Re:I'd say I 90% agree with you....
on
Sims the New Dolls?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What are your thoughts about the concept of children challenging authority because of a need to find their boundaries?
Boundries are one of the things that kids need to learn. There are, however, better ways to impose them than yelling at them. Sticking an animal with a cattle prod in conjunction with some other stimulus simply creates an aversion to that other stimulus. Parents canna change the laws of physics, or patterning and conditioning.
If they ignore these laws and go against them, they fail as parents. Learn your Pavlov and Piaget.
Now think about just what a boundry is. A boundry is something you must not cross. It is proscriptive.Don't go in the liquor cabinet is a boundry. Do your homework is not. Boundries are imposed by negative reenforcemnt. Desired behaviors are created by postitive reenforcment. How about instead of yelling at your kids for not having done their homework you give them a hug and a cookie for having done it?
My problem with typical parental behavior is not in the imposition of boundries or the promotion of desired behaviors, but rather in the way they go about it.
To wit, they adopt strategies that cannot achieve the desired result, and in most cases actually drive the kid in the opposite direction of the desired result. They want what they want, not what is possible. They act like two year olds with regards to their own two year olds, stamping their feet and holding their breath until they turn blue and such.
Because the parents are seeking to be "authority," to control, not teach. You cannot control people. You can induce them, or you can force them, but you cannot control people. They will ultimately do as they wish.
If you wish people to adopt certain behaviors you must induce them to wish to.
Using a real, proscriptive boundry as an example, think about the difference between someone who does not rob a liquor store because he is afraid of being punished and someone who does not rob a liquor store because he does not want to.
It is very, very important to remember that kids are people, not "things." Before birth even they begin simply living their own lives. They will persist in this "undersirable" behavior after birth. Like it or not. They are incomplete people, they are people in need of care, protection, teaching and; most importantly, simple experience, but they are people.
They are your charge. They are your responsibility, but they are not yours. They "own" themselves.
Get off your psuedo-intellectual high horse and go read your Kahlil Gibran. The man knew what the fuck he was talking about.
Kids are also acutely aware of the difference between boundries that are real (such as those imposed by fire) and those that are artificial (like those that are imposed by "authority" with no natural consequences). They know when they are being told to do/not do something because essentially arbitrary reasons for the purpose of imposing will.
And, as a corralary to your point, it is very, very important for kids to also learn to oppose authority, and to do so with success, as well as failure. To push and expand the boundries to their natural limits.
Because authority itself has boundries; and it is the job of the kid to teach the parents just what the limits of their authority is, in order to come into their own authority as adults.
Parents who do not recognize that their authority has limits are going act like dumbasses. Especially since some of those limits on authority are proscribed by law. i.e., a higher authority.
An obvious example of this is that you can't beat your kids. If the higher authority learns about this their will be consequences to the parents.
There are less obvious examples, however, and they are very, very important. Contrary to popular opinion legal ad
It has fewer side affects than alcohol when working out in the gym.
Yeah, like not providing any fuel for muscles.:)
Although you don't actually have to worry about that unless you work out at aerobic threshold for more than two hours at a time. Anything less than that and your liver's glycogen stores have got you covered.
I usually drink water when working out.
The best policy, although a rather dilute sweetened green tea can be a bit of alright as well.
Well, yeah, they learn it because the PHTWs (Pointy Haired Toga Wearers) require it, but real men code in Phoenician, or maybe Classical Attic Greek if they want to feel "cutting edge."
There are still a few long haired, bearded, sandal wearing Cuneiform coders, but Jesus, they should get with the times. Modern hardware makes that short of dirty business pointless.
Don't be a dumbass parent. Your kids are supposed to learn to sneak their whiskey, otherwise they'll never be prepared to survive the workplace environment as adults.
He who has the red stapler wins.
KFG
Re:Wow, what a great comparison of 70s-80s vs now
on
Gadgets, Then & Now
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I'm was just glad when we finally invented feet in the early ninties. Damn that made walking easier.
I was waiting for you to show up. That was the weakest part of my post, written in a hurry while drinking my first cup of coffee of the day. What parents mean when they say "act your age" is actually very complex, but what it almost never means is "act your age." It would take at least a small monograph to explore it.
. ..mean "grow up and take responsibility for your actions".
This, however, is sort of what I said when I said that parents think they are telling their kids to act older than their age.
It isn't what the parents are actually saying though. What they are actually saying is "be a kid, i.e., shut up and do as I tell you."
Adult maturity can be defined as doing as you wish, but taking responsiblity for the consequences. This is how the kids are often actually behaving when told to "act their age" (at least with older kids, the sort that might be playing The Sims. A two year old having a hissy fit is acting his/her age. Two is the age to learn how to throw hissy fits. Throwing hissy fits and saying "No" is part of learning to make your own decisions and be responsible for the consequences. Some people just never manage to mature beyond this behavior perfectly appropriate for a two year old).
They really are asking the child to behave more like an adult (e.g. do homework without being hounded about it, etc).
Well, first off, you'll have to demonstrate to me that adults "do their homework" without being hounded about it. I've seen little concrete evidence of such behavior.
However, let's set that aside for the sake of argument and posit your example.
Mature adult behavior is not doing your homework. Mature adult behavior is making the decision on your own, for your own reasons, whether or not to do your homework, and taking responsbility for the consequences.
Hounding a kid to do their homework is exactly the sort of dumbass parental behavior I'm talking about when I say that "act your age" means "do as I tell you to," i.e., be a kid, when they think they are saying "act more mature," i.e., behave as you wish.
The dumbass part of this is that the parent is focused on entirely the wrong thing, having the homework get done, when the correct thing to focus is the behavior of the kid. Hounding a kid to do their homework has only one possible affect on the kid's behavior, to create a greater resistence to doing homework, "requiring" more and more hounding as time goes by.
It's not uncommon for first graders to love going to school. By about third grade they hate it, because they have been taught to hate it by various people hounding them about schoolwork. Kids want to learn. In fact, they crave it with an often fatal passion. They will put their finger in the pretty flame. ..once.
Kids hating to go to school and/or do their homework isn't a problem with the kid. It's a problem with the teachers and parents. They're being dumbasses, adopting behaviors of their own that necessarily drive the kids away from the behaviors they wish the kids to adopt.
Because they do not want the kids to mature. They want them to shut up and do as they're told; and right now we have a society that tells them this is the way they should behave until their eighteenth birthday, when they are then supposed to automagically transform into responsible adults, without ever having taught, or evern offered the opportunity to learn on their own, just how to do that.
And, of course, as per above, too many adults define mature adult behavior as shutting up and doing what you are told, even for adults, i.e. "do your homework" just because we said so, and without resistence.
I'm afraid I'm in the corner with just about any "kid" who looks at their parents/teachers/bosses and says, "Fuck that shit."
If you want me to behave in a particular manner, make it
Children do not learn social skills from explanation. They learn from . ..games.
Witness kittens playing. Games are the imperical mode of trying out behaviors in a noncritical manner, like, with a real baby.
And where do they find behaviors to try out?
Better yet, they should lead by example.
Ok, ya got me there. Monkey see. Monkey do. Don't like it when your kids do things you'd rather they didn't do? Well, don't do it yourself for starters. Kids learn adult behavior by observing adult behavior and trying it out.
Kids are supposed to engage in adult behavior. They're designed for it. It's how they learn to do it. Most parents are dumbasses when it comes to this issue; and we've created a dumbass society with regards to the maturation process as a result.
Ever notice that when most parents say "Act your age" they really mean, at heart, stop acting more mature than I'm comfortable with, i.e. act younger than your age. (The dumbass parents, of course, think they're telling their kids to act older than their age. That's because most parents are dumbasses)
If you don't want your kids trying to sneak into the liquor cabinet, don't have one. They do it because they wish to grow up and see grown ups drinking liquor and defining it as grownup behavior.
If you don't want to get rid of the liquor cabinet, at least give the poor kids a game that allows them to drink, but also necessitates they are responsible for the consequences.
Just because the cost per unit is zero, doesn't mean that the creators forfeit all rights to a ROI. It still cost money to make the damn thing . ..
Badfinger: No Dice; Cost recovered and reasonable profits made decades ago. Current cost: $16. Cost to trade p2p: $0. Resonable expected current return on current investment value: $0.
. ..cover the losses from all the shit music people don't buy.
I have a simple plan to alleviate most of that loss.
I propose a scale of decreasing cost over time, with the work becoming public domain after a certain amount of revenue.
This changes the whole legal philosophy from a rigth to copy into a right to generate revenue. There is no such thing as a right to generate revenue, nor should there be. That would be Evil(tm).
And the old system of 14 years right to copy renewable for another 14 if it was still worth it to you worked just fine and was easier and cheaper for everyone to administrate, without the government poring over your books all the time, and the subsequent necessity to cook the books in retaliation.
What has been submitted as a pithy wry parody of a real life warning may in fact be dead on in its message.
Isn't that the point of such pithy wry parody?
KFG
Re:It's no wonder people buy into Intellegent Desi
on
One Big Bang, Or Many?
·
· Score: 1
I think calling scientific theories 'laws' is a big mistake.
We don't call theories laws. We call simple imperical observations and their simple mathmatical models laws.
As an example we have the Ideal Gas "Law," and the Kinetic Theory of Gases which offers a possible explanation of that law. The one is an observed phenomenon, the other a line of reasoning making conjoined use of a number of "laws" to derive another.
Of course even this is a big mistake that we don't really do much anymore. The use of the term is primarily historical.
On the topic introduced by the OP, I think we should just teach people what the damned word means, but then, that is, of course, just my theory.
Slashdot Mirror
What are your thoughts about the concept of children challenging authority because of a need to find their boundaries?
Boundries are one of the things that kids need to learn. There are, however, better ways to impose them than yelling at them. Sticking an animal with a cattle prod in conjunction with some other stimulus simply creates an aversion to that other stimulus. Parents canna change the laws of physics, or patterning and conditioning.
If they ignore these laws and go against them, they fail as parents. Learn your Pavlov and Piaget.
Now think about just what a boundry is. A boundry is something you must not cross. It is proscriptive. Don't go in the liquor cabinet is a boundry. Do your homework is not. Boundries are imposed by negative reenforcemnt. Desired behaviors are created by postitive reenforcment. How about instead of yelling at your kids for not having done their homework you give them a hug and a cookie for having done it?
My problem with typical parental behavior is not in the imposition of boundries or the promotion of desired behaviors, but rather in the way they go about it.
To wit, they adopt strategies that cannot achieve the desired result, and in most cases actually drive the kid in the opposite direction of the desired result. They want what they want, not what is possible. They act like two year olds with regards to their own two year olds, stamping their feet and holding their breath until they turn blue and such.
Because the parents are seeking to be "authority," to control, not teach. You cannot control people. You can induce them, or you can force them, but you cannot control people. They will ultimately do as they wish.
If you wish people to adopt certain behaviors you must induce them to wish to.
Using a real, proscriptive boundry as an example, think about the difference between someone who does not rob a liquor store because he is afraid of being punished and someone who does not rob a liquor store because he does not want to.
It is very, very important to remember that kids are people, not "things." Before birth even they begin simply living their own lives. They will persist in this "undersirable" behavior after birth. Like it or not. They are incomplete people, they are people in need of care, protection, teaching and; most importantly, simple experience, but they are people.
They are your charge. They are your responsibility, but they are not yours. They "own" themselves.
Get off your psuedo-intellectual high horse and go read your Kahlil Gibran. The man knew what the fuck he was talking about.
Kids are also acutely aware of the difference between boundries that are real (such as those imposed by fire) and those that are artificial (like those that are imposed by "authority" with no natural consequences). They know when they are being told to do/not do something because essentially arbitrary reasons for the purpose of imposing will.
And, as a corralary to your point, it is very, very important for kids to also learn to oppose authority, and to do so with success, as well as failure. To push and expand the boundries to their natural limits.
Because authority itself has boundries; and it is the job of the kid to teach the parents just what the limits of their authority is, in order to come into their own authority as adults.
Parents who do not recognize that their authority has limits are going act like dumbasses. Especially since some of those limits on authority are proscribed by law. i.e., a higher authority.
An obvious example of this is that you can't beat your kids. If the higher authority learns about this their will be consequences to the parents.
There are less obvious examples, however, and they are very, very important. Contrary to popular opinion legal ad
Feh! For New Covenant emacs users!
KFG
It has fewer side affects than alcohol when working out in the gym.
:)
Yeah, like not providing any fuel for muscles.
Although you don't actually have to worry about that unless you work out at aerobic threshold for more than two hours at a time. Anything less than that and your liver's glycogen stores have got you covered.
I usually drink water when working out.
The best policy, although a rather dilute sweetened green tea can be a bit of alright as well.
KFG
Dude, there is an obvious and rather dramatic flaw in your strategy.
Like, Diet Pepsi has zero calories. Eat a frickin' banana or something, K?
KFG
There are no bad dogs.
KFG
Jeeeeeeeesus Christ! The editor I hired after I sacked the last one I hired after the one before that was sacked has been beheaded.
KFG
Sigh...I might as well finally admit it: MourningBlade
How can one not love?. . .
If we fall, it will be either because we have created a dictatorship or a democracy at the national level.
. . But KFG's If it's something like tossing all the pots out of the cabinet and onto the floor...yeah, probably best to put a stop to that.
A clean and tidy kitchen is a useless kitchen.
KFG
Not until Mithras open sources the code. I'll bet you're a damned He user.
KFG
Aramaic
Frickin' proprietary fork of Proto-Semitic.
KFG
Real people learn Latin.
Well, yeah, they learn it because the PHTWs (Pointy Haired Toga Wearers) require it, but real men code in Phoenician, or maybe Classical Attic Greek if they want to feel "cutting edge."
There are still a few long haired, bearded, sandal wearing Cuneiform coders, but Jesus, they should get with the times. Modern hardware makes that short of dirty business pointless.
KFG
Don't be a dumbass parent. Your kids are supposed to learn to sneak their whiskey, otherwise they'll never be prepared to survive the workplace environment as adults.
He who has the red stapler wins.
KFG
I'm was just glad when we finally invented feet in the early ninties. Damn that made walking easier.
KFG
I was waiting for you to show up. That was the weakest part of my post, written in a hurry while drinking my first cup of coffee of the day. What parents mean when they say "act your age" is actually very complex, but what it almost never means is "act your age." It would take at least a small monograph to explore it.
.mean "grow up and take responsibility for your actions".
.once.
. .
This, however, is sort of what I said when I said that parents think they are telling their kids to act older than their age.
It isn't what the parents are actually saying though. What they are actually saying is "be a kid, i.e., shut up and do as I tell you."
Adult maturity can be defined as doing as you wish, but taking responsiblity for the consequences. This is how the kids are often actually behaving when told to "act their age" (at least with older kids, the sort that might be playing The Sims. A two year old having a hissy fit is acting his/her age. Two is the age to learn how to throw hissy fits. Throwing hissy fits and saying "No" is part of learning to make your own decisions and be responsible for the consequences. Some people just never manage to mature beyond this behavior perfectly appropriate for a two year old).
They really are asking the child to behave more like an adult (e.g. do homework without being hounded about it, etc).
Well, first off, you'll have to demonstrate to me that adults "do their homework" without being hounded about it. I've seen little concrete evidence of such behavior.
However, let's set that aside for the sake of argument and posit your example.
Mature adult behavior is not doing your homework. Mature adult behavior is making the decision on your own, for your own reasons, whether or not to do your homework, and taking responsbility for the consequences.
Hounding a kid to do their homework is exactly the sort of dumbass parental behavior I'm talking about when I say that "act your age" means "do as I tell you to," i.e., be a kid, when they think they are saying "act more mature," i.e., behave as you wish.
The dumbass part of this is that the parent is focused on entirely the wrong thing, having the homework get done, when the correct thing to focus is the behavior of the kid. Hounding a kid to do their homework has only one possible affect on the kid's behavior, to create a greater resistence to doing homework, "requiring" more and more hounding as time goes by.
It's not uncommon for first graders to love going to school. By about third grade they hate it, because they have been taught to hate it by various people hounding them about schoolwork. Kids want to learn. In fact, they crave it with an often fatal passion. They will put their finger in the pretty flame. .
Kids hating to go to school and/or do their homework isn't a problem with the kid. It's a problem with the teachers and parents. They're being dumbasses, adopting behaviors of their own that necessarily drive the kids away from the behaviors they wish the kids to adopt.
Because they do not want the kids to mature. They want them to shut up and do as they're told; and right now we have a society that tells them this is the way they should behave until their eighteenth birthday, when they are then supposed to automagically transform into responsible adults, without ever having taught, or evern offered the opportunity to learn on their own, just how to do that.
And, of course, as per above, too many adults define mature adult behavior as shutting up and doing what you are told, even for adults, i.e. "do your homework" just because we said so, and without resistence.
I'm afraid I'm in the corner with just about any "kid" who looks at their parents/teachers/bosses and says, "Fuck that shit."
If you want me to behave in a particular manner, make it
Children do not learn social skills from explanation. They learn from . . .games.
Witness kittens playing. Games are the imperical mode of trying out behaviors in a noncritical manner, like, with a real baby.
And where do they find behaviors to try out?
Better yet, they should lead by example.
Ok, ya got me there. Monkey see. Monkey do. Don't like it when your kids do things you'd rather they didn't do? Well, don't do it yourself for starters. Kids learn adult behavior by observing adult behavior and trying it out.
Kids are supposed to engage in adult behavior. They're designed for it. It's how they learn to do it. Most parents are dumbasses when it comes to this issue; and we've created a dumbass society with regards to the maturation process as a result.
Ever notice that when most parents say "Act your age" they really mean, at heart, stop acting more mature than I'm comfortable with, i.e. act younger than your age. (The dumbass parents, of course, think they're telling their kids to act older than their age. That's because most parents are dumbasses)
If you don't want your kids trying to sneak into the liquor cabinet, don't have one. They do it because they wish to grow up and see grown ups drinking liquor and defining it as grownup behavior.
If you don't want to get rid of the liquor cabinet, at least give the poor kids a game that allows them to drink, but also necessitates they are responsible for the consequences.
That way they'll learn.
It's all about games.
KFG
By buying a Nintendo Wii-volution.
Be vewy, vewy qwiet, we'ah hunting video fawmats. Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh!
KFG
Kinda like breathing, although there are few who elect not to do it.
KFG
. . .they are trying. . .
They certainly are.
KFG
Just because the cost per unit is zero, doesn't mean that the creators forfeit all rights to a ROI. It still cost money to make the damn thing . . .
.cover the losses from all the shit music people don't buy.
Badfinger: No Dice; Cost recovered and reasonable profits made decades ago. Current cost: $16. Cost to trade p2p: $0. Resonable expected current return on current investment value: $0.
. .
I have a simple plan to alleviate most of that loss.
I propose a scale of decreasing cost over time, with the work becoming public domain after a certain amount of revenue.
This changes the whole legal philosophy from a rigth to copy into a right to generate revenue. There is no such thing as a right to generate revenue, nor should there be. That would be Evil(tm).
And the old system of 14 years right to copy renewable for another 14 if it was still worth it to you worked just fine and was easier and cheaper for everyone to administrate, without the government poring over your books all the time, and the subsequent necessity to cook the books in retaliation.
KFG
. . .they are maintaining a rightful face because of the a century old laws.
Actually, under the century old laws The Beatles would now be in the public domain.
KFG
What has been submitted as a pithy wry parody of a real life warning may in fact be dead on in its message.
Isn't that the point of such pithy wry parody?
KFG
I think calling scientific theories 'laws' is a big mistake.
We don't call theories laws. We call simple imperical observations and their simple mathmatical models laws.
As an example we have the Ideal Gas "Law," and the Kinetic Theory of Gases which offers a possible explanation of that law. The one is an observed phenomenon, the other a line of reasoning making conjoined use of a number of "laws" to derive another.
Of course even this is a big mistake that we don't really do much anymore. The use of the term is primarily historical.
On the topic introduced by the OP, I think we should just teach people what the damned word means, but then, that is, of course, just my theory.
KFG
you are talking about increased employee costs for all of the attendants.
You never filled a gas tank before the 80s, did you?
KFG
The quality of a piece of literature isn't in its complexity, it's actually in the simple, easily apparent parts.
"Call me Ishmael."
The rest of the book just fills in local detail.
KFG
Nothing like a fuel cell.
I know. I was making something of a obscure point I guess.
KFG
There are also batteries that you can recharge just by replacing the electrolyte.
Can you say "fuel cell"?
KFG