Error Correction Mechanisms and Parenting

Critical Fallibilism's (CF's) concept of error correction mechanisms helps people deal with fallibility. Common approaches to fallibility allow arbitrary judgments without transparency, thus enabling bias. On the extreme other end of the spectrum is putting unbounded effort into handling fallibility: just keep trying to agree with critics until you get mutual agreement, get mutual consent, or they give up and stop engaging, but never, ever unilaterally quit a discussion where anyone disagrees with you (and therefore might conceivably be able to correct an error of yours). CF's idea of error correction mechanisms is designed to rationally deal with fallibility using limited time, energy and other resources.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://criticalfallibilism.com/error-correction-mechanisms-and-parenting/

Also flawed & incomplete but maybe helpful:

  1. ‘Why’ questions are expressly allowed & encouraged, and certain common parental non-answers (“Because I said so”, “Because that’s the way God made it”, “Because that’s just the way it is”, “My house, my rules” and variants of those) are disallowed as answers. “I don’t have time to answer right now” or “I can’t remember the answer right now” are allowed, but then parent should try to give an answer when they’re in a different context later, especially if child asks again. “I don’t know”, “I don’t know how to put it in words”, and similar answers are also allowed, but then if it’s something parent thinks is important enough to make a rule, parent should diligently try to research & develop an answer.

  2. Parents allow and encourage “opposition research” in things that are reasonably mainstream but different from parent’s view. Ex: If parent is not religious & child is willing to try church, help them go (parent might or might not have to go - extended family or friend’s parents or whatever will generally happily take a child to church). If parent homeschools and child wants to try school, help them understand the parameters they’d have to agree to and get signed up if they still want it. If parent believes in alien visitors and child wants to watch videos debunking UFOs, let them. If parent hates baseball but child wants to play, help them join little league. Etc. Basically parent should commit to exposing their child to mainstream information and activities the child wants but parent disagrees with.

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