How Do Flaming Hot Cheetos Affect Academic

(Paul Graham)

vo: Stuff

July 2007

I have too much stuff. Most people in America too. In fact, most people are poor, they seem to have more stuff. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can not pile up old cars outside his home.

It was not always been like that. There was a time when things were rare and precious. One can still see evidence if it is sought. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the rooms have no closets. In those days, the stuff people kept in a dresser drawer. Even as recently as a few decades ago, there was a lot less stuff. When I see pictures of the 1970s, I am amazed how the houses seem empty. Child, I had what I thought was a huge fleet of small cars, but they are dwarfed by the number of toys What my nephews. All together, my Matchbox Corgi and I took about a third of the surface of my bed. In the rooms of my nephews, the bed is the only empty space.

The stuff has become much cheaper, but our attitudes towards them have not changed accordingly. We overvalue the stuff.

was a big problem for me when I had no money. I felt poor, and stuff seemed valuable, so almost instinctively I accumulated. My friends left something behind when they moved, or something I saw when I walked down the street one night bins (be careful what we agree to describe as "In perfect condition"), or I found something in near mint to a tenth of its price on sale in a garage. And blam, even more stuff.

In fact, these things free or nearly free business not because they were worth even less than what they cost. Most of the stuff I accumulated was worthless, because I did not need it.

What I did not understand was that the value of some new acquisition was not the difference between its selling price and what I paid for it. It was the value that I pulled. The stuff is extremely illiquid asset. At least we had any plan to sell this precious thing we had for so little, what difference does it make, what it 'worth'? The only way we will derive the value is to use it. And if we do not use it now, it likely never will.

companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums to train ourselves to think that stuff is still valuable. But it would be nearer the truth to treat stuff as worthless.

In fact, worse than without value, because once you have accumulated a certain amount of stuff, they start you own rather than the reverse. I heard about a couple who could not retire in the town they preferred because they could not afford a home big enough for all their stuff. Their house is not theirs and is their stuff.

And unless you are very organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps the spirit. One reason, obviously, there is less room for people in a room full of stuff. But it's not just that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what surrounds them. And the more the scene is hard to analyze, there is less energy for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.

(This may explain why the bulk does not seem to interfere with kids and adults alike. Children are less perceptive. They built a cruder model of their environment, and it consumes less energy.)

I am first realized the value zero stuff when I lived in Italy for one year. All that I took with me was a large backpack of stuff. The rest of my stuff, I left behind me in the cellar of my owner in the United States. And you know what? Anything that I missed were a few books. The end of the year came, I could not even remember what else I had stored in the cellar.

And yet, when I got home, I did not even separate from the equivalent of a box. Take a rotary phone in perfect condition? I might need it someday.

What makes me really bad in retrospect, is not only that I had accumulated all this useless stuff, but I had often spent money I desperately needed in things that I did not need.

Why would I do that? Because people whose job is to sell you stuff is really, really good at it. The base type 25 is a boon for companies that have spent years researching how to spend money for stuff. They make the experience of buying stuff so nice that the "shopping" becomes a hobby.

How to protect against these people? It can not be easy. I am a skeptical person, and their tricks on me walked up to the thirty well advanced. But one thing that might work is to ask yourself before buying something: "Is it going to make my life noticeably better?"

A friend of mine has recovered from a habit of buying Clothing wondering before buying anything: "Is what I'll wear it all the time?" If she could not quite believe that something she thought would buy one of those rare things she wore all the time, she did not buy. I think it would work for any type of purchase. Before buying something, ask: Is it'll be something I use constantly? Or just something cool? Or worse yet, a simple case?

The worst stuff on this side are the stuff that does not use much because it's too good. Nothing like the stuff you have fragile. For example, the "good china" held by many households, and whose dominant quality is not as it is fun to use, but we must be especially careful not to break.

Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall cost of their detention. The purchase price is only the beginning. We'll have to think this thing for years - perhaps for the rest of a lifetime. Anything that holds it deprives you of energy. Some give more than they do. Those are the only things they are worthy to have.

I now stopped accumulating stuff. Apart from books - but books are different. The books are more like a fluid than individual objects. This is not particularly embarrassing to hold several thousand pounds, whereas if you owned several thousand random possessions, it would be a local celebrity. But apart from the books, now I avoid the stuff actively. If I want to spend money to make me happy, I will take a thousand times of services rather than goods.

I'm not trying to argue this because I accomplished something so Zen detachment from material things. I'm talking about something more mundane. A historic change is in place, and I am now aware. The tips were once valuable and now they are no longer.

In industrialized countries, the same thing happened with food in the middle of the twentieth century. When food was less expensive (or as we become richer, it is indistinguishable), eating too has started to become a much greater danger than eating too little. We have now reached that point with stuff. For most people, rich or poor, things have become a burden.

The good news is that if one carries a burden without knowing it, you can have a better life than we think. Imagine, you walk for years with five pounds of weight on the ankle, and then suddenly you remove them.

South Carolina Trailer Title

The lies we tell children

(Paul Graham)

vo: Lies We Tell Kids

May 2008

Adults constantly lie to children. I'm not saying that we should stop, but I think we should at least examine what are the lies we tell and why.

It is also possible that we should withdraw in a profit. We lied when we were kids, and some of the lies they told us affect us still. Thus, studying how adults lie to children, we should be able to wash our heads lies they told us.

I use the word "lie" in a very general sense: not just obvious falsehoods, but also all the subtle ways that we induce children astray. Even if "lie" has negative connotations, I do not intend to suggest that we should never do - just that we should be careful what we do. [1]

One of the most remarkable things about how we lie to children is the size of the conspiracy. All adults know what their culture ment to children: these are the questions that are answered: "Ask your parents." If a child asks who won the World Series of baseball in 1982 or what is the atomic mass of carbon, one can simply tell him. But if a child asks: "Is there a God?" Or: "What is a prostitute?", He will probably answer: "Ask your parents."

Since we all agree that children see cracks in the world presented to them. The biggest disagreements are between parents and schools, but even those are lower. The Schools are careful what they say on controversial topics, and if they contradict what parents want their children to believe, parents, or are silenced by the pressures of school, or put their children into a new school.

The conspiracy is so deep that most children who discover it, do so only by discovering internal contradictions in what they said. This can be traumatic for those who wake up during the operation. Here's what happened to Einstein

For the reading of popular scientific books, I quickly reach the conclusion that many Bible stories could be true. The result was a frenetic free-thinking positively coupled with a mistaken impression that the State intentionally youth with lies: it was a crushing impression. [2]

I remember that feeling. At 15, I was convinced that the world was corrupt from end to end. This is why movies like Matrix have such resonance. Every child grows up in an artificial world. In a way, it would be easier if the forces behind it were also clearly differentiated a bunch of evil machines, and we can get by simply taking a pill.

Protection

If you ask adults why they lie to children, the most common reason they give is to protect them. And the kids really need protection. The environment that we want to create a newborn baby will be quite different from the streets of a big city.

It seems so obvious that it seems wrong to call it a lie. This is certainly not a bad lie to tell, that to give a baby the impression that the world is quiet and safe. But such harmless lie can go wrong if left without attention.

Imagine that lets someone in an environment as protected from newborn to age 18. Mislead someone so grossly over the world does not seem protected but abuse. It is an extreme example, of course, when parents do this kind of thing is talked about in the newspapers. But we see the same problem at a smaller scale in the discomfort felt by adolescents suburbia.

The first goal of suburbia is to provide a safe environment for them to grow children. And it seems perfect for children of 10 years. I liked living in a residential suburb when I was 10. I did not notice as she was barren. My world did not exceed the houses of some friends where I was going to bike and some wood as I walked down a run. On a logarithmic scale, I was halfway between the cradle and the planet. A suburban driveway was just the right size. But while I was growing up, the residential suburb began to feel the knock so suffocating.

Life can be pretty nice at 10 or 20 years, but it is often frustrating to 15. It too big a problem to solve here, but certainly one reason why life sucks when you're 15 years is that children are trapped in a world designed for children aged 10 years.

What do parents hope to protect their children by raising them in suburbia? A friend who went to Manhattan just told me that her 3 year old daughter "had seen too much." What comes to mind include: people who are shot or drunk, poverty, madness, horrible medical condition, sexual behavior in varying degrees of eccentricity, and violent anger.

I think that anger is what concerns me more if I had a child of 3 years. I was 29 years old when I moved to New York, and even then I was surprised. I do not want to just 3 years we track the disputes I've seen. It would be too scary. Much of the things that adults hide their youngest children, he would hide because they scary, not because they want to hide the existence of such things. Induce the child error is a byproduct.

This seems one of the more justifiable lies that adults tell to children. But because the lies are indirect, we do not keep a strict account. Parents know they have hidden the facts of sex, and many, at some point, make their children sit down and give further explanations. But few talk to their children the differences between the real world and the cocoon in which they grew up. Combine this with the confidence that parents try to instill in their children, and every year you get a new crop of 18 year olds who think they know how to lead the world.

All 18 year olds do not think they know they run the world? In fact, it seems a recent innovation, nor a century old. In pre-industrial times, teens were young members of the adult world, and in comparison, they were quite aware of their shortcomings. They could see they were not as strong or skillful as the village blacksmith. Formerly, people were lying to children about certain things more than we do now, but the lies implicit in an artificial environment and protected are a recent invention. Like many new inventions, the rich have been first. The children of kings and great magnates were the first to grow out of touch with the world. The phenomenon of the suburbs pavilion means that half the population can live like kings in this area.

Sex (and Drugs)

I have different concerns about raising teenagers in New York. I am less concerned about what they would and more than what they would do. I went to college with a lot of kids who grew up in Manhattan, and in general, they seemed rather blase. They seemed to have lost their virginity at age 14 on average, and entering college, they had already tried a number of drugs that exceeded everything I could hear talk.

The reasons why parents do not want their adolescent children did not have sex are complex. There are fairly obvious dangers: pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But these are not the only reasons why parents do not want their children to have sex. The average parent of a 14 year old daughter could not bear the idea that it has sex, even if there was zero risk of pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases.

Children can probably feel they do not tell them everything. After all, pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases are equally problems for adults, and they have sex.

What really bothers the parents that their children have sex? The idea they dislike so viscerally that it is probably innate. But if it's innate, it should be universal, and there are many societies where parents have no objection if their children have sex - in fact, where it is normal for girls to 14 years to become mothers. So what happens? They do not seem to have universal taboo against sex with children pre-pubescent. One could imagine reasons related to the development for it. And I think that's the main reason that parents disapprove of industrial societies that teenagers have sex. They still think like children, even though biologically they are not, which means that the taboo against sex with children is still high.

One thing adults conceal about sex, they also hide the drug, it can cause pleasure. That's what makes the sex and drugs so dangerous. They can arouse the desire to disturb the discernment - which is especially scary when discernment is the discernment already troubled very poor adolescent.

Here, the parents' wishes conflict. The old companies were telling children that they had poor insight, but modern parents want their children to be confident. That may be a better plan than the old one which was to put them in their place, but this has the effect secondary after implicitly lying to children about their quality of discernment, we have to lie still on any problems that could happen to them if they believed us.

If parents told their children the truth about sex and drugs, it would be: why you should avoid these things is that you have a poor understanding. People who have twice your experience still burn them. But perhaps one of those cases where the truth is not convincing, because one symptom of poor discernment is to believe we have a good understanding. When you're too weak to lift something, you might say, but when you make a decision on a whim, it is more secure.

Innocence

Another reason that parents do not want their children to have sex is that they want to keep them innocent. Adults have a certain model of how children are supposed to behave, and it is different from what they expect other adults.

One of the most obvious differences are the words that children are allowed to use. Most parents use words in speaking to other adults, they would not want their children to use. They try to hide the very existence of these words as long as they can. And this is another one of those conspiracies which everyone involved: everybody knows that we are not supposed to say bad words in front of children.

I never heard more different explanations in what parents tell their children, that's why they should not say bad words. All parents know that I forbid their children to say bad words, and yet no two have the same justification. It is clear that most assume that they do not want their kids say bad words, and invent the reason later.

So my theory about what is happening is that the function swear words is to mark the speaker as an adult. There is no difference in the meaning of "shit" and "Popo". So why children would be allowed to say one and the other would be prohibited? The only explanation is, by definition. [3]

Why does this bother all the adults when children do things for adults only? The idea of a child of ten, rude, leaning on a lamppost during a cigarette at the corner of the mouth is very disconcerting. But why?

One reason why we want children to be innocent is that we are programmed to like some kinds of helplessness. Several times I have heard mothers say that they themselves incapable deliberately to correct errors in pronunciation of their young children because they were so cute. And if you think about it, being cute is being powerless. Toys and cartoon characters designed to be cute always seem lost and members chubby ineffective.

This is not surprising that we have an innate desire to love and protect the helpless creatures, if we consider that the human offspring is so impotent for so long. Without the powerlessness that makes cute kids, they would be very annoying. They do look like that incompetent adults. But there's more. The reason that our hypothetical 10 year old child bothers me so jaded, it is not only annoying, but we are forced to remove its growth prospects so early. To be bored, you must think we know how the world works, and any theory that a child of 10 years on it would probably be fairly close.

Innocence is also openness. We want children to be innocent to continue to learn. Paradoxical as it seems, there are kinds of knowledge that annoy others kinds of knowledge. If you have to learn that the world is a brutal place full of people trying to one another is exploited, it is worthwhile to learn last. Otherwise, we do not give the effort to learn more.

very intelligent adults often seem unusually innocent, and I do not think it's a coincidence. I think they have deliberately avoided to know about certain things. I do, certainly. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now, I know not.

Death

After sex, death is the subject that adults lie most ostensibly for children. Sex, I think they are hiding because of taboos deep. But why are we hiding death for children? Probably because small children are particularly horrified. They want to feel safe, and death is the ultimate threat.

One of the most spectacular lies our parents have said was the death of our first cat. Year after year, as we ask more details, they were obliged to invent a little more, and so the story became quite elaborate. The cat had died in the vet's office. What? Of anesthesia itself. Why cat was there in the vet's office? For treatment. And why is it that an operation had also routinely killed? It was not the fault of the veto, the heart of the cat was congenitally fragile anesthesia was more than he could bear, but there was no way anyone could know in advance. Only when we had the twenty that the truth was last updated: my sister, then aged three, had accidentally stepped on the cat and broke his back.

They did not feel the need to tell us that the cat was now living happy cats in paradise. My parents never claims that people or animals that died were "parties to a better world", or we meet again someday. This does not seem to hurt us.

My grandmother told us a revised version of the death of my grandfather. She said they sat reading one day, and when she told him something he had not responded. He seemed to be asleep, but when she tried to shake it, she could not. "He was gone." Having a heart attack like the same thing as sleep. Later, I learned that it was not as clean, and heart attack had taken almost a day to kill.

Besides outright lies as it must have been many changes the subject when death was discussed. I do not remember, of course, but I can infer from the fact that I have not really grasped that I would die before about age 19. How could I have missed something so obvious for so long? Now that I've seen parents handle the issue, I can see how: questions about death are gently but firmly put aside.

On this subject, especially, children are half the work. Children often want to lie to them. They want to believe they live in a world of comfortable and safe, provided that their parents want them to believe. [4]

Identity

Some parents feel a strong attachment to an ethnic or religious group and want their children feel too. This requires two different kinds of lies: the first is to tell the child that he or she is an X, and the second is all lies by which both the X differ in what they believe. [5]

Telling a child that he has a particular religious or ethnic identity is one of the most notable one can tell him. For almost anything else that tells a child, he may change his views later when he begins to think for himself. But if you tell a child that belongs to a certain group, it seems almost impossible to shake.

This despite the fact that it is perhaps one of the most premeditated lies parents tell. When parents are of different religions, they will often agree among themselves that their children are raised "like X". And it works. Children grow up considering themselves as kindly in the X, despite the fact that if their parents had chosen the other option they have grown up considering themselves as Y.

A reason why it works so well is the second lie in. The truth is a common good. We can not distinguish his group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. If you want to get away from other people, we must do things that are arbitrary and believing things that are wrong. And after having spent their entire lives doing things that are arbitrary and believing things that are false, and be seen as odd by "outsiders" on this subject, the cognitive dissonance pushing children to regard themselves as X is huge. If they are not X, why are they attached to all these arbitrary beliefs and practices? If they are not X, why is it that all non-X and call them?

This form of falsehood is not without its applications. It can be used to ferry a cargo of beneficial beliefs, and they will also become part of the identity of the child. You can tell the child that addition to never wearing the color yellow, believing that the world was created by a giant rabbit, and still snap their fingers before eating fish, the X's are also particularly honest and industrious. X children will grow up with the feeling that this is part of their identity to be honest and industrious.

This probably accounts for much of the surge of modern religions, and explains why their doctrines joined the useful to the bizarre. Half weird is that fact that religion is, and half the cargo is useful. [6]

Authority

One reason for the less excusable that adults lie to children is to maintain their power over them. Sometimes, these lies are truly sinister, like a pedophile telling his victims that they will have problems if they tell anyone, what happened to them. Others seem more innocent, it depends on the degree of deception reached by the adults to maintain their power and why they use it.

Most adults make little effort to hide their defects in children. Usually, their motivations are mixed. For example, a father who has an extramarital affair with his children cache. His reasons are partly because they care, partly because it would introduce the subject of sex, and partly (more than he would admit) because he does not want to tarnish their eyes.

If you want to learn what lies are told to children, you must read almost any book written to explain the "sensitive issues". [7] Peter Mayle has written one called Why are we divorced? It begins with the three most important things that must be remembered on divorce, one of them being:

Thou shalt not take the blame a single parent, because divorce is never the fault of one person. [8]

Oh really? When a man runs off with his secretary, is that still partly the fault of his wife? But I can see why it has been said Mayle. Maybe it's more important for children to respect their parents as knowing the truth about them.

But because adults hide their faults, and at the same time have high demands for their children, many children grow up with the feeling that they are desperate not match. They wander in feeling horribly ugly to have used a dirty word, when in reality most adults around them do things much worse.

This happens in intellectual matters as well as moral. More people are confident, they seem inclined to answer "I do not know" to a question. People are less confident they feel they should have an answer, otherwise they will look bad. My parents were good enough to admit when they did not know things, but teachers had to tell me many lies of this type, because I rarely heard a teacher say "I do not know" before entering college. I remember because that was surprising to hear someone say that in front of a class.

The first clue I had that teachers were not omniscient came in sixth, after my father had contradicted something I had learned in school. When I protested that the professor had said otherwise, my father replied that the guy had no idea what he was talking - he was just a teacher, after all.

Just a teacher? The sentence seemed almost grammatically malformed. Are the teachers did not know any of the subjects they taught? And if not, why were they the ones who taught us?

The sad truth is that U.S. public school teachers generally do not understand very well the tricks they teach. There are some strong exceptions, but generally, people who plan to teach rank near the bottom of the student population. So the fact that I was thinking about 11 years that professors were infallible system shows what work had been done on my brain.

School

What teaches children to school is a complex mixture of lies. The most excusable are those told to simplify the ideas and make them easy to learn. The problem is that a lot of propaganda creeps into the curriculum in the name of simplification.

textbooks in public schools represent a compromise between what different groups want to be told to children. Lies are rarely evident. Usually, they consist of, or omissions in, or in subjects that increases disproportionately at the expense of others. The conception of history that we had in elementary school was a crude hagiography, with at least one representative from each group powerful.

famous scientists that I remember were Einstein, Marie Curie and George Washington Carver. Einstein was a big piece because his work had led to the atomic bomb. Marie Curie had something to do with X-rays But I was mystified about Carver. It seemed he had done things with peanuts.

is obvious now he was on the list because he was black (and incidentally, that Marie Curie was there because she was a woman), but as a child I was confused for years about it. I wonder if it would not have been better to simply tell us the truth: there was no famous black scientists. Put on an equal footing George Washington Carver and Einstein we misled, not only science but also the barriers that blacks faced at that time.

As the subject became lighter, the lies became more frequent. When it came to politics and recent history, what we were taught was almost pure propaganda. For example, we were taught to see the leaders policies as saints - particularly Kennedy and King, recently died as martyrs. It was stunning to learn later that they had both been inveterate womanizing, and in addition, Kennedy was addicted to amphetamines. (When the King's plagiarism has emerged, I lost the ability to be surprised by the misdeeds of famous people.)

I doubt that we can teach children about the recent history without teaching them lies, because almost anyone has anything to say about it, has a particular way to put. The very recent history is in bias. It might be better to just teach them a few meta-events like this.

This is probably the biggest lie taught in schools, however, is that the way to succeed is to follow "the rules". In reality, most of these rules are just hacks to effectively manage large groups.

Peace

Of all the reasons why we lie to children, the most powerful is probably the same silly reason which they lie to us.

Often, when we lie to people, not as part of a conscious strategy, but because they would react violently to the truth. Children, almost by definition, lack of self-control. They react violently to things - and so are their lies a lot. [9]

few Thanksgivings ago that, a friend of mine found himself in a situation that perfectly illustrates the complex motivations that we have when we lie to children. Appeared as roast turkey on the table, her 5 year old son, perceptive to an alarming degree, asked if the turkey had wanted to die. Foreseeing disaster, my friend and his wife have quickly improvised: yes, the turkey had wanted to die, and in fact had lived all his life with the goal of becoming their Thanksgiving dinner. And that was all (phew).

Whenever we lie to children to protect them, their chins we also keep the peace.

One consequence of this sort of soothing lie is that we grow up believing that horrible things are normal. It's hard for us to feel the urgency as adults, about something that we've literally been trained not to worry about. When I was about 10 years, I saw a documentary on the pollution that I completely panicked. It seemed that the planet was being ruined irretrievably. I went to see my mother after asking if this was so. I can not remember what she said but it made me feel better, so, I stopped worrying to do about it.

was probably the best way to do it with a 10 year old scared. But we should understand the price. This sort of lie is one of the main reasons that cause bad things remain: we're trained to ignore them.

Detox

A sprinter in a race between almost immediately into a state called "oxygen debt". His body starts an emergency power source, which is faster than normal aerobic respiration. But this process will accumulate toxins, which eventually require supplemental oxygen to be eliminated, so that at the end of the race, the sprinter must stop and breathe for a while to recover.

We reach adulthood with a sort of duty to truth. We were told many lies to us through our childhood (we and our parents). Some were perhaps necessary. Some probably were not. But we all reach adulthood head full of lies.

There is never a time when adults make you sit and explain all the lies they have told you. They have forgotten most. So if you want to wash the head of these lies, we must do ourselves.

Few do. Most people go through life with bits of packing glued to their minds, and they never know it. We probably can never completely undo the effects of lies you were told a child, but it's worth trying. I found that whenever I was able to undo a lie I was told, amounts of other things to replace.

Fortunately, once you reach adulthood, we receive a valuable new resource that can be used to realize the lies they have suffered. It is now one of the liars. We have the right to look behind the scenes, as adults skews the world to a new generation of children.

The first step to clean the head is to realize how much we are far from being a impartial observer. When I left school, I was, I thought, a complete skeptic. I realized that the school was crap. I thought I was ready to question everything I knew. But among many other things which I was unaware there was the amount of debris that was already in my head. It is not enough to consider his thoughts in the virgin state. We must erase it conscientiously.

Notes [1] One reason why I am confined to a single word so brutally is that the lies we tell children are probably not so safe as we think. If you look at what adults say to children in the past, it is shocking how much they lied. Like us, they did so with the best intentions. So if we think we're as open as reasonably to be with children, we probably misunderstand. It is likely that in 100 years people will be as shocked by the lies we tell, we are by the lies that people told 100 years ago.

I can not predict which it will, and I do not want to write an essay that will appear idiot in 100 years. So instead of using euphemisms for special lies that seem excusable based on current fashions, I'll just call our lies, lies.

(I have omitted a type: the lies told to mock the credulity of children. These range from "fake", which is not really a lie, because it is told with a wink Look, the lies told by frightening brothers and sisters older. There is not much to say about them: I do not want to see the first type go, and I would expect that not the second.)

[2] Calaprice, Alice (edited by), The Quotable Einstein , Princeton University Press, 1996.

[3] If you ask parents why children should not say bad words, the less educated usually give an answer that begs a question, like "it does not happen," while the more educated échafaudent elaborate rationalizations. In fact, the least educated parents seem closer to the truth.

[4] As a friend who has small children pointed out, it's easy for small children to consider as immortal, because their time seems to pass so slowly. For a 3 year old child, one day seems like a month for an adult. So 80 years it seems like 2400 years for us.

[5] I am aware that I will suffer endless accusations have classified religion as a type of lie. Usually, people evacuating the matter by suggesting that some dithering believed the lies long enough for a sufficiently large number of people are immune to the usual criteria of truth. But because I can not predict what lies future generations will see as inexcusable, I can not calmly leave out any kind whatsoever. Yes, it seems unlikely that religion is outmoded in 100 years but no more unlikely than it would have seemed to someone in 1880 that college students would learn in 1980 that masturbation was perfectly normal and should not be s 'to feel guilty.

[6] Unfortunately, the shipment may be made of malpractice as well as good. For example, there are certain qualities that few groups in America consider "playing white." In fact, most of them could just as accurately be called "playing the Japanese." There is nothing specifically to white to these practices. They are common to all cultures where people live long in cities. So it's probably a losing bet for a group to consider that behave opposite is part of his identity.

[7] In this context, "sensitive issue" means more or less "things where they are going to lie." Therefore there is a special name for these subjects.

[8] Mayle, Peter, Why Are We Getting a Divorce? , Harmony, 1988.

[9] What is ironic is that it also the same reason that children lie to adults. If one starts with you lollipop when people tell alarming things, they will stop you say. Teenagers do not tell their parents what happened that night they were supposed to sleep at a friend for the same reason that parents do not tell children 5 years the truth about Thanksgiving turkey. They would leave if they knew Lollipop.