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Good article, bad title. It’s not the price of discipline, it’s the price of enforcing discipline on others. Discipline can only be learned through personal ex

Good article, bad title. It’s not the price of discipline, it’s the price of enforcing discipline on others. Discipline can only be learned through personal experience, it cannot be indoctrinated as that leads to resentment. This makes sense. It’s like telling a smoker that it will kill them. That only annoys them. They need to come to that conclusion themselves. There are also two kinds of discipline, especially for little kids. There is the type of sacrificing pleasure for future rewards that can be learned naturally. But there is also the type of negative consequence for behavior in small children that is not acceptable but may not carry any inherent tangible negative consequence for the child to actually learn from and the parent needs to fill in. For example, children can be very rude and you can’t treat a rude kid the way you would treat a rude adult, but you need to show them this is unacceptable in some way so you take away toys or other privileges etc.

andrei_says_ 5y ago
Are toys, play, tv time, dessert… privileges? Turns out that humans learn by example. In other words, the lesson of such punishing actions is that bullying, ultimatums and generally exerting control over others, especially ones with less power, is the proper way to achieve one’s goals. Is this the desired lesson? Some additional outcomes are the loss of trust for the parent and the need to constantly police behavior.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  Second order effects are sometimes unavoidable when driving towards a primary goal. Talking through issues requires a level of mental maturity and self-control, which needs to be built-up first
  - andrei_says_ 5y ago
    Is not doing something of fear of punishment the kind of self-control which would be useful in the absence of punishment? Drivers respect the speed limit while driving next to a police car. Does this mean that they will do so in its absence? Did the policing reform them?
    - sangnoir 5y ago
      Conditioning and reinforcement are well-studied in human and animal behavior. I'm not going to engage in hypotheticals or wondering if it works, when there is a large body of work you can consult.
      - andrei_says_ 5y ago
        The largest body of work I know of is Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn, with over 50 pages of citations of studies proving over and over that coercive methods simply do not work on humans. Extrinsic motivation does not magically transform into intrinsic motivation. Instead, coercion causes irreparable harm on parent/child relationships and damages intrinsic motivation. Humans are not birds nor rats so conditioning and reinforcement do not work as intended. They do work to give the enforcer a sense of power and sadistic pleasure but do not teach anything valuable beyond “violence and bullying work.” Are these your primary goals?

andrei_says_ 5y ago

Are toys, play, tv time, dessert… privileges? Turns out that humans learn by example. In other words, the lesson of such punishing actions is that bullying, ultimatums and generally exerting control over others, especially ones with less power, is the proper way to achieve one’s goals. Is this the desired lesson? Some additional outcomes are the loss of trust for the parent and the need to constantly police behavior.

sangnoir 5y ago
Second order effects are sometimes unavoidable when driving towards a primary goal. Talking through issues requires a level of mental maturity and self-control, which needs to be built-up first
- andrei_says_ 5y ago
  Is not doing something of fear of punishment the kind of self-control which would be useful in the absence of punishment? Drivers respect the speed limit while driving next to a police car. Does this mean that they will do so in its absence? Did the policing reform them?
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    Conditioning and reinforcement are well-studied in human and animal behavior. I'm not going to engage in hypotheticals or wondering if it works, when there is a large body of work you can consult.
    - andrei_says_ 5y ago
      The largest body of work I know of is Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn, with over 50 pages of citations of studies proving over and over that coercive methods simply do not work on humans. Extrinsic motivation does not magically transform into intrinsic motivation. Instead, coercion causes irreparable harm on parent/child relationships and damages intrinsic motivation. Humans are not birds nor rats so conditioning and reinforcement do not work as intended. They do work to give the enforcer a sense of power and sadistic pleasure but do not teach anything valuable beyond “violence and bullying work.” Are these your primary goals?