Even a vacation anecdote must include something about how the break is justified by increasing net productivity.
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
I don't know how the site was allowed into production like this.
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'm at 150% scaling, 3840x2160.
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.
Shoppers & hobbyists who spend too much time browsing gear are well aware of this though generally don't like to admit it to themselves...
There was (I believe) a Korean app for people to fake shop so they get all the dopamine of the hunt without the cost of actually buying anything.
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.
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.
It's banal to you as an adult, because it's not rare or new.
Adults do the same thing in more exotic and expensive contexts.
As an adult, if I went and they said it cost 0€, I think I'd play too.
The reward of a game is playing it, not the 'prize', although that can add to the enjoyment too.
People don't pay to get the crap, they pay to have a fun experience and get a memento of it.
Oh yes, I got it, they are like the claw machines that have fake bills and iPhones with them (at least that's what I saw too).
But the point of having fun, you know it's a rigged game.
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.
> Adults hate them
This is absolutely not the case.
I wonder if it's true that people don't remember. People maybe remember but don't want to talk about it. It is such a cognitive dissonance.
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.
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.
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.
This is truly one of life's under-appreciated little pleasures!
There is no more violence in hitting a nail with a hammer.
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.
(Buhurt is a bit more complicated.)
"Children heal the soul" - Dostoevsky
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
- 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.
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.
————-
William Wordsworth 1770 – 1850
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
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.
Would appreciate recommendations for reading material about this.
As a child I played RuneScape and I recently got into Oldschool RuneScape. It's clearly the same engine and it's a lot of the same content but it's very much not exactly the same, as they've rebalanced everything, added new content, and shifted all the metas. But it has the same feeling to it (unlike RuneScape 3).
Or how about this - I used to play with Lego Technic, but now I can build full-scale things by screwing together metal extrusions and wooden planks and beams and other parts. Make sure to sweep/vacuum up metal shavings from your floor immediately - learned that the hard way. Sawdust isn't as bad.
Learning Go felt a bit like learning BASIC again - I just banged out code and the computer did what I wanted - although I wouldn't recommend it as a first language because of all the "if err". You need some pre-existing experience to not ignore your responsibility to write "if err" everywhere.
Today I'm going to make a pasta dish, with tomato, olives, bell peppers, onion, and fresh picked parsley. Haven't made a dish like that in ages, and I've never bought a live parsley plant from the supermarket before. It's a little thing, but it's still neat. I'm aware that it probably tastes exactly the same as dried parsley.
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).
Just observe aggressively and you will notice a lot of childhood patterns at work in adult life around you.
(summary: AI as a metaphor for optimising the fun out of play)
> Father: "Ugh, how do kids enjoy this garbage?" [...]
I had forgotten how often young-me would be daydreaming about stuff. I don't think having more digital distractions fully explains it.
First time I ever went to a big outdoor music festival was completely overwhelming in a good way. Second time was pretty good. Third was alright. Fourth was boring. Maybe that wasn't the exact progression but you get the picture.
We'd call it the "hedonic treadmill" when it comes to music festivals but we don't really use that term for cartoons.
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
I feel so sorry for the next generation
> 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.”
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 all those things, I need money.
what lifestyle do you think you need or deserve?
evolution doesn't remember those who lived well, only those who carried forth
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
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.
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
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's liberating. There seems to be more scope for freedom in what you do than most people think there is.
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.
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.
The logical mechanism for me was - a hobby I've done 30 years I have probably upgraded through various classes of equipment such that anything left to buy is expensive. For a new hobby I am back to buying little $100 gizmos again.
Doesn't work for some hobbies that have a higher cost of entry.
* E.g., https://foodnevercomes.com
* https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/fake-shopping-website-ap...
It's like video game arcades. When you had to pay to play for 2 minutes, it was way more exciting than now playing in an emulator
Edit: apparently it's a vsauce thing. I do think it's right, it helped me a lot in life.
Seems to me it's €20 for a day (8h? 16h?) of fun. That's not bad value: how much does a movie ticket cost for 2-3 hours?
Heck they could run their own carnie games at home with Temu toys. Invite the kid's friends and it would be just as fun.
The fact that the item was won as a prize imparts on it an (psychological) 'aura' that simply buying it does not. Related:
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 genuinely very interested in your thoughts.
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.
And like that to school at summer's end
Us being children of five years of age
Without a word of English in our heads
That's my literal translation anyway.
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.
And, ideally, go and visit a cleared township.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/nc8uhBogrBCjgjYs9
I used to walk out there most weekends when I was at school. Until about 175 years ago, those were homes. Families lived there.
The white dots you see are sheep, which is of course why families don't live there now.
Good Gaelic, incidentally, where did you speak it?
To add to that I think people can have a rose-tinted view and deny what they felt at the time.
I mean, I am absolutely glad about that.
I'm not so glad that I'm now subjected to the will of others on a far longer time horizon.
That consideration > prize isn't part of this common definition.
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.
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.
"You can't give her that!' she screamed. 'It's not safe!'
IT'S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY'RE NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE.
'She's a child!' shouted Crumley.
IT'S EDUCATIONAL.
'What if she cuts herself?'
THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON"
Piñatas are made and designed explicitly to be smashed open to get the treats inside.
We’re not buying brand new iPhones and smashing them, or buying food and making stupid “recipes” for rage bait.
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 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.
However, the article also linked out to revisit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ti%C3%B3_de_Nadal (Merry Christmas, Catalonia!)
And not to mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Judas (Burning Man, Easter edition!)
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.
So does the Bible.
which lesson is it exactly?
2.) Something being fun but expensive is skippable and it is good to be able to say "no" to expensive fun.
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.
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.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?location...
Emil of Lönneberga and The Six Bullerby Children are great books, the rest about traumatized kids/orphans not so much as kid books.
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.
One of parents being dead was way more commom situation then it is today.
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
>>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".
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.
People get arrested for hanging dolls on trees with nooses around their necks.
Some are prosecuted as hate crimes.
Do you think this is an issue from a lack of childlike imagination?
I think you will find it isn't a real animal.
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. They hide the things they do wrong because they learnt there are consequences and they dont want to get caught.
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.
I hear it's traditional in some parts to start an electronics lab semester by blowing up one of every component to show how it goes, and I had a similar experience in metal shop when I was too afraid to crash a lathe and the teacher did it himself, showing me how close you can get the tool to the part before it's a problem.
They're absorbing everything. They're scraping the entirety of your personality to build their own.
I want them to be clever with how they use language. Or at least have the knowledge to be clever, if they apply themselves.
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.
Can't get through life without gambling at least a little bit.
Even taking out a life insurance policy is making a bet you're going to die before it expires
I accidentally killed a baby bird when I was little. It still hurts when I think about it.
Some kids are indeed savages. But not all of us.
And they do care about right and wrong.
Second 4% is actually a lot. In a class of 20 kids, one will have dead parent. That makes it something all kids growing during the era are aware of.
To me it suggest it should be expected for some writers to write about this group.
> 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.
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.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03880...
I know the word "computer". I expect people's "computer" fluency is correlated with their general fluency. Would teaching Victorian peasants "computer" increase their general fluency?
My parents filled in some details, some of which I did not remember.
And yeah, I remember the emotions I felt.
Most of your memories and everything you think of now about early childhood were formed long after it. They were created from bits and pieces of real memories, stories, backsplanations for things that happened later, retrospective, etc. Even if you had now an accurate debug dump of your child brain, you'd still not be able to process that the way you processed it back then.
Your kid brain was a black box, a CPU with a different architecture running code that you've never before or since. You later tried to recreate that code for the CPU you have now, based on input from others who've also never seen that original code or have access to that type of CPU. And you are certain you recreated it accurately?
Yes.
You disagreed with sevenzero when they claimed that concepts like violence and right and wrong are actively taught by parents instead of being innate to children. Assuming you read all three lines of sevenzero's comment before disagreeing: the perspective of your 4-year-old self is not a reliable source, because 4-year-old children cannot accurately differentiate between innate or taught feelings.
I recall seeing a TV show where they studied very young people by putting them in right and wrong situations, and they definitely knew what was right and wrong.
How could a person who was taught social concepts of right and wrong since birth ever hope to reliably determine which parts of said concepts in their own mind are innate, and which aren't? Human minds are infamous for being terrible at introspecting their own mechanisms at the best of times.
> I recall seeing a TV show where they studied very young people by putting them in right and wrong situations, and they definitely knew what was right and wrong.
Unless said very young people were raised by wolves, chances are that they've been taught these concepts since birth as well. You can't determine the innateness by only looking at people who share this bias.