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"He gasped in astonishment at the idea of putting function machines into function machines" "He gasped in astonishment as I carefully explained the results of

• whateveracct 6y ago
  I mean, 6 year olds get excited about all sorts of learning because their proper teachers are enthusiastic. But that enthusiasm helps them enjoy learning real things. And the concepts in the blog post aren't much more complicated than the other fundamentals children learn at that age. So like learning addition and reading, it's probably both the excitement of learning and the mirroring of their teacher.
• FpUser 6y ago
  "I hate to lose reputation with downvotes for sounding negative, but I find my credulity challenged with this story." My opinion about downvotes is that they reflect way more on reputation of those who actually does the thing (unfortunately they stay anonymous). Well HN rates you using down/up votes but personally since I do not agree with this whole anonymous anti-feature I do not really care. Alternatively (lets add some conspiracy to spice it up) they might be doing hidden user profiling on whole range of social patterns and sending data to interested parties.
  • Causality1 6y ago
    I've found HN to be incredibly unpredictable when it comes to public opinion. I've had comments start out with a dozen up votes only to sink into the negatives hours later, and comments that spent a day at negative four suddenly rise into the positives.
    • FpUser 6y ago
      Positive sinking into negatives... Yes that is what I often observe. As for predictability - it seems to me like anything that deviates from the "party line" (whatever that is for any particular area) gets downvoted. Looks like a usual herd mentality to me.
• s_gourichon 6y ago
  > 6yo kid being excited about something their parent is excited about and a product of implicit empathy, than any significant insight? Which is perfectly fine. A young child cannot judge by themselve, so they rely on their parent's judgment which is conveyed by emotion. I played the game an hour ago during family lunch, with my kids aged 15 and nearly 12. It still works! I upvote.
• mikorym 6y ago
  Wait, how do you get from function spaces to the double-slit experiment? Or is it just for illustration of two moments... With regards to your message, I think it's impossible to say whether another person understands something well from reaction. Unfortunately, that is why student focused textbooks (vs. graduate textbooks) usually have a lot of exercises. Edit: By the way, on a somewhat unrelated topic, I have been told that Lawvere thought that set theory was a "historical error" (these kind of semi-biographical stories are code for trying to explain a mathematician's personality, a futile exercise). I wonder if I'll ever be able to meet him and ask him why he thinks that. (I suspect that it will lead to some Lisptopians becoming excited about objects being immaterial. At which point one should remind Lisptopians not to mix programming the activity with mathematics the activity.) It's ironic that set theory is the best way to learn category theory, at which point you to some extent abandon set theory. Maybe it's the pedagicical value of set theory? I wonder if Lawvere would take all my persistent questions kindly.
• bluntfang 6y ago
  >I hate to lose reputation with downvotes for sounding negative This is my experience with this community. Downvotes without any discussion on statements (opinion or fact) that exist outside the norm.
  • teekert 6y ago
    Even more so if you make it meta like you just did, watch this!
    • bluntfang 6y ago
      1 and counting! maybe dang will come and tell me I'm triggering people or something.
      • bluntfang 6y ago
        -4 total so far!
• gen220 6y ago
  This reminds me of one of my favorite stories in This American Life, about a very young daughter who has a lot of questions, and her dad (a professor) asks her to write them down. She comes to him with a list with questions like “are we alive? Explain.” I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s simultaneously hilarious and a tear jerker. They just replayed it a few weeks ago, you can listen to the climax and conclusion here: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/697/alone-together/act-one-12 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/697/alone-together/act-one-...
  • alexpetralia 6y ago
    This is a great episode. My favorite quote of hers was (paraphrasing): "I just wanted someone to talk to."
• jerf 6y ago
  "Surely more like that this describes a 6yo kid being excited about something their parent is excited about and a product of implicit empathy, than any significant insight?" Also possible is that what the kid actually understands and what the parent thinks they are understanding are two different things. The kid is quite likely still wrong in some critical way. But that is where we all start with new things. I've got two boys in 3rd & 5th grade right now and I'm actively fighting with both of them the idea that "learning" is a matter of being told the correct answer and then they forever after know the correct answer in its every nuance. (Not just since the lockdown. It's been a theme for the past six months with me.) The older one has just started learning Spanish with school... well... nominally with the school, that's actually going very badly, but I started him on Duolingo in the meantime... and that's been a very good doorway into the idea that you can't just be exposed to a single isolated fact once and then have it just magically be internalized, you need to be re-exposed to it over and over, use it, practice it, and discover how your initial impressions were wrong over time.
  • thomaslkjeldsen 6y ago
    > I've got two boys in 3rd & 5th grade right now and I'm actively fighting with both of them the idea that "learning" is a matter of being told the correct answer and then they forever after know the correct answer in its every nuance. So there is a difference between insisting on being right and acknowledging the possibility of being wrong. However, this reminds me of the book "Factfulness" where Hans Rosling shows how most of us rely on outdated information (that we were taught decades ago) when asked about the current state of the world. We simply fail to update our knowledge. The book is highly recommended.
    • dmurray 6y ago
      I think he goes further than that: even young people have outdated knowledge in accordance with some predictable biases. We rely on the information because it fits some narrative we believe about the world, not because we learnt it when it was correct 30 years ago.
  • ummonk 6y ago
• surajs 6y ago
  That the child was able to access insights into something new is dimmed in no way by your causal understanding of implicit empathy. This is partly a failure of the writer to convey with precision, what the kid went through in that exact moment. That the kid was genuinely receptive towards the subject because his dad is into it has little bearing on the micro-epiphany he must have gone through. If only we could all retain that sense of wonder with age.
• shultays 6y ago
  Either that or this is a blog post about `Things that didn't happen.`. If OP is claiming a 6 years old understands what `He gasped in astonishment at the idea of putting function machines into function machines` means then he is lying.
  • daotoad 6y ago
    As a parent, I can tell you with 100% certainty that kids can get this kind of concept.
  • copperx 6y ago
    Why is it so hard to fathom? I'm pretty far from smart but I understood functions at that age, and going a few steps further is not that hard. Besides, this is a child of a brilliant CS professor we're talking about, not your average kid.
  • Smithalicious 6y ago
    Nothing ever happens. Everything is fake. People regularly lie about even the most banal things because everyone is a compulsive liar. Is this really the worldview you choose to have?
• fortran77 6y ago
  "He cried when I told him about typeclasses and monads"
• wrsh07 6y ago
  I'm not going to downvote you but this is pretty joyless Just because the writing is not up to your standards doesn't mean the kid wasn't astonished when they realized you could put a function in a function. Kids love meta stuff (there's a book my niece & nephew were talking about and they were like "it's so weird!!" -- it was meta) Also it's not that hard of a concept. Give kids some credit.
  • smt88 6y ago
    > Kids love meta stuff Agreed! > doesn't mean the kid wasn't astonished when they realized you could put a function in a function This is where my credulity was stretched. It's interesting and exciting when you first learn about it only if it breaks a rule you've long had in your mind and enables you to do more interesting things. A 6-year-old child hadn't spent years assuming you can't put a function in a function, and they'd have not the slightest idea what you could now do with it. Generally, very small children have very flexible ideas about the structure and rules of the physical world, so showing them "math tricks" often earns you a, "Duh, of course you can do that!" reaction when you instead expect astonishment. The exception is when they've been doing painful work the slow way and you've given them a shortcut.
    • fao_ 6y ago
      > This is where my credulity was stretched. It's interesting and exciting when you first learn about it only if it breaks a rule you've long had in your mind and enables you to do more interesting things. It's still a new way of using a new idea. People (including children) pick up all kinds of assumptions along with the information that they obtain. If you describe something with certain examples, and then do something that isn't seen as possible or covered in those examples, that can be very surprising. Different children are different people and therefore have different expectations and blindspots.
  • thebigshane 6y ago
    Do you recall the name of the book?
• jshevek 6y ago
  >I hate to lose reputation with downvotes for sounding negative This kind of comment is discussed in the second from the last paragraph here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html