I see this clearly at kids birthday parties whenever there is a piñata. Adults hate them. All they see is the goal and the incredibly inefficient path the kids are taking towards it.
But the kids love it, they don’t care when they miss, they are just enjoying hitting something with a stick. And every miss heightens the excitement for the eventual lolly scramble.
> And every miss heightens the excitement for the eventual lolly scramble.
People under-appreciate (or have forgotten) that a lot of happiness is is related to anticipating as opposed to getting. I think if more people focused on the journey or the process (or the (present) moment), versus the goal, there'd be more joy/happiness around.
I began and ended many hobbies in the novelty phase by endlessly reading about them, shopping, comparing features, etc. that I eventually became bored with them before spending a dollar. I got (almost) the whole novelty phase for free.
HeisenShop sounds like a great app idea for shopaholics -- automatically don't buy / cancel random or exceeding-monthly-budget items without telling the user.
I have been thinking about just this the past two weeks. I have been trying to recall the excitement, the joy in the most mundane things, and indeed I think it has a lot to do with anticipation. FWIW LSD allowed me to experience this joy, and the curiosity kids have, or I had. :)
Older kids tend to get fewer, more expensive gifts. I recently did the nested boxes gag, but with gift bags. What started out as a 2’x1’x6’ draw string bug turned into two gift cards. It was a lot of fun for a shaggy dog payoff that otherwise would have been an envelope tear and into the next thing.
I get piñatas, but there is an extreme version of this that I find just too much. Not sure in other places, but in Spain there is a kind of fair stall where children use a plastic fishing rod with a magnet or hook to catch some plastic ducks with the corresponding magnet or hook. The ducks have some points and give you rewards, but the payoff is terrible - maybe you spend €10 and you get a gift that you could buy for €2 at the neighborhood shops. And the fun part with the fishing lasts like 20 seconds, no more, and it's individual, there isn't even a competition or anything, no time limit, etc. Just catch three ducks and see how many points they give you.
My 7-year-old son (who by the way loves math) always wants to go there. I can't help but explain that the payoff is horrendous from any point of view, and he understands and doesn't argue against it, but he still insists. Sometimes I convince him by offering alternatives, but sometimes I have to cave because he seems to like it so much. But man, spending euros on that stings, I have the feeling that the people who run the stall must be laughing at all the suckers who fall into the trap.
Fundamentally, doesn't gambling require a potential payout that is more valuable than the initial input? If you can only ever get less than you put in that's not really a gamble is it?
My kids love something like this we see every year at the traveling fair. It's the same idea but with rubber duckies floating around and having to catch them with a small pole with a hook attached. It's €20 for 2 kids to have 2 minutes of fun and the payoff is a €1 Aliexpress/Temu pollution generator disguised as a toy. They play with it for a day before it ends up in the trash.
The first few years I hated this for exactly the reasons you mention, but now I'm just happy they are happy. I think I have a few more years left before they don't want to go rubber ducky fishing with their dad no more and I doubt by then €20 gets me 2 minutes of joy with them.
In fact it's the same thing. I said fish by mistake (probably because my mind made an association with the fishing rod and what it's usually used for) but they're ducks. I have edited the comment now.
Don't overthink it, I think you are being a bit cynical. If your kid enjoys it then it's worth the money. If you can't afford that then find other things your kid enjoys.
The reward of a game is playing it, not the 'prize', although that can add to the enjoyment too.
As a parent you should absolutely think about what kind of expectations and behaviours you're setting up for the future if 'if they enjoy it then it's worth the money' is teaching kids. Sure it's not perfectly clear cut but not thinking about value at all does not end well.
Well, your child is spending 0€, getting a bit of fun with a game, and getting a reward afterwards, which is randomized (more dopamine). That seems like an amazing trade.
As an adult, if I went and they said it cost 0€, I think I'd play too.
It sounds like you've got an opportunity to set up something like this at home. You'd feel like you were getting ripped off less, and make the rewards at the fair seem less attractive to "what we have at home". The challenge, of course, is to still make it feel like a special occasion...
Have you tried setting up a tub of water at home and gluing some magnets to some rubber ducks? When my son was 7 I would pay him his weekly allowance and he would get distracted and leave it on some random table and walk away. It's likely the act of fishing for ducks is more appealing in this instance than any potential ROI calculation.
Here there's no skill involved either. It's not that you have some time to catch as many ducks as possible and if you're good at it you catch more. It's that the 10 € give you the right to catch e.g. 3 ducks, so you spend the time that you need to catch 3 ducks (typically for a 7-year-old like 20 seconds, smaller kids take some more but still not long) and then you look at the score below the ducks, which is totally random. So yeah, quite similar to the claw machine although at least they don't have the farce that you could win an iPhone (Actually you can buy more ducks to get higher scores, so the prizes need to be linear. I have seen parents spend like €50 for their kid to get a toy that could be at most €10).
I would have killed to play carnival games like that when I was a kid but they were absolutely strictly forbidden, because 1) they are obviously not worth the price (scam) and 2) prizes are just junk that we didn't have room in the house for anyways.
You can just say no. I have never played a single one of those types of games in my life because once I was old enough to work I understood my parents point of view. I'm actually thankful for them teaching me these sorts of lessons no matter how much I hated at the time. It's actually okay to not allow your children participate in cons and scams.
Yep, for all the moralizing about sports gambling people on HN do, they sure love to prime their children for it.
It also just helped me understand the value of money, which to say has served me well is a massive understatement. Plus a real understanding of the fact that there's cons dressed up as fun, not everything is as it appears. It's okay to say 'no' to high pressure sales tactics.
But, again, we simply just didn't have room in the house for junk carnival prizes from a practical perspective.
Although it uses the same technology as gambling, it's for a different purpose. You aren't hoping to die, you are doing risk management for your family.
Because of circumstances I was involved in running several birthday parties for children these past few years. All of them had pinatas. In my experience:
Runrig's song "Fichead Bliadhna", too, but that's more kind of a protest song:
Ruith sa mhonadh, ruith nam beann
’S mar sin dhan sgoil aig deireadh samhraidh
Nar clann aig còig bliadhna dh’aois
’S gun facal Beurla nar ceann
translated:
Freedom of the moor, freedom of the hills (Ruith is literally "running" though)
And off to school at summer's end
As children of five years old
And not a word of English in our heads
Particularly resonant with me as my 6-year-old cycles off to school for the second month of Primary 2. Quite a wrench to have to deal with sitting still and listening to the teacher when it's 20° outside and sunny and there are bikes and toy cars and mud and sticks.
At least some twenty years later by the late 70s when I was that age they actually were teaching Gaelic in schools again instead of literally beating it out of people, and now my son is in a Gaelic-medium class in school making it one of the three languages he speaks.
I was talking to an American yesterday who couldn't understand the concept of the Highlands yesterday. His whole idea was of a place presented magically but with little more than funny accents in it.
I tried to get over to him all the history of suppression, eviction, lack of economic development etc... but the big one is cultural. If the Highlands lose their culture (and they already have largely) then they are indistinguishable from anywhere else.
I can’t tell if you’re implying that those with ADHD are more likely or less likely to think and act in a childlike way. Or whether doing so or not is what causes the over representation in high level positions.
Could you please elaborate?
My understanding is that ADHD would make you more likely to behave in childlike ways as an adult, but not that that would necessarily lead to holding leadership positions.
I'm not going to argue splitting hairs about what ADHD is. Many of the most famous CEOs and startup founders have properly diagnosed ADHD and have been very vocal about it. This is also often true of any business owner you've met in real life. I didn't think this statement would get any pushback since not too long ago the front page of HN was touting this as a "superpower".
The high-functioning expression of impulsivity is impatience with processes and insistence on maximum efficiency. I guess lately this is seen as negative because of the zeitgeist around AI?
Tao is talking about this impatience.
> Prematurely putting such games to an end by immediately providing the nominal goal --- for instance, providing these children with a brief lecture on infinity and the unbounded nature of the natural numbers --- defeats the entire "purpose" of such curiosity-driven play
It's not that they don't remember playing as children, but that they resent the time spent on it as "wasteful". They do mean well by trying to squash play time, but yes of course that's harmful and naive.
Do you have a source for that? My experience has been that people with ADHD are rather underrepresented, the ones who are overrepresented are rather hyper-extroverts that sometimes present similarly, but that do not have the same impulse control challenges (impossible to focus on boring tasks, hyperfocus on fun tasks) as someone with true ADHD.
This is only tangentially directed at your reply, but this is the kind of statement that I'll sometimes hear other parents say, and it makes me think that they've completely forgotten what childhood was actually like. Like, the idea that normal, fun activities and sports are bad because they bear some abstract resemblance to adult violence feels very contrived and misses what childhood play is about.
Yeah I'm not saying it's bad for the children, but it's unpleasant for me. It seems violence is a concept that gets deeper and uglier as you grow. For young children it's often abstract and maybe harmless. I just read a book to my child that turned out to have violent scenes that horrified me a bit but he barely thought about it and only in technical terms (like where is that artery ripped by the wolf). Same with people that had fun watching horror movies as teens, then find them unpleasant when they're older.
Maybe they did not forgot what the childhood was like. Instead, they remember their own childhood rather then yours. Moreover, they are not you, your exact copies.
It's not really that abstract. You smash the shit out of a cardboard box and candy comes out. Breaking things is not fun. I also hate youtube videos of people breaking stuff for fun.
I don't know. I broke a lot of things when I was a kid, mostly because I was excited to see how they work, but have no knowledge of their value or how to safely disassemble them. I don't do it as an adult because I now have that knowledge. So don't judge a kid as an adult.
I tried reading the English Wikipedia article "Piñata" but it is a mess of cringe information, especially the 16th century background. It seems that original piñatas were clay pots, before papier-mâché came into vogue.
I was going to say, that around the American Southwest, you can find piñatas for sale that are not only abstract, but also plenty of Spongebob and Disney and MCU characters, as well as "political figures that are not particularly well-liked" by Chicanos.
I wouldn't say "violence", rather, an opportunity to demolish something on (good) purpose. Same reason children will be glued to the window if workers outside are going at it with jackhammers, or, better yet, an excavator is crushing and scraping off the asphalt. (Yeah, I remember exactly how awesome that was.)
Those who don't lose the fun of hitting things graduate to hitting things with swords and end up in the SCA (not the coffee one).
I see the point about violence but I'm ok with it because it's based on fun and not anger. Olympic archery, javelin, or even fencing have an obvious past in warfare but today they've become sports.
I can only speak for some of the European versions of SCA-like clubs but there's a lot of pride-flag flying strictly-no-fascists fun activity with a dose of pretending to be children again.
is play not an indirect method of practicing the physiological mechanisms designed for violence ? baby lions are both happy to play with other animals, and to eat them ... which inevitably progresses to predation only ... and humans are the apex predator ...
That's the problem. Hitting a tied up animal until it breaks is clearly a violent affair, similar how hanging puppets in nooses or putting a doll in a guillotine.
I'm sure that there are kids growing up in places where bullfights are common thinking that torturing and killing a bull in a party-like atmosphere is fine.
I mean yeah, absolutely. But a child growing up in a western society is unlikely to encounter either of those. But generally I do see Pokemon as violent and I wouldn't let my 5 year old watch it quite yet. When he's a bit older I hope he enjoys playing through the original games and the OG tv show with me, but I see parents playing the TV show for their 4-5 year olds and I think that's just too young. Same with Spidey and friends and few other shows made "for children" which absolutely promote violence despite the colourful aesthetic.
Children have no concept of violence or empathy or right or wrong. Children often are extremely violent to other kids and sometimes even adults. They kick they scream they punch and they destroy objects. It's on the parents to teach them these concepts and its fun to have settings in which that behavior is allowed.
> Children have no concept of violence or empathy or right or wrong
This is not correct. I remember having a sense of shame when I was 4 when I tried to hurt another kid. Kids will also hide the things they do wrong, because they know it is wrong.
Or they know they'll be told it was wrong. Children start knowing nothing then they slowly absorb what they're told again and again, and what they see around them until they feel it. They go from knowing nothing, to knowing what the adults told them, to internalizing that and feeling it rather than just knowing it (maybe these 2 concepts fully overlap in other people's minds).
But until they do get all of that, they'll spend a lot of time plucking wings off of insects, burning ants with a magnifying glass, pulling the cat by the tail, or throwing rocks at dogs and frogs.
No, not all kids are a little sociopaths. They in fact hide things they have no experience of being reprimanded or punished for, because they feel bad about them. Kids do care about other kids, animals or adults in their lives. They do feel empathy - underdeveloped and sometimes weird, but they display it very clearly.
I am an incredibly non-violent person, but have a toddler has really made me work hard to understand the difference in what associations we attach to "violence" as adults.
I try to help him understand this slowly, but a lot of "play" can look violent to my eyes, and I struggle to remember that. A 3 year old just doesn't see it that way yet, and that's fine. But it's hard to remember that in the moment.
Genuinely, what kind of miserable people are you around when even at a children’s birthday there is this kind of obsessive fixation going on?
You really may want to think about if you are around people who are genuinely good for you and your children.
I’m not surprised though, over the years I have noticed a notable shift towards the controlling and narcissistic spectrums of parents. I’m not totally sure why that is, but it seems to be definitely happening and it’s also rather clear to me that it’s a rather “American” toxic nature, probably due to the sick and perverse obsession with besting, outdoing, greedily wanting and needing more and shinier things than “the Joneses”, the obsession with celebrity and fame and money. It all contributes to the diseased state of society and “culture”, if you can call obsession with corporate outputs that.
But anyways, just let kids have their moment of fun, people, their identity and soul will be crushed by the “American” indoctrination and propaganda machine soon enough and they will become like the drone adults. Let them be human for at least a couple years of their lives.
I think you are right about it being miserable people. People who have forgotten how to have fun and just enjoy life. I think its linked to the hustle culture, and the need to constantly do something (even if its just doomscrolling).
There is also a tendency to treat children as a strange species rather than as human beings. I think that is older but its become worse as people come up with more and more parenting approaches, write books and make videos about it, etc.
Its sadly not just an American problem. At the very least an Anglophone problem.
What?!?!? Piñatas are awesome! And as people who emigrated from California it’s usually a fun novelty for the local Dutchies to see (though I see them in local stores now too!)
I remember reading once about how Astrid Lindgren's children's books were supreme exactly because she - contrary to many others - remembers what it is like to be a child. Not just what you did or thought when you were a child - how it felt. The endless curiosity and appreciation for what in an adult's eyes is trivial is really a special thing I hope most people carry throughout their lives. On the other hand, children also understand more than one would normally think, essentially a Moravec's paradox but in relation to adults.
Learning a second language is a fantastic way to feel many aspects of being a child again. Having to deal with frustration. Understanding a situation but not be able to fully take part. Being able to communicate but only with the blunt instrument of the words you know.
Yep. So many people have been drifting away into some kind of parallel reality where language is seemingly the same, yet transmits no meaning between our diverging realities.
I'm not sure whether to interpret this as a statement about what we currently over/under-estimate, or as command that we should try what feels like over/under-estimation in order to counter our own biases.
No, it was really helpful advice I read somewhere. That when explaining something, always overestimate someones understanding, and underestimate their vocabulary.
Edit: apparently it's a vsauce thing. I do think it's right, it helped me a lot in life.
Kids are so much smarter and more capable than adults give them credit for, and it is stunting society as a whole
I think infantilisation is a huge part of the reason we're where we are today - kids 100 years ago were working harder jobs than most adults today (not implying child slave labour is a good thing, just making a point)
Kids today, though, are given exactly 0 responsibility and treated like babies the whole way through their prime learning years
One of the first emails from the school when my small son was in Primary 1 was that they'd been making some pancakes in class and he'd picked up a Big Sharp Knife and began slicing some strawberries to put on them, and this was Very Much Not Allowed!
Children should not be touching the Big Sharp Knives!
Yeah, did he cut himself? No? Was he holding the knife and the strawberries carefully, so he didn't cut himself? Yes?
Want to take a guess as to why?
He's five. He knows how to chop vegetables. My parents taught me how to cook from a young age, I am teaching him how to cook from a young age. I'm raising a *man* here, not a perma-infant.
Although, between you and me, I think he could stand to use a bit less oregano in his pizza sauce. I'd never criticise his choices, I think he'll figure it out in time.
More people should read Oliver Sacks' book Uncle Tungsten. As a kid he was allowed to buy real chemicals for his chemistry set and was told things like "can you make slightly less hydrogen peroxide next time". Minors buying pitchblende (Uranium ore) at the local drugstore for experiments? Sure, might encourage them to be scientists.
I think the first time my son said the 'f' word, he got the tone and the body language exactly right for the context in which he used it (a frustrated/resigned "fuck's sake", with roll-eyes and throw-head-back, look up to the sky). He might have been five years old at the time. And back then, I really didn't say it around them very much (out of an attempt to be somewhat responsible).
They're absorbing everything. They're scraping the entirety of your personality to build their own.
I never quite understood the obsession with keeping some language away from children that everyone uses themselves. The words are there because they are needed. Walking the euphemism treadmill is a Sisyphus effort.
I heard of a study [1] claiming that people that swear more have a larger vocabulary in general, so your efforts might be counter-intuitive to your goal.
Don't see how deprivation of some words leads to the knowledge of other words, either. Maybe if you interject and correct swear word usage by providing other words that would be a better fit.
> Taboo word fluency is correlated with general fluency.
> Taboo words comprise pejoratives and slurs.
> Taboo fluency is correlated with neuroticism and openness.
When EBv2.0 was tiny, like could walk but not really talk tiny, and I was WFH Because Coronapocalypse, he one day did a straight deadass impersonation of me.
Picked up a cordless mouse and held it up to his little ear like a phone, "Hello? Yeah? Yeah..." and started wandering around the living room with it, occasionally scowling and holding his other hand up to his ear, "yeah... yeah... well yeah, yeah? Naja, yeah... nah, nein! <waving expansively> Nein nein nein... Yeah, 'kay, bye."
Put the mouse down on the table.
"Uuuuuurgh....."
Absolutely nailed it, Gary Oldman level precision.
I like Lemony Snicket's approach: he gives (obviously) wrong, but technically correct, definitions for hard words. These definitions are usually hyper-specific, or satirical. Children, who are still very familiar with learning vocabulary from context, can find this much more amusing than adults who have given up on learning new words except via dictionaries.
> The word “briskly” here means “quickly, so as to get the Baudelaire children to leave the house.”
> “Wipi!” Sunny shrieked, which meant “I’d much prefer gardening to sitting around watching my siblings struggle through law books.”
Speaking of Dostoevsky Prince Myshkin in 'The Idiot' is a fine portrayal of this archetype. In fact I believe at one point it is mentioned that most adults dislike him while children are drawn to him or something to that effect.
I like some of her books, but I am quite annoyed with kids most of the time coming from poor families with missing father/mother, it's like she couldn't write a book without some tragedy, of course the most famous Emil of Lönneberga and The Six Bullerby Children are from normal families (there is probably reason why these are the most famous and beloved), but already Pippi Longstocking is pretty F-ed up and don't get me started on The Brothers Lionheart, which is glorifying suicide and should be really banned for kids under 15, certainly not appropriate for 9yo, though I read it to my younger kid with appropriate commentary.
Remember that Astrid Lindgren was born in 1907, got pregnant at 18 and had to give up her son to a foster home for the first few years. She grew up in a completely different world, and it's no coincidence that a lot of her stories are basically about consoling traumatized children.
Also, back then in 1925 infant mortality was probably ~10x worse [0], which adds to how we (today) might underestimate the prevalence of parent-child traumas.
I don't know why you are down voted. Death was so much more present in kids lives back then. Death from diseases and injuries so common. Kids having dead siblings entirely normal.
I am familiar with her background she was sadly later projecting into many/most of her books. I am pretty sure vast majority of Swedish kids was growing back then in complete families without dead mother/father, same as they do nowadays regardless of marriage or divorce status.
Emil of Lönneberga and The Six Bullerby Children are great books, the rest about traumatized kids/orphans not so much as kid books.
As a Swede, I can't read the Emil books because of fremdscham for the parents from those scenes where Emil feels the need to run to the carpentry shed.
The farmer class could actually be like this, before we banned it, even though she tries to write about it in a comical way, but it was always a low class thing to punish ones children and to read stories where it happens is basically intolerable at least to me.
Astrid Lindgren probably knew this though. She isn't some idiot who puts this in as comic relief, it's comic but there's a serious and intolerable feel to it too. She knows she's portraying something bad and she intends for us readers to sit with the dissonance-- the low class going-to-punish-his-children aspect, the family's love for Emil, that book in which his mother writes down what he does, that Emil is well-meaning, that everything goes well in the end and that the adult Emil becomes a nämndeman, etc.
Astrid Lindgren is one of the scariest Swedish authors because of her deliberate careful and nuanced use of moral dissonance. She's scarier than Willem Fredrik Hermans.
according google in 1925 85% Swedish kids were born to married parents
and
"Long-term cohort studies tracking historical Swedish registry data from the early-to-mid 1900s indicate that approximately 2.3% to 3.6% of children experienced the death of a biological parent before reaching adulthood (under 15 to 18 years of age)"
so less than 4% of the kids experienced parental death, absolute majority was born into regular complete families, my point was like half of the Lindgren characters are missing parent for whatever reason, not one in 20 books main characters, she was clearly projecting something unhealthy unrealistic into her books, if she was following reality it would be rare in her books and not that many if not majority of her characters are from incomplete families
it is not that much, it means if she had 25 (4% is 1 in 25, not 1 in 20) main characters, one of them should have dead parent if she would reflect the reality and didn't have some orphan/death fetish with significant number (way way more than 1 in 25 or even 1 in 10) of her characters being orphans/foster/neglected kids
The "if you show a minority in your book, their number must not exceed their exact demographic share" rule would make it impossible to write about any minority.
> if she would reflect the reality and didn't have some orphan/death fetish
The aggressive hostility toward writing about non-majority is super weird.
I didn't appreciate Pippi Longstocking fully until I read Stieg Larsson's "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." Occasionally covers are better than the original song.
It's perhaps no coincidence that the opening theme song of the Fincher (Mara/Craig) version of the movie is an outstanding cover of "The Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin.
Have you read the book or your kids just read it without you knowing what is it about?
This book says basically - no biggie, there is no death, you commit suicide to move to another level to be with your brother, you can't lose him, you have infinite lives in this videogame called Life. And what if I F up the next level? no biggie, you just commit suicide again to be with him, there is no such thing as permanent death/separation from your loved ones, after each death you just move to another level. That's really F up thing to teach small kids, who should know death is permanent.
I think you miss the point of this book. Karl had tuberculosis, Jonathan died saving him from a fire despite knowing Karl would soon die (which he did). No suicide there, only tragedy. Then they had an "afterlife" which is full of the adventure they wished they had when they were alive - which also means that there's some serious darkness there to fight, so not heaven by any means. In the end, Karl gets to do for Jonathan essentially what he did for him, and they're ready to move on. They didn't commit suicide, they were already dead. I don't think a single Swedish kid killed themselves over misunderstanding this book, they didn't miss the part that the brothers really treasured life and it was a tragedy that they died in the first chapter.
I've literally re-read it this year again and I couldn't disagree more, like, to a point where I wonder if we even read the same book. That book made me scared of dying when I was a child, and it made me appreciate the finality of death again now that I'm a grown up. There's nothing there that "glorifies" suicide - we could have a meta 2026 conversation about whether it's trying to say that yes, terminally ill people _should_ be able to decide what they want to do with their own lives, but that's not the message the book is going for(imho) - it's about bravery and loyalty even through the darkest of times, and about sacrifice(not suicide!!!) that comes from standing up for what you believe for. I don't personally believe in afterlife, but just as much as I loved the idea of naningalia when I was a child I still love it now - it gives children hope that even in the darkest moments of despair, there is something better waiting for them. The main character literally dies of ilness at the start, being bed bound for a long time without his loving brother and mother who doesn't know how to help him. The fact that he chooses to join Johnatan at the end in the trip to the "next" level of afterlife couldn't be further from glorifying suicide.
I read it this year to kids and the book says basically - no biggie, there is no death, you commit suicide to move to another level to be with your brother, you can't lose him, you have infinite lives in this videogame called Life.
And what if I F up the next level? no biggie, you just commit suicide again to be with him, there is no such thing as death, after each death you just move to another level.
So there is no risk at all you will lose your brother/relative, very F up thing to teach the kids, exactly opposite from what should make them scared of dying which is PERMANENT and there is no next level, where you can be with your family again.
That's such a dishonest read of the book I don't actually know what to say. To me, joining Johnathan at the end is the conclusion of the entire book of love, loyalty and bravery. Nowhere does it say "meh, no biggie just kill yourself". If that's the message you took from it then I strongly encourage you to sit down one evening and read it again. The biggest "proof" of it not being treated lightly is obviously all the inhabitants of the valley of cherries enduring, surviving and fighting against oppression instead of as "just killing themselves" to go to the next level. Even at the end Johnathan makes it sound like it's a rumour and maybe there is something there, but no one knows for sure, same as naningalia was at the beginning - people hope there is a better afterlife, but that's all it is - hope.
The "dishonest read" is a strange accusation. I think I was about 11 or 12 when I read the book and my reaction was - "err, so they just going to keep killing themselves willy-nilly? Well thats a bit dumb". I did like the story though and reread the book later several times, but the suicide bits felt always so weird.
Dishonest as in - it requires ignoring 99% of the book and focusing on the last couple pages, ignoring the entire struggle, bravery and sacrifice that lead to that moment.
>>err, so they just going to keep killing themselves willy-nilly
Well so your 12 year old self I guess missed the part where Johnathan was mortally wounded and about to die. The fact that Karl decides to join him in death is not a glorification of suicide, and I don't know how it could possibly be read that way. There's literally nothing willy-nilly about it - again, it doesn't appear to be some well known fact or even a fact at all that there is another "level" beyond that one - it's a guess, a hope at best. And Karl decides to jump with his dearest brother because(as made incredibly explicit multiple times throughout the entire book) - he loves him more than anything in the world and cannot imagine parting with him again. You make it sound like a video game where characters go "meh, let's try again" - it's absolutely not so. Before he died the first time, Karl wasn't sure if Johnathan was telling the truth about afterlife or if he wanted to just make him feel better in his ilness - and now that Johnathan was mortally wounded, Karl knew that only bravery and hope and love for the people you care about is worth living(and dying) for. That's what the book is about.
In my first comment I even made this explicit - I said that as an adult, this book makes me appreciate the finality of death - and you might ask, how is that so, given that in this world it looks like you can just keep dying over and over again only to go to higher planes of existence. And the answer is simple - with every death, you lose everything except for hope. Hope that you are going to wake up again in a better world and that the people you love will still be there. But you don't know. In my personal life I don't believe in it - but for children, this is the greatest gift - hope. Especially struggling ones that see no bright path anywhere - hope is all they have. And as you can tell, for majority of the book the hope was "we can win persevere against hardship and evil" and not "we can kill ourselves and hope the next world is better".
I think Tao correctly sees the problem with AI. It’s not that it is ineffective or has weaknesses. It’s that it’s not human.
Like, it ought to be enough to say that the problem with AI is that it’s not human. Unfortunately, we live in a world where many (most?) people have willingly put away the childish things, so as to achieve some goal.
The problem is that the point of life is to explore and have fun and have human to human experiences. I think math is probably fun because you’re working on hard problems with your collaborators.
It should be obvious to everyone, as it is to children, that the point of life isn’t the goal, the point is the experience one has of living. They say that when you die the only thing you lose is the current moment. The problem with AI is that it doesn’t have a current moment to live in or to lose, it’s an inanimate thing. So, it should be obvious to everyone that the problem with the AI is that it’s not human. Alas.
I think everyone wants the experience of living, but it's not a great one without money, and money commonly requires full-time work until financial freedom. But that point usually comes at 65.
So it's not that only children appreciate life, it's just that adults have to deal with that whole money problem, while children don't.
I take a 8 hour work day over being subjected to more or less random weirdness from "adults" every day. IOW, not everyone has this rose-tinted view of their childhood. I still remember adults saying "you will once look back at your childhood and miss the times". Turns out that was totally and utterly wrong. I even have bad dreams about my school/childhood time every few months. I am sooooo glad that time of being subjected to the will of others is over.
I think the problem is that some people do genuinely have a great childhood, or another phase of life (university is another one), while others have a terrible childhood or another phase of life, and people who have one fail to understand those who have the other.
To add to that I think people can have a rose-tinted view and deny what they felt at the time.
I agree that AI isn't human, but why does that necessarily mean it's a problem? The analogy I use is watching an octopus juggle - just because it's better than a human can ever be, definitionally, doesn't mean it's a problem or replacing people.
I think the impulse to use AI to replace human effort in cases where it's not drudgery, like art, math, etc is the issue, more than the fact that AI isn't human. Let AI do AI things, and humans do human things. I honestly hope that when everything shakes out we have a lot more room in the world for people doing things that are uniquely human, or amazing new collaborations that let humans do things they've never been able to do before.
Isn't the problem that without exploration we won't actually get new goals e.g. can AI come up with new math conjectures instead of "just" solving existing ones.
Yeah - I think he’s worried that we have a tool that’s almost an oracle that can just get straight to the heart of a given problem.
The problems aren’t always that interesting in their own right. But the quest to solve them is often what drives the invention of new techniques.
We ultimately got the Langlands program and a large amount of algebraic number theory out of attempts to solve fermat’s last theorem. A “clever” approach using techniques from the 1800s wouldn’t have been anywhere near as fruitful for mathematics as a discipline.
To be human is like being the training so much more than the execution. Like the parallel post's game where the speed of light is 5km/h, we always try to but never reach true "perfection" (setting aside the discourse what that even would be). Some overfit, some stop short of being good...
> the point of life is to explore and have fun and have human to human experiences
Not really. The point of life is successful reproduction. Because without it, we cease to exist. It wasn't that long ago when humans spent their entire lives struggling to live and protect their children.
To do the first one perhaps, although how many have really explored locally in full. To have fun is all dependent on your view on life and have human to human experiences can be had any time you step outside the door. Just talk to people and be friendly.
These affairs remind me of A Timbered Choir by Wendell Berry, and your comment strikes a similar chord.
Excerpts:
Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,
for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake
of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.
Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.
...
The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.
the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free
to sell themselves to the highest bidder
and to enter the best paying prisons
in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,
which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects,
which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress,
to the completed sale, to the signature
on the contract, which was to clear the way
to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home
would ever get there now, for every remembered place
had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.
Every place had been displaced, every love
unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant
to make way for the passage of the crowd
of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless
with their many eyes opened toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from
"The problem with dogs is that they're not human."
You can make this case for pretty much anything? Are cars human? Are excavators human? The universe does not exist to cater to the human experience, it just is. Not everything we do in it has to be for the greater enlightenment or whatnot, sometimes you just need to get something done.
> But modern AI tools, when directed without such expert supervision, can now be aimed all too easily at the ostensible goals of the field, without any incentive to take the slow, whimsical path.
IMHO, that's the whole point of AI: automate the fun, to leave people with more drudgery. Worker! Spend less (ideally no) time doing creative things like coding, spend your time instead doing code review!
classic, now I can have AIs make my games for me while I still have to cook and wash the dishes! Maybe AI can soon start playing the games for me, can't wait.
This reminds me of a video I saw from Alan Watts [1] where he talks about how from childhood it is hammered into our minds that we must work we must do this or do that or we will be punished. And he talks about how you can choose to change your perspective or mindset and see work as a form of play, where you live in the moment.
This is probably harder to do than to say, but this video resonated with me because your mindset is something you do have control over, and choosing not to get stressed about work, and choosing not to take things "seriously" and choosing not to do something for the outcome but just for performing the act, just like you would play music (an example he gave) or to see it as a game is something you can do.
I think the argument is not to not work, but to change the mindset that is so ingrained in our society that you must work. You don't want to starve, so you work, but you can do it with mindset that is fundamentally different, where you choose to focus on being in the moment, and don't let yourself get stressed by outcomes you have no control over, just as you would if you are playing a game or playing music.
Changing your mindset is hard, you are fighting against an entire society where your are expected to be "serious" as an adult and identify yourself with your work, but you do have a choice
At least in the USA, due to the lack of social safety nets I have to disagree. It's very much work or starve. Yeah you can try to change your perspective, but unless your in a privileged situation where you have a safety net (i.e. a wealthy family to support you if things go wrong) then it's difficult to stop thinking about it.
And, as with many things, as soon as you stop forcing yourself past the point of ease and fluency, you somehow both enjoy it more and also are more effective.
> And he talks about how you can choose to change your perspective or mindset and see work as a form of play, where you live in the moment.
I think it's hilarious that they just let me play with a £150k Nexus 9000 stack at work, like it's fucking Roblox or something.
"Here you go EB, figure that one out, all it's doing is connecting our core network with our VM servers and SAN, no pressure! Documentation? Naaah, we never had any of that..."
It was fairly early in my career in IT that I realised that very few other people at the company really understood what it was that I did, or at least that, as long as the outcome was 'good enough' then how I got there didn't matter and no company has the time to have people monitoring _how_ anyone is doing their jobs (outside of where such things are heavily regulated or prevent fatal accidents kind of things).
It's liberating. There seems to be more scope for freedom in what you do than most people think there is.
You do have control over it, but the external pressure to be “normal” is enormous and insurmountable for a majority of people. There’d be no such thing as “normal” otherwise.
I look at my cohort who I schooled with, and they are all so terrifyingly sober and adult, and take themselves so very seriously. They toil, they spin, they die.
Me… I don’t really know what happened. As a child, the more I was told to be normal, the more I dug my heels in, not out of contrarianism but out of a still indefatigable conviction that all of these people were wrong.
And the proof lies in the pudding. I am in my 40s, still a child, still stop to explore incessantly, still enjoy poking things with a stick, still finding joy, still being told to just for the love of god be normal, when will you get a proper job, settle down and become a banker or a lawyer or a doctor, and all that jazz.
Maybe it’s just the (until recently undiagnosed) ADHD talking - maybe I have been graced with a surfeit of good luck - but I’m pretty content with how being a cast iron weirdo panned out.
On the remembrance of childhood, much of it is clear to me - and now that I have a toddler of my own, I so often find her doing X or Y and going “good god, I remember being that kid”. Her other doesn’t remember her childhood at all, and struggles to relate - whereas I’ll gleefully fill my pockets with sand and run around hooting Yankee Doodle at full blast. It’s fun. People don’t have enough fun.
> I look at my cohort who I schooled with, and they are all so terrifyingly sober and adult, and take themselves so very seriously. They toil, they spin, they die.
Ah, this is the problem, I work with people who take themselves so terribly seriously all the time.
But they do not take what they do seriously.
I don't take myself seriously at all, which really seems to irritate some people - but I take what I do very seriously indeed.
And then the people paying the wages don't seem to understand why my time is *so* *bloody* *expensive*. Yeah, it's not expensive, it's just a lot of money.
While his concerns expressed here aren't new, it looks like the recent cases of scientific misconduct were enough to push for urgency:
> But in the immediate term, the most pressing issue is for the entire mathematical community to unite around our core values and objectives, and reject irresponsible and unsustainable usages of AI technology that only serve to advance nominal goals rather than the true underlying goals of the field.
I've been pretty disappointed with those mathematicians who I once respected so acutely, embrace the leopards. Now, they are complaining that even mathematicians' faces are getting eaten. They chose to ignore the claims of rampant plagiarism laundering through training for several years by visual artists and open source developers. And here we are: Tao is finally concerned about the future of the people sharing a cage with this once-cute kitten.
All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "Le Petit Prince."
While I love de Saint-Exupéry generally, even in his time (especially?), he knew that not all children got to be children. Hell, I think even in his childhood, he never really got to be a child. The reason not many remember it is because for some, they really don't want to.
I can remember a lot from being a child. Mostly a sense of frustration and powerlessness.
But also the way in which things seemed more interesting than they do now. Like I could be fascinated by watching a tree sway in the wind in a way which wouldn't happen now - at least, not without conscious, meditation style effort. I remember when an hour seemed like an almost intolerably long stretch of time.
I also remember loads of events in visual detail, though I'm terrible at remembering when they happened.
I'm pretty sure if you just sit down on the sofa, do not stare at any screen, and do not read any book, and just start counting. Suddenly an hour will be back to an intolerably long stretch of time.
Children also resist, and adults used to resist as well.
Politely outlining coping strategies while taking money from the "AI for math" fund and SAIR doesn't do anything except Tao can point at it later any say "I was concerned".
Maybe if adults get more unruly again and say "stop this IP theft and concentration of capital" people will have more radical math ideas, too. Politicians would listen to math professors but they stay silent.
I mostly remember how it felt to be a child and it's extremely important to me that I continue to do so as I get older. The best days of my life are when I can capture the perfect nostalgia, or deja vu, of the past when I was much younger. Sometimes only for a split second, sometimes longer. Increasingly I believe it's one of the few things in life that truly matters on an existential level: how children feel, and how we feel about (ourselves as) children.
Would appreciate recommendations for reading material about this.
Math from Three to Seven by Alexander Zvonkin is a great read and example of this. It recounts experiences running a math circle for preschoolers and really highlights the value of play, curiosity, and open exploration.
From personal experience, and as noted here, this approach is valuable for everyone regardless of age. In the short term it's far more efficient to learn by having the right way 'pushed' to you. However, by taking the time to fail, repeatedly, and eventually 'pulling' that knowledge the tacit understanding you build has a depth that's hard to shortcut.
This relates almost not at all to the actual linked words, but I feel it relates to the sentiment of the title.
As a parent of two, now pretty much independent grown, children, I came to the conclusion a while ago that my childhood was for my parents enjoyment and my children's childhoods were for my enjoyment.
I fucking loved being able to guide them on their early ride through life. I think I re-lived my childhood vicariously through them, so I assume my parents did the same, and my kids will do the same with theirs. fingers firmly crossed
It feels as if this is how it should be. When you're a child going through childhood you don't have the awareness that, well, that's what's happening, you're just doing your thing without any knowledge yet of what your thing is; very little to compare it to, not a lot of real choice.
As an adult you're aware of the a lot of the badness in the world and the place you've ended up occupying in the innumerable spectrums of all the things. As an adult trying to guide kids into the world, the mad freedom of being a child is a wonder to behold.
For those of you who haven't had kids yet, or have young ones, record their madness. My home videos of my kids being entirely unbridled children are probably my favourite possessions in the whole world. My kids even go back and watch themselves, to their own endless amusement.
I often try to retain my 'wonder', and every now and then make sure to do something a bit mad. It makes the worthwhile people smile (and my kids cringe these days, but I sense there's an appreciation underneath it).
Your approach helps expand our children's imaginations to such an extent that they learn to think outside the box even at the preschool age, which will enable them to make better decisions in their lives.
"C'est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante" - "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important"
This is something I've noticed and wondered about since a long time
Maybe we should stop "belittling" children into "acting like grown ups" as if the former was something to be ashamed of and the latter something proud to aspire to.
This happens even among children within different age groups just 1-2 years apart! Wtf
In Firefox, all text outside the headline post, including the name and username that begin the headline post, appears to be in some kind of shrunken state which ruins its appearance. Zooming in solves the problem and causes the letters to appear correct rather than grotesquely malformed.
I don't know how the site was allowed into production like this.
you are right, it seems to be more zoom issue than font issue (or combo since I don't really experience this elsewhere, which is why I mentioned it), if I zoom out to 90% it becomes normally readable, but at default 100% zoom it is malformed unreadable (btw. I use 225% Windows 10 scaling at 2560x1440)
I can attest that the same thing happens to other fonts.
I have the opposite problem from you, though; for me the font (outside of the focused post) is already being rendered too small and zooming out doesn't help. Zooming in to 110% fixes it (while making some pretty big changes to the layout of the webpage...).
I am not a Tao hater but also not a fanboy but this is spot on! He is right, I don't love AI in many states and feel it is used for pointless task, however the beauty of that helping hand supporting you do tasks that you have no idea how to do is the magic in it. As a child we all asked questions regularly of what if we did this instead of this, why do we do things this way, why not try something else. Work and adult life gets us stuck in a rut, so anything that gets us out of a rut is welcome.
All well and good. I agree with the sentiment, but why are we asking for permission? Does this not strongly demonstrate the inherent corruption of institutions?
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