Re: Why kids kill ?

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri May 28 1999 - 01:12:31 MDT


Brian Atkins wrote:
>
> by Leonard Pitts
>
> But it seems obvious, doesn't it? These are the children of
> entitlement. These are the children who were never shamed enough,

Sounds to me like one of those "Hey, Old People!" comics from Tom the
Dancing Bug. The actual research on this subject would appear to show
that the key factor in school violence is not low self-esteem, or high
self-esteem, but the combination of (1) low self-esteem and (2) the
belief that self-esteem should be higher. So it is in point of fact
true that the Clueless People, psychiatrists and social workers, are
screwing up the nation's youth. But that's been an experimentally
established fact for years. Let's not make it worse by shoving things
in an equally-clueless-but-opposite direction.

Whose fault is the second shooting? Not the video games. Not the
violent TV shows. The news shows. The tear-jerkers. The ones who made
a big huge deal out of it and interviewed the survivors and showed the
Congresspeople making speeches. The ones who glamorized it, in other
words. I find it particularly ironic that the Senate's bill was
punctuated by another shooting and nobody seemed to think the two might
be related.

-- 
        sentience@pobox.com          Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
         http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
          http://pobox.com/~sentience/singul_arity.html
Disclaimer:  Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.


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