The most precious resource is agency
simonsarris.substack.com
The most precious resource is agency
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Re: The most precious resource is agency
#2I know of a lot of highly agent children that are creators, influencers, eSports winners.
Encouraging their passion and enabling them to succeed at whatever it may be, is paramount.
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#3This article resonated with me, as someone who felt the fixed tracks of school often held me back and wasted my time with busy work like random craft projects or homework that didn't further my understanding. It's all lost time that I'll never get back, that I could have spent in some alternate way. Hell, even just spending more time with my parents living our life together would have been great. Instead, childhood flies by with much of that time taken by force seemingly, or as the article puts it, with a lack of agency.
This particular line is something I foresee as a future problem:
> I suspect the downplaying of agency in childhood not only creates fewer opportunities for great people, it must also create more marginal people
The less agency, and corresponding personal responsibility is given out, the more likely it is that we will condition future generations to expect things to be provided. After all, they are used to diminished choice and lesser agency, and removing those training wheels can be intimidating. That's not only a risk, but it is also sad, because I think it will have some indirect impact on the creativity of future generations and the intangibles of life.
This article is focused on childhood and schooling. Maybe those are addressable via concepts like school choice (vouchers). But I would argue that problems of agency extend to adulthood as well. Agency is something that needs to be defended through our policies and laws. For example, I foresee future policies that are hostile towards car ownership as eroding agency. I see the practical need for continuous work history (no gaps in employment) as eroding agency. I see the 5-day work week as eroding agency. I'm sure other HN folks will have their own set of examples and desires for greater agency that are very different from mine. I feel like it'll be harder to solve for all of it except to err on the side of individual freedoms when possible.
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#4> Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and meaningless if we proscribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence?
"Proscribe" means forbid; not sure this is what the author meant here.
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#5> Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and meaningless if we proscribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence? "Proscribe" means forbid; not sure this is what the author meant here.
Whoops, I meant prescribe.
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#6> Do children today have useful childhoods?
Well articulated. I always felt a visceral sense that childhood, the school world, and even arguably college for many feels like we're being kept in some weird pin sequestered from the real world.
As the author shows with early examples, this is not how it's ever been in human societies (as a default for everyone) prior to the last 100 years.
Could this be thought of as a massive experiment the Western first world is undertaking?
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#7This article resonated with me, as someone who felt the fixed tracks of school often held me back and wasted my time with busy work like random craft projects or homework that didn't further my understanding. It's all lost time that I'll never get back, that I could have spent in some alternate way. Hell, even just spending more time with my parents living our life together would have been great. Instead, childhood f…
Note that discouraging car ownership—and instead encouraging cycling with safe infrastructure, like the Netherlands has been doing for the last 50 years—actually dramatically increases independence for both children and adults: https://thecityateyelevel.com/stories/biking-the-streets-to-...
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#8This article did a great job of articulating something I've always felt strongly about but haven't been able to put into words.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt like my schooling was mostly a giant waste of my time and energy.
I was waaaay ahead in subjects I liked, because those things I learned myself out of innate interest. Rather than the system accommodating and encouraging being ahead, in those subjects I was held back and forced to sit through material I already knew, because "in year x we learn this and in year y we learn that". Don't get ahead. Zero agency.
In other subjects that didn't interest me, I was forced to sit through stuff only to forget everything I "learned" soon after.
It really begs the question, what's the point? And while I'm no genius at anything, surely a system like this will kill many, many actual geniuses, just like the article says.
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#9Strongly agree.
It's also why I think the web is unlike almost everything else in computing: it's a high agency environment. Applications afford you certain options, but the web has historically offered great agency to the user. Extensions and user-scripts allow for quite a wide range of alterations to be done! I use the DarkReader extension for example, which makes almost all sites I visit "dark mode". There are ad-blockers, form history control programs, word count programs I make use of on a regular basis. Someone a couple hours ago was complaining about certain sources on HN and asked for them to be banned, and it took me less than 5 minutes to scratch together a userscript they could use to filter their experience in a way they desired[1]!
Thinking of the computing medium we are given as just a start, a launching point, that we inject our agency & prowess into: that constructivist, can do mentality is everything to me. It's completely unmatched, incomparable to everything else I've seen in computing. Having a core medium, and the viewing system decoupled from it, ready to help us do better, has made all the difference.
There's a lot of not-so-great modern web sites, that make things rough. I tried to help someone recently who was asking about scripting a React site[2]. Most of the times I can eventually wrestle the vdom into shape, to make it do what I want, but here the poor user was facing draft.js, a nightmare hell-mode take-over of the browsing experience by a large pile of software that thinks it can do better. Poor user was never going to win. There's all sorts of anti-user potentials to the modern web. I disagreed hard with a refusenik reactionary "the web browser I'm dreaming of" yesterday, but agreed[3] a) that the user should have choice/agency about what they want enabled and b) that certain technologies are an existential threat to agency, chiefly WebAssembly, which further heightens the impossibly of user-agency on the web. I've been quite a jerk to Flutter's CanvasKit a number of times, because it turns the web into a giant television tube that blasts pixels in our face, destroys the hypermedia basis that web engagement has been built around. Threats to user agency, to a modifiable web are everywhere, and plenty of folks simply tell me I'm full of shit, that I'm delusional for thinking the web experience is user programmable. They're not so far off the truth, especially in the days of virtual-dom & react, but I think that's an industrial convenience we've been taking advantage of, and that ultimately we'll see pressures to use the medium more respectfully, to use Custom Elements & other technologies that return some primacy to the DOM, rather than floating off into the virtual forever & treating this medium like an end-target to be made to dance as the large overgrown industrial toolkit + application so desire. There has not been a lot of progress in that direction, and weirdly: that gives me hope. It makes me think we are rife for disruption, that when good folk start trying to understand how not to do harm in their web-application-development, there will be leaps & bounds, huge strides. Meanwhile React &c are definitely mature technologies at this point, excitement has winnowed away, advancement comes in little tiny pinprick bursts. A more hyper-textual medium is possible, this ascent of code over medium doesn't require a total rewrite: we can make the DOM powerful again, make a pro-user, pro-manipulable, pro-rich media experience again. JS will be with us, but woven through the media, rather than hijacking & parasite-ing off it. I look forward to rich internet hypermedia becoming a powerful, expressive, user-manipulable system again, as the web once so powerfully was for users. This would be such a sign of progress and respect: for the web to put the user first again, to make the medium something shapeable by user-agency. I believe those days come.
Computing was always, to me, so compelling because it enabled the limitless virtual, because we could go anywhere, do anything, go wherever we might think. But I see few other places in computing where the frontiers continue to open, where we ennoble & enable the agency within each of us. The web remains one of the rarest finest gems of computing, where agency remains vastly possible & expanding. So much of the rest of computing feels settling & shrinking, receding ever further within the firewall.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27693710
Re: The most precious resource is agency
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