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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

This part is laughable:

> Some parents are having a hard time. They sacrifice for their children and give so much. They want some rules to keep things under control. But rules can’t create good family relationships. Cooperative learning and problem solving is the only win/win approach.

You can't spend time explaining ALL the rules around in society because it takes literally years to explain the ins and outs of everything. And kids need to know how to behave well before they can master speech and language, so it's pretty obvious you need some level of rules and some level of obedience. I am totally for "explaining why", but just saying "rules are bad" sounds like a very poor generalizing principle.

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In practice you can probably get away with explaining some fairly general rules that cover most of day to day life early on and defer detailed exception clauses for later.

Explaining all the rules is what school is for, basically.

> Explaining all the rules is what school is for, basically.

And this is where so many people go wrong. Parents are teachers too, and it's their job to teach their children how to fit into society, behave, be decent people, etc.

A lot of rules, like math tables, help you learn the basic foundational building blocks. Once you have those, you have a reference to understand more things.

School is, basically, for most of the other stuff.

>Explaining all the rules is what school is for, basically.

Heh. My school published a list of rules which included: 'Any breach of common sense is also a breach of school rules.'

Gödel suggests If you can explain all the [sufficiently complex] rules; your system is inconsistent (contradictory rules are true).

If the rules are consistent, some things can't be explained.

That is so ridiculously poorly applied to the legal system. Your system of rules needs power too. Don't just spread lies.

> Don't just spread lies.

Would you mind editing out name-calling from your comments here? The rest of your comment makes your point just fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Learning that any sufficiently advanced system is usually inconsistent and breakable is one of life's most important lessons. Rules are contradictory, both in meaning and application. There is no master theorem and they are not consistently or evenly applied. The world is not fair and just.

It is one of my main conflicts with homeschooling, the point of conventional schooling is that everyone must fit a mould and conforming to a structure. The lesson of that point is finding a way to deal with that conformity, you need to know the rules of hierarchical groups in order to break them or succeed inside or outside of them.

I was unaware that explaining social rules to kids involved arithmetic.

First of all, Gödel talks about the provability of true statements in formal systems, not the explain-ability of laws, and second of all, in any nontrivial formal system there are things that can't be explained, namely the axioms.

From a comment below: "It should go without saying that this strategy should be used only when it's reasonable".

Right, exactly. I don't think the explanation always needs to come first — my toddler knows not to touch the oven, but doesn't understand why. Someday he will, but for now he just needs to fucking listen so he doesn't injure himself.

Even as adults, there are plenty of "rules first, explanation later" situations — and there are plenty of rules that people obey without knowing why. It's not so bad.

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