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Comment by fny | Hacker News Reader

I think the bigger issue here is interest.

I sure as hell would never have enjoyed these games, except maybe Set, as a 5 year-old. My attention span was fit for assembling legos and catching lizards, and a few years later, I became interested in math and programming. Not because my parents foisted them upon me: math because math showed up in school, and I had questions that needed answering; programming because my dad was building a website, and I wanted one too. My siblings took very different paths as well that were similarly organic.

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I got into math because of programming, oddly enough. As a kid, what I really wanted to do was make games to show off to peers. And to do that I needed some mathematical building blocks first. Programming was a way to explore those things and then I ended up being more into that stuff than making RPG games to look cool to peers.

And by accident I transformed a normal interest (games and showing things off) into something that turned out to be useful and insightful to me later.

I agree, a lot of interest in math/programming starts up without a plan and without external pressure. Less when you are a child.

Interest/enjoyment is a factor, but I don't think it's the only factor that matters. Long term success also matters. Pardon my racist stereotype but Asian families are supposedly very strict on and focused towards education for their children, seemingly in spite of the enjoyment of the child. The results here are obvious, Asian adults are kicking every other race's ass in basically every metric of success you can name: lower criminality rates, higher education, higher incomes, lower divorce rate, lower single motherhood rate, etc. Now, I'm not suggesting that everyone must adopt the stereotyped child rearing practices of Asian families, but it's worth considering that enjoyment for the child need not be the only priority.

Asian here, Indian to be precise. While I agree with you, I must point out the side effects. This obsession with grades and studies pushes lot of kids on a sort of rat race. There is immense pressure to succeed and success is typically narrowly defined like high grades and a secure job. I don't know the numbers in US, but in India this has caused a lot of rise in teenage and young adult suicides, it is not uncommon to here of suicides of kids studying for IITs due to pressure to perform. Another side-effect of this obsession with academic achievement has given rise to herd mentality where everyone is pushed to pursue similar career paths like engineering or medicine irrespective of a child's aptitude or interest. In India, especially this has led to a huge number of engineers who never wanted to be engineers. This has also meant that despite the aptitude lot of kids never got to pursue arts or pure sciences, in fact the popular perception of someone pursuing arts or pure sciences is that he or she could not make into engineering or medicine. Not to mention that this also discourages risk taking and entrepreneurship. Last thing I want to mention is that in Indian culture the idea of social perception is very strong, what will the society say tends to be a big factor in how decisions are made. This is one reason why despite sizeable population, India tends to be behind the world in pure science or in many sports. The mentality is changing a bit but not a lot and it is coming at a cost of many innocent lives.

> The results here are obvious, Asian adults are kicking every other race's ass in basically every metric of success you can name.

Perhaps you need to look at more than just metrics of success. South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and a lot of this is due to societal pressures like exams and work. While China's done what everyone was skeptical about 20 years ago, it now recognises that there's a dire lack of the "innovative spirit" - which really is part and parcel of being "free spirit".

I do agree that we can't just pander to children's interests only. Still too young, and they need basic education as a foundation. But childhood is also the perfect time to explore as much as possible, and plant those seeds of interest. Go the "Asian" way if you want, but just bear that in mind to strike a fair balance.

If you look at Nobel prizes, Turing awards, and Fields medals are not represented by Asians.

I think it's better to have fewer medals but have the majority of the population receive the above-mentioned benefits.

I'm certainly open to the idea of studying the early childhood development practices of the parents of those award winners. Individualized success seems like it is more likely to attributable to unique factors such as high IQ coupled with obsessive personality traits. That may not be as helpful as looking at the practices of success groups the size of entire cultures. Shooting star vs rising tide sort of thing.

I think you would find jewish people more represented there.

It's worth mentioning that Jewish people share most if not all of those same "benefits?" I mentioned for Asians: higher education, lower criminality, etc. So there's surely something there to look at.

It is really difficult to generalize but I see Jewish people less strict and giving more freedom to their children while valuing education. It seems there are multiple articles about the subject [1] mainly triggered by Amy Chua [2] bestseller. BTW I just discovered that her husband is Jewish and he has been interviewed here [3]. All this conversation is turning funny in unexpected ways.

[1] https://www.google.com.ar/search?q=asian+mothers+vs+jewish+m...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Chua

[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/relationships/fatherhood/1066...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates

I find it interesting to see almost no Sepharad on this list. And that the list exists at all.

>Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 887 individuals, of whom 195 were people of Jewish descent, although people of Jewish descent comprise less than 0.2% of the world's population.

Guessing it's due to upraising among Ashkenazi and strong networks effects.

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