What shall I teach my son?
stevekrouse.com
stevekrouse.com
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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 very much agree with your last sentence.
It's the same for pretty much all school education. It gives you a chance to spot the grifters, show-offs, and sleazy salespeople.
I wouldn't be surprised if the unschooling movement was supported by said show-offs, grifters and salespeople. Uneducate the masses and you won't have to come up with clever lies anymore. The simple ones are enough.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My mum did emphasise my reading though, and that went well.
its a lottery.
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.
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.
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.
Mona Lisa Vito, is that you?
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:
. | 1 | 2 | 3 | ...
-------------------
1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | ...
2 | 2 | 4 | 6 | ...
3 | 3 | 6 | 9 | ...
..|...|...|...| ...
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.
well said, absolutely agree
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?
Gates had excellent grades and was credited in an academic paper during his undergraduate years. Not exactly like the average dropout.
> "Now that I think of it, apparently Einstein was a mediocre student, but his contributions to science were his way out. "
That's a myth. Einstein got top grades in science and mathematics.
As for the original question, "If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.", incorrectly attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"The Market decided..." stuff is completely ridiculous in these cases. A few individuals have risen by pure competence without education or privilege to the highest levels of science and industry but this claim such a compelling myth that far more have people spread the myth about themselves without it being true.
Curious; Resourceful; Self-reliant (to feel they have agency in the world); Compassionate; Value personal integrity, themselves, their ideas / wishes, and time on the planet; Able to cooperate, communicate, and work as a team; Able to make sacrifices for the future versions of themselves ("I'm having a bad day today, what can I do to make tomorrow me have a better day?"); Able to enjoy life and find fulfillment (however small) even in bad times.
School subjects, economies, social constructs, technology, they all change. A human who's motivated to develop themselves on topics like the above will be the best person they can be whether they are a CEO or living in a cave underground after an apocalypse.
So I think the answer is to first make yourself into somebody you're happy with, and then be yourself. Somebody who's happy with themselves is going to have a good life, regardless of how the world turns. And I think people who are happy with themselves also tend to be better humans to other people, regardless of all of these other terms and values we try to impose on this.
Like if somebody's belittling some service worker, it's not because of a lack of compassion, communication skills, emotional intelligence, or whatever else - it's because that person probably hates themselves, and they're taking out their own self loathing on others.
Could be nice to have if the parents knew how to do all that themselves ...
Maybe we'll have to improve and learn together. How do I start?
You can, however, be a good role-model.
77 million Americans voted to give the higher office and nuclear codes to the complete opposite of that.
Before you roll your eyes and cuss about "someone inserting politics yet again in a topic": kids aren't dumb and have enough innocence to see when adults say something and do the opposite, and not be ok with it. And it is a big part of becoming a jaded, cynical adolescent and adult.
So if you want your kids to have these qualities, show them yourself. Or be very clear with them that you don't and explain why.
Spend meaningful, loving time together, and out in the world, as much of the small scale natural world as you can. Listen to their questions, answer when you can, learn the answers together when you can't.
If they are accustomed to hiking and camping, especially wild camping, they will learn much from you and will ask for more.
If you shop together at markets, they will start to develop a more complete relationship with their food supply and with the people working it.
Empathy and kindness and resilience will develop in those experiences.
Later, when they are closer to school age, be as honest with them as you can about the different personalities they will encounter, the conformist teachers and students, the rebels, the do gooders, the no goods, etc., and comfort them that their people may be there right away or may not be there for decades.
Learn to tell them that you don't have all the answers, and there's a chance that the pair of you can work together to find it out, but there will always be some things that nobody knows yet.
But, most of all, I cam here to say - the foundation you're suggesting building is the strongest one we know of - safety in their emotions, having someone they can talk to, share their feelings with without ridicule or fear.
Start there and children always have someone they can talk to
The main problem with having a 5yo is more generally sanding down their ego. “no bud you can’t swim. not well. yet” and “I think you probably have some more to learn about chess. no I don’t think you can beat me.”
You can steer within their inclinations, but at some point kids are who they are.
I have really really profound regrets about not doing this myself, with my kids.
Sadly COVID kinda of ended the tradition.
Health and wellbeing pay the best dividends as you can maximize the nurture aspect of intelligence early and build resilience against unexpected hardships.
Do you mean all private schools? I'm not sure public schools have admissions tests when they are 5 or 6, except maybe tests on what is being taught in school.
University is a different story obviously..
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful” ...
As someone who's a little further ahead in this process, I realized the true raison d'etre for education might actually not be any of the reason discussed..
It's so you, the children's parents, can go about your business for the day and the kids can stay somewhere safe and where they can interact with their peers. If they happened to learn something, that's pure bonus.
The New Renaissance is Coming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCvixEyV10Q
I doubt it given how liberalism is falling out of favor in politics so rapidly
Maybe that's just me, but this strikes me as a bit odd. When i think about my parents and what i appreciate about them and how they raised me, hard skills are not very high up the list. Things like encouraging curiosity, agency and freedom to pursue things that I showed interest in even if it meant spending many weekends and many eurodollars on me that they would no doubt have found ways to spend otherwise come to mind first, along with general values about society and how (not) to treat people.
Edit: there are "hard skills" they taught me, but they are more along the lines of "we want you to be a self sufficient human being capable of dealing with life" (cooking, cleaning, how to budget and think about money,...) and less about increasing my value as a participant in the labor market
> Maybe that's just me, but this strikes me as a bit odd. When i think about my parents and what i appreciate about them and how they raised me, hard skills are not very high up the list.
For better or worse, parents with lucrative professions have been able to give their kids a leg up to enter those professions. They know the path to get there, have connections, etc. That's especially important in increasingly competitive environments (like we have today).
Thinking you had such an asset to offer your kid, then being forced to doubt its value, is a loss.
But right now I know almost nothing at all for what to tell them. I don't know if any moticum of the experience I have that put me on a successful path will be valuable in the future at all.
Basically my plan is to just spend time enjoying time together and having fun, and cross my fingers and hope that things turn out alright.
Spellcasting used to be incredibly rote magic. Welcome to a new age of spellcasting in the fly. Not required either but knowing the true names and the true forms: I can't imagine any path other than your true understanding directly corresponding to your true agency.
Not that I don’t value or agree with it, those soft skills are incredibly important, but one can I hope have both the soft and the hard skills.
Family and romance have evolved quite a bit in recent years - but all things equal are you wanting to marry into a family with productive skills, assets, etc? Would you pick true love with the peasant girl or marry to strengthen the alliance with Normandy? Would your answre to the latter change if you were the pauper?
Remember that while still being unborn the child will get acquainted with you voice and time if voice. Once born he will observe you and how you conduct yourself from very early on; how you treat others, how you swear, how you treat your wife, and nowadays your device pickup habits too.
so the best way to teach your kids is to teach yourself to be a better person
I would counter that education, at least in the USA, does not adequately prepare one for life, the real world, and effectively finding employment.
What ACTUALLY mattered in my life turned out to be:
1. Who you know, and by proxy, what kind of a person you are
2. The value of "just showing up", every day
3. How important personal relationships/networking are, and just how SMALL the world is for how vast its size
Knowledge and skills are things you can sort of just pick up as you go along, but being given any kind of opportunity in the first place is not quite so easy.
When I was going to primary school, we'd take oath every day before the classes started - first line were to the effect of - "I swear that I will occupy myself with serving the humanity".
I guess that's why I refused when one of my longest serving freelance web development client inquired if I was interested in developing a "naughty" website.
> I would counter that education, at least in the USA, does not adequately
> prepare one for life, the real world, and effectively finding employment.
With respect to your original question: Mirror your sons curiosity, bring in your experience, interest and knowledge, but keep an open mind towards his interests. Don't forget: the game is determined by your child (both literally and metaphorically).
I'm very skeptical that these orwellian rephrasings do any good. I'm super skeptical of this whole approach to speak differently in relationships, at work etc. I've mostly seen this whole "nonviolent communication", therapy-talk and related stuff used as manipulative verbal judo to sound nice but be mean with leaving no avenue to be criticized.
I don't see how this pampering will produce emotionally robust kids. In fact whatever has been this stuff recently seems to have produced an overly anxious and fearful new generation.
Too many husbands get slightly behind in the first few months and never catch up to doing their share.
The best way to feel comfortable, confident, and close with your children is to "be a mom".
Like anything, you don't know how it works until you do it.
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 didn't 'follow in his footsteps', work at the family business, or even in the same industry. In fact, its difficult to name a skill or lesson my father taught me and at the same time I feel like I owe everything I know to him (and mom.)
I think most importantly, he taught me to care. to put in some effort and give a damn. He taught me to be unafraid to be vulernable and loving with my family and to be couragous in the face of fear. He let me be myself, he encouraged whatever it was that I was into and when i felt lost, he gave me a nudge in a good direction. He protected me, and taught me to be aware, how to be strong and kind.
If i were to have children, those are the things I'd want to pass onto them.
Also, I'd teach my kids how to cook!
One thing which I started with my own children which seemed promising was to read biographies of notable individuals in chronological order as bedtime reading --- since it was a difficult list to compile, I started on a smaller subset of U.S. Presidents which worked well (though I was surprised that there was no child-friendly biography for a couple of them in the local library system necessitating ordering) --- I also tried to read a more formal, adult-oriented biography in advance to anticipate questions. Unfortunately, my wife's schedule changed when we got to Truman and the effort was abandoned due to a changing evening schedule. Note that this was in addition to having read all the C.S. Lewis Narnia books, _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_, Susan Cooper's _The Dark is Rising_ pentalogy and many, many other more traditional book choices.
The big thing in child-rearing is to offer the child chances and experiences and age-appropriate choices --- the line in _The Simpsons_ where Homer tells Bart that it's okay that he failed at learning while wrongly phrased does have a kernel of truth in it.
The way to make an idea relatable today is different from 100 or 1000 years ago. The lessons may be timeless, but gaining the lesson is a personal experience.
The conclusion I currently have is that “education starts in the home”. School teaches information that everyone should know but the process starts within a household and community. So I don’t see a generalized solution for education.
When my kids were small we were either at the Perot museum or the Dallas World Aquarium every Saturday morning (giving mom a break). We had family memberships to both of those places and we used it to the fullest. Going to the same places over and over seems boring but I think it really helped them digest what they were seeing and messing with. I feel like a new experience every day is enriching but also overwhelming, especially for really small kids.
I always joked with them "get good at learning and you don't have to get good at anything else". I feel like they've done a pretty solid job at that and can learn/develop their own interests at will. My youngest taught himself guitar, he's really good too, and knows a handful of RATM songs which isn't the easiest music.
Both have gravitated to STEM and attend the magnet HS's in Dasllas ISD ( Townview TAG and Townview SEM ). My oldest is interested in petroleum engineering (i don't really know why, he just is) but my youngest spends all his free time and before school time with his creative writing teacher who he loves. Time will tell with him i guess.
I grew up in Dallas in TAG and Montessori and one of the most impactful days ever was a trip Downtown in the wintertime, just to be in the middle of Downtown during the day developing situational awareness by navigating to and from Thanksgiving Square.
Sometimes once is enough.
Schools have not changed because young kids are biologically wired to get the best out of reading patterns and texts, and writing using tools like pencils. The level of brain stimulation these activities generate is nowhere close to what you get looking at screens and typing on keyboards when you chat with an agent.
I have a five year old. It's almost breathtaking to see him figure out addition and substraction, sometimes in double digits. Do I need to teach to how to program or build agent harnesses like me? Not really. The tech will change when he's 20. The important thing is to let him develop critical thinking skills so that he can adapt and survive, just like I have.
Congrats, programmer dad. Don't stress it, sometimes even try to be Bohemian and enjoy the kid.
Without clear goalposts, external accountability, and support, self paced learning feels like running in a desert. You just end up going in circles. That’s exactly why MOOCs never worked for me, nor for thousands of others.
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.
Often the only thing that is taught is what is on those tests.
Beyond that, the interests were her choice to pursue.
I did do quite a lot of seeding though. It did mean at an age when her friends liked iCarly she liked Red Dwarf, The Prisoner, and Tom Lerher.
I think she has done well, over all.
When I was ~10, I tried to get my TRS-80 (yikes I'm old) to display something like the star wars death star on its primitive graphics. I got pretty far, thanks to the trig examples in the manual. But I was flummoxed that my degree measurements yielded crazy sin/cos results. I felt crushed. Some years later I learned about radians. I often think back how my life trajectory might have been different had I known something simple: how to break problems down.
HP calculator manuals used to be really useful for teaching that.
I kept all of my engineering textbooks and there have been concepts in them that never made sense when they were taught in school but ten years later I re-read them and things click like they never did when I was learning them years ago.
I think one of the tragedies of the public schools is that all the kids are expected to learn certain things at specific ages and grade levels, and for some kids they’re just not quite ready.
That doesn’t mean they won’t be ready in the future. But they will get a failing grade and the associated feeling of “I must be dumb.” And I think that often changes the trajectory of their lives as you described, often in negative ways.
Otherwise this question should bother a parent in every generation.
>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.
Being nice is nice, but it doesn't cure cancer
Could people learn by themselves? – possibly.
Do they? – generally not.
Having agents changes nothing
Access to information isn't the same thing as competency or skill. Giving someone access to google does not make them educated. Have they met people?
I agree with this, my boys are 14 and ~17 and i feel they have a petty good start on both. As a parent, you can guide and encourage but kids grow into individuals with their own passions, interests, and views of the world and being able to learn and think critically arms them with what they need to navigate it all.
“Teach them to create more happiness than they destroy, for others as much as themselves. For we are a finite planet, with nowhere else to go, and thus we all have an obligation to make this sole home the best and happiest place it can be.”
It’s to not bet that tomorrow’s solution might solve today’s problems, but to fix them as they arise. It’s cleaning up your own messes rather than relying on others to clean up after you. It’s not self-sufficiency, but planetary sufficiency, and navigating the impossibly complex systems that influence and impact those outcomes.
Let the children choose their specifics, and connect them with educators and mentors who will nurture their unique learning styles and growth patterns to full blossom. Otherwise, teach them that there is a finite amount of happiness on this planet, and we must do our best to ensure there’s always enough to go around for everyone.
And most importantly of all, never let someone else convince you that you or your passions are irrelevant or replaceable. Machines may do tasks, but they can never do work, for that toil and sacrifice is an innately human action that we’ve staunchly refused to surrender.
1. It’s not possible to influence things on a planetary level, with maybe a very small number of exceptions. Focus on having an impact more locally instead.
2. Disagree that the amount of happiness is finite in the sense of “fixed” or limited. Increasing the amount of total happiness in the world is definitely achievable and worthwhile.
You can keep toiling for mud pies. The way I see it, there are two options: let go or be dragged
Algorithmic feeds are in their "cigarettes are good for you" stage, but they'll get better. In the future (early signs include AI research report makers) tools will emerge that put you in charge, and that's really powerful.
An algorithmic tool - feed, or report-writer - that sifts a mountain of content & information to surface stuff you'll learn from and love, in response to a request you made? That's power. That's leverage. You save hours and get a fully cited and useful thing in response to your request.
An algorithmic tool that builds something in response to a prompt? Leverage!
We are headed for a future adundant with tools just like that. Depending how you use them, you'll get either enslavement, or immense leverage. Teach him nothing, and you risk him becoming a slave to algorithms controlled by others - just like the financially illiterate people out there today who fall into consumer debt or rely on payday loans.
Or, teach him to think deeply about leveraging the cognitive tools of today and tomorrow, and he'll be capable beyond anything our generation can conceive of.
– Thomas Edison, The New York Dramatic Mirror, 1913
What a quote! I love these takes because it instills a sense of skepticism for what our (wise?!) technologists are saying today. Especially the ones who are making the technology. No one knows how it will play out. Books remain.
Regarding your son: I am critical of adults' ability to orchestrate effective learning for children. Err on the side of honesty and directness, even in situations that are personally uncomfortable.
Most children are remarkably smarter and more capable of understanding than we (adults) give them credit for. Your son will likely have a better memory than you in the years when the acquired information disparity is highest (you having a lot, him having very little). Children learn early on how and when adults are being untruthful or partially truthful.
You cannot read too much to your son. You cannot talk too much with your son. You cannot listen too much to your son.
- how to tie his shoelaces,
- how to make/change his bed,
- how to make change (currency),
- how to cook breakfast: boil oatmeal, fry and poach eggs, make toast w/butter,
- how to wash dishes w/o a dishwasher (the value of soaking dirty dishes),
- how to sweep an inside floor, how to sweep large outside areas (e.g.,driveway),
- how to mop a floor and with what (e.g., don't mix stuff!),
- how to change/patch a tire on a bicycle, car, scooter, et al,
- how to use a fire extinguisher,
- when he gets older: how to mow and garden a lawn safely (safety glasses, heavy shoes, keep hands away, proper tool for the job, etc.) and
- the weak points of the body (with an intention of self-defense),
- How to sand and paint,
- the perils of household fluids, e.g., chlorine bleach, alcohol, gasoline, powdered cleaners, etc. and their mixing,
- My least favorite: how to dig and fashion soil with spade, shovel, hoe and rake.
- How to throw balls, rocks, a handful of dirt, etc. Spear/bow/arrow is fantastic but probably best left to organized instruction. Emphasize safety (for the balls and rocks too!8-))
By then he should be old enough to set his own path.
> Schools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet.
I am not at all sure schools survived the internet. The state of education in the era of tiktok and Instagram is absolutely poor and some would even say worse.
The internet (especially on smartphones) completely upended schools, and had taken over the attention of most students with the unrelenting grip of the hulk.
While I am not one for reciting doom and gloom, I think the author is avoiding a more grounded look at things.
Another example is their lineage working at long gone jobs in Scotland. This is not the same. The current tech vector seem to aim for virtually all jobs in one fell sweep. Yes, blue color labor as well, with finely controlled robotics. The industrial and information eras are over, and what comes next could be a leap, or a regression, but I'm sure it won't look like the past either way.
But seeing as the comments are answering the title question (and because I haven’t seen these mentioned yet), I’ll offer my 2c:
I hope to teach my son to embrace his emotions (all of them), to process those emotions in an healthy way, to ask for help when he needs it (without guilt or shame), to value practice (not success) and to play. I think everything else will follow.
DIY, homesteading, animal husbandry, electronics repairs, survival skills, cooking, whatever that cannot be easily automated.
Also teach them weapon handling, surveying, map reading, ham radio.
They will know it's wrong to be right.
It's the only way they'll ever get paid.
I will teach them to lie."
— Mobius Band Twilight
No, I don't agree with it. But on my most cynical days… I do enjoy the song.
The next would be that it's the long game that matters. You are likely to keep them around for pretty much two decades, don't burn all the energy you have the first few years. I've seen too many parents give their five year old all the attention they want but neglect a teenager, which is when the real challenges are.
The final is to be a good role model. The old adage that kids do what you do, not what you say, may sound easy but that's pretty much all there is to it. Show curiosity in everyday life and they will, too. Be kind, and they .. yeah, no guarantees there, but at least you did your thing.
How you act throughout your life, is how your son will act in his life. And it might seem like at times he doesn’t care or is above it, but he will ultimately do how Dad did it. This isn’t taught so much as it is imprinted. for me at least, that means: what will your son teach you? You will see just how much it matters.
Maybe an analogy is that it’s like LLM training…the better the training data, the better model. You are the training data. Remember that! And congratulations.
Is he asking how to parent a child or what fields to nudge them towards, or what?
I am lost in him taking formal education not delivering any more and making it into an existential crisis of parenting.
Is parenting "education"? sure to some extend like do not stick your hand in fire and some such. But that is a far cry even from basic calculus.
Maybe just stick to the basics on what to teach your son, and of the four things written, only the first and last really needed - become a good person; learn basic facts. The other two will fall in place.
Step 1 is surviving the transition.
Step 2, Find yourself someone trustworthy who can watch baby for a time, even a few hours. Create regular space to unwind, and eventually think about important stuff with your partner. What DO we value in raising our kids?
Step 3: start living it. Which starts with both of you. Kids absorb actions much more than words. Having kids has forced both of us to personally grow both out of sheer necessity and desire to impart certain values
Step 4: adjust ongoing
With two young kids, I'm somewhere in between steps 2 & 4. Remember to be kind to yourself too
— Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (Book 1, Preface, 9–10)
- Socrates (via Plato), Gorgias
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1672/1672-h/1672-h.htm#:~:te...
It is repeatedly astonishing how exceptional Americans feel. HN always educate how self - centred American as I dont find here the illiterate and the uneducated but university graduates from the best universites.
For instance on democratic side from Switzerland and Taiwan my country (Germany) can learn more. And how to have a good life, France or Italy or Sweden (list is not finished) are better role models but even then, Germany has its own unique culture which I am currently happy to live in.
This trope is meaningless without a quality standard. Have schools survived? They’re certainly not thriving, even by today’s handicapped & reduced standards. Moreover, k-12 students in the past learned philosophy, classics, Latin / Greek / German , advanced math, civics, home economics, physical education, theology, and so on.
We have “schools” but they’re hardly recognizable to people from before those other media became widespread.
Postman also wrote about the "Disappearance of Childhood". Once upon a time being an adult meant something. Now the world's secrets unfold rapidly unto a child's mind with the help of technology. Today, adults dress up in cartoon characters and enjoy coloring books. Postman also argues that childhood is a recent concept which came about with industrialisation and literacy...
Stafford Beer wrote that the purpose of a system is not its declared intent but what it does - what it manifests, causes or how it behaves (1979, 2001). Higher education has a lofty purpose, but the system manifests as a Defence Contractor among other things like teaching one’s kids. “We’d prefer not spoken aloud” is probably true.
There is shared knowledge and history that form the foundation of a culture.
There are basic life-skills, like understanding banking, the local political system, etc.
On top of all that: knowing how to think and reason, knowing how to find knowledge and learn new things.
So many parents are apparently incapable of covering these basics. In particular, many parents who home-school or, worse, unschool lack many of these capabilities themselves.
The grind is fun. But some of my best day are cleaning my space, making a cup of coffee, cooking a meal staring at the wall. Sometimes it’s nice to just live life in its regular moments and not need to chase adventure to feel something.
“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
That seems pretty good. I might add "curious" and "skeptical."
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.
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.
A competent teacher (doesn't have to be brilliant) puts a floor on basic levels of understanding in a variety of topics.
Without which, a resourceful LLM-guided child - while possibly being a brilliant mathematician - may well come out believing Wicca can heal cancer with the right rocks.
I bought a book on a subject I wanted to understand and read it to my kid every night with silly voices that sent them to sleep. They’re older now with a solid grasp of those foundational topics, which has helped their schoolwork and interactions with teachers, even if they’ve been labelled the class nerd. Works both ways. lol
Enjoy parenting. Be present.
What scares me about statements like this is that they sound so nice, until you ask: Who are "we"? Who is "us"? There's increasingly no longer an answer to that, and it underpins my pessimism for the future. No one gives a shit about the collective anything. It's too hard just to maintain your own existence anymore.
She was interested in Python and now in Godot, even though she knew how to use ChatGPT and all, she still wants to work towards the challenged by herself, using AI as a guide.
This makes me think that at least for the next generation, understanding will still be valued. Even though I am still questioning it that will be the case in the long run
From the quote from 1920. Which is so interesting, as even in the age of AI, language tutors are doing just fine. At least the people I know.
It turns out that no one really wants to learn a language by talking to their computer, and having a weekly scheduled meeting with another human being is quite enjoyable.
Learning what you want to create and how it should generally be done is a learned skill, and it helps it other parts of life.
Nothing to do with code, and it's a superpower in the age of ai. Someone has to talk to the AI for money.
What really happens is that the infant is the teacher. The parents are reduced to sleep-deprived diaper-changers who serve a tyrant who can't walk or talk. Do that for a while and your priorities and worldview have now been reprogrammed.
The kid grows up a bit and now dad, who was so full of wise lessons, is suddenly watching the kid eat a caramel apple for the first time, or riding a tricycle, or going on a water slide. The dad has nothing to teach, the dad gets to re-learn the joy of simple things.
But like others say, just read to them, play with them, be interested in them as little people...the rest will take care of itself.
competence is what I try to teach. Try, try and try again until he'll get it. Small things at first, but (hopefully) he gets the principle. Legos are great at this.
Additionally I try to teach that it's not wrong to defend yourself.
Furthermore, I find it completely reasonable for someone to care about the long-term financial focus of their children. I find this to be the second best antidote to all the uncertainty and fear older generations leave behind to the new ones.
The first best would've been to actually give a damn and make a stand to what the powers-to-be force you to accept as the new norm as if they're the force of nature that make decisions on how the 95% of the world's population must adapt to.
Kids get addicted to video games and TV. I think you should just set those into Spanish and Chinese. Tell them "play all the video games you want so long as the games are in Spanish or Chinese, you're learning a language".
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.
Perhaps Palo Alto isn't representative, and in fact might be doing some things wrong?
Einstein was not a mediocre student, what a stupid thing to believe. And Steve jobs and bill gates weren't drop outs because they were incapable.
As a recent father to two sons, my thinking has been to eventually teach them to "Solve problems (some of them being valuable)".
If I can do that, then it doesnt really matter what AI (insert other tech) pops up. There will always be problems to solve.
Anything, books, magazines, as long as it is on paper. Reading will help them to understand, to think, to use the brain without the need of electronic devices.
Did the author get their programming skill from their parents? I feel it's a quite weird question.
Now they're realizing that all "work" is tech related, and younger one is actually taking comp sci.
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.
Let’s take the likely situation where, AI can do Math, code, biology etc better than most humans ever can and increasingly needs minimal oversight or direction.
The only valuable skills then are social soft skills. This is not that foreign of a concept to humanity, many an aristocracy in times of peace have lived exactly like this, sometimes for generations in a row, Game of Thrones characters like Tyrion, Varys, Littlefinger are all this.
We actually live in a rare time in history, where you could learn some technical skills and advance regardless of your social skills (though even here having good social skills is a huge plus). That will go away. This will feel apocalyptic to the introverted nerd, but probably exciting for other types of people.
Some AI futurists of the permanent underclass meme, believe access to capital before AI gets good enough will be the only differentiator. I doubt that, it will be helpful for sure, but even if you have millions, you’re still going to need friends, a wife, a society etc. The money will diffuse out, marriage being the largest wealth diffusion event in a persons life. In this world, Marriage would arguably be the most important path to social mobility, for men and women alike. This is already true in many countries that haven’t fully entered modernity, it was also true for old western aristocracies.
So finally to answer the posts question, “What shall I teach my son”, well teach him to go and find a place in school. Successfully navigating the high school hierarchy, will be the best predictor of him doing well in society.
IIRC, Bret Weinstein said something like "invest in skills that upgrade your thinking". Coincidentally, many such skills, eg. math and coding, happen to be exactly those where AI also excels at, so I wouldn't rule out learning something simply because AI happens to be good at it.
That's less Mcluhan and more Foucault.
Time is the most valuable thing we have and can share.
- To WANT. Most people don't even want things anymore. No hobbies, no goals. Attention sniped by algos and digital casinos (gaming, sports TV, anxiety-farming news).
- Mind-body coordination. Hobby sport, instrument.
- To not be a pushover.
- To make friends and a strong social circle. (Find common ground + empathize with his current problems = new friend)
- To id and reject poisons: Digital ones, foods, pharma, air quality, delusions,...
- To identify profit motives, machiavellianism and scams.
No matter what happens with AI and various doom bringers (demographics, climate, wars), these skills are evergreen and will likely create an advantage in survival and quality of life in any scenario.
Also, be rich and leave a nice pile of inheritance. Beats every corporate job which is for the losers.
1. a willingness to inspect, interact and "mess with" (for lack of a better term) the world around me — intellectually, mechanically, and socially
2. an awareness that there will be consequences, and that I should take responsibility for them.
3. critically, the idea that "taking responsibility is a good (or at least not bad) thing"
In my case, this was light wrist slaps with a proud chuckle for me messing with the home electricity panel, stealing the refrigerator's power cord to replace my PC's broken one, getting in trouble at school for asking my teachers hard questions, taking some career/financial risks right out of college, and generally bending rules to find novel solutions to common problems, even if i got in mild trouble from time to time.
In many of my peers, including my older brother, they know they must take responsibility for consequences of their interfacing with the world — but that's something scary to them. So their conclusion is to inspect (but unobtrusively), interact (but only as instructed), and never mess with the world. This manifests (where I'm looking from) as limited curiosity, few novel ideas for how things could or should be (even at a small/local/domestic scale), and low initiative to try to alter their circumstances unless forced by said circumstances or authority or long debates to convince them of high certainty of upside.
Our society is cooked in the coming generations if everyone is raised to only operate within the rules they're given, and terrified of taking responsibility for anything they do — the rate of change in the world is going to accelerate so much faster than benevolent authority figures (like parents) can give them sensible long-standing rules to live within, and abusive/manipulative authority figures (billionaire CEOs, possibly superintelligent AIs or even just advanced LLMs) are going to take so much more advantage of them than they already do.
People need to be open to experiment and make their own judgement based on observation without relying purely on their environment and authority.
America is in piss poor 25th place in PISA ranking in Mathematics. Never rely on public school to be anything, but free daycare. Teachers (Education majors) are regularly self-selected from the bottom of the barrel SAT score students, so dont ever rely on teachers to do anything.
Teach your kid everything you want them to know.
My siblings, also non-fiction readers, both learned to read before they went to school.
I point-blank refused: I was confident I could learn to read, and with the now-long-lost confidence of a summer child, at the age of less than four, I said "no, that is what school is for".
When I got there, I was reading well above my level within the first couple of weeks.
I assume that as well as my parents showing what reading was, I had seen my brother reading, and he had read to me and had shown me what learning to read looked like.
The point of this disjointed anecdote is: be engaged, be inquisitive, show yourself learning and exploring; if you are shown a puzzle, approach it as if you don't know it. Furrow your brow comically, make mock mistakes, show your working. Enlist others to play these learning game.
You don't have to worry about teaching your son anything except that learning is great, and if possible that all sorts of adults have all sorts of things they can teach.
Once your kid is at school, then you can fill in the gaps; then you can be the extra teacher who engages with the subject matter (which as an adult you will have long forgotten and really can approach with fresh eyes).
It's your job to help make a learner, not to be a teacher.
I’ve attended ~10 state schools of varying levels of quality and across 2 countries during my childhood because we moved around a lot. Even in the better schools, critical thinking was discouraged or even punished and while there were teachers that did care, I can think of maybe only two that were what I would consider to be decent teachers that instilled a passion for the subjects they were teaching. They weren’t even that inspiring really. I can’t speak for fee paying schools, which I aspire to send my very young son to one day in the hope that he has a better experience.
Radio could have revolutionised teaching as could the internet have, but we as a society didn’t let it and unless AI supersedes us entirely I don’t think it’ll be any different this time.
To tl;dr a bit, this and other analyses tend to agree that whatever benefit you get from being too paranoid, distrusting, skeptical, etc in the name of safety is often overcome by the additional opportunities you get from being open, trusting, optimistic, and so on.
In other words, it is best to teach your children the world is a good and wonderful place; they can usually adjust their expectations accordingly later, but the reverse is less true, since it’s much harder to gain that sense of wonder and trust from nothing.
[1] https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/parentsprimalb...
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.
Are you aware of some StarTrek like technology that can create everything society needs and wants? If not, then scarcity still exists.
I just see existing capital holders with new ways to expand their wealth with even less need to share it.
> the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what
Because this models how to go from oblivious to aware, through investigation and evaluation, while maintaining our own orientation - key to any limited being navigating a world with others
"while maintaining our own orientation": each organized teaching has their own world view (religious, open-liberal, science/art for its own sake, training to combat or fleece the world, etc.). It's extraordinarily difficult to learn and care deeply about any subject without being programmed for these enduring social franchises, adopting dissonant work/home/private or us/other personas, etc. in service of the franchise.
Society will deluge young people with this programming. Parents I hope teach maintaining yourself, the practice of observing yourself and addressing your limits, which would mean being ruthless in pruning delusions, kind about mistakes, and able to retry and/or get help. Indeed, if you teach only that, you'd be expressing a lot of faith that they're unique and good and self-sufficient, and they'll make their way; you believe it, and they will, too.
Yes, once they have learned the usual anecdotal lessons (but before college and life decisions), they'll need intro to systems thinking, to identify ex ante fruitless objectives and cost difficult paths, to game and deconstruct the franchises and make life-decisions based on prospects as well as interests and values.
But play is the most enduring lesson: that (per Nietzsche) after camel-carrying what you need and lion-clearing your workspace, you settle into creating what's interesting.
So teaching should reflect self-observation to be teaching for living your own life, but the goal activity should be creative play, to learn and make life worth living, for yourself and others.
- The most important task of a parent is to make sure your child is bored as FUCK as often as possible.
BUT they should have the means to alleviate that boredom with something creative or interactive. Not just vegging out and consuming content, they should have as many opportunities to create or interact with things available to them.
This is how we figured out that our kid is a proper artist - despite both of their parents being unable to draw anything except technical drawings or UML charts. Boredom + available arts and crafts = fun.
Oh and get your kid reading, the current state of the world is that if your child can read AND UNDERSTAND what they read - not just recite the words out loud - they'll have a massive leg up compared to everyone else. Reading anything is better than nothing.
Comics or even subtitles on non-native programs are better than nothing.
Intelligence will never be scarce. Super Intelligence I meant
Or teach them to marry a rich person. This is the more honest approach. I've been mapping out this strategy with my wife. It's difficult nowadays because of low-trust society and people not marrying so easily. The best path we identified is if the offspring attends an exclusive school in the final few years of high school and seduces and knocks up some rich religious female. Make sure family is against abortion. That's the surest way to achieve marriage with a rich person. It's also financially efficient to only pay for 2 years of private schooling. Only concern is that schools will make those final years more expensive once other people start figuring out this trick. Also, the elegance of this scheme is that schools identify themselves by their religious affiliation and their high fees act as the filter to ensure a high concentration of quality targets; they do most of the hard work for us! Maybe my offspring can get in on a sport scholarship to improve our ROI on the scheme. We'll have to ensure that the school isn't a honeypot for similar-minded people and actually has genuine rich people attending it. The biggest risk is if these elite religious schools become more segregated in terms of all-male vs all-female; this will pose additional hurdles and the playing field for my offspring may shift to an after-school situation... Or this scheme can be delayed until college years. Will need to evaluate and keep a close watch on socio-economic trends. Will rich people still send their kids to college 15 years from now?
For my offspring it's actually highly viable because he is in line to inherit a decent amount of money from grandparents so he wouldn't come empty handed which can aid with seduction/persuasion aspect especially in terms of persuading the opponent's family. Publicly, I will denounce my offspring's behavior (to signal alignment with religious values) but privately, I will congratulate him. Thankfully my 3 siblings were so oppressed by the system that none of them had children except me so my offspring may end up inheriting the share from uncles and aunts as well. Also, we had him late so he will probably inherit at a relatively early age.
Otherwise looksmaxxing is probably a good thing if the offspring is lacking in that department and if the health risks are acceptable.
But TBH I hope we just get some form of UBI/UHI or communism so that it doesn't come to this.
Money values
Hard work
Why community matters
The only thing you can do is trying to avoid giving them trauma. This is important!
Another thing that would be helpful would be coming from wealth where you could attend an elite prep school like the Pine Crest School, tuition roughly $45,000/yr which is close to the entire median yearly take-home salary for an individual in Florida, which is of course the author's background.
Honestly, I am so tired of reading AI articles from people with very low stakes that basically end with stuff like "Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet". Dude I fucking would love that to be the case, in the meantime I'll be figuring out how to put food on the table and help my kids find a place to live.
Because as humanity a handful of billionaires have decided to outsource thinking to machines
The US has somewhat stepped out (been forced out of the arbiter role, frankly, much to everyone's delight) and this was supposedly going to be bad for the US since "everybody else will step in and get the goodwill the US gives up" ... and it's pretty clear now that in reality nobody stepped in and the animus to step in is at an all-time low and dropping further. It has to get a lot worse before we'll even consider (spending the money) to make it better again.
And, no worries! The EU will save us! Or so they claim ... what they mean is they will use economic sanctions to fix things! (They're "free", as don't require budget allocations and so no political conflicts, and very useful for political corruption). Except of course free is between quotes because there is a reason every economist hates them: they are in fact more expensive than just about anything else. But no budget line item!
Oh, in negotiation theory I'm of the opinion that economic sanctions cause wars rather than solve them. Wars are started because one party feels they can improve their economic situation through physical conquest. Add sanctions and there's two options: give in to sanctions (which means you have lost the war, and so have to give up anything the sanctioning side wants, or they'll just sanction you again), or win the war (which will give the opposing side no choice but to give up sanctions, since there's nothing to be gained anymore, and the sanctions will hurt them too). Obviously this means it's not just dictators that will react to sanctions with aggression, everybody will. There's even the problem that they may generate the worst possible outcome. Situation: 2 parties are at war. Someone imposes economic sanctions "to help", but sanctions inevitably also hurt others. Shortly afterwards 5 parties are at war. Oh, and historically economic sanctions have caused far more wars than they have solved, and have in fact dragged more countries into wars they initially didn't participate in.
So that's what the world has decided to do (not the US, in fact I would argue the US was the party that had the least to do with this decision, because the US absolutely didn't choose to lose it's overwhelming economic and military advantage, everyone else very slowly took it away without taking over security. Deciding, in fact, again and again and again, to let security slip further. This was not "a slippery slope", but governments worldwide taking vote after vote after vote to never do anything about an aggressor, time and time again. But, of course, this is not how it will be presented in the press)
Anyway back to why doctor would be good:
1) lots of them will be necessary since obviously lots of countries will be free to wage war on one another without having to face the US as well and so ... they will wage war on one another
You know, what the UN GA, and the "non-aligned movement" have worked for, for decades now. I feel like someone should walk into that meeting, smile like doctor Strange did at the end of that movie, and point out the obvious to these delegates that finally got what they wanted for decades: "Congratulations! You just got everything you ever wanted. You're NOT going to like it!"
2) the rest of the world will get more and more entangled with specific conflicts (Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, no doubt dozens of conflicts that probably have already started but they're not on the news constantly yet ...) and will feel the necessity to "interfere", which will bring loads of countries into one war or another
This will be especially true since those countries that have started small wars are where our raw materials are mined (you know, what we absolutely positively cannot do without).
3) doctors don't have to fight, even an army in a desperate situation would be mad to send doctors to the front
4) not only do they not have to fight, BOTH sides actively avoid attacking doctors. Even hamas has shown consideration for Jewish medical facilities in their attacks.
5) oh and doctors are both an absolute necessity and the ultimate luxury in one neat package, so doctors do well during economic disaster periods AND during periods where things go well
6) it's actually hard to be a doctor, so there won't be excessive competition and your kid will actually learn a lot
7) anything a doctor does is good. It a very morally unambiguous profession, and lots of people will be forced to make questionable choices in the next decades ... and doctors have the moral luxury that they simply will do their best to minimize the impact of those decisions on actual living humans. That impact will be horrible, obviously, but a doctor can actually help
I don't know. I was at my doctor's office a few weeks ago, and the topic of AI came up during our conversation[1]. I expressed the opinion that her profession should be fairly safe because it's so highly regulated and how doctors have the AMA to block new entrants. She said that her and her colleagues had literally just been talking about how they are worried about their jobs, and pointed out that with profit-obsessed private equity firms taking over more and more medical practices, she thought they very much would be trying to replace human doctors with AI. And she alluded to the AMA being a much less effective lobbying body than what I, as an outsider to the field, had perhaps believed.
I dunno. That's just an n=1 anecdote, but if nothing else it shows that (at least some) doctors are not just sitting back and resting easy, assured of a future of high paying career options. And this is a lady with a degree from Yale, who is a Doctor of Internal Medicine, and working for a very large and prestigious medical practice. Not some half-educated nitwit at a random back-country medical practice.
[1]: I mentioned that I'd asked ChatGPT about some test results, and told her what it told me. She replied "Yeah, I agree with that." Then chuckled and said something like "God, did I just agree with ChatGPT?" That's what started the whole sidebar about AI.
In any case, what falls under the label of “education” today is a disconnected assortment of vague aims and promises. The first on the list is “job training”. Oh, how far we have fallen. Classically, education is perhaps best exemplified by the liberal arts [1], the artes liberales, which were oriented toward producing intellectually free people and contrasted with the so-called “servile arts” (artes serviles) which are precisely what job training is concerned with. Freedom, classically, is not absence of restraint, but the ability to be the kind of thing you are. Thus, if human beings are rational[2] animals - if our telos is to be agents of truth - then the more rational we are, the more obedient we are to reason, the more human we are, and therefore the most free we are. It should be obvious. A drug user says he is free, because he takes drugs whenever he wants. But the drugs blunt his humanity and frustrate his rationality, and they enslave him over time. This example may be extrapolated accordingly.
So, education is fundamentally about enabling people to become competent human beings as rational beings and agents of truth. You can’t mechanize or automate that away as the end is the actualization of the human himself as human, not the production of goods or services. And because we’re social animals - our social nature following from the rational - we learn through speech and through communication with each other. A school is - when run properly - a community of learning.
[0] Inevitably, some uninformed person will latch onto “liberal” thinking I mean this in the partisan sense. I don’t. I mean it in the philosophical sense. We are all liberals today. In the US, both major parties are firmly planted in liberal soil.
[1] When I say “liberal arts”, I don’t mean what we call today the liberal arts. Recall that the classical liberal arts existed before the whole “Two Cultures” nonsense, after which they became a kind of stenography for power and an apologetics of the hyperindividualist liberal culture.
[2] “Rationality” in the classical sense is not confined to just inference and calculation (which would fall under ratio).
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?
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.