23 ms·

The most precious resource is agency

• cyberge99 5y ago
  I know of a lot of highly agent children that are creators, influencers, eSports winners. Encouraging their passion and enabling them to succeed at whatever it may be, is paramount.
• throwawaysea 5y ago
  This article resonated with me, as someone who felt the fixed tracks of school often held me back and wasted my time with busy work like random craft projects or homework that didn't further my understanding. It's all lost time that I'll never get back, that I could have spent in some alternate way. Hell, even just spending more time with my parents living our life together would have been great. Instead, childhood flies by with much of that time taken by force seemingly, or as the article puts it, with a lack of agency. This particular line is something I foresee as a future problem: > I suspect the downplaying of agency in childhood not only creates fewer opportunities for great people, it must also create more marginal people The less agency, and corresponding personal responsibility is given out, the more likely it is that we will condition future generations to expect things to be provided. After all, they are used to diminished choice and lesser agency, and removing those training wheels can be intimidating. That's not only a risk, but it is also sad, because I think it will have some indirect impact on the creativity of future generations and the intangibles of life. This article is focused on childhood and schooling. Maybe those are addressable via concepts like school choice (vouchers). But I would argue that problems of agency extend to adulthood as well. Agency is something that needs to be defended through our policies and laws. For example, I foresee future policies that are hostile towards car ownership as eroding agency. I see the practical need for continuous work history (no gaps in employment) as eroding agency. I see the 5-day work week as eroding agency. I'm sure other HN folks will have their own set of examples and desires for greater agency that are very different from mine. I feel like it'll be harder to solve for all of it except to err on the side of individual freedoms when possible.
  • zachkatz 5y ago
    Note that discouraging car ownership—and instead encouraging cycling with safe infrastructure, like the Netherlands has been doing for the last 50 years—actually dramatically increases independence for both children and adults: https://thecityateyelevel.com/stories/biking-the-streets-to-independence/ https://thecityateyelevel.com/stories/biking-the-streets-to-...
    • throwawaysea 5y ago
      Thanks for sharing. Some of what that article outlines resonates with me, and reflecting on what I see today, it does seem odd that there aren't as many children out on bicycles. However, I also was able to have the same freedoms of being able to bike around as a child (without parental supervision) in a car-centric setting. That may be because I lived in the suburbs and not some very dense urban center, but my point is it doesn't have to be a binary choice. As an adult, the type of agency I derive from cars is slightly different. It's about being able to go where I want quickly, without the waiting times of public transit or slow speeds of a bicycle. It's about being able to put that faster travel time to use, by spending the new free time on other activities. For example I can run errands, manage children, meet with a friend, and go to the movies all in one day thanks to the magic of a personal car. And when I go out of town, a car lets me go wherever I want with nearly endless freedom only limited by availability of road infrastructure, while moving the cargo (and people) I want with me at those destinations.
    • elevenoh 5y ago
      Encourage skateboarding in adolescence & I'd bet you'd see even more independence.
• tines 5y ago
  > Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and meaningless if we proscribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence? "Proscribe" means forbid; not sure this is what the author meant here.
  • simonsarris 5y ago
    Whoops, I meant prescribe.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• poorjohnmacafee 5y ago
  > Do children today have useful childhoods? Well articulated. I always felt a visceral sense that childhood, the school world, and even arguably college for many feels like we're being kept in some weird pin sequestered from the real world. As the author shows with early examples, this is not how it's ever been in human societies (as a default for everyone) prior to the last 100 years. Could this be thought of as a massive experiment the Western first world is undertaking?
  • grecy 5y ago
    Yes, of course. School that our western society has created quite recently exists for the purpose of keeping children off the labor market.
    • elevenoh 5y ago
      >School that our western society has created quite recently exists for the purpose of keeping children off the labor market. There's a whole lot more reasons for our current schooling than this as a sole reason IMO.
• bedobi 5y ago
  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 was held back and forced to sit through material I already knew, because "in year x we learn this and in year y we learn that". Don't get ahead. Zero agency. In other subjects that didn't interest me, I was forced to sit through stuff only to forget everything I "learned" soon after. It really begs the question, what's the point? And while I'm no genius at anything, surely a system like this will kill many, many actual geniuses, just like the article says.
  • tvanantwerp 5y ago
    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.
  • jkhdigital 5y ago
    Daycare. The point is that school is, first and foremost, a daycare. All the talk about education is just marketing.
    • benrbray 5y ago
      Unfortunately college puts up the same barriers. Much of the time I spent in high school learning to code was for nothing, because my university wouldn't let me even attempt to test out of the first- and second-year courses. In another instance they also wouldn't let me count a graduate statistics course for a baby-stats elective requirement. "We WoULdn'T bE an AccREdiTeD iNStiTutION if wE lEt yOU do THat!" I ended up majoring in math instead of compsci as a result. It ended up being a good choice, because now I have skills in both areas. But I was pretty disappointed as an incoming freshman, enthusiastic about computer science, that college was nothing like what my parents and teachers made it out to be.
• rektide 5y ago
  Strongly agree. It's also why I think the web is unlike almost everything else in computing: it's a high agency environment. Applications afford you certain options, but the web has historically offered great agency to the user. Extensions and user-scripts allow for quite a wide range of alterations to be done! I use the DarkReader extension for example, which makes almost all sites I visit "dark mode". There are ad-blockers, form history control programs, word count programs I make use of on a regular basis. Someone a couple hours ago was complaining about certain sources on HN and asked for them to be banned, and it took me less than 5 minutes to scratch together a userscript they could use to filter their experience in a way they desired[1]! Thinking of the computing medium we are given as just a start, a launching point, that we inject our agency & prowess into: that constructivist, can do mentality is everything to me. It's completely unmatched, incomparable to everything else I've seen in computing. Having a core medium, and the viewing system decoupled from it, ready to help us do better, has made all the difference. There's a lot of not-so-great modern web sites, that make things rough. I tried to help someone recently who was asking about scripting a React site[2]. Most of the times I can eventually wrestle the vdom into shape, to make it do what I want, but here the poor user was facing draft.js, a nightmare hell-mode take-over of the browsing experience by a large pile of software that thinks it can do better. Poor user was never going to win. There's all sorts of anti-user potentials to the modern web. I disagreed hard with a refusenik reactionary "the web browser I'm dreaming of" yesterday, but agreed[3] a) that the user should have choice/agency about what they want enabled and b) that certain technologies are an existential threat to agency, chiefly WebAssembly, which further heightens the impossibly of user-agency on the web. I've been quite a jerk to Flutter's CanvasKit a number of times, because it turns the web into a giant television tube that blasts pixels in our face, destroys the hypermedia basis that web engagement has been built around. Threats to user agency, to a modifiable web are everywhere, and plenty of folks simply tell me I'm full of shit, that I'm delusional for thinking the web experience is user programmable. They're not so far off the truth, especially in the days of virtual-dom & react, but I think that's an industrial convenience we've been taking advantage of, and that ultimately we'll see pressures to use the medium more respectfully, to use Custom Elements & other technologies that return some primacy to the DOM, rather than floating off into the virtual forever & treating this medium like an end-target to be made to dance as the large overgrown industrial toolkit + application so desire. There has not been a lot of progress in that direction, and weirdly: that gives me hope. It makes me think we are rife for disruption, that when good folk start trying to understand how not to do harm in their web-application-development, there will be leaps & bounds, huge strides. Meanwhile React &c are definitely mature technologies at this point, excitement has winnowed away, advancement comes in little tiny pinprick bursts. A more hyper-textual medium is possible, this ascent of code over medium doesn't require a total rewrite: we can make the DOM powerful again, make a pro-user, pro-manipulable, pro-rich media experience again. JS will be with us, but woven through the media, rather than hijacking & parasite-ing off it. I look forward to rich internet hypermedia becoming a powerful, expressive, user-manipulable system again, as the web once so powerfully was for users. This would be such a sign of progress and respect: for the web to put the user first again, to make the medium something shapeable by user-agency. I believe those days come. Computing was always, to me, so compelling because it enabled the limitless virtual, because we could go anywhere, do anything, go wherever we might think. But I see few other places in computing where the frontiers continue to open, where we ennoble & enable the agency within each of us. The web remains one of the rarest finest gems of computing, where agency remains vastly possible & expanding. So much of the rest of computing feels settling & shrinking, receding ever further within the firewall. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27693710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27693710 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27510276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27510276 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27683659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27683659
• rdxm 5y ago
  I don't even know where to begin. This is the worst kind of cynicism that lacks any connection to current science related to adolescent brain development. The best way to describe this is someone cataloged a person experience trying to broadly apply this to life. Huge FAIL. Science tells us that adolescent brains are technically sociopathic, so I'm trying to reason about the author's contention that agency is developed in this cycle. Weak sauce all around....
• bsder 5y ago
  > After a time all children spot this fakeness, and all honest educators note it Really? Math is useless? English is useless? History is useless? If an educator can't articulate why you are learning something, they are a BAD educator. Math is useless--until you start trading on Robin Hood and can't calculate the financial implications of turning over your stocks that fast. English is useless--until you are standing in front of a judge and don't have enough literacy to understand that what got written down on the official paperwork isn't what the judge ruled. History is useless--until you have a President fomenting an insurrection and you join in because you never studied what happens to 99% of all insurrections.
  • jkhdigital 5y ago
    School != the subjects supposedly taught in school. Anyone can learn math, writing and history from any number of sources. The author’s point, which you clearly missed, is that school often attempts to impart these subjects in a manner that is completely divorced from where and how they are used in real life. The student is a vessel to be passively filled with knowledge, rather than a willing participant.
  • rektide 5y ago
    You have some values stated for these lessons, but I have a hard time imagining a teacher finding ways to bridge the gap with a student or the class & make seen these somewhat adult perspectives. This last is way off in the weeds, but formenting insurrection is often a noble & virtuous thing, change often is direly necessary or more worsely overdue. There is a huge amount of fumbling & failing that often prevents good execution, that ruins follow through, & we see in history so many pendulums of society swinging & counter-swinging wildly around one another: this is purely my personal opinion, but I for one don't de-rate the attempts just because it keeps being really really hard (& often woefully mis-done!!). I think the effort to try is gloriously humanistic, challenges be damned. No, hungry for the challenge, the chance to improve. An agency of last & too often necessary resort. What I would judge might-be insurrectionists on though is their cause. It's easy for groups to be riled up, to let one's group escalate itself rapidly towards inssurectionist climax, to mantle oneselves with cause. Whether you search for some objectively worthy (legible) truth or cause is important. Having a strong epistemic basis is important. I liked almost nothing about what has recently happened & I think we probably agree a lot about how history isn't/might-not-be useless, & that modern times have shown some real grade-A fuck ups vis-a-vie that all. But still, it feels important to me to not condemn insurrection so widely. As a communist, it certainly seems like insurrection remains necessary. Outcomes haven't been good but the revolutionary spirit dwells in all our hearts, amid the beautiful, high-agency/highest-agency better-possible selves we might have had in us.
• CarVac 5y ago
  I think I found school tolerable, or even fun, because I was able to figure out the proper way to exercise agency within the confines of the system. As an analogy, as a kid when I played with Lego or K'NEX, my favorite thing to do was not assemble kits but instead come up with my own designs from the parts therein. Working within the system, but being a creator rather than a consumer. At school, I wasn't just trying to learn the material they wanted me to know, I was also trying to reverse-engineer the tasks asked of me to figure out what the teachers most wanted.
  • BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    Destined for Systems Analysis or Money Laundering.
  • aidenn0 5y ago
    I exercised my agency by annoying my teachers. That tended to lead to me having much lower grades in subjectively graded classes. It was a lot of fun, but I cringe sometimes in retrospect. Here's one example: Slashdot posted a link to a place that would let you search all graduate thesis papers at about the same time I was starting an English class taught by a grad student instructor. I looked up the instructor's Master's thesis and found it was on <Literature Period X>. While the instructor was passing out the syllabus, I said loudly to the person next to me "I hope we don't have to read anything from <Literature Period X>." The instructor just froze and stared at me mouth agape for about 30 seconds. By 4 weeks into that class, the instructor informed me that regardless of my performance, I was not going to get a grade higher than a D. I did in fact end up with a D.
    • bruce343434 5y ago
      Quite the fragile instructor...
    • inglor_cz 5y ago
      LOL. If someone looked up my thesis and did the same to me, I would have laughed with sincerity. In the "I crossed that killing field so that you don't have to" way.
• jkhdigital 5y ago
  > It seems that the more you ask of people, and the more you have them do, the more they are able to later do on their own. This is almost so self-evident as to be banal… and yet this fundamental observation about humans is roundly ignored and outright rejected by most institutions charged with educating our children. This essay feels like it could’ve come straight from John Holt or John Taylor Gatto—highly recommended.
• overgard 5y ago
  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 about it. Essentially we waste all out vitality and youth making other people rich, so that one day when we're old and infirm, we can finally do the things we like with the short time we have left. I think most of us never even think about it because it's too bleak of a reality. I feel somewhat fortunate in that the work I do is something I would generally enjoy doing even if I wasn't being paid for it, but I still have a nagging fear that what I could be is much more than what I am yet I lack the proper tools and perspectives to become that person (and I don't think that just starting my own business, like a lot of people here want to do, is really sufficient, it's just a small part of inventing your own life script).
  • qqtt 5y ago
    > 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 can be - especially for regular folk from humble beginnings who aren't born into huge advantages. Not to say that we can't improve things further for Western society, but just to say that the script we are generally given is pretty damn good compared to historical averages.
    • Aeolun 5y ago
      > 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.
      • 5y ago
• idolaspecus 5y ago
  My first child is due any day now and I’ve been thinking a lot about the central problems presented in this article. But I don’t know what to do about them. Should I keep my son home with me, allocate mornings to academics and afternoons to more practical endeavors? Should I teach him to cook? To garden? To build cabinets? To train a dog? To do his taxes? Should I send him to public school but supplement his learning with what I believe he should learn, topics like statistics and probability and finance? Should I teach him Latin? JavaScript? I personally feel like I am capable of providing an “agentic” education but I almost certainly won’t have the time nor the persuasive powers to convince a (hopefully) rebellious 7 year old that, say, grammar matters and gardening is dope. Seeking any suggestions.
  • combatentropy 5y ago
    You should let your child have lots and lots of freedom to do whatever he wants, even if that is often watching television or whatever. Ideally you would have a lot of outdoor places for him to roam --- whether that be a large amount of land that you live on or just a green neighborhood. This is based on my own experience, because I was allowed to manage my free time. When I got out of school, I had a chore or two, but the rest of the evening was mine to manage. (I was expected to do my homework at some point, though, and make decent grades. In fact I made A's and B's.) But the rest of the time I watched about 2-3 hours of TV, drew a lot, jumped on the trampoline, and in general ran around outside (We lived on five acres). My parents never sent me to summer camp. The summer was mine. They never made me take piano lessons or join the boy scouts. Nothing. I graduated magna cum laude, started my own business (which failed) then pivoted to a completely different field (web programming) and taught myself everything, through books, blogs, etc. That was 15 years ago and professionally speaking, I lead a very stable life. When I hear about today's children being shuttled from school to one extracurricular activity or another, where they have very little unstructured time, I scream on the inside on their behalf. I've known a handful of adults who were homeschooled, and most of them have turned out very poorly. They basically are walking time bombs: quiet and obedient through childhood, then they get out of the house and explode. As my mother wisely said, "Kids need to be kids." (We had a very strong religious teaching, however, in my household --- firm but not oppressive. I ascribe my own acceptance of that teaching as a key reason I did not just squander all that freedom on drugs, sex, and rock'n'roll. But most of all, I felt very, very loved and accepted as a person, even if I were to screw up royally.)
• Russelfuture 5y ago
  This is a good and important essay. I was crazy-lucky, being born at a time and place when kids could be left alone to build stuff and play with real technics when still young. I built hovercraft, rockets, ballistic devices, and hacked with vacuum tubes and transistors and tesla coils and radios and early computer stuff. It was wonderful. Oh, and biotech, too. All before high-school. Now in my sixties, but still like a crazy kid with tech. The tech helped me learn the complex stuff - the math - but it also taught me early I could get help/assistance and better faster results working with smart people. Doing - not just reading about it - but doing it and testing and trying again, and failing and then nailing success - this is so powerful and good. We got airplane crazy for a while - and I built no-airfoil Laminar winged models which flew fine. There were no video games - we built stuff and hacked it and sometimes had accidents... But I learned most of what I needed to know in life doing - doing and failing and fixing and then getting it to work.. This is the algo for life. You will have silly setbacks and make awful boneheaded mistakes - but when DOING you learn quick that nothing is final. If you didnt get killed, you can try again. I never heard this called "agency". But doing - and learning to think, and plan, and then act, and then evaluate - this is really key. Many folks who just write and talk - they never experience true harsh failure of the system. But nature is a really good teacher. She shows clear truth - and you can learn just by keeping your eyes and brain open - and remain curious and driven to know the why and the how. The studio is maybe the kitchen table, or the basement. And maybe the library and Google and DuckDuckGo. But build something. Build a car. Build a go-cart or a rocket. Build a working computer from a bag of parts bought online from Mouser or Digikey. Build a working fusion-generator ( you can buy "lecture bottles" of non-radioactive deuterium. ) Learn to program, and hack together a working version of mplayer from source code, and get it running on a Linux box, and listen to streaming Radio Caroline (the original pirate-radio in the UK from the beginning of open-source hardware). The author here is wise,and makes a very key point. DO something - MAKE something - pull together the bits and pieces of stuff and knowledge that transform nature and get her working for you - instead of you being a slave to her. I remember school was pretty awful... It had to be endured. And it interfered with my experiments. :) I built a TEA laser in my basement. You need a DC power supply, and a bunch of stuff you can buy at Staples - plastic sheets, aluminum foil, etc. It was first written up in Scientific American in 1974. And I also built software machines to hack the markets. To my great surprise, they seem to work. If a dullard like me can do it - any sufficiently motivated person can. :) Do things and make things. You will learn skills that can be used to make the things you want to happen, actually happen. Good essay. - Russel F.
• legendofbrando 5y ago
  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 people, they found a way. If the author preaches agency, stop pretending like you don’t have the agency to “just” be as the system asks.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    If the system doesn’t ask, and you do it anyway, I could sort of see the agency there. If the system forces. Not.
• soheil 5y ago
  > 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 part of the student. I love math and would explore every avenue available to learn more about it, to someone who hates math what's the point of teaching them derivates? Forcing people to learn stuff they aren't interested in only makes them resent the subject and kills any hope of them naturally becoming gravitated to it in the future.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    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.
    • blacktriangle 5y ago
      Then teach them biology and statistics, and the issues of regulatory capture so they learn why vaccines are causing an epidemic.
• dannywarner 5y ago
  You can have way more impact as a teen software developer than almost any field in history. It is a force multiplier to the sort of talent and energy that earlier generations showed by doing paper runs. I reckon open source projects and app/game development are great ways for kids to "reach" today. You can have a meaningful impact, learn a lot, and possibly set yourself up for live. This Australian Ben Pasternak developed a hit game as a teenager, and at 21 he is being featured in the Wall Street Journal after raising $50m for a food-tech startup. https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-21-this-entrepreneur-has-launched-three-startups-raising-millions-11624975201 https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-21-this-entrepreneur-has-lau... But this goes back to Bill Gates and Paul Allen - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/microsoft-co-founders-bill-gates-and-paul-allen-met-in-high-school.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/microsoft-co-founders-bill-g...
• soheil 5y ago
  > 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 abstract level.
  • musingsole 5y ago
    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?
    • soheil 5y ago
      I don't think minds are mere pattern repeaters. There is unlimited complexity if you just follow a simple cellular automata [0]. So not sure where the idea that creation is the fuel for the fire of imagination comes from. [0] http://atlas.wolfram.com/01/01/31/ http://atlas.wolfram.com/01/01/31/
• dkackman11 5y ago
  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.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    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.
• chrisweekly 5y ago
  This is an extraordinary, profound and moving essay. I can't recall the last time I read something that resonated like this. I wish I had something more substantive to add to the discussion, but it just boils down to, "Yes. This."
• musingsole 5y ago
  > And while they may not have wanted to work, the work was nonetheless something that both they and society felt was useful: something purposeful and appreciated. I have begun fearing we live in a world that actively hides useful, meaningful work behind bureaucracies, licensure, advanced degrees, and other mechanisms. I believe this happens as a type of nepotism...a holding onto a nugget of meaningful work/knowledge until someone like you can grab hold of it and complete it to your liking. Why are so many business deals hidden behind golf rounds and clinking glasses? Because business/work/utility is power. If I rely on you, you have power over me. So I better make sure I approve of the who and the how of that power. It's fear that drives this. And my fear of the world it creates is stifling.
  • BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    I'm not sure this is entirely related to your point, but I've recently been thinking that intelligence can be detrimental to promotion, in that intelligence produces questions and disagreements and non-conformity, which are all traits that make the job of Management more difficult. Making life difficult for Management is unquestionably NOT a path towards promotion, and continues the rotating door of mediocre management. And mediocre management wants, desperately, to hold on to their position because they're aware, consciously or otherwise, of their mediocrity. Having someone who can out-think you as a report is a threat to your position. Like you said: fear.
• paulpauper 5y ago
  this article was not that good. came across as vague and lacking of a point and filled with poor examples. There was nothing special about the examples he gives or in any way predictive except for Nabokov. it was not uncommon in Carnegie's era to leave school early. Same for Walt Disney. it was common back then for kids to deliver newspapers, and what does that have to do with animation.
  • human 5y ago
    I agree with you. The article has no substance. We can talk about how today’s schools don’t produce shining stars or bright minds, but the path followed by these legends (Carnegie, Da Vinci, etc.) were not out of the ordinary and I really don’t think they formed their character. If anything, I believe these people had a bias for action, took risks and were hyper-focused. Same recipe works today.
• donkeyd 5y ago
  The Netherlands, over the past few years, has had a massive increase in companies started by young people. Many related to social media, of course, like video production and things like that. But there's also a group doing more original stuff, like breakfast delivery, or ice cream stands. Over here it seems like what the author is looking for is on the rise.
• mikewarot 5y ago
  I decided to share this article with my teenage child. We had a very fruitful discussion, which we will use to make changes to improve both of our senses of agency. This prompted me to realize that Factorio has become a refuge from my sense of lack of agency. I love solving little problems that won't come back and bite me years later if I get it wrong. Thanks for posting, and the discussions it prompted, both here and at home.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• ayngg 5y ago
  I think one of the greatest things that is missing from formal education is the encouragement of exploration, and the acclimation towards the failure that often accompanies that exploration. Everyone in school is so caught up on checking off the right prerequisites in the curriculum for the next set of prerequisites all the way up until graduation, that there usually isn't much room for any sort of real exploration in the system until graduation. However, after graduating, a whole new set of real world responsibilities appear that often restricts the ability to both explore and fail since they come with real consequences that make failing a high school class seem like nothing in comparison. For example, it is kind of hard to explore in university when that year exploring will cost tens of thousands of dollars, or if you are on your own and need to find multiple low skill/ wage jobs just to survive. I was just lucky that my dad had a stem job and had a computer, which got me into video games, which got me into hacking them, which got me involved in communities full of people way older and smarter than I was, which facilitated my growth in a way that school never could. Without that first computer, there is a good chance that I would have just been railroaded into some soul draining corporate job pushing papers.
• camillomiller 5y ago
  What about the fact that most people don’t want agency? Most people are perfectly fine with being told what to do. And rightfully so, as their work is not a measure of their personal success.
• hoseja 5y ago
  Silly frog, teaching agency to children is for the ruling class! The productives are best hammered into small-minded obedience.
• deleted 5y ago
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• DVassallo 5y ago
  Just walked to say https://twitter.com/simonsarris https://twitter.com/simonsarris (the author) is probably my favorite Twitter account. Go follow for a peek into the life of someone living a blissful existence.
• deleted 5y ago
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• mitchell22 5y ago
  Water is our most precious resource. We drink on average around four litres a day, and it is an irreplaceable element of our industry and our agriculture. Indeed it is at the very heart of our existence. https://www.jcpenneykiosk.run/ https://www.jcpenneykiosk.run/
• varjag 5y ago
  I suspect if Leonardo da Vinci stayed in school a few more years he'd still be alright.
• bumbada 5y ago
  I had that experience when I was a kid(of making things that mattered). I became a cracker when I was a kid and we published how to replicate our results on the early Internet. We were the first generation that could play with computers because they were ours. We were much better than 40 years old people(those that protected against the cracks) because they were trained in their youth with machines that were so expensive they basically could not touch. They programmed on paper. We started our own web company early on. We were much better than the competence and it was an easy life and sold the thing at great profit. Today in this field people have 100x more skills and is rewarded way worse and it is an oligopoly of big companies. Then I traveled the world and worked abroad. I worked in China, Japan, Korea, the US. Great opportunities that today are closed. I used digital cameras before everybody did. Nobody uses them and suddenly, boom, everybody uses them. My family though I was crazy for not doing what everybody else does, but turns out everybody started doing what we did first with 10 years of delay. The last thing is working remotely. We have been doing that for a long time. It was just common sense. If you spend 2 hours commuting and are tired before working the company is wasting resources that could be channeled to create real value. We could get people in our company so easy because they loved working on their terms and very few companies could compete with that. Those companies were like KODAK trying to do things the way they always were and it was great for us. Now suddenly Covid happens and so many people are realizing they could work on their terms too. The mass of the people is processing and adapting to what early adopters have discovered way earlier.
• deleted 5y ago
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• tester34 5y ago
  School sucks for individuals, but for the whole system there's no significantly better solution (at least that I'm aware of), sadly.
• christophergs 5y ago
  Shades of PG's "Why Nerds are Unpopular" [1] > "As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere." [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
• ak39 5y ago
  There is no default life script. Everyone is a myth legend. A hero. You can't fault an opinion piece like the posted article, but there's a chink in this thinking. Such opinions - give agency early and it will yield dividends not just for the individual but for humanity as a whole appeals to our most primal human conundrum: our sense of purpose and our destiny in life. The idea of the one individual making geometrically disproportionate impact for all humanity is mythologised. And it's an error. The flip-side of this myth is the ugly face that if we as a society stop producing such myth legends (the original author claims it might have stopped after ca 1968) we are failing as humanity, or worse that if you do not become that myth-legend you are unworthy of respect, or dignity. This is a terrible way to look at things. I do agree about the author's powerful comment that kids (adolescents) today are hardly considered useful for any form of vocational education outside the cookie-cut education systems. But can you orchestrate this paradigm like the CCP did in the late 60s/70s forcing urban kids to learn farming as part of their education? Or is it a naturally existing societal affordance to enable such evolution in kids? There are many unspoken mythical legends living today, huddled in their numbered and anonymous cubicles. There are many unknown engineers who've done crucial work within their own boundaries of "scripted life" to prevent bridges from collapsing or payroll runs to be corrupted (just in time). No one hears about them. No one celebrates them. But there are billions of us on this planet achieving myth-level brilliance daily just by being responsible parents. Or just by being simply kind to fellow humans. There is no default scripted life. Edited: added "Or just by being simply kind to fellow humans."
• rendall 5y ago
  I understand this article's point, but I think it's nonsense, to be honest. It seems like it's saying something, but, really, it's not. It might even be making its readers stupider, sadly. Walt Disney, Leonardo DaVinci, Steve Jobs, et. al. had gigs at 13, so now we draw grand conclusions about how shitty kids have it today? Nah. Doesn't credit. Even accepting as given the undemonstrated premise of the article, that society today has fewer "onramps" for children to contribute, what conclusion can be drawn from that? Do we really have fewer (let us call them) extreme contributors today? Have all extreme contributors had childhood onramps, or are those cited in the article cherry-picked examples? Are all adults who worked as children demonstrably greater contributors as adults than those who did not? Or are they about equivalent? We need answers to those questions before asserting anything at all about how society is failing its children. Now, let us turn our attention to the question of childhood today versus that of even pre-1970. A child today is by all measures safer and healthier than a child of any time in the past: child mortality, disease, environmental pollution, heavy-metal poison, homicide, abuse, all down globally as well as in the US. Let us take as given (not demonstrated, but why not, for the sake of argument) that somehow the rate of extreme contributors is lower now than in the past. Is it really the lack of child labor or is there something else causing this (again, so-far imaginary) problem? Just concluding "lack of avenues to contribute is the problem" could create other problems without addressing the root cause. Definitely, give kids who are eager to take on adult responsibilities some, and let them figure out how much they can handle. Let them fail safely, or succeed wildly, but let them be kids. That's a great message, but it does not need to be couched in terms of some grand societal failure. That part is bullshit. Furthermore, I suspect that there is no formula to making these extreme contributors other than (continue) to make society a better, safer, healthier, wealthier context for children to contribute, or not, as they will. What is up with HN promoting articles advocating working 13 year olds? Here's another, just as nonsensical: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27675603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27675603
  • meesterdude 5y ago
    > It seems like it's saying something, but, really, it's not This was the same takeaway I had of your comment. It reads like glenn beck. Purpose & meaning are strong motivators and I agree with the author that there is not enough focus on that to help promote agency in individuals. There are societal failure(s) to be highlighted here, despite your unwillingness to see them.
• CaptArmchair 5y ago
  The article raises some good points, but I also have some strong reservations. Take the examples, for instance. The author puts a lot of stock in what Nabokov and Da Vinci did themselves in their youth and calls this 'agency'. But at the same time, conveniently or inadvertently, the author doesn't expand and look at the broader picture in which those individuals lived and how that determined their lives. Nabokov was born to a very wealthy and prominent Russian family with ties to Russian high nobility. He had access to a breadth of networks, resources and means to develop into the person he became. Without disparaging the his talent as a writer, it's equally important to acknowledge that his early life wasn't burdened by poverty, bad health, illness, instability and so on. Nabokov himself even described his childhood as "perfect" and "cosmopolitan". Da Vinci, on the other hand, was born out of wedlock outside Florence to a lower class family. The historical record regarding his life before his arrival Florence is fragmentary at best. What can be deduced is that his early childhood must have been tenuous and turbulent, living in different homes with different family members (grandparents, uncles, mother). His own parents went on to live separate lives as well. We do know that he only received very basic education - reading and writing vernacular - as a child. Da Vinci's life was determined by a stroke of chance. At age 14, his family moved to Florence and he was lucky enough to end up a studio boy at Verrocchio. He became an apprentice at 17 and received 7 more years of training. Even so, at the same time, it's clear that his family wasn't wealthy and so he might as well have ended up in a very different place at the time e.g. working as a clerk for a budding bank, notary, or even an industry like a tannery. It should be clear that 'agency' only counts for so much. Neither Nabokov or Da Vinci are exceptional as millions of others also engage in poetry or drawing in early childhood. External circumstances such as birth and chance are just as determining. From a historical perspective, the author can be perceived as falling into the traps of hindsight bias and survivorship bias in that regard. Even so, the article does make a valid criticsm regarding education systems. Transferring knowledge through rote exercising and standardized testing serves a purpose. The upshot is that it allows for scaling basic education towards millions, which is no small feat to accomplish. The downside is that doing so ignores the needs, traits, ambitions, strengths and weaknesses of individuals. Modern educations systems were first formed during the 19th century Industrial Revolution, and further grew during the 20th century when humanity experience profound growth, economical and technological advancements. It should be noted that there never was a unified vision on education, and the argument in the article isn't new by any means. During the early 20th century, incumbent education was heavily criticized by emancipatory movements. Helen Parkhurst, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey were influential educational thinkers who addressed some of the issues touched upon by the author as they laid the groundworks for an educational framework called the Dalton Plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Plan At the same time, Célestin Freinet is another influential educational thinker who created the Freinet system, addressing the same criticisms, which is widely adopted throughout the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9lestin_Freinet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9lestin_Freinet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freinet_Modern_School_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freinet_Modern_School_Movement Finally, the article betrays a fallacy hidden in it's subtitle: The world is a very malleable place. To an extent, the world is malleable. But one only controls one's actions, less so the outcomes. Human life is complex, unpredictable and capricious. The impact of some decisions can sometimes only be gauged several decades into the future. While we consider Da Vinci a succesful individual, a young Leonardo would quite likely have been just as anxious about what what the long future held in store for him as the next young person today. In that regard, it might come across as ironic that Vasari has recorded Leonardo lamenting in his deathbed, aged 67, that "he had offended against God and men by failing to practice his art as he should have done." In the end, it's not unwarranted to consider the author's question "Do children today have useful childhoods?" carrying a due amount of presumptuousness as well. While lamenting how society tends to shoehorn millions into a corset of conformance towards norms and values, it would be quite ironical to fall into the same trap and subject younger generations to different, yet at the same time equally high, expectations and standards maximally living up to purported 'agency' given for the sake of 'agency'.
• jtwaleson 5y ago
  In the summer of '99, when I was 11, my father asked me to reverse engineer a proprietary data format because he would be needing that a couple of months later. He showed me how I could manipulate the data using the proprietary software, and how to inspect the changes using a hex editor. It went very slow, and I'm sure answering my questions and explaining it cost him more time in the end, but I learned so much at a young age and he was really happy with the results. Knowing that it was actually useful made it all the more interesting for me. If I recall correctly he gave me 100 guilders (about $50) for a couple of days of work. The data format was for HP ChemStation, good memories.
• lucideer 5y ago
  While working for a startup enrolled in a small accelerator programme I was involved in a business/pitch type workshop in which we were asked to carry out a little game along with some participants from other enrolled startups. Each individual had to write down what was most important to them in their life/career/role/business and then sell that concept/life-priority to one other person. At the end of each 2-way pitch, the pair agreed to choose one of the two priorities and were then tasked with pitching it to two others (who had selected theirs in the same way), and so on in tournament fashion. I immediately wrote down "autonomy"*. I learned nothing at all about pitching that day, as no-one I spoke to needed any convincing whatsoever: everyone had the same response: "Oh! I never thought of that. That's much more important to me than what I wrote down." * I know "autonomy" and "agency" are technically a bit different from a philosophical perspective but hey.
  • eloff 5y ago
    I came to this conclusion when I was about 24. I was thinking about what I wanted most from life. Success, a girlfriend, a car, etc. I settled on autonomy, although I phrased it as freedom. Freedom to do or work on what I want. I work part time now and spend most of my days working on what I want. I guess I partly achieved that, by age 36. Getting there.
• ThinkBeat 5y ago
  The problem with the article is that it only uses examples of extra ordinary people. Most people are not geniuses, they are average. You are not a genius. Most people who flunk out or drop out of school do not become billionaires and neither will you. Most people who decide to give it their all and become various forms of artists will never be famous, noticed no wealty or admired (Though on a nano scale you may have people who do) By a large margin most restaurants / startups fail. You are not going to create the next unicorn. yes this is not 100% accurate because it does happen. Much like buying a lotto ticket. People do win. But you will not. (Almost entirely certain but again some do win). People like Lonardo da Vinci are 1 in a billion. Maybe one in 2 billion. People like Jobs and Zuckerberg are a lot more common. There are maybe 1000? 10.000? If we say 100.000 that is about 0.0013% of the world population. You are not in the 0.0013% (2019 estimate) (Though you really need take into account the privilege accorded people based. on where they live, where they were born, family. If you win the lottery and grow up in a wealty educated country, you have a HUGE advantage. Much like buying 1 lottery ticket drastically increases you chance of winning. The point being nearly all people fail to be special. They will not be remembered by the grater society after their death. They will have made no huge impact on the world. They will never make it big. Thus we should not focus our choices in life my making a few of the same choices that are advantageous for 1 in a billion. We should not set our goals to achieve what they did. We should focus on having a nice life, a good set of friends, enough money to live ok, having interesting hobbies Having a job that is ok. A safe and dry place to live. Have some love. We should expect and respect that we will be average That is not a failure. That is what most likely will happen. So set out to make the most of it.
  • pgustafs 5y ago
    I vehemently disagree. Not with your explicit reasoning, but with the implicit assumption that there is some 1-dimensional metric of specialness or greatness that we're all being measured against. The great thing about life is that it's so multidimensional. If you want to be the richest person in the world, of course you're setting yourself up for failure. But if you want to be the best version of yourself, you can easily be the best father-husband-son-coder-blogger-walker-painter to your children+wife+colleagues in your city in July 2021. More than that, you can do things no one else has done. If you like research, the frontier is endless and extremely high dimensional. Find some niche that you enjoy and crush it. If you like helping people, there will never be an end of people you can help. You don't have to be average -- you can be in the 1% of what you're passionate about, easily, because there are so many possible choices of passion.
• FourthProtocol 5y ago
  I disagree. Strongly. The (our) most precious resource is time. Our time is finite, and thus constrains agency. Like money, agency is (to a degree) within our reach. It can come and it can go. Time on the other hand, simply runs out. Time can be be taken, it can be given, and it can be squandered. It can never be returned (overtime today repaid by a vacation tomorrow is still time lost today). If you're salaried you know exactly how much you're selling your time for. Real wealth is when ALL your time is yours to do with as you please. Agency therefore is simply one means to that end.
• kitd 5y ago
  I think the article misses the fact that "childhood" in the past was more or less defined as just the stage of your life until you could do something useful, regardless of age. So as a child growing up in that environment, finding something useful to do was more or less the basic minimum to be accepted. Schooling was just an add-on in comparison.
• KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
  Culturally people know this already, though I think most people call it "ambition" rather than agency.
• frequent 5y ago
  The developer in me says life and our society are like open source software. A gigantic piece of code constantly being rewritten and growing exponentially over time. Too much for anyone to truly grasp in its completeness as time progresses, but also not purely spaghetti code, so you can always break it down into smaller components one can eventually understand. Of course, like the author argues, you can use this software without ever caring or wondering about its inner workings. Or you can try to make contributions. However, there are no contribution guidelines for life. "Usefulness" depends on everyones' individual definition (improve the kernel or code readability) and "capacity to act" doesn't age well (I started hacking with jQuery). A contribution can be anything that may leave an impression on someone - a single person or any amount of people, a good or (for sake of completeness) a bad impression, something forgotten after an instant or something passed on for generations in some form or another - legacy contributions that eventually also get rewritten over time. Personally, I don't think the results matter as much as trying to make these contributions. After all, not all merge-requests make it into production code, but they are all worthy efforts of trying to improve small parts of the software of life and move our society forward.
• truenindb 5y ago
  poppycock! the most precious resource is zement and wheat. Sheep and brick can be had anywhere, and longest road and biggest army are both like kick me zigns, yay unto the septenth generatzion. you gotta spend all your time trying to figure out how to translate numbers from aramaic!
• mitchell22 5y ago
  Thanks for the info.. https://www.jcpenneykiosk.run/ https://www.jcpenneykiosk.run/
• TrackerFF 5y ago
  It boils down to risk For me, I had at least the two following choices: 1) Following the straight edge - getting an education, taking a job I enjoy, and work/save for 25 years. I could retire before 60. Low risk, medium reward. 2) Following my dream. Going all in on my passions, and trying to capitalize on them. Maybe if lucky, sell some startup and be able to retire before 40. The problem, though, is that for each year I'd try and fail at option 2), option 1) also becomes less viable. One year for failure at 2) equals one year worth of savings and returns on investment from option 1). FWIW, I'm from a wealthy Nordic country (Norway) - and it's not that entrepreneurship is looked down upon here, it's just that the safe option is much more probable, and the pay-off is pretty good.
• necovek 5y ago
  The biggest missing bits in all of these analyses are, to me: 1. How many people under consideration ("famous people") did not posses the quality brought up in the premise ("agency from early age")? 2. How many people did posses the quality ("agency"), but did not achieve the desired result ("fame")? Without that, we are pretending to show data to support a premise, whereas it's just an opinion with cherry-picked data. Granted, it's hard to get numbers for 1 and 2 (esp 2, I guess), but I don't even see anyone trying before considering their premise "proven" or at least worth sharing. :/
  • b3kart 5y ago
    Survivorship bias plagues all of “self-help” writing, unfortunately. Let’s take successful people and assume everything they’re doing contributes to their success and so must be replicated.