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How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

nytimes.com

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Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#231

Post by corpMaverick »

FussyZeus wrote: post #28
aleem wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From one of the comments on the article > Backing off will no more produce a creative genius than pushing your child. Neither strategy makes the slightest difference to what is essentially an autonomous process. Beethoven's father did not back off. And Lars von Trier's parents left him to his own devices. Both are geniuses and both hated their childhood. > My guess is that most parents who follow Adam Grant's spuriou…

> But guess what, a large proportion of the remaining brats will be all attitude and no skill while the drones will at least become doctors and corporate lawyers. By using creativity as the ultimate-and perhaps only-benchmark, Mr. Grant falls into the same trap as the Tiger Moms he so despises. I guess fuck all the parents who think their kids deserve more than an economically-optimized future? Seriously with the fut…

> I'd rather be broke and happy.

Hard to be happy if you are broke.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#232

Post by DanBC »

59nadir wrote: post #189
pcarolan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't making the point that society was in charge of my kids, rather that society needs to be tolerant of kids nature and adapt to it to some degree. I can get my kid to sit still, but its not his natural state so I don't often do it. I am glad that there are places you can take your kid to join and indoctrinate them into cultures you want to identify with. I am glad there are options. I would not choose french ci…

I don't think other people should necessarily have to accept that you prefer not to keep your child reasonably quiet, as an example, in public. Understanding that kids will be kids doesn't mean understanding that you as a parent prefer not to teach your kid how to act in public. It might seem harsh, but you really do paint the image of someone who thinks it's fine for his kid to keep screaming and running around in p…

You've fallen into the very common trap of taking what someone else says (it's not my child's natural state) and then putting the worst interpretation on it (it's fine for his kid to keep screaming and running around in public)

You can see there's a wide range of behaviour starting at fidgety before you get to running around and screaming.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#233

Post by FussyZeus »

Spooky23 wrote: post #220
FussyZeus wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cabs are harder though. Cabs need to negotiate the complex and often extremely busy city routes. Most truck driving is LTL to warehouses on the edge of cities, and if a truck had sufficient fuel, it would have no reason to ever leave the freeway.

Not really. All of the tech people like to talk about how easy trucking is because of the distance aspect. That's like saying pilots are obsolete because autopilot does 95% of the work. "The work" is actually the 5%. Cabs need to drop you to a 50 meter circle adjacent to a street address. Trucks need to land at a specific dock at a specific warehouse at a specific time. Some warehouses are highly optimized and organi…

In the distro center I worked at, it was incredibly rare for the long haul trucks to actually attach the trailers to the building. They would jack up the trailers in the lot, let the truck go, then use a switcher to do the remaining lot because the switcher can just pick the thing up and go instead of having to have a worker there to wind the legs up and down on the trailer. Ours was not a huge distro hub either, pretty small one so I'd imagine larger ones have even more infrastructure to handle the freight that doesn't involve the pull truck.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#234

Post by simonh »

gls2ro wrote: post #172
simonh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think kids do need freedom, but they also need relationships and guidance. My own girls are 12 and 13 now and doing very well at school. I read a few articles and books about parenting and I do think that helped, not because all of them were great, some were some weren't, but they all helped me think about the problem from different angles. The best advice I can give is to support their interests and get involved i…

What books did you read? I am interested in books recommendation for parenting.

The one that stands out is Raising Happy Children. It brings together a lot of information and advice and isn't one of these 'weird trick' type single author books where someone claims to have discovered the one true way. Just practical down to earth stuff.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#235

Post by Retric »

fjdlwlv wrote: post #164
Retric wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This get's into questions of what is an is not a good proxy for actual intelligence. IQ tests are more likely to become arbitrary rankings once you looking at ever smaller population sizes and thus relative poor proxy's for g. Still, Roughly one third to one half of the billionaires (45.0%), Fortune 500 CEOs (38.6%), Senators (41.0%), and federal judges (40.9%) attended a school requiring standardized test scores tha…

Obviously if you define intelligence as "successful" than intelligence correlates with success. That's a circular void claim.

I am taking about different types of success. Otherwise you can just define a specific IQ test as success.

My point is if you look at Intelligence and assume they should be more successful with more IQ you need validate the IQ test to verify it's still valid at the outer edges. But, if you look at the most successful people and find IQ > 140 to be vastly more common than the general population then intelegence unlikely to be actually harmful.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#236

Post by clarkmoody »

conorh wrote: post #100
smackingly wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm biased because I'm a no-name physician at a community hospital, but the "best doctors" in my eyes are the ones with the best outcomes, lowest utilization, highest efficiency and highest patient satisfaction. These measures don't correlate well with the physician's credentials. I learned this in residency, which I did just down the street from a "top" university hospital. We out-performed that place on every…

> "These measures don't correlate well with the physician's credentials." This. I think I've even posted about this here before. This has been my wife's experience too (surgeon). She trained with highly regarded academic surgeons that set the treatment recommendations and standards for her field. Then during her job search she went to a center with, well, surgeons not at all academic and she had a life changing momen…

This reminds me of Hayek's Knowledge Problem[1]: The most effective ways of solving problems are with those closest to the problems. In an economics setting, this means that central planning is inferior to distributed decision making.

Perhaps it's not a perfect analogy, since it sounds like the academic surgeons are maximizing the wrong utility function (publishing / research).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_knowledge_problem

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#237

Post by xherberta »

gommm wrote: post #200
xherberta wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kids are society's problem Respectfully, I'm sad for children whose parents think society is going to look out for them. Every kid deserves a couple of people who take personal responsibility for their behavior and well-being. I have a pretty high tolerance for kids being bouncy and boisterous, but it's always nice to see parents giving the sort of information that helps them become considerate:("Look, that woman's…

> French kindergarteners spend 90 minutes sitting down to a white-table-cloth four course meal each day during school. This is done because it's considered essential for them to learn the table manners and appreciation of the cuisine that will allow them a lifetime of enjoyable, civilized dining. I wish that were true... They do get a 3 course meal (appetizer, main dish and desert) but it doesn't last 90 minutes and…

I appreciate the correction!

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#238

Post by FussyZeus »

hueving wrote: post #92
FussyZeus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robots do better work without breaks, rest, coffee and in many cases without even occupying physical space. We're on the edge of automating driving, one of the most complex and demanding tasks humans do on a regular basis. The benefits for the companies are infinite: a completely docile workforce of robots that don't need anything but a steady flow of power. There is no reason to suspect any jobs are safe any more. I…

We continue to automate an simultaneously make new jobs all of the time. The same arguments you used about driving could be applied to the printing press displacing people who copied books, etc. The more technology increases, the more our quality of life seems to improve. There was almost no automation during the great depression, yet most people were unemployed. Automation has most certainly increased since 2009 and…

The entire point of automation is to reduce human intervention in a process. If post-automation jobs = current jobs in terms of quantity and skill, there would be no economic benefit to automation. This means that of the people displaced, only a minority can theoretically get the "new" job, and even then, that hopes that there are no already qualified candidates from outside the displaced pool ready to take that job.

It's true tech increases our quality of life, no one argues this (mostly). That said our current political climate can have it's roots traced to the fact that so many blue collar workers have been displaced (first by overseas labor, second by automation) and their uphill battle to attain new work at even living wages, forget similar wages has been largely ignored if not a target for mockery by the middle class.

We need to start taking a serious look at how to deal with the groups of people who will be displaced so far and at such advanced ages that asking them to re-enter the workforce is impractical not just for them, but for the economy at a whole. Hell, even older TECH workers have a hard time finding new work after their COBOL shop shuts down, do we honestly expect it to be any easier at all for a factory worker or coal miner? I do not understand why so many obviously incredibly intelligent people in the industries I work in and read about have such a hard time grasping that for a worker who's done what they call "dumb work" for 10-30 years will have difficulty getting an education and entering a white collar profession. That was hard for me and I was a kid!

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#239

Post by ziikutv »

Retric wrote: post #49
ziikutv wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also like to point out that while there might not be any direct drawbacks, think about others. How many kids put down those smarter to feel better about themselves? Another disagreement: Not all intelligent people are highly social. Many are introverted. Intelligent or introverted kids get bullied the most.

Your assuming kids are accurately measuring intelegence and then picking on the smartest person. Instead they are picking on an outlier who may be less intelegent than other people in the population with different interests.

Fair point.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#240

Post by dragonwriter »

VLM wrote: post #217
arkades wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an article discussing the dispensation of advice to the parenting community as a whole - which includes the whole variety of genetic heterogeneity - her being adopted isn't relevant.

A lot depends on ones beliefs (and possibly facts) about being self taught and if a difference exists in outcomes when various teaching styles and techniques are applied. Its highly likely that the "best" or "right" way Dad X learned topic Y will work pretty well when helping teach a little clone of himself and not so well when teaching random kids. I'd theorize that parents are generally better at teaching their own…

> Its highly likely that the "best" or "right" way Dad X learned topic Y will work pretty well when helping teach a little clone of himself

Perhaps, but children aren't clones of either of their biological parents, generally.

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