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Comment by internetman55 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like another reason not teaching your children masculinity is bad cause one parent can defect (prisoner's dilemma) by teaching his kid boxing and how to use leadership skills to form a gang on the playground and then his kid can just do whatever he wants

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Indeed! I would never not teach my children (father of a boy and a girl) about masculinity or the drive for power accumulation, only how to wield that power in a just way. Good people should have power.

There will always be power dynamics and struggles in human interactions. You can’t ignore that and not properly equip your kids for those interactions, otherwise you’re setting them up for social and career stagnation at best, and abuse at the worst.

> You can’t ignore that and not properly equip your kids for those interactions

I agree. Big question: what are the best methods for doing so?

Teaching leadership, humility, empathy, and critical reasoning. Can’t say for sure, my kids aren’t old enough for me to put it into practice yet. With that said, I’ve had enough practical experience in the workplace to have a rough foundation for how to and not to acquire power and lead.

You want an utterly left-field answer? Minecraft [1].

> Seth Frey, a postdoctoral fellow in computational social science at Dartmouth College, has studied the behavior of thousands of youths on Minecraft servers, and he argues that their interactions are, essentially, teaching civic literacy. “You’ve got these kids, and they’re creating these worlds, and they think they’re just playing a game, but they have to solve some of the hardest problems facing humanity,” Frey says. “They have to solve the tragedy of the commons.” What’s more, they’re often anonymous teenagers who, studies suggest, are almost 90 percent male (online play attracts far fewer girls and women than single-player mode). That makes them “what I like to think of as possibly the worst human beings around,” Frey adds, only half-jokingly. “So this shouldn’t work. And the fact that this works is astonishing.”

> ...

> Three years ago, the public library in Darien, Conn., decided to host its own Minecraft server. To play, kids must acquire a library card. More than 900 kids have signed up, according to John Blyberg, the library’s assistant director for innovation and user experience. “The kids are really a community,” he told me. To prevent conflict, the library installed plug-ins that give players a chunk of land in the game that only they can access, unless they explicitly allow someone else to do so. Even so, conflict arises. “I’ll get a call saying, ‘This is Dasher80, and someone has come in and destroyed my house,’ ” Blyberg says. Sometimes library administrators will step in to adjudicate the dispute. But this is increasingly rare, Blyberg says. “Generally, the self-governing takes over. I’ll log in, and there’ll be 10 or 15 messages, and it’ll start with, ‘So-and-so stole this,’ and each message is more of this,” he says. “And at the end, it’ll be: ‘It’s O.K., we worked it out! Disregard this message!’ ”

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-ge...

Sounds like Ender’s Game for social skills :) love it!

In 2010, there was a camp for gifted children (up to 18, but mostly around about 10) in Sweden. (This story is from a book about gifted children.) The camp had a BYOC computer room, and at one time, the kids in there were mostly playing Minecraft, with one parent keeping watch. There was a rule against killing other players and destroying other people’s constructions, but then it happened that one kid poured lava and destroyed someone else’s stuff. The parent keeping watch thought that this would lead to fighting, ejection and subsequent banning of the offending party, but he chose to stay in the background and silently observe the kids instead of intervening directly. Instead of fighting, the kids self-organized a parliament and debated the pros and cons against “cheating”, decided unanimously not to cheat, and continued to build things together. The parent was flabbergasted and later remarked that few adults would have done what these kids did.

The article suggests we as a society need to recognize the difference between masculinity, which can be perfectly healthy, and toxic masculinity. Forming a violence gang would seem to be an example of the latter and not the former.

Among my relatives are police officers, military veterans, and prison guards...

Those groups theoretically exist within the bounds of the law, which should separate them from someone "forming a gang" and using violence to "do whatever they want." The difference between masculinity and toxic masculinity in those cases is a lack of empathy and a lack of respect for societal boundaries or rules of engagement.

You can form a gang capable of violence without being violent !

In my experience you'd call that something like a neighborhood watch or even a militia. Like during the LA riots, the Korean shop owners banded together to keep their property from getting looted.

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