Curious; Resourceful; Self-reliant (to feel they have agency in the world); Compassionate; Value personal integrity, themselves, their ideas / wishes, and time on the planet; Able to cooperate, communicate, and work as a team; Able to make sacrifices for the future versions of themselves ("I'm having a bad day today, what can I do to make tomorrow me have a better day?"); Able to enjoy life and find fulfillment (however small) even in bad times.
School subjects, economies, social constructs, technology, they all change. A human who's motivated to develop themselves on topics like the above will be the best person they can be whether they are a CEO or living in a cave underground after an apocalypse.
So I think the answer is to first make yourself into somebody you're happy with, and then be yourself. Somebody who's happy with themselves is going to have a good life, regardless of how the world turns. And I think people who are happy with themselves also tend to be better humans to other people, regardless of all of these other terms and values we try to impose on this.
Like if somebody's belittling some service worker, it's not because of a lack of compassion, communication skills, emotional intelligence, or whatever else - it's because that person probably hates themselves, and they're taking out their own self loathing on others.
they look the same for sure, but very different.
"transferring consciousness" when that consciousness is 50% different
Could be nice to have if the parents knew how to do all that themselves ...
I'd also add that I struggled with the word 'teach' or 'guide' and settled on 'enable'. Different kids (and parents) have different intrinsic abilities or interest in each of these categories. Doing your best to make it at least possible for a child to see the value of them and possibly even make progress is already a great accomplishment.
You can't really teach/enable any of that stuff for real without living it yourself and being an example - which is very difficult because most of us weren't really raised that way ourselves, so we're not like that.
I'm not so sure what my point is other than that change is very difficult and raising children is difficult and raising them to be genuinely good people will be very hard without change.
Maybe we'll have to improve and learn together. How do I start?
You can, however, be a good role-model.
77 million Americans voted to give the higher office and nuclear codes to the complete opposite of that.
Before you roll your eyes and cuss about "someone inserting politics yet again in a topic": kids aren't dumb and have enough innocence to see when adults say something and do the opposite, and not be ok with it. And it is a big part of becoming a jaded, cynical adolescent and adult.
So if you want your kids to have these qualities, show them yourself. Or be very clear with them that you don't and explain why.
Biden was a senile career politician. His administration pushed for confrontation with Russia over bringing Ukraine into NATO, and did nothing about Israel's genocide in Gaza. When it became obvious Biden was effectively brain dead, much like Mitch McConnell now, the DNC appointed Kamala without a primary -- another glaring example of their subversion of touted democratic principles. She was yet another empty suit, incapable of expressing original ideas, and would have done basically the exact same things as Trump like allowing Israel to expand theirs wars of choice in the middle east.
This is accurate but most people will not recognize it that way because it's designed that way.
Prior to 'democracy' the peasants revolted and that occasionally had some very nasty consequences for the ruling class. Now when the peasants have the urge to revolt - you just remind them them to do a better job at 'voting'. Like they say in a democracy: Consent is manufactured.
Democracy is not just voting and expecting things to fall your way. You have to convince. You have to organize. You have to nourish the civil society through sustained effort. You need to have reasonable expectations and make choices, not whine and wish you had you cake and eat it.
As a Europoor it's sad seeing my young nephew growing up, and realising he will have far better opportunities in the US or China than here, where everything is blocked, taxed and regulated to maintain the status quo.
The USA certainly have the "best" (according to some metrics) economy in the world, but the reasons are complex, diverse, and mainly historical.
I will concede that some areas see fewer regulations, leading to a leaner permitting process (though it has consequences on road safety, environment pollution and gun safety, for instance).
However, it is hard to predict the future, and I am unsure if your last point will stand the test of time. For instance, if/when the AI bubble pop, the USA job market will probably suffer more than others. It is tempting to always see greener grass elsewhere, but Europe isn't in such a bad position compared to the USA.
Those two countries have far worse inequality than most countries in Europe. So yes, he might have better opportunities in US and China, but that's because he was born in Europe and will be in a better position to choose his future than if he had been born in a country where the inequality level meant he could not access the opportunities available in that country. You need to think about why those countries have better opportunities in the first place. They paid a price for that.
There is inequality because they have more super rich people, whereas in Europe there is less inequality but everyone is poorer. This is why inequality is a pointless argument.
Not quite, they also have more poor people to a scale that doesn't exist in many countries in Europe.
A consequence of having more poor people: strain on the healthcare and justice systems (relatively more acutely ill people, relatively more people committing crime) and bad educational outcomes (poor people tend to score lower).
A consequence of having more rich people: democratic processes are regularly under pressure due to the influence of rich people trying to make more favourable processes. Government institutions getting swayed by money from these rich people in exchange for preferable treatment.
My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...
I am not, in fact my understanding of mechanics is extremely basic.
If I go back into my family tree, I can find three generations of Sugar House Labourers in Scotland in the early 1800s.. a profession that no longer exists in the UK as far as I can tell, and I'm certain they had a specialisation.
We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
Our jobs as parents is to teach values and make sure they're good people and have the tools to make good decisions too, not to set them on a particular path... that's a losing goal, we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
There's an Unschooling group on Facebook I watch. If you search "calculus" you get threads where a parent asks how their kid is going to learn calculus and the answers are mostly "when did you need calculus after high school." Aside from needing it for college, my answer would be "why am I raising my kid to be a 1:1 clone of me and not someone with a lot of different options." So I dig this as an answer. The world has ended a billion times already. People who work hard pursuing a skilled passion have never been obsolete.
Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest.
(But then, I once did a game physics engine and have a patent in that area. I spent a lot of time in the hell which is integration of stiff systems of nonlinear differential equations. Turned out that was the wrong way to approach the problem. Works, but there are better approaches.)
A very common example is compound, continual interest accumulation. As a mathematician, I had trouble understanding how banks calculate it (as they would obviously not point me at the derivation of the formula), but it's actually a limit sum over infinitely small interest terms.
Similarly, these techniques work to explain and derive numerical methods for calculating many natural constants like e, pi etc.
This is not true? The formula is well known:
A = P*e^(rt)
where"
A = Final amount
P = Principal (initial investment/loan)
r = Annual interest rate (as a decimal)
t = Time in years
e = Euler's number
I did not say "derivation of the formula" by accident: this is about why would this produce something that makes sense as "interest-as-percentage"?
Financial calculators do integrate, though. "Present value" is computed by integration.
The school system needs to provide not just the essentials — though most of that comes from the family and environment — but a window into opportunities.
By however much we invested into mathematics, it put a number of people on this AI track, and through their contributions, here we are — for better or for worse.
Maths, while it is only to be practised by few, has such broad applicability to our entire world — I honestly believe we step straight into Idiocracy in a couple generations if we stop teaching fundamental sciences, among which mathematics is the first of.
For better or for worse, humanity has chosen the path of gods. We'd all better start thinking like gods.
Learning calculus or French can be beneficial, especially when the glass ceiling in certain workplaces is whether or not you’re bilingual. However, the point that’s getting missed is the metaexperience that consciously or subconsciously shapes the way the child interacts with the world later on.
I likely would have been better off taking Spanish but I avoided that b/c half my class were fluent in Spanish already and I had to maintain a decent grade.
shoulda done French or Spanish. yeah there is some shared Latin roots there but that doesn't magically make it simple to pick up the languages. Hell, Italian might have been a better choice.
Most jobs that are focused on interacting with people benefit from speaking a second language if it’s a common language in your community: nursing, teaching, customer service, social work, etc.
I’ve seen job listings mention it as a nice-to-have and know bilingual friends who have gotten those jobs.
I only speak one language well but I wish I spoke more. I hope my son (and future other kids) learn multiple languages. But not for job/economic reasons: it just seems good for your brain and interesting for how you think about the world.
I am fluent in 3 languages, and while it is convenient, I assume claims about it being "good for your brain" are just as pseudoscience-y as all the other claims about what is good for the brain.
One of the languages I know doesn't even use a Latin alphabet, and I spent many hours learning it when I was little. And it's basically useless (obviously just my experience) except for communicating with older family members. Once they pass away in ~3 decades, I doubt I use it again.
Actually, the biggest incentive for me to teach my kids that language is so that we have a secret way of communicating in public (in the US). But I have failed so far, because it's just a lot of work to teach kids another language when you and your spouse prefer to speak in another, and so the kids are not completely immersed in it.
A quick google search finds several studies about the benefits of multilingualism on the brain.
Here’s a recent one: https://www.fens.org/news-activities/news/speaking-another-l...
Still, I get, over all, the number is small. They could have all had a different career in their native language.
I know people in both camps. I have more respect for English speakers learning Dutch than for Dutch speakers learning English. Even though I respect both. But the simple truth is: there's a lot of incentive to learn English. There is not a lot of incentive to learn Dutch.
Learning English from Dutch is 24-30 weeks whereas from German is 36 weeks. I am assuming some degree of reciprocity but maybe not.
For me, calculus was the first math I learned, where symbols represented something other than pure numbers or tangible points on a plane, and we proved things about higher level abstractions. Of course many of the topics had tangible applications, but it was a launching point towards further abstraction in the higher level math courses.
A friend of mine in grad school was a student in medieval church history, but was assigned to teach a freshman course in modern history. For one class session, he asked a math teacher to give a guest lecture on calculus. Then he lectured on its impact on society.
It's true that most people, including managers and engineers, forget their school math not long after school. Their software tools, such as Excel and CAD, can do the math that they need. One can hope without proof that a little bit of mathematical thinking rubbed off on them.
Just as you will never know what you might have discovered if you used the time you spent learning calculus learning something else instead, of course. There is no magic formula to life.
> you shouldn't learn anything until you need it
Impossible. Simply existing as a functioning human means you are going to be constantly learning something. Not everything you learn will be useful, but that's also true of calculus. Not everyone finds it useful in the end either. You never know what will end up being useful, but you also can't learn everything.
The great thing about the curious mind is that you tend to be naturally drawn towards the things that are most useful for you. Those born most likely to do something with calculus already voluntarily choose to learn about it. You don't have to make them. The stereotypical druggy who has no interest in anything but getting high, who suddenly has his life turned around because you force him to learn calculus, is little more than Hollywood fantasy.
I know few adults that were forced to learn something as kids that regret learning it. Conversely I know tons of adults that, as a kid talked their parents out of being forced to learn something and as an adult seriously regret it.
Unlikely. Too many things in life depend on arithmetic. Most people will learn things when they must.
What is more likely is that kids won't learn arithmetic before they need it and therefore may theoretically miss out on the aforementioned discoveries that are overlooked when one doesn't already have a foundation in arithmetic. However, most people never have such discoveries anyway. Those who do tend to be the type that would learn something like arithmetic just for fun.
> I know few adults that were forced to learn something as kids that regret learning it.
As a once child, if I didn't want to learn something, I didn't. Forcing someone to sit in a classroom where a subject is being taught, for example, is not the same as actually learning the material. So this is an obvious truism. Those who didn't want to learn something never did.
Yes but arithmetic is actually not intuitive at all, and you can certainly grow up to not know it. There's a lot of people who once grew up not knowing how to read, because they didn't go to school.
Children are still children, they very famously make poor decisions. Yes, not all children, but most. We have to mold and steer them, because for humans we come into this world as basically blank slates. We're not like other animals, ready to roll. We require decades of careful curation.
Can you source this? I thought we were pretty much expressions of our particular genetics and the biological human substrate we all inhabit. This is very much not a 'blank slate'. Every time I've tried to look into or steelman the blank-slate I can never come across hard science that backs up the assertion that we are all 'blank slates'.
Blank-slate seems to be more of a liberal idea then a scientific one.
We also have case studies that if humans are not taught language then they won’t, and can’t, speak. Genie comes to mind.
If you speak math problems to your child you are… wait for it… teaching them arithmetic. That’s what teaching is.
Arithmetic is not something that just naturally exists in the world, it’s a purely human construct. It does have to be taught in one way or another, otherwise people won’t know it. And, unlike language, I seriously doubt parents are just speaking arithmetic randomly in conversation that often. Your kid most definitely will not just “pick up” arithmetic.
In fact, I doubt a kid would even pick up language if you never spoke to them directly, and instead they just heard bits in passing between adults.
Exposure to something and being taught something are usually recognized as being quite different, but it is clear now that you just want to play a game of semantics, so we can put and end to that.
> I doubt a kid would even pick up language if you never spoke to them directly, and instead they just heard bits in passing between adults.
Kids not being able pick up on language by listening to a recording of adults speaking about some random thing is supported by the research so there is likely some validity to the latter half of your claim, with some assumptions about what you mean about "heard in passing", but the research also strongly suggests that kids can pick up on language if those adults are surrounded by additional context. For example, if adults in the same room were talking about a visible object in front of them then the research suggests that the child would be able to pick up the language even when not directly spoken to.
Why do you doubt the research?
If you are in a situation where you don't need it, sure, but if you don't need it then who cares? I get the nebulous "but what about the discoveries you are missing out on", but the type of people who wouldn't learn something like arithmetic for fun also never find discoveries anyway, and never would even if you could force feed them all the knowledge of the world. That argument really doesn't apply to most people.
> Children are still children, they very famously make poor decisions.
Not quite. What children are most famous for is that they won't learn until they want to. Poor decisions, implying that they could have made good decisions if only they would have listened, are the outcome of them not learning even when you tried.
> We have to mold and steer them
There are deadbeats in the world, sure, but for the most part that just naturally happens at least up until they hit the rebellious teen years. Kids want to be by your side, watching, learning. We wouldn't have made it as a species if this didn't occur automatically. Like I said before, you cannot exist without learning things constantly.
I very much agree with your last sentence.
It's the same for pretty much all school education. It gives you a chance to spot the grifters, show-offs, and sleazy salespeople.
I wouldn't be surprised if the unschooling movement was supported by said show-offs, grifters and salespeople. Uneducate the masses and you won't have to come up with clever lies anymore. The simple ones are enough.
If schooling was about making it so people aren't tricked, why do they have you say an national anthem (that used to be called a prayer) pledging allegiance to the flag of the empire?
Its a very sick view of the world to think that the government is who has your back and cares about you and is the person you can trust, rather then your own flesh and blood family and community.
The thing that really begets me in all of this is that what you describe, working hard pursuing a skilled passion, requires a foundation of knowledge that up until a year ago was considered a foregone conclusion for becoming someone of note. It doesn't matter whether someone learned it autodidactically or through structured schooling, the point is that the knowledge itself is fundamentally important. We never stopped teaching children basic arithmetic or mental math when slide rules, adding machines, and calculators became widespread. The reason why is pretty obvious.
And yet, the technofeudalists want us to stop teaching our children critical thinking, science, arts, technology, and everything else that encompasses the indomitable human spirit, and why? Because a machine can do those things too? Machines have been capable of or better at a great many things that humans are also capable of for the past hundred years or so and yet we have never stopped teaching humans those very things exactly because we used to recognize that those things had enormous utility in general in a sphere far beyond whatever is necessary for your calling or profession. It is absolute lunacy to me that someone could see LLMs and agentic flows do brute-force proofs and then somehow suggest that the entire field of mathematics is obsolete.
I urge you to read the piece "Complex Systems Won't Survive the Competency Crisis." If we lose all of our institutional knowledge of how the puzzle pieces all fit together there will be no one to save us when (when, not if) the systems we're creating now suffer a catastrophic failure. And they will. Model collapse has not happened yet because of luck. Synthetic data can only get you so far. And whenever we enter our Idiocracy/WALL-E stage of total compliance and deference to machines themselves, one day there will come a time when something breaks and no one knows how to fix it because they no longer understand the underlying principles.
You might say in an optimistic scenario you can just ask the LLM for the tools and resources and prior knowledge needed to fix it. Alas in many cases, this is barely enough, and most on this forum are technically knowledgeable enough to actually make use of that advice. It's hard to see a compliant, totally intellectually decrepit population doing the same. I'd also advise you that although unschooling has its benefits, it's a movement that is filled by those who are often cultists and other fringe hacks who have grievances with the school system for reasons unbeknownst to me and many others. I would not use them as any sort of advice forum or channel for meaning, and the fact that you seem to be taking them as gospel is extremely questionable and makes me uneasy about the future of this forum in general.
Oh dear.
How many years will you say this before conceding it's no longer luck?
Calculus is a shared language in the grand universal ocean of intellectual cultural. Rejecting calculus is rejecting part of that culture…
e.g. I can tell you things act like a spring near (stable) equilibrium, and you can believe me, but why on Earth would that be true? Well, Taylor expand the potential at equilibrium. Define V(0)=0, and equilibrium means V'(0)=0, so V(x) ~ V''(0)/2 x^2, so F = -dV/dx = -V''(0)x, which is a spring with spring constant k=V''(0).
That's all a very conceptual explanation; the point is near an equilibrium, zoom in and you have a parabolic potential! What is the potential for a spring? A parabola! This is basic Calc BC stuff, but it also justifies why we might care about about simple harmonic motion. Calculus is the whole business of "zooming in."
You need calculus to design a windmill or an auto engine or an electric motor beyond the "just sort of works" level. Most of analog electrical engineering is defined by calculus. Althogh, yes, you can get LTSPICE to do most of that for you.
(A small wind turbine is like a propeller in reverse. A large wind turbine is not, because wind speed varies across the blade circle enough that those stresses dominate the design. It took decades to debug this, and make large wind turbines stable under high winds.)
A lot of it I think is just training people to adopt a "physics-like" or "math-like" way of thinking and giving them a general overview of how things work.
A factory needs to produce 12,000 components per year. Each production run costs $300 to set up, and storing one component costs $4 per year. What production quantity Q minimizes the annual setup and storage costs?
How long does a production run take and how many units can you do in a single sun? Since this isn't mentioned, the answer is to produce everything at the last second of the year. But we are also missing information on why the factory needs to produce 12,000 components in a year and for whom and about the logistics involved in getting those components to the buyer.
I always hated these type of questions for their lack of precision. You haven't even mentioned how many units in a single production run will be faulty and need to be scrapped instead of delivered, how am I supposed to optimize anything?!
Doing one run each month (quantity = 1,000 a month) would entail setup costs of 3,600. And storage costs of 4 * average storage of 500 components = 2,000. For a total cost of 5,600.
All according to the given model, of course, but I think this is the general idea.
"And you, too, will be a mechanic", which is how that usually goes.
People should spend enough time with tools to get the basic skills down. Some years ago a Stanford mechanical engineering prof was complaining to me that many of the Indian students from wealthy families thought that using tools was beneath them. "They've never used a pair of pliers." Now, to some extent, that mindset has spread to the American middle class.
Being proficient in reading, at least one instrument, and one additional language is always welcome, regardless of the timeline.
"Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
Regardless, both of those talents have the potential to open doors and set the stage for opportunity, nor are they mutually exclusive to whatever economic skills might be viable in the future.
I'm not against things like learning to play an instrument, but if you're going to major in Music Theory, you better have a solid plan for a career on the other end. It can be a risky plan, but it has to be real with non-zero odds of success. It can't be just because you love playing the violin.
It's true it won't pay the bills, but knowing one instrument is a good skill that differentiates you from others.
Or are you suggesting one should also prioritise buying a guitar over paying rent too?
Any kind of musical ability is a skill that differentiates you from the guy who doesn't have any. It widens your perspective, it allows you to talk about music more deeply (for example theory) with others, it creates joy to your life and you will gain bigger respect for the skills of other musicians.
This all doesn't have anything to do with money and it doesn't have to. Not 100% of your time is needed to make money at all times.
I’m older than YouTube and my parents didn’t have a lot of money.
Never seen free guitars in any charity shops otherwise I’d have picked one up.
Also singing isn’t playing an instrument. Which was specifically what the OP was discussing and thus specifically what I’m reply about.
> Any kind of musical ability is a skill that differentiates you from the guy who doesn't have any. It widens your perspective, it allows you to talk about music more deeply (for example theory) with others, it creates joy to your life and you will gain bigger respect for the skills of other musicians.
I agree. But that wasn’t the point being discussed.
Also the same can also be said for sports. Or knitting. Or in fact any skill.
I love music, it’s my biggest passion outside of computers. But it seems daft to argue music is uniquely different to any other hobby. For example, my wife actually hates music and it wasn’t my interest in it that she found attractive (ironically to this thread, it was actually my work ethic, because she saw someone stable who wanted kids too).
> This all doesn't have anything to do with money and it doesn't have to. Not 100% of your time is needed to make money at all times.
Unfortunately that’s exactly how some families do have to live.
Not all of us are fortunate enough to have the free time to enjoy a hobby. Some people literally work most of their waking hours just to pay rent and buy food. Life can be really hard for some people.
I was in my 20s before I learned to play a guitar because my family couldn’t afford one. So I had to prioritise other skills and those skills are what got me a lucrative career which allowed me the luxury of pursuing creative hobbies.
It sucks that’s how life works. But that’s the world we live in.
This thread is about what you might teach your children, and predicting what works well in 20 years. There's no future where knowing how to play an instrument isn't a great thing. If you can't afford a guitar, don't get a guitar. There are cheaper instruments. Humans have figured out how to make it work across the ages, regardless of financial status.
You might change careers several times in your life, but being able to play an instrument is always a viable way to enrich one's life.
That was literally the core premise of this thread.
> So I had to prioritise other skills
Do you think prioritizing those skills and music could have coexisted? Why not? Why does learning to play instruments take away from that?
I wish we were living in a world were people could earn a living and follow their passion but capitalism doesn't allow for that. It's designed for consuming things and increasing profits, not for improving the well being of people.
They are saying a depressingly large number of people don’t earn enough to cover their essential daily expenses like rent and food despite working extremely long hours. And thus they do not have the same luxuries of time and disposable income that people in our position do.
So to say “everyone has the time to learn an instrument” isn’t technically accurate.
Jake the dog: "Music is powerful man. It speaks to a primal pit in our brains. It makes anyone wanna get up and get their knees goin'. Gotta get 'em pumpin' pumpin' pumpin', boompa boompa boom."
Music Hole: "Jake's right. A good song can really wrap people up in a mood, better than any words alone could."
People have been freaking out about this pending doom for as long as we've walked the earth. Most of it stems from either old age or political hyperventilating (both symptoms of perceived displacement). Humanity's still grinding forward ... faster than ever.
Times already have changed. It’s not people freaking out about a theoretical scenario. It’s already happened for those entering the job market today.
And as for the fear of WW3, have you turned on the news recently? That fear is just as real now than it was in the 80s.
The American Midwest would like a word.
If you don't mind being a couple hours drive from anywhere Taylor Swift would play, you can find affordable property, a good community, and amazon prime service. Any town that lacks tech work opportunities will still have solid internet from Starlink to support remote work.
There are awesome opportunities if you look.
My biggest frustration, currently, is a lack of time and energy to devote to my creative projects. I still give them some time, but between a full-time job, child care, and other day-to-day responsibilities, it is not as much as I would like.
My wildest hope for society in my lifetime is that we will experience dramaticly shorter work weeks. Keynes predicted 15 hour work weeks by 2030 or so. If I could afford a modest life on only 15 hours of labor, and devote other time to family, friends, and art, I would feel so amazing. I'm skeptical of the claims of AI, but a society where a shorter work week is the norm would turn me into its biggest fan.
Anyway, despite my frustration, the time I spend with my creative projects results in my greatest self-satisfaction, after the time I devote to raising my children. And the creative outlets I pursue today are directly related to the artistic skills I developed in my youth (including music). So yeah, it probably won't pay the bills, but there's much more important things in life than bills.
But... Far more people do some sort of art as a hobby than will ever make a career out if it.
I recall reading of studies that found that a significant majority of adults who did not learn to play an instrument when they were young wish that they had.
Only a small minority of adults who did learn to play an instrument when young wish that they hadn't.
I'm still not amazing at piano. But having a basic understanding of musical theory, understanding how a lot of these concepts of harmonics and tones and waves are related, have really unlocked a lot of neat things throughout my life. Their push for me to learn an instrument drove me to performing for family events including a couple of weddings, with my involvement in their day still quite a powerful shared memory between us. It led me to learn additional musical instruments, which I enjoyed a lot more than piano. It helped me in other artistic endeavors like theater. It helped me understand music production, something I moonlight in as a volunteer. It gave me instant connections with lots of people who were important people in my life but probably would have forever been passing strangers. It has given me something else to share with my children, as they routinely ask me to play for them and show them how instruments work. A basic understanding of waves and harmonics and what not even helped me understand a lot of more complicated EE topics.
Learning an instrument early in my life was definitely a powerful and deeply impactful thing in my life journey, almost entirely positively outside of many afternoons where I had to catch up on DBZ later.
It was a funny moment where she was like "you have perfect pitch!" "What is perfect pitch?"
I guess it's a shame, I could've been a great musician if I was trained.
In any case, if you want to meet up online, my email is in my profile. You sound fun!
Proficiency in musical instrumemts is not necessarily useful by itself, but it's a path towards mastery of something hard that typically involves a lot of intentional practice. Having been able to master something hard once makes it easier to master other hard things, because you can reuse the learning skills. Music has a little bit of applied fractions and what not, too.
The same thing learning to learn journey happens with learning a second language. But also, learning a second language helps develop skills and understanding of your first language, and helps develop communication skills for situations where there's a limited mutual understandable vocabulary.
Some languages have market value too. Better communication with employers, customers, and suppliers is valuable.
The music bit is mostly things you’d want to impart on your kids if you care about that sort of thing. (Which I do!) The public versions of it are not great where I am but individually you can do a lot.
And yet the highest earning people I know who didn’t come from affluent backgrounds are musically and linguistically talented.
Focusing on what the market demands is chasing a moving target and if you miss the boat you might just end up a low-level peon holding a wrench.
See it that way, having a normal social life requires other skills than your job.
It’s either some form of socialism or mass starvation.
From what history shows, there's not much difference between the two.
Scaling it up is hard, though.
I guess you needed some validation today.
What sort of socialism was at play when the British forced Ireland into famine during the potato blight? What about the British role in India’s famine? What about the many famines brought about by civil wars and ethnic conflicts in Africa? The Great Depression, famously brought about by socialist policies and definitely not gilded age wealth inequality decadence?
If you’re looking for a common thread, it’s authoritarianism, not socialism.
Modern Western European socialism has probably suppressed wages and increased unemployment relative to the US, but hasn’t led to starvation.
I got really lucky that my passion was computers and not something less "productive" like art, or more productive but less economically advantageous like farming.
But you won't go wrong teaching your children how to weigh options, make their own decisions and to be good people with principles and tools for helping them understand how to learn new things themselves.
You will probably go wrong pushing your children to be doctors, lawyers or whatever else you want them to be.
Much of the personality and intelligence is genetic and that's determined at conception, as for optimum parenting it seems that general indifference yields the best outcomes. There are many ways to damage a person so they won't reach their potential but there does not seem to be many ways to 'make' a person better than they otherwise would have been if they were largely left alone to control their own lives.
Understandably parents want to feel more important and in control, and that their investments will yield good results. And since most people want to feel this way they like to promote messages that reinforce these priors, so the whole platform slowly turns into Linked-In.
I base my assessments on large scale machine learned behavioral analytics done on a full click log history on a non-trivial portion of the US population. Unfortunately I know things about society that I really wish I didn't.
I'd say giving them the tools to make good decisions will naturally lead them to a particular path, why not push that path as well?
That said, I am probably going to do with my kids exactly what your parents did and just hope I’m not wrong about their economic future and passions. But man, it’s a tough strategy call.
So really the meat of the problem is treading that balance. Though I am of the belief that the mind, just like the body, needs cultivating through training and studying helps cultivate the mind. Also, breadth can really unlock different things in perspective and learning so in that respect I have faith in traditional curriculums - it's hard to predict what and how things will stick for a kid so just let them learn a bit of everything because it's possible something they learn in A might lead to an aha in "unrelated" B.
Probably the one invariant for our kid will be "you must work hard"
But maybe that's because I grew up in a place where you can make a decent living in a wide variety of jobs. Or because almost nobody in my (childhood) vicinity ever had a STEM, or even any white collar job.
I've always been smart enough to pick any jobs I want, and, if I'm perfectly honest, I've never liked any of them in the long run. All jobs start feeling like chores after a while. In every job, the stuff surrounding the job (waking up early, commuting, talking with people I might not like, the general office setting, being told what to do, etc.) is awful enough to make even the good bits worthless.
On the flip side, anything can become somewhat interesting when I spend some effort to learn it.
So yeah, I'm not a big fan of "do whatever interests you".
Could be a temporary fluctuation, or it could be that we're mean-reverting to the historical average of an ownership class and an underclass, where only the ownership class has the freedom to pursue their passions with any security. That would be sad, but I'm prepping my family for the latter.
How, if I may ask?
We've been financially fortunate enough to be in the top 25% of US households, and even I'm living the reality where I can't afford what my dad could afford working effectively the same job at the same age. Looking out at the world I see little reason why that trend should reverse, it'll have to get a lot worse first.
If I'm right I have a good shot to keep my family on the better side of this shitty transition, and if I'm wrong then my kids will have even more freedom than average, at the cost of a slightly more humble present. Probably won't step on a plane much over the next 2-3 decades, and that's fine.
I will street my children towards something that is at least employable, assuming AI has not completely obliterated job market by then.
Besides for many people the higher income job is more enjoyable, especially when the lower income job takes a large physical toll.
My mum did emphasise my reading though, and that went well.
its a lottery.
We're moving more slowly on physical robotics in varied environments, so it's going to take a while before we automate reaching under the sink and turning a knob. Or maybe your kids will have a bright future in janitorial work, who knows?
I feel like this is a crazy take. Smart (and motivated) people are better at adapting to a different world than not smart people.
still, i think getting ASI to distribute itself properly is going to be harder than people give credit. there is still a lot of problems to solve. i dont think im going to wake up one day and we are shuttling people to jupiter and back.
Studies on education and well-being don't really validate us though. They generally find a positive correlation between education and happiness when you don't control for other factors. But better educated people are usually from a higher social class, have better income, are healthier, are less likely to have been abused, etc. When they control for these factors, the correlation often goes slightly negative.
(If ASI does all the labor, education would no longer cause better income or health, so we want to remove those confounders.)
There are a number of proposed explanations for this, and it doesn't prove causation. But the data isn't on my side.
Also, I think there are two kinds of learning, easy learning and hard learning, and most people will only do easy learning without extrinsic motivation.
Easy learning is fun. It's why there are so many edutainment videos on YouTube and TikTok. Learning cool facts, or reading an educational book (without doing exams or problems) fall into this category.
Hard learning requires more effort. An example would be learning Cal II. You have to study and practice, and you likely won't get it right away. People do hard learning all the time, but usually because they have to.
Before online courses were a thing, friends or family would sometimes tell me they wish they could go back to college and take some courses they were interested in. Now we can, for free, at our convenience. But they don't. We'll watch endless edutainment videos on YouTube, but we'll only enroll in Cal II if we think we may need it.
If future AI can do everything, the extrinsic motivation is going to disappear. People will naturally tend towards easy learning. Maybe that's good enough. Easy learning will help us get funny jokes, recognize references, and appreciate good movies. But you don't need school for this type of learning. It's everywhere, and people seek it out because it's fun.
> still, i think getting ASI to distribute itself properly is going to be harder than people give credit
I'm guessing you mean getting AI to allocate resources and distribute wealth fairly without employment? Assuming we don't get a doomsday scenario, I see two likely possibilities. If a democratic government has control, people will vote to give themselves wealth. We end up with something like UBI, and people vote with their wallets to decide what the market (controlled by AI) should produce.
The other option is we get a dictator. With ASI and robotic armies, the factors that normally protect us from dictatorships would be gone. Currently, if the president wanted to declare himself a dictator, he would need support from a lot of people. At the very least, the military would have to back him. And you need your citizenry to be productive. They make all your food and machines and services. But if the army is composed of deadly autonomous drones instead of people and one person has authority over the army, they basically have absolute power and they don't need other people for anything. The factories keep running. The drones gun down anyone who resists. We're left at their whim, and we better hope they aren't cruel.
More likely we'll be permanently starving and fighting over the scraps in a dystopian world.
If AI doesn't take off but instead remains "spiky", then being smart and adaptable will be an advantage for those trying to stay ahead of AI.
smart people are better at taking action based on directive than not smart people (im assuming).
It's certainly possible, and even likely, that AI companies will fail to deliver, but let's assume for a moment that they don't crash and burn.
Why bother learning drawing at all, if an AI can draw better than you? Presumably because you, yourself, want to draw.
AI art currently mostly sucks, but if we solve that, there's an infinite supply of art that will be more to your friends taste than anything you want produce.
And as to Wolfram alpha: people here, on this site, argue that mental math is unnecessary because of calculators.
I draw myself. AI draws way better than me and will continue to draw way better than I do. I still go to live figure drawing sessions every other week and show people my work and they show me theirs and share criticism. I don't show my work to friends, it's mostly just to other artists.
These people, like you, are not the sharpest tools in the shed.
As long as there's an element of competition, you need to take advantage and remove the human from the loop if they're the bottleneck.
Add to that the tendency of people to take the solution that's easy in the moment, and not the long term best option, and yes, I think a lot of people will outsource their thinking.
As for what makes life worth living? Enriching the wealthy, if you look at the actions if the tech industry. The world we're heading to seems like a hell.
> Add to that the tendency of people to take the solution that's easy in the moment, and not the long term best option, and yes, I think a lot of people will outsource their thinking.
Hmm I don't agree with this, many people will want to live instead of longevitymaxxing like Bryan Johnson.
> The world we're heading to seems like a hell.
We agree.
A good education would let you realise how unlikely this is.
Yeah you can point out a handful of people across the nation who do really well, but you can do the same thing for jobs that are all but obsolete and worthless. Blacksmithing and tailoring and paper making also has handfuls of well paid professionals, but 99% of people with those skills will never make any meaningful money from it and it would be a foolish path to guide people towards.
The best bet you can go for in trades is union work, but that is far from all encompassing. Go to any part of the poorest parts of the country and you will find swathes of people who can do trade work, and yet they are still poor.
Don't get me wrong, having trade and tool skills is still useful, but it is a long way from a slam dunk into a great future.
If AI succeeds and the future is good for the average person, education will probably improve your quality of life. Especially because it doesn't have to focus on all that boring stuff that only aims to increase your productivity.
If the future is bad, you should probably aim to be rich very soon. Preferably by owning something that is scarce and useful in the physical world. Financial assets could be unpredictable if consumer demand collapses.
If far more Americans learn to do blue collar stuff, it will devalue the massive amounts of scammers, charlatans, grifters that we see in these professions. Construction has literally significantly declined in real productivity since the 80s. Racists say it’s cus of immigrants doing the building. I think it’s because of grift, fraud, and greed.
Pure and utter nonsense. Good education teaches you how the (natural and human) world works, and how to think and reason systematically. Intellectual work is your own exercise in maintenance of those skills.
Those skills are the most valuable thing our species has ever possessed. They are what makes us us. You speak like some alien. Please don't pollute young humans with this bile.
What's next? Due to the existence of forklifts, everyone should stop lifting weights? Hell, due to the existence of cars and at-home delivery, people should infact aim for a vegetative lifestyle on their couches. They should also make sure not to think a single thought now that AI has you covered?
I swear I thought I was losing my mind over the cult of the cryptobros a few years back. You AI boosters are a hundred times worse.
Mona Lisa Vito, is that you?
I remember my father taught me how to divide numbers and somewhat how to multiply them, before we learned that at school, with his own explanations. For multiplication he taught me indirectly, by making "number tables" with me:
. | 1 | 2 | 3 | ...
-------------------
1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | ...
2 | 2 | 4 | 6 | ...
3 | 3 | 6 | 9 | ...
..|...|...|...| ...
For division, he often said: "How often does one number fit into the other?" as a way of explaining that operation.
Ah and he also taught me about negative numbers, when other kids at school didn't even understand what that was supposed to be, and teachers still wanted us to write "not solvable", instead of the correct answer, which were negative numbers. How silly.
When the time came and we learned about division and fractions, I had an easy time to understand what the teacher explained, due to knowing an intuition about what division actually means. The hardest thing for me was not dividing numbers, but following that methodical procedure to divide in the written form, digit by digit. Something I had done in my head already, when thinking about that some number "fits into another number" only half, ergo must be 0.5 added to the number of times it fits in there whole. Only that I didn't realize immediately, that this written way of dividing 2 numbers was the same thing actually.
In this way parents can make school life and learning soooo much easier and less painful for their kids. Granted, I did seem to have a gift for calculation in primary school, but what was so casually taught to me by my father every now and then, helped tremendously. It wasn't even like strict hours of learning. It was just using chances to show me stuff.
From my mother I learned to actually pay attention how I write words. Initially, my spelling was only OKish, not great, until one day I somehow realized "Hey I just have to think a little and pay attention." and suddenly had good spelling. But this didn't come about, without my mother sitting down with me and complaining about my handwriting and also once or twice forcing me to do some writing. My handwriting is still no good though. Glad that didn't influence my grades. I write better Chinese characters, than German words, apparently.
If I had children, I would definitely try to teach them such things. Even if it is just how to look at something or what to pay attention to, or small calculation tricks. I would try to make their learning easier and offer support when they need it to learn.
Methodology is important but growing these intuitions feels critical to me, but no idea if that is something can be taught as much as it’s learned.
well said, absolutely agree
Now what does that look like concretely? Still sending them to school for several hours a day, 5 days a week? Doing what during those hours?
Gates had excellent grades and was credited in an academic paper during his undergraduate years. Not exactly like the average dropout.
> "Now that I think of it, apparently Einstein was a mediocre student, but his contributions to science were his way out. "
That's a myth. Einstein got top grades in science and mathematics.
As for the original question, "If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.", incorrectly attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"The Market decided..." stuff is completely ridiculous in these cases. A few individuals have risen by pure competence without education or privilege to the highest levels of science and industry but this claim such a compelling myth that far more have people spread the myth about themselves without it being true.
Spend meaningful, loving time together, and out in the world, as much of the small scale natural world as you can. Listen to their questions, answer when you can, learn the answers together when you can't.
If they are accustomed to hiking and camping, especially wild camping, they will learn much from you and will ask for more.
If you shop together at markets, they will start to develop a more complete relationship with their food supply and with the people working it.
Empathy and kindness and resilience will develop in those experiences.
Later, when they are closer to school age, be as honest with them as you can about the different personalities they will encounter, the conformist teachers and students, the rebels, the do gooders, the no goods, etc., and comfort them that their people may be there right away or may not be there for decades.
You can steer within their inclinations, but at some point kids are who they are.
Learn to tell them that you don't have all the answers, and there's a chance that the pair of you can work together to find it out, but there will always be some things that nobody knows yet.
But, most of all, I cam here to say - the foundation you're suggesting building is the strongest one we know of - safety in their emotions, having someone they can talk to, share their feelings with without ridicule or fear.
Start there and children always have someone they can talk to
The main problem with having a 5yo is more generally sanding down their ego. “no bud you can’t swim. not well. yet” and “I think you probably have some more to learn about chess. no I don’t think you can beat me.”
I have indeed.
> The main problem with having a 5yo is more generally sanding down their ego. “no bud you can’t swim. not well. yet” and “I think you probably have some more to learn about chess. no I don’t think you can beat me.”
I don't think you've understood my post at all.
If, as you say, you have to spend that amount of time adjusting expectations, which I too have had to do with children, adults, and managers alike, then, if you understand my post, you would do that in a way that teaches them that adjustments don't have to come with ridicule, or cause for fear.
The suggestion that you don't steer the children toward understanding that there are limitations to the world (including their own abilities) is the complete reverse of my post - the opposite is what I am saying, I even explicitly mention telling your child that "there will always be some things that nobody knows yet"
In fact, I would go further, teaching your child that there will be times that they fail, but can come to you with their head held high because they learnt from that experience, is what safety is all about.
I have really really profound regrets about not doing this myself, with my kids.
I don't think there's tension in what you're saying: Yes it's very much ok to avoid people when they're being mean, heartless, etc. At the same time that doesn't mean they're "bad" or enemies.
Sadly COVID kinda of ended the tradition.
Health and wellbeing pay the best dividends as you can maximize the nurture aspect of intelligence early and build resilience against unexpected hardships.
Of course you can always go to a no name CSU. I’ve been on both sides of the divide. The education at a cal state is like elite high school or lower.
The data doesn’t support that assertion. Elite collages do favor elite high schools, and elite high schools do favor elite middle schools etc but each link in the chain dilutes the impact of the steps further up the chain. Kids have many opportunities to jump up the chain before college and many to fail to keep up with the elite track. Which is why statistically elite preschools have such a minimal impact.
Of course that’s adjusting for the role of the parents which impacts attendance at elite schools but is obviously not impacted by their kids attendance.
I already did it for you: the numbers I gave you are already conditioned on all that. You’re making the false assumption that moving from each tier is a low probability event. It is not. The retention from elite elementary to elite high school is very high. It’s not some hyper improbable funnel.
You didn’t give any numbers, just stated things very confidently without actually reviewing any of the relevant literature.
> the false assumption that moving from each tier is a low probability event
Doesn’t need to be a low probability events, multiply probabilities and the result becomes less likely every single time. And that’s of course ignoring the underlying reasons why the probability at each stage isn’t low in the first place. A smart kid at 6 is unlikely to turn into a dumb kid at 16 etc.
Do you mean all private schools? I'm not sure public schools have admissions tests when they are 5 or 6, except maybe tests on what is being taught in school.
University is a different story obviously..
To simplify: C = elite colleges
P(C| private high school) = 2 P(C| affluent public high school)
P(C | private elementary) = 5P(C | affluent public schools) = 35 P(C)
I suppose the argument is that a hard working kid from a lower income family can test into a private elementary school on a scholarship?
What you’re saying is just a comfortable lie to make people feel better about public schooling.
It didn’t control for the value parents put on education in general.
It didn’t control for children’s expectations (seems likely that a high school student who wants to attend an elite college will be more likely to push to attend private school).
It didn’t control for extracurricular activities (it seems likely that private school parents will be more likely to encourage their kids to participate in extracurriculars that look good on an elite college application).
It did control for SAT scores through, so the one thing this study is definitely not doing is examining the effectiveness of public vs private schools at effectively educating children.
But that last point about SAT is just too much for me. Just because the study controlled for SAT score doesn’t mean private education does not impact SAT score. In fact there is a correlation. And even causation. You can dig into the data yourself.
Run that statement through AI and ask it if it says that private education can’t impact SAT score.
> Look, I’m not going to rebut each of your points one by one. Ask AI
Why are you even here? I think you’d be happier just going back and forth with AI all day.
Lmfao. Okay, buddy.
That can’t be true. A group’s probability cannot exceed the overall probability by more than the reciprocal of its population share. A 35× ratio therefore requires the group to represent at most 2.86% of the relevant population. For comparison, NCES reported that 9.3% of students in grades 1–5 attended private schools in 2016.
Please check your rebuttals against AI before you post it.
And if you’re only counting elite schools there are so many uncontrolled confounders that this is a patently stupid argument.
Elite schools are selective, a large part of what they are selecting for is kids who are likely to get into elite colleges to keep their success rates up.
Of course kids who are screened for being likely to get into an elite college are more likely to get into an elite college.
The only realistic way to control for this is to look at kids who got into elite schools but decided not to go.
>check with AI
Kick rocks. I’m not normalizing this shit. Why didn’t you check with AI. It would have told you that omitting key information to save a few keystrokes was a bad move.
People clearly have preconceived conclusions and they don’t have an interest in learning any facts.
The education in both public and private schools is so garbage, I would also rather kids be in public school since it will be way easier to get good grades and take up less of their time, as the purpose is mostly just social.
Any real education will happen at home for kids with STEM employed parents.
> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful” ...
As someone who's a little further ahead in this process, I realized the true raison d'etre for education might actually not be any of the reason discussed..
It's so you, the children's parents, can go about your business for the day and the kids can stay somewhere safe and where they can interact with their peers. If they happened to learn something, that's pure bonus.
At least if there's learning involved, then one can say it was worth it. But if it boils down to nothing other than babysitting..?
> Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet
> The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be
> The World Makers – as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us
These memes make me nostalgic for the pre-9/11 era. I remember being taught to consider myself as a “citizen of the world.” That seems exceedingly quaint now.
That’s just a moniker wealthy elites who feel more connected to other wealthy elites in largely indistinguishable major metropolitan cities, than they do to people from any specific place or nation.
But the more I hope, the more one single cynical sociopath seems to co-opt the entire commons for their own purposes. The leverage of sociopathy is incredible.
That resonated with me. As someone not even in the US, I think about this a lot.
But I think the timeline change was the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore (2000), which halted the Florida recount.
If Al Gore had won, so much of our timeline would have remained in the realm of the unfathomable/impossible. Pax Americana would have continued possibly for a few more eons who knows.
I'm not gonna claim it would be star trek but I would likely be a lot less worried about my kids in that world than what I currently am.
These are far more important points in time to fix as a time cop than a stupid election. You would also go back and kill Hitler, instead of simply letting him get into art school…
Not that it matters much to me whether it was or is meaningful or not. Nostalgia is simply a feeling that doesn’t imply much about its object.
The New Renaissance is Coming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCvixEyV10Q
I doubt it given how liberalism is falling out of favor in politics so rapidly
I disagree. Making money is a means to an end, that end being one's ability to live a comfortable life as a member of society. If other means are able to achieve that end, then that reduces the need (or even desire) for money.
While I'd cynically agree that modern society as structured today will fight tooth and nail to keep those other means from being viable (because the current powers-that-be are such specifically because they were able to accumulate the most money), that doesn't have to be the case. We can and should demand better.
For those for whom making money is a primary goal, they miss their essential purpose in life.
Like global economic and political systems has a manager you can demand to speak to like a Karen getting subpar customer service?
Any change is going to require wide spread spiritual and moral change in the general populace first.
Probably asking for $5000 checks from the government.
Just vote Republican! He promised!
What you've just stated is a Marxist/materialist perspective. Up to a certain point of meeting basic survival needs, it's probably true. But there are other ways to think about what ultimately determines human goals once survival needs are met. This illustrates my point about the humanities, often we put our thinking into boxes without realizing that the box exists at all.
With respect to your original question: Mirror your sons curiosity, bring in your experience, interest and knowledge, but keep an open mind towards his interests. Don't forget: the game is determined by your child (both literally and metaphorically).
I'm very skeptical that these orwellian rephrasings do any good. I'm super skeptical of this whole approach to speak differently in relationships, at work etc. I've mostly seen this whole "nonviolent communication", therapy-talk and related stuff used as manipulative verbal judo to sound nice but be mean with leaving no avenue to be criticized.
I don't see how this pampering will produce emotionally robust kids. In fact whatever has been this stuff recently seems to have produced an overly anxious and fearful new generation.
Since children have very limited experience, I think it is important for them to know that their feelings are valid instead being discarded. This makes them understand their own feelings and build empathy for others. Otherwise you are basically teaching the kids other's feelings are invalid or not important to be acknowledged. Think of it as model training to build empathy and understanding.
That's why it's important to affirm your toddler's emotions. Even when it seems like a trivial event to you, their feelings and emotions about that trivial event are anything but trivial. And teaching them that feeling their feelings is silly or irrational will instill that belief in them for the rest of their lives.
Would be good to know for what they are going for therapy. Many people go for therapy for different issues. The parent post mentioned about empathy issues. But not clear what issues you are mentioning here.
Some of divorces happen because one partner thinks the other partner's concern is not "big deal".
The goal is not to teach what issues are critical and what is not. This they will learn over time. The goal is to teach them empathy and you show it by example, showing empathy to their concerns - big or small.
It is not exact words to memorize. It is about what attitude you bring to your child.
If you really try to understand the toddler's sadness, you would realize that something important to her has been lost and instead of disregarding it as unimportant (for an adult), you would help her to find, make her understand her emotions etc. This is more about being empathetic and not about the right words to use. In case of psychologists, they are giving example phrases - doesn't have to be exact as long as the spirit of those phrases are maintained.
Obviously being as asshole doesn't help, but most of the times children of assholes tend to be assholes due to the same reasons.
Maybe that’s a topic you could dive in deeper on your own terms, then? And stay curious!
There are many ways of approaching this idea (nonviolent communication is one). This blog post is another for those interested: https://chrisbarber.co/resonance/
This didn't result in her refusing and a big fight. She agreed and changed her top without any physical force.
As she did, she was still crying, but with hugs from me. Instead of me being the adversary imposing the rules, she got to have emotional support through what was, for her, a hard time.
She will not grow up to be an emotionally fragile adult, upset every time she needs to change her top. (At least, not because of that interaction.) That's giving your actions too much credit! She will learn for herself that it's not important. But she'll grow up feeling supported.
(Honestly, it probably wouldn't have been that bad if I had let wear it to bed! But I'm sure you wouldn't prefer that level of pandering.)
--------
Edit:
Piggybacking my comment to add: a great book on this subject is "How To Talk So That Kids Will Listen" and, for younger children, "How To Talk So Little Kids Will Listen". An approach it advocates is:
1. Clearly sympathising with the child's emotion (as several of my replies say, this takes a lot more effort than just saying "I see that you're sad, oh dear").
2. Saying "The problem is ...". Not "but"! Like adults, children know that nothing before "but" means anything.
3. Give a brief reason why you're going to do something different. To repeat what I said in several comments, the goal is not to persuade them (although, of course, it's great if it does), just to demonstrate that there is a reason.
4. Follow through with the action regardless.
I have since seen my daughter saying to other children (or her animals during imaginary play) "the problem is..." :-)
It does have some great other tips e.g. using a visual timer to illustrate when there's some amount of time to complete an activity.
The reality of dirty clothes getting her bed dirty comes from physics, not me.
Edit: As another example, I might impose the end of TV time but still give a brief reason of it not being good for your concentration to watch too much. The point is not that every explanation will be understood, but to at least demonstrate that there is a reason for preventing fun things, even if it's complex and confusing - it's not me just enjoying her being upset.
> The point is not that every explanation will be understood, but to at least demonstrate that there is a reason for preventing fun things, even if it's complex and confusing.
If I tell my 3 year old that watching too much TV will affect her concentration, I absolutely don't expect her to make a complex long-term value judgement, or even to know what the word "concentration" means. I also don't expect her to just say "oh fair enough then". As I said, it's just to demonstrate that there is a reason (even if she doesn't understand it) beyond my own satisfaction.
Can you really not see that there are three possibilities here:
1. "I don't care if you're upset, so that's what we're doing".
2. "I don't want you to be upset, and although there's a good reason, if I can't persuade you logically then you can have it your way"
3. "I don't want you to be upset, but there's a good reason, so that's what we're doing"
(Edit: Having written that, the last one is still not quite right. The point is to acknowledge why that have that feeling - not just assert that they're upset. Usually it's pretty simple e.g. they want to carry on playing. But it does take more effort than either of the other approaches.)
> I sometimes see parents ...
In my experience (from casual observation), the very worst behaved children have uncaring parents that shout and scream at them.
Not just outright memory either, but applying logic to those memories “last time we left the car alone we said it would be lonely, now the bike is alone so it will be lonely”
> “Imagine you or me, I’m a small boy. It’s Sunday afternoon. My father wants me to visit our grandmother. Let’s say my father is a traditional authority. What would he be doing? He would probably tell me something like, “I don’t care how you feel; it’s your duty to visit your grandmother. Be polite to her and so on.” Nothing bad about this I claim because I can still rebel and so on. It’s a clear order.
> But what would the so-called post-modern non-authoritarian father do? I know because I experienced it. He would have said something like this, “You know how much your grandmother loves you, but nonetheless I’m not forcing you to visit her. You should only visit her if you freely decide to do it.” Now every child knows that beneath the appearance of free choice there is a much stronger pressure in this second message. Because basically your father is not only telling you, you must visit your grandmother, but you must love to visit it. You know he tells you how you must feel about it. It’s a much stronger order.”
I think that if OP were to use the approach Zizek mentioned, they would've said something along the lines of: "You don't have to take off your dirty shirt, but oh the bed would be so sad if you were to wear it, really you would be the most beautiful child if you were to take off your dirty shirt and put a clean new one".
overly anxious generation
I feel
I've mostly seen
manipulation
Most children and young adults I interact with closely these days seem to be far more emotionally mature than my cohort or my parents' cohort.
But that's also just my anecdata.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/haidt-the-teen-mental-ill...
A majority of young people across the world also believe their future will be significantly worse, either due to climate change or other causes like globalization and AI.
I do think that millenial-style parenting has many flaws and is guilty of messing of kids in novel ways, but it's dishonest to say that it's more guilty than social media, stagnating wages, etc.
I agree with what you last said, it's not necessarily entirely hippy parenting, but it does seem like hippy parenting at best did not prepare people for the real world or hasn't had a material improvement. Maybe each previous generation laments of the next generation's parenting style.
It is sad that it has been abused by previous generations and in corporate uses to the point where we can no longer even receive emotional support without suspicion of intent.
I hope you are able to find a community where people who say that, feel it, and mean it, and partner with you to resolve the underlying issue.
Have you interacted with a toddler? They are completely unaware of their emotional state, they’ll just cry or complain. So you gently remind them that it’s indeed frustrating, or that they’re sad, etc. There’s nothing Orwellian about it, you’re merely giving them words to name emotions. And, ideally, they’ll grow up way less confused and reactive than the generation you’re thinking about.
Emotional resilience doesn’t come from “toughen up”, but rather from knowing what you’re feeling and how/why you gotta handle it in a healthy way.
Everything GP said is basically modern, evidence-based, good parenting.
Too many husbands get slightly behind in the first few months and never catch up to doing their share.
The best way to feel comfortable, confident, and close with your children is to "be a mom".
Like anything, you don't know how it works until you do it.
Maybe that's just me, but this strikes me as a bit odd. When i think about my parents and what i appreciate about them and how they raised me, hard skills are not very high up the list. Things like encouraging curiosity, agency and freedom to pursue things that I showed interest in even if it meant spending many weekends and many eurodollars on me that they would no doubt have found ways to spend otherwise come to mind first, along with general values about society and how (not) to treat people.
Edit: there are "hard skills" they taught me, but they are more along the lines of "we want you to be a self sufficient human being capable of dealing with life" (cooking, cleaning, how to budget and think about money,...) and less about increasing my value as a participant in the labor market
> Maybe that's just me, but this strikes me as a bit odd. When i think about my parents and what i appreciate about them and how they raised me, hard skills are not very high up the list.
For better or worse, parents with lucrative professions have been able to give their kids a leg up to enter those professions. They know the path to get there, have connections, etc. That's especially important in increasingly competitive environments (like we have today).
Thinking you had such an asset to offer your kid, then being forced to doubt its value, is a loss.
My dad was in a lucrative and booming industry: the printing press during the digital transformation. By the time I got to college it was a dying industry. I was in a lucrative and booming industry: programming during the 2000s. By the time my son is in college it might be dying too.
What you're talking about is mostly about timeless industries like health care, some types of engineering, finance, etc.
I think what you mean by a "timeless industry" is one that defines itself by the problem it's solving rather than by the solution. Tech and the Internet was so powerful that for a brief couple decades, the industry defined itself by the solution: just use computers. But really, AirBnB is in the hospitality industry, and Uber/Lyft/Waymo are in the transportation industry, and Zillow/Redfin/Trulia are in the real estate industry, and Stripe/Square/Paypal/Zelle/Plaid are in the payments industry, and Flexport is in the shipping industry, and so on.
The depressing part for me, who went into one of the consumer tech giants, is that I thought I was going into the tech industry and it turns out I'm really in the addiction industry. I now know a lot about how to deliver hits of dopamine at scale that bump up daily engagement, but that's not really what I thought I was going into, and the actual technology I use has completely shifted underneath.
Just keep an eye out for something different. I'm sure there are jobs that you can do and feel good about.
You could've got out sooner once you caught a whiff of this?
Same, but what I lucked into as a result of that was that pops bought a computer for the house back in the early 90's in a curious attempt at learning what was happening with desktop publishing (to keep up with what was going on in the wider industry), and computers never really clicked with him, but they did with me.
I think there's often definite overlap in what's happening now with what's coming next, and I can only wish that my son will benefit from some kind of comparable serendipity in the same way that I did.
I grew up poor and as an adult I'm surrounded by silicon valley engineers who grew up wealthy. The biggest differences in our upbringing is their knowledge of the system and their connections within it. Their parents knew college admissions officers, knew what kind of test prep mattered and what didn't, knew the competitive clubs that their friends who were admissions officers looked for and how to get their kids into those competitive clubs. They have friends who are VCs and hedge fund managers and their kids can get high school internships working for their friends where they can learn about those industries and gain the warm connections needed to start startups or court investment. They know doctors when they need medical advice and their doctor doesn't have the time, lawyers who will give them free advice on legal issues, etc etc
And now, as a well-to-do adult in the tech industry, I have the same connections. Generally speaking the privilege you can offer your kids is the knowledge and access to highly qualified individuals.
But right now I know almost nothing at all for what to tell them. I don't know if any moticum of the experience I have that put me on a successful path will be valuable in the future at all.
Basically my plan is to just spend time enjoying time together and having fun, and cross my fingers and hope that things turn out alright.
Spellcasting used to be incredibly rote magic. Welcome to a new age of spellcasting in the fly. Not required either but knowing the true names and the true forms: I can't imagine any path other than your true understanding directly corresponding to your true agency.
Not that I don’t value or agree with it, those soft skills are incredibly important, but one can I hope have both the soft and the hard skills.
Family and romance have evolved quite a bit in recent years - but all things equal are you wanting to marry into a family with productive skills, assets, etc? Would you pick true love with the peasant girl or marry to strengthen the alliance with Normandy? Would your answre to the latter change if you were the pauper?
I also think both hard and soft skills are important, it just feels to me that a parent's job is primarily the latter, not the former. There are plenty of places that can teach your child very well how to become a programmer/electrician/younameit, but not many places that you trust to teach your child how to be a good human (amplified by the fact that a lot of social conditioning happens and is engrained before we really go super deep down the "tech tree" of hard skills in life)
There are people who see it that way, who marry for money and clout. We call them the unhappy ones.
Remember that while still being unborn the child will get acquainted with you voice and time if voice. Once born he will observe you and how you conduct yourself from very early on; how you treat others, how you swear, how you treat your wife, and nowadays your device pickup habits too.
so the best way to teach your kids is to teach yourself to be a better person
Behavior learnt from school is exhausting me.
you can absolutely teach those
my dad was an abusive alcoholic. i have never laid a hand on my kids. i am not just like my dad.
(And congratulations on breaking the cycle. It's not easy.)
Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916273 - November 2025 (1 comment)
Catholic Schools and Weekly Mass Aren’t Solving the Retention Crisis - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/catholic-schools-and-w... - October 15th, 2026 (“Just 58% of People Raised Catholic Are Still Catholic”)
The LDS Church Has a Retention Problem - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-lds-church-has-a-r... - August 6th, 2026 (“Just a bare majority of kids raised LDS are still LDS as adults (54%)“)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48634883 (additional citations)
(parent)
I would counter that education, at least in the USA, does not adequately prepare one for life, the real world, and effectively finding employment.
What ACTUALLY mattered in my life turned out to be:
1. Who you know, and by proxy, what kind of a person you are
2. The value of "just showing up", every day
3. How important personal relationships/networking are, and just how SMALL the world is for how vast its size
Knowledge and skills are things you can sort of just pick up as you go along, but being given any kind of opportunity in the first place is not quite so easy.
When I was going to primary school, we'd take oath every day before the classes started - first line were to the effect of - "I swear that I will occupy myself with serving the humanity".
I guess that's why I refused when one of my longest serving freelance web development client inquired if I was interested in developing a "naughty" website.
> I would counter that education, at least in the USA, does not adequately
> prepare one for life, the real world, and effectively finding employment.
I didn't 'follow in his footsteps', work at the family business, or even in the same industry. In fact, its difficult to name a skill or lesson my father taught me and at the same time I feel like I owe everything I know to him (and mom.)
I think most importantly, he taught me to care. to put in some effort and give a damn. He taught me to be unafraid to be vulernable and loving with my family and to be couragous in the face of fear. He let me be myself, he encouraged whatever it was that I was into and when i felt lost, he gave me a nudge in a good direction. He protected me, and taught me to be aware, how to be strong and kind.
If i were to have children, those are the things I'd want to pass onto them.
Also, I'd teach my kids how to cook!
I'm in the same boat as the author, have four kids and I struggle with keeping them motivated and this has been my anchor so far.
Industrial revolution, the shift from manufacturing to services, the shift of technology over time.
Hell, they say that the reason millennials are so nostalgic and enjoy childish things is because of rapid technological and societal change in the last 30 years.
I doubt it'll slow down, the era of doing anything until you die was a foolish thing for even our grandparents generation.
I strongly disagree with that.
> In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture.
Nature has set us up to be amongst the most adaptive creatures on the planet. I think only the rats and the microbes have us beat. We are everywhere. One of the things that struck me while traveling the world and visiting some pretty out-of-the-way places is that there were always people living there as if it was perfectly normal.
> It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels.
Why would it have to be shallow? If you spend your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what.
> Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
Not really, but again, you are welcome to that opinion, I just don't share it.
The time when a single skill would get you from the cradle to the grave is over and done with. And probably has been for a while but it is going to be much more fractured going forward.
Because when you ground this in reality, if you spend 3 to 5 years in a field and moved to another field and spend 3 to 5 years in that from a monetary perspective, you are always going to be a junior you are going to spend your entire life doing low-level tasks and getting paid at low levels.
One thing which I started with my own children which seemed promising was to read biographies of notable individuals in chronological order as bedtime reading --- since it was a difficult list to compile, I started on a smaller subset of U.S. Presidents which worked well (though I was surprised that there was no child-friendly biography for a couple of them in the local library system necessitating ordering) --- I also tried to read a more formal, adult-oriented biography in advance to anticipate questions. Unfortunately, my wife's schedule changed when we got to Truman and the effort was abandoned due to a changing evening schedule. Note that this was in addition to having read all the C.S. Lewis Narnia books, _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_, Susan Cooper's _The Dark is Rising_ pentalogy and many, many other more traditional book choices.
The big thing in child-rearing is to offer the child chances and experiences and age-appropriate choices --- the line in _The Simpsons_ where Homer tells Bart that it's okay that he failed at learning while wrongly phrased does have a kernel of truth in it.
The way to make an idea relatable today is different from 100 or 1000 years ago. The lessons may be timeless, but gaining the lesson is a personal experience.
The conclusion I currently have is that “education starts in the home”. School teaches information that everyone should know but the process starts within a household and community. So I don’t see a generalized solution for education.
We spend an ungodly amount of money on education. The one problem the public schools don’t have is a lack of money. The budget for the public school system in my midwestern city of 750,000 people is larger than the city’s entire budget.
Third world countries get better educational outcomes with literally 5% of the money we spend on education. It can be done, quite easily, in fact.
This is not a socioeconomic problem. It is an incentive problem. No one is ever held accountable for educational outcomes in public school systems. Tie teacher and administrator compensation to educational outcomes and this problem will disappear in a semester.
There are three reasons this doesn't make education a solved problem:
1. Often, students are not interchangeable, in the sense that the problem we are interested in is how a particular person can get educated, rather than how someone can get educated. So knowing that the quality of the student matters most of all doesn't give us much of an attack on the problem, at least after you solve the obvious problems like iodine deficiency, lead poisoning, kwashiorkor, starting classes at 7 AM, and your best students getting sent off to death camps. Even these are often out of the control of the would-be education reformer. So "have the best students" is the most important thing we know about how to get great education, but it doesn't make education a solved problem.
2. It's difficult to tell which teachers or tutors are good, partly because student quality is so much more important than teacher quality (so a single particularly good or bad student can make a teacher appear particularly good or bad, an effect that is even larger for tutors, and overall student populations are also variable, for example because of admission requirements or brain drains), and partly because the bad teachers and tutors have strong incentives to fudge the signal. Generally speaking, those running educational institutions are drawn from among the worst teachers, compounding this problem. So, although "use the best teachers and tutors" is a thing we know about how to get great educational results, but when we don't know who the best teachers and tutors are, it doesn't make education a solved problem.
3. There aren't enough really good tutors to tutor more than a tiny fraction of students individually, so even if you can get the best tutors to teach (forbidden by law in many places, for example by teacher-licensing requirements, and often economically unappealing for the tutors) you're still left with the important question of what to do with the majority of the population. So "tutor individually rather than teaching a group" and "use really good tutors" are things we know about how to get great educational results, but it doesn't make education a solved problem, even when we know who those tutors are.
4. Plausibly, there is some way that we could still get much better educational results than the best tutors tutoring the best students today. Many of the things that students today do to improve their educational results, such as consulting Wikipedia, memorizing vocabulary with spaced repetition systems like Anki, or reading books, are things that were not technologically possible at some point in the past.
None of these problems are a result of people not caring or actively hating the solutions.
When my kids were small we were either at the Perot museum or the Dallas World Aquarium every Saturday morning (giving mom a break). We had family memberships to both of those places and we used it to the fullest. Going to the same places over and over seems boring but I think it really helped them digest what they were seeing and messing with. I feel like a new experience every day is enriching but also overwhelming, especially for really small kids.
I always joked with them "get good at learning and you don't have to get good at anything else". I feel like they've done a pretty solid job at that and can learn/develop their own interests at will. My youngest taught himself guitar, he's really good too, and knows a handful of RATM songs which isn't the easiest music.
Both have gravitated to STEM and attend the magnet HS's in Dasllas ISD ( Townview TAG and Townview SEM ). My oldest is interested in petroleum engineering (i don't really know why, he just is) but my youngest spends all his free time and before school time with his creative writing teacher who he loves. Time will tell with him i guess.
I grew up in Dallas in TAG and Montessori and one of the most impactful days ever was a trip Downtown in the wintertime, just to be in the middle of Downtown during the day developing situational awareness by navigating to and from Thanksgiving Square.
Sometimes once is enough.
Schools have not changed because young kids are biologically wired to get the best out of reading patterns and texts, and writing using tools like pencils. The level of brain stimulation these activities generate is nowhere close to what you get looking at screens and typing on keyboards when you chat with an agent.
I have a five year old. It's almost breathtaking to see him figure out addition and substraction, sometimes in double digits. Do I need to teach to how to program or build agent harnesses like me? Not really. The tech will change when he's 20. The important thing is to let him develop critical thinking skills so that he can adapt and survive, just like I have.
Congrats, programmer dad. Don't stress it, sometimes even try to be Bohemian and enjoy the kid.
- how to tie his shoelaces,
- how to make/change his bed,
- how to make change (currency),
- how to cook breakfast: boil oatmeal, fry and poach eggs, make toast w/butter,
- how to wash dishes w/o a dishwasher (the value of soaking dirty dishes),
- how to sweep an inside floor, how to sweep large outside areas (e.g.,driveway),
- how to mop a floor and with what (e.g., don't mix stuff!),
- how to change/patch a tire on a bicycle, car, scooter, et al,
- how to use a fire extinguisher,
- when he gets older: how to mow and garden a lawn safely (safety glasses, heavy shoes, keep hands away, proper tool for the job, etc.) and
- the weak points of the body (with an intention of self-defense),
- How to sand and paint,
- the perils of household fluids, e.g., chlorine bleach, alcohol, gasoline, powdered cleaners, etc. and their mixing,
- My least favorite: how to dig and fashion soil with spade, shovel, hoe and rake.
- How to throw balls, rocks, a handful of dirt, etc. Spear/bow/arrow is fantastic but probably best left to organized instruction. Emphasize safety (for the balls and rocks too!8-))
By then he should be old enough to set his own path.
Without clear goalposts, external accountability, and support, self paced learning feels like running in a desert. You just end up going in circles. That’s exactly why MOOCs never worked for me, nor for thousands of others.
Otherwise this question should bother a parent in every generation.
Beyond that, the interests were her choice to pursue.
I did do quite a lot of seeding though. It did mean at an age when her friends liked iCarly she liked Red Dwarf, The Prisoner, and Tom Lerher.
I think she has done well, over all.
Partially agreed.
Whatever we teach today will be solved or obsolete tomorrow anyway. In fact, in school we learn methods that are never used in real life anyway. So the "what" is not fully the point.
It's how we teach it and what the point of it. The point of it is to teach how to learn things, how to practice, how to become experts, how to struggle with them and persevere eventually. It is not a sort of an exercise for our minds, but it is exactly an exercise for our minds. That's the point.
The "what" matters in that it is a foundation of knowledge upon which future knowledge and understanding is built.
So, I agree with the spirit of the argument but it is a bit more nuanced.
Often the only thing that is taught is what is on those tests.
Assessing and measuring student knowledge is very important. Impossible to evaluate and improve current teaching methods otherwise.
For example is the purpose of educating children about history A) to give them a systemic, if somewhat cursory, understanding of the evolution of society, in order allow them to contextualize the present? or B) ensure they know a list of a hundred or so people and events that happened?
It is much easier to quantify the latter.
– Thomas Edison, The New York Dramatic Mirror, 1913
What a quote! I love these takes because it instills a sense of skepticism for what our (wise?!) technologists are saying today. Especially the ones who are making the technology. No one knows how it will play out. Books remain.
Regarding your son: I am critical of adults' ability to orchestrate effective learning for children. Err on the side of honesty and directness, even in situations that are personally uncomfortable.
Most children are remarkably smarter and more capable of understanding than we (adults) give them credit for. Your son will likely have a better memory than you in the years when the acquired information disparity is highest (you having a lot, him having very little). Children learn early on how and when adults are being untruthful or partially truthful.
You cannot read too much to your son. You cannot talk too much with your son. You cannot listen too much to your son.
If you long for books for your children, join the fight!
I also hope to see a rebound for books and reading for all ages.
When I was ~10, I tried to get my TRS-80 (yikes I'm old) to display something like the star wars death star on its primitive graphics. I got pretty far, thanks to the trig examples in the manual. But I was flummoxed that my degree measurements yielded crazy sin/cos results. I felt crushed. Some years later I learned about radians. I often think back how my life trajectory might have been different had I known something simple: how to break problems down.
HP calculator manuals used to be really useful for teaching that.
I kept all of my engineering textbooks and there have been concepts in them that never made sense when they were taught in school but ten years later I re-read them and things click like they never did when I was learning them years ago.
I think one of the tragedies of the public schools is that all the kids are expected to learn certain things at specific ages and grade levels, and for some kids they’re just not quite ready.
That doesn’t mean they won’t be ready in the future. But they will get a failing grade and the associated feeling of “I must be dumb.” And I think that often changes the trajectory of their lives as you described, often in negative ways.
But seeing as the comments are answering the title question (and because I haven’t seen these mentioned yet), I’ll offer my 2c:
I hope to teach my son to embrace his emotions (all of them), to process those emotions in an healthy way, to ask for help when he needs it (without guilt or shame), to value practice (not success) and to play. I think everything else will follow.
Could people learn by themselves? – possibly.
Do they? – generally not.
Having agents changes nothing
Access to information isn't the same thing as competency or skill. Giving someone access to google does not make them educated. Have they met people?
>become a good citizen
>make the world better
That's basically the whole game right there. Or as Hillel might say, the rest is commentary.
Being nice is nice, but it doesn't cure cancer
>become a good citizen
these are skills.
these are what you teach your children.
Could essentially be saying, obey and work. A lot of people won't agree that is the ideal life. If that's not how you interpreted it then you have my point.
Teaching kids to be good slaves to the system...
Dissent can be patriotic.
If I could stomach being an "Optimal Machiavellian Dad" I would tell my kid:
1. Use people to get what you want.
2. Always take more than you give.
3. You're the only one who matters. Don't empathize with others.
That's the mentality that is consistently rewarded in society today.
kids are smarter than people realize, and they don't glean the things that people intend.
It's not a new thing either. The more history I learn, the more it's clear that these things have always been rewarded. It's also just a higher risk way to live, because if you piss off the other sociopaths they will slap you down.
Otherwise you get an evil billionaire child, but they don't even have the nerve to shower riches on you in your old age.
In all fairness, I know that you meant "wealthy and/or influential people". But it bodes ill at every level that your tacit belief about success is widely known and widely accepted (though certainly not universally).
Postman's book is exactly against that definition of success, though he readily points it out. He describes it in the "Gods that Fail" section of the book.
Yeah, I'm not stupid rich, but the evidence is that I'm far better put together than Elon Musk emotionally, and even happier in regular day to day life. Which is hilarious because I just had my entire life upended.
But I've never felt a compulsion to pretend to be good at a video game to impress strangers on the internet because I have responded to difficulties and personal failings by bettering myself. I embrace recognizing my faults, fixing them, and knowing that I am human.
Do you want a child like me or a child like musk?
I agree with this, my boys are 14 and ~17 and i feel they have a petty good start on both. As a parent, you can guide and encourage but kids grow into individuals with their own passions, interests, and views of the world and being able to learn and think critically arms them with what they need to navigate it all.
Algorithmic feeds are in their "cigarettes are good for you" stage, but they'll get better. In the future (early signs include AI research report makers) tools will emerge that put you in charge, and that's really powerful.
An algorithmic tool - feed, or report-writer - that sifts a mountain of content & information to surface stuff you'll learn from and love, in response to a request you made? That's power. That's leverage. You save hours and get a fully cited and useful thing in response to your request.
An algorithmic tool that builds something in response to a prompt? Leverage!
We are headed for a future adundant with tools just like that. Depending how you use them, you'll get either enslavement, or immense leverage. Teach him nothing, and you risk him becoming a slave to algorithms controlled by others - just like the financially illiterate people out there today who fall into consumer debt or rely on payday loans.
Or, teach him to think deeply about leveraging the cognitive tools of today and tomorrow, and he'll be capable beyond anything our generation can conceive of.
Postman also wrote about the "Disappearance of Childhood". Once upon a time being an adult meant something. Now the world's secrets unfold rapidly unto a child's mind with the help of technology. Today, adults dress up in cartoon characters and enjoy coloring books. Postman also argues that childhood is a recent concept which came about with industrialisation and literacy...
She was interested in Python and now in Godot, even though she knew how to use ChatGPT and all, she still wants to work towards the challenged by herself, using AI as a guide.
This makes me think that at least for the next generation, understanding will still be valued. Even though I am still questioning it that will be the case in the long run
There is shared knowledge and history that form the foundation of a culture.
There are basic life-skills, like understanding banking, the local political system, etc.
On top of all that: knowing how to think and reason, knowing how to find knowledge and learn new things.
So many parents are apparently incapable of covering these basics. In particular, many parents who home-school or, worse, unschool lack many of these capabilities themselves.
Step 1 is surviving the transition.
Step 2, Find yourself someone trustworthy who can watch baby for a time, even a few hours. Create regular space to unwind, and eventually think about important stuff with your partner. What DO we value in raising our kids?
Step 3: start living it. Which starts with both of you. Kids absorb actions much more than words. Having kids has forced both of us to personally grow both out of sheer necessity and desire to impart certain values
Step 4: adjust ongoing
With two young kids, I'm somewhere in between steps 2 & 4. Remember to be kind to yourself too
From the quote from 1920. Which is so interesting, as even in the age of AI, language tutors are doing just fine. At least the people I know.
It turns out that no one really wants to learn a language by talking to their computer, and having a weekly scheduled meeting with another human being is quite enjoyable.
Is he asking how to parent a child or what fields to nudge them towards, or what?
I am lost in him taking formal education not delivering any more and making it into an existential crisis of parenting.
Is parenting "education"? sure to some extend like do not stick your hand in fire and some such. But that is a far cry even from basic calculus.
Maybe just stick to the basics on what to teach your son, and of the four things written, only the first and last really needed - become a good person; learn basic facts. The other two will fall in place.
— Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (Book 1, Preface, 9–10)
- Socrates (via Plato), Gorgias
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1672/1672-h/1672-h.htm#:~:te...
Also, be rich and leave a nice pile of inheritance. Beats every corporate job which is for the losers.
The next would be that it's the long game that matters. You are likely to keep them around for pretty much two decades, don't burn all the energy you have the first few years. I've seen too many parents give their five year old all the attention they want but neglect a teenager, which is when the real challenges are.
The final is to be a good role model. The old adage that kids do what you do, not what you say, may sound easy but that's pretty much all there is to it. Show curiosity in everyday life and they will, too. Be kind, and they .. yeah, no guarantees there, but at least you did your thing.
DIY, homesteading, animal husbandry, electronics repairs, survival skills, cooking, whatever that cannot be easily automated.
Also teach them weapon handling, surveying, map reading, ham radio.
How you act throughout your life, is how your son will act in his life. And it might seem like at times he doesn’t care or is above it, but he will ultimately do how Dad did it. This isn’t taught so much as it is imprinted. for me at least, that means: what will your son teach you? You will see just how much it matters.
Maybe an analogy is that it’s like LLM training…the better the training data, the better model. You are the training data. Remember that! And congratulations.
They will know it's wrong to be right.
It's the only way they'll ever get paid.
I will teach them to lie."
— Mobius Band Twilight
No, I don't agree with it. But on my most cynical days… I do enjoy the song.
competence is what I try to teach. Try, try and try again until he'll get it. Small things at first, but (hopefully) he gets the principle. Legos are great at this.
Additionally I try to teach that it's not wrong to defend yourself.
Furthermore, I find it completely reasonable for someone to care about the long-term financial focus of their children. I find this to be the second best antidote to all the uncertainty and fear older generations leave behind to the new ones.
The first best would've been to actually give a damn and make a stand to what the powers-to-be force you to accept as the new norm as if they're the force of nature that make decisions on how the 95% of the world's population must adapt to.
You are correct. Competence in one field does not translate. However, the idea of 'try, try, try again' is something that should work across all fields
Stafford Beer wrote that the purpose of a system is not its declared intent but what it does - what it manifests, causes or how it behaves (1979, 2001). Higher education has a lofty purpose, but the system manifests as a Defence Contractor among other things like teaching one’s kids. “We’d prefer not spoken aloud” is probably true.
The grind is fun. But some of my best day are cleaning my space, making a cup of coffee, cooking a meal staring at the wall. Sometimes it’s nice to just live life in its regular moments and not need to chase adventure to feel something.
“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A competent teacher (doesn't have to be brilliant) puts a floor on basic levels of understanding in a variety of topics.
Without which, a resourceful LLM-guided child - while possibly being a brilliant mathematician - may well come out believing Wicca can heal cancer with the right rocks.
I bought a book on a subject I wanted to understand and read it to my kid every night with silly voices that sent them to sleep. They’re older now with a solid grasp of those foundational topics, which has helped their schoolwork and interactions with teachers, even if they’ve been labelled the class nerd. Works both ways. lol
Enjoy parenting. Be present.
Anything, books, magazines, as long as it is on paper. Reading will help them to understand, to think, to use the brain without the need of electronic devices.
As a recent father to two sons, my thinking has been to eventually teach them to "Solve problems (some of them being valuable)".
If I can do that, then it doesnt really matter what AI (insert other tech) pops up. There will always be problems to solve.
That seems pretty good. I might add "curious" and "skeptical."
My 14 year old is pretty sharp and i like to pose philosophical questions that have no answer to him to watch the gears turn and see what he comes up with. I once asked him what he thought the meaning of life is and he replied "to make the most effective use of the resources available to you". I can't tell you if that came from him or something he read and, while not a perfect answer, i like it quite a bit.
Availability of resources does not entail skill in leveraging them. I'm not sure classical eduction is the best way to learn that, but it's certainly better than nothing and a useful first step.
What really happens is that the infant is the teacher. The parents are reduced to sleep-deprived diaper-changers who serve a tyrant who can't walk or talk. Do that for a while and your priorities and worldview have now been reprogrammed.
The kid grows up a bit and now dad, who was so full of wise lessons, is suddenly watching the kid eat a caramel apple for the first time, or riding a tricycle, or going on a water slide. The dad has nothing to teach, the dad gets to re-learn the joy of simple things.
But like others say, just read to them, play with them, be interested in them as little people...the rest will take care of itself.
- To WANT. Most people don't even want things anymore. No hobbies, no goals. Attention sniped by algos and digital casinos (gaming, sports TV, anxiety-farming news).
- Mind-body coordination. Hobby sport, instrument.
- To not be a pushover.
- To make friends and a strong social circle. (Find common ground + empathize with his current problems = new friend)
- To id and reject poisons: Digital ones, foods, pharma, air quality, delusions,...
- To identify profit motives, machiavellianism and scams.
No matter what happens with AI and various doom bringers (demographics, climate, wars), these skills are evergreen and will likely create an advantage in survival and quality of life in any scenario.
Kids get addicted to video games and TV. I think you should just set those into Spanish and Chinese. Tell them "play all the video games you want so long as the games are in Spanish or Chinese, you're learning a language".
I’ve attended ~10 state schools of varying levels of quality and across 2 countries during my childhood because we moved around a lot. Even in the better schools, critical thinking was discouraged or even punished and while there were teachers that did care, I can think of maybe only two that were what I would consider to be decent teachers that instilled a passion for the subjects they were teaching. They weren’t even that inspiring really. I can’t speak for fee paying schools, which I aspire to send my very young son to one day in the hope that he has a better experience.
Radio could have revolutionised teaching as could the internet have, but we as a society didn’t let it and unless AI supersedes us entirely I don’t think it’ll be any different this time.
Did the author get their programming skill from their parents? I feel it's a quite weird question.
To tl;dr a bit, this and other analyses tend to agree that whatever benefit you get from being too paranoid, distrusting, skeptical, etc in the name of safety is often overcome by the additional opportunities you get from being open, trusting, optimistic, and so on.
In other words, it is best to teach your children the world is a good and wonderful place; they can usually adjust their expectations accordingly later, but the reverse is less true, since it’s much harder to gain that sense of wonder and trust from nothing.
[1] https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/parentsprimalb...
Now they're realizing that all "work" is tech related, and younger one is actually taking comp sci.
Time is the most valuable thing we have and can share.
That's less Mcluhan and more Foucault.
Einstein was not a mediocre student, what a stupid thing to believe. And Steve jobs and bill gates weren't drop outs because they were incapable.
1. a willingness to inspect, interact and "mess with" (for lack of a better term) the world around me — intellectually, mechanically, and socially
2. an awareness that there will be consequences, and that I should take responsibility for them.
3. critically, the idea that "taking responsibility is a good (or at least not bad) thing"
In my case, this was light wrist slaps with a proud chuckle for me messing with the home electricity panel, stealing the refrigerator's power cord to replace my PC's broken one, getting in trouble at school for asking my teachers hard questions, taking some career/financial risks right out of college, and generally bending rules to find novel solutions to common problems, even if i got in mild trouble from time to time.
In many of my peers, including my older brother, they know they must take responsibility for consequences of their interfacing with the world — but that's something scary to them. So their conclusion is to inspect (but unobtrusively), interact (but only as instructed), and never mess with the world. This manifests (where I'm looking from) as limited curiosity, few novel ideas for how things could or should be (even at a small/local/domestic scale), and low initiative to try to alter their circumstances unless forced by said circumstances or authority or long debates to convince them of high certainty of upside.
Our society is cooked in the coming generations if everyone is raised to only operate within the rules they're given, and terrified of taking responsibility for anything they do — the rate of change in the world is going to accelerate so much faster than benevolent authority figures (like parents) can give them sensible long-standing rules to live within, and abusive/manipulative authority figures (billionaire CEOs, possibly superintelligent AIs or even just advanced LLMs) are going to take so much more advantage of them than they already do.
People need to be open to experiment and make their own judgement based on observation without relying purely on their environment and authority.
- The most important task of a parent is to make sure your child is bored as FUCK as often as possible.
BUT they should have the means to alleviate that boredom with something creative or interactive. Not just vegging out and consuming content, they should have as many opportunities to create or interact with things available to them.
This is how we figured out that our kid is a proper artist - despite both of their parents being unable to draw anything except technical drawings or UML charts. Boredom + available arts and crafts = fun.
Oh and get your kid reading, the current state of the world is that if your child can read AND UNDERSTAND what they read - not just recite the words out loud - they'll have a massive leg up compared to everyone else. Reading anything is better than nothing.
Comics or even subtitles on non-native programs are better than nothing.
Nope, ship sailed. You haven’t had a child in school yet. It’s not like that anymore.
5 years ago in Palo Alto (Paly High) it was: Take your shoes off, get on your phone to watch a season of whatever you want, leave for “up to” 40 minutes. Paying attention to a teacher… who may have been teaching? or not? Why not just head over to the wellness center and get snacks? They let you hang out there.
Those IN CHARGE didn’t care to make learning matter or be rewarding. With AI, it “matters” less, in the credential-sense of schooling.
Institutions are meh. My bet is on individuals.
Perhaps Palo Alto isn't representative, and in fact might be doing some things wrong?
> the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what
Because this models how to go from oblivious to aware, through investigation and evaluation, while maintaining our own orientation - key to any limited being navigating a world with others
"while maintaining our own orientation": each organized teaching has their own world view (religious, open-liberal, science/art for its own sake, training to combat or fleece the world, etc.). It's extraordinarily difficult to learn and care deeply about any subject without being programmed for these enduring social franchises, adopting dissonant work/home/private or us/other personas, etc. in service of the franchise.
Society will deluge young people with this programming. Parents I hope teach maintaining yourself, the practice of observing yourself and addressing your limits, which would mean being ruthless in pruning delusions, kind about mistakes, and able to retry and/or get help. Indeed, if you teach only that, you'd be expressing a lot of faith that they're unique and good and self-sufficient, and they'll make their way; you believe it, and they will, too.
Yes, once they have learned the usual anecdotal lessons (but before college and life decisions), they'll need intro to systems thinking, to identify ex ante fruitless objectives and cost difficult paths, to game and deconstruct the franchises and make life-decisions based on prospects as well as interests and values.
But play is the most enduring lesson: that (per Nietzsche) after camel-carrying what you need and lion-clearing your workspace, you settle into creating what's interesting.
So teaching should reflect self-observation to be teaching for living your own life, but the goal activity should be creative play, to learn and make life worth living, for yourself and others.
America is in piss poor 25th place in PISA ranking in Mathematics. Never rely on public school to be anything, but free daycare. Teachers (Education majors) are regularly self-selected from the bottom of the barrel SAT score students, so dont ever rely on teachers to do anything.
Teach your kid everything you want them to know.
My siblings, also non-fiction readers, both learned to read before they went to school.
I point-blank refused: I was confident I could learn to read, and with the now-long-lost confidence of a summer child, at the age of less than four, I said "no, that is what school is for".
When I got there, I was reading well above my level within the first couple of weeks.
I assume that as well as my parents showing what reading was, I had seen my brother reading, and he had read to me and had shown me what learning to read looked like.
The point of this disjointed anecdote is: be engaged, be inquisitive, show yourself learning and exploring; if you are shown a puzzle, approach it as if you don't know it. Furrow your brow comically, make mock mistakes, show your working. Enlist others to play these learning game.
You don't have to worry about teaching your son anything except that learning is great, and if possible that all sorts of adults have all sorts of things they can teach.
Once your kid is at school, then you can fill in the gaps; then you can be the extra teacher who engages with the subject matter (which as an adult you will have long forgotten and really can approach with fresh eyes).
It's your job to help make a learner, not to be a teacher.
I disagree here that agentic AI somehow replaces the need for humans to be resourceful. LLMs and their harnesses are just more resources for humans to use to uncover and solve problems, and resourcefulness is more important than ever for navigating a world increasingly riddled with slop (of the AI-generated variety or otherwise) and enshittification. A properly-functioning education system should absolutely emphasize resourcefulness as the primary skill to teach students, even (especially!) in the post-AI world.
Intelligence will never be scarce. Super Intelligence I meant
The only thing you can do is trying to avoid giving them trauma. This is important!
Money values
Hard work
Why community matters
> Schools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet.
I am not at all sure schools survived the internet. The state of education in the era of tiktok and Instagram is absolutely poor and some would even say worse.
The internet (especially on smartphones) completely upended schools, and had taken over the attention of most students with the unrelenting grip of the hulk.
While I am not one for reciting doom and gloom, I think the author is avoiding a more grounded look at things.
Another example is their lineage working at long gone jobs in Scotland. This is not the same. The current tech vector seem to aim for virtually all jobs in one fell sweep. Yes, blue color labor as well, with finely controlled robotics. The industrial and information eras are over, and what comes next could be a leap, or a regression, but I'm sure it won't look like the past either way.
This trope is meaningless without a quality standard. Have schools survived? They’re certainly not thriving, even by today’s handicapped & reduced standards. Moreover, k-12 students in the past learned philosophy, classics, Latin / Greek / German , advanced math, civics, home economics, physical education, theology, and so on.
We have “schools” but they’re hardly recognizable to people from before those other media became widespread.
Learning what you want to create and how it should generally be done is a learned skill, and it helps it other parts of life.
Nothing to do with code, and it's a superpower in the age of ai. Someone has to talk to the AI for money.
What scares me about statements like this is that they sound so nice, until you ask: Who are "we"? Who is "us"? There's increasingly no longer an answer to that, and it underpins my pessimism for the future. No one gives a shit about the collective anything. It's too hard just to maintain your own existence anymore.
It is repeatedly astonishing how exceptional Americans feel. HN always educate how self - centred American as I dont find here the illiterate and the uneducated but university graduates from the best universites.
For instance on democratic side from Switzerland and Taiwan my country (Germany) can learn more. And how to have a good life, France or Italy or Sweden (list is not finished) are better role models but even then, Germany has its own unique culture which I am currently happy to live in.
“Teach them to create more happiness than they destroy, for others as much as themselves. For we are a finite planet, with nowhere else to go, and thus we all have an obligation to make this sole home the best and happiest place it can be.”
It’s to not bet that tomorrow’s solution might solve today’s problems, but to fix them as they arise. It’s cleaning up your own messes rather than relying on others to clean up after you. It’s not self-sufficiency, but planetary sufficiency, and navigating the impossibly complex systems that influence and impact those outcomes.
Let the children choose their specifics, and connect them with educators and mentors who will nurture their unique learning styles and growth patterns to full blossom. Otherwise, teach them that there is a finite amount of happiness on this planet, and we must do our best to ensure there’s always enough to go around for everyone.
And most importantly of all, never let someone else convince you that you or your passions are irrelevant or replaceable. Machines may do tasks, but they can never do work, for that toil and sacrifice is an innately human action that we’ve staunchly refused to surrender.
1. It’s not possible to influence things on a planetary level, with maybe a very small number of exceptions. Focus on having an impact more locally instead.
2. Disagree that the amount of happiness is finite in the sense of “fixed” or limited. Increasing the amount of total happiness in the world is definitely achievable and worthwhile.
World leaders influence planetary agendas and ideals on a daily basis, deciding who lives and dies with the flourish of a pen or the screed of a late-night tweet. That doesn’t even touch the random encounters online or in person that irreparably change who we grow into as people and the decisions we make that affect others. In fact, it has never been easier for any single person to have an impact across the planet, even if it’s as small as one-on-one.
I also vehemently disagree with happiness being infinite on a single-planet species. We have finite resources, finite materials, and finite people, all with finite time. Infinite cannot emerge from the finite, though we often mistake vast expanses as infinite because we cannot calculate or visualize limits for ourselves. It is not physically possible for everyone on the planet to live like the richest Americans, in palatial estates with private jets and dedicated servants, and therefore (material) happiness is finite and must be budgeted and balanced. In that sense, instilling a sense of “enough” in children and adults both is crucial to the balancing of our species and maximizing happiness.
You can keep toiling for mud pies. The way I see it, there are two options: let go or be dragged
You lot keep parroting the same schlock generation after generation because you hope it’s true, and yet you’re dim enough to conflate work and labor with somehow being optional to existence.
My god, man, read a book. Go outside, pursue a passion with the fire in your heart, do something with your time beyond merely pursuing empty luxuries and a hollow life of non-existence. Nothing you say to me can convince me that this time, this invention, will finally be the one that destroys work and enables utopia, because to remove humanity from existence - be it in labor, or work, or passion of pursuit - is a utopia for nobody but those cretins who abhor their fellow humans.
I need to eat man
The US has somewhat stepped out (been forced out of the arbiter role, frankly, much to everyone's delight) and this was supposedly going to be bad for the US since "everybody else will step in and get the goodwill the US gives up" ... and it's pretty clear now that in reality nobody stepped in and the animus to step in is at an all-time low and dropping further. It has to get a lot worse before we'll even consider (spending the money) to make it better again.
And, no worries! The EU will save us! Or so they claim ... what they mean is they will use economic sanctions to fix things! (They're "free", as don't require budget allocations and so no political conflicts, and very useful for political corruption). Except of course free is between quotes because there is a reason every economist hates them: they are in fact more expensive than just about anything else. But no budget line item!
Oh, in negotiation theory I'm of the opinion that economic sanctions cause wars rather than solve them. Wars are started because one party feels they can improve their economic situation through physical conquest. Add sanctions and there's two options: give in to sanctions (which means you have lost the war, and so have to give up anything the sanctioning side wants, or they'll just sanction you again), or win the war (which will give the opposing side no choice but to give up sanctions, since there's nothing to be gained anymore, and the sanctions will hurt them too). Obviously this means it's not just dictators that will react to sanctions with aggression, everybody will. There's even the problem that they may generate the worst possible outcome. Situation: 2 parties are at war. Someone imposes economic sanctions "to help", but sanctions inevitably also hurt others. Shortly afterwards 5 parties are at war. Oh, and historically economic sanctions have caused far more wars than they have solved, and have in fact dragged more countries into wars they initially didn't participate in.
So that's what the world has decided to do (not the US, in fact I would argue the US was the party that had the least to do with this decision, because the US absolutely didn't choose to lose it's overwhelming economic and military advantage, everyone else very slowly took it away without taking over security. Deciding, in fact, again and again and again, to let security slip further. This was not "a slippery slope", but governments worldwide taking vote after vote after vote to never do anything about an aggressor, time and time again. But, of course, this is not how it will be presented in the press)
Anyway back to why doctor would be good:
1) lots of them will be necessary since obviously lots of countries will be free to wage war on one another without having to face the US as well and so ... they will wage war on one another
You know, what the UN GA, and the "non-aligned movement" have worked for, for decades now. I feel like someone should walk into that meeting, smile like doctor Strange did at the end of that movie, and point out the obvious to these delegates that finally got what they wanted for decades: "Congratulations! You just got everything you ever wanted. You're NOT going to like it!"
2) the rest of the world will get more and more entangled with specific conflicts (Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, no doubt dozens of conflicts that probably have already started but they're not on the news constantly yet ...) and will feel the necessity to "interfere", which will bring loads of countries into one war or another
This will be especially true since those countries that have started small wars are where our raw materials are mined (you know, what we absolutely positively cannot do without).
3) doctors don't have to fight, even an army in a desperate situation would be mad to send doctors to the front
4) not only do they not have to fight, BOTH sides actively avoid attacking doctors. Even hamas has shown consideration for Jewish medical facilities in their attacks.
5) oh and doctors are both an absolute necessity and the ultimate luxury in one neat package, so doctors do well during economic disaster periods AND during periods where things go well
6) it's actually hard to be a doctor, so there won't be excessive competition and your kid will actually learn a lot
7) anything a doctor does is good. It a very morally unambiguous profession, and lots of people will be forced to make questionable choices in the next decades ... and doctors have the moral luxury that they simply will do their best to minimize the impact of those decisions on actual living humans. That impact will be horrible, obviously, but a doctor can actually help
I don't know. I was at my doctor's office a few weeks ago, and the topic of AI came up during our conversation[1]. I expressed the opinion that her profession should be fairly safe because it's so highly regulated and how doctors have the AMA to block new entrants. She said that her and her colleagues had literally just been talking about how they are worried about their jobs, and pointed out that with profit-obsessed private equity firms taking over more and more medical practices, she thought they very much would be trying to replace human doctors with AI. And she alluded to the AMA being a much less effective lobbying body than what I, as an outsider to the field, had perhaps believed.
I dunno. That's just an n=1 anecdote, but if nothing else it shows that (at least some) doctors are not just sitting back and resting easy, assured of a future of high paying career options. And this is a lady with a degree from Yale, who is a Doctor of Internal Medicine, and working for a very large and prestigious medical practice. Not some half-educated nitwit at a random back-country medical practice.
[1]: I mentioned that I'd asked ChatGPT about some test results, and told her what it told me. She replied "Yeah, I agree with that." Then chuckled and said something like "God, did I just agree with ChatGPT?" That's what started the whole sidebar about AI.
(there, perhaps insane, but at least a more original take than "AI is a bubble", no?)
Because as humanity a handful of billionaires have decided to outsource thinking to machines
I just see existing capital holders with new ways to expand their wealth with even less need to share it.
Are you aware of some StarTrek like technology that can create everything society needs and wants? If not, then scarcity still exists.
Not necessarily stuff like hunting and dismembering animals... but basic trades skills go a loooong way. Being able to do basic wiring tasks without ending up like the "how did you know my nephew's home burnt down" meme, woodworking, metalworking, painting, plumbing, maybe some basic car maintenance like changing tires, checking important stuff such as tire depth, tire pressure, operating fluids... soooooooooo many young people have zero skills in manual labor and have to call in tradespeople for everything.
That and how to find solutions for problems using Google are the most important skills my father taught me, and that is what I plan on teaching my children one day.
In any case, what falls under the label of “education” today is a disconnected assortment of vague aims and promises. The first on the list is “job training”. Oh, how far we have fallen. Classically, education is perhaps best exemplified by the liberal arts [1], the artes liberales, which were oriented toward producing intellectually free people and contrasted with the so-called “servile arts” (artes serviles) which are precisely what job training is concerned with. Freedom, classically, is not absence of restraint, but the ability to be the kind of thing you are. Thus, if human beings are rational[2] animals - if our telos is to be agents of truth - then the more rational we are, the more obedient we are to reason, the more human we are, and therefore the most free we are. It should be obvious. A drug user says he is free, because he takes drugs whenever he wants. But the drugs blunt his humanity and frustrate his rationality, and they enslave him over time. This example may be extrapolated accordingly.
So, education is fundamentally about enabling people to become competent human beings as rational beings and agents of truth. You can’t mechanize or automate that away as the end is the actualization of the human himself as human, not the production of goods or services. And because we’re social animals - our social nature following from the rational - we learn through speech and through communication with each other. A school is - when run properly - a community of learning.
[0] Inevitably, some uninformed person will latch onto “liberal” thinking I mean this in the partisan sense. I don’t. I mean it in the philosophical sense. We are all liberals today. In the US, both major parties are firmly planted in liberal soil.
[1] When I say “liberal arts”, I don’t mean what we call today the liberal arts. Recall that the classical liberal arts existed before the whole “Two Cultures” nonsense, after which they became a kind of stenography for power and an apologetics of the hyperindividualist liberal culture.
[2] “Rationality” in the classical sense is not confined to just inference and calculation (which would fall under ratio).
Or teach them to marry a rich person. This is the more honest approach. I've been mapping out this strategy with my wife. It's difficult nowadays because of low-trust society and people not marrying so easily. The best path we identified is if the offspring attends an exclusive school in the final few years of high school and seduces and knocks up some rich religious female. Make sure family is against abortion. That's the surest way to achieve marriage with a rich person. It's also financially efficient to only pay for 2 years of private schooling. Only concern is that schools will make those final years more expensive once other people start figuring out this trick. Also, the elegance of this scheme is that schools identify themselves by their religious affiliation and their high fees act as the filter to ensure a high concentration of quality targets; they do most of the hard work for us! Maybe my offspring can get in on a sport scholarship to improve our ROI on the scheme. We'll have to ensure that the school isn't a honeypot for similar-minded people and actually has genuine rich people attending it. The biggest risk is if these elite religious schools become more segregated in terms of all-male vs all-female; this will pose additional hurdles and the playing field for my offspring may shift to an after-school situation... Or this scheme can be delayed until college years. Will need to evaluate and keep a close watch on socio-economic trends. Will rich people still send their kids to college 15 years from now?
For my offspring it's actually highly viable because he is in line to inherit a decent amount of money from grandparents so he wouldn't come empty handed which can aid with seduction/persuasion aspect especially in terms of persuading the opponent's family. Publicly, I will denounce my offspring's behavior (to signal alignment with religious values) but privately, I will congratulate him. Thankfully my 3 siblings were so oppressed by the system that none of them had children except me so my offspring may end up inheriting the share from uncles and aunts as well. Also, we had him late so he will probably inherit at a relatively early age.
Otherwise looksmaxxing is probably a good thing if the offspring is lacking in that department and if the health risks are acceptable.
But TBH I hope we just get some form of UBI/UHI or communism so that it doesn't come to this.
Let’s take the likely situation where, AI can do Math, code, biology etc better than most humans ever can and increasingly needs minimal oversight or direction.
The only valuable skills then are social soft skills. This is not that foreign of a concept to humanity, many an aristocracy in times of peace have lived exactly like this, sometimes for generations in a row, Game of Thrones characters like Tyrion, Varys, Littlefinger are all this.
We actually live in a rare time in history, where you could learn some technical skills and advance regardless of your social skills (though even here having good social skills is a huge plus). That will go away. This will feel apocalyptic to the introverted nerd, but probably exciting for other types of people.
Some AI futurists of the permanent underclass meme, believe access to capital before AI gets good enough will be the only differentiator. I doubt that, it will be helpful for sure, but even if you have millions, you’re still going to need friends, a wife, a society etc. The money will diffuse out, marriage being the largest wealth diffusion event in a persons life. In this world, Marriage would arguably be the most important path to social mobility, for men and women alike. This is already true in many countries that haven’t fully entered modernity, it was also true for old western aristocracies.
So finally to answer the posts question, “What shall I teach my son”, well teach him to go and find a place in school. Successfully navigating the high school hierarchy, will be the best predictor of him doing well in society.
IIRC, Bret Weinstein said something like "invest in skills that upgrade your thinking". Coincidentally, many such skills, eg. math and coding, happen to be exactly those where AI also excels at, so I wouldn't rule out learning something simply because AI happens to be good at it.
Another thing that would be helpful would be coming from wealth where you could attend an elite prep school like the Pine Crest School, tuition roughly $45,000/yr which is close to the entire median yearly take-home salary for an individual in Florida, which is of course the author's background.
Honestly, I am so tired of reading AI articles from people with very low stakes that basically end with stuff like "Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet". Dude I fucking would love that to be the case, in the meantime I'll be figuring out how to put food on the table and help my kids find a place to live.
But this question is tripped up in the idea of work being one's only value. If programming by humans were made illegal tomorrow, what would Steve Krouse do for work? How would he find a path forward? Who would he turn to for advice? How would he build community to this new goal?
If it's not clear, thinking about this is what to teach a child. Even in the end of the article we sort of elide the importance of teaching others to act with grace and reflection, but what more significant thing can you share with the next generation?
What happened to religion? Last I checked it was doing well.
> We typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one’s kids.
We typically confuse that that particular confusion is the thing. God is the model's weights running on the distributed computer that we form collectively with our brains and whose running realization we call "society." The Christians (which are superb at sleazing their way around the irrefutable lack of supernatural divinity) call it "concursus dei". Considering that in some parts of the world people consistently elect whoever looks more like a radical God-GPU-node, I would say this particular one among our "dī" is still firmly at the helm.