Age and mental abilities

[Admin]

When i tried looking up studies regarding this i found it very difficult to find any decent studies where they actually measured the real-world performance of teens vs adults. Often studies are brain-scans (unclear what if anything that tells us) or it doesn't actually measure how smart the teens of the study were.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-the-teen-brain-2007-06/

I did manage to find a 40 year old study evaluating the abilities of teens to make medical decisions and they did not find much difference between 14-year-olds, 18-year-olds and 21-year olds.

https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.2307/1130087

Unfortunately the sample size was too small to get great results but this is still a decent indication that adults are not much smarter than 14-year-olds when it comes to medical decision. When looking at the medical decisions adults generally make it becomes very obvious that most are very bad at it, they havn't become much smarter since they were young teens, often people become dumber as they get older.

I suspect that authorities don't want to study this properly because adults do not want to find out that they are not smarter than 14 to 18 year olds.

We also cannot trust doctors since they are there to please ignorant politicians elected by ignorant voters (and often supported by special interests) and ignorant patients.

In order to properly make medical decisions you need to put effort into it (such as reading the full texts of various trials) and most people are not going to do that.

 

[Admin]

About "maturity"
What people (including researchers) call "maturity" is typically about views (such as rape being bad) rather than being able to make good decisions.

For example if you look at the questions at https://howadultareyou.com/ we see that many questions is about what you believe and often these views they regard as "adult beliefs" are questionable at best.

Interestingly he claims that adults do not actually score higher than teens for that test, i have not been able to find that data (he probably hasn't published it anywhere) and it also doesn't prove anything since the test isn't legitimate in the first place.

60. If you have more education, you'll probably get a better job. Do you agree?

While education does correlate with higher income it's difficult to establish a causal relationship. It might be the case that people who are ambitious are more likely to pursue higher education and that smart people are more likely to be successful in academia, these confounding factors will make education look much better than it really is.

To be fair the question did not specify what they meant by education, for example you can view you learning on your own ad education.

What's more important is the quality of your education.

96. "Safe sex" means having sex in a safe place. Is this true?

While it's technically false this illustrates another issue.

Using contraceptives is generally bad in terms of survival and reproduction but that is viewed as unsafe by the leftwing establishment pushing for genetically suicidal policies (like anti-natalism).

117. If you are severely depressed for several weeks, you should probably get professional help. Do you agree?

That's a very bad idea.

https://vintologi.com/threads/psychiatry.737/

https://vintologi.com/threads/psychiatry-horror-stories.267/

135. It's improper to have sex with someone without his or her consent. Is this true?

This is a moral question.

The notion that rape is just lack of consent is actually fairly new.

140. You can get prescription medicine over-the-counter without a prescription. Is this true?

Actually you can (such as in mexico).

 

[Admin]

APA paper: people are mentally capable but not mature at 16
They used this to argue against draconian punishments against young people while also supporting allowing young people to consent to abortion. This of course doesn't make sense.

https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-64-7-583.pdf

If lack of maturity was the cause of criminality we should expect people to commit more crimes at 14 than 18 but we actually observe the exact opposite despite the legal system often being more lenient towards young offenders, Here the crime and arrest rate peak at 18:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/additional-ucr-publications/age_race_arrest93-01.pdf

The reason why we should be lenient towards young people is that young people have the future ahead of them making it a lot more worthwhile to pursue rehabilitation rather than locking them up for life.

Young people are the most important members of society. IP

Punishments early in life will have a bigger impact (especially with regard to death pentalty) so you could argue that it's unfair to subject young people to death penalties for that reason, you can also oppose the death-penalty in general. In-addition young people are to a very large extent legally controlled by their parents and their government so we could argue that other people are to a very large responsible if they commit crimes (this is less a case with older criminals).

Their study did have some interesting data

Here we did see slightly lower scores at 14 to 15 on average.

They also tried measuring "psychosocial maturity" and you can tell just from the results that it's bogus.

The study did not directly list which questions they asked. This is likely due to wanting to hide something.

They did cite this study regarding how money now vs more money in the future

This isn't that large of a difference.

They actually listed the 15-question scale used.

The issue with linking this with cognitive ability is that focusing too much on the future and planning might not always be the best strategy. Magnus Carlsen when playing chess rarely has some lengthy plan for how to win, instead he focuses mostly on the upcoming few moves since that is far more valuable to focus on.

https://youtu.be/7tD6WgVTe5o?t=123

Furthermore young people are taken care of by parents so they do not need to worry about things like bills or how to pay the next rent.

They linked to this study which started with the following

Adolescence is a period of high risk in a person's life. It is the only agegroupfor which mortality has risen since 1960, with traffic accidents constituting the leading cause of death among peoplebetween 15 and 24 yearsofage

So why are we not banning cars from cities to keep children safe?

How many young people have died from having sex?

I did not find any useful data in the study. Let's look at actual study results for various bad behaviours.

So it's mostly a problem at 21 and older (when people can legally drink alcohol easily).

I have not yet found good data regarding the usage of harder drugs (such as fentanyl). One issue with going by survey data is that young people may answers they are using drugs to fuck a little with adults (making them panic over all the people saying the use heroin).

 

[Claire_Lovely]

There is a book The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen that looks like a good read.
https://www.crosswalk.com/family/homeschool/the-myth-of-the-teen-brain-a-qanda-with-dr-epstein-11551480.html
https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Adolescence-Rediscovering-Adult/dp/188495670X#customerReviews

I wasn't too sure how to read the charts in the original post, but from interacting with teenagers I have seen that most of them understand things on a more comprehensive level than most adults. If they were allowed to have more significant rights, we would quickly have a much better world.