Honest opinion: Prior to teaching your son, you should be caring for him.
In the first few weeks, you should change diapers, starting from the first time in hospital. Your partner should take her time to recover from birth (even more in a C-section or similar situation) and only breastfeed and do "Kangoroo care"/Contact napping. So it is up to you to cook, clean, do administrative work etc. Interact with your child from the very first moment, talk to him, sing songs to him, move his arms and legs in play. Carry him around in a baby carrier so he can feel body warmth and sense your heartbeat similar to what he experiences now in your partners belly. Talk to him all the time, explain everything as if you wrote close caption. In later stages, try to mirror emotions ("I understand that you feel sad because..." instead of "don't cry, it's not that bad"). You are now one of the baby's two primary caregivers. Give him the love and bonding they require to build up the Basic Trust.
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).
> In later stages, try to mirror emotions ("I understand that you feel sad because..." instead of "don't cry, it's not that bad").
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.
> I understand that you feel sad because..." instead of "don't cry, it's not that bad").
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.
I still don't know what a valid and an invalid feeling is supposed to mean. Kids should learn to calibrate their sense of proportion by parental guidance. Not everything that seems like a big deal to a toddler is one, and simply reaffirming that won't help. I wonder how many of these theorists have seen real kids do real kid stuff.
> Not everything that seems like a big deal to a toddler is one, and simply reaffirming that won't help
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.
If you're an asshole, this stuff won't help. If you're a balanced person, obsessing over what words to use will just make you more anxious and worried and will do more harm to the kid than if you're just relaxed and say or phrase something in a way the parenting experts and TikTok therapists deem a nono.
You clearly have a lot of "feelings", but do you have any facts? On any of whether children / young adults are actually more anxious, on how parenting has changed, and whether those two things are related?
I've mostly seen
manipulation
As you've said, perhaps the problem is that you seem to live in a space where all you're experiencing is manipulation, and not that supporting your children and teaching them the skills needed to navigate and regulate their emotions is "pampering".
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.
Did it survive the replication crisis? File drawer effect? Social science produces whatever results are prestigious in the current intellectual academic zeitgeist. I have zero trust in any of it and will trust a random granny's life experience more.
It's not really about the words, but about the intentions. If you speak the words without the intentions, then you get the orwellian mismatch you describe. So it's not really about "rephrasing" but more about "reorientation". The suggested phrasings are just a pointer to something deeper.
There are many ways of approaching this idea (nonviolent communication is one). This blog post is another for those interested: https://chrisbarber.co/resonance/
Yesterday, my 3 year old daughter was very upset because she wanted to wear her very dirty top from the day to bed. I took exactly the approach described. I didn't scold her for being upset about something that doesn't matter - it did to her! - I sympathised about how she felt, but also explained that it had to be changed.
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.)
I’m sorry that has been your experience. The language, like anything available and useful, can be used by anyone, and for any purpose.
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.
My father didn’t teach me many skills. But he cared for me. Never been harsh or unfair. And at any point in my life, he was there for me without yelling or judgement. I always wanted a father that taught me stuff. But I realise that he taught me how to care for people, be there for them and make my own choices without him wanting me to become what he wants. That’s actually not bad.
I’m also dumbfounded, but that comment definitely echoes my experience that the father and mother roles have basically blended to one in modern society. Or at least that’s the expectation and how it’s portrayed on social media.
Immense pressure on fathers to care while still providing. Immense pressure on mothers to provide while still caring.
Parents should focus on enabling their children to be:
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.
>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.
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.
And the US has the greatest economy in the world as a result. No losing millions to corrupt licensing and permitting schemes, council / tribunal approvals, certifications and mandatory examinations, etc.
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.
> 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.
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.
I am not sure where you got this dichotomy, but the appropriation process in the USA certainly has its own corruption issues, strong industrial lobbies are IMO a form of legal corruption (including campaign donations), and the current administration is in a class of its own wrt corruption and wasteful spending.
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.
> Parents should focus on enabling their children to be:
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.
Could be nice to have if the parents knew how to do all that themselves ...
This list is my notes on what I'd like to be able to pass on after my limited 10 years of parenting. That learning process has been primarily an exercise about where I, too, need to develop. Parenting... you do your best even though it's not enough.
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.
Don't get me wrong I like that list and agree with everything in it.
I just think, as others have said, kids are smart. They pick up on our shit and unfortunately internalize a lot of our values, insecurities, biases, anxieties.
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.
My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
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?
If you can read and have any sort of curiosity (or you help teach curiosity) it’s a pretty solid foundation to learn just about anything.
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.
There is more to life than earning money, and not all skills need to be in service of that.
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.
If you have rent or a mortgage, there is little more important than paying it. Everything else comes after. Everyone alive in the developed world today grew up in a wondrous period of history where the middle class had many luxuries previously only afforded to those with inherited wealth. There are signs that period is ending.
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.
Actually, it's more basic than that: you're not going to be able to afford having a wife and children if you can hardly pay your own rent.
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.
I beatbox and sometimes I sing. Though to be fair I am just being me. While I do have musical ability, I don't use that to impress people. It's a me thing. It keeps my brain juice flowing.
I’ve got no issues with people wanting to express themselves creatively. The point that was contentious was whether learning to play an instrument (specifically) was a core and essential skill.
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.
Nobody has said playing an instrument is a core and essential skill. If this thread was about that, I'd say learning to cook is a priority.
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.
In what world are you living in that you can't afford an instrument to play? You can get used acoustic guitars practically for free secondhand. You can practice singing for free, youtube has lots of great tutorials.
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.
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."
> "Everyone alive in the developed world today grew up in a wondrous period of history where the middle class had many luxuries previously only afforded to those with inherited wealth. There are signs that period is ending."
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.
Try telling that to the 20-somethings who already cannot afford to get on the property ladder and are being told AI will replace what few skilled white collar roles were available to them.
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.
Izzat all? Man, kids these day sure have it easy. When I was a kid, we had to worry about getting nuked into glowing cinders in World War III, getting conscripted and blown to bits fighting the Soviet led Warsaw Pact, or not being able to get on the property ladder and being told that the Japanese will replace what few skilled blue and white collar jobs were available.
I know that HN is quite American-centric, but for rest of the developed world (particularity Europe and East Asia), we're already worried about an impending world war.
It’s definitely harder to get on the property ladder now than it has been for decades. This isn’t hyperbole, house prices have grown disproportionately to wages. This has been proven in literally every financial report about property prices. Eg https://mojomortgages.com/mortgage-news/homeownership-50-yea...
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.
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.
I think becoming proficient in some form of artistic expression is very helpful for achieving self-actualization.
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.
On the one hand yea, but on the other hand, society is trying to create a situation where the biggest necessities are less of a burden. The big 4 IMO are: food, water, air, sleep. I get water out of the tap. It costs a lot less for me to get clean water than it is costing people 500 years ago (on average). At least that's my guess anyway.
Reading is a life skill. Proficiency in it makes you understand things. Weren't there plenty of news articles this year about how high schoolers didn't have proficient reading capabilities? Maybe teaching your kids how to properly read a text is a good thing.
"Hey, Muse, read me this article". Voila, your kids know how to read. Deciphering marks on paper can be as obsolete as lightning a fire without matches, with the advent of technology.
‘Hey, Claude, make me a painting of a sunset.’ Voila, you know how to make art. ‘Hey, Chat, write me a sonnet.’ Voila, you know how to write poetry. But you don’t really though, don’t you.
Text-to-speech didn’t come into existence with the advent of agentic AI, and yet you will have a hard time getting any job or being part of most communities if you are illiterate. It turns out technology did not make literacy obsolete.
In any case, we already know that putting screens in front of children is harmful, so unless someone advocates harming children, using a modern computing device (touchscreen slate, keyboard and mouse, etc) as a replacement for basic education is highly suspect.
Hey Claude, can you have sex with my wife for me? Voila, your wife now has an actual lover. Having sex with your wife can be as obsolete as real intimacy, with the advent of technology.
Lmao. This comment combined with the one above are just a microcosm of the worst HN has to offer.
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.
Music and linguistics have often been considered amongst the "liberal arts" - none of which are arguably "useful" but all of which are terribly worthwhile.
Proficiency in reading and writing is clearly useful.
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.
People should prepare their kids to be happy adults, not just employed adults.
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 was often really frustrated with my parents pushing me to learn at least some basics on the piano. Why do I have to practice, I want to watch Dragonball Z. Practicing is sooooo boring. Ugh.
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.
I didn't have that but I instead did a lot of music production as a teenager, hand dragging midi notes. It turns out, I have perfect pitch. But I learned that at 27 where a musically trained person noticed it. I make melodies all the time in my head.
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!
Not musical, but definitely linguistic. There are many jobs for people to work as translators or to provide customer service in languages other than the dominant one.
It’s easier to say that when your parents were right. But there are a lot of parents who pushed their now-graduating children into fields that AI has recently eaten. And before that, parents who pushed their kids into fields they hated and ended up burning out.
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.
If you look at the two extremes: "follow exactly the plan I've laid out for you to the letter" and "be whoever you want to be and do whatever you want to do" in a vacuum both of those come with understandable tradeoffs and risks.
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"
and my mum dissuaded me from computers pretty strongly due to the negative stereotypes at the time, and its hindsight that tells us that I got lucky with my passion.
My mum did emphasise my reading though, and that went well.
Regardless of making big money later or not, I find it horrible to push your kids in a direction simply because of that. They might be better off with less income but liking their job. Or like their job, become very good, and make a lot of money anyway because of that.
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.
That's the issue, seems like the amount of jobs that produce a decent living are fewer and further between. Particularly if you want your own house and a family.
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.
Buying lots of stocks, owning my home, maxing out my Roth 401k and Roth IRA as opposed to funding more short term priorities, with the idea that my retirement account isn't just funding my retirement, but possibly buying my kids houses as well. Would like to start a lifestyle business when the kids are older. Looking after my health so that I have more time out of the hospital. When my kids are old enough I'll teach them the absolute necessity of making money and every way I can think of to do that, that whatever they do when they grow up they have to be willing and able to do the version of it that makes money. If they love dance, they better be prepared to be dance instructors and open a studio or savagely commit to going pro, or be prepared to do something else to pay the bills and keep it as a hobby.
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.
The older I get, the more I feel it's better to just chase the money. I mean, everyone needs some amount of money and all the stuff other than the job can be made so much easier with money. Also, high paying jobs tend to be more comfortable in other ways too: nicer offices, more slack allowed, less horrible people.
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".
I think some guidance is necessary. It's not nice to spend years in university, and then end up unemployed, or working a job that requires no higher education. That is the reality for many young people today.
I will street my children towards something that is at least employable, assuming AI has not completely obliterated job market by then.
Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds, so keep in mind that anything you're teaching is a hedge against AI stalling or collapsing.
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 think this is a bit naive unless youre letting a neural interface run opus 12.6 and shutting down the rest of your brain to redirect energy towards local compute.
smart people are better at taking action based on directive than not smart people (im assuming).
Go ahead, expand on that. If you have a functional AI that delivers on the majority of what AI companies promise, can you explain why you would not be better off asking it what to do in most cases?
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.
I am so confused by this. Why does the existence of an AI that can tell you what to do mean that knowledge is useless? This is like saying teaching calculus to children is useless because every integral they can solve has been solvable by WolframAlpha since 2009.
Why bother learning drawing at all, if an AI can draw better than you? Presumably because you, yourself, want to draw.
A lot of people want to draw because they enjoy it, but they also enjoy showing it to others and seeing them enjoy it.
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.
This is just alien thinking to me and probably many others. You are saying that you are willing to submit your whole agency to an AI because it makes better decisions? What makes the life worth living then?
AI is starting to outdo humans at forecasting events and trends. If you run a hedge fund, for example, and you have an AI that makes decisions that lead to 10% better returns, would you rely on your brain? What about a clothing company following fashion trends? A military predicting troop movement?
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.
Ah I failed to notice that we were talking about decisions on a company level. Sure, it will devolve into AI vs AI.
> 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.
If AI takes off, there will be nothing to adapt to. Anything a smart (and motivated) person can do, a smart (and motivated) AI will be able to do faster and cheaper. We might end up permanently retired and just spend our time entertaining ourselves.
id still argue that (human) education and intelligence is not worthless even in this world. learning is fun, a joke is often funnier the more clever it is, movies are better when they are well thought out, reading is more interesting when you can acknowledge the parallels to things youve read before, etc...
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.
I feel the same way about education, but as someone who received an education, I'm biased. I like knowing things and understanding things.
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.
I'd argue that even endless leisure is better if you're smart and educated. Gives you better decision making (even if the AI makes your decisions, you still have to make the meta decision of which questions to ask the AI) and something other to do than just mindless hedonism. More art exhibits and intellectual conversations, less drug abuse and trash food.
But if AI “succeeds” then everyone that used to hold a job that has now been replaced would flood the blue collar market. I am not so sure that is such a bright future either.
Oh no, the enormous amounts of deferred maintenance that everyone puts off is now cheap enough to do! Oh no, we have stronger incentives to build and employ blue collar workers! Oh no! The horror!
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.
In the same sense as being fit is not really worth anything today.
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.
> Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds, so keep in mind that anything you're teaching is a hedge against AI stalling or collapsing.
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.
I would not be betting on trade jobs for the future. Many people right now who are capable and skilled in trades left and stayed out of the industry because of crap pay and working conditions, im one of them. And not only are we likely to see a further reduction in pay because of everyone thinking trades is a good path right now and pushing it, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, if people start losing their jobs elsewhere even more people are going to try and get into trades and further depress wages.
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.
This is a weird perspective, considering that university education was originally meant for the upper classes, who didn't have to do jack shit if they didn't want to.
> We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
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.
Not to mention physics, which is useful for understanding why things are the way they are. Which, is an important skill lest you fall into anti intellectual traps like flat earthism.
Calculus is a shared language in the grand universal ocean of intellectual cultural. Rejecting calculus is rejecting part of that culture…
Yeah, for me the real click was in AP Physics where we derived an equation for some motion property rather than just being handed the formula as I had been in, say, 8th grade science. The meta lesson is that you can use math to get more information out of a model than you think you have, which, yeah, keeps you from becoming a 5G get the facts style individual.
I’m not sure there’s enough overlap between physics and calculus to justify calculus. That might mean you can’t derive physical equations yourself, but no one needs that who isn’t becoming a physicist.
> I’m not sure there’s enough overlap between physics and calculus to justify calculus.
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.
F=ma is slightly important for physics, no? And deriving the equations is kind of the point; it's the understanding of "why" something is true.
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."
I mean one example is like a dampened spring system or RLC circuits or something. You can simplify a lot of systems down to those types of simple physics systems you learn about in class.
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.
I think their answer would be "why would I care how long it takes this ladder to slide down the wall?" Which STINKS don't get me wrong. This is not a group I take seriously.
Here is an example of a practical optimization problem:
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?
The one-dimensional mentality of anti-intellectualism is absurd. I have heard parents outside of our school but in my community talk down French Immersion programs (versus English schooling) saying that people put their children in for the wrong reasons. I don’t know what the explicit reasons were in this case, but I am assuming that the other parent means academic overachievement.
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 wonder. In my world, almost everyone I know is bilingual and I would not have met them and worked with them otherwise. So many of my coworkers are from countries where English is not required but they were fortunate to pick it up as a 2nd language for one reason or another and now work in a high paying company that requires English.
Still, I get, over all, the number is small. They could have all had a different career in their native language.
Knowing English as a second language and Dutch as a first language is different than knowing, for example, Dutch as a second language and English as a first.
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.
The Foreign Service Institute has a language difficulty rating, based on the first language of a speaker, to estimate the number of class hours needed to achieve fluency.
Learning English from Dutch is 24-30 weeks whereas from German is 36 weeks. I am assuming some degree of reciprocity but maybe not.
Where I live (Oregon, USA) there are very few jobs that require it but a lot of jobs where speaking a second language might get you hired over someone else.
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.
>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.
One example: I worked for an Alphabet company with some very, very accomplished people. When the drawdown on the project came, the people who were bi- or multi-lingual all kept their jobs. They were more useful in more situations for a multinational project. The 36 people let go probably wish they'd spent a little more time studying Japanese, Spanish or Norwegian.
In high school, I thought my French classes were mostly pointless, but then 14 years later, I moved to Paris where I have been living ever since, which is something I never could have imagined as a teenager. It's hard to predict what knowledge will end up being useful. To be fair, I had to mostly reteach myself French when I moved here, so I guess the real lesson is that it's useful to be a strong autodidact.
Calculus is entry level math for all the hard sciences, engineering, and finance. It's how to think about how things change over time. Understanding what integrals and derivatives look like, especially as graphs, is very practical knowledge.
Being able to think about compound interest and acceleration under gravity as driven by the same rules gives an understanding of what's happening underneath.
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.)
> Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest.
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.
The only intuitive definition of e I can remember is "how much $1 becomes after a year in a savings account with 100% interest compounded infinitely" funny enough.
Where I live, the banks say that they compound interest daily, but pay interest monthly. So, I think the small interest term is just limited to a day where the error is small enough for the average person to not care.
A loan is subdivided and sold in different allotments each year at a different interests rate, principal, and terms. You want to sell the entire debt at some point in the future. How do you calculate the price such that you don’t sell at a loss?
If you learnt calculus, you could check their work and see that it's accurate. And it only takes algebra and a few minutes of work to see that your bank statements match the formula that's been given.
Right? Just because my professional career never took me in those directions doesn't mean I want to foreclose them for my kid! I did do electrical engineering classes in college wherein I needed calculus, I just never took a derivative/integral after graduation because I ended up on the coding side of a Computer Engineering degree.
My grad program had an advanced math sequence that was traditionally numerical methods for solving PDE’s and boundary value problems. Except my year, a visiting professor made it infinite series solutions using laplace transforms. Because why would you want an inexact numerical solution when you could have an exact solution to whatever degree of accuracy you need. Line integrals have their own special place in hell.
i hope i don't get downvoted for this, but billions of people function just fine without the most rudimentary understanding of calculus. while i love maths, i am sympathetic to the view that it's not an essential life skill, and might even be less so in the future.
School shouldn't be teaching essential life skills. It should inspire and enable young people to go on to achieve great things -- at least some of them. How will we ever get another Newton, Einstein, von Neumann, Noether, etc. if we don't teach all young kids what is possible with math? Calculus arguably transformed our society and is a great showcase of the power of math. It can shape the way we think about things, because this level of precision is rarely needed when thinking about other disciplines.
Intentionally not learning Calculus will make your kid into a better AI researcher, as they will naturally study gradient free optimization that makes few assumptions about a problem space. Global Optimization as a concept is not dead guys!
You never know if learning calculus will make you discover new things that you might like to pursue. Also, you never know if you will need it or not apriori. By that logic, you shouldn't learn anything until you need it, wich I think would be a disaster.
> You never know if learning calculus will make you discover new things that you might like to pursue.
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.
This framing doesn't fit my experience. Most kids, left to their own devices, would not learn arithmetic.
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.
> Most kids, left to their own devices, would not learn arithmetic.
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.
> Unlikely. Too many things in life depend on arithmetic. Most people will learn things when they must.
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.
> Yes but arithmetic is actually not intuitive at all, and you can certainly grow up to not know it.
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 think it's hard to have the kind of meta-skills as a child, it's kind of hit and miss. (Ie discovery, learn what to learn, how to learn, make learning pleasant). As an example, music is one thing that works best if parents, siblings and friends are into it and you can do it together or if it's somehow ambiently present most of the time. But if it's something that you only go to lessons for, decided by someone else, that you don't enjoy etc - then it's often like pouring water into a dry well. Yet those mechanical even if less enthusiastic skills can then be useful later, if the inspiration comes, with a new social circle etc. Or similar with sports. In some families, it's more "present" in an ambient way. When waiting for something outside, the kids have some hockey sticks and a tennis ball lying around and just start playing, maybe with adults who also find it fun. Or talking with the family about the news in an analytical way: that person leads that party and they have these values, while that other person drives these other things. If you have these available then different kids are exposed to things and can pick up things they are more inclined to. I've read lots of mathematician and scientists' stories how Martin Gardner's problem books drew them in to the field. So parents exposed them but didn't force. And their exceptional inclination did a lot of work.
It's interesting to see different perspectives on this.
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.
Learning what infinitesimals were and how useful they were for understanding the rates of change was an actual eureka moment for me, and many people in my classes felt similarly. It fundamentally changes the way you view things as simple as a car accelerating or the way heat spreads through a system, the way fruits spoil faster in the winter if you have heat, why metals creak when they're cold and why they groan when they're heated.
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.
Mathematics is fundamental as it shows you there in fact exists a way to spot bullshit with no concern for however much rhetoric is used. Many people would be really and truly shocked to know we can definitively prove things given certain axioms, and not just have "wishy washy" verbal arguments or slogans. Without exposure to mathematical training, nonsense like belief in gods or supernatural thinking tends to increase.
This is the wrong way to think about school education. It's not just to prepare you to use it yourself. For most people it's there to prevent them from being lied to. If you did something as a kid, even if you wouldn't be able to do so now, you know it can't be that hard. So if anyone tries to sell you something saying "oh, don't even look at this part it's just complicated math stuff" you now at least have a chance to spot the BS.
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.
As the parent of a 4 year old, we're allowed to raise them to be mini us until the tell us otherwise, then we can respectfully disengage. Sharing things we're good at and enthusiastic about only helps kindle their enthusiasm for things in general, in my experience.
But give a boy until the age of 7 and he's ours for life, is what that old order of the monks said about values. What do you do for the remaining 11 years?
Yeah, but that doesn't mean, that parents can't give their children a head start by teaching them stuff, that will smarten them up or help them understand stuff at school.
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:
Up to 20. I used to bring them to school and teachers were discouraging, not realizing, what a great thing this was and what kind of insight it could allow a child to have into basic operations.
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.
Your bit about numbers “fitting” into each other is exactly my intuition about division as well, probably formed at a young age. 7, 3 and 21 fit together in my mind like “Kiki” is sharp and “bouba” is round. Or how I could intuit the word “melt” in German was “schmelzen” before I ever learned it - it’s a core memory of mine just guessing that word from the ether and being correct, and felt like validation that I could become fluent.
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.
> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
"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.
In my graduate engineering program you could always tell who came from high caste families and who came from low caste families by how they performed in the lab.
Maybe, the point I'm making is that we focus on thinking we know what the best thing for our children will be ("I can teach them the stuff I learned latest and have the most info about and they'll get a better headstart!") and we overlook things that don't fit into that framing.
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.
> "...Bill Gates were college dropouts, but the market deemed them good."
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
Gates also came from a wealthy and well-connected family. His mother's connections allowed Microsoft to get their original contract with IBM.
"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.
Gate's dad was also a lawyer. Compare Gate's behavior working with contracts against kids of the same age, say, those who played in band and signed a record deal.
If lifestyles support it, and parents are so inclined, I'd worry less about teaching the first few years and more about reading to them and with them, esp. with some silliness and improvisation, hiking, camping, and shopping as a family, especially at local markets.
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.
> 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.
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
I agree with sentiment but have you had small children?
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.”
> 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.
Funny how 5yo needs sanding down, 15yo you need power tools like grinder, 30yo needs explosives to take ego down like major life event, death of close one or their own close call.
All well and good until they’re 5 or 6 and you find out all school admissions are gated by tests and performance. Oh unless you’re old money. Then your kids get in.
> All well and good until they’re 5 or 6 and you find out all school admissions are gated by tests and performance.
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.
Sure, but Chetty et al were measuring based on the top-1% of income, the private elementary schools are acting like filters based on income. Yes, they can buy more access to things that will weigh heavily on an admissions acceptance, but that's a filter by parental income which is well known...
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?
It didn’t control for wealth though just income. It also didn’t control for parental education or familiarity with elite colleges. It didn’t control for parental expectations (seems likely that a parent who spends money on private school will be more likely to expect their child to attend an elite college).
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.
Look, I’m not going to rebut each of your points one by one. Ask AI to steelman both sides and learn the facts for yourself. Then you can decide.
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.
Man, you just keep repeating about AI, do you actually have your own opinions? I have more fruitful conversations with angry teenagers than this empty broken record track
> 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
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.
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.
The study you’re referencing didn’t examine elite schools just non-religious.
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.
Broken people being pushed like that in childhood often never know better and feel this shitty approach is normalized path for some better life, which it is on paper/instagram feed, not so much in real life
Elite early education minimal little long term benefit, people tend to revert to the mean over time. The education system has plenty of slack for intelligent individuals to excel, so play the long game.
Health and wellbeing pay the best dividends as you can maximize the nurture aspect of intelligence early and build resilience against unexpected hardships.
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 don’t know why humans even bother talking to each other anymore. Go ask AI why your argument is wrong.
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.
Thank you for sharing this, reading it was very inspirational for me, as a young guy whose looking forward to starting a family in the near future. Cheers!
exactly. unconscious bias is an observed psychologic phenomena and i have my doubts if an adult can opinate agnostically about all of them. sure you don't want your kids getting together with bullies but that's basic compassion. let them tie/explore with people freely
I'm curious to hear more if you're willing to share. I have two young kids and think about how to approach the tension between open to everyone, not seeing people as "bad" or enemies, versus the reality that some people can be mean, heartless, etc., and it's ok to avoid them.
> the tension between open to everyone, not seeing people as "bad" or enemies, versus the reality that some people can be mean, heartless, etc., and it's ok to avoid them.
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.
> 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.
I don't think there's just _one_ singular "raison d'etre" for school; many different forces have influenced its current-day shape: learning (or rather, the appearance of learning), socializing and friend-making, daycare for working adults (like you mention), etc.
Socializing (with peer) and allow parents to do that too (work is basically a form of socializing with peer, with benefits) will probably remain far far into the future, as long as humanity exist, whether AGI pans out or not.
Regarding the socializing and friend making function, if school didn’t exist would that be a problem? Like you have to send your kid to school to be with other kids only because the schools silo away the kids. If there weren’t any schools there would be kids in the neighborhoods. Do kids have to be at desks or in gym class to socialize with each other? I don’t think so?
This is the sad reality. The education provided is based on an industrial revolution era theory of the worker as well. I’m not sure what a better alternative is.
Why would it be sad? They get to socialize with their peers, which is probably the more valuable part of the education process. Learning as I come to understand, are better curiosity driven, which don't necessarily need to happen at school. All the game hacking and number crunching on unit stats probably did more to where I am today than any school class.
It's sad because anyone spending a good chunk of the week with others roughly exactly their age is completely artificial. This doesn't happen outside of traditional schooling (until university level). It's no surprise that for some, it's quite toxic.
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.
A lot of people still feel this way, possibly the majority. I think we're already starting to see a backlash against the cynical politics of the past decade and a renewed interest in shared values.
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.
I don’t really agree. Carl Sagan and other public intellectuals popularized these sorts of memes but no one really stepped in to replace them. The Ezra Kleins and Nate Silvers of the contemporary world are not in the same class. And the culture is so much more anti-intellectual than it was back then...
Nate Silver’s early 538 work absolutely was this. He was spitting out minitab output from the command line straight into articles to answer fun questions like, “Is Tom Brady the most efficient passer of all time?”. It’s a capital offense that the NYT scrubbed the web of everything from 538.
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.
Grand thoughts always meet reality poorly. Does Spaceship Earth mean that you live in the forest to be surrounded by the greenery or live in a high-rise to preserve the greenery? Do you allow the other to exist to preserve Spaceship Earth? Environmental organizations in San Francisco treat this question like Shiri's Scissor. It is not so easy to coordinate people - disagreements on the specifics can easily fragment coalitions.
> 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 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.
The death of Cecil the lion, harambe, Zoe Quinn doing whatever the heck caused gamergate.
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…
I am currently teaching programming to my cousin, which is 13.
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
I hope we see a revival of the humanities in the coming decades. The original meaning of "liberal" in liberal education referred to cultivating free human beings (Latin libertas). Arguably, the most important skills going forward are the ability to think independently and critically, to adapt to new circumstances, to formulate one's thoughts in a coherent and convincing manner, and to understand things in a broader historical perspective.
I'm not sure how widespread this meme (in the general sense, not the internet fad sense) is, but I came across it theorized by this humanities account, Adam Walker - Close Reading Poetry:
Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal, especially if you’re now competing against machines as well. If you ask me, my prediction is that humanities and liberal arts as organized schools of thought are going to fall even more to the wayside unless you’re very rich. It’s going to be replaced by cultural memes and other short relatable digestible pieces of “community” knowledge kind of like a lot of the youth already.
> Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal
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.
You can demand whatever you want, but most people are not going to be with you. Very few people at least in the US are going to agree with the communist perspective that a street cleaner or security guard should be paid the same amount as a doctor. You can suggest some form of workable socialism, which would be good, but I am mainly referring to the transition phase between now and some sort of utopian future where resources are unlimited and robots do all of our physical and mental labor. That transition period is going to last decades or for the rest of our lives and most of the early period, at the very least, for our kids.
Humans as individuals and groups will fight tooth and nail to "have more" because that is our nature. Money was a brilliant invention that allowed people to get what they want without forcefully taking it from someone else, or having a particular skill or thing that you could barter.
No they won't..like, observably they won't. This is a problem almost every entrepreneur who looked at small businesses as a start up opportunity ran into immediately: most small businesses are run by people who are exactly happy with where they got to, and so showing up and promising you'll expand the business goes over as well as a lead balloon.
>Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal, especially if you’re now competing against machines as well
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.
> I hope we see a revival of the humanities in the coming decades. The original meaning of "liberal" in liberal education referred to cultivating free human beings (Latin libertas).
I doubt it given how liberalism is falling out of favor in politics so rapidly
It turns out that liberalism is a metastable state between dictatorship of the proletariat and dictatorship of the owner class. But then, I think Marx could have told you that a century and three quarters ago...
> My economically valuable skillset – programming – suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son?
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
>> My economically valuable skillset – programming – suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son?
> 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.
That's only for an extremely small set of professions, for most people their parent's professions were not lucrative by the time they grew up.
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.
Medicine and finance have both reinvented themselves within the last generation. The skillset of a top practitioner now looks very different from the top practitioners in the 80s.
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.
> 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
You could've got out sooner once you caught a whiff of this?
> My dad was in a lucrative and booming industry: the printing press during the digital transformation.
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.
From an employment perspective those are irrelevant industries. Number of actors and professional athletes that can earn a good living while doing it is in the low thousands, and even then it may be for a couple of years only.
FWIW I don't think programming changing devalues the experience you give your kid.
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.
I hate to be “that guy” - but I truly believe there is a degree of so-called privilege in that perspective.
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 don't doubt my comment comes from a place of privilege, but the OP seems like there is some privilege there too so maybe in a way, that makes it an even better fit ;)
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)
Speaking for myself, although I never expected that I'd pass on hard skills to my child (unless they showed a particular interest), at least up until 2019 I felt confident that I could guide them in a general direction to be successful in life. How to do well in school, how to develop a work ethic, how to learn and pursue the things that interest them, how to approach planning a career, how to market their skills, how to manage risk, how to balance doing what they love vs what pays the bills, how to approach relationships... things like that. Regardless of whether they wanted to become a piano tuner or a park ranger or an astronaut or a homemaker.
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.
Yeah, agency is never more available than it has been now. These skills of talking to the machines make you far more capable than it used to.
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.
Compassion, respect for all living things no matter the colour or gender, how to live healthy and physically active, financial literacy. Most of these things have a huge role model part.
Don't give him a screen mounted to the stroller.
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.
Religions lose half their members every generation, I believe the evidence is robust kids can pick a different path than their parents. You can guide, support, and nurture, but their personality is theirs once they reach escape velocity. Empathy and curiosity is brain structure though (the amygdala, broadly speaking).
I am a highschool dropout, so I am perhaps not the best judge of this, but I later worked on-campus at a major university and befriended many students, most of whom struggled to find employment after graduation.
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.
I appreciate it. One overlooked part of education is that it is supposed to teach these values.
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 dont have kids, so this question makes me ask, what did my father teach me?
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.
To be adaptive. That's going to be the most valuable skill going forward, to be able to adapt to any and all circumstances that may come your way because it is going to be a rough ride for at least the next decade and possibly much longer than that.
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.
That's always been an important skill (at least in the last couple hundred years as far as I can tell).
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.
That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree. In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture. 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. Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
> That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree.
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.
> Why would it have to be shallow? If you spent your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what.
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.
I don't think that's true either, or a least, it wasn't until the bots came of age. There was plenty of gold to be found on the crossroads of various fields and the matrix of skills is large enough that the competition is immediately a small fraction of what it is within any one field.
Lovely article, and something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. There is some amazing (evidence and strength based) stuff on both parenting and schooling from Dr Billy Garvey [1] that I really can’t recommend highly enough. He just published a book specifically on raising boys too (which I haven’t read yet).
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.
To me programming does not feel less valuable. I'm building custom harnesses at a financial institution and I'm thriving. Same me was building actionscript animations for a car dealer twenty years back.
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.
I have two boys ages 14 and almost 17. First priority is for both mom and dad to invest the time and energy to build a bedrock solid relationship from day 0. It's so frustrating and exhausting but that's priority 1.
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.
Being comfortable navigating a city like Dallas while feeling at home and welcome at the Perot and Aquarium did a lot of character building.
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.
The fact that this question is getting a due regard now, then before AI, shows that all we care about from education is getting a job that pays. And we are worried that jobs are being taken away by AI.
Otherwise this question should bother a parent in every generation.
It kills me that education is not a solved problem --- we have many of the same hurdles which the Greeks faced, and apparently, one of the best schools which I ever attended is no longer run as it once was (classes were divided between academic and social, the latter were attended at one's age level (homeroom, phys. ed, social studies, &c.) and academic classes were attended at one's grade level with teachers at the combined elementary/high school also being accredited as faculty at a nearby college and students being able to continue on to university level study until such time as they had attended their 12th year of education, with the possibility of being awarded not only a high school diploma, but also a college degree, or at least being afforded a transcript of college-level studies to apply at the school of their choice.
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.
We demonstrably pay plenty for other people’s kids, at least through high school (and often Community College) - the resulting education isn’t poor because of lack of funds.
Just look at what we do relative to other countries that get better results. Teacher pay is abysmal, teacher-student ratios are abysmal. Lack of social safety nets mean our schools end up being the backstop of last resort for children who are hungry and stressed and whose parents are overworked and stressed. We have this stupid obsession with testing all the time (best practice is no homework and no tests). But hey, if you can afford it you can pay for a private school or homeschool and contribute to the further starvation of the public system.
This is wrong. Most public school systems spend north of $20,000 per student per year. That money comes from property taxes, which anyone who consumes housing contributes to. People regularly vote for bond issues and sales tax increases to help the kids get what they need.
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.
To look at it from the teacher's perspective, they're the only workers who are held accountable for the outcome regardless of the quality of the incoming raw material.
A good education is not being provided to every child who is in need of one --- that happening would be a solution to the problem of education, that it does not, is the problem.
What would it even look like for education to be “solved”? I think if you put 10 people in a room and asked them what the purpose of education was, you’d get 10 different answers.
How to get great educational results is to have a good teacher, or, better, a good individual tutor, and, most importantly, a good student. Also, there are some techniques that help, but those don't matter very much by comparison to how good the teacher is, whether they're teaching a class or an individual, and how good the student is.
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.
I’d argue that education is not a problem that can be solved. Because it involves people and people learn differently and different generations learn differently.
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.
The "not solved" part of the education is the same as "perpetuum mobile" is not solved - if you want to get kids educated without stress and putting in effort you are out of luck.
>Already one may learn languages by means
Of Victrola records.
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.
School only worked for me because it forced structure onto my learning. Live lectures rarely engaged me, math and physics aside. So traditional teaching wasn't the draw. What mattered were the guardrails: quarterly exams, a peer group to measure myself against, and a pace that forced me to push past initial boredom until a subject clicked.
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.
Your description feels very apt. I was great in a classroom but I've done poorly learning alone outside of it. Do you have any recommendations on how to pick up new subjects and material after college?
Postman has re-incarnated as James Marriott who recently published the book "The New Dark Ages". The end of reading. Post-Literate society.
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...
Considering the arc of history, your son should have the skills and knowledge to be able to get together with a few friends and conquer a primitive land and establish a society in its place. Conquering, raiding, and civilization building are skills that are never going to become obsolete.
Hear, O my son, and receive my sayings; and the years of thy life shall be many. ¹¹I have taught thee in the way of wisdom; I have led thee in right paths. ¹²When thou goest, thy steps shall not be straitened; and when thou runnest, thou shalt not stumble. ¹³Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go: keep her; for she is thy life. ¹⁴Enter not into the path of the wicked, and go not in the way of evil men. ¹⁵Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it, and pass away. ¹⁶For they sleep not, except they have done mischief; and their sleep is taken away, unless they cause some to fall. ¹⁷For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence. ¹⁸But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. ¹⁹The way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at what they stumble. ²⁰My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings. ²¹Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart. ²²For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh. ²³Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. ²⁴Put away from thee a froward mouth, and perverse lips put far from thee. ²⁵Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. ²⁶Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. ²⁷Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil.
Proverbs 4:10-27
> That the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what.
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.
Based on my experiences with the teachers my kids had a decade or so ago, all you would have to do is find a way to test for it and then put it on the state-mandated test that is used to evaluate schools.
Often the only thing that is taught is what is on those tests.
The one-two punch of Goodhart's law and the McNamara fallacy bites hard here, though. We only measure things we can easily quantify, and then we optimize around those measurements, destroying their efficacy as second-order indicators of the things we couldn't figure out how to measure.
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?
There are basic skills that everyone needs, for example, the three R's: reading-riting-rithmetic.
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.
It's good to think about. But you'll first be exhausted with disrupted sleep, diaper changes, tantrums, etc.
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
I aim to teach my son how to teach himself by instilling in him a sense of curiosity, encouraging him to read, and helping him to experiment and learn by trying things out for himself.
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.
Many adults have mutually incompatible ideas of what would make the world better. Many adults are willing to use violence to make their version of the world become a thing. It's not really as simple as saying it doesn't have to be this way.
> That's the mentality that is consistently rewarded in society today.
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.
It entirely depends what success means to you! Don't let society or even your perception of society define that.
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.
That you believe those people with all the money are "successful" is actually the entire problem.
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.
Hard isn’t inherently complicated and simple isn’t inherently easy. A commitment to those ideals is wildly complicated. To pick a child-rearing-relevant example, saying sorry and taking responsibility is simple and easy, but such a difficult thing to achieve, even for adults, and is rife with complicated and complicating emotions and relationships.
Who said don’t have any skills? There are different ways to make the world better, and certainly each takes a different set of skills. If your way of helping the world is advancing biomedical research, you will need those skills. It’s downstream of the top-level prerogative, if you wanna put it that way.
Add to that how to do so through reading[0]. If you get through this book and skim through the reading list at the end you’ll end up with a good chunk of a liberal arts education.
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.
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.
- To MOVE. It will likely become key to migrate to escape anarchy, race riots, and resource scarcity in the coming 15-50 years.
- 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).
- 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.
Questions are more powerful than answers.
My kids are 29 & 31 now. I'd suggest that they master how to ask well formed questions.
Also, "The medium is the message" is from Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964)
Your children are about to reach an age where they have a better formed understanding of the world than you. Might serve you well to see what you can learn from them.
"The man who can really play his part as a citizen, who is fit for the management of public and private business, and who can guide cities by his counsels, establish them by his laws, and amend them by his judicial decisions, is assuredly no other than the orator... My aim, then, is the education of the perfect orator. The first essential for such a one is that he should be a good man, and consequently we demand of him not merely the possession of exceptional gifts of speech, but of all the excellences of character as well."
"SOCRATES: Yes, Callicles, if he have that defence, which as you have often acknowledged he should have—if he be his own defence, and have never said or done anything wrong, either in respect of gods or men; and this has been repeatedly acknowledged by us to be the best sort of defence. And if any one could convict me of inability to defend myself or others after this sort, I should blush for shame, whether I was convicted before many, or before a few, or by myself alone; and if I died from want of ability to do so, that would indeed grieve me. But if I died because I have no powers of flattery or rhetoric, I am very sure that you would not find me repining at death. For no man who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid of death itself, but he is afraid of doing wrong. For to go to the world below having one’s soul full of injustice is the last and worst of all evils. "
I’ve long been struck by this study [1], “Parents think - incorrectly - that teaching their children that the world is a bad place is good for them”.
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.
Learn how to break down a problem when you're stuck.
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.
As I get older I am starting to think that there are some things people just aren’t ready to learn at a given moment in time.
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.
Some interesting points, but I am a bit discombobulated because the author keeps changing between education, schooling, and parenting pretending they are the same.
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.
I'm a bit further on the same path (4 year old). Here's what I've come up with:
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.
The issue with is, as far as my personal anecdote is concerned, that competence doesn't translate across all activities. Me being good with figuring out Legos, video games, or programming doesn't translate to me being good with cooking, socializing, music, etc.
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.
>The issue with is, as far as my personal anecdote is concerned, that competence doesn't translate across all activities. Me being good with figuring out Legos, video games, or programming doesn't translate to me being good with cooking, socializing, music, etc
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
Teach your children about the things you love. Partially because children often don’t fall far from the tree, and mostly so they can learn how to enjoy something.
Anyone and everyone can raise a child, and have done so more or less successfully over the ages. My first tip would be not to worry too much, if you are inclined doing so.
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.
You know this, but it is worth repeating - I think you just need to always make good decisions, strive to have a moral backbone, and don’t be afraid to let him see you fail now and then, because he needs to know what it’s like to get back up.
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.
Teach them how to use tools to solve their own problems; give them real tasks to do, and trust them to do them, without watching over them. I want my kids to be curious about the world, and understand that they have the agency to fix things. The other thing I try to drive home is that failure is a natural part of learning, if you want to get good at something, you have to fail a bunch first. My biggest failure as a parent is completely flying off the handle when they don't eat their food, but I'm trying to be less psychotic about that. You'll have your own problems. Try to get ahead of them and course-correct before it defines their whole personality or ruins your relationship with them.
I would say that schools survive because there purpose is none of those lofty ideals that we hope they are. But instead they solve for daycare and they've got the benefits of progressing towards some idea of your child being independent and hopefully successful.
When I think of how I would raise kids I turn it on it’s head and say “how would I raise me”.
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
> We have captured intelligence in a bottle, and you’re telling me that “Ok class, turn to page 17” and “Does anyone know how to solve for x” are still going to be around in the 2030s?
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.
> “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.”
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.
Show them how to be resourceful, think for themselves and own their decisions by practicing it yourself and telling stories.
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
I often think of this question. Probably things that are enduring. How to be a good person, how do people work, how does society work, how to learn, some hobbies and life skills.
If there's one thing I'd impart on a kid is how to lose, and lose early, and to keep trying after losing. Resiliency. Chances are, if they are my kid they would not be the best nor the brightest. So I'd love to impart onto them the spirit of and satisfaction of hard work and the importance of persistence in any endeavour.
This reads like the typical expectant-parent confusion. The big mistake is thinking about a one-way flow of information from the parent to the child.
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.
I really like that paragraph in the article. We have more access to knowledge and other resources than ever in history, and yet not everyone is a Renaissance Man.
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.
I suggest you have them learn a foreign language when young. Particularly Spanish and Chinese.
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".
Mostly adaptability, fearless independence, and being a curious person. The rest falls into place if you come from a place of abundance vs projecting a parent's insecurity and fears on your prodigy.
- 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.
Tangentially related, but thinking about what to teach your kid years into the future before it's even born has a bit of an unhealthy touch to it. Take it step by step and especially don't pressure your kid with high expectations.
The right question might be: how to expose a kid to many things to pick up what are they into. And how to let them spend as much time on it as possible.
The single most useful thing I am glad my parents encouraged in my upbringing that is not ubiquitous among my peers, is a set of three things:
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.
Very deep and well written. I think the most important thing I want to pass to my kids is that there are reasons rules are put in place, and there are reasons why we should respect the rules, but there are exceptions. There are times when rules can be bent or broken, and we need to know how to judge, when to take risks, and when we should be transparent about own our decisions and actions.
People need to be open to experiment and make their own judgement based on observation without relying purely on their environment and authority.
Play with them, and show how play involves observing the play and changing it.
> 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.
> and you’re telling me that “Ok class, turn to page 17” and “Does anyone know how to solve for x” are still going to be around in the 2030s?
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.
I am a reader; I'm not interested in fiction particularly but I read absolutely extensively, constantly and on more or less any topic, so the internet always appealed to me.
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.
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.
This is a typical rookie mistake; thinking you are going to learn your child anything. I hate to disappoint you, but the opposite is true; the child is who it is and you can't change that - but they will teach you something :)
The only thing you can do is trying to avoid giving them trauma. This is important!
> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”, because I reasoned that if you “were able to use arbitrary resources to uncover and solve problems”, you had no more need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a person was educated when they could wield them. But now I see my vision of resourcefulness perfected in the AI agent and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness will go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in turn supplanted memorization and an oral tradition.
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.
> 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.
AI has become such a hollow term. A literal tautology if you will. Everything and anything follows from AI. From devaluing education to human extinction. As time goes on the AI bros are even turning it into a dystopian fanstasy where finally there will be no need to interact with humans. Imo best way to deal with all the AI marketing BS and spam is to take a few deep breaths and head outside. Living in a state of fear an panic isn't going to result in any self-beneficial rational decision making.
Teach your kid to be a good person, to value hard work, to set lofty goals and strive to achieve them. Beyond that they’ll find their own way. “I’ll make my unborn son a programmer just like myself” was always going to be a pointless effort, AI or not.
> Schools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet
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.
>"Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet."
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.
Shit, I feel a but better about my life kids chances of making it in the world seeming how many people have nothing to pass on to their kids but empty virtue signaling about "being kind".
Lovely
"The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be"
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.
If I were to distill my educational opinions into a soundbite, it would sound very similar to the rule of happiness on submarines:
“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.
Said folks about the telegraph to letter carriers, about the radio to live performers, about the television to radio personalities, about the internet to all manner of companies.
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.
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 have a sad idea of what is required for happiness. We have more than enough to feed and clothe everyone. Beyond that, happiness is internal and requires no resources.
Well since the world has just restarted the geopolitical situation from before WW2 (every country for themselves), how about you help your son to become a doctor? You know, a medical doctor. It will require lots of teaching.
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
how about you help your son to become a doctor? You know, a medical doctor.
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.
AI will fail because the supply chains required for the hardware are not feasible if there's more than a few wars worldwide (including internet connectivity, so no ChatGPT). To say nothing of the fact that of course governments will decide that they have absolute priority. Right now China is calmly preparing to invade Taiwan and the second the first boat leaves the shore: no more Nvidia (or AMD, or Qualcomm, or ...) chips. Zero. For years. No matter how the conflict goes. And China keeps just calmly and very publicly repeating they're going to do so.
(there, perhaps insane, but at least a more original take than "AI is a bubble", no?)
We finally have a chance to bring up our kids with kindness as the main charesterstic to improve. Given they wont have to compete for limited resources like we had. We get crushed, scammed and trampled on if show any kindness.
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.
And it is perfectly fine for them to not waste their time on knowing how to change the oil or wire an outlet. Such things really aren’t needed any more for everyone.
It's an interesting question about how to prepare your child for the coming economic precarity induced by AI and its impact on intellectual work. I guess one idea could be to create an AI startup so that you can make a bunch of money and insulate yourself and your family from these impacts, which is indeed what the author is doing (https://www.val.town/).
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.
It really is a sign of the times that people are totally unable to define what education is for. And when they attempt answers, they usually fall flat on their faces. Perhaps this is because we have suppressed the habit - or fail to develop one - of asking what the ends of things are. Because if there are ends, then there are norms, and when there are norms, there is a right and a wrong, a better way and a worse way. It means there is an objective end written into human nature, and one’s actions and choices either align with that end or deviate from it. These are not something a hyperindividualist liberal[0] culture wants to hear. After all, telos was thrown out centuries ago, an intellectual process we can trace at least to Ockham’s nominalism. Telos makes a moral demand of us and we moderns and postmoderns chafe under moral demands (though we predictably reach for strong men, leviathans, and mortal gods to save us from the inevitable chaos). We would sooner declare life meaningless and plunge ourselves into the void of nihilism and its thrashing violence and nauseating malaise than submit to some objective moral order.
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).
Always teach your child how to really get the most out of life. How to make many friends, how to not do all the fuck ups you've done, the love you've missed out on from having a cynical heart.
This all sounds like cope to me, from people who don’t take AI seriously. Either they don’t think it is as impactful as it already is, or they don’t think we will continue to see exponential capabilities improvement for a while.
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.
If the current system continues, you have to teach them to cheat, lie, pretend and use loopholes as much as possible.
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.
I feel the word 'son' carries a lot of heft here - if it were 'what will I teach my child' the expectation of passing on an economically-viable craft would feel less urgent.
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?
> Schools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet.
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.
Honest opinion: Prior to teaching your son, you should be caring for him. In the first few weeks, you should change diapers, starting from the first time in hospital. Your partner should take her time to recover from birth (even more in a C-section or similar situation) and only breastfeed and do "Kangoroo care"/Contact napping. So it is up to you to cook, clean, do administrative work etc. Interact with your child from the very first moment, talk to him, sing songs to him, move his arms and legs in play. Carry him around in a baby carrier so he can feel body warmth and sense your heartbeat similar to what he experiences now in your partners belly. Talk to him all the time, explain everything as if you wrote close caption. In later stages, try to mirror emotions ("I understand that you feel sad because..." instead of "don't cry, it's not that bad"). You are now one of the baby's two primary caregivers. Give him the love and bonding they require to build up the Basic Trust.
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).
> In later stages, try to mirror emotions ("I understand that you feel sad because..." instead of "don't cry, it's not that bad").
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.
> I understand that you feel sad because..." instead of "don't cry, it's not that bad").
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.
I still don't know what a valid and an invalid feeling is supposed to mean. Kids should learn to calibrate their sense of proportion by parental guidance. Not everything that seems like a big deal to a toddler is one, and simply reaffirming that won't help. I wonder how many of these theorists have seen real kids do real kid stuff.
> Not everything that seems like a big deal to a toddler is one, and simply reaffirming that won't help
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.
If you're an asshole, this stuff won't help. If you're a balanced person, obsessing over what words to use will just make you more anxious and worried and will do more harm to the kid than if you're just relaxed and say or phrase something in a way the parenting experts and TikTok therapists deem a nono.
> I still don't know what a valid and an invalid feeling is supposed to mean.
Maybe that’s a topic you could dive in deeper on your own terms, then? And stay curious!
You clearly have a lot of "feelings", but do you have any facts? On any of whether children / young adults are actually more anxious, on how parenting has changed, and whether those two things are related?
As you've said, perhaps the problem is that you seem to live in a space where all you're experiencing is manipulation, and not that supporting your children and teaching them the skills needed to navigate and regulate their emotions is "pampering".
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.
The research is sound and comprehensive. Validate someone’s emotions then try and fix the problem.
Did it survive the replication crisis? File drawer effect? Social science produces whatever results are prestigious in the current intellectual academic zeitgeist. I have zero trust in any of it and will trust a random granny's life experience more.
It's not really about the words, but about the intentions. If you speak the words without the intentions, then you get the orwellian mismatch you describe. So it's not really about "rephrasing" but more about "reorientation". The suggested phrasings are just a pointer to something deeper.
There are many ways of approaching this idea (nonviolent communication is one). This blog post is another for those interested: https://chrisbarber.co/resonance/
Yesterday, my 3 year old daughter was very upset because she wanted to wear her very dirty top from the day to bed. I took exactly the approach described. I didn't scold her for being upset about something that doesn't matter - it did to her! - I sympathised about how she felt, but also explained that it had to be changed.
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.)
But you did impose the rule, it didn't come from outside so you misled her.
I’m sorry that has been your experience. The language, like anything available and useful, can be used by anyone, and for any purpose.
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.
My father didn’t teach me many skills. But he cared for me. Never been harsh or unfair. And at any point in my life, he was there for me without yelling or judgement. I always wanted a father that taught me stuff. But I realise that he taught me how to care for people, be there for them and make my own choices without him wanting me to become what he wants. That’s actually not bad.
Yes, this is wise advice.
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.
I'm confused. Are you saying the husband should "be a mom"?
I’m also dumbfounded, but that comment definitely echoes my experience that the father and mother roles have basically blended to one in modern society. Or at least that’s the expectation and how it’s portrayed on social media.
Immense pressure on fathers to care while still providing. Immense pressure on mothers to provide while still caring.
Parents should focus on enabling their children to be:
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.
Best comment in the thread.
>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.
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.
And the US has the greatest economy in the world as a result. No losing millions to corrupt licensing and permitting schemes, council / tribunal approvals, certifications and mandatory examinations, etc.
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.
> 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.
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.
I am not sure where you got this dichotomy, but the appropriation process in the USA certainly has its own corruption issues, strong industrial lobbies are IMO a form of legal corruption (including campaign donations), and the current administration is in a class of its own wrt corruption and wasteful spending.
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.
You can’t control or enable your children …
You can, however, be a good role-model.
> Parents should focus on enabling their children to be: 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.
Could be nice to have if the parents knew how to do all that themselves ...
This list is my notes on what I'd like to be able to pass on after my limited 10 years of parenting. That learning process has been primarily an exercise about where I, too, need to develop. Parenting... you do your best even though it's not enough.
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.
Don't get me wrong I like that list and agree with everything in it. I just think, as others have said, kids are smart. They pick up on our shit and unfortunately internalize a lot of our values, insecurities, biases, anxieties.
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.
How do I teach my children to be like that if I am not all that?
Maybe we'll have to improve and learn together. How do I start?
My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
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?
> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver. My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...
Mona Lisa Vito, is that you?
Can't make that comment without Positraction.
I think her husband was a lawyer... but the utes will be alright.
Future husband...
> how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
Being proficient in reading, at least one instrument, and one additional language is always welcome, regardless of the timeline.
Not many people get paid for musical or linguistic talents, actually.
"Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
If you can read and have any sort of curiosity (or you help teach curiosity) it’s a pretty solid foundation to learn just about anything.
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.
There is more to life than earning money, and not all skills need to be in service of that.
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.
If you have rent or a mortgage, there is little more important than paying it. Everything else comes after. Everyone alive in the developed world today grew up in a wondrous period of history where the middle class had many luxuries previously only afforded to those with inherited wealth. There are signs that period is ending.
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.
That’s called strawmanning.
Music can do so much more than just paying rent. You can impress your future wife with your playing or singing. It's a form of therapy for many.
It's true it won't pay the bills, but knowing one instrument is a good skill that differentiates you from others.
How are you going to impress your future wife with music skills if you can’t afford an instrument to play?
Or are you suggesting one should also prioritise buying a guitar over paying rent too?
Actually, it's more basic than that: you're not going to be able to afford having a wife and children if you can hardly pay your own rent.
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.
I beatbox and sometimes I sing. Though to be fair I am just being me. While I do have musical ability, I don't use that to impress people. It's a me thing. It keeps my brain juice flowing.
I’ve got no issues with people wanting to express themselves creatively. The point that was contentious was whether learning to play an instrument (specifically) was a core and essential skill.
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.
Ah responded elsewhere already, but sucks that you weren't able to afford a guitar at a young age.
> 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?
Nobody has said playing an instrument is a core and essential skill. If this thread was about that, I'd say learning to cook is a priority.
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.
In what world are you living in that you can't afford an instrument to play? You can get used acoustic guitars practically for free secondhand. You can practice singing for free, youtube has lots of great tutorials.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw2NFh95aHQ
The traditional career for people studying music theory is acquiring wealthy parents.
I'm not suggesting a career. I'm saying those three things are always valuable to learn.
Somehow they read "learning a musical instrument" as "majoring in music".
Your college major doesn't determine your career path, and the sooner people stop pretending that they are necessarily correlated, the better.
> "Everyone alive in the developed world today grew up in a wondrous period of history where the middle class had many luxuries previously only afforded to those with inherited wealth. There are signs that period is ending."
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.
Try telling that to the 20-somethings who already cannot afford to get on the property ladder and are being told AI will replace what few skilled white collar roles were available to them.
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.
Izzat all? Man, kids these day sure have it easy. When I was a kid, we had to worry about getting nuked into glowing cinders in World War III, getting conscripted and blown to bits fighting the Soviet led Warsaw Pact, or not being able to get on the property ladder and being told that the Japanese will replace what few skilled blue and white collar jobs were available.
I know that HN is quite American-centric, but for rest of the developed world (particularity Europe and East Asia), we're already worried about an impending world war.
You mean US. Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Brazil, Argentina & Chile have the same concerns.
It’s definitely harder to get on the property ladder now than it has been for decades. This isn’t hyperbole, house prices have grown disproportionately to wages. This has been proven in literally every financial report about property prices. Eg https://mojomortgages.com/mortgage-news/homeownership-50-yea...
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.
> cannot afford to get on the property ladder
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.
Now those 20-somethings need to deal with US immigration too. Because most of the world don’t live in the USA.
I think becoming proficient in some form of artistic expression is very helpful for achieving self-actualization.
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.
On the one hand yea, but on the other hand, society is trying to create a situation where the biggest necessities are less of a burden. The big 4 IMO are: food, water, air, sleep. I get water out of the tap. It costs a lot less for me to get clean water than it is costing people 500 years ago (on average). At least that's my guess anyway.
Reading is a life skill. Proficiency in it makes you understand things. Weren't there plenty of news articles this year about how high schoolers didn't have proficient reading capabilities? Maybe teaching your kids how to properly read a text is a good thing.
"Hey, Muse, read me this article". Voila, your kids know how to read. Deciphering marks on paper can be as obsolete as lightning a fire without matches, with the advent of technology.
What a zero-brain statement.
‘Hey, Claude, make me a painting of a sunset.’ Voila, you know how to make art. ‘Hey, Chat, write me a sonnet.’ Voila, you know how to write poetry. But you don’t really though, don’t you. Text-to-speech didn’t come into existence with the advent of agentic AI, and yet you will have a hard time getting any job or being part of most communities if you are illiterate. It turns out technology did not make literacy obsolete. In any case, we already know that putting screens in front of children is harmful, so unless someone advocates harming children, using a modern computing device (touchscreen slate, keyboard and mouse, etc) as a replacement for basic education is highly suspect.
So far, it's been hard to point your phone at text and just have what you need to know summarized at speed.
As much as they'd know how to bake bread by buying a loaf in the shops.
Have you tried lighting a fire without matches? It's deeply satisfying.
Hey Claude, can you have sex with my wife for me? Voila, your wife now has an actual lover. Having sex with your wife can be as obsolete as real intimacy, with the advent of technology.
There won’t be a labor market any more, unless there’s some technological barrier for AIs and robots that has not appeared yet.
It’s either some form of socialism or mass starvation.
> socialism or mass starvation
From what history shows, there's not much difference between the two.
Most of the major mass starvation events in modern history were caused by some form of socialism.
Lmao. This comment combined with the one above are just a microcosm of the worst HN has to offer.
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.
Well that's certainly engaging with the meat of his comment, instead of the HN equivalent spamming stupid X clapbacks for likes. Bravo.
I guess you needed some validation today.
I don’t disagree, but I’m not seeing many other options here.
Modern Western European socialism has probably suppressed wages and increased unemployment relative to the US, but hasn’t led to starvation.
Maybe it comes down to whether you advocate for live-to-work or work-to-live.
> Not many people get paid for musical or linguistic talents, actually.
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.
"Highest earning people who didn't come from affluent backgrounds" is entirely consistent with "not many people".
None of the wealthy people I know had wealthy parents. Most of them had parents who didn't even have shoes for significant periods of time.
"Wealthy people" alone is also consistent with "not many people". There aren't that many rich people in general, musicians or otherwise.
Music and linguistics have often been considered amongst the "liberal arts" - none of which are arguably "useful" but all of which are terribly worthwhile.
Proficiency in reading and writing is clearly useful.
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.
Self-expression is a fundamental human need. Ignore to your own detriment.
People should prepare their kids to be happy adults, not just employed adults.
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 was often really frustrated with my parents pushing me to learn at least some basics on the piano. Why do I have to practice, I want to watch Dragonball Z. Practicing is sooooo boring. Ugh.
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.
I didn't have that but I instead did a lot of music production as a teenager, hand dragging midi notes. It turns out, I have perfect pitch. But I learned that at 27 where a musically trained person noticed it. I make melodies all the time in my head.
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!
> "Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
See it that way, having a normal social life requires other skills than your job.
Not musical, but definitely linguistic. There are many jobs for people to work as translators or to provide customer service in languages other than the dominant one.
I dunno, my parents were correct about my STEM education that was basically shoved up my ass as soon as I showed any science/engineering aptitude.
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?
It’s easier to say that when your parents were right. But there are a lot of parents who pushed their now-graduating children into fields that AI has recently eaten. And before that, parents who pushed their kids into fields they hated and ended up burning out.
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.
If you look at the two extremes: "follow exactly the plan I've laid out for you to the letter" and "be whoever you want to be and do whatever you want to do" in a vacuum both of those come with understandable tradeoffs and risks.
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"
and my mum dissuaded me from computers pretty strongly due to the negative stereotypes at the time, and its hindsight that tells us that I got lucky with my passion.
My mum did emphasise my reading though, and that went well.
its a lottery.
Regardless of making big money later or not, I find it horrible to push your kids in a direction simply because of that. They might be better off with less income but liking their job. Or like their job, become very good, and make a lot of money anyway because of that.
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.
That's the issue, seems like the amount of jobs that produce a decent living are fewer and further between. Particularly if you want your own house and a family.
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.
> That would be sad, but I'm prepping my family for the latter.
How, if I may ask?
Buying lots of stocks, owning my home, maxing out my Roth 401k and Roth IRA as opposed to funding more short term priorities, with the idea that my retirement account isn't just funding my retirement, but possibly buying my kids houses as well. Would like to start a lifestyle business when the kids are older. Looking after my health so that I have more time out of the hospital. When my kids are old enough I'll teach them the absolute necessity of making money and every way I can think of to do that, that whatever they do when they grow up they have to be willing and able to do the version of it that makes money. If they love dance, they better be prepared to be dance instructors and open a studio or savagely commit to going pro, or be prepared to do something else to pay the bills and keep it as a hobby.
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.
One can downshift into a lower income more enjoyable job, but one cannot up shift into a higher income job without the required education.
Besides for many people the higher income job is more enjoyable, especially when the lower income job takes a large physical toll.
While it is becoming harder, if you have the right affinity you can certainly still up shift without formal education in IT and related fields.
The older I get, the more I feel it's better to just chase the money. I mean, everyone needs some amount of money and all the stuff other than the job can be made so much easier with money. Also, high paying jobs tend to be more comfortable in other ways too: nicer offices, more slack allowed, less horrible people.
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".
I think some guidance is necessary. It's not nice to spend years in university, and then end up unemployed, or working a job that requires no higher education. That is the reality for many young people today.
I will street my children towards something that is at least employable, assuming AI has not completely obliterated job market by then.
Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds, so keep in mind that anything you're teaching is a hedge against AI stalling or collapsing.
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?
> Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds
I feel like this is a crazy take. Smart (and motivated) people are better at adapting to a different world than not smart people.
If we have working AI, I'll be able to ask it what I should do to adapt.
i think this is a bit naive unless youre letting a neural interface run opus 12.6 and shutting down the rest of your brain to redirect energy towards local compute.
smart people are better at taking action based on directive than not smart people (im assuming).
Yes, a little bit of intelligence would be necessary to follow directions, but not much education. We were discussing education.
lmao
Go ahead, expand on that. If you have a functional AI that delivers on the majority of what AI companies promise, can you explain why you would not be better off asking it what to do in most cases?
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.
I am so confused by this. Why does the existence of an AI that can tell you what to do mean that knowledge is useless? This is like saying teaching calculus to children is useless because every integral they can solve has been solvable by WolframAlpha since 2009.
Why bother learning drawing at all, if an AI can draw better than you? Presumably because you, yourself, want to draw.
A lot of people want to draw because they enjoy it, but they also enjoy showing it to others and seeing them enjoy it.
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.
This is just alien thinking to me and probably many others. You are saying that you are willing to submit your whole agency to an AI because it makes better decisions? What makes the life worth living then?
AI is starting to outdo humans at forecasting events and trends. If you run a hedge fund, for example, and you have an AI that makes decisions that lead to 10% better returns, would you rely on your brain? What about a clothing company following fashion trends? A military predicting troop movement?
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.
Ah I failed to notice that we were talking about decisions on a company level. Sure, it will devolve into AI vs AI.
> 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.
> If you have a functional AI that delivers on the majority of what AI companies promise
A good education would let you realise how unlikely this is.
If AI takes off, there will be nothing to adapt to. Anything a smart (and motivated) person can do, a smart (and motivated) AI will be able to do faster and cheaper. We might end up permanently retired and just spend our time entertaining ourselves.
id still argue that (human) education and intelligence is not worthless even in this world. learning is fun, a joke is often funnier the more clever it is, movies are better when they are well thought out, reading is more interesting when you can acknowledge the parallels to things youve read before, etc...
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.
I feel the same way about education, but as someone who received an education, I'm biased. I like knowing things and understanding things.
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.
We might end up permanently retired and just spend our time entertaining ourselves.
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.
You are proposing we commit collective suicide as a species. My answer is no, I'm not joining you and your cult.
The hell? Where did you get that from?
I'd argue that even endless leisure is better if you're smart and educated. Gives you better decision making (even if the AI makes your decisions, you still have to make the meta decision of which questions to ask the AI) and something other to do than just mindless hedonism. More art exhibits and intellectual conversations, less drug abuse and trash food.
By the time they reach adulthood this aspect of robotics will be solved. I give it about 5 years.
But if AI “succeeds” then everyone that used to hold a job that has now been replaced would flood the blue collar market. I am not so sure that is such a bright future either.
Oh no, the enormous amounts of deferred maintenance that everyone puts off is now cheap enough to do! Oh no, we have stronger incentives to build and employ blue collar workers! Oh no! The horror!
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.
In the same sense as being fit is not really worth anything today.
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.
Yes, it's likely that it could be a cute hobby.
> Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds, so keep in mind that anything you're teaching is a hedge against AI stalling or collapsing.
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.
I would not be betting on trade jobs for the future. Many people right now who are capable and skilled in trades left and stayed out of the industry because of crap pay and working conditions, im one of them. And not only are we likely to see a further reduction in pay because of everyone thinking trades is a good path right now and pushing it, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, if people start losing their jobs elsewhere even more people are going to try and get into trades and further depress wages.
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.
This is a weird perspective, considering that university education was originally meant for the upper classes, who didn't have to do jack shit if they didn't want to.
OK, sure.
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?
School is half about babysitting while the parents work. So... yes. Kids will still have to go somewhere during the day. Might as well be a school.
So we stop even pretending to teach them anything.
> We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
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.
i mean even basic differentiation is useful for optimization problems.
Not to mention physics, which is useful for understanding why things are the way they are. Which, is an important skill lest you fall into anti intellectual traps like flat earthism.
Calculus is a shared language in the grand universal ocean of intellectual cultural. Rejecting calculus is rejecting part of that culture…
Yeah, for me the real click was in AP Physics where we derived an equation for some motion property rather than just being handed the formula as I had been in, say, 8th grade science. The meta lesson is that you can use math to get more information out of a model than you think you have, which, yeah, keeps you from becoming a 5G get the facts style individual.
I loved learning about jerk, snap, crackle, and pop as higher-order derivatives of position wrt time in physics.
I’m not sure there’s enough overlap between physics and calculus to justify calculus. That might mean you can’t derive physical equations yourself, but no one needs that who isn’t becoming a physicist.
> I’m not sure there’s enough overlap between physics and calculus to justify calculus.
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.
Windmills are older than calculus, so that's just not true.
F=ma is slightly important for physics, no? And deriving the equations is kind of the point; it's the understanding of "why" something is true.
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."
I mean one example is like a dampened spring system or RLC circuits or something. You can simplify a lot of systems down to those types of simple physics systems you learn about in class.
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.
I think their answer would be "why would I care how long it takes this ladder to slide down the wall?" Which STINKS don't get me wrong. This is not a group I take seriously.
Here is an example of a practical optimization problem:
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?
Can you do a single run on the last day of the year?
The one-dimensional mentality of anti-intellectualism is absurd. I have heard parents outside of our school but in my community talk down French Immersion programs (versus English schooling) saying that people put their children in for the wrong reasons. I don’t know what the explicit reasons were in this case, but I am assuming that the other parent means academic overachievement.
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.
Somehow I feel like the workplaces with a glass ceiling over bilingual is so small as to be immaterial.
I wonder. In my world, almost everyone I know is bilingual and I would not have met them and worked with them otherwise. So many of my coworkers are from countries where English is not required but they were fortunate to pick it up as a 2nd language for one reason or another and now work in a high paying company that requires English.
Still, I get, over all, the number is small. They could have all had a different career in their native language.
Knowing English as a second language and Dutch as a first language is different than knowing, for example, Dutch as a second language and English as a first.
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.
Also, as an aside: Dutch is probably the closest language to English (aside from very minor or no longer spoken languages).
no, not really, dutch are close to german. Spanish is closer to english, than dutch.
The Foreign Service Institute has a language difficulty rating, based on the first language of a speaker, to estimate the number of class hours needed to achieve fluency.
Learning English from Dutch is 24-30 weeks whereas from German is 36 weeks. I am assuming some degree of reciprocity but maybe not.
(1) https://dlsdc.com/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/
Where I live (Oregon, USA) there are very few jobs that require it but a lot of jobs where speaking a second language might get you hired over someone else.
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.
>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.
One example: I worked for an Alphabet company with some very, very accomplished people. When the drawdown on the project came, the people who were bi- or multi-lingual all kept their jobs. They were more useful in more situations for a multinational project. The 36 people let go probably wish they'd spent a little more time studying Japanese, Spanish or Norwegian.
Why Norwegian? Why not Luxembourgish then?
In high school, I thought my French classes were mostly pointless, but then 14 years later, I moved to Paris where I have been living ever since, which is something I never could have imagined as a teenager. It's hard to predict what knowledge will end up being useful. To be fair, I had to mostly reteach myself French when I moved here, so I guess the real lesson is that it's useful to be a strong autodidact.
Calculus is entry level math for all the hard sciences, engineering, and finance. It's how to think about how things change over time. Understanding what integrals and derivatives look like, especially as graphs, is very practical knowledge. Being able to think about compound interest and acceleration under gravity as driven by the same rules gives an understanding of what's happening underneath.
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.)
> Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest.
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.
The only intuitive definition of e I can remember is "how much $1 becomes after a year in a savings account with 100% interest compounded infinitely" funny enough.
That definition also gives a nice introduction to e's taylor series!
I just call it “pi but for curves”
Where I live, the banks say that they compound interest daily, but pay interest monthly. So, I think the small interest term is just limited to a day where the error is small enough for the average person to not care.
> As a mathematician, I had trouble understanding how banks calculate it (as they would obviously not point me at the derivation of the formula)
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
A loan is subdivided and sold in different allotments each year at a different interests rate, principal, and terms. You want to sell the entire debt at some point in the future. How do you calculate the price such that you don’t sell at a loss?
Why does that formula work? ;)
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"?
You're assuming banks use that formula and not just YOLO it, "haha fuck you pay me more".
If you learnt calculus, you could check their work and see that it's accurate. And it only takes algebra and a few minutes of work to see that your bank statements match the formula that's been given.
That is the integral
Right? Just because my professional career never took me in those directions doesn't mean I want to foreclose them for my kid! I did do electrical engineering classes in college wherein I needed calculus, I just never took a derivative/integral after graduation because I ended up on the coding side of a Computer Engineering degree.
My grad program had an advanced math sequence that was traditionally numerical methods for solving PDE’s and boundary value problems. Except my year, a visiting professor made it infinite series solutions using laplace transforms. Because why would you want an inexact numerical solution when you could have an exact solution to whatever degree of accuracy you need. Line integrals have their own special place in hell.
i hope i don't get downvoted for this, but billions of people function just fine without the most rudimentary understanding of calculus. while i love maths, i am sympathetic to the view that it's not an essential life skill, and might even be less so in the future.
School shouldn't be teaching essential life skills. It should inspire and enable young people to go on to achieve great things -- at least some of them. How will we ever get another Newton, Einstein, von Neumann, Noether, etc. if we don't teach all young kids what is possible with math? Calculus arguably transformed our society and is a great showcase of the power of math. It can shape the way we think about things, because this level of precision is rarely needed when thinking about other disciplines.
Intentionally not learning Calculus will make your kid into a better AI researcher, as they will naturally study gradient free optimization that makes few assumptions about a problem space. Global Optimization as a concept is not dead guys!
Thanks for highlighting that your children aren't you! Easy to forget.
You never know if learning calculus will make you discover new things that you might like to pursue. Also, you never know if you will need it or not apriori. By that logic, you shouldn't learn anything until you need it, wich I think would be a disaster.
> You never know if learning calculus will make you discover new things that you might like to pursue.
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.
This framing doesn't fit my experience. Most kids, left to their own devices, would not learn arithmetic.
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.
> Most kids, left to their own devices, would not learn arithmetic.
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.
> Unlikely. Too many things in life depend on arithmetic. Most people will learn things when they must.
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.
> Yes but arithmetic is actually not intuitive at all, and you can certainly grow up to not know it.
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 think it's hard to have the kind of meta-skills as a child, it's kind of hit and miss. (Ie discovery, learn what to learn, how to learn, make learning pleasant). As an example, music is one thing that works best if parents, siblings and friends are into it and you can do it together or if it's somehow ambiently present most of the time. But if it's something that you only go to lessons for, decided by someone else, that you don't enjoy etc - then it's often like pouring water into a dry well. Yet those mechanical even if less enthusiastic skills can then be useful later, if the inspiration comes, with a new social circle etc. Or similar with sports. In some families, it's more "present" in an ambient way. When waiting for something outside, the kids have some hockey sticks and a tennis ball lying around and just start playing, maybe with adults who also find it fun. Or talking with the family about the news in an analytical way: that person leads that party and they have these values, while that other person drives these other things. If you have these available then different kids are exposed to things and can pick up things they are more inclined to. I've read lots of mathematician and scientists' stories how Martin Gardner's problem books drew them in to the field. So parents exposed them but didn't force. And their exceptional inclination did a lot of work.
It's interesting to see different perspectives on this.
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.
The classic SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-...
Learning what infinitesimals were and how useful they were for understanding the rates of change was an actual eureka moment for me, and many people in my classes felt similarly. It fundamentally changes the way you view things as simple as a car accelerating or the way heat spreads through a system, the way fruits spoil faster in the winter if you have heat, why metals creak when they're cold and why they groan when they're heated.
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.
>Model collapse has not happened yet because of luck.
Oh dear.
How many years will you say this before conceding it's no longer luck?
Mathematics is fundamental as it shows you there in fact exists a way to spot bullshit with no concern for however much rhetoric is used. Many people would be really and truly shocked to know we can definitively prove things given certain axioms, and not just have "wishy washy" verbal arguments or slogans. Without exposure to mathematical training, nonsense like belief in gods or supernatural thinking tends to increase.
This is the wrong way to think about school education. It's not just to prepare you to use it yourself. For most people it's there to prevent them from being lied to. If you did something as a kid, even if you wouldn't be able to do so now, you know it can't be that hard. So if anyone tries to sell you something saying "oh, don't even look at this part it's just complicated math stuff" you now at least have a chance to spot the BS.
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.
As the parent of a 4 year old, we're allowed to raise them to be mini us until the tell us otherwise, then we can respectfully disengage. Sharing things we're good at and enthusiastic about only helps kindle their enthusiasm for things in general, in my experience.
But give a boy until the age of 7 and he's ours for life, is what that old order of the monks said about values. What do you do for the remaining 11 years?
Yeah, but that doesn't mean, that parents can't give their children a head start by teaching them stuff, that will smarten them up or help them understand stuff at school.
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:
Up to 20. I used to bring them to school and teachers were discouraging, not realizing, what a great thing this was and what kind of insight it could allow a child to have into basic operations.
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.
Your bit about numbers “fitting” into each other is exactly my intuition about division as well, probably formed at a young age. 7, 3 and 21 fit together in my mind like “Kiki” is sharp and “bouba” is round. Or how I could intuit the word “melt” in German was “schmelzen” before I ever learned it - it’s a core memory of mine just guessing that word from the ether and being correct, and felt like validation that I could become fluent.
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.
> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
"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.
In my graduate engineering program you could always tell who came from high caste families and who came from low caste families by how they performed in the lab.
Mother of all selection bias criteria, one thing about getting older is noticing all the people who didn’t make it
Maybe, the point I'm making is that we focus on thinking we know what the best thing for our children will be ("I can teach them the stuff I learned latest and have the most info about and they'll get a better headstart!") and we overlook things that don't fit into that framing.
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.
> we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
well said, absolutely agree
> "...Bill Gates were college dropouts, but the market deemed them good."
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
Good lesson to fact-check even the things we "know" when writing.
Gates also came from a wealthy and well-connected family. His mother's connections allowed Microsoft to get their original contract with IBM.
"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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
Come on, Bill Gates is not the only kid whose mother had connections. You can't credit his entire success to this single fact.
Gate's dad was also a lawyer. Compare Gate's behavior working with contracts against kids of the same age, say, those who played in band and signed a record deal.
If lifestyles support it, and parents are so inclined, I'd worry less about teaching the first few years and more about reading to them and with them, esp. with some silliness and improvisation, hiking, camping, and shopping as a family, especially at local markets.
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.
> 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.
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
I agree with sentiment but have you had small children?
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.”
> but have you had small children?
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.
Funny how 5yo needs sanding down, 15yo you need power tools like grinder, 30yo needs explosives to take ego down like major life event, death of close one or their own close call.
I feel like the solution here is to say 'Try'?
Some kids love learning at an early age. If not, it’s easy to find out. Don’t worry about teaching too soon.
Something I have learned as a new parent is your ability to force much of anything is kinda limited.
You can steer within their inclinations, but at some point kids are who they are.
I see it like growing a plant. You can prune here and there, change the soil, but the plant does what it wants.
Play is learning. Very important learning. Adults forget that. Not playing is a great way to become a boring adult
All well and good until they’re 5 or 6 and you find out all school admissions are gated by tests and performance. Oh unless you’re old money. Then your kids get in.
I do not know what country you are in, but in the US school is free until college.
Yeah the public school that serves reheated fast food and bowls of cereal for lunch. I’m not making it up. That is the district wide menu.
> All well and good until they’re 5 or 6 and you find out all school admissions are gated by tests and performance.
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..
You can ask AI. Access to elite colleges is super conditioned on going to private elementary schools. North of 2x.
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)
Sure, but Chetty et al were measuring based on the top-1% of income, the private elementary schools are acting like filters based on income. Yes, they can buy more access to things that will weigh heavily on an admissions acceptance, but that's a filter by parental income which is well known...
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?
No. Spar this with AI. The 2X multiplier is AFTER controlling income.
What you’re saying is just a comfortable lie to make people feel better about public schooling.
>spar this with AI
Lmfao. Okay, buddy.
It didn’t control for wealth though just income. It also didn’t control for parental education or familiarity with elite colleges. It didn’t control for parental expectations (seems likely that a parent who spends money on private school will be more likely to expect their child to attend an elite college).
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.
Look, I’m not going to rebut each of your points one by one. Ask AI to steelman both sides and learn the facts for yourself. Then you can decide.
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.
Man, you just keep repeating about AI, do you actually have your own opinions? I have more fruitful conversations with angry teenagers than this empty broken record track
> 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
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.
>P(C | private elementary) = 5P(C | affluent public schools) = 35 P(C)
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.
For sake of conciseness I didn’t explicitly say elite non-religious private school.
Please check your rebuttals against AI before you post it.
The study you’re referencing didn’t examine elite schools just non-religious.
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.
You’re just saying that because you think you’re clever, making your little mathematical quip rather than looking into the actual data and argument.
People clearly have preconceived conclusions and they don’t have an interest in learning any facts.
Look at this guy over here with his math and his statistical literacy you guys. He doesn’t even spend all day talking to AI.
Not me teaching my kids this loser mentality that you’ll win/lose in life if you get/don’t get into certain private schools at the age fking five
Broken people being pushed like that in childhood often never know better and feel this shitty approach is normalized path for some better life, which it is on paper/instagram feed, not so much in real life
Elite early education minimal little long term benefit, people tend to revert to the mean over time. The education system has plenty of slack for intelligent individuals to excel, so play the long game.
Health and wellbeing pay the best dividends as you can maximize the nurture aspect of intelligence early and build resilience against unexpected hardships.
False. It massively increases access to good teachers and ultimately university.
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.
> massively increases
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 don’t know why humans even bother talking to each other anymore. Go ask AI why your argument is wrong.
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.
> the numbers I gave you
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.
Shopping as a family activity? That sounds very odd.
Not really. I took both kids shopping with me. One preschool age, one first grade. They got little quests to find things through the store.
Sadly COVID kinda of ended the tradition.
COVID ended a lot of good things.
Activities and homework would have ended it in a couple of years anyway and that's really why it hasn't come back - lack of time.
Thank you for sharing this, reading it was very inspirational for me, as a young guy whose looking forward to starting a family in the near future. Cheers!
yes, there are personalities, but, please do not teach them to stereotype.
exactly. unconscious bias is an observed psychologic phenomena and i have my doubts if an adult can opinate agnostically about all of them. sure you don't want your kids getting together with bullies but that's basic compassion. let them tie/explore with people freely
You're reading too much into this, I think. Bad kids do exist. Be compassionate, but do not encourage involvement with them.
I have really really profound regrets about not doing this myself, with my kids.
I'm curious to hear more if you're willing to share. I have two young kids and think about how to approach the tension between open to everyone, not seeing people as "bad" or enemies, versus the reality that some people can be mean, heartless, etc., and it's ok to avoid them.
check my profile for proton mail address.
> the tension between open to everyone, not seeing people as "bad" or enemies, versus the reality that some people can be mean, heartless, etc., and it's ok to avoid them.
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.
For philosophical consistency, one should therefore not hang out with your own child if they are bad.
> My wife and I are expecting our first child.
> 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.
> needing someone to watch one’s kids.
I glossed over it, it probably deserve half the article if I was writing it.
I don't think there's just _one_ singular "raison d'etre" for school; many different forces have influenced its current-day shape: learning (or rather, the appearance of learning), socializing and friend-making, daycare for working adults (like you mention), etc.
Socializing (with peer) and allow parents to do that too (work is basically a form of socializing with peer, with benefits) will probably remain far far into the future, as long as humanity exist, whether AGI pans out or not.
Regarding the socializing and friend making function, if school didn’t exist would that be a problem? Like you have to send your kid to school to be with other kids only because the schools silo away the kids. If there weren’t any schools there would be kids in the neighborhoods. Do kids have to be at desks or in gym class to socialize with each other? I don’t think so?
This is the sad reality. The education provided is based on an industrial revolution era theory of the worker as well. I’m not sure what a better alternative is.
Why would it be sad? They get to socialize with their peers, which is probably the more valuable part of the education process. Learning as I come to understand, are better curiosity driven, which don't necessarily need to happen at school. All the game hacking and number crunching on unit stats probably did more to where I am today than any school class.
It's sad because anyone spending a good chunk of the week with others roughly exactly their age is completely artificial. This doesn't happen outside of traditional schooling (until university level). It's no surprise that for some, it's quite toxic.
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..?
Weird, I remember being told to stop talking all the time in school. Apparently those teachers were confused about the true purpose of school!
> My favorite suggestions of Postman’s are:
> 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.
A lot of people still feel this way, possibly the majority. I think we're already starting to see a backlash against the cynical politics of the past decade and a renewed interest in shared values.
Maybe! I hope so!
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.
I don’t really agree. Carl Sagan and other public intellectuals popularized these sorts of memes but no one really stepped in to replace them. The Ezra Kleins and Nate Silvers of the contemporary world are not in the same class. And the culture is so much more anti-intellectual than it was back then...
Nate Silver’s early 538 work absolutely was this. He was spitting out minitab output from the command line straight into articles to answer fun questions like, “Is Tom Brady the most efficient passer of all time?”. It’s a capital offense that the NYT scrubbed the web of everything from 538.
None of that makes you a “citizen of the world”.
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.
Grand thoughts always meet reality poorly. Does Spaceship Earth mean that you live in the forest to be surrounded by the greenery or live in a high-rise to preserve the greenery? Do you allow the other to exist to preserve Spaceship Earth? Environmental organizations in San Francisco treat this question like Shiri's Scissor. It is not so easy to coordinate people - disagreements on the specifics can easily fragment coalitions.
Well it was still completely meaningless back then, too.
For a completely meaningless notion you do seem able to dispute its meaning in the sibling thread.
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.
> 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 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.
The death of Cecil the lion, harambe, Zoe Quinn doing whatever the heck caused gamergate.
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…
I think Spaceship Earth goes a bit further back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth
I am currently teaching programming to my cousin, which is 13.
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
I hope we see a revival of the humanities in the coming decades. The original meaning of "liberal" in liberal education referred to cultivating free human beings (Latin libertas). Arguably, the most important skills going forward are the ability to think independently and critically, to adapt to new circumstances, to formulate one's thoughts in a coherent and convincing manner, and to understand things in a broader historical perspective.
I'm not sure how widespread this meme (in the general sense, not the internet fad sense) is, but I came across it theorized by this humanities account, Adam Walker - Close Reading Poetry:
The New Renaissance is Coming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCvixEyV10Q
Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal, especially if you’re now competing against machines as well. If you ask me, my prediction is that humanities and liberal arts as organized schools of thought are going to fall even more to the wayside unless you’re very rich. It’s going to be replaced by cultural memes and other short relatable digestible pieces of “community” knowledge kind of like a lot of the youth already.
> Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal
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.
You can demand whatever you want, but most people are not going to be with you. Very few people at least in the US are going to agree with the communist perspective that a street cleaner or security guard should be paid the same amount as a doctor. You can suggest some form of workable socialism, which would be good, but I am mainly referring to the transition phase between now and some sort of utopian future where resources are unlimited and robots do all of our physical and mental labor. That transition period is going to last decades or for the rest of our lives and most of the early period, at the very least, for our kids.
Exactly. Making money is a means to an end.
For those for whom making money is a primary goal, they miss their essential purpose in life.
That’s just a random platitude that everyone will agree with, but has no workable means of achievement in the real world.
OK so how do you acquire everything you need in order to achieve your essential purpose, without making money?
Who said anything about not making money?
"means to an end"
Humans as individuals and groups will fight tooth and nail to "have more" because that is our nature. Money was a brilliant invention that allowed people to get what they want without forcefully taking it from someone else, or having a particular skill or thing that you could barter.
No they won't..like, observably they won't. This is a problem almost every entrepreneur who looked at small businesses as a start up opportunity ran into immediately: most small businesses are run by people who are exactly happy with where they got to, and so showing up and promising you'll expand the business goes over as well as a lead balloon.
People are generally fine with a personal decision of "I have enough" they are much less happy about being told that by a government.
What the hell does “demand better” even mean here?
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.
> What the hell does “demand better” even mean here?
Probably asking for $5000 checks from the government.
Trump has that covered.
Just vote Republican! He promised!
>Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal, especially if you’re now competing against machines as well
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.
Why are you guys so obsessed with money? You can live a perfectly good life with little wealth if you want to, humans are really great at adapting.
> I hope we see a revival of the humanities in the coming decades. The original meaning of "liberal" in liberal education referred to cultivating free human beings (Latin libertas).
I doubt it given how liberalism is falling out of favor in politics so rapidly
It turns out that liberalism is a metastable state between dictatorship of the proletariat and dictatorship of the owner class. But then, I think Marx could have told you that a century and three quarters ago...
> My economically valuable skillset – programming – suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son?
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
>> My economically valuable skillset – programming – suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son?
> 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.
that's fair, i haven't thought about it that way.
That's only for an extremely small set of professions, for most people their parent's professions were not lucrative by the time they grew up.
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.
Medicine and finance have both reinvented themselves within the last generation. The skillset of a top practitioner now looks very different from the top practitioners in the 80s.
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.
> 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
You could've got out sooner once you caught a whiff of this?
A situation like this isn't as simple as words on a screen.
I'm out now.
This post is deserving of more visible placement...
I can relate! I once joined a team that worked on "Analytics" when I was naive and didn't realize that meant "remarketing and ad targeting."
Just keep an eye out for something different. I'm sure there are jobs that you can do and feel good about.
> My dad was in a lucrative and booming industry: the printing press during the digital transformation.
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.
Sports and entertainment come to mind.
From an employment perspective those are irrelevant industries. Number of actors and professional athletes that can earn a good living while doing it is in the low thousands, and even then it may be for a couple of years only.
FWIW I don't think programming changing devalues the experience you give your kid.
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.
I hate to be “that guy” - but I truly believe there is a degree of so-called privilege in that perspective.
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 don't doubt my comment comes from a place of privilege, but the OP seems like there is some privilege there too so maybe in a way, that makes it an even better fit ;)
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)
But all things aren't equal. Love is not a formula to see how one can improve their social status.
There are people who see it that way, who marry for money and clout. We call them the unhappy ones.
Speaking for myself, although I never expected that I'd pass on hard skills to my child (unless they showed a particular interest), at least up until 2019 I felt confident that I could guide them in a general direction to be successful in life. How to do well in school, how to develop a work ethic, how to learn and pursue the things that interest them, how to approach planning a career, how to market their skills, how to manage risk, how to balance doing what they love vs what pays the bills, how to approach relationships... things like that. Regardless of whether they wanted to become a piano tuner or a park ranger or an astronaut or a homemaker.
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.
Yeah, agency is never more available than it has been now. These skills of talking to the machines make you far more capable than it used to.
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.
Compassion, respect for all living things no matter the colour or gender, how to live healthy and physically active, financial literacy. Most of these things have a huge role model part. Don't give him a screen mounted to the stroller.
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.
you cant teach these, the kid will naturally pick up and learn from parents and the environment.
so the best way to teach your kids is to teach yourself to be a better person
>you cant teach these,
you can absolutely teach those
regardless of how you teach them, the kids will grow up just like their parents
parents are a huge factor, yes, but what you've said is not an absolute.
my dad was an abusive alcoholic. i have never laid a hand on my kids. i am not just like my dad.
I think "exactly like their parents" and "exactly opposite their parents" are indeed the two most likely outcomes.
(And congratulations on breaking the cycle. It's not easy.)
That's not an absolute rule, of course...
Religions lose half their members every generation, I believe the evidence is robust kids can pick a different path than their parents. You can guide, support, and nurture, but their personality is theirs once they reach escape velocity. Empathy and curiosity is brain structure though (the amygdala, broadly speaking).
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)
… but you can’t force them to learn. Explicit instruction that isn’t backed by modeled behavior isn’t going to be very effective, IMO.
right. "teaching" isn't restricted solely to explicit instruction.
At this stage, I feel kids learn more in their environments than their parents...
Behavior learnt from school is exhausting me.
I am a highschool dropout, so I am perhaps not the best judge of this, but I later worked on-campus at a major university and befriended many students, most of whom struggled to find employment after graduation.
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.
I appreciate it. One overlooked part of education is that it is supposed to teach these values.
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.
Education should educate. Alas, parents outsources raising their kids to schools.
I dont have kids, so this question makes me ask, what did my father teach me?
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!
To be adaptive. That's going to be the most valuable skill going forward, to be able to adapt to any and all circumstances that may come your way because it is going to be a rough ride for at least the next decade and possibly much longer than that.
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.
That's always been an important skill (at least in the last couple hundred years as far as I can tell).
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.
That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree. In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture. 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. Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
> That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree.
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.
I’ve done okay with my single skill (IT expert). It may be a bit broader than what some would call a skill, though :)
Best of luck.
> Why would it have to be shallow? If you spent your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what.
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.
I don't think that's true either, or a least, it wasn't until the bots came of age. There was plenty of gold to be found on the crossroads of various fields and the matrix of skills is large enough that the competition is immediately a small fraction of what it is within any one field.
Lovely article, and something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. There is some amazing (evidence and strength based) stuff on both parenting and schooling from Dr Billy Garvey [1] that I really can’t recommend highly enough. He just published a book specifically on raising boys too (which I haven’t read yet).
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.
[1] https://www.guidinggrowingminds.com/
To me programming does not feel less valuable. I'm building custom harnesses at a financial institution and I'm thriving. Same me was building actionscript animations for a car dealer twenty years back.
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.
I have two boys ages 14 and almost 17. First priority is for both mom and dad to invest the time and energy to build a bedrock solid relationship from day 0. It's so frustrating and exhausting but that's priority 1.
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.
Being comfortable navigating a city like Dallas while feeling at home and welcome at the Perot and Aquarium did a lot of character building.
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.
The fact that this question is getting a due regard now, then before AI, shows that all we care about from education is getting a job that pays. And we are worried that jobs are being taken away by AI.
Otherwise this question should bother a parent in every generation.
It kills me that education is not a solved problem --- we have many of the same hurdles which the Greeks faced, and apparently, one of the best schools which I ever attended is no longer run as it once was (classes were divided between academic and social, the latter were attended at one's age level (homeroom, phys. ed, social studies, &c.) and academic classes were attended at one's grade level with teachers at the combined elementary/high school also being accredited as faculty at a nearby college and students being able to continue on to university level study until such time as they had attended their 12th year of education, with the possibility of being awarded not only a high school diploma, but also a college degree, or at least being afforded a transcript of college-level studies to apply at the school of their choice.
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.
In what way is education not a solved problem? We know how to get great educational results. People either don't care or actively hate the solutions.
It's mostly an socioeconomic problem, at least for US public education. People don't want to pay for other people's kids.
We demonstrably pay plenty for other people’s kids, at least through high school (and often Community College) - the resulting education isn’t poor because of lack of funds.
Just look at what we do relative to other countries that get better results. Teacher pay is abysmal, teacher-student ratios are abysmal. Lack of social safety nets mean our schools end up being the backstop of last resort for children who are hungry and stressed and whose parents are overworked and stressed. We have this stupid obsession with testing all the time (best practice is no homework and no tests). But hey, if you can afford it you can pay for a private school or homeschool and contribute to the further starvation of the public system.
It’s easy to pass failing students when you don’t test them. That’s the whole reason it looks good
This is wrong. Most public school systems spend north of $20,000 per student per year. That money comes from property taxes, which anyone who consumes housing contributes to. People regularly vote for bond issues and sales tax increases to help the kids get what they need.
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.
To look at it from the teacher's perspective, they're the only workers who are held accountable for the outcome regardless of the quality of the incoming raw material.
A good education is not being provided to every child who is in need of one --- that happening would be a solution to the problem of education, that it does not, is the problem.
What would it even look like for education to be “solved”? I think if you put 10 people in a room and asked them what the purpose of education was, you’d get 10 different answers.
How to get great educational results is to have a good teacher, or, better, a good individual tutor, and, most importantly, a good student. Also, there are some techniques that help, but those don't matter very much by comparison to how good the teacher is, whether they're teaching a class or an individual, and how good the student is.
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.
I’d argue that education is not a problem that can be solved. Because it involves people and people learn differently and different generations learn differently.
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.
The "not solved" part of the education is the same as "perpetuum mobile" is not solved - if you want to get kids educated without stress and putting in effort you are out of luck.
>Already one may learn languages by means Of Victrola records.
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.
School only worked for me because it forced structure onto my learning. Live lectures rarely engaged me, math and physics aside. So traditional teaching wasn't the draw. What mattered were the guardrails: quarterly exams, a peer group to measure myself against, and a pace that forced me to push past initial boredom until a subject clicked.
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.
Your description feels very apt. I was great in a classroom but I've done poorly learning alone outside of it. Do you have any recommendations on how to pick up new subjects and material after college?
Yes, the certification of acquired knowledge has always been the real value of educational institutions.
My priority with my daughter was to teach her to do what she believes is right, seek what makes her happy, and to not shy away from the difficult.
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.
Postman has re-incarnated as James Marriott who recently published the book "The New Dark Ages". The end of reading. Post-Literate society.
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...
The only reason the industrial education school survives is that it is obligatory.
Considering the arc of history, your son should have the skills and knowledge to be able to get together with a few friends and conquer a primitive land and establish a society in its place. Conquering, raiding, and civilization building are skills that are never going to become obsolete.
Hear, O my son, and receive my sayings; and the years of thy life shall be many. ¹¹I have taught thee in the way of wisdom; I have led thee in right paths. ¹²When thou goest, thy steps shall not be straitened; and when thou runnest, thou shalt not stumble. ¹³Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go: keep her; for she is thy life. ¹⁴Enter not into the path of the wicked, and go not in the way of evil men. ¹⁵Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it, and pass away. ¹⁶For they sleep not, except they have done mischief; and their sleep is taken away, unless they cause some to fall. ¹⁷For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence. ¹⁸But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. ¹⁹The way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at what they stumble. ²⁰My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings. ²¹Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart. ²²For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh. ²³Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. ²⁴Put away from thee a froward mouth, and perverse lips put far from thee. ²⁵Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. ²⁶Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. ²⁷Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil. Proverbs 4:10-27
> That the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what.
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.
While I agree with this, it seems like by this measure the educational system is failing in most places.
Based on my experiences with the teachers my kids had a decade or so ago, all you would have to do is find a way to test for it and then put it on the state-mandated test that is used to evaluate schools.
Often the only thing that is taught is what is on those tests.
That’s a good thing.
Assessing and measuring student knowledge is very important. Impossible to evaluate and improve current teaching methods otherwise.
The one-two punch of Goodhart's law and the McNamara fallacy bites hard here, though. We only measure things we can easily quantify, and then we optimize around those measurements, destroying their efficacy as second-order indicators of the things we couldn't figure out how to measure.
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.
I somewhat disagree- I think a lot of what is taught today will be useful in most people’s lifetimes.
There are basic skills that everyone needs, for example, the three R's: reading-riting-rithmetic.
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.
Thinking radio, calculators, the internet etc will make teachers obsolete misses something fundamental.
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?
It's good to think about. But you'll first be exhausted with disrupted sleep, diaper changes, tantrums, etc.
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
I aim to teach my son how to teach himself by instilling in him a sense of curiosity, encouraging him to read, and helping him to experiment and learn by trying things out for himself.
c.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49794456
>become a good person
>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.
The sort of slop they tell children. Adult world is far more complicated than that.
The adult world doesn't have to be far more complicated than that.
>good person >good citizen >make the world better
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.
In free countries, being a good citizen also means criticizing your government when you see it making mistakes.
Dissent can be patriotic.
Many adults have mutually incompatible ideas of what would make the world better. Many adults are willing to use violence to make their version of the world become a thing. It's not really as simple as saying it doesn't have to be this way.
The dissonance is deafening. Especially since the most successful people in our society are not doing any of those 3 things.
In fact, most extremely successful people are doing the opposite of those three things and directly deriving their success from it.
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.
Just give them The 48 Laws of Power.
Don't forget 4. - There's always love for papa.
Otherwise you get an evil billionaire child, but they don't even have the nerve to shower riches on you in your old age.
> That's the mentality that is consistently rewarded in society today.
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.
That was my mom's strategy seemingly, and it didn't create anything near her intent; it just taught me a lot about her.
kids are smarter than people realize, and they don't glean the things that people intend.
But then are they truly successful?
It entirely depends what success means to you! Don't let society or even your perception of society define that.
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.
That you believe those people with all the money are "successful" is actually the entire problem.
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?
Well it’s just under specified.
Hard isn’t inherently complicated and simple isn’t inherently easy. A commitment to those ideals is wildly complicated. To pick a child-rearing-relevant example, saying sorry and taking responsibility is simple and easy, but such a difficult thing to achieve, even for adults, and is rife with complicated and complicating emotions and relationships.
How do you make the world better without any useful skills?
Being nice is nice, but it doesn't cure cancer
Who said don’t have any skills? There are different ways to make the world better, and certainly each takes a different set of skills. If your way of helping the world is advancing biomedical research, you will need those skills. It’s downstream of the top-level prerogative, if you wanna put it that way.
>become a good person
>become a good citizen
these are skills.
these are what you teach your children.
Being nice helps those with cancer to have a nicer day.
You should teach your child how to learn and think critically. This is probably the biggest skill that can be taught to a child now days.
Add to that how to do so through reading[0]. If you get through this book and skim through the reading list at the end you’ll end up with a good chunk of a liberal arts education.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
Perhaps the most important thing, let them read.
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.
Teach your son to leverage leverage.
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.
- To MOVE. It will likely become key to migrate to escape anarchy, race riots, and resource scarcity in the coming 15-50 years.
- 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.
Questions are more powerful than answers. My kids are 29 & 31 now. I'd suggest that they master how to ask well formed questions. Also, "The medium is the message" is from Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964)
How would you recommend they learn to ask well-formed questions?
Your children are about to reach an age where they have a better formed understanding of the world than you. Might serve you well to see what you can learn from them.
"The man who can really play his part as a citizen, who is fit for the management of public and private business, and who can guide cities by his counsels, establish them by his laws, and amend them by his judicial decisions, is assuredly no other than the orator... My aim, then, is the education of the perfect orator. The first essential for such a one is that he should be a good man, and consequently we demand of him not merely the possession of exceptional gifts of speech, but of all the excellences of character as well."
— Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (Book 1, Preface, 9–10)
"SOCRATES: Yes, Callicles, if he have that defence, which as you have often acknowledged he should have—if he be his own defence, and have never said or done anything wrong, either in respect of gods or men; and this has been repeatedly acknowledged by us to be the best sort of defence. And if any one could convict me of inability to defend myself or others after this sort, I should blush for shame, whether I was convicted before many, or before a few, or by myself alone; and if I died from want of ability to do so, that would indeed grieve me. But if I died because I have no powers of flattery or rhetoric, I am very sure that you would not find me repining at death. For no man who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid of death itself, but he is afraid of doing wrong. For to go to the world below having one’s soul full of injustice is the last and worst of all evils. "
- Socrates (via Plato), Gorgias
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1672/1672-h/1672-h.htm#:~:te...
I’ve long been struck by this study [1], “Parents think - incorrectly - that teaching their children that the world is a bad place is good for them”.
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...
Learn how to break down a problem when you're stuck.
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.
Knowing to read the manual at that age may have proven invaluable in the future.
HP calculator manuals used to be really useful for teaching that.
As I get older I am starting to think that there are some things people just aren’t ready to learn at a given moment in time.
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.
Some interesting points, but I am a bit discombobulated because the author keeps changing between education, schooling, and parenting pretending they are the same.
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.
I'm a bit further on the same path (4 year old). Here's what I've come up with:
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.
How does that avoid the bullied from shooting up their school bullies while at school under the guise of defense?
The issue with is, as far as my personal anecdote is concerned, that competence doesn't translate across all activities. Me being good with figuring out Legos, video games, or programming doesn't translate to me being good with cooking, socializing, music, etc.
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.
>The issue with is, as far as my personal anecdote is concerned, that competence doesn't translate across all activities. Me being good with figuring out Legos, video games, or programming doesn't translate to me being good with cooking, socializing, music, etc
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
Teach your children about the things you love. Partially because children often don’t fall far from the tree, and mostly so they can learn how to enjoy something.
Anyone and everyone can raise a child, and have done so more or less successfully over the ages. My first tip would be not to worry too much, if you are inclined doing so.
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.
You know this, but it is worth repeating - I think you just need to always make good decisions, strive to have a moral backbone, and don’t be afraid to let him see you fail now and then, because he needs to know what it’s like to get back up.
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.
Other than literacy and Math, I’d say, if you are capable, and is willing, teach them about everything that involves some manual labor.
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.
Teach them how to use tools to solve their own problems; give them real tasks to do, and trust them to do them, without watching over them. I want my kids to be curious about the world, and understand that they have the agency to fix things. The other thing I try to drive home is that failure is a natural part of learning, if you want to get good at something, you have to fail a bunch first. My biggest failure as a parent is completely flying off the handle when they don't eat their food, but I'm trying to be less psychotic about that. You'll have your own problems. Try to get ahead of them and course-correct before it defines their whole personality or ruins your relationship with them.
"I will teach my children to lie.
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.
I would say that schools survive because there purpose is none of those lofty ideals that we hope they are. But instead they solve for daycare and they've got the benefits of progressing towards some idea of your child being independent and hopefully successful.
When I think of how I would raise kids I turn it on it’s head and say “how would I raise me”.
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
> make the world better
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.
> We have captured intelligence in a bottle, and you’re telling me that “Ok class, turn to page 17” and “Does anyone know how to solve for x” are still going to be around in the 2030s?
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.
> “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.”
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.
Show them how to be resourceful, think for themselves and own their decisions by practicing it yourself and telling stories.
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.
Teach your son consent and respect, two qualities that seem to be severely lacking these days
According to the Ancient Greeks, the single word to aim at with education is not "resourceful," it is "virtuous." Hard to get Lindy-er than that.
I often think of this question. Probably things that are enduring. How to be a good person, how do people work, how does society work, how to learn, some hobbies and life skills.
If there's one thing I'd impart on a kid is how to lose, and lose early, and to keep trying after losing. Resiliency. Chances are, if they are my kid they would not be the best nor the brightest. So I'd love to impart onto them the spirit of and satisfaction of hard work and the importance of persistence in any endeavour.
This reads like the typical expectant-parent confusion. The big mistake is thinking about a one-way flow of information from the parent to the child.
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.
https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/
https://github.com/RCSnyder/open-frontier-curriculum
> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”
That seems pretty good. I might add "curious" and "skeptical."
capable, tenacious, kind
I really like that paragraph in the article. We have more access to knowledge and other resources than ever in history, and yet not everyone is a Renaissance Man.
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.
Teach him to be rich. That's all that matters from now on. That's the only measure of merit. He can buy IQ by the token.
I suggest you have them learn a foreign language when young. Particularly Spanish and Chinese.
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".
So long as the primary purpose of school is to babysit children while their parents "work" it can never be supplanted by anything educational.
teach him how to read properly, and how to exercise critical thinking in picking the right books. after that, how to put all that learning to use.
Mostly adaptability, fearless independence, and being a curious person. The rest falls into place if you come from a place of abundance vs projecting a parent's insecurity and fears on your prodigy.
In the list of purposes for education he left out "Daycare for children of working parents".
For me - it’s a love of reading, music, and intellectual curiosity. From there most everything else follows.
My main advice as a parent:
- 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.
> Now that I think of it, apparently Einstein was a mediocre student, but his contributions to science were his way out.
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.
I'm becoming a father, it really make me warried..
> My economically valuable skillset – programming – suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son
Did the author get their programming skill from their parents? I feel it's a quite weird question.
Tangentially related, but thinking about what to teach your kid years into the future before it's even born has a bit of an unhealthy touch to it. Take it step by step and especially don't pressure your kid with high expectations.
Growing up, my daughters HATED anything STEM (maybe because I'm such a nerd :-)
Now they're realizing that all "work" is tech related, and younger one is actually taking comp sci.
Buy a bike and start riding around. Fresh air, exercise, have an ice cream, learn, talk, spend time.
Time is the most valuable thing we have and can share.
Terminator 2, Sarah Connor teaches her son to fight the machines.
Teach them to be preppers!
The right question might be: how to expose a kid to many things to pick up what are they into. And how to let them spend as much time on it as possible.
The single most useful thing I am glad my parents encouraged in my upbringing that is not ubiquitous among my peers, is a set of three things:
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.
Very deep and well written. I think the most important thing I want to pass to my kids is that there are reasons rules are put in place, and there are reasons why we should respect the rules, but there are exceptions. There are times when rules can be bent or broken, and we need to know how to judge, when to take risks, and when we should be transparent about own our decisions and actions.
People need to be open to experiment and make their own judgement based on observation without relying purely on their environment and authority.
Play with them, and show how play involves observing the play and changing it.
> 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.
How to establish safe and effective social and work boundaries, financial literacy, time management, and "Eat the Frog" principle for tasks.
"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"
That's less Mcluhan and more Foucault.
> and you’re telling me that “Ok class, turn to page 17” and “Does anyone know how to solve for x” are still going to be around in the 2030s?
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.
!!!HN Trigger Warning!!!
Perhaps Palo Alto isn't representative, and in fact might be doing some things wrong?
I am a reader; I'm not interested in fiction particularly but I read absolutely extensively, constantly and on more or less any topic, so the internet always appealed to me.
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.
Teach your child Mathematics.
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.
We can skip our education the day rich people learn to share
Teach him well the thing you cannot avoid teaching: how to raise a child.
This is a typical rookie mistake; thinking you are going to learn your child anything. I hate to disappoint you, but the opposite is true; the child is who it is and you can't change that - but they will teach you something :)
The only thing you can do is trying to avoid giving them trauma. This is important!
Teach him how to use ai.
Be a life-long learner.
Teach them how to build civilization from scratch.
My advice, is don't take advice.
> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”, because I reasoned that if you “were able to use arbitrary resources to uncover and solve problems”, you had no more need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a person was educated when they could wield them. But now I see my vision of resourcefulness perfected in the AI agent and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness will go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in turn supplanted memorization and an oral tradition.
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.
How to determine what is true, and how to avoid being deceived?
Tell him he should learn how to use his second brain, it has a thousand times more capacity than his first brain
Intelligence will never be scarce. Super Intelligence I meant
A life of privilege does this read like.
The Bible (very underrated here)
Money values
Hard work
Why community matters
Curiosity. Empathy.
Please, thank you and power electronics
This gave me pause:
> 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.
teach him to be resilient, and emphasize learning how to learn.
Be kind.
AI has become such a hollow term. A literal tautology if you will. Everything and anything follows from AI. From devaluing education to human extinction. As time goes on the AI bros are even turning it into a dystopian fanstasy where finally there will be no need to interact with humans. Imo best way to deal with all the AI marketing BS and spam is to take a few deep breaths and head outside. Living in a state of fear an panic isn't going to result in any self-beneficial rational decision making.
Curiosity, and problem solving.
Curiosity and problem solving have been automated and will be obselete in the next release.
Teach your kid to be a good person, to value hard work, to set lofty goals and strive to achieve them. Beyond that they’ll find their own way. “I’ll make my unborn son a programmer just like myself” was always going to be a pointless effort, AI or not.
> Schools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet
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.
Crypto trading.
How about anything, generally speaking? My father didn’t teach me shit beyond “how to drive” so frankly the bar here is extraordinarily low lol
theology, algebra, coding, calculus, physics
Teach them to backflip. Nothing will replace the body they are born in.
You ask strangers in internet what should you teach your kids, isn’t that stupid?
Strategy shifted, will focus less on code other than basics, but I'm still going to teach my daughter how to reason and problem solve.
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.
Philosophy.
>"Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet."
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.
Shit, I feel a but better about my life kids chances of making it in the world seeming how many people have nothing to pass on to their kids but empty virtue signaling about "being kind".
Kindness
Lovely "The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be"
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.
If I were to distill my educational opinions into a soundbite, it would sound very similar to the rule of happiness on submarines:
“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.
>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.
You can keep toiling for mud pies. The way I see it, there are two options: let go or be dragged
Said folks about the telegraph to letter carriers, about the radio to live performers, about the television to radio personalities, about the internet to all manner of companies.
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.
The transition to mass media and recording media is what has made performance art an infeasible career for all but a tiny minority of high-performers.
I need to eat man
Two objections:
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.
I disagree with your disagreements.
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 have a sad idea of what is required for happiness. We have more than enough to feed and clothe everyone. Beyond that, happiness is internal and requires no resources.
Well since the world has just restarted the geopolitical situation from before WW2 (every country for themselves), how about you help your son to become a doctor? You know, a medical doctor. It will require lots of teaching.
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
how about you help your son to become a doctor? You know, a medical doctor.
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.
AI will fail because the supply chains required for the hardware are not feasible if there's more than a few wars worldwide (including internet connectivity, so no ChatGPT). To say nothing of the fact that of course governments will decide that they have absolute priority. Right now China is calmly preparing to invade Taiwan and the second the first boat leaves the shore: no more Nvidia (or AMD, or Qualcomm, or ...) chips. Zero. For years. No matter how the conflict goes. And China keeps just calmly and very publicly repeating they're going to do so.
(there, perhaps insane, but at least a more original take than "AI is a bubble", no?)
Get them cracked at Deadlock
Make a fire Make bread Make music
How to work with his hands and not his brain
Because as humanity a handful of billionaires have decided to outsource thinking to machines
We finally have a chance to bring up our kids with kindness as the main charesterstic to improve. Given they wont have to compete for limited resources like we had. We get crushed, scammed and trampled on if show any kindness.
Where do you see in the current trajectory of our world broadly shared unlimited resources?
I just see existing capital holders with new ways to expand their wealth with even less need to share it.
>Given they wont have to compete for limited resources like we had
Are you aware of some StarTrek like technology that can create everything society needs and wants? If not, then scarcity still exists.
Survival skills.
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.
And it is perfectly fine for them to not waste their time on knowing how to change the oil or wire an outlet. Such things really aren’t needed any more for everyone.
Disagree. Wiring up a new outlet or replacing a breaker gone bad, that is basic home maintenance stuff.
It's an interesting question about how to prepare your child for the coming economic precarity induced by AI and its impact on intellectual work. I guess one idea could be to create an AI startup so that you can make a bunch of money and insulate yourself and your family from these impacts, which is indeed what the author is doing (https://www.val.town/).
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.
It really is a sign of the times that people are totally unable to define what education is for. And when they attempt answers, they usually fall flat on their faces. Perhaps this is because we have suppressed the habit - or fail to develop one - of asking what the ends of things are. Because if there are ends, then there are norms, and when there are norms, there is a right and a wrong, a better way and a worse way. It means there is an objective end written into human nature, and one’s actions and choices either align with that end or deviate from it. These are not something a hyperindividualist liberal[0] culture wants to hear. After all, telos was thrown out centuries ago, an intellectual process we can trace at least to Ockham’s nominalism. Telos makes a moral demand of us and we moderns and postmoderns chafe under moral demands (though we predictably reach for strong men, leviathans, and mortal gods to save us from the inevitable chaos). We would sooner declare life meaningless and plunge ourselves into the void of nihilism and its thrashing violence and nauseating malaise than submit to some objective moral order.
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).
Always teach your child how to really get the most out of life. How to make many friends, how to not do all the fuck ups you've done, the love you've missed out on from having a cynical heart.
This all sounds like cope to me, from people who don’t take AI seriously. Either they don’t think it is as impactful as it already is, or they don’t think we will continue to see exponential capabilities improvement for a while.
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.
If the current system continues, you have to teach them to cheat, lie, pretend and use loopholes as much as possible.
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.
You should teach your son to be virtuous according to philosophers and the catholic tradition. A virtuous person will do what is right wherever he is
I feel the word 'son' carries a lot of heft here - if it were 'what will I teach my child' the expectation of passing on an economically-viable craft would feel less urgent.
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?
> Schools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet.
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.
As long as "being the least practiced in recorded history" is compatible with "doing well", then sure.