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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

>And it seems safe to say that there is an age below which very, very few children can understand a commercial as such.

Of course there's such an age, but since I didn't have any claim for the "right" age in front of me, all I could say was "a certain age." Maybe I should have said that children X age can't understand Y.

But the main point of this discussion is to recognize the temptation of taking generalizations at face value, which is what we do when we assign rigid age norms. That temptation has been around with us for a long time; Arnold Gesell and Frances Ilg warned against it in 1943 in Infant and Child in the Culture of Today. But since then the focus of psychology has shifted from the mind to the brain, and that makes those age norms even more tempting, and the responsibility of experts to point out the limits of generalizations even greater. If they don't, we get silly pontifications such as that teenagers make foolish choices because their brains aren't fully formed.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Education in the United States does not work. [...] Is the populace educated?

The question is not how much they are educated compared to other countries. The question is how educated they are compared to not having a (US) education at all. For a start, they can read, and count - a not completely insignificant difference. Internationally, countries with decent education systems tend to fare much better than countries without them.

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