I've really, really enjoyed pg's tweets on parenting and his kids. It's obvious he loves his kids and he loves being a dad.
Given how much of parenting advice/writing is written by and for moms (rather than dads), and given how much of it is (separately) written by and for people who are both extremely anxious and not very analytical, reading pg's thoughtful and joyous takes on being a parent makes me want to be a parent, too.
As a new father, it is crazy how little us fathers write for each other. Almost everything I read on parenting is directed at mothers, and in some ways, it is infuriating.
Either way, seeing someone write about parenting and reference fatherhood is always a fresh breath of air.
(In a way, I guess I have tasted what it can be like as a woman in engineering, with everything written for "him".)
Part of why it's like this could be because of how our dads and their dads handled being fathers. Perhaps too often they didn't own it, made child raising women's work, and created that gap in society that we see here today.
I might be wrong. I used to get a little frustrated by how men are treated as parents though, and I've come to think it's no one's fault today. If some old lady congratulates me for spending time with my sons (something I do every day and while it is nice, I don't want people to think it's remarkable and novel), I shouldn't assume it's condescending or rude; it's more likely that her husband rarely spent time with their kids and/or her father never spend time with her. She could be totally sincere.
Similarly, there could be very little written for us because in much of the world and recent history, raising kids has been largely placed on women. We might need to start writing if we want to see that change.
Again, I could be wrong. I think about it quite a bit though. Being a 'single dad' was a real eye opener about how men and parenting are perceived in society.
It was a deep and profound eye opener for me to (1) notice how most of the writing about the stuff I did all day was written specifically for people without Y chromosomes
but more importantly
(2) it made it much more clear to me what it must be like to be a woman who wants to be or is a part of a male-dominated field. Even though I was already aware of the concept of gendered literature as it pertains to a field of endeavor, wow, was it a totally different experience to have it apply directly to me and to my feelings. I used to be a bit cavalier about this - acknowledging that it was a real thing, but downplaying its significance.
No more. The kid is now 25, and we talk gender politics every other week :)
Almost any book on raising young children (say birth to 5) would be written with the assumption that diapers, feeding, play arrangements, and what we might call "very early childhood education" were the responsibility of a mother. Many early children's books would feature mothers as the ones taking care of young children too, and that grated on me a bit.
To be fair, there's a flip side to this which is almost as bad. By the time my child ended up at a (co-op) nursery school, I of course got huge karma from all the other stay-at-home mothers there for doing precisely what they did. That wasn't comfortable either, but at least it was an ego massage.
A couple of decades later ... it all seems like water under the bridge now compared to the deeper gender politics that we still face, and I am only glad that it made me pay attention to what I had previously assumed was a trivial thing.
Yeah. Stuff that is written in an affective style drives me crazy. I want to scream "Stop trying to make me feel the emotions, and get to the point already!" I find it rather hard to read.
For certain people, PG talks their language in a way that few others do. Not that others couldn't, but at the moment, very few do.
Reading everything from an account will usually give you quite low signal to noise ratio. Even for someone like pg's timeline. I usually use min_retweets and min_faves filter of Twitter advanced search to get to the best (crowd-sourced) tweets by someone. For example -
I think GP asked more about ascending chronological order (i.e. "oldest first"). Of course, that's only conjecture, based on what I thought when reading the question.
OTOH, your info about "best" vs. "everything" is of interest, too.
For 2, I'm guessing that BASIC is a step away from a visual drag-and-drop language towards something that you type in, and it's a stepping stone towards something like Python and other languages.
1. electrical circuits (switch, button, battery), no reading necessary, and purely physical.
2. gcompris (computer skills + you can simulate circuits so it connects to 1.)
3. Scratch
4. something textual (e.g. Basic but maybe Python or JS)
I like the texts and also the concept as a whole. Discovering old tweets is very cumbersome on twitter.com. So this site really meets a need that Twitter itself doesn’t.
> The biggest division in work may be between jobs that involve making new stuff (science, engineering) and those that don't (administration, sales), and you'll be a lot happier if you end up on the side you're suited for.
This is rather binary (and naive) distinction. There is a lot of room for creative work in any field.
Exactly. I find so many of PG's musings to be pretentious in their short sightedness. As if these are great revelations that underscore a deep observation, when in reality they are often shallow or contrived points.
I like most of PG's musings, but I agree that they often pertain to a very thin slice of reality. If we conducted a taste test comparing randomly selected ideas/excerpts from PG and senior engineers who comment on HN, I doubt most people would be able to tell the difference.
Most people in science and engineering can think of equally (if not more) clever and thought-provoking sentences, but PG's carry more weight because of who he is. We still live in a world where thought-leading is dominated by who has the most attention.
In software, to invent and make something work, you spend maybe 10% of the time actually inventing/creating things, and for the remaining 90% of the time, you try to "instantiate" your creation, which involves lots of drudgework, code bureaucracy (and sometimes real bureaucracy), dealing with irrelevant crap (e.g. tooling issues) and debugging.
It is interesting that science is considered as "making new stuff". In the classic distinction it's the opposite: Art (and artisanship and crafts) is creating new stuff, while science (natural philosophy) is about studying and understanding the existing natural world.
This is a very interesting comment, applying equally well to Marc Andreesen’s recent “Time to Build”, which I thought was excellent, but his choice of daily work effectively describes the problem. There’s way too much risk and way too little reward in actual creative work versus social value extraction. Almost everybody who is successful at the former moves quickly to the latter.
That’s actually what makes it useful. Anyone can exhaustively describe a thing. Only good communicators can select down to their audience, assume things, and then generalize at a level that provides broad meaning.
The strength is in being able to select the first eigenvalues.
After all, the only real thing is the thing itself. A textual description of the thing is not the thing, Cecil’s lost his pipe. So then it falls to you to describe the thing well. To a man standing in front of ten cars, if you say, “the black one” he knows which one. If you say, “it is a motor vehicle made by Mercedes, noted for their three point logo, that is currently painted black” you have more data but not more information.
All the capable people generalize. That is where predictive strength comes from.
It's not just binary, it's a binary choice between "those jobs that are a bit like mine" and "all the other ones". Imagine what some hypothetical parents with other careers might say:
> ... between jobs that involve being outside (gardener, railroad worker) and those that don't (office worker, bus driver, ...)
> ... between jobs that involve creative expression of your emotions (artist, musician) and those that don't (office worker, bus driver, ...)
> ... between jobs that involve saving people's lives (firefighter, doctor) and those that don't (office worker, bus driver, ...)
In the above, "office worker" includes desk jobs like programmer, startup CEO, and secretary. To people in some careers, those all sound pretty much the same.
A less extreme version of that third example would be jobs that are more people-based (in a meaningful way e.g. perhaps including travel agent but not barista) and those that aren't, which would be a very significant split for some people.
----
As a separate point, and probably a bit more pendantic: I think that even "making new stuff" can mean two different things. If you look at manufacturing e.g. building cars, you typically have a split between interesting design jobs and the factory floor where stuff actually gets built but the job is pretty boring and maybe sometimes even low skilled. Computer programming, even low-level implementation, is more analagous to design in manufacturing (then the "creating" is the trivial file copy of the executable).
But again, to some people that distinction is important and they would rather be building something physical with their hands (plasterer, carpenter, etc.), even if it's to someone else's design, rather than doing something that doesn't involve fine motor skill even if it's "creating" software or car designs.
He probably means the distinction between jobs that are innovative or not, but he's explaining this to a 7-year old, so making stuff is a reasonable approximation of that word.
(I just checked with my kid if he knew what innovative is and he answered it mostly right, but he's 13)
> Writing Basic programs (I'm teaching my son Basic) reminds me that there was once a time when I used to be impressed when my programs were long. Look at all the work I've done, I used to think.
I am glad I am not alone I thinking that BASIC is still a great language to teach young kids to program. I love how there is not a lot of boilerplate (for example the parenthesis for the print call in python and indentation).
At the moment primary school age (5 to 10) children in the UK seem to learn some flavour of Scratch. And then (in the UK) they also tinker with boards like Crumble or CodeBug or BBC Micro:Bit (which use blockly or MS MakeCode or something a bit like Scratch).
I don't know what the next step in progression is. I'm curious about what HN readers would think good stepping stones would be? Direct to Python, or something else then to python?
Python seems to be what's chosen next; couple of years ago I did the UMich/Coursera course "Python for Everybody" as prep for parenting a high-schooler as I'd never done any Python, good level for that.
I think if they're looking at the js behind the blocks in blockly that python isn't a very big step.
C64 BASIC was the first language I learned which is probably true for lots and lots of other people. However, I learned it by reading the book that came with the computer and trying it out.
I cannot really imagine someone teaching me a programming language. Half the fun was trying to "get it". I think that if I had had someone teaching me BASIC back then, it would half felt like trying to solve a Sudoku with someone watching over your shoulder and telling you which numbers to put.
Same here. Truth be told, I likely wouldn't be a programmer today if not for BASIC. My first exposure to programming as a kid was actually a COBOL book, explaining how to punch cards. Didn't get far there. Bought a C++ book and didn't get far there either. Found BASIC and found myself writing til my fingers were sore. One thing it taught me about myself is that I'm very very biased and/or strongly opinionated about languages and how they look. Love BASIC, hate COBOL. Love Python, hate Perl. Love Go, hate Rust. I feel like I'm cheating myself out of cool paradigms, but my brain has this builtin disgust reaction I can't get past.
This, the Academia SE, and the Workplace SE are wonderful repositories full of shining examples of how many pedantic, bureaucratic sociopaths walk among us.
This has been discussed in the responses to the tweets, but still couldn't find a definitive answer - why Basic?
I started with Basic too when I was a kid, but if I were to teach my child programming now in 2020, I would choose Python as a first language. It has many graphic tools, and it looks even more beginner-friendly than Basic.
Logo on the C64 was one of the foundational tools in my programming journey. It was part of a computing class in primary school, I think when we were 9 years old. For many in the class, this was a first opportunity to mess around with a computer (almost no one had any kind of computer at home back then).
Getting that little triangular turtle to draw the shape of my house, simply by telling it how far to move and which way to turn, ended up being a life altering moment.
I don't know if it's possible to enthrall children with it these days. The graphics must seem absolutely bland and boring compared to many things children these days get to tinker with.
We got started with logo (on DOS PCs) at the same age in my school. It took me a long time to even realize it had anything to do with programming, just seemed like a wierd and cumbersome drawing program (compared to PC Paintbrush for example).
A couple years later I started messing around with QBasic & that really pulled me in even tho it took me a long while to learn even the basics.
Computer classes in school (until high school at least) seemed to have been generally be taught by teachers slightly less computer-literate than more advanced pupils in their class.
When I was testing a Logo implementation that had been released, I called my much younger cousin to look at it since he had been so good at Logo back in school that they had made him the "class monitor" the following year.
I quickly typed in code to draw a recursive tree and ran it. His reaction was "What?!?! You mean Logo is a programming language like the Pascal I learned at the university?"
Honestly what can be expected when the teachers aren't programmers and learned it just before the pupils themselves? Which I guess may be sorta forgivable in the early 90s when there were few programmers (especially in the global periphery) and even fewer that were both programmers & teachers.
I don't know yet (my child is still far too young for logo) that said I grew up in an era spanning from frogger and handheld lcd tennis to all the BBC games to lemmings and Super Mario, any of which had better graphics than I could make in logo, but they lacked the thrill of creating things for myself that I got from the latter.
I prefer python professionally. But I have been trying to teach my kids programming via code breaking with the Gravity Falls tv show. Trying to add numbers to letters is very confusing for younger kids.
The real shame is that there's not a good Beginner's Lisp yet, but when lacking one of those, BASIC is pretty easy to learn, and more importantly is pretty easy to teach.
Basic is great because it has lower level primatives.
I think it's very easy for an existing programmer to forget that even the simplest high level concepts like looping and functions are not familiar to a child. These things are just not optional in python. If you want to make a loop, is has to be a high level one.
I would much rather teach a child "if" and "goto" for them to make their own control flow constructs. Later on after they realise that they are making these things manually all the time then they will learn to value of a function or a for loop and how it simplifies their life.
I think it really helps internalise these concepts.
Literally all the best programmers I know started with basic.
Some of them are quite nice but being a parent myself I don't subscribe to all of them. Which is expected, of course.
And then there are some tweets which are very situation/environment specific, like for instance the one about walking to school alone:
10 yo asked when I'd let him and his 7 yo brother walk to school by themselves. I told him the task was not to get himself to school safely, but to get his brother to school safely. I could practically hear his brain struggle to assimilate this paradigm shift.
All of my class mates and I walked to school alone from first class on (6 yrs of age) simply because we used to live in a smaller town where that was no problem. I'd even think that a parent driving their elementary school kids to school would have been looked at funny by the other parents.
Or this one:
Explained to nervous 7 yo that me being on the floor above is the same as me being in the next room, just rotated 90 degrees. After trying various objections, he had to agree.
While it might be true topologically, of course there are just practical every-day considerations why the are not exactly the same.
So, yeah, I find a lot of the tweets entertaining, but not as deeply insightful than some other commenters here.
Our older one goes to school himself from first grade on. The second is about to start school. Each one getting to school safely is not the problem. Getting them to school safely if they walk together is a problem.
I used to walk with class mates most of the time, I don't remember that making much of a difference if any. But of course, that's the judgment of my 6-year old self. In any event, it just comes down to what I stated above: all of this is / can be very dependent on the specific situation / environment that you live in.
Yeah, to someone who is wheelchair bound, that the room above them which is only accessible by stairs, is not even close to the same as the room next door.
While that's definitely true, I don' think that's the point here. The 7 yo had anxiety about proximity, which is very common in children that age. They just want to know that the adult is nearby and has not abandoned them.
While I'm not a fan of "visual programming languages", I think Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) and ScratchJr (http://scratchjr.org/) are good. ScratchJr is made for the younger ones, "no reading required" (but knowing the digits/numbers is helpful)
I never really understood the whole thing around Paul Graham. His insights on startups and tech are somewhat interesting and legitimate, but at this point I feel like some people are taking his every thought, even mondaine, as gospel...
I've read a collection of his essays and outside of programming/startups, they are really mundane/black & white/binary division. I.e., the world is divided into nerds who are good, and bullies who are bad.
There are a lot of “hackers” who think that the ability to code or build a successful business is synonymous with deep intellect and wisdom, and a forum such as this naturally attracts a greater number of them who engage in some vicarious glory seeking.
I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really like to avoid it
would probaly talk less or at least narrow his focus.
It gets really repetitive and boring to see this sort of comment (and often much nastier ad homenim attacks) every single time any of pg's writing is on the front page.
If you think his observations are mundane, then why not just move on to another link, hopefully one that you're interested in?
It also gets tiring to have the knee-jerk defensive of PG or any other expert leveraging ina different vertical to be "if you don't love america than get the hell out".
HN loves to question the bonafides of everyone/everything; if you're sick of these comments, why do you take the time and effort to comment?
I found his essay on kids [0] a lot more insightful than this collection of short tweets. In particular, he admits that having kids may actually make you less ambitious
The fact is, once you have kids, you're probably going to care more about them than you do about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum game.
I've noticed this in myself. As usual though, he has a hack for this as well:
I have some hacks for sailing close to this wind. For example, when I write essays, I think about what I'd want my kids to know. That drives me to get things right. And when I was writing Bel, I told my kids that once I finished it I'd take them to Africa. When you say that sort of thing to a little kid, they treat it as a promise. Which meant I had to finish or I'd be taking away their trip to Africa. Maybe if I'm really lucky such tricks could put me net ahead. But the wind is there, no question.
I agree, though I’ll add that my perspective has become much, much longer. I am laying plans for 20-40 years from now and continuously attend to their fruition. I don’t think that would have been possible without kids and, in light of the compounding nature of life (and capital), it feels like a super power.
I really like this point, and 100% agree having had a wee one recently. I've found I'm more discerning about opportunities, not jumping headlong into any new thing.
If anything having a kid has helped me focus, by cutting out a lot of extraneous noise in other parts of life.
I guess it depends were you are in life. I’ve noticed since having kids that working and succeeding takes on a whole other meaningful level. Before, ambition was tied to abstract things I didn’t quite care too much about, i.e. money. Now, being my best self is the greatest teaching tool for our kids as they look to us as role models.
I was impressed when PG admitted this. Empirically, people with kids almost never achieve outlier levels of success (since attention is a zero sum game, and kids force your risk appetite to be lower [1]). But this is an extremely politically incorrect thing to admit, and people seem to be in denial about it.
For the record I plan to have kids (because kids are awesome), but want to push it off as far as humanly possible. It's basically a sign that you've retired/don't have anything that important left to contribute other than steady-state levels of productivity.
[1] I think having Fuck You Money is the best way to prevent kids from lowering your risk appetite. But attention is still a zero sum game (even with nannies helping to offload some of the work), so money won't save you entirely.
I have two kids and I've achieved a lot since having them, but Paul's root argument is absolutely correct. I've staved off a lot of the deterioration by investing tons of money into systems that make family life easier, rather than fight things like house cleaning services and such from a point of "efficiency."
I have far fewer material things, a very basic house, and not very nice cars, but an equally important shift is your financial mindset on helping your family's stability today as well as into the future.
Re-reading this, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Wish I could reword it, but it's how I feel, I guess. Maybe it'll help someone out there. Having kids is tough!
I am by no means rich by Hacker News standards, and I live a very modest life in a modest home. The money I do have, I use on a personal assistant, housecleaning services, a nanny, and other things that allow me to be as productive as possible at work so when I'm at home, I can maximize family time with the kids and my partner.
I very much believe in the ego depletion theory (though I know, it's not been reproduced) - the more choices I have to make in a sub-arena, the more fatigued I get, and the lower self-control I have. I've just admitted to myself that I am poor at time management, so I've outsourced a lot of things to my personal assistant (whom I would never hire in the past given my income bracket). We have a housecleaner service despite the fact that I'm perfectly capable of cleaning the house, but in doing so I just pile up more tasks that I really don't want to do.
I've had these discussions with other people in my income bracket who say they can't afford to get help around the house, but they drive Teslas, have super nice clothes, buy expensive TVs / electronics, eat out a lot, go on posh vacations... it's about what you prioritize your money towards. I spend a huge amount of my money on my family and their needs, and I want for very little in my personal life.
I see it this way: I'm an entrepreneur, getting to do my thing. That's enough for me. I don't need nice stuff or to go to foreign lands; all the clothes I wear are free from vendors or cheaply purchased at Old Navy / Goodwill / etc. My family emotionally supports my self-employment, which is more than anyone can ask for in this life. They deserve everything else.
I've wondered if a lot of the bias against older people in tech is actually a bias against parents of young children. Obviously age and parenting are tightly correlated.
I've worked with a lot super smart folks that are older and, thinking back, their kids were old enough to not be a constant concern, or they never had kids. They seem to have both the energy to be focused at work and also a lot of knowledge that someone a few years out of college doesn't yet have. I've also seen this when one parent is a stay-at-home parent, allowing the other parent to be more engaged with work.
Obviously we should be compassionate to people with young kids at home and not hold it against them, because civilization requires a certain number of people to procreate.
> Empirically, people with kids almost never achieve outlier levels of success
> Don't most successful people have kids (just like anybody else)?
I imagine both those things are true.
> Also, many people just don't take care of their kids. There are many mono-parental families out there.
I became a single parent when my wife developed mental illness (which was like getting 5 more kids). In my case self-employment allowed me to be present a lot more often than most single parents can.
Nevertheless, the overriding truth is that nearly every sq inch of modern western society is stacked against single parents.
> Empirically, people with kids almost never achieve outlier levels of success
I really don't think this is true statistically. Plenty of outliers with kids, as far as kids go.
Moreover, argument is not true, especially for men. Many men leave most of care and career sacrifice on their wifes. They may be slightly inconvenienced by kids here and there, but actually spend equal or even more time in work then before. (Cause home isore boring and wife less friendly now)
Honorable mention: Anthony Fauci but he won't be remembered in 100 years. But, who will? J.k.Rowling, Donald Trump, Barack Obama. Then I am out of ideas, through I can think of both childless and non childless people.
Not slowed down by children: Albert Einstein, Joseph Stalin, Goering, Speer. (I happened to read about that period a lot).
Bill Gates, Musk also have children, but I don't think business owners are remembered that long. Plus, Elon Musk is not active father. More if sponsor from what I heard. The "remembered after 100 years" basically limits me to politicians making massive changes. But if you check those who won Nobel prize, they have plenty children too. And writers have them too.
Seriously, career of males are not much harmed by children. It used to be an advantage even
The question is whether they had children when they began their ambitious project. Bill Gates was definitely childless when he started Microsoft. He met his wife Melinda through Microsoft; she was an employee. I don't know about Musk but the question is whether he had kids when founding Paypal.
So like, business man count only if they started business late? Successful person that did not started during college is too much of complicated rule. You require someone who had kids too young or started work life too old.
Musk was born I'm rich family for that matter. And was not hold back by kid at all, cause he was not spending hours with them or something. Ha had nanny.
>> It's basically a sign that you've retired/don't have anything that important left to contribute other than steady-state levels of productivity.
That's a pretty blinkered perspective. For the large majority of people, your children are the most impactful thing you contribute. Say you have 2 kids. You marginally reduce your contribution to care for them but in return they contribute two whole lifetimes worth. Way more than you would ever add to your career.
Of course there's prudence in planning, but there are other ways to define your success and contribution other than your immediate economic utililty.
An alternate approach is to have kids young while you work through the grind-ier stages of your career and then do your high impact work when they're teenagers / young adults. One benefit of this approach is that even if your attention is sometimes away from them during that stage in their life they still get to see what you're doing, and if you take time when you can to talk to them about it they'll feel at least a little bit involved. In my experience sometimes bringing what you're learning as a parent out in the real world back home to them can be very engaging for them. School can be very mundane, and a glimpse in to how the real world works can be very enlightening.
When I first became a parent I thought it would be great if I could just stay home with my kids all the time and not have to go to work. I thought that would be better for them and me, and concluded that's what I'd do if I ever had fuck-you money. Then when they got old enough to have conversations with (3-4 yo) I realized that they really engaged with conversations about things outside their daily lives, which for better or worse can be very routine. If I wasn't going to work I wouldn't have much to tell them that they don't already know. And again for better or worse, young kids and teens tend to see anything that happened before they were born as ancient irrelevant history, so I'm not sure that telling stories about the glory days of past contributions would have the same impact.
Lastly, if you'll pardon a bit of good-natured snark, while
> Empirically, people with kids almost never achieve outlier levels of success
is certainly true,
> Empirically, people almost never achieve outlier levels of success
People in any category "almost never achieve outlier levels of success"; that's what "outlier" means. If you mean that people with children achieve outlier levels of success much less often than people without children, then I think you owe us some of the evidence implied by that word "empirically".
J S Bach had 21 children. Karl Friedrich Gauss had 6 children. Warren Buffett has 3 children. Rembrandt van Rijn had 5 children. Isambard Kingdom Brunel had 3 children. Charles Dickens had 10 children. Charles Darwin had 10 children.
The only one of those I picked on the basis of knowing about their children was Bach; the others were the first super-eminent people in their fields who occurred to me that I didn't know were childless.
Modern examples (like Warren Buffett) are probably better, since most of those men lived during times when there were almost zero expectations placed on fathers, apart from making an income. Men could almost completely ignore their children without their spouse, the children, or anyone else seeing it as a problem.
OK, let's stick with modern examples. We already had Warren Buffett.
Some very rich tech people: Bill Gates, 3 children; Larry Ellison, 2 children; Jeff Bezos, 4 children; Mark Zuckerberg, 2 children. (I just picked some rich tech people and checked whether they had children; no deliberate cherry-picking here.)
The most recent Nobel prize in physics went to Jim Peebles (3 children), Michel Mayor (3 children), and Didier Queloz (haven't been able to find out, so maybe none?).
I'm not going to spend ages looking up stats for every area of human achievement, and maybe it turns out that all these people had children after achieving success (lots of us non-outliers, after all, wait to have children until we're reasonably secure financially), but at any rate it certainly doesn't seem as if highly successful people are unusually likely not to have children at all.
But the snark has a point: Paul Graham is qualified to give advice about startups, but what qualifies him to dispense parenting advice? Like all other parents, it sounds like he's making it up as he goes along.
Meh. The vast majority of parenting advice lacks scientific evidence anyway. (I tried to find some with a proper evidence base as a new dad and honestly I'm amazed we don't have more for what is clearly such an important topic).
And what qualifies anyone here to discount his advice? He's not bringing down stone tablets from Mt. Sinai, just writing about his own thoughts and experiences. If you're not interested, don't read it.
There is no point, because he doesn't pretend to be anything than other than a parent, not an expert on parenting. It's like posting to a mommy blog. The call for industry professionals to "stay in their lane" when they want to talk about whatever they want to talk about is ridiculous.
...except you are only listening to his parenting advice compared to, say mine or the GP, because of his relative narrow expertise in a completely unrelated area. I'm not calling for famous people to STFU, but to be extra vigilant about passing on advice outside of their recognized area of epertise. For example: should Jenny McCarthy "stay in her lane" or are you cool with a c-grade actress using her fame to promote dangerous pseudo science?
Perhaps people like his parenting advice because it's insightful on its own merits? I wouldn't expect an expert on startups to be particularly wise when it comes to parenting. If anything, I'd expect the opposite. But the proof is in the pudding.
While that is admittedly a bit snarky, the fact is the context of nearly all PG’s essays are things he is an expert in, and has rightly earned a bit of authority in influencing others in these areas he is an expert in.
So I think it’s fair for others to make it clear he may not have much more authority in this area vs. other “mommy bloggers”, who probably have as much, and in many cases much more experience.
Anybody can make a startup, but it’s incredibly tough to make a successful one, and YC and what PG has built has arguably earned him authority to influence others in this space. And it’s usually pretty objective what constitutes a successful startup.
On the other hand, almost anyone can be a parent, there are many more parents on the planet, and what constitutes an “expert in this space” is incredibly more subjective.
Begs the question, who has the authority in that area? No one, except experienced parents.
When it comes to life advice, it's redundant to point out "lack of authority" when there is no authority body. No disclaimer is needed for life advice.
I wish more people would chill out, love their kids and just make it up as they go along. SPOILERS: there are no secrets; nobody really knows what the hell they are doing
For all you PG super fans: being a good (or great!) parent is the ultimate doing something that does not scale.
The snark is an over-reaction. This is just a collection of thoughts. He has every right in the world to put his thoughts online. It is up to everyone else whether or not to read them.
Fundamentally, there is an impedance mismatch between Tweets and Hacker News norms.
I'm not defending the snark. The link brings Twitter into Hacker News. All the social context comes with it. Getting reactions is the purpose of tweeting. Having reactions is the purpose of reading. Thoughtful long form comments are not.
I'm not part of the anti-pg crowd. I'm aware of where I am, I've read Hackers and painters and his blog ("essays"). But I prefer to think of him as a famous Lisp hacker and venture capitalist, not Peter Gregory from the Silicon Valley show.
If you wanted snarky comments about people reinventing parenthood, go to person would have been my school teacher grandmother. Unfortunately she's gone 30 years.
Distilled: Parenthood is like the old military saying that no plan survives contact with the enemy.
I got down to the one where he says adults lecture kids on morality, but not other adults.
Does he really not get regularly lectured on morality by other adults? I certainly do, and I get a tiny fraction of such lectures compared to my wife...
Yeah, I had a bit of a baby face when I first became a parent so got some of those same things. As soon as one of them called me "daddy" the ice melted
To expand, I often find that, if I feel strongly about a piece of feedback, it's because a part of me agrees with it. It says more about me than it does the other person.
Going from "People being critical of your wife and not you for the same actions is just conversation!" to trying to guilt a guy for...pointing out that his wife experiences sexism...is pretty strange.
I'm not trying to "guilt" anybody. Please don't spin my words.
My two points are related. I recall hearing comments like that when my spouse and I had one infant child, and I remember taking them more personally, because it's easy as a new parent to feel like you should be doing more. Now if I hear someone comment on something I'm doing as a parent, it's just conversation, and I think the primary difference was my confidence in my own parenting ability.
I've never hard of people making conversation by telling them how they're doing things wrong, except when it comes to raising kids. How often do you hear stuff like this from random strangers:
It's too cold for shorts.
You're pushing that shopping cart wrong.
You need to wash your car.
That's a lot of ice cream in your shopping cart, maybe you should try eating something else.
It's been a while thanks to COVID, but next time a stranger walks up to you and offers unsolicited advice, try responding with anything other than "thanks"
I don't know about morality. But I have noticed that many adults tend to expect kids to behave better than other adults.
The behavior of many adults isn't that far removed from the behavior of your average toddler. As a society we seem to have come to accept this as fairly normal though.
Paul Graham does not exist in the same social class you and I do
He’s surrounded by always happy “yes people” who validate but never really challenge him
He promises his kids extravagant trips, as if more air travel, as a reward for what exactly? Not like they’re curing cancer here, is what his kids future environment needs
Thanks, Graham. Glad your kids get to go. Please let the rest of us know how to live proper
Yeah if you promise your kids a trip to a different continent as a reward for something that has nothing to do with them you and I aren't even living on the same planet.
Depending on the length of the trip, a vacation in Africa can be cheaper than one in America. Sure the flight will cost a bit more, but the vacation costs while there will likely be much cheaper than, say, staying at Disneyland.
He might be a good entrepreneur but ffs, why the rabid, unthinking enthusiasm in following everything this guy says? Why not make a website for someone else who happens to be a good parent? This cultish b/s is exactly what leads to the hell of Trumpistan. IMO.
Parenting trick: invent a gesture that means "I love you." 2 yos like it as a game. 8 yos like it because they can use it in public.
I learned to say "I love you." It still gets an "I love you, too" nearly twenty years later by default. If I don't fuck up, I expect it will work on my deathbed. It probably helped that I often add "and am very very proud of you" when I've thought it's a good thing to say. Most recently by text across two thousand miles in the midst of a pandemic. Because I was. YMMV.
That's something to strive for - that those around me will want to say that on my deathbed. I mean, there's not much else that is going to matter to me then.
Does anyone else feel this is extreme amount of pushing/hand-holding to kids to have them learn programming?
My own experience is this: (1) kids meticulously observe what their parents do in their "natural" state and get interested in that, however, (2) kids develop sort of "not for me" or even outright repulsion for things parents what them to excel at.
So the best way for kids to get interested in X is just to do that yourself all the time and let them approach you with questions while never let them feel that you are way too good at that. One technique is to do Conway style "blunders" while teaching something to kids. This apparently makes them feel that there is room for them to come in, contribute and think independently.
John Conway had a teaching technique where he would appear to make an error in a talk, act slightly confused, then restart the problem now that a faulty assumption (for example) was made explicit. Second time around greater insight would be reached.
You have to be very good to pull off that kind of move.
If you are trying to force your children to grow up to be coders, that would be extreme. But the parents and educators I know consider it more of a new facet to basic literacy. You know how to read. You know how to write. You know basic computational concepts.
I had no problem spending many hours learning to program the Apple II+ we had but I always felt forced to practice playing the piano. I think the difference for me was the computer was a puzzle to be figured out and I saw a lot of potential reward in it whereas the piano just seemed like something that had little use beyond the skill of coordinating the reading of notes to playing them. My parents did neither of these things so I had no models to base my interests in in these cases at least.
I have 5 sons. I exposed all of them to computer, appliance & car repair. That involved setting them in front of the project, tool in hand & letting them go as far as they could.
Only one really bit into it & he largely eclipsed my ability by the time he was 18.
The others found their own skill sets, mostly with stuff I suck at.
Edit: Interestingly, one is training as an electrician which is tangentially related to my skills. However, he came to that totally on his own.
His learning is best aided thru support, not influence.
Speaking from personal experience, the seed was planted and just took longer to grow.
I share a hobby with my great grandmother. I was never interested in it when my parents were involved with it, but on my own I still think of grandma when I’m making plans. It was just something she did, often while we were visiting.
This is pretty stupid. The cross-over between VC and parenting is ... non-existent. Maybe PG is a great person and parent, but I don't know him.
VC playbook: build a portfolio of rapid growth companies, spread a bunch of cash around; expect most to fail but one or a few are huge successes in a short time frame; repeat.
Parent playbook: no real repeatable systems, slow organic growth, everyone succeeds, likely no unicorns, one-and-done.
pg was famous for his essays before he was famous for being a venture capitalist. I disagree with many of his late-stage essays, but his reflections on parenting aren't the worst.
I don't take parenting advice from anybody. It's all bunk. Much of it can be summed up thus: If you're unusually self disciplined and organized, your children will be unusually self disciplined and organized. Otherwise, just as you learned to work past your faults, so will your kids have to. Many of us got through school and life by having the brains to make up for our other shortcomings. You're about to find out what it looks like when someone you care about goes through the same.
Is KidsRuby still active? The downloads page isn't working (leads to an access denied page) and the twitter account hasn't posted anything for 5 years.
248 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadGiven how much of parenting advice/writing is written by and for moms (rather than dads), and given how much of it is (separately) written by and for people who are both extremely anxious and not very analytical, reading pg's thoughtful and joyous takes on being a parent makes me want to be a parent, too.
Either way, seeing someone write about parenting and reference fatherhood is always a fresh breath of air.
(In a way, I guess I have tasted what it can be like as a woman in engineering, with everything written for "him".)
I might be wrong. I used to get a little frustrated by how men are treated as parents though, and I've come to think it's no one's fault today. If some old lady congratulates me for spending time with my sons (something I do every day and while it is nice, I don't want people to think it's remarkable and novel), I shouldn't assume it's condescending or rude; it's more likely that her husband rarely spent time with their kids and/or her father never spend time with her. She could be totally sincere.
Similarly, there could be very little written for us because in much of the world and recent history, raising kids has been largely placed on women. We might need to start writing if we want to see that change.
Again, I could be wrong. I think about it quite a bit though. Being a 'single dad' was a real eye opener about how men and parenting are perceived in society.
It was a deep and profound eye opener for me to (1) notice how most of the writing about the stuff I did all day was written specifically for people without Y chromosomes
but more importantly
(2) it made it much more clear to me what it must be like to be a woman who wants to be or is a part of a male-dominated field. Even though I was already aware of the concept of gendered literature as it pertains to a field of endeavor, wow, was it a totally different experience to have it apply directly to me and to my feelings. I used to be a bit cavalier about this - acknowledging that it was a real thing, but downplaying its significance.
No more. The kid is now 25, and we talk gender politics every other week :)
Almost any book on raising young children (say birth to 5) would be written with the assumption that diapers, feeding, play arrangements, and what we might call "very early childhood education" were the responsibility of a mother. Many early children's books would feature mothers as the ones taking care of young children too, and that grated on me a bit.
To be fair, there's a flip side to this which is almost as bad. By the time my child ended up at a (co-op) nursery school, I of course got huge karma from all the other stay-at-home mothers there for doing precisely what they did. That wasn't comfortable either, but at least it was an ego massage.
A couple of decades later ... it all seems like water under the bridge now compared to the deeper gender politics that we still face, and I am only glad that it made me pay attention to what I had previously assumed was a trivial thing.
Yeah. Stuff that is written in an affective style drives me crazy. I want to scream "Stop trying to make me feel the emotions, and get to the point already!" I find it rather hard to read.
For certain people, PG talks their language in a way that few others do. Not that others couldn't, but at the moment, very few do.
Which tool do Hacker News users recommend for reading everything ever written by a Twitter user in chronological order?
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apaulg%20min_faves%3A200&...
OTOH, your info about "best" vs. "everything" is of interest, too.
1. Didn't he had already a personal website?
2. Why is he teaching Basic over Scratch?
3. Will it scale to Kubernetes one day?
1. Someone else made this site in order to centralize all of Paul's relevant parenting content in one place.
2. PG prefers the text-only purity of Basic.
3. Who cares.
Scratch is too mainstream for Graham.
1. electrical circuits (switch, button, battery), no reading necessary, and purely physical. 2. gcompris (computer skills + you can simulate circuits so it connects to 1.) 3. Scratch 4. something textual (e.g. Basic but maybe Python or JS)
I like the texts and also the concept as a whole. Discovering old tweets is very cumbersome on twitter.com. So this site really meets a need that Twitter itself doesn’t.
This is rather binary (and naive) distinction. There is a lot of room for creative work in any field.
Most people in science and engineering can think of equally (if not more) clever and thought-provoking sentences, but PG's carry more weight because of who he is. We still live in a world where thought-leading is dominated by who has the most attention.
In software, to invent and make something work, you spend maybe 10% of the time actually inventing/creating things, and for the remaining 90% of the time, you try to "instantiate" your creation, which involves lots of drudgework, code bureaucracy (and sometimes real bureaucracy), dealing with irrelevant crap (e.g. tooling issues) and debugging.
I suspect he thinks it’s the former, when, of course, it’s the latter.
The strength is in being able to select the first eigenvalues.
After all, the only real thing is the thing itself. A textual description of the thing is not the thing, Cecil’s lost his pipe. So then it falls to you to describe the thing well. To a man standing in front of ten cars, if you say, “the black one” he knows which one. If you say, “it is a motor vehicle made by Mercedes, noted for their three point logo, that is currently painted black” you have more data but not more information.
All the capable people generalize. That is where predictive strength comes from.
> ... between jobs that involve being outside (gardener, railroad worker) and those that don't (office worker, bus driver, ...)
> ... between jobs that involve creative expression of your emotions (artist, musician) and those that don't (office worker, bus driver, ...)
> ... between jobs that involve saving people's lives (firefighter, doctor) and those that don't (office worker, bus driver, ...)
In the above, "office worker" includes desk jobs like programmer, startup CEO, and secretary. To people in some careers, those all sound pretty much the same.
A less extreme version of that third example would be jobs that are more people-based (in a meaningful way e.g. perhaps including travel agent but not barista) and those that aren't, which would be a very significant split for some people.
----
As a separate point, and probably a bit more pendantic: I think that even "making new stuff" can mean two different things. If you look at manufacturing e.g. building cars, you typically have a split between interesting design jobs and the factory floor where stuff actually gets built but the job is pretty boring and maybe sometimes even low skilled. Computer programming, even low-level implementation, is more analagous to design in manufacturing (then the "creating" is the trivial file copy of the executable).
But again, to some people that distinction is important and they would rather be building something physical with their hands (plasterer, carpenter, etc.), even if it's to someone else's design, rather than doing something that doesn't involve fine motor skill even if it's "creating" software or car designs.
(I just checked with my kid if he knew what innovative is and he answered it mostly right, but he's 13)
I'd say it is more about discovering what's already there :)
Anyway, the thread related to this dichotomy is great: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1250840771751809024
I am glad I am not alone I thinking that BASIC is still a great language to teach young kids to program. I love how there is not a lot of boilerplate (for example the parenthesis for the print call in python and indentation).
At the moment primary school age (5 to 10) children in the UK seem to learn some flavour of Scratch. And then (in the UK) they also tinker with boards like Crumble or CodeBug or BBC Micro:Bit (which use blockly or MS MakeCode or something a bit like Scratch).
I don't know what the next step in progression is. I'm curious about what HN readers would think good stepping stones would be? Direct to Python, or something else then to python?
BBC Micro:Bit https://microbit.org/
Crumble https://redfernelectronics.co.uk/crumble/
Codebug http://www.codebug.org.uk/
I think if they're looking at the js behind the blocks in blockly that python isn't a very big step.
I cannot really imagine someone teaching me a programming language. Half the fun was trying to "get it". I think that if I had had someone teaching me BASIC back then, it would half felt like trying to solve a Sudoku with someone watching over your shoulder and telling you which numbers to put.
I started with Basic too when I was a kid, but if I were to teach my child programming now in 2020, I would choose Python as a first language. It has many graphic tools, and it looks even more beginner-friendly than Basic.
Getting that little triangular turtle to draw the shape of my house, simply by telling it how far to move and which way to turn, ended up being a life altering moment.
I don't know if it's possible to enthrall children with it these days. The graphics must seem absolutely bland and boring compared to many things children these days get to tinker with.
A couple years later I started messing around with QBasic & that really pulled me in even tho it took me a long while to learn even the basics.
Computer classes in school (until high school at least) seemed to have been generally be taught by teachers slightly less computer-literate than more advanced pupils in their class.
I quickly typed in code to draw a recursive tree and ran it. His reaction was "What?!?! You mean Logo is a programming language like the Pascal I learned at the university?"
Very sad.
The real shame is that there's not a good Beginner's Lisp yet, but when lacking one of those, BASIC is pretty easy to learn, and more importantly is pretty easy to teach.
I think it's very easy for an existing programmer to forget that even the simplest high level concepts like looping and functions are not familiar to a child. These things are just not optional in python. If you want to make a loop, is has to be a high level one.
I would much rather teach a child "if" and "goto" for them to make their own control flow constructs. Later on after they realise that they are making these things manually all the time then they will learn to value of a function or a for loop and how it simplifies their life.
I think it really helps internalise these concepts.
Literally all the best programmers I know started with basic.
And then there are some tweets which are very situation/environment specific, like for instance the one about walking to school alone:
10 yo asked when I'd let him and his 7 yo brother walk to school by themselves. I told him the task was not to get himself to school safely, but to get his brother to school safely. I could practically hear his brain struggle to assimilate this paradigm shift.
All of my class mates and I walked to school alone from first class on (6 yrs of age) simply because we used to live in a smaller town where that was no problem. I'd even think that a parent driving their elementary school kids to school would have been looked at funny by the other parents.
Or this one:
Explained to nervous 7 yo that me being on the floor above is the same as me being in the next room, just rotated 90 degrees. After trying various objections, he had to agree.
While it might be true topologically, of course there are just practical every-day considerations why the are not exactly the same.
So, yeah, I find a lot of the tweets entertaining, but not as deeply insightful than some other commenters here.
Is this a problem anywhere outside the US? (I’m sure there are a few exceptions)
Let me ask you though, what's the simplest plainest programming language for a preteen that won't have any patience for dealing with syntax?
This thread changed my perspective on teaching my kids to code. I won’t.
I guess it's halo effect? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really like to avoid it
would probaly talk less or at least narrow his focus.
replace artists with parents and re-read https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
If you think his observations are mundane, then why not just move on to another link, hopefully one that you're interested in?
HN loves to question the bonafides of everyone/everything; if you're sick of these comments, why do you take the time and effort to comment?
I replied in a perhaps futile attempt to discourage a comment which has spawned an almost entirely mean-spirited sub-thread.
Enjoy your jerk, hackers.
I've noticed this in myself. As usual though, he has a hack for this as well: I have some hacks for sailing close to this wind. For example, when I write essays, I think about what I'd want my kids to know. That drives me to get things right. And when I was writing Bel, I told my kids that once I finished it I'd take them to Africa. When you say that sort of thing to a little kid, they treat it as a promise. Which meant I had to finish or I'd be taking away their trip to Africa. Maybe if I'm really lucky such tricks could put me net ahead. But the wind is there, no question.
[0] http://paulgraham.com/kids.html
If anything having a kid has helped me focus, by cutting out a lot of extraneous noise in other parts of life.
For the record I plan to have kids (because kids are awesome), but want to push it off as far as humanly possible. It's basically a sign that you've retired/don't have anything that important left to contribute other than steady-state levels of productivity.
[1] I think having Fuck You Money is the best way to prevent kids from lowering your risk appetite. But attention is still a zero sum game (even with nannies helping to offload some of the work), so money won't save you entirely.
I have far fewer material things, a very basic house, and not very nice cars, but an equally important shift is your financial mindset on helping your family's stability today as well as into the future.
Re-reading this, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Wish I could reword it, but it's how I feel, I guess. Maybe it'll help someone out there. Having kids is tough!
I very much believe in the ego depletion theory (though I know, it's not been reproduced) - the more choices I have to make in a sub-arena, the more fatigued I get, and the lower self-control I have. I've just admitted to myself that I am poor at time management, so I've outsourced a lot of things to my personal assistant (whom I would never hire in the past given my income bracket). We have a housecleaner service despite the fact that I'm perfectly capable of cleaning the house, but in doing so I just pile up more tasks that I really don't want to do.
I've had these discussions with other people in my income bracket who say they can't afford to get help around the house, but they drive Teslas, have super nice clothes, buy expensive TVs / electronics, eat out a lot, go on posh vacations... it's about what you prioritize your money towards. I spend a huge amount of my money on my family and their needs, and I want for very little in my personal life.
I see it this way: I'm an entrepreneur, getting to do my thing. That's enough for me. I don't need nice stuff or to go to foreign lands; all the clothes I wear are free from vendors or cheaply purchased at Old Navy / Goodwill / etc. My family emotionally supports my self-employment, which is more than anyone can ask for in this life. They deserve everything else.
I've worked with a lot super smart folks that are older and, thinking back, their kids were old enough to not be a constant concern, or they never had kids. They seem to have both the energy to be focused at work and also a lot of knowledge that someone a few years out of college doesn't yet have. I've also seen this when one parent is a stay-at-home parent, allowing the other parent to be more engaged with work.
Obviously we should be compassionate to people with young kids at home and not hold it against them, because civilization requires a certain number of people to procreate.
Don't most successful people have kids (just like anybody else)?
Also, many people just don't take care of their kids. There are many mono-parental families out there.
> Don't most successful people have kids (just like anybody else)?
I imagine both those things are true.
> Also, many people just don't take care of their kids. There are many mono-parental families out there.
I became a single parent when my wife developed mental illness (which was like getting 5 more kids). In my case self-employment allowed me to be present a lot more often than most single parents can.
Nevertheless, the overriding truth is that nearly every sq inch of modern western society is stacked against single parents.
I really don't think this is true statistically. Plenty of outliers with kids, as far as kids go.
Moreover, argument is not true, especially for men. Many men leave most of care and career sacrifice on their wifes. They may be slightly inconvenienced by kids here and there, but actually spend equal or even more time in work then before. (Cause home isore boring and wife less friendly now)
Reality might skew a little in tech because of some high profile successes that occurred while founders were absurdly young.
Not slowed down by children: Albert Einstein, Joseph Stalin, Goering, Speer. (I happened to read about that period a lot).
Bill Gates, Musk also have children, but I don't think business owners are remembered that long. Plus, Elon Musk is not active father. More if sponsor from what I heard. The "remembered after 100 years" basically limits me to politicians making massive changes. But if you check those who won Nobel prize, they have plenty children too. And writers have them too.
Seriously, career of males are not much harmed by children. It used to be an advantage even
Musk was born I'm rich family for that matter. And was not hold back by kid at all, cause he was not spending hours with them or something. Ha had nanny.
That's a pretty blinkered perspective. For the large majority of people, your children are the most impactful thing you contribute. Say you have 2 kids. You marginally reduce your contribution to care for them but in return they contribute two whole lifetimes worth. Way more than you would ever add to your career.
Of course there's prudence in planning, but there are other ways to define your success and contribution other than your immediate economic utililty.
When I first became a parent I thought it would be great if I could just stay home with my kids all the time and not have to go to work. I thought that would be better for them and me, and concluded that's what I'd do if I ever had fuck-you money. Then when they got old enough to have conversations with (3-4 yo) I realized that they really engaged with conversations about things outside their daily lives, which for better or worse can be very routine. If I wasn't going to work I wouldn't have much to tell them that they don't already know. And again for better or worse, young kids and teens tend to see anything that happened before they were born as ancient irrelevant history, so I'm not sure that telling stories about the glory days of past contributions would have the same impact.
Lastly, if you'll pardon a bit of good-natured snark, while
> Empirically, people with kids almost never achieve outlier levels of success
is certainly true,
> Empirically, people almost never achieve outlier levels of success
Is almost equally true!
That's ridiculous. Do you have any way of backing that claim up? If you're using the word "empirically", you should have.
J S Bach had 21 children. Karl Friedrich Gauss had 6 children. Warren Buffett has 3 children. Rembrandt van Rijn had 5 children. Isambard Kingdom Brunel had 3 children. Charles Dickens had 10 children. Charles Darwin had 10 children.
The only one of those I picked on the basis of knowing about their children was Bach; the others were the first super-eminent people in their fields who occurred to me that I didn't know were childless.
Some very rich tech people: Bill Gates, 3 children; Larry Ellison, 2 children; Jeff Bezos, 4 children; Mark Zuckerberg, 2 children. (I just picked some rich tech people and checked whether they had children; no deliberate cherry-picking here.)
The most recent Nobel prize in physics went to Jim Peebles (3 children), Michel Mayor (3 children), and Didier Queloz (haven't been able to find out, so maybe none?).
I'm not going to spend ages looking up stats for every area of human achievement, and maybe it turns out that all these people had children after achieving success (lots of us non-outliers, after all, wait to have children until we're reasonably secure financially), but at any rate it certainly doesn't seem as if highly successful people are unusually likely not to have children at all.
I'm looking forward to hearing his cooking advice next.
Who says we don't listen to others for parenting advice?
> extra vigilant about passing on advice outside of their recognized area of epertise.
It's life advice. Anyone can dispense it.
> For example: should Jenny McCarthy "stay in her lane" or are you cool with a c-grade actress using her fame to promote dangerous pseudo science?
I'm not cool with any pseudo science no matter who's dispensing it. People have the right to babble about what they want.
While that is admittedly a bit snarky, the fact is the context of nearly all PG’s essays are things he is an expert in, and has rightly earned a bit of authority in influencing others in these areas he is an expert in.
So I think it’s fair for others to make it clear he may not have much more authority in this area vs. other “mommy bloggers”, who probably have as much, and in many cases much more experience.
On the other hand, almost anyone can be a parent, there are many more parents on the planet, and what constitutes an “expert in this space” is incredibly more subjective.
There are none.
When it comes to life advice, it's redundant to point out "lack of authority" when there is no authority body. No disclaimer is needed for life advice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21859353
For all you PG super fans: being a good (or great!) parent is the ultimate doing something that does not scale.
I'm not defending the snark. The link brings Twitter into Hacker News. All the social context comes with it. Getting reactions is the purpose of tweeting. Having reactions is the purpose of reading. Thoughtful long form comments are not.
I'm not part of the anti-pg crowd. I'm aware of where I am, I've read Hackers and painters and his blog ("essays"). But I prefer to think of him as a famous Lisp hacker and venture capitalist, not Peter Gregory from the Silicon Valley show.
It's not sound to build a cult around anyone.
Distilled: Parenthood is like the old military saying that no plan survives contact with the enemy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Does he really not get regularly lectured on morality by other adults? I certainly do, and I get a tiny fraction of such lectures compared to my wife...
older women who would be uncomfortable telling men that they are "doing it wrong"
Differing standards for moms and dads. I get kudos for doing anything with my kids. She gets told she is parenting wrong
I wonder where the culture is so different, or if this is a case of people reading into (ugh) "resting bitch face"
My two points are related. I recall hearing comments like that when my spouse and I had one infant child, and I remember taking them more personally, because it's easy as a new parent to feel like you should be doing more. Now if I hear someone comment on something I'm doing as a parent, it's just conversation, and I think the primary difference was my confidence in my own parenting ability.
It's too cold for shorts.
You're pushing that shopping cart wrong.
You need to wash your car.
That's a lot of ice cream in your shopping cart, maybe you should try eating something else.
Regularly - when the critic feels the object of their derision is out of earshot.
Parents presume what feedback they get and they're usually right.
The behavior of many adults isn't that far removed from the behavior of your average toddler. As a society we seem to have come to accept this as fairly normal though.
He’s surrounded by always happy “yes people” who validate but never really challenge him
He promises his kids extravagant trips, as if more air travel, as a reward for what exactly? Not like they’re curing cancer here, is what his kids future environment needs
Thanks, Graham. Glad your kids get to go. Please let the rest of us know how to live proper
He's a billionaire, so he's surrounded exclusively by sycophants.
I learned to say "I love you." It still gets an "I love you, too" nearly twenty years later by default. If I don't fuck up, I expect it will work on my deathbed. It probably helped that I often add "and am very very proud of you" when I've thought it's a good thing to say. Most recently by text across two thousand miles in the midst of a pandemic. Because I was. YMMV.
My own experience is this: (1) kids meticulously observe what their parents do in their "natural" state and get interested in that, however, (2) kids develop sort of "not for me" or even outright repulsion for things parents what them to excel at.
So the best way for kids to get interested in X is just to do that yourself all the time and let them approach you with questions while never let them feel that you are way too good at that. One technique is to do Conway style "blunders" while teaching something to kids. This apparently makes them feel that there is room for them to come in, contribute and think independently.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843693
You have to be very good to pull off that kind of move.
Only one really bit into it & he largely eclipsed my ability by the time he was 18.
The others found their own skill sets, mostly with stuff I suck at.
Edit: Interestingly, one is training as an electrician which is tangentially related to my skills. However, he came to that totally on his own.
His learning is best aided thru support, not influence.
I share a hobby with my great grandmother. I was never interested in it when my parents were involved with it, but on my own I still think of grandma when I’m making plans. It was just something she did, often while we were visiting.
VC playbook: build a portfolio of rapid growth companies, spread a bunch of cash around; expect most to fail but one or a few are huge successes in a short time frame; repeat.
Parent playbook: no real repeatable systems, slow organic growth, everyone succeeds, likely no unicorns, one-and-done.
You cannot engineer and scale parenting.
Here's a guy who thinks of his kids as products. And things he does and they do as features.
This pretty much applies to most advice doled out by the super rich for consumption by the to the general public.
From that generation - nearly all the worthwhile advice came from women.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
#### kodable https://www.kodable.com/
#### scratch https://scratch.mit.edu/
#### tynker https://www.tynker.com/
#### blackly https://developers.google.com/blockly/
####star logo http://education.mit.edu/starlogo-tng/
#### alice http://www.alice.org/index.php
#### kodu form microsofts https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/confirmation.aspx?i...
#### android app inventor http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/
#### kids ruby http://kidsruby.com/
#### Lua programming language https://www.lua.org/
Hardware programming for kids
Crumble https://redfernelectronics.co.uk/crumble/
BBC Micro:Bit https://microbit.org/
CodeBug http://www.codebug.org.uk/
I am an advisor