The author might like an illustrated summary of a talk given by Sir Ken Robinson about "Changing education paradigms"[0], which includes some of the essence of this article (particularly referring to studies about how many uses one person can think of for a paperclip)
I actually link to [0] in my text in the end when I say we should 'rethink education'. :) I did not know of the full talk, and I am very grateful for your link [1]!
I'm sorry I missed that! I did read the rest but must have been so eager to share that fascinating talk that I overlooked this mistake. Thanks for the article!
Following this article I would have to say my 2-year-old is obviously also a hacker and we should not imitate him because we have to spend all our time standing next to him ready to save his life when he does something really stupid to get the result he wants, but not well.
I agree, but you don't have to save 7 years old in the same way. :)
Your comment made me think, and I think my view may be all to hidden (between the lines) in my post.
I added this passage, which is more on-point, which I stand by:
My general point is that sometimes we're so focused on producing (2) 'an incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed' that we fail in (1) '[producing] what is needed, but not well' (and thus end up failing in general). In this respect, we should take inspiration from our seven-year-olds. In the best of worlds, we could take inspiration from them with regard to point 1, mentor them to respecting point 2 while making sure not to smother the essence of point 1 - not in them, nor in ourselves.
Also, I am not fully 'serious' with this post! I just thought it was cute, while also containing some interesting points. :)
One of my favorite sayings, first seen tacked on the door of a rock climbing school, explains it better:
---
Good judgement comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgement.
---
Of course, the trick is to ensure that the bad judgement is not bad enough to take you out of the game.
Seems that's what the parent is around for - let the kid explore while acting as the safety net.
Good judgement is an intuitive understanding of taking calculated risks. One gets this intuition by estimating risks. Experience is the litmus test or experiment which validates one’s risk estimates and checks how expectations aligned with reality.
Aren't all definitions arbitrary? If we would only go by how words are used 'in general', who would want to be a 'hacker'? ;) And I don't think the definition of 'hacker' in The Jargon File is just... arbitrary in the context of Hacker News? However, I am guilty as charged of making a very free, playful interpretation. Also, I am guilty as charged for trying to have a title that makes some people curious. I am sorry you did not like the post, but that's life! Cheers and thank you very much for reading!
Yes and people should try to skip definitions without context.
If you have technical document or research paper there are definitions at the start which are defined for the scope of a document or a paper. Those are still arbitrary but at least they have some value.
First off, having a seven year old, I thank you for your words. They resonate with me.
I think perhaps arguing about the arbitrary nature of definitions will devolve into pedantry. While you are completely correct (e.g. the meaning of "toilet" over time). There is perhaps a better current arbitrary word (mouth hole sound) that implies something deeper. There are immutable essences (or platonic forms) that cannot change that we have been describing with different language since the very beginning. It kind of reminds me of that scene in the matrix where Neo meets the machine father with his daughter who tells him how "love" is just a word. What it implies is what matters. It doesn't matter how you describe it visually or audibly, if you are communicating with someone else, and they are trying to understand you, the reason they ever can is because something exists independent of either communicator, and both have recognized that thing and are willing to acknowledge that.
Some people contribute to the Web with opinions using cutesy one-liners, some people attempt to explore subject matters in articles and thus sometimes fail, sometimes succeed.
Haha! I enjoyed your elegant reply. And yes, you're quite possibly right. When writing it I had many doubts, and they have still not left me. Perhaps this text did should not have been published.
Thank you, I've never thought about it but it takes great courage to show skill that may be judged as inferior. And most of the children skills are not of levels of adult. Adult skills are not as good as industry standards either. My position was "with experience grows skill" now I see it contains judgement. Which may be discouraging. Both to other and to myself.
Hmm. I liked your other reply. I don't agree with you upon this one. I write:
> It's sound that our children have us, adults, as role models, that they are inspired by us, by what we do, what we say, and by how we act. However, wiIt's sound that our children have us, adults, as role models, that they are inspired by us, by what we do, what we say, and by how we act. However, with regard to creativity and hacking, you don't have to spend much time building with lego, drawing, playing and discussing to realize that you won't match your seven-year-old in terms of getting things done, solving problems related to creative tasks.th regard to creativity and hacking, you don't have to spend much time building with lego, drawing, playing and discussing to realize that you won't match your seven-year-old in terms of getting things done, solving problems related to creative tasks.
[...]
> My general point is that sometimes we're so focused on producing (2) 'an incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed' that we fail in (1) '[producing] what is needed, but not well' (and thus end up failing in general). In this respect, we should take inspiration from our seven-year-olds.
But what you insinuate in your other reply may still be correct! Perhaps this usage makes the notion of a hack, hacker, hacking empty? I believe it's important to be able to say 'I am wrong'. And perhaps I am here. I have not decided what I think yet.
> As adults, we can't progress at the same speed as kids,
This is definitely not true. Adults have more trouble learning some kinds of new motor skills up to expert level, and if the physical skill requires e.g. extreme flexibility kids sometimes have a less fixed bone structure, but adults are a lot faster at getting to basic competence in new physical tasks by building from past experience, and for any other kind of skill adults can learn much faster than kids.
The real problem adults have vs. kids is available time to spend thinking about things (because they have other responsibilities), not raw learning speed.
True. Maybe we lose in the creative side of learning, but in the effectiveness and speed I would say we get better and better with years.
It's hard learning when you basically don't know a lot. But when you have a large knowledge base and you are building on it - you can learn really fast, basically just linking the information you already know and adding some bits.
But this is also true in the brain. A child's brain isn't limited by what it already knows.
Their brains are more flexible and don't have a "fixed [mental] structure", and this is why I think it's very important to promote and encourage creativity and passions from a young age.
There's a lot we can learn from kids, even if we need to filter some things through the wisdom that comes with age. Sometimes they have a tendency to have a machine-learning-esque approach to trying new things, which is fascinating to watch, and then how they take instructional guidance to alter their approach.
This might be an easy article to critique, but there's some good points to be gleamed.
“The real problem adults have vs. kids is available time to spend thinking about things (because they have other responsibilities), not raw learning speed.“
I think this is spot on. As adult you have a big pile of past experiences and responsibilities constantly keeping your mind busy. This makes learning new stuff hard.
Lately I have been making an effort to approach things with less worries and baggage. I make an effort to not think “I should be able to do this faster” or “this is useless” but instead just do it without too much thinking.
> My general point is that sometimes we're so focused on producing (2) 'an incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed' that we fail in (1) '[producing] what is needed, but not well' (and thus end up failing in general). In this respect, we should take inspiration from our seven-year-olds. In the best of worlds, we could take inspiration from them with regard to point 1, mentor them to respecting point 2 while making sure not to smother the essence of point 1 - not in them, nor in ourselves.
> Adults fail, seven-year-olds are just sad (in the moment) because they were not able to materialize some grande vision. This is two separate experiences; and perhaps this is precisely why seven-year-olds are better hackers than adults? …because they don't really fail?
Woah boy, this hit home. I really ought to get back in touch with my inner seven-year-old self.
I agree with this, and it's something that's been on my mind recently.
I've dabbled with trying to make a game over the last 5 years or so, and run into this problem every time. As a kid, I learned computer programming partially by making little Visual Basic programs and partially by making a couple dorky little 2D games.
At no point do I ever remember stepping back at my "work" and being frustrated to the point of giving up that whatever I was building didn't look like some professional thing I was trying to emulate.
I was mostly just happy that I could put something together, understand it and learn from it, and then see all the possibilities I could add to it and refine.
That feedback loop of "learn something new", "mess around with it", and then sort of spontaneously refine it and add new features, was super fun, and is what drove me to software engineering as a career.
For example, if I wanted to make a game, I would learn how to import a "sprite". I'd spend a little time drawing a crappy spaceship, and then be thrilled to see it on the screen, responding to key presses. Then, excitedly, I'd add an enemy. Then, "cool, I can have him shoot bullets and add to a counter every time I dodge one".
At no point did I say "my spaceship sucks, and I have no idea if I'm doing this scoring code right... I'm a loser and I'm done". I was having too much fun in the process for that.
But now? My attempts at making a game all start and stop with "I want to make an overhead shooter" and then I try to draw a pixel art spaceship and after a few hours of comparing what I do with the art in "real" games, get frustrated and give up. I want it to look and feel a certain way, and when I don't get that, I feel like the whole project is doomed to failure.
I don't feel this way with what I do professionally, which is primarily front and back end web and mobile app development. When I have to learn something new, I'm confident enough in my ability to learn and improve.
But my hobby stuff, and particularly artwork? Not happening, and I'm not sure how to get past this.
Some of this, I wonder, comes down to expectations of adults vs kids. As a kid, I never expected my stuff to be perfect or professional, and neither did anyone else.
Your picture of your kid's wall hit me. As a kid, I would proudly display my creations, and not care if someone nitpicked it. And of course, nobody did, because I was "just a kid".
But, honestly, if an adult proudly displayed a bunch of amateur artwork he/she drew, that would be really weird, right?
I'm capable of professional quality web development work, because it's what I've focused on for the last 6-8 years, but if someone were to see my amateur "pew pew" spaceship game, it would just be sad... if I haven't magically developed good skills here at this point of my life ("this point" being any point at which you are considered an adult), then I must just be bad at it, right?
I'm sure I can improve, but the combination of being embarrassed by everything I produce, along with a preoccupation with what everyone would think of it, and an impatience for being able to produce something good... it feels like a lot of barriers to get through.
And as a kid, I don't know what the "end goal" was, other than it was just fun to mess around. When I did release something online, I wasn't bothered by criticism and was happy at the praise, but mostly I just liked making the actual thing.
As an adult? Somehow the end goal feels like it's about the end result of releasing the thing, more so than the actual process of making it.
There's something about the lower expectations placed on a kid, and a lack of comparing everything I make to the gobs of talented people on Twitter or Pinterest, combined with a focus on the fun of just "messing around", that mak...
Thank you for reading and sharing your interesting story and your experiences! I am also struggling with what you describe, and this is why I wanted to play around with the notion of hack and hacker. The word in itself is no holy cow to me. I want to get better at just 'messing around'. And in this very limited sense, I do think kids should inspire us, and that a connection to hack-ish things exists. It's about a mentality, not only skills and knowledge. I lack your vast experience (I am a quite old junior front-end developer), so you can imagine what I feel when showing what I've done. Why should one be embarrassed? If you worked professionally for years on some application and had lots of experience and the app sucked, perhaps it would be motivated (or more reasonable to think, the team or management had issues) - but otherwise? I love this sentence: 'a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well.' I read it is a description of a mentality, a quite amateur-sh DIY spirit. Or at least it was fun to play around with the meaning in that way.
42 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] thread[0] RSA Animate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
[1] Full talk (55 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCbdS4hSa0s
Your comment made me think, and I think my view may be all to hidden (between the lines) in my post.
I added this passage, which is more on-point, which I stand by:
My general point is that sometimes we're so focused on producing (2) 'an incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed' that we fail in (1) '[producing] what is needed, but not well' (and thus end up failing in general). In this respect, we should take inspiration from our seven-year-olds. In the best of worlds, we could take inspiration from them with regard to point 1, mentor them to respecting point 2 while making sure not to smother the essence of point 1 - not in them, nor in ourselves.
Also, I am not fully 'serious' with this post! I just thought it was cute, while also containing some interesting points. :)
I am very grateful for your comment! Cheers!
Of course, the trick is to ensure that the bad judgement is not bad enough to take you out of the game.
Seems that's what the parent is around for - let the kid explore while acting as the safety net.
If you have technical document or research paper there are definitions at the start which are defined for the scope of a document or a paper. Those are still arbitrary but at least they have some value.
I think perhaps arguing about the arbitrary nature of definitions will devolve into pedantry. While you are completely correct (e.g. the meaning of "toilet" over time). There is perhaps a better current arbitrary word (mouth hole sound) that implies something deeper. There are immutable essences (or platonic forms) that cannot change that we have been describing with different language since the very beginning. It kind of reminds me of that scene in the matrix where Neo meets the machine father with his daughter who tells him how "love" is just a word. What it implies is what matters. It doesn't matter how you describe it visually or audibly, if you are communicating with someone else, and they are trying to understand you, the reason they ever can is because something exists independent of either communicator, and both have recognized that thing and are willing to acknowledge that.
About the later part: yes, I actually agree!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3jfDT5Rx30
> It's sound that our children have us, adults, as role models, that they are inspired by us, by what we do, what we say, and by how we act. However, wiIt's sound that our children have us, adults, as role models, that they are inspired by us, by what we do, what we say, and by how we act. However, with regard to creativity and hacking, you don't have to spend much time building with lego, drawing, playing and discussing to realize that you won't match your seven-year-old in terms of getting things done, solving problems related to creative tasks.th regard to creativity and hacking, you don't have to spend much time building with lego, drawing, playing and discussing to realize that you won't match your seven-year-old in terms of getting things done, solving problems related to creative tasks. [...]
> My general point is that sometimes we're so focused on producing (2) 'an incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed' that we fail in (1) '[producing] what is needed, but not well' (and thus end up failing in general). In this respect, we should take inspiration from our seven-year-olds.
But what you insinuate in your other reply may still be correct! Perhaps this usage makes the notion of a hack, hacker, hacking empty? I believe it's important to be able to say 'I am wrong'. And perhaps I am here. I have not decided what I think yet.
This is definitely not true. Adults have more trouble learning some kinds of new motor skills up to expert level, and if the physical skill requires e.g. extreme flexibility kids sometimes have a less fixed bone structure, but adults are a lot faster at getting to basic competence in new physical tasks by building from past experience, and for any other kind of skill adults can learn much faster than kids.
The real problem adults have vs. kids is available time to spend thinking about things (because they have other responsibilities), not raw learning speed.
Their brains are more flexible and don't have a "fixed [mental] structure", and this is why I think it's very important to promote and encourage creativity and passions from a young age.
There's a lot we can learn from kids, even if we need to filter some things through the wisdom that comes with age. Sometimes they have a tendency to have a machine-learning-esque approach to trying new things, which is fascinating to watch, and then how they take instructional guidance to alter their approach.
This might be an easy article to critique, but there's some good points to be gleamed.
I think this is spot on. As adult you have a big pile of past experiences and responsibilities constantly keeping your mind busy. This makes learning new stuff hard. Lately I have been making an effort to approach things with less worries and baggage. I make an effort to not think “I should be able to do this faster” or “this is useless” but instead just do it without too much thinking.
> Adults fail, seven-year-olds are just sad (in the moment) because they were not able to materialize some grande vision. This is two separate experiences; and perhaps this is precisely why seven-year-olds are better hackers than adults? …because they don't really fail?
Woah boy, this hit home. I really ought to get back in touch with my inner seven-year-old self.
I've dabbled with trying to make a game over the last 5 years or so, and run into this problem every time. As a kid, I learned computer programming partially by making little Visual Basic programs and partially by making a couple dorky little 2D games.
At no point do I ever remember stepping back at my "work" and being frustrated to the point of giving up that whatever I was building didn't look like some professional thing I was trying to emulate.
I was mostly just happy that I could put something together, understand it and learn from it, and then see all the possibilities I could add to it and refine.
That feedback loop of "learn something new", "mess around with it", and then sort of spontaneously refine it and add new features, was super fun, and is what drove me to software engineering as a career.
For example, if I wanted to make a game, I would learn how to import a "sprite". I'd spend a little time drawing a crappy spaceship, and then be thrilled to see it on the screen, responding to key presses. Then, excitedly, I'd add an enemy. Then, "cool, I can have him shoot bullets and add to a counter every time I dodge one".
At no point did I say "my spaceship sucks, and I have no idea if I'm doing this scoring code right... I'm a loser and I'm done". I was having too much fun in the process for that.
But now? My attempts at making a game all start and stop with "I want to make an overhead shooter" and then I try to draw a pixel art spaceship and after a few hours of comparing what I do with the art in "real" games, get frustrated and give up. I want it to look and feel a certain way, and when I don't get that, I feel like the whole project is doomed to failure.
I don't feel this way with what I do professionally, which is primarily front and back end web and mobile app development. When I have to learn something new, I'm confident enough in my ability to learn and improve.
But my hobby stuff, and particularly artwork? Not happening, and I'm not sure how to get past this.
Some of this, I wonder, comes down to expectations of adults vs kids. As a kid, I never expected my stuff to be perfect or professional, and neither did anyone else.
Your picture of your kid's wall hit me. As a kid, I would proudly display my creations, and not care if someone nitpicked it. And of course, nobody did, because I was "just a kid".
But, honestly, if an adult proudly displayed a bunch of amateur artwork he/she drew, that would be really weird, right?
I'm capable of professional quality web development work, because it's what I've focused on for the last 6-8 years, but if someone were to see my amateur "pew pew" spaceship game, it would just be sad... if I haven't magically developed good skills here at this point of my life ("this point" being any point at which you are considered an adult), then I must just be bad at it, right?
I'm sure I can improve, but the combination of being embarrassed by everything I produce, along with a preoccupation with what everyone would think of it, and an impatience for being able to produce something good... it feels like a lot of barriers to get through.
And as a kid, I don't know what the "end goal" was, other than it was just fun to mess around. When I did release something online, I wasn't bothered by criticism and was happy at the praise, but mostly I just liked making the actual thing.
As an adult? Somehow the end goal feels like it's about the end result of releasing the thing, more so than the actual process of making it.
There's something about the lower expectations placed on a kid, and a lack of comparing everything I make to the gobs of talented people on Twitter or Pinterest, combined with a focus on the fun of just "messing around", that mak...