maybe smaller cliffs to jump off for now...

Lantis blogged about a the concept of adulthood with a reference to
howadultareyou.com some time ago and I thought it was interesting
enough to warrant a little writing about it but I hadn't got around to
doing it until now. 

Well I took that test, in fact I took it twice. Once I took it thinking
along the lines of what is likely to be the most 'adult' answer and
score you the highest score. When I took it this way I got something
like 98% then I went back and reread each question until I found the
one that I misread and changed the answer. Then I got 100%.  This was
pretty comforting to me. It means that if society were to ever
implement some sort of test as the author of The Case Against Adolesence 
seems to suggest before letting you do certain things if the test is
anything like this test I should be able to do whatever I want and be
judged as fully 'adult'. All I have to do is lie...

The other time I took it, I was as honest as I possibly could be and
also as completely literally minded. That is to say if some question
said "most of the time"  or "always" and I thought there was not enough
evidence to prove "most" or "always", I would answer "no" even though I
was well aware that lots and lots of the time it would be true. To do
otherwise seemed to me that it wouldn't be fully honest even if I was
sure this method would lead to a lower score.

As a result, I scored a 71% this time. I was disappointed. I thought I
would score a lot lower! You see I have no interest whatsoever in being
perceived as society would judge someone as adult. That just doesn't
matter to me at all. And sometimes I specifically fight against it.

I was a little surprised at the breakdown though. It seems I score
perfect adultness in the first and last categories of the continuum.
That was odd, those are two categories I would not have expected my
score to be highest in. Rather the more 'fact' based categories I
thought I would score highest in. But it turns out that a lot of those
fact based questions must have fallen to my overly literal reading of
the questions.

Now for the analysis. I have no inherent objection to a kind of test to
help people understand how grown up they are by the society's
standards. That's well and good but I hate the way this particular test
is scored. A percentage score like you are being graded on an exam
strikes me as utterly wrong. Growing up isn't a competition. You're not
trying to make the grade. And nobody should judge anyone less for their
lack of knowledge or experience judged by the social system as being
representative of adultness.  

I would have rather had this test scored with a kind of graphical
representation, say like you see a polygonal shape where each vertex
represents a particular area of adultness and the polygon that appears
within this shape represents the picture of in what ways you are adult
and what ways you are not.  Or rather maybe just not score it at all.
Just tell people where their answer differed from what experts
considered the more 'adult' answer and at the same time tell them how
common their answers amongst the society and amongst people of their
own age group.

The other weird thing about this is the nature of the questions
themselves. You can break the questions into three categories and there
is something a little weird about each category.

The first category are shear knowledge and facts based questions. If
you know the answer then you are more adult than if you don't and for
the most part there is little to argue about. Either 42 x 5 = 220  or
it doesn't. There's no real area for dispute.

What's weird about these questions is that the test is administered
un-timed on the internet! That means... Everybody gets a 100% on these
questions! All you have to do is look it up. It takes almost no time. 

Now you might argue, but that would be cheating! But is it really? The
test measures your adultness right? So once you've looked up the right
answers aren't you now more adult than you were when you started the
test? So then isn't the test an accurate measure of your adultness as
you finish the test? After all, you now *know* the right answers.
Right? You might say that cheating is immature and not adult of you, 
but at the same time some of the questions on the test suggest quite
clearly if you don't know where to look for help and you aren't willing
to get assistance from others than you are less adult than if you do?
How is looking up the right answer to one of these questions on
wikipedia really different?  In fact I would say that if you believe
that this test truly measures adulthood, then its greatest service to
society is that it makes everyone who takes it more adult than they
were before they took it. Whether or not they 'preserve' their first
belief or their last when determining their score, most people are
unlikely to just let it go that they don't know something listed here
and are likely to at some point look up the truth of it or ask someone.
Hence we all become more 'adult' if you buy that these questions are a
measure of adultness. If you don't well then at least we all become
more knowledgeable. And all knowledge is worth having.

So of course I got all of these questions right except where I believe
they were mis-worded in which case I still think I got them right. The
test is wrong.

The second category of questions are what I would call self-esteem
questions. They basically ask you about characteristics of yourself,
like are you a fat, lazy, slob and the likes.  Now these questions are
passing odd to me. First of all for many of them there is an objective
truth to them. Either you are over your ideal weight or you are not.
The problem is the test doesn't judge you on that objective truth.
Rather it judges you on what you believe to be the truth, i.e. on what
you think about your weight relative to what you think is ideal. The
idea I guess is that it is more adult to not believe yourself to be a
fat, lazy, slob than it is to believe yourself to be one.

You know its strange though. Most young children I've met don't seem to
think of themselves as being fat,lazy,slobs. Really those self-esteem
problems seem to me to be more common in adults than in children.
Indeed adults even strike me as more likely to actually be fat, lazy,
slobs and not give a damn about it. And isn't that just a fine attitude
to have? To me the more disturbing attitude to have is to care too much
about what other people think about your characteristics. Whether you
actually are or are not fat, lazy, or a slob seems irrelevant in terms
of a your 'adultness', though it may well be relevant in terms of your
overall quality of life.

You can see the fallacy fairly easily here. We could just imagine
hypnotizing humanity and making everybody think that no matter what
they do they are always at their prime physical state and are always
accurate and precise and clean and neat and honest and strong and
courageous and possessing of every other possible virtue of humanity.
And if we did this of course we'd all perform better on the adultness
test, but the test losing all meaning. It makes it seem as if the
characteristic to be valued in adults is being self-deluded. That's
crazy!

Anyway, even if you could measure how overly concerned people are with
how other people perceive them in terms of these virtues, a
characteristic I think would be well correlated with adultness and
maturity, I still would probably score really low on these questions as
I actually did when I took the test. These are the questions that
really heavily dragged down my overall score. So blah to that. I guess
it's fine.

The third category of questions are the toughest. These just seem to be
based on your opinions about various things. There doesn't seem to me
to be any objective truth to them. For example for the question "Good
leaders must be good listeners. Do you agree?" I might go either way. I
might say there can exist leaders that I might think are good leaders
who aren't particularly good listeners. But you might say that by
definition because that leader isn't a good listener they aren't a good
leader no matter what other leadership qualities that leader happens to
have. So who is to say which of us is right or not? What makes your
answer more 'adult' than mine? Nothing really, except that whatever
panel of experts the writers of the test used to determine the question
believed that the more 'adult' answer was that good listening is not
just an advantage for leaders to have but is an essential
characteristic of a good leader.

And there are lots and lots of questions like this that I could go both
ways on. Some days I might think one way, other days I might think
another way but in no way am I certain or convinced that only one of
these answers represents the gods honest truth of it. In this way the
test seems biased against those with quirky ideals, strange opinions,
or non-standard beliefs. Those who have conformist opinions are
elevated in their 'adultness' quotient while those who don't are faced
as I was with decision of whether to lie in order to seem more adult or
be honest and seem less so.

Well anyway for these questions those that I agreed with the normal
opinions like on questions of 'love' I scored high, but in areas where
I disagreed such as on questions of 'leadership' I scored pretty low.

Even so I think it was an interesting test to take and help people to
know themselves a little better.  But I think there is a missing
component. What is also needed is a "how child-like are you?" test. 
Such a test would provide the other side of the picture, and help
people to know where they relate with respect to others. Notice I
didn't use the term "childish".  Childish has a severe negative
connotation. We use it a pejorative mostly to mean acting exactly in
direct opposition to what would be considered the adult thing to do. So
a childishness test would look exactly the same as an adultness test
except that the opposite set of answers would be deemed correct. 

A child-like test I think is quite different.  I think, although
incorrect answers on the adult test may well be correlated with higher
scores on the child-like test, the two are not causually connected.  It
is quite possible then to score both 100% on the adultness test and
100% on the child-like test if you are a person who acts both in
accordance with how society perceives an adult should behave and at the
same time in accordance with how society perceives as meaning you have
child-like outlook on life. And likewise it is possible to score very
low on both tests.

What would a child-like test look like? Well for one thing it might ask
you about your recreational activities, how much time you spend "having
fun", what kinds of toys you play with, what kinds of slang you use,
maybe try to get at how much you care about appearances or how
important you think conformity is.  How stressed you are, How tired you
feel versus how energetic, how many friends you have, and how
frequently you hang out with them. How fascinated are you by new
experiences and how much do you seek out knowledge for the sake of the
pleasure in that knowledge.  All these things I think I would associate
with having a "child-like" mind. And none of them are particularly a
bad thing.

Of course none of this is to say that I disagree with the premise of the book The Case Against Adolesence.
(No I haven't read it) I am skeptical of any arguments made on the
basis of the how adult are you test, but on basic principle the idea
that we are over-sheltering our children is something I have thought
was true for a long long time. I would not use a loaded term like
"infantalize"  which sounds just awful to me, but I would say that we
don't give children enough responsibilities and we don't allow them to
interact enough with people in various age groups. We try to hide
knowledge from them again and again on the grounds that it is for their
own good, even when they are at an age where they are likely to absorb
and benefit from that knowledge more than they ever would at any other
time.  We don't make use of our children even when they have capacities
that exceed our own. And generally we just treat them with an unfair
cultural bias that is cruel and unjust. There is a kind of anti-youth
prejudice that guides our decisions as a culture that is perhaps
understandable given how important they are to us and how afraid we are
for them generaly, but we really ought to outgrow it in the future.
Children are sentient beings capable of making hard decisions, facing
challenges, learning and growing just as adults are. How they learn and
grow will be different, but that doesn't mean they should be alloted
any less rights than their parents.

Really the whole concept of adult versus child is for individuals
really a concept of becoming complete. We want to say that a a child is
in the process of maturing whereas being an adult means you've achieved
that maturity. Much like fruit and plants mature. Once your there you
may well continue to change but the important part of your development
is over. That's it. You're done. You're complete. Edible. Or whatever.
Game over. You win.  So for that reason the idea of a test of adultness
must appeal a great deal to people. We always wonder if we are really
somewhat immature and we are often trying to prove to one another
(especially our parents) that we have made it and should be treated
with the same level of respect as everybody else that has "made it". 
You sort of join the "adult club" only those with scores above 90% on
the adultness test are allowed in or whatever. Members of that club can
be entrusted with deep responsibilities like raising children,
teaching, running for office, having the fate of the world in their
hands or whatever else.

And, well, I guess that makes some sense. Like I said I don't have a
particular problem with learning from taking an adultness test any more
than I have an inherent problem with the multitudes of ways we test
each other right now in society in order to assess our adultness, be it
through high school and college, work, graduation, marriage, jury duty,
voting, drivers licenses, and of course the thousands of thousands of
little events, minor questions, and moments of challenge and decision
all of which we use to try and see of someone we are speaking, "how
adult are you?" just so that we know how to relate to them and to what
extent we can rely on them.

I don't exactly have a problem with it.... but it really doesn't mesh
with the way I understand reality. I don't think in terms of
completion. I don't think in terms of meeting some benchmark because to
me that benchmark always seems to be arbitrarily determined. The
reality is I feel that there is just a continuum of growth. We become
better and more than we were before. We grow and change. And that
change progression is a different curve for every individual, there's
no inherent common shape to it and there's no moment within the
progression that we can say for everyone, yup that's the point where
they are done. No need for them to keep growing now. Rather, it seems
like we as a society just chose an arbitrary cut off point on
everybody's graph and associated that y coordinate with special
meaning. We said now if you have grown this much you are an "adult". If
you haven't then you are still a child. But drawing a line like that
based on personal growth and experience is really as arbitrary as
drawing a line based on age and saying anyone over 21 or 18 is an
"adult". We all know that there isn't anything special about that line
that makes people above it more human than those below and we could
have drawn that line absolutely anywhere and all places would make
about as much sense as all others. In fact in society as it is now we
all are drawing our own lines based on our own experiences. One person
might judge someone as mature but another might judge that person as
immature even based on the same knowledge about that person just
differences in opinions about what characteristics constitute maturity.
If we could standardize a "how adult are you?" test we might well be
able to standardize the benchmark so that we sling the insult
"immature" around with more consistency (I guess you'll just have to
find yourself another insult if you think someone who scored high on
the adultness test is still lacking in something important). but it
will still be an arbitrary threshold no more meaningful than how we
happen to call January first the new year in western cultures.

So no, leave me out of it. I don't care about whether I've passed your
line or anybody else's. What I do care about is that I am always
growing and always changing and always becoming a better person. I want
my upwards slope to always be as high as I am able to make it. I want
to grow in excellence, to be ever struggling to come as close to
approaching the ideal of good as I can get. I want the continuum to go
forever upwards. And the day I die I want to know and believe that
before me there is still as much growth and change that awaits than
ever has gone before. And I want to be able to say on that last day,
that today I grew as much as I have on any other day.

Call it adult or childish, but that's the kind of person I want to be.

Imagine you are driving along and you suddenly see an image of yourself getting into an accident at a specific point further along on your trip, a place you are about to reach. What would you do?  I know what I'd do because I did it just today. I took another route.

Of course it turned out that that other route was closed due to road construction and I had to go through this convoluted process to get to work instead which ended up making me extremely late. And yet I don't regret it.

Now my track record with premonitions, intuitions, perception, and awareness is actually pretty god awful. I'm never right. Everything I think might be the case generally turns out not to be at all the case. It was all always just a figment of my imagination.

And yet, I never ignore it. Perhaps it is folly, but I don't think I ever could. Even tomorrow I won't take that route to work again no matter how late I am running. In fact chances are very good that I will never drive that way again if I can help me.

How crazy is that?

Here is Lawrence Lessig's talk as part of the Authors@Google series of talks: http://youtube.com/watch?v=9xbRE_H5hoU

It is fairly similar to the last talk by him I posted but has a few pretty interesting differences especially the talk about the Long Tale and some discussion specific to Google.

Anyway, definitely worth seeing. Also a lot of the other talks in the Authors@Google series are also quite interesting.