> Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet
> The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be
> The World Makers – as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us
These memes make me nostalgic for the pre-9/11 era. I remember being taught to consider myself as a “citizen of the world.” That seems exceedingly quaint now.
A lot of people still feel this way, possibly the majority. I think we're already starting to see a backlash against the cynical politics of the past decade and a renewed interest in shared values.
But the more I hope, the more one single cynical sociopath seems to co-opt the entire commons for their own purposes. The leverage of sociopathy is incredible.
I don’t really agree. Carl Sagan and other public intellectuals popularized these sorts of memes but no one really stepped in to replace them. The Ezra Kleins and Nate Silvers of the contemporary world are not in the same class.
Nate Silver’s early 538 work absolutely was this. He was spitting out minitab output from the command line straight into articles to answer fun questions like, “Is Tom Brady the most efficient passer of all time?”. It’s a capital offense that the NYT scrubbed the web of everything from 538.
That’s just a moniker wealthy elites who feel more connected to other wealthy elites in largely indistinguishable major metropolitan cities, than they do to people from any specific place or nation.
Grand thoughts always meet reality poorly. Does Spaceship Earth mean that you live in the forest to be surrounded by the greenery or live in a high-rise to preserve the greenery? Do you allow the other to exist to preserve Spaceship Earth? Environmental organizations in San Francisco treat this question like Shiri's Scissor. It is not so easy to coordinate people - disagreements on the specifics can easily fragment coalitions.
Yes, I think a lot of us feel this nostalgic yearning for a revival of more science&techno-optimistic times.
We are tired of the constant cynicism, negativity, and small-minded thinking. It's too easy to be a cynic. To put everyone & everything down, and to feel intellectually superior. You see it all over on the Internet and in the real world too, it's a true mind virus. It'll never die, but one can only hope more people just get tired of it.
I will teach my kids that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
> These memes make me nostalgic for the pre-9/11 era. I remember being taught to consider myself as a “citizen of the world.” That seems exceedingly quaint now.
That resonated with me. As someone not even in the US, I think about this a lot.
But I think the timeline change was the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore (2000), which halted the Florida recount.
If Al Gore had won, so much of our timeline would have remained in the realm of the unfathomable/impossible. Pax Americana would have continued possibly for a few more eons who knows.
I'm not gonna claim it would be star trek but I would likely be a lot less worried about my kids in that world than what I currently am.
The death of Cecil the lion, harambe, Zoe Quinn doing whatever the heck caused gamergate.
These are far more important points in time to fix as a time cop than a stupid election. You would also go back and kill Hitler, instead of simply letting him get into art school…
I really like that paragraph in the article. We have more access to knowledge and other resources than ever in history, and yet not everyone is a Renaissance Man.
Availability of resources does not entail skill in leveraging them. I'm not sure classical eduction is the best way to learn that, but it's certainly better than nothing and a useful first step.
My 14 year old is pretty sharp and i like to pose philosophical questions that have no answer to him to watch the gears turn and see what he comes up with. I once asked him what he thought the meaning of life is and he replied "to make the most effective use of the resources available to you". I can't tell you if that came from him or something he read and, while not a perfect answer, i like it quite a bit.
I feel the word 'son' carries a lot of heft here - if it were 'what will I teach my child' the expectation of passing on an economically-viable craft would feel less urgent.
But this question is tripped up in the idea of work being one's only value. If programming by humans were made illegal tomorrow, what would Steve Krouse do for work? How would he find a path forward? Who would he turn to for advice? How would he build community to this new goal?
If it's not clear, thinking about this is what to teach a child. Even in the end of the article we sort of elide the importance of teaching others to act with grace and reflection, but what more significant thing can you share with the next generation?
> That the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what.
Partially agreed.
Whatever we teach today will be solved or obsolete tomorrow anyway. In fact, in school we learn methods that are never used in real life anyway. So the "what" is not fully the point.
It's how we teach it and what the point of it. The point of it is to teach how to learn things, how to practice, how to become experts, how to struggle with them and persevere eventually. It is not a sort of an exercise for our minds, but it is exactly an exercise for our minds. That's the point.
The "what" matters in that it is a foundation of knowledge upon which future knowledge and understanding is built.
So, I agree with the spirit of the argument but it is a bit more nuanced.
The one-two punch of Goodhart's law and the McNamara fallacy bites hard here, though. We only measure things we can easily quantify, and then we optimize around those measurements, destroying their efficacy as second-order indicators of the things we couldn't figure out how to measure.
For example is the purpose of educating children about history A) to give them a systemic, if somewhat cursory, understanding of the evolution of society, in order allow them to contextualize the present? or B) ensure they know a list of a hundred or so people and events that happened?
Many adults have mutually incompatible ideas of what would make the world better. Many adults are willing to use violence to make their version of the world become a thing. It's not really as simple as saying it doesn't have to be this way.
> That's the mentality that is consistently rewarded in society today.
It's not a new thing either. The more history I learn, the more it's clear that these things have always been rewarded. It's also just a higher risk way to live, because if you piss off the other sociopaths they will slap you down.
It entirely depends what success means to you! Don't let society or even your perception of society define that.
In all fairness, I know that you meant "wealthy and/or influential people". But it bodes ill at every level that your tacit belief about success is widely known and widely accepted (though certainly not universally).
Postman's book is exactly against that definition of success, though he readily points it out. He describes it in the "Gods that Fail" section of the book.
That you believe those people with all the money are "successful" is actually the entire problem.
Yeah, I'm not stupid rich, but the evidence is that I'm far better put together than Elon Musk emotionally, and even happier in regular day to day life. Which is hilarious because I just had my entire life upended.
But I've never felt a compulsion to pretend to be good at a video game to impress strangers on the internet because I have responded to difficulties and personal failings by bettering myself. I embrace recognizing my faults, fixing them, and knowing that I am human.
Hard isn’t inherently complicated and simple isn’t inherently easy. A commitment to those ideals is wildly complicated. To pick a child-rearing-relevant example, saying sorry and taking responsibility is simple and easy, but such a difficult thing to achieve, even for adults, and is rife with complicated and complicating emotions and relationships.
My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...
I am not, in fact my understanding of mechanics is extremely basic.
If I go back into my family tree, I can find three generations of Sugar House Labourers in Scotland in the early 1800s.. a profession that no longer exists in the UK as far as I can tell, and I'm certain they had a specialisation.
We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
Our jobs as parents is to teach values and make sure they're good people and have the tools to make good decisions too, not to set them on a particular path... that's a losing goal, we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
If you can read and have any sort of curiosity (or you help teach curiosity) it’s a pretty solid foundation to learn just about anything.
The music bit is mostly things you’d want to impart on your kids if you care about that sort of thing. (Which I do!) The public versions of it are not great where I am but individually you can do a lot.
There is more to life than earning money, and not all skills need to be in service of that.
Regardless, both of those talents have the potential to open doors and set the stage for opportunity, nor are they mutually exclusive to whatever economic skills might be viable in the future.
Reading is a life skill. Proficiency in it makes you understand things. Weren't there plenty of news articles this year about how high schoolers didn't have proficient reading capabilities? Maybe teaching your kids how to properly read a text is a good thing.
Lmao. This comment combined with the one above are just a microcosm of the worst HN has to offer.
What sort of socialism was at play when the British forced Ireland into famine during the potato blight? What about the British role in India’s famine? What about the many famines brought about by civil wars and ethnic conflicts in Africa? The Great Depression, famously brought about by socialist policies and definitely not gilded age wealth inequality decadence?
If you’re looking for a common thread, it’s authoritarianism, not socialism.
Music and linguistics have often been considered amongst the "liberal arts" - none of which are arguably "useful" but all of which are terribly worthwhile.
Proficiency in reading and writing is clearly useful.
Proficiency in musical instrumemts is not necessarily useful by itself, but it's a path towards mastery of something hard that typically involves a lot of intentional practice. Having been able to master something hard once makes it easier to master other hard things, because you can reuse the learning skills. Music has a little bit of applied fractions and what not, too.
The same thing learning to learn journey happens with learning a second language. But also, learning a second language helps develop skills and understanding of your first language, and helps develop communication skills for situations where there's a limited mutual understandable vocabulary.
Some languages have market value too. Better communication with employers, customers, and suppliers is valuable.
People should prepare their kids to be happy adults, not just employed adults.
I recall reading of studies that found that a significant majority of adults who did not learn to play an instrument when they were young wish that they had.
Only a small minority of adults who did learn to play an instrument when young wish that they hadn't.
I was often really frustrated with my parents pushing me to learn at least some basics on the piano. Why do I have to practice, I want to watch Dragonball Z. Practicing is sooooo boring. Ugh.
I'm still not amazing at piano. But having a basic understanding of musical theory, understanding how a lot of these concepts of harmonics and tones and waves are related, have really unlocked a lot of neat things throughout my life. Their push for me to learn an instrument drove me to performing for family events including a couple of weddings, with my involvement in their day still quite a powerful shared memory between us. It led me to learn additional musical instruments, which I enjoyed a lot more than piano. It helped me in other artistic endeavors like theater. It helped me understand music production, something I moonlight in as a volunteer. It gave me instant connections with lots of people who were important people in my life but probably would have forever been passing strangers. It has given me something else to share with my children, as they routinely ask me to play for them and show them how instruments work. A basic understanding of waves and harmonics and what not even helped me understand a lot of more complicated EE topics.
Learning an instrument early in my life was definitely a powerful and deeply impactful thing in my life journey, almost entirely positively outside of many afternoons where I had to catch up on DBZ later.
I didn't have that but I instead did a lot of music production as a teenager, hand dragging midi notes. It turns out, I have perfect pitch. But I learned that at 27 where a musically trained person noticed it. I make melodies all the time in my head.
It was a funny moment where she was like "you have perfect pitch!" "What is perfect pitch?"
I guess it's a shame, I could've been a great musician if I was trained.
In any case, if you want to meet up online, my email is in my profile. You sound fun!
Not musical, but definitely linguistic. There are many jobs for people to work as translators or to provide customer service in languages other than the dominant one.
Playing an instrument (or rather learning new pieces to play) is super efficient brain training increasing your performance in pretty much everything else that requires you to do thinking.
It’s easier to say that when your parents were right. But there are a lot of parents who pushed their now-graduating children into fields that AI has recently eaten. And before that, parents who pushed their kids into fields they hated and ended up burning out.
That said, I am probably going to do with my kids exactly what your parents did and just hope I’m not wrong about their economic future and passions. But man, it’s a tough strategy call.
If you look at the two extremes: "follow exactly the plan I've laid out for you to the letter" and "be whoever you want to be and do whatever you want to do" in a vacuum both of those come with understandable tradeoffs and risks.
So really the meat of the problem is treading that balance. Though I am of the belief that the mind, just like the body, needs cultivating through training and studying helps cultivate the mind. Also, breadth can really unlock different things in perspective and learning so in that respect I have faith in traditional curriculums - it's hard to predict what and how things will stick for a kid so just let them learn a bit of everything because it's possible something they learn in A might lead to an aha in "unrelated" B.
Probably the one invariant for our kid will be "you must work hard"
and my mum dissuaded me from computers pretty strongly due to the negative stereotypes at the time, and its hindsight that tells us that I got lucky with my passion.
My mum did emphasise my reading though, and that went well.
Regardless of making big money later or not, I find it horrible to push your kids in a direction simply because of that. They might be better off with less income but liking their job. Or like their job, become very good, and make a lot of money anyway because of that.
But maybe that's because I grew up in a place where you can make a decent living in a wide variety of jobs. Or because almost nobody in my (childhood) vicinity ever had a STEM, or even any white collar job.
That's the issue, seems like the amount of jobs that produce a decent living are fewer and further between. Particularly if you want your own house and a family.
Could be a temporary fluctuation, or it could be that we're mean-reverting to the historical average of an ownership class and an underclass, where only the ownership class has the freedom to pursue their passions with any security. That would be sad, but I'm prepping my family for the latter.
Buying lots of stock, owning my home, maxing out my Roth 401k and Roth IRA as opposed to funding more short term priorities, with the idea that my retirement account isn't just funding my retirement, but possibly buying my kids houses as well. When my kids are old enough I'll teach them the absolute necessity of making money and every way I can think of to do that, that whatever they do when they grow up they have to be willing and able to do the version of it that makes money. If they love dance, they better be prepared to be dance instructors and open a studio or savagely commit to going pro, or be prepared to do something else to pay the bills and keep it as a hobby.
We've been financially fortunate enough to be in the top 25% of US households, and even I'm living the reality where I couldn't afford what my dad could afford working effectively the same job at the same age. Looking out at the world I see little reason why that trend should reverse, it'll have to get a lot worse first.
If I'm right I can keep my family on the better side of this shitty transition, and if I'm wrong then my kids will have even more freedom than average, at the cost of a slightly more humble present. Probably won't step on a plane much over the next 2-3 decades, and that's fine.
The older I get, the more I feel it's better to just chase the money. I mean, everyone needs some amount of money and all the stuff other than the job can be made so much easier with money. Also, high paying jobs tend to be more comfortable in other ways too: nicer offices, more slack allowed, less horrible people.
I've always been smart enough to pick any jobs I want, and, if I'm perfectly honest, I've never liked any of them in the long run. All jobs start feeling like chores after a while. In every job, the stuff surrounding the job (waking up early, commuting, talking with people I might not like, the general office setting, being told what to do, etc.) is awful enough to make even the good bits worthless.
On the flip side, anything can become somewhat interesting when I spend some effort to learn it.
So yeah, I'm not a big fan of "do whatever interests you".
On the flip side, the people that have been the most successful at chasing the money seem to be absolutely horrible people. I'm sure we can all think of a few.
I think some guidance is necessary. It's not nice to spend years in university, and then end up unemployed, or working a job that requires no higher education. That is the reality for many young people today.
I will street my children towards something that is at least employable, assuming AI has not completely obliterated job market by then.
Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds, so keep in mind that anything you're teaching is a hedge against AI stalling or collapsing.
We're moving more slowly on physical robotics in varied environments, so it's going to take a while before we automate reaching under the sink and turning a knob. Or maybe your kids will have a bright future in janitorial work, who knows?
i think this is a bit naive unless youre letting a neural interface run opus 12.6 and shutting down the rest of your brain to redirect energy towards local compute.
smart people are better at taking action based on directive than not smart people (im assuming).
If AI takes off, there will be nothing to adapt to. Anything a smart (and motivated) person can do, a smart (and motivated) AI will be able to do faster and cheaper. We might end up permanently retired and just spend our time entertaining ourselves.
id still argue that (human) education and intelligence is not worthless even in this world. learning is fun, a joke is often funnier the more clever it is, movies are better when they are well thought out, reading is more interesting when you can acknowledge the parallels to things youve read before, etc...
still, i think getting ASI to distribute itself properly is going to be harder than people give credit. there is still a lot of problems to solve. i dont think im going to wake up one day and we are shuttling people to jupiter and back.
I feel the same way about education, but as someone who received an education, I'm biased. I like knowing things and understanding things.
Studies on education and well-being don't really validate us though. They generally find a positive correlation between education and happiness when you don't control for other factors. But better educated people are usually from a higher social class, have better income, are healthier, are less likely to have been abused, etc. When they control for these factors, the correlation often goes slightly negative.
(If ASI does all the labor, education would no longer cause better income or health, so we want to remove those confounders.)
There are a number of proposed explanations for this, and it doesn't prove causation. But the data isn't on my side.
Also, I think there are two kinds of learning, easy learning and hard learning, and most people will only do easy learning without extrinsic motivation.
Easy learning is fun. It's why there are so many edutainment videos on YouTube and TikTok. Learning cool facts, or reading an educational book (without doing exams or problems) fall into this category.
Hard learning requires more effort. An example would be learning Cal II. You have to study and practice, and you likely won't get it right away. People do hard learning all the time, but usually because they have to.
Before online courses were a thing, friends or family would sometimes tell me they wish they could go back to college and take some courses they were interested in. Now we can, for free, at our convenience. But they don't. We'll watch endless edutainment videos on YouTube, but we'll only enroll in Cal II if we think we may need it.
If future AI can do everything, the extrinsic motivation is going to disappear. People will naturally tend towards easy learning. Maybe that's good enough. Easy learning will help us get funny jokes, recognize references, and appreciate good movies. But you don't need school for this type of learning. It's everywhere, and people seek it out because it's fun.
> still, i think getting ASI to distribute itself properly is going to be harder than people give credit
I'm guessing you mean getting AI to allocate resources and distribute wealth fairly without employment? Assuming we don't get a doomsday scenario, I see two likely possibilities. If a democratic government has control, people will vote to give themselves wealth. We end up with something like UBI, and people vote with their wallets to decide what the market (controlled by AI) should produce.
The other option is we get a dictator. With ASI and robotic armies, the factors that normally protect us from dictatorships would be gone. Currently, if the president wanted to declare himself a dictator, he would need support from a lot of people. At the very least, the military would have to back him. And you need your citizenry to be productive. They make all your food and machines and services. But if the army is composed of deadly autonomous drones instead of people and one person has authority over the army, they basically have absolute power and they don't need other people for anything. The factories keep running. The drones gun down anyone who resists. We're left at their whim, and we better hope they aren't cruel.
I'd argue that even endless leisure is better if you're smart and educated. Gives you better decision making (even if the AI makes your decisions, you still have to make the meta decision of which questions to ask the AI) and something other to do than just mindless hedonism. More art exhibits and intellectual conversations, less drug abuse and trash food.
But if AI “succeeds” then everyone that used to hold a job that has now been replaced would flood the blue collar market. I am not so sure that is such a bright future either.
Oh no, the enormous amounts of deferred maintenance that everyone puts off is now cheap enough to do! Oh no, we have stronger incentives to build and employ blue collar workers! Oh no! The horror!
If far more Americans learn to do blue collar stuff, it will devalue the massive amounts of scammers, charlatans, grifters that we see in these professions. Construction has literally significantly declined in real productivity since the 80s. Racists say it’s cus of immigrants doing the building. I think it’s because of grift, fraud, and greed.
In the same sense as being fit is not really worth anything today.
If AI succeeds and the future is good for the average person, education will probably improve your quality of life. Especially because it doesn't have to focus on all that boring stuff that only aims to increase your productivity.
If the future is bad, you should probably aim to be rich very soon. Preferably by owning something that is scarce and useful in the physical world. Financial assets could be unpredictable if consumer demand collapses.
> Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds, so keep in mind that anything you're teaching is a hedge against AI stalling or collapsing.
Pure and utter nonsense. Good education teaches you how the (natural and human) world works, and how to think and reason systematically. Intellectual work is your own exercise in maintenance of those skills.
Those skills are the most valuable thing our species has ever possessed. They are what makes us us. You speak like some alien. Please don't pollute young humans with this bile.
What's next? Due to the existence of forklifts, everyone should stop lifting weights? Hell, due to the existence of cars and at-home delivery, people should infact aim for a vegetative lifestyle on their couches. They should also make sure not to think a single thought now that AI has you covered?
I swear I thought I was losing my mind over the cult of the cryptobros a few years back. You AI boosters are a hundred times worse.
I would not be betting on trade jobs for the future. Many people right now who are capable and skilled in trades left and stayed out of the industry because of crap pay and working conditions, im one of them. And not only are we likely to see a further reduction in pay because of everyone thinking trades is a good path right now and pushing it, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, if people start losing their jobs elsewhere even more people are going to try and get into trades and further depress wages.
Yeah you can point out a handful of people across the nation who do really well, but you can do the same thing for jobs that are all but obsolete and worthless. Blacksmithing and tailoring and paper making also has handfuls of well paid professionals, but 99% of people with those skills will never make any meaningful money from it and it would be a foolish path to guide people towards.
The best bet you can go for in trades is union work, but that is far from all encompassing. Go to any part of the poorest parts of the country and you will find swathes of people who can do trade work, and yet they are still poor.
Don't get me wrong, having trade and tool skills is still useful, but it is a long way from a slam dunk into a great future.
This is a weird perspective, considering that university education was originally meant for the upper classes, who didn't have to do jack shit if they didn't want to.
> We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
There's an Unschooling group on Facebook I watch. If you search "calculus" you get threads where a parent asks how their kid is going to learn calculus and the answers are mostly "when did you need calculus after high school." Aside from needing it for college, my answer would be "why am I raising my kid to be a 1:1 clone of me and not someone with a lot of different options." So I dig this as an answer. The world has ended a billion times already. People who work hard pursuing a skilled passion have never been obsolete.
Not to mention physics, which is useful for understanding why things are the way they are. Which, is an important skill lest you fall into anti intellectual traps like flat earthism.
Calculus is a shared language in the grand universal ocean of intellectual cultural. Rejecting calculus is rejecting part of that culture…
I’m not sure there’s enough overlap between physics and calculus to justify calculus. That might mean you can’t derive physical equations yourself, but no one needs that who isn’t becoming a physicist.
> I’m not sure there’s enough overlap between physics and calculus to justify calculus.
You need calculus to design a windmill or an auto engine or an electric motor beyond the "just sort of works" level. Most of analog electrical engineering is defined by calculus. Althogh, yes, you can get LTSPICE to do most of that for you.
Inefficient windmills are older than calculus. Efficient windmills need aerodynamic theory to calculate a good blade design. It's quite difficult to do that. It took several decades to scale up windmills.
(A small wind turbine is like a propeller in reverse. A large wind turbine is not, because wind speed varies across the blade circle enough that those stresses dominate the design. It took decades to debug this, and make large wind turbines stable under high winds.)
You can get LTSPICE to do the simulation for you, but it will be much harder to understand why an interesting circuit works (such that you can adjust it or implement it with real components) without understanding some of the calculus behind the simulation.
F=ma is slightly important for physics, no? And deriving the equations is kind of the point; it's the understanding of "why" something is true.
e.g. I can tell you everything acts like a spring near (stable) equilibrium, and you can believe me, but why on earth would that be true? Well, Taylor expand the potential at equilibrium. Equilibrium means the first derivative is 0, so V(x) ~ V(x_0) + 1/2(x-x_0)^2V''(x_0), so F = -dV/dx = -(x-x_0)V''(x_0), which is a spring with spring constant k=V''(x_0).
That's all a very conceptual explanation; the point is near an equilibrium, zoom in and you rock back and forth on a parabolic potential! This is basic Calc BC stuff, but it also justifies why we might care about about simple harmonic motion.
I mean one example is like a dampened spring system or RLC circuits or something. You can simplify a lot of systems down to those types of simple physics systems you learn about in class.
A lot of it I think is just training people to adopt a "physics-like" or "math-like" way of thinking and giving them a general overview of how things work.
I think their answer would be "why would I care how long it takes this ladder to slide down the wall?" Which STINKS don't get me wrong. This is not a group I take seriously.
Here is an example of a practical optimization problem:
A factory needs to produce 12,000 components per year. Each production run costs $300 to set up, and storing one component costs $4 per year. What production quantity Q minimizes the annual setup and storage costs?
Sure, but to be able to fulfill all the year's orders (expected to total 12,000) a single run would have to be on the first day of the year. Setup cost = 300. Now we have 12,000 components to store. If the orders come in steadily, the last component will be sold on the last day of the year. Average quantity stored over the whole year will be 6,000 components. So storage will cost 24,000. Total cost 24,300.
Doing one run each month (quantity = 1,000 a month) would entail setup costs of 3,600. And storage costs of 4 * average storage of 500 components = 2,000. For a total cost of 5,600.
All according to the given model, of course, but I think this is the general idea.
Just like all school problems of this nature I have ever seen, the question lacks precision.
How long does a production run take and how many units can you do in a single sun? Since this isn't mentioned, the answer is to produce everything at the last second of the year. But we are also missing information on why the factory needs to produce 12,000 components in a year and for whom and about the logistics involved in getting those components to the buyer.
I always hated these type of questions for their lack of precision. You haven't even mentioned how many units in a single production run will be faulty and need to be scrapped instead of delivered, how am I supposed to optimize anything?!
The one-dimensional mentality of anti-intellectualism is absurd. I have heard parents outside of our school but in my community talk down French Immersion programs (versus English schooling) saying that people put their children in for the wrong reasons. I don’t know what the explicit reasons were in this case, but I am assuming that the other parent means academic overachievement.
Learning calculus or French can be beneficial, especially when the glass ceiling in certain workplaces is whether or not you’re bilingual. However, the point that’s getting missed is the metaexperience that consciously or subconsciously shapes the way the child interacts with the world later on.
I wonder. In my world, almost everyone I know is bilingual and I would not have met them and worked with them otherwise. So many of my coworkers are from countries where English is not required but they were fortunate to pick it up as a 2nd language for one reason or another and now work in a high paying company that requires English.
Still, I get, over all, the number is small. They could have all had a different career in their native language.
Knowing English as a second language and Dutch as a first language is different than knowing, for example, Dutch as a second language and English as a first.
I know people in both camps. I have more respect for English speakers learning Dutch than for Dutch speakers learning English. Even though I respect both. But the simple truth is: there's a lot of incentive to learn English. There is not a lot of incentive to learn Dutch.
The Foreign Service Institute has a language difficulty rating, based on the first language of a speaker, to estimate the number of class hours needed to achieve fluency.
Learning English from Dutch is 24-30 weeks whereas from German is 36 weeks. I am assuming some degree of reciprocity but maybe not.
Where I live (Oregon, USA) there are very few jobs that require it but a lot of jobs where speaking a second language might get you hired over someone else.
Most jobs that are focused on interacting with people benefit from speaking a second language if it’s a common language in your community: nursing, teaching, customer service, social work, etc.
I’ve seen job listings mention it as a nice-to-have and know bilingual friends who have gotten those jobs.
I only speak one language well but I wish I spoke more. I hope my son (and future other kids) learn multiple languages. But not for job/economic reasons: it just seems good for your brain and interesting for how you think about the world.
>it just seems good for your brain and interesting for how you think about the world.
I am fluent in 3 languages, and while it is convenient, I assume claims about it being "good for your brain" are just as pseudoscience-y as all the other claims about what is good for the brain.
One of the languages I know doesn't even use a Latin alphabet, and I spent many hours learning it when I was little. And it's basically useless (obviously just my experience) except for communicating with older family members. Once they pass away in ~3 decades, I doubt I use it again.
Actually, the biggest incentive for me to teach my kids that language is so that we have a secret way of communicating in public (in the US). But I have failed so far, because it's just a lot of work to teach kids another language when you and your spouse prefer to speak in another, and so the kids are not completely immersed in it.
Because there are few if any good metrics for evaluating the brain’s performance and connecting it to isolated factors, and the experiments are near impossible to replicate. Brain related research is also some of the easiest to churn into clickbait, since it rarely gets into the nitty gritty of molecular interactions.
>Public Significance Statement—The idea that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in cognitive control functions seems to have already been accepted by the popular media and educators, because of a number of influential studies reporting a bilingual advantage. Our thorough meta-analysis, however, suggests that healthy bilingual adults do not have such a cognitive control advantage. The synthesis of 152 studies and 891 comparisons and several moderator variables does not show systematic advantages across the analyzed cognitive domains, tasks, or bilingual population
One example: I worked for an Alphabet company with some very, very accomplished people. When the drawdown on the project came, the people who were bi- or multi-lingual all kept their jobs. They were more useful in more situations for a multinational project. The 36 people let go probably wish they'd spent a little more time studying Japanese, Spanish or Norwegian.
In high school, I thought my French classes were mostly pointless, but then 14 years later, I moved to Paris where I have been living ever since, which is something I never could have imagined as a teenager. It's hard to predict what knowledge will end up being useful. To be fair, I had to mostly reteach myself French when I moved here, so I guess the real lesson is that it's useful to be a strong autodidact.
In middle school my foreign language choices were Spanish, French, or Latin. I picked Latin because it was cool. When it came time to talk about subordinate clauses and noun cases in English, Spanish, and French, what I'd learned in Latin was invaluable. It's like learning a purely functional style programming language versus an imperative one: they'll both inform how you think about solving problems in the other. Getting really good at another language is good because it makes you better at thinking about grammar.
I question the "like learning a purely functional style programming language" part of this but Latin did have its advantages. Many English words are derived from Latin roots (but I didn't study Greek and that is the second great source!8-(()
I likely would have been better off taking Spanish but I avoided that b/c half my class were fluent in Spanish already and I had to maintain a decent grade.
counterpoint: I did 3 years of Latin and it only helped me with SATs and/or sounding legit while playing Crusader Kings II
shoulda done French or Spanish. yeah there is some shared Latin roots there but that doesn't magically make it simple to pick up the languages. Hell, Italian might have been a better choice.
Weirdly my mom said that Portuguese Portuguese is the closest language to Latin that she'd ever encountered, not French or Italian or Spanish. My high school required an ancient and modern language, so I did French and Latin, then dropped Latin and picked up Spanish because it's kind of wild not to know any Spanish in the US. When learning French it helped with roots, sure, but it really helped with knowing how subordinate clauses work, why you'd use the subjunctive, that kind of thing.
Calculus is entry level math for all the hard sciences, engineering, and finance. It's how to think about how things change over time. Understanding what integrals and derivatives look like, especially as graphs, is very practical knowledge.
Being able to think about compound interest and acceleration under gravity as driven by the same rules gives an understanding of what's happening underneath.
Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest.
(But then, I once did a game physics engine and have a patent in that area.
I spent a lot of time in the hell which is integration of stiff systems of nonlinear differential equations. Turned out that was the wrong way to approach the problem. Works, but there are better approaches.)
> Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest.
A very common example is compound, continual interest accumulation. As a mathematician, I had trouble understanding how banks calculate it (as they would obviously not point me at the derivation of the formula), but it's actually a limit sum over infinitely small interest terms.
Similarly, these techniques work to explain and derive numerical methods for calculating many natural constants like e, pi etc.
Where I live, the banks say that they compound interest daily, but pay interest monthly. So, I think the small interest term is just limited to a day where the error is small enough for the average person to not care.
A loan is subdivided and sold in different allotments each year at a different interests rate, principal, and terms. You want to sell the entire debt at some point in the future. How do you calculate the price such that you don’t sell at a loss?
If you learnt calculus, you could check their work and see that it's accurate. And it only takes algebra and a few minutes of work to see that your bank statements match the formula that's been given.
I know calculus, and I also know that mortgage payments don't follow that formula - or, maybe they do but they're so buried in noise and extra charges and costs you'd never know it.
Bookkeeping normally computes interest based on some accounting period - days, weeks, months, or quarters. It's a sum of discrete charges, not an integral.
It was usually monthly in the paper and pencil era; today it is usually daily.
Look up "double declining balance" and "Rule of 73".
Financial calculators do integrate, though. "Present value" is computed by integration.
Generally, banks try to get as much of the interest early on, and move the base to later. This is why it usually makes no sense to pay off a debt after 5 or 10 years when you paid 80% of the interest already (but also why refinancing works for banks: more upfront interest which they put into books as profit right away).
On some things, governments put the cap on how much can early payments be loaded with interest and how much at least should be paying off the base debt — otherwise, you'd be paying only the interest for the first 15 years of a mortgage.
Though, these things work slightly differently in different countries.
Right? Just because my professional career never took me in those directions doesn't mean I want to foreclose them for my kid! I did do electrical engineering classes in college wherein I needed calculus, I just never took a derivative/integral after graduation because I ended up on the coding side of a Computer Engineering degree.
My grad program had an advanced math sequence that was traditionally numerical methods for solving PDE’s and boundary value problems. Except my year, a visiting professor made it infinite series solutions using laplace transforms. Because why would you want an inexact numerical solution when you could have an exact solution to whatever degree of accuracy you need. Line integrals have their own special place in hell.
i hope i don't get downvote for this, but billions of people function just fine without the most rudimentary understanding of calculus. while i love maths, i am sympathetic to the view that it's not an essential life skill, and might even be less so in the future.
School shouldn't be teaching essential life skills. It should inspire and enable young people to go on to achieve great things -- at least some of them. How will we ever get another Newton, Einstein, von Neumann, Noether, etc. if we don't teach all young kids what is possible with math? Calculus arguably transformed our society and is a great showcase of the power of math. It can shape the way we think about things, because this level of precision is rarely needed when thinking about other disciplines.
They function just fine as either 1) subsistence farmers, or 2) beneficiaries of an enormous machine designed largely by people who knew calculus. You used to be able to function fine as 3) subsistence hunter, but then members of group 1 destroyed most of the wild ecosystems, while group 2 paved what was left and turned it into luxury apartments.
For better or for worse, humanity has chosen the path of gods. We'd all better start thinking like gods.
Intentionally not learning Calculus will make your kid into a better AI researcher, as they will naturally study gradient free optimization that makes few assumptions about a problem space. Global Optimization as a concept is not dead guys!
You never know if learning calculus will make you discover new things that you might like to pursue. Also, you never know if you will need it or not apriori. By that logic, you shouldn't learn anything until you need it, wich I think would be a disaster.
> You never know if learning calculus will make you discover new things that you might like to pursue.
Just as you will never know what you might have discovered if you used the time you spent learning calculus learning something else instead, of course. There is no magic formula to life.
> you shouldn't learn anything until you need it
Impossible. Simply existing as a functioning human means you are going to be constantly learning something. Not everything you learn will be useful, but that's also true of calculus. Not everyone finds it useful in the end either. You never know what will end up being useful, but you also can't learn everything.
The great thing about the curious mind is that you tend to be naturally drawn towards the things that are most useful for you. Those most likely to do something with calculus already voluntarily choose to learn about it. You don't have to make them. The druggy who has no interest in anything but getting high, who suddenly has his life turned around because you force him to learn calculus, is little more than Hollywood fantasy.
This framing doesn't fit my experience. Most kids, left to their own devices, would not learn arithmetic.
I know few adults that were forced to learn something as kids that regret learning it. Conversely I know tons of adults that, as a kid talked their parents out of being forced to learn something and as an adult seriously regret it.
> Most kids, left to their own devices, would not learn arithmetic.
Unlikely. Too many things in life depend on arithmetic. Most people will learn things when they must.
What is more likely is that kids won't learn arithmetic before they need it and therefore may theoretically miss out on the aforementioned discoveries that are overlooked when one doesn't already have a foundation in arithmetic. However, most people never have such discoveries anyway. Those who do tend to be the type that would learn arithmetic just for fun.
> I know few adults that were forced to learn something as kids that regret learning it.
As a once child, if I didn't want to learn something, I didn't. Forcing someone to sit in a classroom where a subject is being taught, for example, is not the same as actually learning the material. So this is an obvious truism. Those who didn't want to learn something never did.
> Unlikely. Too many things in life depend on arithmetic. Most people will learn things when they must.
Yes but arithmetic is actually not intuitive at all, and you can certainly grow up to not know it. There's a lot of people who once grew up not knowing how to read, because they didn't go to school.
Children are still children, they very famously make poor decisions. Yes, not all children, but most. We have to mold and steer them, because for humans we come into this world as basically blank slates. We're not like other animals, ready to roll. We require decades of careful curation.
> Yes but arithmetic is actually not intuitive at all, and you can certainly grow up to not know it.
If you are in a situation where you don't need it, sure, but if you don't need it then who cares? I get the nebulous "but what about the discoveries you are missing out on", but the type of people who wouldn't learn something like arithmetic for fun also never find discoveries anyway, and never would even if you could force feed them all the knowledge of the world. That argument really doesn't apply to most people.
> Children are still children, they very famously make poor decisions.
Not quite. What children are most famous for is that they won't learn until they want to. Poor decisions, implying that they could have made good decisions if only they would have listened, are the outcome of them not learning even when you tried.
> We have to mold and steer them
There are deadbeats in the world, sure, but for the most part that just naturally happens at least up until they hit the rebellious teen years. Kids want to be by your side, watching, learning. We wouldn't have made it as a species if this didn't occur automatically. Like I said before, you cannot exist without learning things constantly.
"for humans we come into this world as basically blank slates."
Can you source this? I thought we were pretty much expressions of our particular genetics and the biological human substrate we all inhabit. This is very much not a 'blank slate'. Every time I've tried to look into or steelman the blank-slate I can never come across hard science that backs up the assertion that we are all 'blank slates'.
Blank-slate seems to be more of a liberal idea then a scientific one.
Blank-slate as compared to most other mammals, who are often born with knowledge of how to walk, feed, or even hunt. These skills usually come pretty quickly, most mammals have their young on their own within a year. Humans can’t even walk for a year. Many other mammals walk on their first day.
We also have case studies that if humans are not taught language then they won’t, and can’t, speak. Genie comes to mind.
Genie could't speak because she was deprived of exposure to normal human interaction, not because of lack of being taught. It is apparent you've never been around a child because otherwise you'd have quickly recnoized that most of them do speak before anyone tries to teach them how.
I’ve obviously been around children, and I do qualify speaking to children as “teaching them how to speak”.
If you speak math problems to your child you are… wait for it… teaching them arithmetic. That’s what teaching is.
Arithmetic is not something that just naturally exists in the world, it’s a purely human construct. It does have to be taught in one way or another, otherwise people won’t know it. And, unlike language, I seriously doubt parents are just speaking arithmetic randomly in conversation that often. Your kid most definitely will not just “pick up” arithmetic.
In fact, I doubt a kid would even pick up language if you never spoke to them directly, and instead they just heard bits in passing between adults.
> If you speak math problems to your child you are… wait for it… teaching them arithmetic. That’s what teaching is.
Exposure to something and being taught something are usually recognized as being quite different, but it is clear now that you just want to play a game of semantics, so we can put and end to that.
> I doubt a kid would even pick up language if you never spoke to them directly, and instead they just heard bits in passing between adults.
Kids not being able pick up on language by listening to a recording of adults speaking about some random thing is supported by the research, but the research also strongly suggests that kids can pick up on language if those adults are surrounded by additional context. For example if adults in the same room were talking about a visible object in front of them then the research suggests that the child would be able to pick up the language.
Most kids don't want to learn that eating nothing but candy and drinking sodapop is bad for you. You have to force them to eat their veggies. By force = don't allow them the candy and sodapop.
Most kids would never go to school if not forced. They'd play video games or watch youtube.
There are 0.7 billion adults that can't read. 40% of adults in 1st world countries can't do arithmetic.
So, no, there is no evidence people will not learn without being made to learn. There are only anecdotes that some children get lucky and learn things on their own. That's not the norm and there is ample data to back that up.
> 40% of adults in 1st world countries can't do arithmetic.
Including whomever wrote the article.
"Suppose, a litre of cola costs US$3.15. If you buy one third of a litre of cola, how much would you pay?"
As cola has a large size-indpedenent cost, I would reasonably expect to need to pay more than the claimed $1.05 if 1 L is $3.15. Moreover, the marginal utility of 1L isn't 3x more than the smaller container. There is no need to have that much soda when an appropriately scaled option is available. Based on real-world prices I could find, 1 L of cola sells for $1.99, while a can (355 mL; as close to 1/3 of 1 L as we find in the real world) sells for $1.50, echoing that $1.05 is not a realistic price to pay. And in actual practice, I'd pay nothing for cola and get water instead.
And he is supposedly a lecturer in Economics and Social Statistics. Goes to show, again, that the kids won't learn unless they want to. Teaching alone is insufficient.
I think it's hard to have the kind of meta-skills as a child, it's kind of hit and miss. As an example, music is one thing that works best if parents, siblings and friends are into it and you can do it together or if it's somehow ambiently present most of the time. But if it's something that you only go to lessons for, decided by someone else, that you don't enjoy etc - then it's often like pouring water into a dry well. Yet those mechanical even if less enthusiastic skills can then be useful later, if the inspiration comes, with a new social circle etc. Or similar with sports. In some families, it's more "present" in an ambient way. When waiting for something outside, the kids have some hockey sticks and a tennis ball lying around and just start playing. Or talking about the news in an analytical way: that person leads that party and they have these values, while that other person drives these other things. If you have these available then different kids are exposed to things and can pick up things they are moreinclined to. I've read lots of mathematician and scientists' stories how Martin Gardner's problem books drew them in to the field. So parents exposed them but didn't force. And their exceptional inclination did a lot of work.
It's interesting to see different perspectives on this.
For me, calculus was the first math I learned, where symbols represented something other than pure numbers or tangible points on a plane, and we proved things about higher level abstractions. Of course many of the topics had tangible applications, but it was a launching point towards further abstraction in the higher level math courses.
A friend of mine in grad school was a student in medieval church history, but was assigned to teach a freshman course in modern history. For one class session, he asked a math teacher to give a guest lecture on calculus. Then he lectured on its impact on society.
It's true that most people, including managers and engineers, forget their school math not long after school. Their software tools, such as Excel and CAD, can do the math that they need. One can hope without proof that a little bit of mathematical thinking rubbed off on them.
I enjoy it when parents don't educate their children and I encourage it, because it reducing competition for my child. The people pushing unschooling and dismantling public education pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for private schools and college admission consultants.
They are thrilled if you opt into being a servant class.
Learning what infinitesimals were and how useful they were for understanding the rates of change was an actual eureka moment for me, and many people in my classes felt similarly. It fundamentally changes the way you view things as simple as a car accelerating or the way heat spreads through a system, the way fruits spoil faster in the winter if you have heat, why metals creak when they're cold and why they groan when they're heated.
The thing that really begets me in all of this is that what you describe, working hard pursuing a skilled passion, requires a foundation of knowledge that up until a year ago was considered a foregone conclusion for becoming someone of note. It doesn't matter whether someone learned it autodidactically or through structured schooling, the point is that the knowledge itself is fundamentally important. We never stopped teaching children basic arithmetic or mental math when slide rules, adding machines, and calculators became widespread. The reason why is pretty obvious.
And yet, the technofeudalists want us to stop teaching our children critical thinking, science, arts, technology, and everything else that encompasses the indomitable human spirit, and why? Because a machine can do those things too? Machines have been capable of or better at a great many things that humans are also capable of for the past hundred years or so and yet we have never stopped teaching humans those very things exactly because we used to recognize that those things had enormous utility in general in a sphere far beyond whatever is necessary for your calling or profession. It is absolute lunacy to me that someone could see LLMs and agentic flows do brute-force proofs and then somehow suggest that the entire field of mathematics is obsolete.
I urge you to read the piece "Complex Systems Won't Survive the Competency Crisis." If we lose all of our institutional knowledge of how the puzzle pieces all fit together there will be no one to save us when (when, not if) the systems we're creating now suffer a catastrophic failure. And they will. Model collapse has not happened yet because of luck. Synthetic data can only get you so far. And whenever we enter our Idiocracy/WALL-E stage of total compliance and deference to machines themselves, one day there will come a time when something breaks and no one knows how to fix it because they no longer understand the underlying principles.
You might say in an optimistic scenario you can just ask the LLM for the tools and resources and prior knowledge needed to fix it. Alas in many cases, this is barely enough, and most on this forum are technically knowledgeable enough to actually make use of that advice. It's hard to see a compliant, totally intellectually decrepit population doing the same. I'd also advise you that although unschooling has its benefits, it's a movement that is filled by those who are often cultists and other fringe hacks who have grievances with the school system for reasons unbeknownst to me and many others. I would not use them as any sort of advice forum or channel for meaning, and the fact that you seem to be taking them as gospel is extremely questionable and makes me uneasy about the future of this forum in general.
Oh don't get me wrong, I concede I could be totally wrong. But there are other scenarios that are apocalyptic that aren't model collapse and they are equally as terrible. Civilization lives and dies on our edge cases.
Mathematics is fundamental as it shows you there in fact exists a way to spot bullshit with no concern for however much rhetoric is used. Many people would be really and truly shocked to know we can definitively prove things given certain axioms, and not just have "wishy washy" verbal arguments or slogans. Without exposure to mathematical training, nonsense like belief in gods or supernatural thinking tends to increase.
This is the wrong way to think about school education. It's not just to prepare you to use it yourself. For most people it's there to prevent them from being lied to. If you did something as a kid, even if you wouldn't be able to do so now, you know it can't be that hard. So if anyone tries to sell you something saying "oh, don't even look at this part it's just complicated math stuff" you now at least have a chance to spot the BS.
It's the same for pretty much all school education. It's gives you a chance to spot the fluff, pomp, and lies.
Yeah, I don't know what the other guy is talking about, but when you look at the birth of Truancy laws, it becomes obvious that state schooling was instituted so that you would believe the lies and indoctrination of the state over the wisdom and care of your family and community.
If schooling was about making it so people aren't tricked, why do they have you say an national anthem (that used to be called a prayer) pledging allegiance to the flag of the empire?
Its a very sick view of the world to think that the government is who has your back and cares about you and is the person you can trust, rather then your own flesh and blood family and community.
As the parent of a 4 year old, we're allowed to raise them to be mini us until the tell us otherwise, then we can respectfully disengage. Sharing things we're good at and enthusiastic about only helps kindle their enthusiasm for things in general, in my experience.
I don't think your reasoning is well thought out. You shifted the question from why should someone learn calculus in high school to why someone should learn it in college. I do think that it would be better if most high school students were taught probability and statistics than calculus.
"I needed it in college" is the answer to "when have you needed calculus after high school." In fact I was wrong though: I had forgotten that calculus was a prerequisite for AP Physics in high school. We also did plenty of probability in high school. I will say that Bayes and information theory in college were really cool and would have been a cool hook for teaching something in high school though, but there's only so much time. Had I taken AP Statistics they may have come up..
But give a boy until the age of 7 and he's ours for life, is what that old order of the monks said about values. What do you do for the remaining 11 years?
Yeah, but that doesn't mean, that parents can't give their children a head start by teaching them stuff, that will smarten them up or help them understand stuff at school.
I remember my father taught me how to divide numbers and somewhat how to multiply them, before we learned that at school, with his own explanations. For multiplication he taught me indirectly, by making "number tables" with me:
Up to 20. I used to bring them to school and teachers were discouraging, not realizing, what a great thing this was and what kind of insight it could allow a child to have into basic operations.
For division, he often said: "How often does one number fit into the other?" as a way of explaining that operation.
Ah and he also taught me about negative numbers, when other kids at school didn't even understand what that was supposed to be, and teachers still wanted us to write "not solvable", instead of the correct answer, which were negative numbers. How silly.
When the time came and we learned about division and fractions, I had an easy time to understand what the teacher explained, due to knowing an intuition about what division actually means. The hardest thing for me was not dividing numbers, but following that methodical procedure to divide in the written form, digit by digit. Something I had done in my head already, when thinking about that some number "fits into another number" only half, ergo must be 0.5 added to the number of times it fits in there whole. Only that I didn't realize immediately, that this written way of dividing 2 numbers was the same thing actually.
In this way parents can make school life and learning soooo much easier and less painful for their kids. Granted, I did seem to have a gift for calculation in primary school, but what was so casually taught to me by my father every now and then, helped tremendously. It wasn't even like strict hours of learning. It was just using chances to show me stuff.
From my mother I learned to actually pay attention how I write words. Initially, my spelling was only OKish, not great, until one day I somehow realized "Hey I just have to think a little and pay attention." and suddenly had good spelling. But this didn't come about, without my mother sitting down with me and complaining about my handwriting and also once or twice forcing me to do some writing. My handwriting is still no good though. Glad that didn't influence my grades. I write better Chinese characters, than German words, apparently.
If I had children, I would definitely try to teach them such things. Even if it is just how to look at something or what to pay attention to, or small calculation tricks. I would try to make their learning easier and offer support when they need it to learn.
Your bit about numbers “fitting” into each other is exactly my intuition about division as well, probably formed at a young age. 7, 3 and 21 fit together in my mind like “Kiki” is sharp and “bouba” is round. Or how I could intuit the word “melt” in German was “schmelzen” before I ever learned it - it’s a core memory of mine just guessing that word from the ether and being correct, and felt like validation that I could become fluent.
Methodology is important but growing these intuitions feels critical to me, but no idea if that is something can be taught as much as it’s learned.
> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
"And you, too, will be a mechanic", which is how that usually goes.
People should spend enough time with tools to get the basic skills down. Some years ago a Stanford mechanical engineering prof was complaining to me that many of the Indian students from wealthy families thought that using tools was beneath them. "They've never used a pair of pliers." Now, to some extent, that mindset has spread to the American middle class.
In my graduate engineering program you could always tell who came from high caste families and who came from low caste families by how they performed in the lab.
Maybe, the point I'm making is that we focus on thinking we know what the best thing for our children will be ("I can teach them the stuff I learned latest and have the most info about and they'll get a better headstart!") and we overlook things that don't fit into that framing.
I got really lucky that my passion was computers and not something less "productive" like art, or more productive but less economically advantageous like farming.
But you won't go wrong teaching your children how to weigh options, make their own decisions and to be good people with principles and tools for helping them understand how to learn new things themselves.
You will probably go wrong pushing your children to be doctors, lawyers or whatever else you want them to be.
You don't seem to be understanding the importance and effect of selection criteria bias.
Much of the personality and intelligence is genetic and that's determined at conception, as for optimum parenting it seems that general indifference yields the best outcomes. There are many ways to damage a person so they won't reach their potential but there does not seem to be many ways to 'make' a person better than they otherwise would have been if they were largely left alone to control their own lives.
Understandably parents want to feel more important and in control, and that their investments will yield good results. And since most people want to feel this way they like to promote messages that reinforce these priors, so the whole platform slowly turns into Linked-In.
I base my assessments on large scale machine learned behavioral analytics done on a full click log history on a non-trivial portion of the US population. Unfortunately I know things about society that I really wish I didn't.
To be adaptive. That's going to be the most valuable skill going forward, to be able to adapt to any and all circumstances that may come your way because it is going to be a rough ride for at least the next decade and possibly much longer than that.
I'm in the same boat as the author, have four kids and I struggle with keeping them motivated and this has been my anchor so far.
That's always been an important skill (at least in the last couple hundred years as far as I can tell).
Industrial revolution, the shift from manufacturing to services, the shift of technology over time.
Hell, they say that the reason millennials are so nostalgic and enjoy childish things is because of rapid technological and societal change in the last 30 years.
I doubt it'll slow down, the era of doing anything until you die was a foolish thing for even our grandparents generation.
That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree. In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture. It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels. Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
> That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree.
I strongly disagree with that.
> In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture.
Nature has set us up to be amongst the most adaptive creatures on the planet. I think only the rats and the microbes have us beat. We are everywhere. One of the things that struck me while traveling the world and visiting some pretty out-of-the-way places is that there were always people living there as if it was perfectly normal.
> It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels.
Why would it have to be shallow? If you spend your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what.
> Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
Not really, but again, you are welcome to that opinion, I just don't share it.
> Why would it have to be shallow? If you spent your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what.
Because when you ground this in reality, if you spend 3 to 5 years in a field and moved to another field and spend 3 to 5 years in that from a monetary perspective, you are always going to be a junior you are going to spend your entire life doing low-level tasks and getting paid at low levels.
I don't think that's true either, or a least, it wasn't until the bots came of age. There was plenty of gold to be found on the crossroads of various fields and the matrix of skills is large enough that the competition is immediately a small fraction of what it is within any one field.
I hope we see a revival of the humanities in the coming decades. The original meaning of "liberal" in liberal education referred to the ability to act as a free human being (libertas). Arguably, the most important skills going forward are the ability to think independently and critically, to adapt to new circumstances, and to be able to formulate one's thoughts in a coherent and convincing manner.
I'm not sure how widespread this meme (in the general sense, not the internet fad sense) is, but I came across it theorized by this humanities account, Adam Walker - Close Reading Poetry:
Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal, especially if you’re now competing against machines as well. If you ask me, my prediction is that humanities and liberal arts as organized schools of thought are going to fall even more to the wayside unless you’re very rich.
> Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal
I disagree. Making money is a means to an end, that end being one's ability to live a comfortable life as a member of society. If other means are able to achieve that end, then that reduces the need (or even desire) for money.
While I'd cynically agree that modern society as structured today will fight tooth and nail to keep those other means from being viable (because the current powers-that-be are such specifically because they were able to accumulate the most money), that doesn't have to be the case. We can and should demand better.
>Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal, especially if you’re now competing against machines as well
What you've just stated is a Marxist/materialist perspective. Up to a certain point of meeting basic survival needs, it's probably true. But there are other ways to think about what ultimately determines human goals once survival needs are met. This illustrates my point about the humanities, often we put our thinking into boxes without realizing that the box exists at all.
> I hope we see a revival of the humanities in the coming decades. The original meaning of "liberal" in liberal education referred to cultivating free human beings (Latin libertas).
I doubt it given how liberalism is falling out of favor in politics so rapidly
It turns out that liberalism is a metastable state between dictatorship of the proletariat and dictatorship of the owner class. But then, I think Marx could have told you that a century and three quarters ago...
> Schools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet.
What happened to religion? Last I checked it was doing well.
> We typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one’s kids.
We typically confuse that that particular confusion is the thing. God is the model's weights running on the distributed computer that we form collectively with our brains and whose running realization we call "society." The Christians (which are superb at sleazing their way around the irrefutable lack of supernatural divinity) call it "concursus dei". Considering that in some parts of the world people consistently elect whoever looks more like a radical God-GPU-node, I would say this particular one among our "dī" is still firmly at the helm.
Questions are more powerful than answers.
My kids are 29 & 31 now. I'd suggest that they master how to ask well formed questions.
Also, "The medium is the message" is from Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964)
Your children are about to reach an age where they have a better formed understanding of the world than you. Might serve you well to see what you can learn from them.
Teach your children about the things you love. Partially because children often don’t fall far from the tree, and mostly so they can learn how to enjoy something.
> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”, because I reasoned that if you “were able to use arbitrary resources to uncover and solve problems”, you had no more need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a person was educated when they could wield them. But now I see my vision of resourcefulness perfected in the AI agent and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness will go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in turn supplanted memorization and an oral tradition.
I disagree here that agentic AI somehow replaces the need for humans to be resourceful. LLMs and their harnesses are just more resources for humans to use to uncover and solve problems, and resourcefulness is more important than ever for navigating a world increasingly riddled with slop (of the AI-generated variety or otherwise) and enshittification. A properly-functioning education system should absolutely emphasize resourcefulness as the primary skill to teach students, even (especially!) in the post-AI world.
School for me, was only useful to providing structure. I wasn't very good at paying attention in most classes, except math and physics maybe. So having a human teacher talk to me in real time wasn't really as useful.
What school did provide was a sense of structure. There were 4 main exams every year, there were peers for me to compare myself with, that helped me feel good about myself when I was doing well and miserable when I was trying to catch up. There were lessons which felt incredibly boring at start but got hold of my attention by the 4th lesson. Without a structure like this, it would feel like running in a desert. Without goal posts, encouragement and support system (a slap on the wrist sometimes), the best of us would just run around in circles. This is exactly why MOOCs never worked for me and thounsands of others.
Your description feels very apt. I was great in a classroom but I've done poorly learning alone outside of it. Do you have any recommendations on how to pick up new subjects and material after college?
> and you’re telling me that “Ok class, turn to page 17” and “Does anyone know how to solve for x” are still going to be around in the 2030s?
Nope, ship sailed. You haven’t had a child in school yet. It’s not like that anymore.
5 years ago in Palo Alto (Paly High) it was: Take your shoes off, get on your phone to watch a season of whatever you want, leave for “up to” 40 minutes. Paying attention to a teacher… who may have been teaching? or not? Why not just head over to the wellness center and get snacks? They let you hang out there.
Those IN CHARGE didn’t care to make learning matter or be rewarding. With AI, it “matters” less, in the credential-sense of schooling.
Not necessarily stuff like hunting and dismembering animals... but basic trades skills go a loooong way. Being able to do basic wiring tasks without ending up like the "how did you know my nephew's home burnt down" meme, woodworking, metalworking, painting, plumbing, maybe some basic car maintenance like changing tires, checking important stuff such as tire depth, tire pressure, operating fluids... soooooooooo many young people have zero skills in manual labor and have to call in tradespeople for everything.
That and how to find solutions for problems using Google are the most important skills my father taught me, and that is what I plan on teaching my children one day.
And it is perfectly fine for them to not waste their time on knowing how to change the oil or wire an outlet. Such things really aren’t needed any more for everyone.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 19.3 ms ] thread> Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet
> The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be
> The World Makers – as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us
These memes make me nostalgic for the pre-9/11 era. I remember being taught to consider myself as a “citizen of the world.” That seems exceedingly quaint now.
But the more I hope, the more one single cynical sociopath seems to co-opt the entire commons for their own purposes. The leverage of sociopathy is incredible.
That’s just a moniker wealthy elites who feel more connected to other wealthy elites in largely indistinguishable major metropolitan cities, than they do to people from any specific place or nation.
1. not internationally wealthy 2. drank the kool-aid and never stepped too far away from their family money.
We are tired of the constant cynicism, negativity, and small-minded thinking. It's too easy to be a cynic. To put everyone & everything down, and to feel intellectually superior. You see it all over on the Internet and in the real world too, it's a true mind virus. It'll never die, but one can only hope more people just get tired of it.
I will teach my kids that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Not that it matters much to me whether it was or is meaningful or not. Nostalgia is simply a feeling that doesn’t imply much about its object.
That resonated with me. As someone not even in the US, I think about this a lot.
But I think the timeline change was the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore (2000), which halted the Florida recount.
If Al Gore had won, so much of our timeline would have remained in the realm of the unfathomable/impossible. Pax Americana would have continued possibly for a few more eons who knows.
I'm not gonna claim it would be star trek but I would likely be a lot less worried about my kids in that world than what I currently am.
These are far more important points in time to fix as a time cop than a stupid election. You would also go back and kill Hitler, instead of simply letting him get into art school…
That seems pretty good. I might add "curious" and "skeptical."
Availability of resources does not entail skill in leveraging them. I'm not sure classical eduction is the best way to learn that, but it's certainly better than nothing and a useful first step.
My 14 year old is pretty sharp and i like to pose philosophical questions that have no answer to him to watch the gears turn and see what he comes up with. I once asked him what he thought the meaning of life is and he replied "to make the most effective use of the resources available to you". I can't tell you if that came from him or something he read and, while not a perfect answer, i like it quite a bit.
But this question is tripped up in the idea of work being one's only value. If programming by humans were made illegal tomorrow, what would Steve Krouse do for work? How would he find a path forward? Who would he turn to for advice? How would he build community to this new goal?
If it's not clear, thinking about this is what to teach a child. Even in the end of the article we sort of elide the importance of teaching others to act with grace and reflection, but what more significant thing can you share with the next generation?
Partially agreed.
Whatever we teach today will be solved or obsolete tomorrow anyway. In fact, in school we learn methods that are never used in real life anyway. So the "what" is not fully the point.
It's how we teach it and what the point of it. The point of it is to teach how to learn things, how to practice, how to become experts, how to struggle with them and persevere eventually. It is not a sort of an exercise for our minds, but it is exactly an exercise for our minds. That's the point.
The "what" matters in that it is a foundation of knowledge upon which future knowledge and understanding is built.
So, I agree with the spirit of the argument but it is a bit more nuanced.
Assessing and measuring student knowledge is very important. Impossible to evaluate and improve current teaching methods otherwise.
For example is the purpose of educating children about history A) to give them a systemic, if somewhat cursory, understanding of the evolution of society, in order allow them to contextualize the present? or B) ensure they know a list of a hundred or so people and events that happened?
It is much easier to quantify the latter.
>become a good citizen
>make the world better
That's basically the whole game right there. Or as Hillel might say, the rest is commentary.
If I could stomach being an "Optimal Machiavellian Dad" I would tell my kid:
1. Use people to get what you want.
2. Always take more than you give.
3. You're the only one who matters. Don't empathize with others.
That's the mentality that is consistently rewarded in society today.
Otherwise you get an evil billionaire child, but they don't even have the nerve to shower riches on you in your old age.
It's not a new thing either. The more history I learn, the more it's clear that these things have always been rewarded. It's also just a higher risk way to live, because if you piss off the other sociopaths they will slap you down.
kids are smarter than people realize, and they don't glean the things that people intend.
In all fairness, I know that you meant "wealthy and/or influential people". But it bodes ill at every level that your tacit belief about success is widely known and widely accepted (though certainly not universally).
Postman's book is exactly against that definition of success, though he readily points it out. He describes it in the "Gods that Fail" section of the book.
Yeah, I'm not stupid rich, but the evidence is that I'm far better put together than Elon Musk emotionally, and even happier in regular day to day life. Which is hilarious because I just had my entire life upended.
But I've never felt a compulsion to pretend to be good at a video game to impress strangers on the internet because I have responded to difficulties and personal failings by bettering myself. I embrace recognizing my faults, fixing them, and knowing that I am human.
Do you want a child like me or a child like musk?
Being nice is nice, but it doesn't cure cancer
>become a good citizen
these are skills.
these are what you teach your children.
My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...
I am not, in fact my understanding of mechanics is extremely basic.
If I go back into my family tree, I can find three generations of Sugar House Labourers in Scotland in the early 1800s.. a profession that no longer exists in the UK as far as I can tell, and I'm certain they had a specialisation.
We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
Our jobs as parents is to teach values and make sure they're good people and have the tools to make good decisions too, not to set them on a particular path... that's a losing goal, we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
Being proficient in reading, at least one instrument, and one additional language is always welcome, regardless of the timeline.
"Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
The music bit is mostly things you’d want to impart on your kids if you care about that sort of thing. (Which I do!) The public versions of it are not great where I am but individually you can do a lot.
Regardless, both of those talents have the potential to open doors and set the stage for opportunity, nor are they mutually exclusive to whatever economic skills might be viable in the future.
It’s either some form of socialism or mass starvation.
From what history shows, there's not much difference between the two.
Scaling it up is hard, though.
What sort of socialism was at play when the British forced Ireland into famine during the potato blight? What about the British role in India’s famine? What about the many famines brought about by civil wars and ethnic conflicts in Africa? The Great Depression, famously brought about by socialist policies and definitely not gilded age wealth inequality decadence?
If you’re looking for a common thread, it’s authoritarianism, not socialism.
I guess you needed some validation today.
Modern Western European socialism has probably suppressed wages and increased unemployment relative to the US, but hasn’t led to starvation.
And yet the highest earning people I know who didn’t come from affluent backgrounds are musically and linguistically talented.
Focusing on what the market demands is chasing a moving target and if you miss the boat you might just end up a low-level peon holding a wrench.
Proficiency in musical instrumemts is not necessarily useful by itself, but it's a path towards mastery of something hard that typically involves a lot of intentional practice. Having been able to master something hard once makes it easier to master other hard things, because you can reuse the learning skills. Music has a little bit of applied fractions and what not, too.
The same thing learning to learn journey happens with learning a second language. But also, learning a second language helps develop skills and understanding of your first language, and helps develop communication skills for situations where there's a limited mutual understandable vocabulary.
Some languages have market value too. Better communication with employers, customers, and suppliers is valuable.
I recall reading of studies that found that a significant majority of adults who did not learn to play an instrument when they were young wish that they had.
Only a small minority of adults who did learn to play an instrument when young wish that they hadn't.
I'm still not amazing at piano. But having a basic understanding of musical theory, understanding how a lot of these concepts of harmonics and tones and waves are related, have really unlocked a lot of neat things throughout my life. Their push for me to learn an instrument drove me to performing for family events including a couple of weddings, with my involvement in their day still quite a powerful shared memory between us. It led me to learn additional musical instruments, which I enjoyed a lot more than piano. It helped me in other artistic endeavors like theater. It helped me understand music production, something I moonlight in as a volunteer. It gave me instant connections with lots of people who were important people in my life but probably would have forever been passing strangers. It has given me something else to share with my children, as they routinely ask me to play for them and show them how instruments work. A basic understanding of waves and harmonics and what not even helped me understand a lot of more complicated EE topics.
Learning an instrument early in my life was definitely a powerful and deeply impactful thing in my life journey, almost entirely positively outside of many afternoons where I had to catch up on DBZ later.
It was a funny moment where she was like "you have perfect pitch!" "What is perfect pitch?"
I guess it's a shame, I could've been a great musician if I was trained.
In any case, if you want to meet up online, my email is in my profile. You sound fun!
See it that way, having a normal social life requires other skills than your job.
I'd say giving them the tools to make good decisions will naturally lead them to a particular path, why not push that path as well?
That said, I am probably going to do with my kids exactly what your parents did and just hope I’m not wrong about their economic future and passions. But man, it’s a tough strategy call.
So really the meat of the problem is treading that balance. Though I am of the belief that the mind, just like the body, needs cultivating through training and studying helps cultivate the mind. Also, breadth can really unlock different things in perspective and learning so in that respect I have faith in traditional curriculums - it's hard to predict what and how things will stick for a kid so just let them learn a bit of everything because it's possible something they learn in A might lead to an aha in "unrelated" B.
Probably the one invariant for our kid will be "you must work hard"
My mum did emphasise my reading though, and that went well.
its a lottery.
But maybe that's because I grew up in a place where you can make a decent living in a wide variety of jobs. Or because almost nobody in my (childhood) vicinity ever had a STEM, or even any white collar job.
Could be a temporary fluctuation, or it could be that we're mean-reverting to the historical average of an ownership class and an underclass, where only the ownership class has the freedom to pursue their passions with any security. That would be sad, but I'm prepping my family for the latter.
How, if I may ask?
We've been financially fortunate enough to be in the top 25% of US households, and even I'm living the reality where I couldn't afford what my dad could afford working effectively the same job at the same age. Looking out at the world I see little reason why that trend should reverse, it'll have to get a lot worse first.
If I'm right I can keep my family on the better side of this shitty transition, and if I'm wrong then my kids will have even more freedom than average, at the cost of a slightly more humble present. Probably won't step on a plane much over the next 2-3 decades, and that's fine.
Besides for many people the higher income job is more enjoyable, especially when the lower income job takes a large physical toll.
I've always been smart enough to pick any jobs I want, and, if I'm perfectly honest, I've never liked any of them in the long run. All jobs start feeling like chores after a while. In every job, the stuff surrounding the job (waking up early, commuting, talking with people I might not like, the general office setting, being told what to do, etc.) is awful enough to make even the good bits worthless.
On the flip side, anything can become somewhat interesting when I spend some effort to learn it.
So yeah, I'm not a big fan of "do whatever interests you".
I will street my children towards something that is at least employable, assuming AI has not completely obliterated job market by then.
We're moving more slowly on physical robotics in varied environments, so it's going to take a while before we automate reaching under the sink and turning a knob. Or maybe your kids will have a bright future in janitorial work, who knows?
I feel like this is a crazy take. Smart (and motivated) people are better at adapting to a different world than not smart people.
smart people are better at taking action based on directive than not smart people (im assuming).
still, i think getting ASI to distribute itself properly is going to be harder than people give credit. there is still a lot of problems to solve. i dont think im going to wake up one day and we are shuttling people to jupiter and back.
Studies on education and well-being don't really validate us though. They generally find a positive correlation between education and happiness when you don't control for other factors. But better educated people are usually from a higher social class, have better income, are healthier, are less likely to have been abused, etc. When they control for these factors, the correlation often goes slightly negative.
(If ASI does all the labor, education would no longer cause better income or health, so we want to remove those confounders.)
There are a number of proposed explanations for this, and it doesn't prove causation. But the data isn't on my side.
Also, I think there are two kinds of learning, easy learning and hard learning, and most people will only do easy learning without extrinsic motivation.
Easy learning is fun. It's why there are so many edutainment videos on YouTube and TikTok. Learning cool facts, or reading an educational book (without doing exams or problems) fall into this category.
Hard learning requires more effort. An example would be learning Cal II. You have to study and practice, and you likely won't get it right away. People do hard learning all the time, but usually because they have to.
Before online courses were a thing, friends or family would sometimes tell me they wish they could go back to college and take some courses they were interested in. Now we can, for free, at our convenience. But they don't. We'll watch endless edutainment videos on YouTube, but we'll only enroll in Cal II if we think we may need it.
If future AI can do everything, the extrinsic motivation is going to disappear. People will naturally tend towards easy learning. Maybe that's good enough. Easy learning will help us get funny jokes, recognize references, and appreciate good movies. But you don't need school for this type of learning. It's everywhere, and people seek it out because it's fun.
> still, i think getting ASI to distribute itself properly is going to be harder than people give credit
I'm guessing you mean getting AI to allocate resources and distribute wealth fairly without employment? Assuming we don't get a doomsday scenario, I see two likely possibilities. If a democratic government has control, people will vote to give themselves wealth. We end up with something like UBI, and people vote with their wallets to decide what the market (controlled by AI) should produce.
The other option is we get a dictator. With ASI and robotic armies, the factors that normally protect us from dictatorships would be gone. Currently, if the president wanted to declare himself a dictator, he would need support from a lot of people. At the very least, the military would have to back him. And you need your citizenry to be productive. They make all your food and machines and services. But if the army is composed of deadly autonomous drones instead of people and one person has authority over the army, they basically have absolute power and they don't need other people for anything. The factories keep running. The drones gun down anyone who resists. We're left at their whim, and we better hope they aren't cruel.
More likely we'll be permanently starving and fighting over the scraps in a dystopian world.
If AI doesn't take off but instead remains "spiky", then being smart and adaptable will be an advantage for those trying to stay ahead of AI.
If far more Americans learn to do blue collar stuff, it will devalue the massive amounts of scammers, charlatans, grifters that we see in these professions. Construction has literally significantly declined in real productivity since the 80s. Racists say it’s cus of immigrants doing the building. I think it’s because of grift, fraud, and greed.
If AI succeeds and the future is good for the average person, education will probably improve your quality of life. Especially because it doesn't have to focus on all that boring stuff that only aims to increase your productivity.
If the future is bad, you should probably aim to be rich very soon. Preferably by owning something that is scarce and useful in the physical world. Financial assets could be unpredictable if consumer demand collapses.
Pure and utter nonsense. Good education teaches you how the (natural and human) world works, and how to think and reason systematically. Intellectual work is your own exercise in maintenance of those skills.
Those skills are the most valuable thing our species has ever possessed. They are what makes us us. You speak like some alien. Please don't pollute young humans with this bile.
What's next? Due to the existence of forklifts, everyone should stop lifting weights? Hell, due to the existence of cars and at-home delivery, people should infact aim for a vegetative lifestyle on their couches. They should also make sure not to think a single thought now that AI has you covered?
I swear I thought I was losing my mind over the cult of the cryptobros a few years back. You AI boosters are a hundred times worse.
Yeah you can point out a handful of people across the nation who do really well, but you can do the same thing for jobs that are all but obsolete and worthless. Blacksmithing and tailoring and paper making also has handfuls of well paid professionals, but 99% of people with those skills will never make any meaningful money from it and it would be a foolish path to guide people towards.
The best bet you can go for in trades is union work, but that is far from all encompassing. Go to any part of the poorest parts of the country and you will find swathes of people who can do trade work, and yet they are still poor.
Don't get me wrong, having trade and tool skills is still useful, but it is a long way from a slam dunk into a great future.
Now what does that look like concretely? Still sending them to school for several hours a day, 5 days a week? Doing what during those hours?
There's an Unschooling group on Facebook I watch. If you search "calculus" you get threads where a parent asks how their kid is going to learn calculus and the answers are mostly "when did you need calculus after high school." Aside from needing it for college, my answer would be "why am I raising my kid to be a 1:1 clone of me and not someone with a lot of different options." So I dig this as an answer. The world has ended a billion times already. People who work hard pursuing a skilled passion have never been obsolete.
Calculus is a shared language in the grand universal ocean of intellectual cultural. Rejecting calculus is rejecting part of that culture…
You need calculus to design a windmill or an auto engine or an electric motor beyond the "just sort of works" level. Most of analog electrical engineering is defined by calculus. Althogh, yes, you can get LTSPICE to do most of that for you.
(A small wind turbine is like a propeller in reverse. A large wind turbine is not, because wind speed varies across the blade circle enough that those stresses dominate the design. It took decades to debug this, and make large wind turbines stable under high winds.)
e.g. I can tell you everything acts like a spring near (stable) equilibrium, and you can believe me, but why on earth would that be true? Well, Taylor expand the potential at equilibrium. Equilibrium means the first derivative is 0, so V(x) ~ V(x_0) + 1/2(x-x_0)^2V''(x_0), so F = -dV/dx = -(x-x_0)V''(x_0), which is a spring with spring constant k=V''(x_0).
That's all a very conceptual explanation; the point is near an equilibrium, zoom in and you rock back and forth on a parabolic potential! This is basic Calc BC stuff, but it also justifies why we might care about about simple harmonic motion.
A lot of it I think is just training people to adopt a "physics-like" or "math-like" way of thinking and giving them a general overview of how things work.
A factory needs to produce 12,000 components per year. Each production run costs $300 to set up, and storing one component costs $4 per year. What production quantity Q minimizes the annual setup and storage costs?
Doing one run each month (quantity = 1,000 a month) would entail setup costs of 3,600. And storage costs of 4 * average storage of 500 components = 2,000. For a total cost of 5,600.
All according to the given model, of course, but I think this is the general idea.
How long does a production run take and how many units can you do in a single sun? Since this isn't mentioned, the answer is to produce everything at the last second of the year. But we are also missing information on why the factory needs to produce 12,000 components in a year and for whom and about the logistics involved in getting those components to the buyer.
I always hated these type of questions for their lack of precision. You haven't even mentioned how many units in a single production run will be faulty and need to be scrapped instead of delivered, how am I supposed to optimize anything?!
Learning calculus or French can be beneficial, especially when the glass ceiling in certain workplaces is whether or not you’re bilingual. However, the point that’s getting missed is the metaexperience that consciously or subconsciously shapes the way the child interacts with the world later on.
Still, I get, over all, the number is small. They could have all had a different career in their native language.
I know people in both camps. I have more respect for English speakers learning Dutch than for Dutch speakers learning English. Even though I respect both. But the simple truth is: there's a lot of incentive to learn English. There is not a lot of incentive to learn Dutch.
Learning English from Dutch is 24-30 weeks whereas from German is 36 weeks. I am assuming some degree of reciprocity but maybe not.
(1) https://dlsdc.com/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/
Most jobs that are focused on interacting with people benefit from speaking a second language if it’s a common language in your community: nursing, teaching, customer service, social work, etc.
I’ve seen job listings mention it as a nice-to-have and know bilingual friends who have gotten those jobs.
I only speak one language well but I wish I spoke more. I hope my son (and future other kids) learn multiple languages. But not for job/economic reasons: it just seems good for your brain and interesting for how you think about the world.
I am fluent in 3 languages, and while it is convenient, I assume claims about it being "good for your brain" are just as pseudoscience-y as all the other claims about what is good for the brain.
One of the languages I know doesn't even use a Latin alphabet, and I spent many hours learning it when I was little. And it's basically useless (obviously just my experience) except for communicating with older family members. Once they pass away in ~3 decades, I doubt I use it again.
Actually, the biggest incentive for me to teach my kids that language is so that we have a secret way of communicating in public (in the US). But I have failed so far, because it's just a lot of work to teach kids another language when you and your spouse prefer to speak in another, and so the kids are not completely immersed in it.
A quick google search finds several studies about the benefits of multilingualism on the brain.
Here’s a recent one: https://www.fens.org/news-activities/news/speaking-another-l...
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fbul0000142
>Public Significance Statement—The idea that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in cognitive control functions seems to have already been accepted by the popular media and educators, because of a number of influential studies reporting a bilingual advantage. Our thorough meta-analysis, however, suggests that healthy bilingual adults do not have such a cognitive control advantage. The synthesis of 152 studies and 891 comparisons and several moderator variables does not show systematic advantages across the analyzed cognitive domains, tasks, or bilingual population
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366360968_The_Bilin...
I likely would have been better off taking Spanish but I avoided that b/c half my class were fluent in Spanish already and I had to maintain a decent grade.
shoulda done French or Spanish. yeah there is some shared Latin roots there but that doesn't magically make it simple to pick up the languages. Hell, Italian might have been a better choice.
Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest.
(But then, I once did a game physics engine and have a patent in that area. I spent a lot of time in the hell which is integration of stiff systems of nonlinear differential equations. Turned out that was the wrong way to approach the problem. Works, but there are better approaches.)
A very common example is compound, continual interest accumulation. As a mathematician, I had trouble understanding how banks calculate it (as they would obviously not point me at the derivation of the formula), but it's actually a limit sum over infinitely small interest terms.
Similarly, these techniques work to explain and derive numerical methods for calculating many natural constants like e, pi etc.
This is not true? The formula is well known:
A = P*e^(rt)
where"
A = Final amount
P = Principal (initial investment/loan)
r = Annual interest rate (as a decimal)
t = Time in years
e = Euler's number
Financial calculators do integrate, though. "Present value" is computed by integration.
On some things, governments put the cap on how much can early payments be loaded with interest and how much at least should be paying off the base debt — otherwise, you'd be paying only the interest for the first 15 years of a mortgage.
Though, these things work slightly differently in different countries.
For better or for worse, humanity has chosen the path of gods. We'd all better start thinking like gods.
Just as you will never know what you might have discovered if you used the time you spent learning calculus learning something else instead, of course. There is no magic formula to life.
> you shouldn't learn anything until you need it
Impossible. Simply existing as a functioning human means you are going to be constantly learning something. Not everything you learn will be useful, but that's also true of calculus. Not everyone finds it useful in the end either. You never know what will end up being useful, but you also can't learn everything.
The great thing about the curious mind is that you tend to be naturally drawn towards the things that are most useful for you. Those most likely to do something with calculus already voluntarily choose to learn about it. You don't have to make them. The druggy who has no interest in anything but getting high, who suddenly has his life turned around because you force him to learn calculus, is little more than Hollywood fantasy.
I know few adults that were forced to learn something as kids that regret learning it. Conversely I know tons of adults that, as a kid talked their parents out of being forced to learn something and as an adult seriously regret it.
Unlikely. Too many things in life depend on arithmetic. Most people will learn things when they must.
What is more likely is that kids won't learn arithmetic before they need it and therefore may theoretically miss out on the aforementioned discoveries that are overlooked when one doesn't already have a foundation in arithmetic. However, most people never have such discoveries anyway. Those who do tend to be the type that would learn arithmetic just for fun.
> I know few adults that were forced to learn something as kids that regret learning it.
As a once child, if I didn't want to learn something, I didn't. Forcing someone to sit in a classroom where a subject is being taught, for example, is not the same as actually learning the material. So this is an obvious truism. Those who didn't want to learn something never did.
Yes but arithmetic is actually not intuitive at all, and you can certainly grow up to not know it. There's a lot of people who once grew up not knowing how to read, because they didn't go to school.
Children are still children, they very famously make poor decisions. Yes, not all children, but most. We have to mold and steer them, because for humans we come into this world as basically blank slates. We're not like other animals, ready to roll. We require decades of careful curation.
If you are in a situation where you don't need it, sure, but if you don't need it then who cares? I get the nebulous "but what about the discoveries you are missing out on", but the type of people who wouldn't learn something like arithmetic for fun also never find discoveries anyway, and never would even if you could force feed them all the knowledge of the world. That argument really doesn't apply to most people.
> Children are still children, they very famously make poor decisions.
Not quite. What children are most famous for is that they won't learn until they want to. Poor decisions, implying that they could have made good decisions if only they would have listened, are the outcome of them not learning even when you tried.
> We have to mold and steer them
There are deadbeats in the world, sure, but for the most part that just naturally happens at least up until they hit the rebellious teen years. Kids want to be by your side, watching, learning. We wouldn't have made it as a species if this didn't occur automatically. Like I said before, you cannot exist without learning things constantly.
Can you source this? I thought we were pretty much expressions of our particular genetics and the biological human substrate we all inhabit. This is very much not a 'blank slate'. Every time I've tried to look into or steelman the blank-slate I can never come across hard science that backs up the assertion that we are all 'blank slates'.
Blank-slate seems to be more of a liberal idea then a scientific one.
We also have case studies that if humans are not taught language then they won’t, and can’t, speak. Genie comes to mind.
If you speak math problems to your child you are… wait for it… teaching them arithmetic. That’s what teaching is.
Arithmetic is not something that just naturally exists in the world, it’s a purely human construct. It does have to be taught in one way or another, otherwise people won’t know it. And, unlike language, I seriously doubt parents are just speaking arithmetic randomly in conversation that often. Your kid most definitely will not just “pick up” arithmetic.
In fact, I doubt a kid would even pick up language if you never spoke to them directly, and instead they just heard bits in passing between adults.
Exposure to something and being taught something are usually recognized as being quite different, but it is clear now that you just want to play a game of semantics, so we can put and end to that.
> I doubt a kid would even pick up language if you never spoke to them directly, and instead they just heard bits in passing between adults.
Kids not being able pick up on language by listening to a recording of adults speaking about some random thing is supported by the research, but the research also strongly suggests that kids can pick up on language if those adults are surrounded by additional context. For example if adults in the same room were talking about a visible object in front of them then the research suggests that the child would be able to pick up the language.
Most kids would never go to school if not forced. They'd play video games or watch youtube.
There are 0.7 billion adults that can't read. 40% of adults in 1st world countries can't do arithmetic.
https://theconversation.com/high-number-of-adults-unable-to-...
So, no, there is no evidence people will not learn without being made to learn. There are only anecdotes that some children get lucky and learn things on their own. That's not the norm and there is ample data to back that up.
Including whomever wrote the article.
"Suppose, a litre of cola costs US$3.15. If you buy one third of a litre of cola, how much would you pay?"
As cola has a large size-indpedenent cost, I would reasonably expect to need to pay more than the claimed $1.05 if 1 L is $3.15. Moreover, the marginal utility of 1L isn't 3x more than the smaller container. There is no need to have that much soda when an appropriately scaled option is available. Based on real-world prices I could find, 1 L of cola sells for $1.99, while a can (355 mL; as close to 1/3 of 1 L as we find in the real world) sells for $1.50, echoing that $1.05 is not a realistic price to pay. And in actual practice, I'd pay nothing for cola and get water instead.
And he is supposedly a lecturer in Economics and Social Statistics. Goes to show, again, that the kids won't learn unless they want to. Teaching alone is insufficient.
For me, calculus was the first math I learned, where symbols represented something other than pure numbers or tangible points on a plane, and we proved things about higher level abstractions. Of course many of the topics had tangible applications, but it was a launching point towards further abstraction in the higher level math courses.
A friend of mine in grad school was a student in medieval church history, but was assigned to teach a freshman course in modern history. For one class session, he asked a math teacher to give a guest lecture on calculus. Then he lectured on its impact on society.
It's true that most people, including managers and engineers, forget their school math not long after school. Their software tools, such as Excel and CAD, can do the math that they need. One can hope without proof that a little bit of mathematical thinking rubbed off on them.
They are thrilled if you opt into being a servant class.
The thing that really begets me in all of this is that what you describe, working hard pursuing a skilled passion, requires a foundation of knowledge that up until a year ago was considered a foregone conclusion for becoming someone of note. It doesn't matter whether someone learned it autodidactically or through structured schooling, the point is that the knowledge itself is fundamentally important. We never stopped teaching children basic arithmetic or mental math when slide rules, adding machines, and calculators became widespread. The reason why is pretty obvious.
And yet, the technofeudalists want us to stop teaching our children critical thinking, science, arts, technology, and everything else that encompasses the indomitable human spirit, and why? Because a machine can do those things too? Machines have been capable of or better at a great many things that humans are also capable of for the past hundred years or so and yet we have never stopped teaching humans those very things exactly because we used to recognize that those things had enormous utility in general in a sphere far beyond whatever is necessary for your calling or profession. It is absolute lunacy to me that someone could see LLMs and agentic flows do brute-force proofs and then somehow suggest that the entire field of mathematics is obsolete.
I urge you to read the piece "Complex Systems Won't Survive the Competency Crisis." If we lose all of our institutional knowledge of how the puzzle pieces all fit together there will be no one to save us when (when, not if) the systems we're creating now suffer a catastrophic failure. And they will. Model collapse has not happened yet because of luck. Synthetic data can only get you so far. And whenever we enter our Idiocracy/WALL-E stage of total compliance and deference to machines themselves, one day there will come a time when something breaks and no one knows how to fix it because they no longer understand the underlying principles.
You might say in an optimistic scenario you can just ask the LLM for the tools and resources and prior knowledge needed to fix it. Alas in many cases, this is barely enough, and most on this forum are technically knowledgeable enough to actually make use of that advice. It's hard to see a compliant, totally intellectually decrepit population doing the same. I'd also advise you that although unschooling has its benefits, it's a movement that is filled by those who are often cultists and other fringe hacks who have grievances with the school system for reasons unbeknownst to me and many others. I would not use them as any sort of advice forum or channel for meaning, and the fact that you seem to be taking them as gospel is extremely questionable and makes me uneasy about the future of this forum in general.
Oh dear.
How many years will you say this before conceding it's no longer luck?
What do you mean by infinitesimals here?
It's the same for pretty much all school education. It's gives you a chance to spot the fluff, pomp, and lies.
If schooling was about making it so people aren't tricked, why do they have you say an national anthem (that used to be called a prayer) pledging allegiance to the flag of the empire?
Its a very sick view of the world to think that the government is who has your back and cares about you and is the person you can trust, rather then your own flesh and blood family and community.
I very much agree with your last sentence.
I remember my father taught me how to divide numbers and somewhat how to multiply them, before we learned that at school, with his own explanations. For multiplication he taught me indirectly, by making "number tables" with me:
Up to 20. I used to bring them to school and teachers were discouraging, not realizing, what a great thing this was and what kind of insight it could allow a child to have into basic operations.For division, he often said: "How often does one number fit into the other?" as a way of explaining that operation.
Ah and he also taught me about negative numbers, when other kids at school didn't even understand what that was supposed to be, and teachers still wanted us to write "not solvable", instead of the correct answer, which were negative numbers. How silly.
When the time came and we learned about division and fractions, I had an easy time to understand what the teacher explained, due to knowing an intuition about what division actually means. The hardest thing for me was not dividing numbers, but following that methodical procedure to divide in the written form, digit by digit. Something I had done in my head already, when thinking about that some number "fits into another number" only half, ergo must be 0.5 added to the number of times it fits in there whole. Only that I didn't realize immediately, that this written way of dividing 2 numbers was the same thing actually.
In this way parents can make school life and learning soooo much easier and less painful for their kids. Granted, I did seem to have a gift for calculation in primary school, but what was so casually taught to me by my father every now and then, helped tremendously. It wasn't even like strict hours of learning. It was just using chances to show me stuff.
From my mother I learned to actually pay attention how I write words. Initially, my spelling was only OKish, not great, until one day I somehow realized "Hey I just have to think a little and pay attention." and suddenly had good spelling. But this didn't come about, without my mother sitting down with me and complaining about my handwriting and also once or twice forcing me to do some writing. My handwriting is still no good though. Glad that didn't influence my grades. I write better Chinese characters, than German words, apparently.
If I had children, I would definitely try to teach them such things. Even if it is just how to look at something or what to pay attention to, or small calculation tricks. I would try to make their learning easier and offer support when they need it to learn.
Methodology is important but growing these intuitions feels critical to me, but no idea if that is something can be taught as much as it’s learned.
"And you, too, will be a mechanic", which is how that usually goes.
People should spend enough time with tools to get the basic skills down. Some years ago a Stanford mechanical engineering prof was complaining to me that many of the Indian students from wealthy families thought that using tools was beneath them. "They've never used a pair of pliers." Now, to some extent, that mindset has spread to the American middle class.
I got really lucky that my passion was computers and not something less "productive" like art, or more productive but less economically advantageous like farming.
But you won't go wrong teaching your children how to weigh options, make their own decisions and to be good people with principles and tools for helping them understand how to learn new things themselves.
You will probably go wrong pushing your children to be doctors, lawyers or whatever else you want them to be.
Much of the personality and intelligence is genetic and that's determined at conception, as for optimum parenting it seems that general indifference yields the best outcomes. There are many ways to damage a person so they won't reach their potential but there does not seem to be many ways to 'make' a person better than they otherwise would have been if they were largely left alone to control their own lives.
Understandably parents want to feel more important and in control, and that their investments will yield good results. And since most people want to feel this way they like to promote messages that reinforce these priors, so the whole platform slowly turns into Linked-In.
I base my assessments on large scale machine learned behavioral analytics done on a full click log history on a non-trivial portion of the US population. Unfortunately I know things about society that I really wish I didn't.
well said, absolutely agree
I'm in the same boat as the author, have four kids and I struggle with keeping them motivated and this has been my anchor so far.
Industrial revolution, the shift from manufacturing to services, the shift of technology over time.
Hell, they say that the reason millennials are so nostalgic and enjoy childish things is because of rapid technological and societal change in the last 30 years.
I doubt it'll slow down, the era of doing anything until you die was a foolish thing for even our grandparents generation.
I strongly disagree with that.
> In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture.
Nature has set us up to be amongst the most adaptive creatures on the planet. I think only the rats and the microbes have us beat. We are everywhere. One of the things that struck me while traveling the world and visiting some pretty out-of-the-way places is that there were always people living there as if it was perfectly normal.
> It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels.
Why would it have to be shallow? If you spend your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what.
> Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
Not really, but again, you are welcome to that opinion, I just don't share it.
Because when you ground this in reality, if you spend 3 to 5 years in a field and moved to another field and spend 3 to 5 years in that from a monetary perspective, you are always going to be a junior you are going to spend your entire life doing low-level tasks and getting paid at low levels.
The New Renaissance is Coming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCvixEyV10Q
I disagree. Making money is a means to an end, that end being one's ability to live a comfortable life as a member of society. If other means are able to achieve that end, then that reduces the need (or even desire) for money.
While I'd cynically agree that modern society as structured today will fight tooth and nail to keep those other means from being viable (because the current powers-that-be are such specifically because they were able to accumulate the most money), that doesn't have to be the case. We can and should demand better.
Like global economic and political systems has a manager you can demand to speak to like a Karen getting subpar customer service?
Any change is going to require wide spread spiritual and moral change in the general populace first.
Probably asking for $5000 checks from the government.
Just vote Republican! He promised!
What you've just stated is a Marxist/materialist perspective. Up to a certain point of meeting basic survival needs, it's probably true. But there are other ways to think about what ultimately determines human goals once survival needs are met. This illustrates my point about the humanities, often we put our thinking into boxes without realizing that the box exists at all.
I doubt it given how liberalism is falling out of favor in politics so rapidly
What happened to religion? Last I checked it was doing well.
> We typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one’s kids.
We typically confuse that that particular confusion is the thing. God is the model's weights running on the distributed computer that we form collectively with our brains and whose running realization we call "society." The Christians (which are superb at sleazing their way around the irrefutable lack of supernatural divinity) call it "concursus dei". Considering that in some parts of the world people consistently elect whoever looks more like a radical God-GPU-node, I would say this particular one among our "dī" is still firmly at the helm.
I disagree here that agentic AI somehow replaces the need for humans to be resourceful. LLMs and their harnesses are just more resources for humans to use to uncover and solve problems, and resourcefulness is more important than ever for navigating a world increasingly riddled with slop (of the AI-generated variety or otherwise) and enshittification. A properly-functioning education system should absolutely emphasize resourcefulness as the primary skill to teach students, even (especially!) in the post-AI world.
What school did provide was a sense of structure. There were 4 main exams every year, there were peers for me to compare myself with, that helped me feel good about myself when I was doing well and miserable when I was trying to catch up. There were lessons which felt incredibly boring at start but got hold of my attention by the 4th lesson. Without a structure like this, it would feel like running in a desert. Without goal posts, encouragement and support system (a slap on the wrist sometimes), the best of us would just run around in circles. This is exactly why MOOCs never worked for me and thounsands of others.
That's less Mcluhan and more Foucault.
Nope, ship sailed. You haven’t had a child in school yet. It’s not like that anymore.
5 years ago in Palo Alto (Paly High) it was: Take your shoes off, get on your phone to watch a season of whatever you want, leave for “up to” 40 minutes. Paying attention to a teacher… who may have been teaching? or not? Why not just head over to the wellness center and get snacks? They let you hang out there.
Those IN CHARGE didn’t care to make learning matter or be rewarding. With AI, it “matters” less, in the credential-sense of schooling.
Institutions are meh. My bet is on individuals.
Not necessarily stuff like hunting and dismembering animals... but basic trades skills go a loooong way. Being able to do basic wiring tasks without ending up like the "how did you know my nephew's home burnt down" meme, woodworking, metalworking, painting, plumbing, maybe some basic car maintenance like changing tires, checking important stuff such as tire depth, tire pressure, operating fluids... soooooooooo many young people have zero skills in manual labor and have to call in tradespeople for everything.
That and how to find solutions for problems using Google are the most important skills my father taught me, and that is what I plan on teaching my children one day.