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> The gestalt of a farm transcends what pixels and speakers can convey. Humanity has historically fled from working on farms (note the % of farm workers over t

> The gestalt of a farm transcends what pixels and speakers can convey. Humanity has historically fled from working on farms (note the % of farm workers over the last 300 years). Maybe before writing this sentence, question your pastoralist presumptions. I will also remark, without proof, that retreating from the contemporary world gives your children a tailwind that they will need to overcome. The notion of teaching computers to children is a notion, at its core, of guiding children into engagement with the contemporary, preparing them to deliver their full potential within the world we live in. Assumptions that "nature is better", or "sweaty work is more moral than brain work", or "face to face is better than distance" are founded upon certain assumptions about the world that are not per se true. Just because one might feel better, or feel more trusting, in certain environments does not make what you feel to be rational or correct. Much like "wellness", juice cleanses, or antivaxxing. And, as counterpoint to the inevitable - it's also true that f2p mobile games and video short video recommendation systems are finely tuned addiction engines that prey upon children - the mental & physical health issues are not to be ignored. The author isn't going into those issues. And, limiting screen time is a very common practice in recognition of that reality.

jdhendrickson 8y ago
I'm replying to you as someone whose children attend coder dojo twice a week, and they both have gtx 1070s despite being 7 and 9 respectively, this is relevant as evidence that I truly believe giving my children the best leg up in our society, requires them to have a a deep understanding of computers from a young age. Face to face is better than distance. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance requires you to physically be in the same room with someone. We are creatures who can transmit a tremendous amount of information in everything from subtle facial expression to smell. All of that goes out the window over remote work. Nature is not better, but it is important. I spent every waking moment from the time I got a computer at 19 until I turned 40 doing nothing but learning about computers, be it networking, programming, or system administration and the devops mutation that really just encapsulates a lot of what the grey beard sys admins were already doing. It consumed my life. I've taken time off thanks to my wife and her patience, and the boot strapped company we started. Having gone camping now on state and federal lands, there is something there that we need. I realize this is anecdata but I think the reason these fallacious ideas have such appeal is a tiny kernel of truth. Sweaty work is not more moral, but many times for me it's been more satisfying, there is a reason I have a wood and metal working shop setup. The moment when something I programmed works is absolutely euphoric, I've woken my wife more than once with a war shout of victory at 4 am. It's ephemeral though, there is always another problem nothing is ever truly done. When I walk into my shop and see the work bench I made, it fills me with deep satisfaction. A level of satisfaction I always found missing from my work no matter how elegant or satisfying the design. Apologies for the maudlin, meandering discourse, I'm on the ++ side of the Balmer curve today.
- pnathan 8y ago
  You're coming at this more nuanced and from a somewhat different angle than OP. I largely agree with you, given this angle. But, it's Friday after noon... The physical provides a certain sense of satisfaction that is not obtainable with the intellectual - and, frankly, vice versa. The OP makes a hard claim for monism, which tends to be a very difficult sell to people who think very hard about the notion of perceptions. Or, curiously enough, working psychologists - they tend to be intensely dualistic, whether they profess it or no. We exist within bodies, will we or nil we, however. And those bodies tend to feel good after running, or working out, or showering - or a wide variety of other things, such as a glass of a fine Scotch. I have... great doubts about face to face for many things. It's a hotter medium in the McLuhan schema than, say, an email. You can forget what is said. People get angry at each other. People can read emotions that are there - and aren't! It's a slippery medium, and it's not a repeatable one. It's the best medium for a date with your partner, however. And in a sense, what we're really discussing here is media - and its effect upon a society. If, as McLuhan said, the medium is the message - what is the medium that tablets teach? What is the medium that a laptop teaches? A book? Face to face instruction? And, finally, a farm? If we break this down to a media-message-instruction approach, I think that is the educational question. It is no use to say, "well, a bookish person is drawn to books" - you might as well say "people who read books become bookish", and still tell the truth - it's a circular cause and effect. What is the nature of the tabletish? That's an interesting question we haven't answered. My opinion is that the Tablet as constituted today, for children, teaches constant interaction, constant focus, and destroys the body via bad posture & physical inactivity. Now, the Tablet can also be used for other things. Note taking. Drawing. Reading. And as adults, we find these less gamified things more powerful to our desires often. I want to very carefully interrogate the concept of nature. I grew up approximately 1 mile from B.L.M. land, near towering mountains and inscrutable high mountain desert, and in my teens I hunted. Once I even shot a deer, gutted it, and hauled it out with my dad. My mom loved her gardens, and I was expected - and did - help out. I reference this to note that I literally had my hands deep in, "nature". Is it more natural (better?) to shoot an animal in the forest or to buy your meat from the grocery store? Or is it more natural to raise your cow, butcher, then eat? What qualifies as the natural? Lettuce from the forest? The garden? The roadside stand? the grocery store? Where do we draw this line? Historically, we learn that "nature" itself is a somewhat newer concept - it's not something standing outside of culture and time. The idea of wilderness itself is conceptualized differently between 2018, 1950, 1900, 1850, and, say, 1700. Let's interrogate further. Are you in nature in your front yard? A small park down the street with a few trees, groomed grass, and a playground? What about a large park with a stream and many trees? What if we stop grooming grass? Take out the playground? What's going on here - when do we feel that we are in nature - and when are we not in nature? But - at some point we can say that "we are in nature", and people who "spend time in nature" to some degree actually generally report being healthier and happier, apparently. Well, okay, sure. So this idea of "nature is beneficial" is really saying - this experiential concept that relates to embodiment is beneficial, but we haven't nailed down what that concept is - only that we agree that this undescribed concept is useful. Is this porn? Is this art? Do we know when we see it? Or can we actually define what is going on here. I propose a mildly contrarian concept: humans are natural; ergo, what we create is natural, and thus we need to really tighten down what we're trying to say here. Perhaps what we are saying is that an experience oriented around sense experience & focused embodiment in a setting without buildings is pleasurable and generally beneficial. And now back to debugging a misbehaving system....
xkcd-sucks 8y ago
Active, unstructured engagement with the physical environment is absolutely necessary for children to develop spatial reasoning skills. Spatial reasoning is important for "STEM-like" learning, and also for safely navigating the physical world. Children use fewer senses to engage with visual simulacra, and there is less diversity in the visual data provided by a screen than there is in a physical object. Consider that holding an object allows a child to explore what happens to (sight, sound, smell, taste, texture, temperature) of (the object, their own body) when they (eat it, throw it, change its angle re: sunlight, tear it apart, bang it with a rock, draw on it, draw on something with it, etc). A really excellent simulation might encode some of those behaviors. Most, especially "educational" things, do not. No simulations deal with texture, taste, smell, weight, or effects on the user's own body. This has been common knowledge in the developmental psych community for decades. Also obvious that "sweaty work", as exercise, is really quite beneficial to mental health and ability. This is also common knowledge in the psych/medical communities.
- pnathan 8y ago
  OP did not make those points, and I am not rebutting them, because they are true. :-)

jdhendrickson 8y ago

I'm replying to you as someone whose children attend coder dojo twice a week, and they both have gtx 1070s despite being 7 and 9 respectively, this is relevant as evidence that I truly believe giving my children the best leg up in our society, requires them to have a a deep understanding of computers from a young age. Face to face is better than distance. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance requires you to physically be in the same room with someone. We are creatures who can transmit a tremendous amount of information in everything from subtle facial expression to smell. All of that goes out the window over remote work. Nature is not better, but it is important. I spent every waking moment from the time I got a computer at 19 until I turned 40 doing nothing but learning about computers, be it networking, programming, or system administration and the devops mutation that really just encapsulates a lot of what the grey beard sys admins were already doing. It consumed my life. I've taken time off thanks to my wife and her patience, and the boot strapped company we started. Having gone camping now on state and federal lands, there is something there that we need. I realize this is anecdata but I think the reason these fallacious ideas have such appeal is a tiny kernel of truth. Sweaty work is not more moral, but many times for me it's been more satisfying, there is a reason I have a wood and metal working shop setup. The moment when something I programmed works is absolutely euphoric, I've woken my wife more than once with a war shout of victory at 4 am. It's ephemeral though, there is always another problem nothing is ever truly done. When I walk into my shop and see the work bench I made, it fills me with deep satisfaction. A level of satisfaction I always found missing from my work no matter how elegant or satisfying the design. Apologies for the maudlin, meandering discourse, I'm on the ++ side of the Balmer curve today.

pnathan 8y ago
You're coming at this more nuanced and from a somewhat different angle than OP. I largely agree with you, given this angle. But, it's Friday after noon... The physical provides a certain sense of satisfaction that is not obtainable with the intellectual - and, frankly, vice versa. The OP makes a hard claim for monism, which tends to be a very difficult sell to people who think very hard about the notion of perceptions. Or, curiously enough, working psychologists - they tend to be intensely dualistic, whether they profess it or no. We exist within bodies, will we or nil we, however. And those bodies tend to feel good after running, or working out, or showering - or a wide variety of other things, such as a glass of a fine Scotch. I have... great doubts about face to face for many things. It's a hotter medium in the McLuhan schema than, say, an email. You can forget what is said. People get angry at each other. People can read emotions that are there - and aren't! It's a slippery medium, and it's not a repeatable one. It's the best medium for a date with your partner, however. And in a sense, what we're really discussing here is media - and its effect upon a society. If, as McLuhan said, the medium is the message - what is the medium that tablets teach? What is the medium that a laptop teaches? A book? Face to face instruction? And, finally, a farm? If we break this down to a media-message-instruction approach, I think that is the educational question. It is no use to say, "well, a bookish person is drawn to books" - you might as well say "people who read books become bookish", and still tell the truth - it's a circular cause and effect. What is the nature of the tabletish? That's an interesting question we haven't answered. My opinion is that the Tablet as constituted today, for children, teaches constant interaction, constant focus, and destroys the body via bad posture & physical inactivity. Now, the Tablet can also be used for other things. Note taking. Drawing. Reading. And as adults, we find these less gamified things more powerful to our desires often. I want to very carefully interrogate the concept of nature. I grew up approximately 1 mile from B.L.M. land, near towering mountains and inscrutable high mountain desert, and in my teens I hunted. Once I even shot a deer, gutted it, and hauled it out with my dad. My mom loved her gardens, and I was expected - and did - help out. I reference this to note that I literally had my hands deep in, "nature". Is it more natural (better?) to shoot an animal in the forest or to buy your meat from the grocery store? Or is it more natural to raise your cow, butcher, then eat? What qualifies as the natural? Lettuce from the forest? The garden? The roadside stand? the grocery store? Where do we draw this line? Historically, we learn that "nature" itself is a somewhat newer concept - it's not something standing outside of culture and time. The idea of wilderness itself is conceptualized differently between 2018, 1950, 1900, 1850, and, say, 1700. Let's interrogate further. Are you in nature in your front yard? A small park down the street with a few trees, groomed grass, and a playground? What about a large park with a stream and many trees? What if we stop grooming grass? Take out the playground? What's going on here - when do we feel that we are in nature - and when are we not in nature? But - at some point we can say that "we are in nature", and people who "spend time in nature" to some degree actually generally report being healthier and happier, apparently. Well, okay, sure. So this idea of "nature is beneficial" is really saying - this experiential concept that relates to embodiment is beneficial, but we haven't nailed down what that concept is - only that we agree that this undescribed concept is useful. Is this porn? Is this art? Do we know when we see it? Or can we actually define what is going on here. I propose a mildly contrarian concept: humans are natural; ergo, what we create is natural, and thus we need to really tighten down what we're trying to say here. Perhaps what we are saying is that an experience oriented around sense experience & focused embodiment in a setting without buildings is pleasurable and generally beneficial. And now back to debugging a misbehaving system....

xkcd-sucks 8y ago

Active, unstructured engagement with the physical environment is absolutely necessary for children to develop spatial reasoning skills. Spatial reasoning is important for "STEM-like" learning, and also for safely navigating the physical world. Children use fewer senses to engage with visual simulacra, and there is less diversity in the visual data provided by a screen than there is in a physical object. Consider that holding an object allows a child to explore what happens to (sight, sound, smell, taste, texture, temperature) of (the object, their own body) when they (eat it, throw it, change its angle re: sunlight, tear it apart, bang it with a rock, draw on it, draw on something with it, etc). A really excellent simulation might encode some of those behaviors. Most, especially "educational" things, do not. No simulations deal with texture, taste, smell, weight, or effects on the user's own body. This has been common knowledge in the developmental psych community for decades. Also obvious that "sweaty work", as exercise, is really quite beneficial to mental health and ability. This is also common knowledge in the psych/medical communities.

pnathan 8y ago
OP did not make those points, and I am not rebutting them, because they are true. :-)