Young children would rather explore than get rewards • Hacker News Board

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#71

Post by raxxorrax » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 7:32 AM UTC

coddle-hark wrote: post #53

acituan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for nearly every kid there is intrinsic motivations you can find I think this can be generalized to all humans. It would be near impossible for a true lack of intrinsic motivation to have made it through evolutionary selection. Like you say, what matters is matching the child's potential with what is available in their current environment, and institutional schooling might be a very blunt tool for that. Not only it…

> It would be near impossible for a true lack of intrinsic motivation to have made it through evolutionary selection. Be careful making assumptions like that. Suicidal tendencies made it through evolutionary selection, after all.

You too. I doubt suicidal tendencies are generally a danger without extrinsic factors and I don't think the current structure of our society could be called "natural" in a way that behaves neutral to evolutionary selection.

The argument would propose that desensitization is mostly preferable, which is probably false if you look at particularly gifted people.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#72

Post by jv22222 » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 7:37 AM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #24

kqr wrote: post #4

For anyone interested in this type of stuff, I can recommend reading Drive . Briefly, human behaviour can be motivated for extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. The rewards in this article are extrinsic motivators. Exploring is rewarding in an intrinsic way; it is a strive towards autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In adults (and in older children) applying extrinsic motivators kills intrinsic motivation. Once the extrinsic…

I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. However many children lack one or more of those factors. For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed. There is no intrinsic motivation for most children to learn all the…

Check out this article about unschooling, you might find it interesting:

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/7/17/21328316/covid-19...

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#73

Post by cycomanic » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 7:44 AM UTC

kqr wrote: post #55

euske wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the major obstacle here is the cost. Since intrinsic motivators vary a lot from person to person, the program has to be customized for individual learners. Unless every kid has an individual tutor or something, this isn't feasible. Most education problems are basically a money problem.

Student-to-student tutoring is super effective. Even if most students suck as tutors (which they probably do – tutoring is difficult), the benefits outweigh the problems by a big margin. Most importantly, it allows each student the desired individual focus. But it also improves the tutors' memories of the classes they used to take. I'm baffled it's not more widely employed in lower education. (Higher education seems…

The finish system seems to get this mostly right, from what I've read. No clear age based classes, group work across traditional class boundaries, older kids helping the younger ones. They also seem to get excellent results based on the Pisa studies.

Mind you, this is from reading about it, I don't have first hand experience how the system works. I can however attest to the effectiveness of tutoring in higher education. Tutors (typically grad students) often understand much better the subtle points that are difficult to understand in a topic, I guess because it's been more recent that they have learnt it. There also seems to be less reluctance for students to ask questions of their tutor then their lecturer.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#74

Post by atoav » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 7:44 AM UTC

robocat wrote: post #69

atoav wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I managed with ~4 kids at once, but it was one of the most exhausting jobs I ever had (which includes street/road work in the summer and carrying stone tiles up houses). Education problems are indeed money problems.

FYI A “street worker” is a prostitute in some English dialects - I am guessing you didn’t mean that!

Ah THX for the heads up, road work is the word

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#75

Post by randomsearch » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 7:47 AM UTC

brnt wrote: post #17

I guess I must have bever lost the child in me. I've been a fan of open world games, just so I can roam the world. I sometimes dont even play the storyline at all. I still don't like that Steam added 'achievements' that I can't turn off, I'll be in charge of what constitutes a goal thank you very much :) Another poster had an interesting observation about academia vs corporate work. I'm 33 and still in academia, and…

Steel yourself for revelations about academia - unsure what stage you’re at but I’d guess PhD or post doc at most from the comment. Talk to people above you that you absolutely trust about the realities of academia.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#76

Post by randomsearch » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 7:48 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #58

adamnemecek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academia really doesn't let you explore.

Depends on your advisor.

You don’t have an “advisor” for most of an academic career

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#77

Post by cycomanic » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 7:49 AM UTC

For people interested in this topic I highly recommend reading about summerhill school [1] and similar projects. The topic of alternative schooling systems is quite fascinating.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#78

Post by flooo » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 7:49 AM UTC

There is an interesting relation to this with regard to reinforcement learning (RL) where the trade-off between exploration and exploitation is one of the fundamental issues. Systematic or structured exploration has shown some success here as well.

What 'structured' means here deeply depends on the representation the agent has of the world, i.e. which states and actions are similar to each other. Current RL setups typically learn such representations on the go. Abstractions can be very powerful here.

Arguably, people also perform structured exploration on learned representations. It may be the case that the adults have learned a representation of the 'game' and their lies little exploratory value in suboptimal actions.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#79

Post by mhaberl » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 7:50 AM UTC

smhg wrote: post #67

kqr wrote: post #4

For anyone interested in this type of stuff, I can recommend reading Drive . Briefly, human behaviour can be motivated for extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. The rewards in this article are extrinsic motivators. Exploring is rewarding in an intrinsic way; it is a strive towards autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In adults (and in older children) applying extrinsic motivators kills intrinsic motivation. Once the extrinsic…

> The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life. I think your expectations of the schooling system are simply skewed. At least in the countries which I lived in (Europe) the 'customer' of the schooling system is…

I agree with this.

We all love to say that we want creative free thinking individuals.. but come on now - currently the society is mostly composed of conformed (without this society probably would not function, at least as it does now) and in a lesser extent the obedient.

The creative and free thinking individuals push us all foward and we would not advance without them, but the majority is different.

Schooling system is not what it is by accident.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#80

Post by cycomanic » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 7:57 AM UTC

donw wrote: post #35

adrianN wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. However many children lack one or more of those factors. For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed. There is no intrinsic motivation for most children to learn all the…

I think you're both kinda right? Drive is great. Leverage it heavily as a manager. But when it comes to kids, the problems I see are that (a) cognitively speaking, children are not tiny adults; and (b) if you want them to be successful and happy adults, you need to give kids the ability to work through mountains of "I Need To Do This Even Though It Sucks" Cognitive development is an amazing process to watch -- you ca…

There is some fascinating research on how children think vs adults. Adults use much more their frontal cortex (responsible for rational thought). However, when children experience trauma, e.g. abuse they will use much more their frontal cortex. The kicker is that those kids when they become adults use the frontal cortex much less, thus becoming more impulsive less rational.