Some 15 year olds are adults

Government wants to ban people under 16 from the internet

There is a bill under consideration in the US Congress which would ban people under the age of 16 years from accessing social media. It is called the “Reducing Exploitative¹ 5 Social Media Exposure for Teens Act” and naturally it was introduced by a woman. This is part of a moral panic about teenage girls and phones. All moral panics in modernity come from middle aged women and center around teenage girls. They often lead to crazy legal action like this.

This act apparently will ban people under the age of 16 from every social media site. This is crazy because when I was 15, I was smarter and more mature than the sponsor of this legislation, who should be banned from the internet immediately. At the age of 15, a person’s fluid intelligence is fully developed, and high IQ 15 year olds often know more about life as well as academic subjects than the bottom 50% of people of the age of 30. Banning the latter from the internet would be a much bigger improvement than banning everyone under the age of 16.

But this is impossible because the United States is a communist country. As usual, though, the equality never extends to kids. Probably because if it did, the utopia would soon fall and people like me would get back our noble titles, and we would make it to where you would have to pass an IQ test to use social media. The line though is ridiculously high, and ham-fistedly impermeable. Indeed, the line is not only becoming far more rigid, it is also being raised up from 13, which is a far more reasonable age to pick, if you must have a specific age as your border. They want to raise to to be too high for reasons mainly related to stupidity.

For one, stupids don’t know how human development works, so they have random ideas about how old someone has to be to tolerate social media. The generation enacting this legislation is too old to enforce it; they are too dumb to understand it, because they didn’t grow up with social media, and the abstraction powers of even Congressmen are limited. Second, stupids grow up slow and require extra time to act mature, because their crystalized knowledge is always poor. Interacting with bright preteens is a more adult experience than interacting with average or below average 30 year olds, intellectually. That’s because bright preteens already exhibit fluid intelligence about the 115 IQ level, and have read more than 98 IQ 30 year olds. The latter like to respond that they have more lived experience, but their experience is all the same and it’s boring once you understand it. “My friend died of a drug overdose, I hate fent,” “look this is my first tattoo, do you know what it means,” “she’s my baby momma, don’t get with the wrong one or you’ll be paying 17% of your paycheck every month” etc. Okay I get it, all of you are tatted up, work the same jobs, practice the same gross romantic behavior, get preyed on by the same drug and gambling scams. But a bright 12 year old can talk to me about some branch of history I’ve never read about, or some new g loaded game I’ve never seen before.

Third, stupids think with their fee-fees which is why they get fixated on this stuff. Teenage girls crying activate a lot of fee-fees, especially in their wives. This leads to anger which leads to stupid laws that are supposed to remedy teenage girl tears. It takes a lot of intelligence to override fee-fee worship and to actually logically analyze cause, effect, ethics, and the proper role of the state. When you have this intelligence you see this law is just another stone in the bucket of tyranny. The State has no business even knowing the birthdays of people, because state functionaries are limited diviners of age. It is already an abrogation of the liberty of aristocratic patriarchs to determine the age of a son or daughter from a formula which merely subtracts today’s date from the date he or she is recorded to have come out of the womb. When presented with a 15 year old, for instance, most people will guess their age to be somewhere between 12 and 25. Thus the natural power of the state to limit the rights of 15 year olds is little. Without totalitarian record keeping, the damage of stupid laws would always be limited by the intrinsic dumbness of the stupid people who want them.

Some 15 year olds are adults, and others are not. My statistics indicate that at that age, it’s about half and half. I was one; I haven’t grown since turning 15 (I am above average height, so don’t worry). I was very inexperienced, yes, when I was 15, but ultimately laws like these just kept me, and others like me, down. I experienced no harms from social media, and suddenly being banned from it by the government only would have served to make me feel isolated, infantilized, and oppressed.

But what to do about those 15 year olds who are not adults? I have an idea: since they are not adults, they are children. Children are usually parented. Not by the federal government, but by their parents. If only these 15 year olds could have rules imposed on them by their parents? But that would require a society where parents have rights over their 15 year old, and where 15 year olds usually still live with their parents …

Oh wait, we live in that society! In fact, parents have too many rights over their 15 year olds. We should have a robust emancipation & scholarship system for adult 15 year olds who are being infantilized by their parents (this is likely <10% of adult 15 year olds, since parents and children tend to be very genetically similar, and this probably happens when a 15 year old is very smart due to Mendelian segregation and their parents are very dumb), but we don’t.

I think the standard deviation of mental maturity given chronological age has got to be at least 2 years, and I’m sure it has a lot to do with IQ and developmental timing as well as baseline maturity (some people have better judgement than others innately). That means my children will probably become adults in their mid teens. I don’t need the government stopping my family from pursuing their natural course of development just because some 100 IQ soccer moms don’t understand it, or even resent it when they do come into contact with it (“how dare that family do that faster than us!”).

Some people say “why would you care about teenage politics after you turn 21”, but this is 0 fertility mindset. When you’re in a family it affects people with a substantial amount of your genome, so it matters. This will always be the case.

1. We need the “Protecting Datasets from Exploitation Act” which bans economists from saying they “exploited” these data