) impact on me, but anecdote is not data - If you think the advice would have been bad for you, I'd love to hear how - not because I think it's impossible or that you'd be wrong, but because I have no idea what is probable without more people weighing in.
  - dllthomas 9y ago
    I mean, if instead of smoking pot with friends you decided to rob a bank, that sounds like a bad outcome in line with the advice...

GuiA 9y ago

Original title is ”Sex and drugs and self-control: how the teen brain navigates risk”, and seems better than the editorialized HN title.

njarboe 9y ago

Being able to engage and succeed in high risk endeavors was much more useful in the past than today. Getting pregnant and giving birth was a high risk/reward proposition, much less so today. For men there were other avenues to engage high risk for high reward activities. Being in the hunting party for your tribe and being the one to go in close with a spear to make the killing thrust on a large animal. A bit closer to today: a poor young man with no prospects goes off on a two-three year whaling voyage. If he makes it back he would have enough experience to sign up from another two-three year voyage and get a decent share. If he returned from that one he would have enough capital to set himself up with a home and family. These days taking risk in the physical realm is highly discouraged and there is almost no highly rewarding outcomes for taking physical risk in wealthier countries. A crew hand on a crabbing boat can make good money, with low skills for high risk, but that is so strange we televise them on TV for entertainment. And even that type of work is going away as people decided it is too high risk and introduce individual fishing quotas instead of short open fishing seasons. Many more people do high risk activities unrelated to any productive endeavor (mountaineering, BASE jumping, wingsuit flying, etc). Maybe human space travel with open up high risk/high reward opportunities for people again.

seibelj 9y ago
Oil rigs are a similar situation today - high pay, relatively high risk, and you'll be away from family living on the ocean for weeks or months at a time.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  The difference is a lot of jobs in oil are manual labor that do not require a college degree and can be high paying if one is willing to go to where the jobs are, even on land.
alexpetralia 9y ago
I would really hesitate to make sweeping generalizations comparing the risk-return profiles of different periods in history. This is like trying to summarize all uncertainty (risk) of the entire world at a point in time into a single number: futile and meaningless.

bitL 9y ago

Reinforcement Learning: Exploration vs Exploitation with epsilon-decreasing strategy. I am wondering if we are indeed some kind of optimization algorithm ran for somebody else to validate some model they need in their "real" universe.

artur_makly 9y ago

As a parent of a budding 5yr old.. I am starting to think about this upcoming phase in terms of where to raise him. Currently the two options we are contemplating between is staying in a large major urban city (population ~10M) or moving to Bariloche, Patagonia (population ~150k) I only have my own childhood experiences to work from growing up in NYC..and remembering vividly how I yearned to always play in nature. Going to summer camp was my only joy to escape the intensities of the city. I noticed how pre-teens and teens are here in the big cities, and the kinds of activities they do ( which are quite varied naturally ) vs the kinds that Bariloche will have to offer. On one side the kids from big cities never get bored.. but seem to always grow up very fast..and get into all sorts of night-life very early on. On the other side, if you are teen bored in a small town then getting into trouble there with less stuff around that will kill you is very appealing to a parent. What are your stories??

kraftman 9y ago
I lived in the countryside and envied the kids that could walk home from school, walk to each others houses and hang out after school etc. I think you just always want what you don't have.
draugadrotten 9y ago
Grew up in the countryside, population 3K. Very happy about it, it has given me deep friendships, safety and a deep love of all things nature. Moved to a big city to attend a good University. Worked for global corporations 15+ years, got more airmiles than I imagined possible and loved every second of it. Now I've got kids and live in a mid-size city, work is 30 minutes walk, and I'm starting to think that I should move to the countryside to give the same chances I had to learn to love nature.
quasse 9y ago
>if you are teen bored in a small town then getting into trouble there with less stuff around that will kill you is very appealing to a parent I don't know what small towns you've been around, but at least where I grew up those things were: A: Drinking and driving B: Heroin/Meth My friends from the countryside generally got into waayyy riskier stuff than the city kids, and it often seemed to be boredom / hopelessness related.

kaycebasques 9y ago

There was nothing nuanced about my risky adolescent behavior. I give thanks about once a month for the good fortune of not ending up in a dumpster.