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Young children would rather explore than get rewards

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Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#101

Post by cyberdrunk »

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…

Yep. I am a fairly intelligent person (your typical coder) from a family that valued education. I was nevertheless never internally driven to do anything. I played a bit with computers when I was a child - BASIC and assembler on C-64, then a little bit of AMOS and computer graphics on Amiga etc. - but it was never any sustained effort that led to anything - I was mostly just satisfying my own curiosity, which didn't run that deep. Instead, I spent the majority of my time playing games (video and otherwise), hanging out with friends, watching TV and reading books. If I wasn't forced to go to school, I think I'd just do more of those things (certainly that's what I did during vacation time). I think what the highly internally driven people cannot understand is that they're the minority and majority of people is more like me.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#103

Post by tremon »

watwut wrote: post #85
rpastuszak wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+100000 > Even if most students suck as tutors [...] Teaching is such a valuable skill in itself! And, it can be improved. I'd argue that you can't say that you understand something unless you can explain it to someone a step away from your current level of depth in the domain. Now, imagine every developer spend 5%, 1% of their (coding) time learning how to teach or communicate ideas in a succinct, empathetic way. We…

> Teaching is such a valuable skill in itself! And, it can be improved. You dont improve peoples skills in general just by throwing them into water and hoping that swimming happens by itself.

Very bad analogy. Yes, for almost all skills, just doing them improves your proficiency. For example, toddlers learn primarily by mimicking their parents, replicating their behaviour.

The exception to this is skills that will kill you if you get in over your head. But that's a rather small category of skills, and it only calls for supervision, not avoidance.

As for tutoring itself: it increases the skill level of both the teacher and the student. The student gets 1-on-1 directed focus, and the teacher is forced to reflect more deeply on his own skills. Having students teach each other is very beneficial at all levels of education.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#104

Post by Tainnor »

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…

Just saying, in Europe kids didn't bring rifles to school in the 70s and they are not getting expelled for accidentally bringing in pocket knives nowadays.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#105

Post by watwut »

tremon wrote: post #103
watwut wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teaching is such a valuable skill in itself! And, it can be improved. You dont improve peoples skills in general just by throwing them into water and hoping that swimming happens by itself.

Very bad analogy. Yes, for almost all skills, just doing them improves your proficiency. For example, toddlers learn primarily by mimicking their parents, replicating their behaviour. The exception to this is skills that will kill you if you get in over your head. But that's a rather small category of skills, and it only calls for supervision, not avoidance. As for tutoring itself: it increases the skill level of bot…

> As for tutoring itself: it increases the skill level of both the teacher and the student.

As someone who was a kid in that position, no it did not increased my skill in thing I was supposed to teach at all. That might happen when you are teaching interested peer at similar level, does not happen when you are teaching someone uninterested and someone who has much lower skills.

> For example, toddlers learn primarily by mimicking their parents, replicating their behaviour.

That body of knowledge wears off after you are like 3. Then explicit teaching by parents and other adults becomes much more prominent. And even toddlers are explicit taught a lot.

> Very bad analogy. Yes, for almost all skills, just doing them improves your proficiency.

Only up to the pretty low level for most people and most activities. After that, you reach a plateau.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#106

Post by qwertox »

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…

In German "to educate/bring up someone" is "jemanden erziehen".

"erziehen", if translated literally, means "to pull", "er" is something like "to act" while "ziehen" means "pull"

Sometimes it feels like that, that it is necessary to pull someone into a certain direction in order to better that person. And this is usually not easy to do.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#107

Post by cycomanic »

mamurphy wrote: post #19
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…

>I'm 33 and still in academia, I'm allergic to competition, scores, rewards, prestige I had been under the impression that academia was mostly very competitive to be able to get career (tenure track) positions. Are you not aiming for that, is it less competitive in your field, or am I missing something else?

Yes academia is very competitive, even after you get tenure you still need to write grants all the time to be able to do your research.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#108

Post by 082349872349872 »

Anyone have access to the paper? As far as I can tell, the young children were perfect convex utilitarians, in deciding that more than "enough" stickers were not worth the more fun of clicking around.

How were the adults rewarded? Did they also get something intrinsically valuable at the end of the experiment, or did they just collect virtual points because they were told they were supposed to?

Working dogs have been specialised by breeding for overexpression of the various initial phases of the wildtype hunting sequence: herding, retrieval, etc. Does "sex sells" indicate we may have been bred to overexpress the "identify attractive potential partner" and "do things they (appear to) like doing" phases of the wildtype reproductive sequence?

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#109

Post by wcoenen »

I'm reminded of a paper about an AI system with curiosity. Basically, the AI would learn to predict the effect of its actions, and would prefer to take actions where its prediction error was large. That way it would gather more data about stuff it didn't know yet.

This works well to learn to play video games without defining an extrinsic reward. However, there is a problem when the system encounters the equivalent of TV. It then gets stuck watching the unpredictable stream of events.

paper and code: https://pathak22.github.io/large-scale-curiosity/

Coverage by "2 minute papers" youtube channel: https://youtu.be/fzuYEStsQxc

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#110

Post by kqr »

watwut wrote: post #105
tremon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very bad analogy. Yes, for almost all skills, just doing them improves your proficiency. For example, toddlers learn primarily by mimicking their parents, replicating their behaviour. The exception to this is skills that will kill you if you get in over your head. But that's a rather small category of skills, and it only calls for supervision, not avoidance. As for tutoring itself: it increases the skill level of bot…

> As for tutoring itself: it increases the skill level of both the teacher and the student. As someone who was a kid in that position, no it did not increased my skill in thing I was supposed to teach at all. That might happen when you are teaching interested peer at similar level, does not happen when you are teaching someone uninterested and someone who has much lower skills. > For example, toddlers learn primarily…

It makes no sense to blame a bad outcome on the student being uninterested and of lower skill. As a tutor, you have exactly two jobs:

1. Make the student interested.

2. Improve the student's skills.

Of course the student is uninterested and has low skills when you start out. Otherwise there wouldn't be much of a point to the activity.

You might argue that it's not the tutor's job to make the student interested, but it is. The primary thing that sets good tutors apart from bad ones is their ability to motivate their students. To care. To fiendishly ask questions that are just out of reach of the students ability, or will reveal some tiny flaw in the students understanding. This type of thing engages everyone when done well.

(I did have a source for this but I seem to have lost it. That is a shame because it was a really good article.)

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