One thing neither this article nor the linked study measure is if there is a difference in this behavior between boys and girls. I looked through the actual article to see if there was a statement that said if there was a statistical difference between the two or not, but although they do specify the numbers for the genders of the participants in the study, none of the analysis does any comparison between the genders.
It would be fascinating to see if there are gender differences in this behavior in childhood and adulthood and compare childhood and adulthood.
They weren't testing that hypothesis, so that's why they didn't do this. If you go back and torture the data like this, you'll get acne from green jellybeans.
For anyone interested in this type of stuff, I can recommend reading Drive.
Briefly, human behaviour can be motivated for extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. The rewards in this article are extrinsic motivators. Exploring is rewarding in an intrinsic way; it is a strive towards autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
In adults (and in older children) applying extrinsic motivators kills intrinsic motivation. Once the extrinsic motivators stop coming in, there is no desire left to do the task. Intrinsic motivation is practically infinite, as long as the environment is set up right to enable it.
Extrinsic motivation also tends to produce behaviour that does the bare minimum to get the reward (or avoid the negative consequences) whereas intrinsic motivation is what makes us want to excel.
Of course, I've skipped many important points and not countered any counterargument here, but I recommend reading Drive first if you think you disagree.
But the worst part of it all?
The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.
Also Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards, a thick tome dedicated to the research and reasons of how and why punishment and rewards don’t teach what’s intended and don’t motivate as intended... and how extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation.
Withdrawing rewards is punishment so both are really the same.
Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe.
If your kid is good at something and you want them to lose interest, encourage or reward them for doing the thing :)
Punished by Rewards is in my reading heap but rather far down. Maybe I should prioritise it slightly higher.
> Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe.
I'd just want to add that according to Drive, training humans like rats and birds work great... If blind obedience, conformity, and minimal quality is something you're looking for -- which many factory line type managers wanted, for a very long time (and in many cases probably still do, sadly.)
Damnit, if Punished by Rewards contradicts this, I have to read it now, don't I?
I'm currently reading Punished by Rewards. So far I would say that Punished by Rewards is broadly consistent with how you describe Drive.
Alfie Kohn acknowledges that where the work is low skill, very dull, requires little collaboration, rewards generally work for as long as the rewards continue.
But employee of the month? Stack ranking? Basically they're just going to destroy any intrinsic motivation, and lead to teams where people are reluctant to collaborate.
They are consistent... controlling people with punishment and rewards works, as long as the incentive is present, at the cost of destroying intrinsic motivation. It also changes the relationship, positioning the “manager” as a prison guard of sorts and tying them to that role.
It teaches its subjects to do the thing but only if they get the reward and never otherwise. To comply, but only when watched, and to act in secret when fulfilling their true needs.
His book focuses on parenting and one can see how punishment and rewards impact this most important relationship and negatively impact intrinsic motivation in exchange for the illusion of control.
Engage yourself in what they are doing. Describe what you see. Tell them what that makes you feel. Be objective, rather than judging of their performance.
"You have been trying to find that bug for hours. That's true perseverance!"
"I like the sound effects you added. They really draw me into the game even more."
"It sounds like you're using a technology you haven't before. Trying is the only way to learn new things."
"This runs so smoothly!"
Also, ask questions.
"How did you get the enemy to follow my character?"
"I feel like the game is unfair when I die here. Is there anything you can do to make this section not so difficult?"
"I understood what I was meant to do right away. Can you think of why that was?"
Note how you don't even have to be positive when you do it this way. Simply sharing the experience goes a long way. Encouraging critical thought and decision-making makes it even better.
Then again, if one is more interested in practically applicable tips, the book How To Talk So Kids Will Listen... And Listen So Kids Will Talk is great too -- for all kinds of interpersonal relationships.
It covers empathy (actually listening and confirming feelings) but is largely about how to enable extrinsic motivation, through encouraging autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
One rather concrete example is that the authors argue it is no good to say, e.g. "if you take a bath you'll get this nice gift" or "if you don't take a bath I will remove your video gaming time for the day."
More effective, according to the authors, are to give a choice, even if it is somewhat of a forced one: "I want you to take a bath. Do you want to bathe with your boat or your duck?"
This, then, would speak to the same desire to explore as the hidden option in the article. (Or, the way I view it having read Drive: this gives the child a hint of autonomy.)
But it's great! They learn to pick-up when they're 'tricked' and they learn to chose.
Man, I remember when I started deciding things for myself... at 16-17! 'so you want to go to prep school, university, or eng. school?' WTF I don't even know what I want for dinner... I feel this is something that needs to be trained the soonest possible. See what you feel when asked to chose. Decide something. See how you feel when you've taken option A or B (or feel when you don't like any of the available options! And learn to think outside the box!). See what happens when you change your mind before you started A. Or after you've started B and think 'I should have done A'. With your parents, friends, teachers. It's amazing how teaching this to my little kids with a positive and caring attitude has shown me how hard and important it all is! And it's even harder for collective decisions!
Something amazing for twin children: they also have the opportunity (or the burden sometimes) to see how their choices affect others and how important negociating, defending, compromising is.
Those books that GP cited are gold. The whole Positive Education movement is, I think, a way to a better future, with balanced and reasonable members of the citizenry. And I ache for all the children with have parents that don't even have the tiniest bit of empathy and interest for their children.
> More effective, according to the authors, are to give a choice, even if it is somewhat of a forced one: "I want you to take a bath. Do you want to bathe with your boat or your duck?"
This can be so surprisingly effective that it is almost scary. And while I'm at it: it works with many adults too.
Use with caution. Leadership is good and kids needs to go to bed at night, but manipulation isn't what you want to be remembered for.
Other nice-to-knows to be used with caution:
- as kids start to negotiate, add slack for negotiations.
- "catch them" when they do something right, reward it immediately (with encouraging words, a hug, increased trust - or even a piece of chocolate)
- look for the intentions - or anything that was right even if the intent wasn't there:
-- tried to do something right but failed? Good! (On the other side: there's few things as discouraging as gettig a scolding when you thought you did something good.)
-- used to slam the door but closed it carefully for some reason (hands full, in the phone, etc)? Good.
I did teach a kid math and how subtle communication is when you're an adult.
sometimes they'll talk, then mutter to confusion then emit blips because they heard words coming from you, then all of a sudden they'll have a burst of excitement again.
This describes 'work' life pretty well, with extrinsic motivation being a salary. If that spigot were shut off there certainly would be little desire to do the task for most.
True as that may be, I think the argument that resonated with me is that there is an even more primitive type of motivation than extrinsic: the drive to survive. (Or, more generally, physical and emotional needs.)
Under that hypothesis, the salary is there to take physical needs as a motivator off the table. If an employee has to worry about physical needs, there's no room at all for any other concern.
Once the salary is sufficient to no longer be a point of worry (will I afford my mortgage, can I support my spouse, etc) only then will additional money serve as extrinsic motivation.
(Which of course spells disaster for things like performance bonuses, which (a) are impossible to target at the right people (see Deming for more on that) and (b) literally designed to stop coming, reducing motivation overall.)
I think for most people a salary is just the constant, like air. You get it and it’s the reason you show up everyday.
But your salary doesn’t change if you work hard or slack. It’s not a reward for performance.
Similar to how you’d die without breathing but you don’t feel rewarded for every breath. You wouldn’t breathe more than someone else to get more alive.
> But your salary doesn’t change if you work hard or slack. It’s not a reward for performance.
Maybe not in an immediate sense, but working hard ostensibly makes it more likely to get promoted to a position with a higher salary, while slacking ostensibly makes it more likely to get demoted or fired.
Of course, I say "ostensibly" because the real world doesn't really work like that, with hard workers getting shafted and lazy pricks schmoozing and politicking their way into the very positions those hard workers should've gotten. It'd be disheartening, but it happens to be a decent treatment for my impostor syndrome: everyone else is an impostor, too, so might as well just play along.
is mastery a new word that's come up in education? i can't help but (red) flag that word in the context of teaching children these days, maybe before the wrong people have said it.
The only person I've heard say "mastery" are Betsy devos (when she was getting grilled by warren at her senate confirmation) and some religious conservatives i know that homeschool their children.
My general impression is that it's a marketing gimmick by carter schools that want to show they're somehow innovating in education. This is probably all horse shit as the longer term outcomes in devos type schools are really bad (see: michigan).
anyway, it's a flag. probably a big red one.
I doubt it's taken seriously by regular school teachers whos models come from Columbia university.
First I’ve heard of this, just copied a section from the linked Wikipedia page:
> The Chicago Mastery Learning Reading program was criticized for a focus on testing. A concern is that children were taught to pass tests without a focus on enduring skills. The duration of the retention of skills was questioned.
I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. However many children lack one or more of those factors. For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed. There is no intrinsic motivation for most children to learn all the subjects taught in school. I think the school system is fairly good at forcing all children to learn at least a little about all subjects. This comes at the price of not optimally supporting students who would do much better in a different kind of system.
> I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education.
I ain't vain enough to consider myself even "fairly intelligent", but I can say that I ain't very self-motivated, nor have I been since elementary school, and in hindsight my education system's insistence on strangling such intrinsic motivation in favor of extrinsic motivation is exactly what killed said self-motivation. "Grades are all that matter, and mine ain't anywhere near good enough to go to a good college, so why bother trying?"
It's something I'm actively working on trying to fix to this day, but old habits die hard.
Decent high school grades are not that hard to get. It's not 'strangulation' to have to take 'English, Geography, History and Math'. I wish I had paid more attention in English class, I did not respect how important it was going to be until later in life, for example.
The course load in Eng. or in Grad School - now that can be overwhelming to the point of exhaustion.
Your experience mirrors mine, but it's not like that for everyone. There's a group of people for which a given level of highschool education is going to be a crushing workload. Minimising their effort doesn't help them to get to a better mindset, so why do it at all?
Decent Eng Grad School grades are not that hard to get. It's not 'exhausting' to have to take 'Electrodynamics, Orbital Mechanics, or Geophysics' I wish I would have paid more attention in Project Management class, I did not respect how important it was going to be until later in life, for example.
Your version sounds stupid, because Electrodynamics and Orbital Mechanics are notoriously difficult classes where even those who passed them use expressions like "working hard" and "difficult". And many students actually fail them.
High schoool English, Geography, History and Math is referenced as easy by many students. Typical student does not have a problem to pass that class.
English, Math, History and Geography at the high school level are fairly straight forward, and the subjects are important to a rounded character. They really are not hard.
Most of Grad school is utterly gruelling, there isn't time to sleep, students pulled in different directions, and studying mostly arcane subjects that really are not important to anyone.
> Decent high school grades are not that hard to get.
"Decent" high school grades are seldom adequate to even meet acceptance requirements for "good" colleges, let alone actually compete with the straight-A students also applying to said colleges.
Not that this really does anything to address the broader point: that "get into college because you'll make more money" is one of many extrinsic motivators American schools seem to push in order to strangle intrinsic motivators.
Right, but the other 99.9% of people don’t go to a “good” college. Plenty of ones that are considered quite good by the Little Folk—the mere commoners—can be attended with grades far from a 4.0 and nothing special in the extracurriculars department, if your test scores are decent (and I assure you, the cutoff for lots of them is way under what you’d consider good)
It's easy to say that now, we being adults long out of high school. Do you really expect a high schooler to understand that? I sure as hell didn't back then (my guidance counselor strongarmed me into a curriculum specifically around meeting UC and CSU requirements, despite me having nowhere near the GPA to get into any such school), and thus admission into a 4-year university was an extrinsic motivator that seemed unrealistic and was therefore ineffective.
Well, I only left high school last year... I don't think it's impossible to at least guess this. I think I got very lucky in realising that the school's goals (push me to university) were not aligned with my own.
The forced cadence of certain topics actually does have a part to play. Imagine if you could have skipped all those English classes back then. Guess what? You would be learning it all right now! Just like you're _re_learning it right now. Why? Because you now have intrinsic motivation to learn it. Having entirely skipped it, you might even have realized a lot sooner the actual need instead of limping along with whatever informational crutches you managed to walk away with. The fact that we leave little room to teach the need of a subject, and force feed it in a prescribed manner rather than allowing exploration, is all commingled together into the failure mode being discussed.
Allowing children to pick what they want to explore and modeling the education after exploration is part of the baseline for Montessori education.
" Imagine if you could have skipped all those English classes back then. Guess what? You would be learning it all right now!"
No, no way.
It's a total misunderstanding of education to contemplate this.
Education is not 'some facts and things you learn that you may use later'.
Education at HS level is much more fundamental than that, particularly English.
It's about communicating, developing ideas, writing. Not only is it essential, it takes quite a lot of time and effort, and it's hard to just 'pick up'.
I have an Angel investor friend who just set up his own basic website (simple is fine) and wrote his own little intro copy. It's atrocious. Basically, in four sentences in writing, he reveals his own lack of education to anyone who cares to read. I mean - it's not 'that that bad' - but it really is sub professional and embarrassing. He's otherwise very smart, very educated, but it turns out he can't string together a few tightly coherent sentences to make a point.
There's no 'going back'. Both of should have paid more attention in school.
I do agree with he cadence, I think that school days should be shorter, and there should be more music and sports, shop class and longer term projects.
I agree with you. I did intend for that as a thought experiment, but I didn't make that clear. However, the part about teaching the need before the material and leaving time for exploration I'm very serious about. I think it's the biggest change we could make to the system without completely breaking the current structure of it.
I am not pursuing a PhD in pure math so I certainly have both interest and ability in doing academic stuff but I found it incredibly hard to get acceptable grades in high school.
> I am not pursuing a PhD in pure math so I certainly have both interest and ability in doing academic stuff
I don't see how the second half of the sentence follows from the first half. Did that "not" slip in by accident? Or do you consider a PhD in pure maths to be evidence of not having academic ability?
I did too. But I've gotten much better at studying/learning over the years, and I attribute my high school problems with grades as a combination of ADD and my head being focused on trying to deal with what, in retrospect, were psychological problems. What I needed back then was a really great therapist and some training in mindfulness meditation. Alas.
I think this has shifted somewhat to the standardized tests mattering quite a bit now these days.
Should we not consider alternative methods or options for education? What should everything be concentrated into one public model that follows one national standard?
Right. You're touching on another important factor: everyone, and especially children, want to belong to a group. They do this by adopting values similar to their peers.
When those peer groups have values that include playing video games and exclude exploring learning, it's very hard to motivate members of the group to explore learning. I don't actually have any data on this, but I suspect that applies even under extrinsic motivators. In other words, telling the cool kids who hate school that they will get bad grades if they don't learn more will not make them learn more. It will simply become a badge of honour to have bad grades.
Perhaps the single most important job of a teacher is to attempt to create a single group of the class[1] with which every student identifies, and then imbue that group with the value of learning.
I don't think the way to do this is by promising rewards (good grades) for good performance (doing exactly what the teacher asks.) The way to do it is to encourage self-directed exploration and mastery, with a sense of a greater good. (This sounds like something out of an Italian-inspired educational philosophy, but as far as I'm concerned, it's just rather simple reasoning from the principles of motivation and social behaviour as we know them.)
In the end, this is a really tough problem. If children are convinced (based on interactions with their peer groups) that learning sucks, then it's really hard to change their mind. This goes for adults as well. I'm not saying there's a magic formula to make everything work out right.
What I'm saying is that there are two insufficient and contradictory methods. I think one of them is slightly less bad than the other one.
[1]: It might sound like creating multiple groups would be easier and accomplish the same thing, but the danger with that is that small natural variations in the value of learning between these groups could get exaggerated in an attempt to create group identities. I.e. if one group is just about considered more school-happy than the other group, then that will become a point both groups can use to distinguish between themselves: one group will intentionally become more ignorant of the benefits of learning to separate its members from the other. It has to be one single group for them to all adopt the same value of learning.
Edit: I almost forgot. For more on this, see The Nurture Assumption – well worth a read.
I also think this is so important and so often improperly addressed in various articles about 'how kids should be taught'. I think most of us who founds 'groups' growing up can relate to this. There is almost an inevitable tendency as well for some form of contrarian group to form, perhaps it's some kind of law of social evolution that some percentage of any assembly of people will not conform and create groups around themselves which will go against the grain. No matter how good your intentions are.
But when it comes to kids, the problems I see are that (a) cognitively speaking, children are not tiny adults; and (b) if you want them to be successful and happy adults, you need to give kids the ability to work through mountains of "I Need To Do This Even Though It Sucks"
Cognitive development is an amazing process to watch -- you can see as brains grow and develop a wide variety of skills we take for granted.
But what that means is that you can't treat a six-year-old as an adult.
Their thinking is likely highly egocentric, because they have not yet developed the ability to realize that "my feelings and wants" are different from "other peoples' feelings and wants".
In their world, when they like Pokemon, they literally believe that everybody in the world feels the same way about Pokemon that they do. They just haven't yet gained the ability to handle that concept.
So, up to age eleven or so, you need to put enough structure around children to deal with their cognitive development path. Rules that are consistently enforced are critical (it's also good if those rules, in fact, make sense), with a gradual loosening of constraints as the child grows the ability to handle greater responsibilities.
This path continues from eleven -- when, cognitively, your child is now a functioning adult -- onwards towards the age of majority.
You still need to provide structure, but with enough freedom and ability to bend-or-change the rules such that the child can learn how to make their own decisions. Your goal is ramp them towards the full set of adult responsibilities, as quickly as they are able to handle it.
The problem with a lot of "traditional" education is that it failed to do the latter in a lot of ways -- rigid structure until age of majority, and then bam!, you're an adult, good luck.
This is compounded by how much regulation and how little slack there is in society. In the 70s, teenagers commonly brought rifles to school (because they were on the shooting team, or going hunting afterwards). Nowadays, kids are getting expelled for accidentally forgetting a tiny, micro-sized pocketknife.
The problem with "modern" education is that there is no expectation that you will ever assume responsibility. If you've dealt with a lot of recent graduates, you probably know what I mean. They have been denied much of the experience required for them to mature as adults, all in the name of keeping them "safe".
Including being "safe" from boredom. Which relates to giving kids the ability to get through mountains of drudgery.
That skill is so critical.
And I didn't really master it until I was an adult, much to my disadvantage.
If Elon Musk and every one of his employees were to vanish tomorrow, I'd be sad. SpaceX is cool. But my life would go on.
If the organization that handles sewage for my city were to vanish tomorrow, I would soon be, quite literally, in a world of shit.
I doubt that working for a sewage treatment plant offers much in the way of Autonomy. Mastery, perhaps? Purpose, absolutely.
And I doubt most kids grow up dreaming of being a waste engineer.
It's a hard job, and it demands grit. But that job makes modern life possible, and I don't see us setting up kids to be able to tackle both kinds of challenges.
> I doubt that working for a sewage treatment plant offers much in the way of Autonomy.
I wouldn't be so sure. I think Deming (and, perhaps more concretely, the Toyota Production System) has showed us that there is a surprising amount of autonomy that can be unlocked even for the most menial roles.
Treating low-level workers with respect, training them well, and listening to what they have to say is a mutually beneficial agreement. They are the people who know what is really going on in the processes they control. They are (or at least should be!) the most informed people in the room when it comes to decisions around those processes.
In exchange for their valuable input, low-level workers should, then, get a piece of autonomy. If they have figured out a way to prevent mistakes, or a more efficient procedure to accomplish their objective, they can do it their way – with the support of management. Of course, if they know they aren't respected or listened to, it will never occur to them even to think about improvements.
There is some fascinating research on how children think vs adults. Adults use much more their frontal cortex (responsible for rational thought). However, when children experience trauma, e.g. abuse they will use much more their frontal cortex. The kicker is that those kids when they become adults use the frontal cortex much less, thus becoming more impulsive less rational.
Just saying, in Europe kids didn't bring rifles to school in the 70s and they are not getting expelled for accidentally bringing in pocket knives nowadays.
> However many children lack one or more of those factors. For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed.
To be fair, even for an intelligent and educated person it's prettty likely to end with a worse benefit footprint to the world (environmentally & socially) than being with friends and playing video games / smoking weed.
As someone who in his (mandatory in my country) social year worked with "difficult" kids: for nearly every kid there is intrinsic motivations you can find. Of course that isn't easy and requires much more teachers and a bit more flexibility when it comes to which topics to learn, but good education is making every bodies life better and should be IMO much higher valued both in societal and monetary terms.
> for nearly every kid there is intrinsic motivations you can find
I think this can be generalized to all humans. It would be near impossible for a true lack of intrinsic motivation to have made it through evolutionary selection.
Like you say, what matters is matching the child's potential with what is available in their current environment, and institutional schooling might be a very blunt tool for that. Not only it is necessarily inadequate for every individual kid, it can also occupy too much time and deprive them from the opportunity to experiment and explore to their niche in society in their unstructured free time.
For the case of suicide there is a potential mechanism in which there is a benefit for genes to pass. We can imagine a hardship scenario in which removal of oneself leaves more resources to the remainder of one’s group, which is likely to be their kin and have shared genes. In this case suicide would be adaptive for the genes to pass on. This is nor far fetched because we see other self sacrifice behavior (e.g. between parents and offspring) too.
True lack of motivation both consumes resources and doesn’t contribute to back to the individual or group survival. It is a mode of being that approximates non-living with extra costs. And to be clear I am not talking about a temporary state like depression, or a disease state like chronic depression. I just can’t imagine a permanently stagnant reservoir of genes really passing on without any form of intrinsic motivation. Even at the lowest end of mammalian bioeconomics like sloths, there is motivation, if is just fulfilled it with a different strategy.
People almost never commit suicide for "leaving more resources to the tribe". They do because they are complex persons living in a complex environment that is radically different from the savannahs for which our genes evolved.
Likewise, your evolutionary arguments for motivation are equally useless. Evolution takes place on much larger timescales than the changes in our environment. 3000 years is almost nothing in terms of meaningful evolution through natural selection, and the world has drastically changed in the last 400, or 150, or even 70!
> People almost never commit suicide for "leaving more resources to the tribe". They do because they are complex persons living in a complex environment that is radically different from the savannahs for which our genes evolved.
We are not talking about why people might be committing suicide now, we are talking about how the genetic disposition for suicadility might have passed along. To give context, 50% of the people will seriously have suicidal thoughts in their lifetime for about a week or two (so few actually do).
> Likewise, your evolutionary arguments for motivation are equally useless.
You misunderstand. We are not talking about an environment - gene mismatch, therefore the timescales are not relevant at all. I am positing a near impossibility of complete lack of intrinsic motivation to have passed genetically, regardless of timescale or even species.
But identical arguments to the suicide-logic can be made about a lack of intrinsic motivation - someone without intrinsic motivation but who is easily externally motivated could be a great asset to a group with more plans than people to enact them. I could imagine plenty of situations where strong intrinsic motivation relative to external motivation could be detrimental to either the individual or the group.
That is a fair point. But wouldn't an intrinsic motivation for group conformity be a competitive advantage here, instead of being coerced or convinced for it? For example ants must have high intrinsic motivation for following the group, they don't need to be motivated or convinced. Likewise, humans come with factory settings for many prosocial behaviors somewhat instinctively (e.g. mother-infant behavior), therefore the group benefit and intrinsic motivations being in alignment can be a selective advantage.
Can be certainly, but I'm not convinced it would be a selective advantage in all situations - when being coerced by a more powerful human or group of humans for example, it may be most adaptive to be pliant to the extrinsic motivation for co-operation but maintain an intrinsic motivation to act against the coercer's interest.
You too. I doubt suicidal tendencies are generally a danger without extrinsic factors and I don't think the current structure of our society could be called "natural" in a way that behaves neutral to evolutionary selection.
The argument would propose that desensitization is mostly preferable, which is probably false if you look at particularly gifted people.
I don't like evolutionary arguments because society changes much faster than genetic adaption can keep up with. There was no industry making money off distracting people when our intrinsic motivation system was shaped.
Certainly our environment changes very fast but assuming all adaptation has to happen in the genetic space is fallacious. Humans are already the most generalist species ever existed; even at the most basic level we can live in environments ranging from deserts to arctic, just using our bodies we can locomote through walking, climbing, swimming, and on top of that our offsprings take the most time to raise because so much of our adaptive machinery is installed memetically on that generalist hardware (genes). Besides, even the society we change is part of our niche construction, so we do have influence over it. Maybe not huge as single individuals, but that industry making money off distracting people is still our own making, not a "force of nature", and most of what is done by us can be undone by us.
I think the major obstacle here is the cost. Since intrinsic motivators vary a lot from person to person, the program has to be customized for individual learners. Unless every kid has an individual tutor or something, this isn't feasible. Most education problems are basically a money problem.
Even if most students suck as tutors (which they probably do – tutoring is difficult), the benefits outweigh the problems by a big margin. Most importantly, it allows each student the desired individual focus. But it also improves the tutors' memories of the classes they used to take.
I'm baffled it's not more widely employed in lower education. (Higher education seems to get it right by using former students as TAs. Although then it happens against payment. I'd argue for simply making it part of the regular curriculum.)
Teaching is such a valuable skill in itself! And, it can be improved. I'd argue that you can't say that you understand something unless you can explain it to someone a step away from your current level of depth in the domain.
Now, imagine every developer spend 5%, 1% of their (coding) time learning how to teach or communicate ideas in a succinct, empathetic way.
We'd not only have less 40yo ranting at some 15yo project, because they used React, but also the quality of our work would improve drastically.
Very bad analogy. Yes, for almost all skills, just doing them improves your proficiency. For example, toddlers learn primarily by mimicking their parents, replicating their behaviour.
The exception to this is skills that will kill you if you get in over your head. But that's a rather small category of skills, and it only calls for supervision, not avoidance.
As for tutoring itself: it increases the skill level of both the teacher and the student. The student gets 1-on-1 directed focus, and the teacher is forced to reflect more deeply on his own skills. Having students teach each other is very beneficial at all levels of education.
> As for tutoring itself: it increases the skill level of both the teacher and the student.
As someone who was a kid in that position, no it did not increased my skill in thing I was supposed to teach at all. That might happen when you are teaching interested peer at similar level, does not happen when you are teaching someone uninterested and someone who has much lower skills.
> For example, toddlers learn primarily by mimicking their parents, replicating their behaviour.
That body of knowledge wears off after you are like 3. Then explicit teaching by parents and other adults becomes much more prominent. And even toddlers are explicit taught a lot.
> Very bad analogy. Yes, for almost all skills, just doing them improves your proficiency.
Only up to the pretty low level for most people and most activities. After that, you reach a plateau.
It makes no sense to blame a bad outcome on the student being uninterested and of lower skill. As a tutor, you have exactly two jobs:
1. Make the student interested.
2. Improve the student's skills.
Of course the student is uninterested and has low skills when you start out. Otherwise there wouldn't be much of a point to the activity.
You might argue that it's not the tutor's job to make the student interested, but it is. The primary thing that sets good tutors apart from bad ones is their ability to motivate their students. To care. To fiendishly ask questions that are just out of reach of the students ability, or will reveal some tiny flaw in the students understanding. This type of thing engages everyone when done well.
(I did have a source for this but I seem to have lost it. That is a shame because it was a really good article.)
So now, you are blaming another kid for failure to be perfect tutor where adult educated teacher failed too. And that good kid is supposed to study out tutoring methods from materials targeted at adults. Which is definitely not fun free exploration for that good kid.
Which is why literally this whole setup where you have good students tutoring weak ones is a trap and punishment for the good one.
Expecting well behaved kid to be that emphatetic mind reading tutor is waaay beyond age appropriate expectations and abilities of typical kid.
I think you'll find better discussions if you choose to attack the steel man version of someone's argument, rather than the straw man.
Nowhere did I state I expected any expert tutors from children. I merely said that something, anything at all, is better than nothing. It might not even be better in all cases, but on average, the evidence tells us it is.
Literally in the comment I responded to, you expect student tutor to make the subject interesting. This is your description of what you expect: To fiendishly ask questions that are just out of reach of the students ability, or will reveal some tiny flaw in the students understanding. This type of thing engages everyone when done well.
Plus, this is your attitude toward kid tutoring another kid: as a tutor, you have exactly two jobs: Make the student interested. Improve the student's skills. And you have this expectation placed on a kid.
> I merely said that something, anything at all, is better than nothing.
That something is to put responsibility on a kid and then blame a kid for not tutoring well enough it it fails. And I am telling you that it is unfair to punish the good kid by doing this. Because this plan is not caring about the "good" kid at at all.
To fiendishly ask questions that are just out of reach of the students ability, or will reveal some tiny flaw in the students understanding. This type of thing engages everyone when done well.
What you are describing is out of range for peer tutoring (child-to-child) which is what I was thinking of. For children, the motivation for the task doesn't need to come from the subject matter itself, the very fact that a friend/peer is working with you can be all the motivation you need.
> We'd not only have less 40yo ranting at some 15yo project, because they used React, but also the quality of our work would improve drastically.
I’m not sure what you have against people in their 40s but, it might be worth it to spend 5% of your time learning to respect and have empathy for them.
Whoa, I meant something completely different! My point was that when you're in your 40s your emotional intelligence is probably well developed.
Context: As I was replying to this post I saw another one where a bunch of senior 10x developers were bashing a 15yo who came up with a personal project, because the poor guy/gal used React(!).
I mean, surely we can do better than that. I'm really tired of seeing senior engineers, often fairly intelligent people acting as if being kind to others wasn't their responsibility because how smart they perceive themselves. HN is a prime example of that (despite some amazing content that can be found here too).
I'm sorry if my comment hurt you in any way. I hope it's a bit more clear now. (I won't edit the parent comment—to keep the context of your reply and remind myself to be more specific).
> Side note, people in their 40s aren’t old. Damn.
The finish system seems to get this mostly right, from what I've read. No clear age based classes, group work across traditional class boundaries, older kids helping the younger ones. They also seem to get excellent results based on the Pisa studies.
Mind you, this is from reading about it, I don't have first hand experience how the system works. I can however attest to the effectiveness of tutoring in higher education. Tutors (typically grad students) often understand much better the subtle points that are difficult to understand in a topic, I guess because it's been more recent that they have learnt it. There also seems to be less reluctance for students to ask questions of their tutor then their lecturer.
The Finnish school system is nice, until you wanna go to college/university.
I think higher education in Finland isn't anything special, if you actually want a quality education you'll have to go abroad (like the actually successful people do here anyway). Even the arguably best schools aren't that good. People mostly coast through them once they get in and just want the piece of paper at the end. Good parties though.
Years later in the work force they'll wake up and see they barely make more money then an electrician with their fancy degree because of the insane tax policies here. What's the point of having a nice degree if you're still gonna have a moderately low salary compared to other European countries?
It's not an either or though. Just because a company generates good extrinsic motivation by paying well, that doesn't mean its impossible for them to also foster intrinsic motivation too. It's really not unreasonable to ask for both.
It sucks to be the kid who behaves well is punished by being a tutor for kid with issues the adults have hard time to motivate or deal with.
The tutors is not improving own recall. The tutor is dealing with social problem outside of tutors control or abilities. And no, good student kid wont be able to individualize teaching better then adult teacher. The good student kid will struggle with the whole motivational thing much much more.
I managed with ~4 kids at once, but it was one of the most exhausting jobs I ever had (which includes street/road work in the summer and carrying stone tiles up houses).
This highlights our inability as a society to properly value things. Things like education, the environment, mental health, and just creating a place that does right by as many people as possible are improperly weighted. I'm not saying it's easy to put proper valuations on any of this, but it's easy to do a lot better than we - at least in the US - are.
That's not true. They all have some sort of thing that drives them. For some it might be football, for others it is making up stories, for yet others it is coming up with drawings of weird mad-professor like castles, fashion, a certain genre of music, food, cooking, decorating things you name it.
The one kid that I ever encountered which I didn't find something that I could leverage to get their intrinsic motivation was a very young syrian refugee child who must have been so severeley traumatized he barely remembered my name despite seeing me every day – he was 6 years old. With him it was like working with someone who had dementia, you could only get him for very short periods and do something and he would completely lose it the day after. Most times it seemed like he wasn't there at all mentally.
But for all the others it was just about finding a way to connect certain topics to their field of interest. E.g. xkcd-style calculations for catapult with the "mad professor" as a trojan horse to physics he tended to hate before that, doing record sales calculations with the hiphop guy, writing a text about a soccer game with the soccer guy etc.
Of course sometimes they just wanted to do nothing, but slowly connecting the stuff they were forced to do before with their interests was something that showed tremendous effect. They were gladly coming every day (most because it was worse at home). If someone is stressed they cannot focus unless you make them care and motivate them.
Edit: as you can imagine, this is not the easy route to do that job. The easy route is more authoritarian.
I'd imagine the authoritarian route isn't even all that much easier in terms of total effort expended, it's just easier from a mental perspective because it's so formulaic.
> However many children lack one or more of those factors. [...] For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed.
We grossly overestimate the amount of kids who fall into this group, maybe because we're priviledged enough exclude ourselves from it.
> I think the school system is fairly good at forcing all children to learn at least a little about all subjects.
Dude, ca. 20% of people in the US are either illiterate or functionally illiterate. How is that good?[1]
Unless, given your previous point, they're too busy playing computer games or getting high on Satan's lettuce?
Pardon the sarcasm, but this is an extremely dangerous mindset as it distracts us from the actual problem.
I read it as OP saying that illiteracy rate would be even higher if not this system.
It’d be great to solve internal motivation issue. It’s damn hard though. Forcing some of them to learn in other ways is better than nothing while we come up with a solution for the core issue.
Yep. I am a fairly intelligent person (your typical coder) from a family that valued education. I was nevertheless never internally driven to do anything. I played a bit with computers when I was a child - BASIC and assembler on C-64, then a little bit of AMOS and computer graphics on Amiga etc. - but it was never any sustained effort that led to anything - I was mostly just satisfying my own curiosity, which didn't run that deep. Instead, I spent the majority of my time playing games (video and otherwise), hanging out with friends, watching TV and reading books. If I wasn't forced to go to school, I think I'd just do more of those things (certainly that's what I did during vacation time). I think what the highly internally driven people cannot understand is that they're the minority and majority of people is more like me.
In German "to educate/bring up someone" is "jemanden erziehen".
"erziehen", if translated literally, means "to pull", "er" is something like "to act" while "ziehen" means "pull"
Sometimes it feels like that, that it is necessary to pull someone into a certain direction in order to better that person. And this is usually not easy to do.
Fair enough - but my solution to that has always been, 'pay children to pass their classes'. That would be an extrinsic motivator the kind of families you're referencing would respect.
And annoyingly, when I bring this proposal up, most people talk about how important it is for learning to be intrinsically motivated.
> This comes at the price of not optimally supporting students who would do much better in a different kind of system.
It depends on the culture of the place the school system is applied in. This kind of blanket utilitarianism by way of school is a sad state for society as a whole. In a country like Canada we have a sordid past, very recently, when implementing the residential school system [0].
That's the more extreme case but I'd argue that elements of that exist in every school system when applied in a one-size-fits-all fashion and when that system has a monopoly on education.
It doesn't seem self-evident that forcing kids to learn a little about all subjects has that much benefit. I do taxes for a living and we have a lot of tradespeople as clients, and their life histories are surprisingly frequently - do miserably in school to the point that their self-esteem is destroyed, spend a few years bumming around, drinking too much, playing video games, get a job in the trades, realize they can make more money owning their own business, etc. By the time they come to us, you'd never be able to tell they were the worst students ever.
How many people never make it out of the drinking and playing video games phase because school has convinced them that they're failures?
A lot of kids would be perfectly happy starting some sort of apprenticeship when they were teenagers, and it's not obvious to me that that would be worse than forcing them through the remainder of school.
I think it's hard to tell the difference between kids who have an intrinsic motivation to play video games, and kids who have an intrinsic motivation to do anything but school and have to default to video games because the world doesn't offer much of an avenue for kids to be productive on their own (unless you happen to be very interested in computers and have access to one and the internet).
I say all this as someone who thinks education is profoundly important. I just don't think as much education happens in schools as we'd like to believe, especially for people who don't fit neatly in the system.
For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed. There is no intrinsic motivation for most children to learn all the subjects taught in school.
This is a false dichotomy that gets reinforced everywhere to the detriment of all students. There is no reason those things should be mutually exclusive, but we make it so by the power of our collective expectations.
Lots of people are discouraged and pushed away from their areas of interest because they aren't seen as fitting a stereotype or mold. Some people never even get a chance to discover that they have academic interests, and are effectively placed on a "remedial" track from the time they enter the school system because of their background. The messaging is that they cannot succeed without external motivation, which sets them up for failure.
On the other side of the coin, it also contributes to the unhealthy pressures advanced students face. Building rigid assumptions into the education system about how students spend their leisure time is part of what kills diversity.
I suspect that many kids do not understand the why behind many of the subjects being taught. What intrinsic motivation could they have under these circumstances?
This is all fine and good but it misses some much more fundamental drivers, not those that are narrowly instinctive.
If you want to play the violin beautifully, you have to practice for 10 years, there's no way around it.
If you want to do important things, you have to train in all sorts of capacities, and put in a lot of sweat.
One of the things that differentiates humans from beasts is that we have at least some sense of higher purpose and many of us derive considerable fulfilment from that.
For the most part, most of our education is necessary - and the ability to focus, to plan, to think beyond just a few steps, to control one's desires and emotions, to concentrate and balance one's life energies - this requires education and maturity.
Yes, it can be stifling in some ways, that's ok, we want our doctors and accountants (mostly) to be small-c conservatives. Others can write Operas.
But none of it comes without a formal journey at least in some capacity.
It's a neat experiment but I think it's hard to determine the results. The novelty of exploration in that context just might not be 'novelty' from the adults perspective. Try trading rewards for truly novel things, like, jumping out of planes, I wonder what the result would be.
I want to respond to your point about violin-playing, because I think it will open up an interesting discussion. Anecdotally, I was always motivated to practice my instruments by the same exploratory drive discussed in the article. I was taught to ask, "what if I did XXX this way?", i.e., what happens to my sound if I play long tones, what techniques do I need to play piece Y, how do I use scale Z to improvise?
Growing up, I found that those who ran on pure extrinsic factors with all discipline and no enjoyment either stopped or were stunted by locally optimal decisions. On the other hand, those who went on to study in university and play professionally seemed to derive the same obsessive enjoyment from their craft as I would a video game.
Do you think these data points further prove your point about emotional maturity? Or is there something more universal, that true success requires a fierce passion?
> If you want to play the violin beautifully, you have to practice for 10 years, there's no way around it.
>
> If you want to do important things, you have to train in all sorts of capacities, and put in a lot of sweat.
I don't know the source of this, but I remember reading that most people who become good at things, by practicing for 10 years or whatever, were intrinsically motivated to do so. It's not a process of "want to be good -> force self to practice -> become good", but more of "want to practice -> become good". Can't remember if this was just conjecture, and I'm not a citeable source myself, but it seems like a more likely story. I know I've heard stories of talented people who got where they are because they spent all day noodling on the guitar, or writing programs, but I've heard less stories about people who didn't really enjoy the practice but forced themselves into it via willpower.
Not to say that "just noodling" is all that the person needed, or that no willpower was required, but that the process might be more intrinsic for the people who are actually going to become great anyway.
Why such a dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic when any situation is a mix of both ?
We do our job to get money, but we won't do any job for that sole purpose.
Kids learn chemistry because they are forced to, but they'll find fun bits here and there, they'll ask teachers questions to better understand what they're taught. They won't give a crap about half of the curriculum, but the half they'll remember and will be formative is not guaranteed to be solely from the self-motivated part either.
Going further what motivates us to explore also depends on the environment, what is rewarded and what is not, etc.
I feel splitting things in two theoretical extremes is close to labelling actions good or bad, it's useful if we don't care about nuance, but has little use once we dive below the surface.
> I recommend reading Drive first if you think you disagree.
I remember getting that recommendation for "Getting Things Done" ... is Drive much better as a reading experience ? Is it readable for people who're not into self help books in general ?
Because there is some evidence that extrinsic motivation outcompetes intrinsic motivation. In other words, for some reason, they cannot coexist.
As soon as adults feel extrinsically motivated, they start to view the situation as an economic transaction, where they will only perform tricks for treats. Typical real-world example of this: if you start charging parents (punishment) for coming late to pick up their kids from daycare, parents will become more late. One can speculate that this might be because they start thinking of it as "paying for extra time" rather than "being a nice human being to the daycare staff."
The cases you mention where they do indeed apparently coexist, I suspect (but have no data to support) that the children successfully manage to ignore the extrinsic motivation because the intrinsic drive is so powerful in that instance. It's probably not a sustainable model to rely on that happening, though.
Drive is decidedly not a self-help book. It's a summary of the available evidence in support of and against the existence of intrinsic motivation and how it relates to the other types of motivation (extrinsic and physical and emotional needs.)
> In other words, for some reason, they cannot coexist.
I would be interested if you have some pointers. I've tried searching a bit but didn't hit anything.
Intuitively there is a lot of things that I want intrinsically to do, but I will do a calculation wether I'll have external motivations/rewards to do it and decide from there.
For instance I intrincically like programming. It still doesn't mean my intrinsic motivation to program disappeared because I get paid, nor that I won't be exploring thing that I am curious about and try to align external motivation to help me explore them.
> if you start charging parents (punishment) for coming late to pick up their kids from daycare, parents will become more late.
I know this case study, but as a parent I don't see this on a personal level. To put it on a different case, you get fined for parking on priority/handicaped places, but don't see rich people everywhere abusing priority parking. Some do, but most don't, so at least a majority of them don't see it as just an economic transaction. As usual, reality is more complicated.
> The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.
I think your expectations of the schooling system are simply skewed. At least in the countries which I lived in (Europe) the 'customer' of the schooling system is first and foremost society as a whole.
The individual, the child, comes second. Not in a way that children are not important. It's just that the outcome of a well organised society is what matters. So, although not in extreme ways of course (there is no evil mastermind), conformity and the likes are important values.
We all love to say that we want creative free thinking individuals.. but come on now - currently the society is mostly composed of conformed (without this society probably would not function, at least as it does now) and in a lesser extent the obedient.
The creative and free thinking individuals push us all foward and we would not advance without them, but the majority is different.
Actual, socially beneficial conformity is produced just fine on its own with how humans generally are social group animals that want to fit in and not be embarrassed from doing weird, unfair, or harmful stuff.
Simply interacting with other people is what makes humans follow meaningful rules. That happens whether or not we're rewarded for being good dogs in the eyes of adults.
Conformity to arbitrary procedures and sets of rules is not helpful anywhere, and that's what school gives us.
Try getting children to learn to play guitar or piano or math purely through intrinsic moyovation. They might be into it for a bit, but not enough for regular practice. But, when they have enough skill, they can then develop further intrinsic motivation to really get good.
It takes at least 5 years of learning piano to get good enough to enjoy it. IMO this is why adults almost never take it up - we're just not prepared to invest in something that takes so much work with such a distant payoff
Rocksmith is a guitar playing video game that can be fun from day one. I don't see why similar concepts couldn't be used to teach just about any musical instrument.
This is how I survive usually. I turn whatever externally imposed duty is imposed into something that will tickle my inner curiosity / desire.
Extrinsic motivation, IMO, is akin to an exchange or bargain, you have to develop a sense or skill to know how to make them.
ps: more generally I'm very curious about the topic of 'pedagogics' and also the way to create harmonious, high level work environment between people (all motivated by few years of seeing nothing but drag, pain and waste in too many workplaces). If you know board, MLists or else, ping me.
> The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.
We finish 50 million kids in school each year.
100's of millions have been through the US system alone over it's history.
If this was simply true then I feel like there'd be some evidence by now.
Yes we can do better schooling for some kids, and yes there are certainly improvements, but after 100's of year of doing it, it's not going to be a country wide system of let kids just have more freedom.
The best improvement we know of is cohorts matter. Which is a zero sum game.
Actually the modern concept of a school was developed to train people for industrial jobs, where they would have to follow instructions and a schedule set by their superiors -- hence the strict scheduling, the rank-and-file arrangement of classrooms, and so forth. Prior to the industrial revolution most children did not go to a formal schools, and would receive their education from parents and tutors, or by some other ad-hoc arrangements. In some parts of the world it was common for traveling teachers to board with a family for some time and educate the children.
I don’t think anyone is encouraging total unstructured freedom.
I went to a school without grades. It encourages cultivating a love of learning. There was concrete feedback on quality of work and assessments of knowledge (tests). But no public grading scale. It’s been awarded 3 blue ribbon awards and consistently outperformed its grading-based peers.
I know it's a lame answer because I can answer it to most new schooling concepts
Cohorts.
If all the students you schooled with could easily come from the other available systems and your school could only expel them at the same rates as the other schools I'd be happier.
I think you might like this interview with the now deceased but brilliant contrarian educator John Taylor Gatto, in which he speaks about just that in the schooling system and the crazy changes he saw when he said he moved towards a more intrinsic motivation system, though he didn't use those terms:
Not a native speaker, I can understand but his speech gives me a hard time. Could you share a pointer to a relevant segment? The complete interview is five hours!
> The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.
As a teen, I think I would've agreed with you on this, but looking back personally, I think boundaries inspired my creativity to break out of them.
The "exploring" is because they're told to make a choice. Is there something similar to developing object permanence but with abstract concepts or probabilities that happens after that age?
Academics are dealt with as we do kids i.e. they are protected and allowed to explore. Corporations exploit what has already been explored for reward - without the reward there is nothing protecting them.
Academia isn't being a grad student with an advisor. Academia is being the advisor to a grad student (along with research, publishing, probably teaching, etc).
I guess I must have bever lost the child in me. I've been a fan of open world games, just so I can roam the world. I sometimes dont even play the storyline at all. I still don't like that Steam added 'achievements' that I can't turn off, I'll be in charge of what constitutes a goal thank you very much :)
Another poster had an interesting observation about academia vs corporate work. I'm 33 and still in academia, and I now realize a large part of that is the freedom it provides. I've see salary as a score on someone else's scoreboard, and very uninteresting for that reason. OK, I'm old enough to have experienced a person needs income for practical reasons, but I'm not going to work for it ;)
I'm allergic to competition, scores, rewards, prestige, I guess that makes me child-like?
>I'm 33 and still in academia, I'm allergic to competition, scores, rewards, prestige
I had been under the impression that academia was mostly very competitive to be able to get career (tenure track) positions. Are you not aiming for that, is it less competitive in your field, or am I missing something else?
I've described academia (to my friends who work in software) as a company where the most coveted promotion will land you a job in marketing.
It does indeed come with a lot of freedom, but the relatively flat structure means that there's usually no one above the group's PI to promote their research. As a result PIs spend a lot of time writing grant proposals.
When I first started played Age of Empires 2, I would play against AI and just continue the map for 10s of hours, slowly expanding my influence, but never killing the enemy outright. I would just reshape the map according to my will.
I think a lot of modern games are designed to be like this. Building farms or worlds for fun (I haven't played any of them).
Steel yourself for revelations about academia - unsure what stage you’re at but I’d guess PhD or post doc at most from the comment. Talk to people above you that you absolutely trust about the realities of academia.
Hehe, well aware of those. After my (first) postdoc I managed to get hired in a supportive role (in a whole new field, pretty exciting). If I hadn't managed that, I definitely would not be in academia anymore.
I've got no strings so I have fun
I'm not tied up to anyone
They've got strings, but you can see
There are no strings on me
Viewed as meta-game, school can be viewed as the child's exercise in learning where society attaches the strings, and how to acquire and retain slack in them. Where better to learn Bureaucracy-fu than in a bureaucracy?
I play games the same way, and I am also not easy to motivate with extrinsic motivators like money or deadlines.
If I'm doing the same thing for too long it becomes an almost impenetrable blocker in my mind, it's like if I try to do the task again there is a mental block that doesn't allow me to imagine it. I have been working on the tools to push through this but I decided it's ultimately a problem with my lifestyle. I was never going to be happy working 9-5 on the same types of work all year.
I started working for myself once I realized this, and do considerably fewer hours, of course also making less money. I'm happier by far and getting more done than I did before in the time I do work, and getting more "life" done as well. I'm lucky enough to be able to do that and still make a living.
Relating it to the article, it seems we function in a similar way to the mold, but our balance between exploration and exploitation changes as we grow up.
Also reading other comments, it seems like different people have different balances or proportions between the exploration/exploitation modes. I personally am very imbalanced towards exploration; exploitation makes me demotivate and stop doing very quickly.
Peter Hartkamp started one in the Netherlands, and wrote a book about it.
“Our current education systems do not trust children to learn what they need to know. Governments believe that children must be coerced into learning what they prescribe as necessary for future life even though they do not and cannot know what that future will be like. Yet we do know that coercion produces anxiety and fear of failure and that this in turn inhibits learning and destroys confidence. We also know that creativity, innovation and empathy are not encouraged in such a climate even though above all else these are the survival qualities for coping with an uncertain future.
In this short book Peter Hartkamp develops his arguments against coercive ‘education’ with a needle-sharp engineer’s logic. He invites us to imagine what schools would be like if they took the articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child seriously, a not unreasonable position as all states are signatories.
I wholeheartedly and without reservation recommend this book to the many parents, students, teachers, employers and policy makers who know in their hearts that something is very wrong with the examination and testing factories that we are allowing our schools to become. It represents a beacon of hope that another way is possible.” [1]
While the study classifies it as exploration and claims an intrinsic reward that will die out later in life, I would describe the behavior as novelty-seeking.
I'd wager that for adults, a game on a screen is just not new enough. But if you'd give adult males a choice of which female to undress, I'm pretty sure they would value "exploration" very highly again.
In a similar vain, when smartphones were new, the adult population was very active at buying new ones, comparing, and exploring the market. Now that we've had them for some years, phone upgrades have become a necessity and a lot less exciting.
So my theory would be that there is no loss in the intrinsic motivation, there is a loss in the amount of novelty.
If that is correct, then our school system is actually very appropriate even for highly intrinsically motivated kids, because they are introduced to new topics and areas of knowledge that are (hopefully) new to them.
That also aligns with my personal experience. While I hated getting up early and the concept of sitting in a chair just listening, I was excited about all the different things they showed me. And I liked best the teachers that would mention slightly irrelevant side details just for the fun of it.
But if you'd give adult males a choice of which female to undress, I'm pretty sure they would value "exploration" very highly again
Likely, but that's not the same experiment anymore since the sex factor comes into play and living beings are basically programmed to reproduce as much as possible and also with as much variety as possible (maybe oversimplified, but you get the point). So for a smartphone you can talk abut novelty-seeking/exploration (which btw I'm not sure are really different things), but when reproduction comes into play it's a whole different game anymore and it'll alter/override parts of the behavior and it shouldn't be underestimated how string the effectss can be.
They're saying that novelty is the fundamental drive behind the observed behavior, not some priority towards "exploration" that children have in greater abundance than adults. The children are seeking pleasure through novelty, and the researchers are interpreting that as exploration. The parent comment illustrates how silly that is, if you substitute something that still holds pleasure for an adult (ie sex), they exhibit the same behavior.
The difference between the adult and the child is the adult has the world experience that the trivial game doesn't hold novel (therefore pleasurable) implications for them anymore, not that they don't prioritize "exploration".
Given how many adults would board a ship to sail to faraway lands in the past before much was known about the "here be dragons" places, suggests adults still value exploration.
I am not aware of any good statistics about that, but my assumption is the line level travelers to faraway lands simply didn’t have better economic options.
As far as I understand, going out on ships to unknown places was an extremely risky venture with zero luxuries.
I dont think that the point was that adults value exploration less, just that the amount of exploration already done reduces the density of novelty in new exploration. Im interested in foreign travel, but not nearly as interested in traveling to a new town in the state I live in, because that town will have less new stuff to do, and much of it will be similar to what I've seen before.
This varies from person to person of course (some people don't really care much for travel in the first place, while others find every new town to be interesting and an invigorating adventure) but the general trend is for exploration to reveal less that is novel with experience.
Let me just be the one to say your choice of topic for exploration is incredibly cringeworthy in 2020. Also inaccurate for some parts of the adult male population. Use a better example next time.
Maybe you find it cringeworthy, but I find it on topic and very relatable. The role of a speaker is to make their material easy to digest for their audience. For this audience in particular, I would argue that this example is statistically likely to resonate with most of them. So your parent commenter is strongly incentivized to use this example and conduct themselves this way, so of course they did so.
I don't think your comment contributes much to the conversation. If anything I feel it stifles the conversation. If you had shared that the parent's comment made you uncomfortable then that is a contribution that we could explore. Instead you decide to decree from the top of your high horse that his speech wasn't acceptable. I don't like what you did one bit, and I think you did it just to make other people uncomfortable and put yourself in a position of power over them.
I think that point was that relevant portion of adult male population spends a lot of time play games on screen, not finding it boring at all. They do find it more then they do porn. In 2020, claiming that "a game on a screen is just not new enough" for adults is highly inaccurate.
While I fully agree with you that there are fantastic games on screens (I'm playing HL Alyx at the moment), I was trying to present an alternative explanation for the study. So we are taking about a game that is easy enough for kids to understand and play reliably. That might make the game used in the study too boring for adults, because they have played similar games in the past, while it is a new experience for the kids.
I think the bigger problem is that the experiment wouldn't be well formed (the "value" of each image would vary between study participants).
I don't think we should throw out wholesale that sexuality is a big driver of human behavior though, even if the example isn't inclusive. Changing "woman" to "person" addresses part of your concern, but still doesn't actually fix the experiment as proposed. The bigger problem is the experiment wouldn't work, rather than that it was cringeworthy. Which, sure. If it was cringeworthy, but worked, I guess it could have some excusability in terms of science. As is, you're right. It's juvenile.
Let me just be the one to say that anyone who denies most men are sexual creatures who enjoy looking at naked women and tries to shame someone for stating that truth is incredibly cringeworthy, no matter the year.
Use some common sense next time and realize no one got hurt by speaking an obvious truth.
might be true but the OP didn't intend any harm and was just trying to illustrate a point.
I think we should strive to be more tolerant. we should encourage more discourse and take well intentioned remarks in context or else how different are we from the morality police in other countries?
It is scientific concensus that our genes survive through sex and that by optimizing for their own survival our genes have made sex the strongest possible behavioral motivator. It is also agreed upon that the desire for sexual exploration is higher for males, because their genes can spread more widely through additional partners, while a typical female can only get pregnant by one partner at a time.
You'll find that non-traditional pairings will have very little effect on genetic evolution, because they tend to not produce genetically related offspring.
So the study says "adults are less interested in exploration" and to that I reply "we have literally optimized our genes for adult male exploration over hundreds of thousands of years".
Isn't that a rather large omission in the study, that they didn't mention the single most powerful motivator for exploration?
I think what you are calling exploration through multiple sex partners is more of an urge to procreate, which would be different from what the study found in children, a systematic learning attempt to see if they missed anything. The sex example isn’t cognitive. But I take no issue with your choice of sex as an example or debating this and considering this argument for a potential flaw in the study.
My reason for calling it cringeworthy was your choice of words of adult males undressing females. It seems cringeworthy to talk about females as an object in this way and ignore sexual orientation when you could have phrased it (if it had to be about sex) as exploring sex partners or any other hundreds of ways.
That is a very valid point, I should have phrased it in a more generical / biological way from the start.
My hope with the original formulation was that it'd be easy to understand and relate to, but I agree that I should have put in more time to find a better way of saying it.
As for the argument itself, I believe that novelty seeking in general might be an unintended side effect of that urge to procreate. That would also explain why people use words like "love" for new technical gadgets and develop a highly emotional and irrational attachment to their newest toy. Plus, there is evidence that the raw attraction fades more quickly for couples that spend more time together, which would suggest that one aspect of sexual attraction is in fact exactly the novelty of the partner. And since genetic compatibility is difficult to determine in advance, there would be benefits to a systematic exploration strategy.
FWIW, I find "in year XXXX" arguments equally frustrating. It is an entitled, condescending perspective that automatically dismisses the counter-point as a "thing of the past" and "regressive" without adding any substance.
Which also happens to be factually misleading. Views on sexuality normativity does not have a linear progression over time, nor through societies [1].
Name dropping the current year not only doesn't add anything to the argument, it is also fallacious for any domain that doesn't progress strictly monotonically.
[1] For example in contrast to attitudes towards homosexuality in certain Middle Eastern countries today, little would consider that heteronormativity might have increased as more of a result of 19th century colonial European influence on those cultures. See this r/AskHistorians post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r17fc/what_...
That's what I get, too. A "reward" is a subjective experience. If someone doesn't care about grades, then good grades will not be rewarding, and bad grades will not be punishment.
Offtopic but regarding the supression of the child from the parent: few people realize how severely the large majority of parents damage their children and supress their innate creativity and drive.
This is also very hard to realize as an adult because it gets unconsiously supressed.
The following books opened my eyes at the fact how dangerous it is for the grown up adult to then keep thinking "yeah, but my parents did the best you could you know?" even though they completely destroyed his innate creativity and freedom.
Alice Miller: The Drama of the Gifted Child
Alice Miller: The Body Never Lies
TLDR version of these books is that a large majority of parents tried to mold them as children and fit them into boxes or supressed their needs and wants as children and never truly listened to them.
This then causes uncousious guilt/anxiety/etc... feeling in the person as adult and prevents him from "taking oportunities" etc..
And at the core of the issue is the forced-upon-us belief that we always have to respect our parents, even though we secretely hate them. Saying "yeah but they did something good for me you know" is actually a huge problem that will only keep us from seeing the fact that many in fact do not like/love their parents very much because the parents did not truly listen to them etc...
As long as we try to weight the good vs the bad moments we will relapse into the false indoctrinated compassion/guilt towards our parents, into denial of the cruelties we experienced as a child, all because people say that we should try to "balance the good vs the bad". But this does not work in practice. This balancing process seems to be a reflection of how we tried to cope as children to survive. The adult must reject this balancing process because it only causes confusion without resolving anything.
Many people when they break contact from parents feel guilty and think even more about their own parents: the "experts" and her parents have reinforced the indoctrinated belief in this person that "this individual has no right to his own life, feelings and needs."
It was this desire of the child to believe that the parents were good that led to these supressions because the child blamed himself. This is why when a therapists says "try to see the good" it will only cause great harm. regression and confusion: since it was this need of the child to "try and see the good" in his parents when there was none that caused these issues in the first place.
So anyone who even slightly suspects that their parents supressed him as a child and denied him freedom of expression etc... will find many answers in those books above.
This is by no means limited to young people; I much prefer video games where I can keep discovering things to the tedious business of performing tasks or winning beating bosses.
Exploration as the primary algorithm continues as long as we continue to get increasing variable rewards from it. When the rewards tapper off or we are pressured for money, we choose the maximum we've found so far. This instinct to collect options has probably served us well in foraging for food, picking a mate, and any other exploration endeavor that involves finding the best of a range of newly available options.
However it may also be the root of gambling addiction and any other variable rewards game systems. Gambling, lotteries can also become more attractive the more you are pressured for money - one could argue as a means of concentrating on your most approachable local maximum.
For people interested in this topic I highly recommend reading about summerhill school [1] and similar projects. The topic of alternative schooling systems is quite fascinating.
There is an interesting relation to this with regard to reinforcement learning (RL) where the trade-off between exploration and exploitation is one of the fundamental issues. Systematic or structured exploration has shown some success here as well.
What 'structured' means here deeply depends on the representation the agent has of the world, i.e. which states and actions are similar to each other. Current RL setups typically learn such representations on the go. Abstractions can be very powerful here.
Arguably, people also perform structured exploration on learned representations. It may be the case that the adults have learned a representation of the 'game' and their lies little exploratory value in suboptimal actions.
> But while adults then used that knowledge to maximize their prizes, children continued exploring the other options, just to see if their value may have changed.
I think it is not just "semantics" to consider that for children the reward is simply the rush of playing instead of what the researchers design as the intended award. And frankly speaking this is not at all a surprising result. Children learn through playing and they very much enjoy that process.
Overall, this style is what Montessori-schools of teaching believe and how they operate. Essentially a self-exploratory based learning style.
There's lots of benefit in letting kids simply explore. As a parent, I find I have to stop myself from pushing my child to the 'best' result and let them be. That it's okay to pick a less optimal solution.
Where I find this alarmingly true is when outcome/results are negative (usually ending in pain). "Don't stand like that on the chair." "Climb in this way" "Don't eat that dirt, soap, car, whatever!!"
I know my job as a parent is to guide while keeping them safe at the same time letting exploration happen, but man sometimes it's just so hard. For example, letting my child explore while walking home can make a 5 minute walk take 10, 15 minutes longer.
Such things tend to be at odds with what I want but it is more important than myself.
Especially since while you're small, falling hurts a lot less.
It's surprising to me how people consistently try to discourage traits in children which they at the same time glorify in adults.
I suppose considering how much effort society puts into raising meager people, it's only right we glorify those who manage to manage to grow as a person regardless.
I’ve also noticed that my toddler falls “better” than most adults do. If you ever take up judo, early on they need to teach you to fall correctly so you avoid injury. My toddler does most of it be instinct which is cool.
I was hanging out with a friend who is also parent. As happens pretty often, the kids are all off somewhere else getting into trouble. Eventually, one starts wailing. My friend looks at me and says, "Ah, the sound of learning."
I always tell my wife is that my goal is not to keep the kids from getting hurt, just to keep them from getting maimed.
It's not just that pain is a good teacher, though it is. There is an even more vital lesson that the kids need to learn. "I can handle pain." They need to see themselves survive and push through difficulty because I believe witnessing their own resilience is the foundation of not just good self-esteem, but strong self-esteem.
In the US today, we're expected to raise our children like hothouse flowers. We get them to blossom by creating a maximally nurturing environmennt and shielding them from all possible adversity. That's maybe a good strategy if they can be shielded for the rest of their lives, but unlike orchids, eventually our kids will have to leave the greenhouse. They need to be able to handle what's out there and not wilt.
Parenting is about using our experience to avoid catastrophic outcomes for our children until they've developed enough experience to avoid those outcomes themselves.
It's more than that, but that's at the core. Love them, model good behaviors, and don't let them do irreparable harm to themselves or others.
> I know my job as a parent is to guide while keeping them safe at the same time letting exploration happen, but man sometimes it's just so hard. For example, letting my child explore while walking home can make a 5 minute walk take 10, 15 minutes longer.
As we were putting our 2-year-old to sleep last night, my wife was commenting, "Remember how last year, when we read him a book, it would take all of 3 minutes and then we'd be done?" It now takes about 2-3 minutes per page, and can be 20-30 minutes to get through a 12-page book. In the meantime, for every object on the page he's like "What's this?" "What's it doing?" "No snake?" "It a green one!" "They put the duck in the cart!" "Where going?"
Also amazing how early the desire to make up stories and explain why things are the way they are appears. The drive to make sense of the world appears to be innately human, and comes out at a young age.
> The drive to make sense of the world appears to be innately human
I think it is something kids learn though. They seem content early on (2-3 years) with a collection of observations (I ate water melon, my hands are sticky, I’m now touching the dog), yet they constantly see us engaging in “sense making” as part of teaching them to talk and described their surroundings.
There’s a lot of space between optimal and failure, though it doesn’t always feel like it. Kids can sit a million ways in chairs but at some point they can also understand the concept of balance so that they can figure out for themselves the 10%of positions which result in failure.
This has surprising similarities with data science theory: multi-armed bandit with a decreasing-epsilon strategy (children) or an epsilon-first strategy (adults).
Anyone have access to the paper? As far as I can tell, the young children were perfect convex utilitarians, in deciding that more than "enough" stickers were not worth the more fun of clicking around.
How were the adults rewarded? Did they also get something intrinsically valuable at the end of the experiment, or did they just collect virtual points because they were told they were supposed to?
Working dogs have been specialised by breeding for overexpression of the various initial phases of the wildtype hunting sequence: herding, retrieval, etc. Does "sex sells" indicate we may have been bred to overexpress the "identify attractive potential partner" and "do things they (appear to) like doing" phases of the wildtype reproductive sequence?
I'm reminded of a paper about an AI system with curiosity. Basically, the AI would learn to predict the effect of its actions, and would prefer to take actions where its prediction error was large. That way it would gather more data about stuff it didn't know yet.
This works well to learn to play video games without defining an extrinsic reward. However, there is a problem when the system encounters the equivalent of TV. It then gets stuck watching the unpredictable stream of events.
Many non-human animals show exploratory behaviors. It remains unclear whether any possess human-like curiosity. We previously proposed three criteria for applying the term curiosity to animal behavior: (1) the subject is willing to sacrifice reward to obtain information, (2) the information provides no immediate instrumental or strategic benefit, and (3) the amount the subject is willing to pay depends systematically on the amount of information available. In previous work on information-seeking in animals, information generally predicts upcoming rewards, and animals’ decisions may therefore be a byproduct of reinforcement processes. Here we get around this potential confound by taking advantage of macaques’ ability to reason counterfactually (that is, about outcomes that could have occurred had the subject chosen differently). Specifically, macaques sacrificed fluid reward to obtain information about counterfactual outcomes. Moreover, their willingness to pay scaled with the information (Shannon entropy) offered by the counterfactual option. These results demonstrate the existence of human-like curiosity in non-human primates according to our criteria, which circumvent several confounds associated with less stringent criteria.
Doesn't this just mean that the "reward" definition is poor in this case i.e. the agent does not care about maximizing it because there are additional components left out of it (e.g. survival)?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadIt would be fascinating to see if there are gender differences in this behavior in childhood and adulthood and compare childhood and adulthood.
Briefly, human behaviour can be motivated for extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. The rewards in this article are extrinsic motivators. Exploring is rewarding in an intrinsic way; it is a strive towards autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
In adults (and in older children) applying extrinsic motivators kills intrinsic motivation. Once the extrinsic motivators stop coming in, there is no desire left to do the task. Intrinsic motivation is practically infinite, as long as the environment is set up right to enable it.
Extrinsic motivation also tends to produce behaviour that does the bare minimum to get the reward (or avoid the negative consequences) whereas intrinsic motivation is what makes us want to excel.
Of course, I've skipped many important points and not countered any counterargument here, but I recommend reading Drive first if you think you disagree.
But the worst part of it all?
The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.
Withdrawing rewards is punishment so both are really the same.
Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe.
If your kid is good at something and you want them to lose interest, encourage or reward them for doing the thing :)
Or force them to do it.
Just like school system does with learning.
> Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe.
I'd just want to add that according to Drive, training humans like rats and birds work great... If blind obedience, conformity, and minimal quality is something you're looking for -- which many factory line type managers wanted, for a very long time (and in many cases probably still do, sadly.)
Damnit, if Punished by Rewards contradicts this, I have to read it now, don't I?
Alfie Kohn acknowledges that where the work is low skill, very dull, requires little collaboration, rewards generally work for as long as the rewards continue.
But employee of the month? Stack ranking? Basically they're just going to destroy any intrinsic motivation, and lead to teams where people are reluctant to collaborate.
It teaches its subjects to do the thing but only if they get the reward and never otherwise. To comply, but only when watched, and to act in secret when fulfilling their true needs.
His book focuses on parenting and one can see how punishment and rewards impact this most important relationship and negatively impact intrinsic motivation in exchange for the illusion of control.
Genuine question: What do you do if you want them to get better then?
"You have been trying to find that bug for hours. That's true perseverance!"
"I like the sound effects you added. They really draw me into the game even more."
"It sounds like you're using a technology you haven't before. Trying is the only way to learn new things."
"This runs so smoothly!"
Also, ask questions.
"How did you get the enemy to follow my character?"
"I feel like the game is unfair when I die here. Is there anything you can do to make this section not so difficult?"
"I understood what I was meant to do right away. Can you think of why that was?"
Note how you don't even have to be positive when you do it this way. Simply sharing the experience goes a long way. Encouraging critical thought and decision-making makes it even better.
It covers empathy (actually listening and confirming feelings) but is largely about how to enable extrinsic motivation, through encouraging autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
One rather concrete example is that the authors argue it is no good to say, e.g. "if you take a bath you'll get this nice gift" or "if you don't take a bath I will remove your video gaming time for the day."
More effective, according to the authors, are to give a choice, even if it is somewhat of a forced one: "I want you to take a bath. Do you want to bathe with your boat or your duck?"
This, then, would speak to the same desire to explore as the hidden option in the article. (Or, the way I view it having read Drive: this gives the child a hint of autonomy.)
About that time you need to explain why we have regular baths.
Man, I remember when I started deciding things for myself... at 16-17! 'so you want to go to prep school, university, or eng. school?' WTF I don't even know what I want for dinner... I feel this is something that needs to be trained the soonest possible. See what you feel when asked to chose. Decide something. See how you feel when you've taken option A or B (or feel when you don't like any of the available options! And learn to think outside the box!). See what happens when you change your mind before you started A. Or after you've started B and think 'I should have done A'. With your parents, friends, teachers. It's amazing how teaching this to my little kids with a positive and caring attitude has shown me how hard and important it all is! And it's even harder for collective decisions!
Something amazing for twin children: they also have the opportunity (or the burden sometimes) to see how their choices affect others and how important negociating, defending, compromising is.
Those books that GP cited are gold. The whole Positive Education movement is, I think, a way to a better future, with balanced and reasonable members of the citizenry. And I ache for all the children with have parents that don't even have the tiniest bit of empathy and interest for their children.
This can be so surprisingly effective that it is almost scary. And while I'm at it: it works with many adults too.
Use with caution. Leadership is good and kids needs to go to bed at night, but manipulation isn't what you want to be remembered for.
Other nice-to-knows to be used with caution:
- as kids start to negotiate, add slack for negotiations.
- "catch them" when they do something right, reward it immediately (with encouraging words, a hug, increased trust - or even a piece of chocolate)
- look for the intentions - or anything that was right even if the intent wasn't there:
-- tried to do something right but failed? Good! (On the other side: there's few things as discouraging as gettig a scolding when you thought you did something good.)
-- used to slam the door but closed it carefully for some reason (hands full, in the phone, etc)? Good.
The fake choice thing, though, never EVER worked with my kids.
sometimes they'll talk, then mutter to confusion then emit blips because they heard words coming from you, then all of a sudden they'll have a burst of excitement again.
Under that hypothesis, the salary is there to take physical needs as a motivator off the table. If an employee has to worry about physical needs, there's no room at all for any other concern.
Once the salary is sufficient to no longer be a point of worry (will I afford my mortgage, can I support my spouse, etc) only then will additional money serve as extrinsic motivation.
(Which of course spells disaster for things like performance bonuses, which (a) are impossible to target at the right people (see Deming for more on that) and (b) literally designed to stop coming, reducing motivation overall.)
But your salary doesn’t change if you work hard or slack. It’s not a reward for performance.
Similar to how you’d die without breathing but you don’t feel rewarded for every breath. You wouldn’t breathe more than someone else to get more alive.
Maybe not in an immediate sense, but working hard ostensibly makes it more likely to get promoted to a position with a higher salary, while slacking ostensibly makes it more likely to get demoted or fired.
Of course, I say "ostensibly" because the real world doesn't really work like that, with hard workers getting shafted and lazy pricks schmoozing and politicking their way into the very positions those hard workers should've gotten. It'd be disheartening, but it happens to be a decent treatment for my impostor syndrome: everyone else is an impostor, too, so might as well just play along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning#General_conce...
The only person I've heard say "mastery" are Betsy devos (when she was getting grilled by warren at her senate confirmation) and some religious conservatives i know that homeschool their children.
My general impression is that it's a marketing gimmick by carter schools that want to show they're somehow innovating in education. This is probably all horse shit as the longer term outcomes in devos type schools are really bad (see: michigan).
anyway, it's a flag. probably a big red one.
I doubt it's taken seriously by regular school teachers whos models come from Columbia university.
> The Chicago Mastery Learning Reading program was criticized for a focus on testing. A concern is that children were taught to pass tests without a focus on enduring skills. The duration of the retention of skills was questioned.
I ain't vain enough to consider myself even "fairly intelligent", but I can say that I ain't very self-motivated, nor have I been since elementary school, and in hindsight my education system's insistence on strangling such intrinsic motivation in favor of extrinsic motivation is exactly what killed said self-motivation. "Grades are all that matter, and mine ain't anywhere near good enough to go to a good college, so why bother trying?"
It's something I'm actively working on trying to fix to this day, but old habits die hard.
The course load in Eng. or in Grad School - now that can be overwhelming to the point of exhaustion.
See how stupid that sounds
Theoretically the courses are probably designed to allow most people to succeed.
High schoool English, Geography, History and Math is referenced as easy by many students. Typical student does not have a problem to pass that class.
English, Math, History and Geography at the high school level are fairly straight forward, and the subjects are important to a rounded character. They really are not hard.
Most of Grad school is utterly gruelling, there isn't time to sleep, students pulled in different directions, and studying mostly arcane subjects that really are not important to anyone.
"Decent" high school grades are seldom adequate to even meet acceptance requirements for "good" colleges, let alone actually compete with the straight-A students also applying to said colleges.
Not that this really does anything to address the broader point: that "get into college because you'll make more money" is one of many extrinsic motivators American schools seem to push in order to strangle intrinsic motivators.
Allowing children to pick what they want to explore and modeling the education after exploration is part of the baseline for Montessori education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
But this:
" Imagine if you could have skipped all those English classes back then. Guess what? You would be learning it all right now!"
No, no way.
It's a total misunderstanding of education to contemplate this.
Education is not 'some facts and things you learn that you may use later'.
Education at HS level is much more fundamental than that, particularly English.
It's about communicating, developing ideas, writing. Not only is it essential, it takes quite a lot of time and effort, and it's hard to just 'pick up'.
I have an Angel investor friend who just set up his own basic website (simple is fine) and wrote his own little intro copy. It's atrocious. Basically, in four sentences in writing, he reveals his own lack of education to anyone who cares to read. I mean - it's not 'that that bad' - but it really is sub professional and embarrassing. He's otherwise very smart, very educated, but it turns out he can't string together a few tightly coherent sentences to make a point.
There's no 'going back'. Both of should have paid more attention in school.
I do agree with he cadence, I think that school days should be shorter, and there should be more music and sports, shop class and longer term projects.
I don't see how the second half of the sentence follows from the first half. Did that "not" slip in by accident? Or do you consider a PhD in pure maths to be evidence of not having academic ability?
-- Yours, offended holder of PhD in pure maths :)
Or even worse when teachers decide it isn’t worth you trying because they failed to inspire you.
I think this has shifted somewhat to the standardized tests mattering quite a bit now these days.
Should we not consider alternative methods or options for education? What should everything be concentrated into one public model that follows one national standard?
When those peer groups have values that include playing video games and exclude exploring learning, it's very hard to motivate members of the group to explore learning. I don't actually have any data on this, but I suspect that applies even under extrinsic motivators. In other words, telling the cool kids who hate school that they will get bad grades if they don't learn more will not make them learn more. It will simply become a badge of honour to have bad grades.
Perhaps the single most important job of a teacher is to attempt to create a single group of the class[1] with which every student identifies, and then imbue that group with the value of learning.
I don't think the way to do this is by promising rewards (good grades) for good performance (doing exactly what the teacher asks.) The way to do it is to encourage self-directed exploration and mastery, with a sense of a greater good. (This sounds like something out of an Italian-inspired educational philosophy, but as far as I'm concerned, it's just rather simple reasoning from the principles of motivation and social behaviour as we know them.)
In the end, this is a really tough problem. If children are convinced (based on interactions with their peer groups) that learning sucks, then it's really hard to change their mind. This goes for adults as well. I'm not saying there's a magic formula to make everything work out right.
What I'm saying is that there are two insufficient and contradictory methods. I think one of them is slightly less bad than the other one.
[1]: It might sound like creating multiple groups would be easier and accomplish the same thing, but the danger with that is that small natural variations in the value of learning between these groups could get exaggerated in an attempt to create group identities. I.e. if one group is just about considered more school-happy than the other group, then that will become a point both groups can use to distinguish between themselves: one group will intentionally become more ignorant of the benefits of learning to separate its members from the other. It has to be one single group for them to all adopt the same value of learning.
Edit: I almost forgot. For more on this, see The Nurture Assumption – well worth a read.
Drive is great. Leverage it heavily as a manager.
But when it comes to kids, the problems I see are that (a) cognitively speaking, children are not tiny adults; and (b) if you want them to be successful and happy adults, you need to give kids the ability to work through mountains of "I Need To Do This Even Though It Sucks"
Cognitive development is an amazing process to watch -- you can see as brains grow and develop a wide variety of skills we take for granted.
But what that means is that you can't treat a six-year-old as an adult.
Their thinking is likely highly egocentric, because they have not yet developed the ability to realize that "my feelings and wants" are different from "other peoples' feelings and wants".
In their world, when they like Pokemon, they literally believe that everybody in the world feels the same way about Pokemon that they do. They just haven't yet gained the ability to handle that concept.
So, up to age eleven or so, you need to put enough structure around children to deal with their cognitive development path. Rules that are consistently enforced are critical (it's also good if those rules, in fact, make sense), with a gradual loosening of constraints as the child grows the ability to handle greater responsibilities.
This path continues from eleven -- when, cognitively, your child is now a functioning adult -- onwards towards the age of majority.
You still need to provide structure, but with enough freedom and ability to bend-or-change the rules such that the child can learn how to make their own decisions. Your goal is ramp them towards the full set of adult responsibilities, as quickly as they are able to handle it.
The problem with a lot of "traditional" education is that it failed to do the latter in a lot of ways -- rigid structure until age of majority, and then bam!, you're an adult, good luck.
This is compounded by how much regulation and how little slack there is in society. In the 70s, teenagers commonly brought rifles to school (because they were on the shooting team, or going hunting afterwards). Nowadays, kids are getting expelled for accidentally forgetting a tiny, micro-sized pocketknife.
The problem with "modern" education is that there is no expectation that you will ever assume responsibility. If you've dealt with a lot of recent graduates, you probably know what I mean. They have been denied much of the experience required for them to mature as adults, all in the name of keeping them "safe".
Including being "safe" from boredom. Which relates to giving kids the ability to get through mountains of drudgery.
That skill is so critical.
And I didn't really master it until I was an adult, much to my disadvantage.
If Elon Musk and every one of his employees were to vanish tomorrow, I'd be sad. SpaceX is cool. But my life would go on.
If the organization that handles sewage for my city were to vanish tomorrow, I would soon be, quite literally, in a world of shit.
I doubt that working for a sewage treatment plant offers much in the way of Autonomy. Mastery, perhaps? Purpose, absolutely.
And I doubt most kids grow up dreaming of being a waste engineer.
It's a hard job, and it demands grit. But that job makes modern life possible, and I don't see us setting up kids to be able to tackle both kinds of challenges.
Adults are merely large children.
Edit: I did read the rest of your comment and generally agree whole heartedly.
And I do know a frighteningly large number of thirty-odd-year old children. :)
I wouldn't be so sure. I think Deming (and, perhaps more concretely, the Toyota Production System) has showed us that there is a surprising amount of autonomy that can be unlocked even for the most menial roles.
Treating low-level workers with respect, training them well, and listening to what they have to say is a mutually beneficial agreement. They are the people who know what is really going on in the processes they control. They are (or at least should be!) the most informed people in the room when it comes to decisions around those processes.
In exchange for their valuable input, low-level workers should, then, get a piece of autonomy. If they have figured out a way to prevent mistakes, or a more efficient procedure to accomplish their objective, they can do it their way – with the support of management. Of course, if they know they aren't respected or listened to, it will never occur to them even to think about improvements.
Really, it's two sides of the same coin.
Totally unlike adults then.
I think this can be generalized to all humans. It would be near impossible for a true lack of intrinsic motivation to have made it through evolutionary selection.
Like you say, what matters is matching the child's potential with what is available in their current environment, and institutional schooling might be a very blunt tool for that. Not only it is necessarily inadequate for every individual kid, it can also occupy too much time and deprive them from the opportunity to experiment and explore to their niche in society in their unstructured free time.
Be careful making assumptions like that. Suicidal tendencies made it through evolutionary selection, after all.
True lack of motivation both consumes resources and doesn’t contribute to back to the individual or group survival. It is a mode of being that approximates non-living with extra costs. And to be clear I am not talking about a temporary state like depression, or a disease state like chronic depression. I just can’t imagine a permanently stagnant reservoir of genes really passing on without any form of intrinsic motivation. Even at the lowest end of mammalian bioeconomics like sloths, there is motivation, if is just fulfilled it with a different strategy.
Likewise, your evolutionary arguments for motivation are equally useless. Evolution takes place on much larger timescales than the changes in our environment. 3000 years is almost nothing in terms of meaningful evolution through natural selection, and the world has drastically changed in the last 400, or 150, or even 70!
We are not talking about why people might be committing suicide now, we are talking about how the genetic disposition for suicadility might have passed along. To give context, 50% of the people will seriously have suicidal thoughts in their lifetime for about a week or two (so few actually do).
> Likewise, your evolutionary arguments for motivation are equally useless.
You misunderstand. We are not talking about an environment - gene mismatch, therefore the timescales are not relevant at all. I am positing a near impossibility of complete lack of intrinsic motivation to have passed genetically, regardless of timescale or even species.
The argument would propose that desensitization is mostly preferable, which is probably false if you look at particularly gifted people.
Even if most students suck as tutors (which they probably do – tutoring is difficult), the benefits outweigh the problems by a big margin. Most importantly, it allows each student the desired individual focus. But it also improves the tutors' memories of the classes they used to take.
I'm baffled it's not more widely employed in lower education. (Higher education seems to get it right by using former students as TAs. Although then it happens against payment. I'd argue for simply making it part of the regular curriculum.)
> Even if most students suck as tutors [...]
Teaching is such a valuable skill in itself! And, it can be improved. I'd argue that you can't say that you understand something unless you can explain it to someone a step away from your current level of depth in the domain.
Now, imagine every developer spend 5%, 1% of their (coding) time learning how to teach or communicate ideas in a succinct, empathetic way.
We'd not only have less 40yo ranting at some 15yo project, because they used React, but also the quality of our work would improve drastically.
You dont improve peoples skills in general just by throwing them into water and hoping that swimming happens by itself.
The exception to this is skills that will kill you if you get in over your head. But that's a rather small category of skills, and it only calls for supervision, not avoidance.
As for tutoring itself: it increases the skill level of both the teacher and the student. The student gets 1-on-1 directed focus, and the teacher is forced to reflect more deeply on his own skills. Having students teach each other is very beneficial at all levels of education.
As someone who was a kid in that position, no it did not increased my skill in thing I was supposed to teach at all. That might happen when you are teaching interested peer at similar level, does not happen when you are teaching someone uninterested and someone who has much lower skills.
> For example, toddlers learn primarily by mimicking their parents, replicating their behaviour.
That body of knowledge wears off after you are like 3. Then explicit teaching by parents and other adults becomes much more prominent. And even toddlers are explicit taught a lot.
> Very bad analogy. Yes, for almost all skills, just doing them improves your proficiency.
Only up to the pretty low level for most people and most activities. After that, you reach a plateau.
1. Make the student interested.
2. Improve the student's skills.
Of course the student is uninterested and has low skills when you start out. Otherwise there wouldn't be much of a point to the activity.
You might argue that it's not the tutor's job to make the student interested, but it is. The primary thing that sets good tutors apart from bad ones is their ability to motivate their students. To care. To fiendishly ask questions that are just out of reach of the students ability, or will reveal some tiny flaw in the students understanding. This type of thing engages everyone when done well.
(I did have a source for this but I seem to have lost it. That is a shame because it was a really good article.)
Which is why literally this whole setup where you have good students tutoring weak ones is a trap and punishment for the good one.
Expecting well behaved kid to be that emphatetic mind reading tutor is waaay beyond age appropriate expectations and abilities of typical kid.
Nowhere did I state I expected any expert tutors from children. I merely said that something, anything at all, is better than nothing. It might not even be better in all cases, but on average, the evidence tells us it is.
Plus, this is your attitude toward kid tutoring another kid: as a tutor, you have exactly two jobs: Make the student interested. Improve the student's skills. And you have this expectation placed on a kid.
> I merely said that something, anything at all, is better than nothing.
That something is to put responsibility on a kid and then blame a kid for not tutoring well enough it it fails. And I am telling you that it is unfair to punish the good kid by doing this. Because this plan is not caring about the "good" kid at at all.
What you are describing is out of range for peer tutoring (child-to-child) which is what I was thinking of. For children, the motivation for the task doesn't need to come from the subject matter itself, the very fact that a friend/peer is working with you can be all the motivation you need.
I’m not sure what you have against people in their 40s but, it might be worth it to spend 5% of your time learning to respect and have empathy for them.
Side note, people in their 40s aren’t old. Damn.
Context: As I was replying to this post I saw another one where a bunch of senior 10x developers were bashing a 15yo who came up with a personal project, because the poor guy/gal used React(!).
I mean, surely we can do better than that. I'm really tired of seeing senior engineers, often fairly intelligent people acting as if being kind to others wasn't their responsibility because how smart they perceive themselves. HN is a prime example of that (despite some amazing content that can be found here too).
I'm sorry if my comment hurt you in any way. I hope it's a bit more clear now. (I won't edit the parent comment—to keep the context of your reply and remind myself to be more specific).
> Side note, people in their 40s aren’t old. Damn.
Personal note: I hope so!
Mind you, this is from reading about it, I don't have first hand experience how the system works. I can however attest to the effectiveness of tutoring in higher education. Tutors (typically grad students) often understand much better the subtle points that are difficult to understand in a topic, I guess because it's been more recent that they have learnt it. There also seems to be less reluctance for students to ask questions of their tutor then their lecturer.
I think higher education in Finland isn't anything special, if you actually want a quality education you'll have to go abroad (like the actually successful people do here anyway). Even the arguably best schools aren't that good. People mostly coast through them once they get in and just want the piece of paper at the end. Good parties though.
Years later in the work force they'll wake up and see they barely make more money then an electrician with their fancy degree because of the insane tax policies here. What's the point of having a nice degree if you're still gonna have a moderately low salary compared to other European countries?
Interesting comment in a thread about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation...
The tutors is not improving own recall. The tutor is dealing with social problem outside of tutors control or abilities. And no, good student kid wont be able to individualize teaching better then adult teacher. The good student kid will struggle with the whole motivational thing much much more.
That's not the alternative, either, because nobody will pay for one adult teacher per student. The alternative is no tutoring at all.
It is absolutely not solution to lack of teachers. Even teacher having 15 bad students the same time is better then one kid trying to be tutor.
It is also quite unfair expectation to be placed on a kid.
Education problems are indeed money problems.
The one kid that I ever encountered which I didn't find something that I could leverage to get their intrinsic motivation was a very young syrian refugee child who must have been so severeley traumatized he barely remembered my name despite seeing me every day – he was 6 years old. With him it was like working with someone who had dementia, you could only get him for very short periods and do something and he would completely lose it the day after. Most times it seemed like he wasn't there at all mentally.
But for all the others it was just about finding a way to connect certain topics to their field of interest. E.g. xkcd-style calculations for catapult with the "mad professor" as a trojan horse to physics he tended to hate before that, doing record sales calculations with the hiphop guy, writing a text about a soccer game with the soccer guy etc.
Of course sometimes they just wanted to do nothing, but slowly connecting the stuff they were forced to do before with their interests was something that showed tremendous effect. They were gladly coming every day (most because it was worse at home). If someone is stressed they cannot focus unless you make them care and motivate them.
Edit: as you can imagine, this is not the easy route to do that job. The easy route is more authoritarian.
https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/7/17/21328316/covid-19...
We grossly overestimate the amount of kids who fall into this group, maybe because we're priviledged enough exclude ourselves from it.
> I think the school system is fairly good at forcing all children to learn at least a little about all subjects.
Dude, ca. 20% of people in the US are either illiterate or functionally illiterate. How is that good?[1]
Unless, given your previous point, they're too busy playing computer games or getting high on Satan's lettuce?
Pardon the sarcasm, but this is an extremely dangerous mindset as it distracts us from the actual problem.
Edit: source
[1] https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=How-Serious-Is-A...
It’d be great to solve internal motivation issue. It’s damn hard though. Forcing some of them to learn in other ways is better than nothing while we come up with a solution for the core issue.
"erziehen", if translated literally, means "to pull", "er" is something like "to act" while "ziehen" means "pull"
Sometimes it feels like that, that it is necessary to pull someone into a certain direction in order to better that person. And this is usually not easy to do.
And annoyingly, when I bring this proposal up, most people talk about how important it is for learning to be intrinsically motivated.
It depends on the culture of the place the school system is applied in. This kind of blanket utilitarianism by way of school is a sad state for society as a whole. In a country like Canada we have a sordid past, very recently, when implementing the residential school system [0].
That's the more extreme case but I'd argue that elements of that exist in every school system when applied in a one-size-fits-all fashion and when that system has a monopoly on education.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_...
How many people never make it out of the drinking and playing video games phase because school has convinced them that they're failures?
A lot of kids would be perfectly happy starting some sort of apprenticeship when they were teenagers, and it's not obvious to me that that would be worse than forcing them through the remainder of school.
I think it's hard to tell the difference between kids who have an intrinsic motivation to play video games, and kids who have an intrinsic motivation to do anything but school and have to default to video games because the world doesn't offer much of an avenue for kids to be productive on their own (unless you happen to be very interested in computers and have access to one and the internet).
I say all this as someone who thinks education is profoundly important. I just don't think as much education happens in schools as we'd like to believe, especially for people who don't fit neatly in the system.
This is a false dichotomy that gets reinforced everywhere to the detriment of all students. There is no reason those things should be mutually exclusive, but we make it so by the power of our collective expectations.
Lots of people are discouraged and pushed away from their areas of interest because they aren't seen as fitting a stereotype or mold. Some people never even get a chance to discover that they have academic interests, and are effectively placed on a "remedial" track from the time they enter the school system because of their background. The messaging is that they cannot succeed without external motivation, which sets them up for failure.
On the other side of the coin, it also contributes to the unhealthy pressures advanced students face. Building rigid assumptions into the education system about how students spend their leisure time is part of what kills diversity.
If you want to play the violin beautifully, you have to practice for 10 years, there's no way around it.
If you want to do important things, you have to train in all sorts of capacities, and put in a lot of sweat.
One of the things that differentiates humans from beasts is that we have at least some sense of higher purpose and many of us derive considerable fulfilment from that.
For the most part, most of our education is necessary - and the ability to focus, to plan, to think beyond just a few steps, to control one's desires and emotions, to concentrate and balance one's life energies - this requires education and maturity.
Yes, it can be stifling in some ways, that's ok, we want our doctors and accountants (mostly) to be small-c conservatives. Others can write Operas.
But none of it comes without a formal journey at least in some capacity.
It's a neat experiment but I think it's hard to determine the results. The novelty of exploration in that context just might not be 'novelty' from the adults perspective. Try trading rewards for truly novel things, like, jumping out of planes, I wonder what the result would be.
Growing up, I found that those who ran on pure extrinsic factors with all discipline and no enjoyment either stopped or were stunted by locally optimal decisions. On the other hand, those who went on to study in university and play professionally seemed to derive the same obsessive enjoyment from their craft as I would a video game.
Do you think these data points further prove your point about emotional maturity? Or is there something more universal, that true success requires a fierce passion?
I don't know the source of this, but I remember reading that most people who become good at things, by practicing for 10 years or whatever, were intrinsically motivated to do so. It's not a process of "want to be good -> force self to practice -> become good", but more of "want to practice -> become good". Can't remember if this was just conjecture, and I'm not a citeable source myself, but it seems like a more likely story. I know I've heard stories of talented people who got where they are because they spent all day noodling on the guitar, or writing programs, but I've heard less stories about people who didn't really enjoy the practice but forced themselves into it via willpower.
Not to say that "just noodling" is all that the person needed, or that no willpower was required, but that the process might be more intrinsic for the people who are actually going to become great anyway.
We do our job to get money, but we won't do any job for that sole purpose.
Kids learn chemistry because they are forced to, but they'll find fun bits here and there, they'll ask teachers questions to better understand what they're taught. They won't give a crap about half of the curriculum, but the half they'll remember and will be formative is not guaranteed to be solely from the self-motivated part either.
Going further what motivates us to explore also depends on the environment, what is rewarded and what is not, etc.
I feel splitting things in two theoretical extremes is close to labelling actions good or bad, it's useful if we don't care about nuance, but has little use once we dive below the surface.
> I recommend reading Drive first if you think you disagree.
I remember getting that recommendation for "Getting Things Done" ... is Drive much better as a reading experience ? Is it readable for people who're not into self help books in general ?
As soon as adults feel extrinsically motivated, they start to view the situation as an economic transaction, where they will only perform tricks for treats. Typical real-world example of this: if you start charging parents (punishment) for coming late to pick up their kids from daycare, parents will become more late. One can speculate that this might be because they start thinking of it as "paying for extra time" rather than "being a nice human being to the daycare staff."
The cases you mention where they do indeed apparently coexist, I suspect (but have no data to support) that the children successfully manage to ignore the extrinsic motivation because the intrinsic drive is so powerful in that instance. It's probably not a sustainable model to rely on that happening, though.
Drive is decidedly not a self-help book. It's a summary of the available evidence in support of and against the existence of intrinsic motivation and how it relates to the other types of motivation (extrinsic and physical and emotional needs.)
I would be interested if you have some pointers. I've tried searching a bit but didn't hit anything.
Intuitively there is a lot of things that I want intrinsically to do, but I will do a calculation wether I'll have external motivations/rewards to do it and decide from there.
For instance I intrincically like programming. It still doesn't mean my intrinsic motivation to program disappeared because I get paid, nor that I won't be exploring thing that I am curious about and try to align external motivation to help me explore them.
> if you start charging parents (punishment) for coming late to pick up their kids from daycare, parents will become more late.
I know this case study, but as a parent I don't see this on a personal level. To put it on a different case, you get fined for parking on priority/handicaped places, but don't see rich people everywhere abusing priority parking. Some do, but most don't, so at least a majority of them don't see it as just an economic transaction. As usual, reality is more complicated.
I think your expectations of the schooling system are simply skewed. At least in the countries which I lived in (Europe) the 'customer' of the schooling system is first and foremost society as a whole.
The individual, the child, comes second. Not in a way that children are not important. It's just that the outcome of a well organised society is what matters. So, although not in extreme ways of course (there is no evil mastermind), conformity and the likes are important values.
We all love to say that we want creative free thinking individuals.. but come on now - currently the society is mostly composed of conformed (without this society probably would not function, at least as it does now) and in a lesser extent the obedient.
The creative and free thinking individuals push us all foward and we would not advance without them, but the majority is different.
Schooling system is not what it is by accident.
Simply interacting with other people is what makes humans follow meaningful rules. That happens whether or not we're rewarded for being good dogs in the eyes of adults.
Conformity to arbitrary procedures and sets of rules is not helpful anywhere, and that's what school gives us.
Everything in moderation.
It takes at least 5 years of learning piano to get good enough to enjoy it. IMO this is why adults almost never take it up - we're just not prepared to invest in something that takes so much work with such a distant payoff
Rocksmith is a guitar playing video game that can be fun from day one. I don't see why similar concepts couldn't be used to teach just about any musical instrument.
Extrinsic motivation, IMO, is akin to an exchange or bargain, you have to develop a sense or skill to know how to make them.
ps: more generally I'm very curious about the topic of 'pedagogics' and also the way to create harmonious, high level work environment between people (all motivated by few years of seeing nothing but drag, pain and waste in too many workplaces). If you know board, MLists or else, ping me.
We finish 50 million kids in school each year.
100's of millions have been through the US system alone over it's history.
If this was simply true then I feel like there'd be some evidence by now.
Yes we can do better schooling for some kids, and yes there are certainly improvements, but after 100's of year of doing it, it's not going to be a country wide system of let kids just have more freedom.
The best improvement we know of is cohorts matter. Which is a zero sum game.
I went to a school without grades. It encourages cultivating a love of learning. There was concrete feedback on quality of work and assessments of knowledge (tests). But no public grading scale. It’s been awarded 3 blue ribbon awards and consistently outperformed its grading-based peers.
Cohorts.
If all the students you schooled with could easily come from the other available systems and your school could only expel them at the same rates as the other schools I'd be happier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQiW_l848t8&list=PL463AA90FD...
As a teen, I think I would've agreed with you on this, but looking back personally, I think boundaries inspired my creativity to break out of them.
Obedience to hierarchy around stuff collecting is extrinsic.
One must learn facts and emotional character to tell grandpa go away.
We’re far to servile to decades old delusions of grandeur.
Extreme ownership of social agency by one circular meme isn’t good enough.
And the abstract is here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/desc.13026
Academics are dealt with as we do kids i.e. they are protected and allowed to explore. Corporations exploit what has already been explored for reward - without the reward there is nothing protecting them.
Academia is the same cut-throat pursuit for funding as industry, but with fewer options.
Another poster had an interesting observation about academia vs corporate work. I'm 33 and still in academia, and I now realize a large part of that is the freedom it provides. I've see salary as a score on someone else's scoreboard, and very uninteresting for that reason. OK, I'm old enough to have experienced a person needs income for practical reasons, but I'm not going to work for it ;)
I'm allergic to competition, scores, rewards, prestige, I guess that makes me child-like?
I had been under the impression that academia was mostly very competitive to be able to get career (tenure track) positions. Are you not aiming for that, is it less competitive in your field, or am I missing something else?
It does indeed come with a lot of freedom, but the relatively flat structure means that there's usually no one above the group's PI to promote their research. As a result PIs spend a lot of time writing grant proposals.
I think a lot of modern games are designed to be like this. Building farms or worlds for fun (I haven't played any of them).
A video about strings (both literal and metaphorical): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_CZTi8L29c
Compare a 1940 vision of catfishing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAykOz1gWi4
If I'm doing the same thing for too long it becomes an almost impenetrable blocker in my mind, it's like if I try to do the task again there is a mental block that doesn't allow me to imagine it. I have been working on the tools to push through this but I decided it's ultimately a problem with my lifestyle. I was never going to be happy working 9-5 on the same types of work all year.
I started working for myself once I realized this, and do considerably fewer hours, of course also making less money. I'm happier by far and getting more done than I did before in the time I do work, and getting more "life" done as well. I'm lucky enough to be able to do that and still make a living.
Relating it to the article, it seems we function in a similar way to the mold, but our balance between exploration and exploitation changes as we grow up.
Also reading other comments, it seems like different people have different balances or proportions between the exploration/exploitation modes. I personally am very imbalanced towards exploration; exploitation makes me demotivate and stop doing very quickly.
Peter Hartkamp started one in the Netherlands, and wrote a book about it.
“Our current education systems do not trust children to learn what they need to know. Governments believe that children must be coerced into learning what they prescribe as necessary for future life even though they do not and cannot know what that future will be like. Yet we do know that coercion produces anxiety and fear of failure and that this in turn inhibits learning and destroys confidence. We also know that creativity, innovation and empathy are not encouraged in such a climate even though above all else these are the survival qualities for coping with an uncertain future.
In this short book Peter Hartkamp develops his arguments against coercive ‘education’ with a needle-sharp engineer’s logic. He invites us to imagine what schools would be like if they took the articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child seriously, a not unreasonable position as all states are signatories.
I wholeheartedly and without reservation recommend this book to the many parents, students, teachers, employers and policy makers who know in their hearts that something is very wrong with the examination and testing factories that we are allowing our schools to become. It represents a beacon of hope that another way is possible.” [1]
[1] http://hetgedwongenonderwijsvoorbij.nl/en/
I'd wager that for adults, a game on a screen is just not new enough. But if you'd give adult males a choice of which female to undress, I'm pretty sure they would value "exploration" very highly again.
In a similar vain, when smartphones were new, the adult population was very active at buying new ones, comparing, and exploring the market. Now that we've had them for some years, phone upgrades have become a necessity and a lot less exciting.
So my theory would be that there is no loss in the intrinsic motivation, there is a loss in the amount of novelty.
If that is correct, then our school system is actually very appropriate even for highly intrinsically motivated kids, because they are introduced to new topics and areas of knowledge that are (hopefully) new to them.
That also aligns with my personal experience. While I hated getting up early and the concept of sitting in a chair just listening, I was excited about all the different things they showed me. And I liked best the teachers that would mention slightly irrelevant side details just for the fun of it.
Likely, but that's not the same experiment anymore since the sex factor comes into play and living beings are basically programmed to reproduce as much as possible and also with as much variety as possible (maybe oversimplified, but you get the point). So for a smartphone you can talk abut novelty-seeking/exploration (which btw I'm not sure are really different things), but when reproduction comes into play it's a whole different game anymore and it'll alter/override parts of the behavior and it shouldn't be underestimated how string the effectss can be.
They're saying that novelty is the fundamental drive behind the observed behavior, not some priority towards "exploration" that children have in greater abundance than adults. The children are seeking pleasure through novelty, and the researchers are interpreting that as exploration. The parent comment illustrates how silly that is, if you substitute something that still holds pleasure for an adult (ie sex), they exhibit the same behavior.
The difference between the adult and the child is the adult has the world experience that the trivial game doesn't hold novel (therefore pleasurable) implications for them anymore, not that they don't prioritize "exploration".
As far as I understand, going out on ships to unknown places was an extremely risky venture with zero luxuries.
This varies from person to person of course (some people don't really care much for travel in the first place, while others find every new town to be interesting and an invigorating adventure) but the general trend is for exploration to reveal less that is novel with experience.
I don't think your comment contributes much to the conversation. If anything I feel it stifles the conversation. If you had shared that the parent's comment made you uncomfortable then that is a contribution that we could explore. Instead you decide to decree from the top of your high horse that his speech wasn't acceptable. I don't like what you did one bit, and I think you did it just to make other people uncomfortable and put yourself in a position of power over them.
I don't think we should throw out wholesale that sexuality is a big driver of human behavior though, even if the example isn't inclusive. Changing "woman" to "person" addresses part of your concern, but still doesn't actually fix the experiment as proposed. The bigger problem is the experiment wouldn't work, rather than that it was cringeworthy. Which, sure. If it was cringeworthy, but worked, I guess it could have some excusability in terms of science. As is, you're right. It's juvenile.
Use some common sense next time and realize no one got hurt by speaking an obvious truth.
I think we should strive to be more tolerant. we should encourage more discourse and take well intentioned remarks in context or else how different are we from the morality police in other countries?
It is scientific concensus that our genes survive through sex and that by optimizing for their own survival our genes have made sex the strongest possible behavioral motivator. It is also agreed upon that the desire for sexual exploration is higher for males, because their genes can spread more widely through additional partners, while a typical female can only get pregnant by one partner at a time.
You'll find that non-traditional pairings will have very little effect on genetic evolution, because they tend to not produce genetically related offspring.
So the study says "adults are less interested in exploration" and to that I reply "we have literally optimized our genes for adult male exploration over hundreds of thousands of years".
Isn't that a rather large omission in the study, that they didn't mention the single most powerful motivator for exploration?
My reason for calling it cringeworthy was your choice of words of adult males undressing females. It seems cringeworthy to talk about females as an object in this way and ignore sexual orientation when you could have phrased it (if it had to be about sex) as exploring sex partners or any other hundreds of ways.
My hope with the original formulation was that it'd be easy to understand and relate to, but I agree that I should have put in more time to find a better way of saying it.
As for the argument itself, I believe that novelty seeking in general might be an unintended side effect of that urge to procreate. That would also explain why people use words like "love" for new technical gadgets and develop a highly emotional and irrational attachment to their newest toy. Plus, there is evidence that the raw attraction fades more quickly for couples that spend more time together, which would suggest that one aspect of sexual attraction is in fact exactly the novelty of the partner. And since genetic compatibility is difficult to determine in advance, there would be benefits to a systematic exploration strategy.
Which also happens to be factually misleading. Views on sexuality normativity does not have a linear progression over time, nor through societies [1].
Name dropping the current year not only doesn't add anything to the argument, it is also fallacious for any domain that doesn't progress strictly monotonically.
[1] For example in contrast to attitudes towards homosexuality in certain Middle Eastern countries today, little would consider that heteronormativity might have increased as more of a result of 19th century colonial European influence on those cultures. See this r/AskHistorians post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r17fc/what_...
This is also very hard to realize as an adult because it gets unconsiously supressed.
The following books opened my eyes at the fact how dangerous it is for the grown up adult to then keep thinking "yeah, but my parents did the best you could you know?" even though they completely destroyed his innate creativity and freedom.
Alice Miller: The Drama of the Gifted Child
Alice Miller: The Body Never Lies
TLDR version of these books is that a large majority of parents tried to mold them as children and fit them into boxes or supressed their needs and wants as children and never truly listened to them. This then causes uncousious guilt/anxiety/etc... feeling in the person as adult and prevents him from "taking oportunities" etc..
And at the core of the issue is the forced-upon-us belief that we always have to respect our parents, even though we secretely hate them. Saying "yeah but they did something good for me you know" is actually a huge problem that will only keep us from seeing the fact that many in fact do not like/love their parents very much because the parents did not truly listen to them etc...
As long as we try to weight the good vs the bad moments we will relapse into the false indoctrinated compassion/guilt towards our parents, into denial of the cruelties we experienced as a child, all because people say that we should try to "balance the good vs the bad". But this does not work in practice. This balancing process seems to be a reflection of how we tried to cope as children to survive. The adult must reject this balancing process because it only causes confusion without resolving anything. Many people when they break contact from parents feel guilty and think even more about their own parents: the "experts" and her parents have reinforced the indoctrinated belief in this person that "this individual has no right to his own life, feelings and needs." It was this desire of the child to believe that the parents were good that led to these supressions because the child blamed himself. This is why when a therapists says "try to see the good" it will only cause great harm. regression and confusion: since it was this need of the child to "try and see the good" in his parents when there was none that caused these issues in the first place.
So anyone who even slightly suspects that their parents supressed him as a child and denied him freedom of expression etc... will find many answers in those books above.
For the adults, there's no incentive to maximise how many virtual candies they collect, beyond doing it because they were told it was the aim.
I am having fun discovering the plots bit by bit
However it may also be the root of gambling addiction and any other variable rewards game systems. Gambling, lotteries can also become more attractive the more you are pressured for money - one could argue as a means of concentrating on your most approachable local maximum.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School
What 'structured' means here deeply depends on the representation the agent has of the world, i.e. which states and actions are similar to each other. Current RL setups typically learn such representations on the go. Abstractions can be very powerful here.
Arguably, people also perform structured exploration on learned representations. It may be the case that the adults have learned a representation of the 'game' and their lies little exploratory value in suboptimal actions.
It’s just that “survival” takes away too much time and energy from exploration.
I think it is not just "semantics" to consider that for children the reward is simply the rush of playing instead of what the researchers design as the intended award. And frankly speaking this is not at all a surprising result. Children learn through playing and they very much enjoy that process.
There's lots of benefit in letting kids simply explore. As a parent, I find I have to stop myself from pushing my child to the 'best' result and let them be. That it's okay to pick a less optimal solution.
Where I find this alarmingly true is when outcome/results are negative (usually ending in pain). "Don't stand like that on the chair." "Climb in this way" "Don't eat that dirt, soap, car, whatever!!"
I know my job as a parent is to guide while keeping them safe at the same time letting exploration happen, but man sometimes it's just so hard. For example, letting my child explore while walking home can make a 5 minute walk take 10, 15 minutes longer.
Such things tend to be at odds with what I want but it is more important than myself.
Pain is a very good teacher. Letting children hurt themselves and learn from that (within reason, obviously) is not a bad thing.
It's surprising to me how people consistently try to discourage traits in children which they at the same time glorify in adults.
I suppose considering how much effort society puts into raising meager people, it's only right we glorify those who manage to manage to grow as a person regardless.
I always tell my wife is that my goal is not to keep the kids from getting hurt, just to keep them from getting maimed.
It's not just that pain is a good teacher, though it is. There is an even more vital lesson that the kids need to learn. "I can handle pain." They need to see themselves survive and push through difficulty because I believe witnessing their own resilience is the foundation of not just good self-esteem, but strong self-esteem.
In the US today, we're expected to raise our children like hothouse flowers. We get them to blossom by creating a maximally nurturing environmennt and shielding them from all possible adversity. That's maybe a good strategy if they can be shielded for the rest of their lives, but unlike orchids, eventually our kids will have to leave the greenhouse. They need to be able to handle what's out there and not wilt.
It's more than that, but that's at the core. Love them, model good behaviors, and don't let them do irreparable harm to themselves or others.
i am stealing that one
As we were putting our 2-year-old to sleep last night, my wife was commenting, "Remember how last year, when we read him a book, it would take all of 3 minutes and then we'd be done?" It now takes about 2-3 minutes per page, and can be 20-30 minutes to get through a 12-page book. In the meantime, for every object on the page he's like "What's this?" "What's it doing?" "No snake?" "It a green one!" "They put the duck in the cart!" "Where going?"
Also amazing how early the desire to make up stories and explain why things are the way they are appears. The drive to make sense of the world appears to be innately human, and comes out at a young age.
I think it is something kids learn though. They seem content early on (2-3 years) with a collection of observations (I ate water melon, my hands are sticky, I’m now touching the dog), yet they constantly see us engaging in “sense making” as part of teaching them to talk and described their surroundings.
At age 6 and above, the style of learning changes and starts to touch on more abstract concepts.
There’s a lot of space between optimal and failure, though it doesn’t always feel like it. Kids can sit a million ways in chairs but at some point they can also understand the concept of balance so that they can figure out for themselves the 10%of positions which result in failure.
How were the adults rewarded? Did they also get something intrinsically valuable at the end of the experiment, or did they just collect virtual points because they were told they were supposed to?
Working dogs have been specialised by breeding for overexpression of the various initial phases of the wildtype hunting sequence: herding, retrieval, etc. Does "sex sells" indicate we may have been bred to overexpress the "identify attractive potential partner" and "do things they (appear to) like doing" phases of the wildtype reproductive sequence?
This works well to learn to play video games without defining an extrinsic reward. However, there is a problem when the system encounters the equivalent of TV. It then gets stuck watching the unpredictable stream of events.
paper and code: https://pathak22.github.io/large-scale-curiosity/
Coverage by "2 minute papers" youtube channel: https://youtu.be/fzuYEStsQxc
Many non-human animals show exploratory behaviors. It remains unclear whether any possess human-like curiosity. We previously proposed three criteria for applying the term curiosity to animal behavior: (1) the subject is willing to sacrifice reward to obtain information, (2) the information provides no immediate instrumental or strategic benefit, and (3) the amount the subject is willing to pay depends systematically on the amount of information available. In previous work on information-seeking in animals, information generally predicts upcoming rewards, and animals’ decisions may therefore be a byproduct of reinforcement processes. Here we get around this potential confound by taking advantage of macaques’ ability to reason counterfactually (that is, about outcomes that could have occurred had the subject chosen differently). Specifically, macaques sacrificed fluid reward to obtain information about counterfactual outcomes. Moreover, their willingness to pay scaled with the information (Shannon entropy) offered by the counterfactual option. These results demonstrate the existence of human-like curiosity in non-human primates according to our criteria, which circumvent several confounds associated with less stringent criteria.
Paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00100...
Non-paywalled version: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/03/29/291...