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The most precious resource is agency

simonsarris.substack.com

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Re: The most precious resource is agency

#41

Post by tvanantwerp »

bedobi wrote: post #8

This 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…

Through the confines of scheduling, I once found myself in the lowest level of biology and AP biology in the same high school semester with the same teacher. At first she was perplexed, wondering what the hell was going on. But once she got to know me, she realized it was a scheduling thing and that I did not really belong in the low-level class. It got to the point where I just napped through that low level course and she didn't care at all. She was a good teacher.

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#42

Post by AussieWog93 »

eikenberry wrote: post #32
overgard wrote: post #18

One of the biggest tragedies isn't just that the childhood is wasted, but that many people never learn to have agency once it is available. I'm not saying you need to start your own business or anything like that, but it seems like most people live their lives never questioning the scripts that are given to them. The basic life script we all seem to have in western society seems pretty awful when you think critically…

> The basic life script we all seem to have in western society seems pretty awful when you think critically about it. Not if you've studied much history. Modern western society is awesome compared to what nearly all of our ancestors lived through. Wanting more is good, but denigrating things that nearly anyone from history would kill for doesn't sound right.

>Modern western society is awesome compared to what nearly all of our ancestors lived through.

Any sane person would agree with you in the sense that it's definitely better to be alive in 2021 than 1621.

If you you shorten the timespan and only look at cultural changes since, say, the 1970s, though, it seems we've sacrificed a lot of what makes us human (community, interconnectedness, a sense of wonder about the future etc.) at the altar of free market economics and received little of actual value in return (Uber Eats, iPhones, Netflix etc.).

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#43

Post by musingsole »

soheil wrote: post #37

> The act of creation causes imagination, not the other way around. I think this sentence is almost correct. The act of creation does wonders and induces imagination, but that is not the only way to achieve imagination. The act of just going deep on a thought and abstracting away the frictions of the real world can do wonders. Imagination is probably most readily available to a brain that is operating at its most abs…

Minds are pattern repeaters. Creation begets imagination begets creation begets...Separating the two or holding one over the other is rather pointless.

You can tell a child they can create things. That should be enough for them to abstractly reason from there about all the possibilities, right? Or is it that you have to teach a child to create so that they can imagine what they might create next?

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#44

Post by Aeolun »

qqtt wrote: post #22
overgard wrote: post #18

One of the biggest tragedies isn't just that the childhood is wasted, but that many people never learn to have agency once it is available. I'm not saying you need to start your own business or anything like that, but it seems like most people live their lives never questioning the scripts that are given to them. The basic life script we all seem to have in western society seems pretty awful when you think critically…

> The basic life script we all seem to have in western society seems pretty awful when you think critically about it. On the flip side, if you step outside the bubble of comfort that Western society generally affords people, you'll find that life is "nasty, brutish & short" as Hobbes put it. We've come a very very long way in a short time towards raising our standard of living and our expectations for what our lives…

> just to say that the script we are generally given is pretty damn good

Honestly, it’s so good it’s boring. Not much challenge to life if the only thing you need to do to continue existing is plant your ass in the same chair every day.

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#45

Post by Aeolun »

wombatmobile wrote: post #28
overgard wrote: post #18

One of the biggest tragedies isn't just that the childhood is wasted, but that many people never learn to have agency once it is available. I'm not saying you need to start your own business or anything like that, but it seems like most people live their lives never questioning the scripts that are given to them. The basic life script we all seem to have in western society seems pretty awful when you think critically…

This is the argument Hubert Dreyfuss advances to postulate Artificial General Intelligence can never be achieved - because computers are not “in the world.” > One of the leading critics was the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0494-4

Just raise them as you would a child? Give them a body, upgrade it so they grow every few years. Lets see where we end up.

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#46

Post by Aeolun »

legendofbrando wrote: post #29

For an article focused on the benefits of agency, the author sure seems to ignore agency on behalf of parents and people to decide how to make space for their kids. Modern education is no more a trap for the gifted than it is a vehicle to produce mediocrity. Greatness and mediocrity are products of what happens around school. The reality is that most folks aren’t Da Vinci or Steve Jobs. And in the case of those peopl…

If the system doesn’t ask, and you do it anyway, I could sort of see the agency there.

If the system forces. Not.

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#48

Post by Aeolun »

dkackman11 wrote: post #39

Such a promising introduction about the importance of agency, and then "blah blah kids these days blah uphill in the snow blah". "A reawakening of meaningful work"? Come on. Tell that to the child coal miner or factory worker of Carnegie's era.

It’s not? Obviously it’s not nearly as safe, but coal mining sounds a lot more interesting than another geography lesson. Factory work? Maybe not so much.

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#49

Post by Aeolun »

soheil wrote: post #33

> Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and meaningless if we prescribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence? This does not mean schoolwork would have been more meaningful to them if they had less meaningless work in their earlier years. Most schoolwork is complete crap that is highly irrelevant and should never be taught unless there is strong interest on the p…

I believe there is something to be said for teaching people elementary math. But that doesn’t include anything at high-school level.

Also, statistics and chance. Maybe it’d allow people to properly understand why we need to get vaccinated.

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#50

Post by megameter »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #42
eikenberry wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The basic life script we all seem to have in western society seems pretty awful when you think critically about it. Not if you've studied much history. Modern western society is awesome compared to what nearly all of our ancestors lived through. Wanting more is good, but denigrating things that nearly anyone from history would kill for doesn't sound right.

>Modern western society is awesome compared to what nearly all of our ancestors lived through. Any sane person would agree with you in the sense that it's definitely better to be alive in 2021 than 1621. If you you shorten the timespan and only look at cultural changes since, say, the 1970s, though, it seems we've sacrificed a lot of what makes us human (community, interconnectedness, a sense of wonder about the futu…

It's clear to me that it's too easy to be Panglossian about our material conditions. Just thinking about the time frame I grew up within(1980's-2000's US) there were a lot of things that I now see as definitely bad and that have, in fact, all started to change in my adult life:

* The omnipresent nature of sweetened food and drink

* Car-dependent culture

* Mass media culture

* Simpsons-style dysfunctional nuclear families

* The whole array of corrupt policies and programs, cults-in-disguise(e.g. "troubled teen" schools), and ideologically driven movements; while we're hardly free of those things, and there are plenty of new or intensified versions of them, I believe there are also more ways to find a sustainable path outside those frameworks these days.

But if you asked me if life was good in 2000, I would be mostly in agreement, because my life seemed pretty good - I was told it was! But then I look back on it and it's like, nooo, actually, there were all these pieces that traumatized me, removed my agency, were bad for my health or made me settle for less. And I believe the same would be true if I had been experiencing life in 1970's.

Like, sure, in 1621 I'd probably have died at a young age. But I am on the hedonic treadmill with respect to life quality too. It doesn't matter to my feelings that now is the best time, if better is still possible.

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