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Teach kids to farm, not code.

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Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#151

Post by mamoswined »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #126

Funny they should mention this, when I first went to college I majored in Horticulture, the idea being that I would one day be an organic farmer. Turns out that's a lousy way of learning the trade. They'll teach you a little bit of the hands-on stuff, but pretty soon it's all plant physiology. If you really wanted to learn, you had to go out and farm, not learn how the Krebs cycle works. So, after having worked as a…

Yeah I too went to ag school and then got into coding.

It's pretty hard to be a farmer coming out of ag school unless your family has a farm already for you to run since the entry costs are so high. I still produce a lot of my own food via a family farm, but god I'm glad it's not my main job. I make a mistake when coding and things can be bad, but usually they are OK especially if you have revision control and a good workflow.

I make a mistake farming and things die and I have nothing to eat or sell. Then there are just random inexplicable things that screw you over. Yes, this happens in IT, see what happened with Cloudflare this week, but imagine if that lasted for months, even years, and you could never switch providers- that's how badly weather can screw you over.

I worked in academia IT for a bit and took archaeology classes for fun. It's no surprise that ancient farmer's bones have markers like pitting that indicate periods of severe malnutrition.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#153

Post by Turing_Machine »

wazoox wrote: post #118
Turing_Machine wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There may be an equivalent revolution looming, but I can see no sign of it." Plenty of material here: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html

Yes, I know of this one and it's precisely the sort of wishful thinking I was mentioning, particularly the sheer disregard of energy related problems (obviously, everything will be easy for ever if finding energy and getting rid of waste heat has some magical solution). You should study some posts from this for a contradictory POV: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/ I particularly like the discussion between the "e…

"Waste heat" is not a problem for the foreseeable future, by the way.

The mean insolation arriving at the surface of the earth is ~1000 w/m2. The Earth has a surface area of about 5.1×10^8 km^2 or 5.1x10^14 m^2, so the incoming energy from the sun amounts to about 5x10^17 watts.

World electrical power output is only about 2 terawatts = 2x10^12 watts, or 1/250,000 of the heat received from the sun.

Clearly it's going to be a long time before we have to worry about "waste heat" on a global level.

As your source says, do the math.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#154

Post by wazoox »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #148
wazoox wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I know of this one and it's precisely the sort of wishful thinking I was mentioning, particularly the sheer disregard of energy related problems (obviously, everything will be easy for ever if finding energy and getting rid of waste heat has some magical solution). You should study some posts from this for a contradictory POV: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/ I particularly like the discussion between the "e…

"particularly the sheer disregard of energy related problems" Did you actually read this? We have enough fissile material to last billions of years. "Billions". With a B. http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html

Yes, I've read this several years ago, but you didn't read my links. Because my link use actual arithmetic, while McCarthy only says that those who don't use arithmetic are condemned to fail, then happily proceed with vague numbers and absolutely ZERO actual data.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#155

Post by saturdayplace »

edw519 wrote: post #78

I don't think we should encourage anyone to do anything. We should discourage them. Let me explain... I take my example from this traditional practice of Rabbis: never accept a convert until they have been turned away twice before. Make them make 3 attempts to show their determination. Why? Because Judaism is hard. If they're not committed, they'll either give up or do just enough to satisify the minimum requirements…

Graphic design went through this a while back: "Woe! Our industry is flooded with people who've no aptitude." Desktop publishing resulted in a metric crapton of nasty designs for a while. But subsequently we've seen a Cambrian explosion of great looking stuff. The same thing is happening with video production right now. YouTube is overfilled with stuff no one wants to watch but already we're seeing innovative stuff come out as people with access to previously unavailable tools learn how to use them effectively.

For a while this probably means that our code repos might be filled with nasty stuff, but I'm convinced we'll be better off for it in the long run.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#156

Post by icebraining »

coldtea wrote: post #146
dasil003 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all been pretty boring since the harnessing of fire.

Certainly. For example conversation without BS snide remarks seems to be a lost art.

I've upvoted your posts, but claiming that computers did nothing more than improve delivery of porn and commerce is borderline trolling, particularly on HN. While I can agree that computing is often overpraised, there's still more to it than porn and commerce (e.g. being an indispensable tool in reaching other planets).

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#157

Post by fsniper »

rorrr wrote: post #28
fsniper wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe computer programing is a good way to teach logical thinking. Sociology, Philosophy and Literature are better alternatives. Coding only makes you better micro managers, "thinking of efficient ways to make idiots do things you like". Also teaching agriculture or other physical goods producing craftsmanship to kids would make them better at real world challenges. Modern society seems to be run by digital…

> I don't believe computer programing is a good way to teach logical thinking. Sociology, Philosophy and Literature are better alternatives That makes no sense. I've taken literature, I've read hundreds of books on my own. Most of them are full of illogical things. At best they are OK to teach morals, not logic. Philosophy is closer. Computer programming is pretty much pure logic and problem solving. The only better…

Teaching kids to make them better understand what's going around them?

"Say Kitty move right, Kitty move left and do this about 5 times." is not about logic. This logic, that you can teach with programming is only mathematical logic. "If a > b and a is negative then b should be negative". Real world logic does not work like that. There is not only 1's and 0's, blacks or whites. There are also shades of gray and reds, purples, blues. Some fractions, doubles.

Everyday you make many decisions. Some are easy yay/nay decisions, some are hard decisions like "what to wear today" or "Voting that candidate or this?" or "Should I ask her out, but what if it's too soon?". Many things affect them; Human interactions, weather conditions, light conditions, feelings... So many unknowns. Maybe just some luck? Murhpy laws?

We can not or have not yet deducted them into pure mathematical logic.

So giving kids programming as logical thinking aid would help, but maybe in a wrong way. It would teach them an illusionary version of logical thinking where everything is 1 or 0.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#158

Post by maebert »

Heliosmaster wrote: post #58
gambiting wrote: post #11

I don't understand. We've spent thousands of years, using 99.9% of able-bodied people for farming, hunting or some other food-gathering activities. Only selected few could afford to NOT work in farming. Even America, just 200 years ago had 90% of its population working as farmers. Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again? Sure, the food industry is not always honest,not always as good as…

> Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again? Because people forgot in a hanfdul of years (that's what it is, compared to the span of human history) what was slowly learned over the course of centuries and millennia. And the result? That kids nowadays almost think that foods magically pops out from the shelf at the supermarket. Specialization (in the sense that nobody does everything, every…

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." In that sense: learn to farm. And to Code.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#159

Post by pasbesoin »

Encourage -- allow and enable -- kids to participate in the real world around them, whether that's farming, or computer work, or whatever else.

Shoving kids into artificial situations does everyone a disservice.

P.S. Keep them safe, by all means -- reasonably safe, not to the point of disabling learning. But don't keep them ignorant, or perhaps worse, mis-informed.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#160

Post by justin66 »

curiousdannii wrote: post #54
Turing_Machine wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again? " Because most of them have no idea just how grim the life of a subsistence peasant farmer really is, and how that differs from the lucky few who get to sell boutique "organic" produce to rich people.

Subsistence farmers in developing countries often have quite happy lives. I've lived in PNG, and the biggest thing they lack is health care, but that's getting better all the time. Farmers in developed western countries probably have it worse. Supermarkets have driven prices down to ridiculous levels, so the profit of, for example, dairy farmers is very low. There are reasons the suicide rates in rural areas is high.

The flip side is, farmers in developed western countries have the option of selling their land to agribusiness and sending their children off to do something less godawful.

Economists tell us the "developing countries" will never actually develop until rich countries stop subsidizing their agriculture. Those folks in developing countries are stuck.

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