Uh, I'm sad for people who think you have to break things or press random buttons in order to figure out what it does. Like the people in stores who press buttons and then wonder why the police is knocking with a full SWAT team. Documentation exists. The resources exist to inform yourself if you're actually curious. Emphasize the need to satiate that curiosity, but there are ways to do it without being an idiot.

I generally agree with this, which makes the existence of buttons that do kill (you, someone else, or an expensive device) a problem.

I did have to teach my toddler not to press the power button of the PC while I was working. What kind of idiot puts a led in a power button?! Of course children will push that. Clearly PCs need to be put as high up as possible, to keep them out of reach of children.

Interesting, got a couple responses in this vein. I can certainly see how my initial post would give the impression of not allowing exploration. I certainly encourage them to explore the world, learn about things, and figure out what things do. They can of course also ask what things do. I don't think you need to have wide open freedom to try anything to explore though; part of learning to navigate the world is to develop an understanding of what sort of experimentation is safe and prudent, and in what cases learning should be done first. IE: experiment with sandpaper on a fallen branch or scrap lumber, great. Experiment on the kitchen table, not great; potentially expensive.

Likewise, regarding button pushing specifically—say a kid happens to get their hands on a power tool—I don't want them experimenting with it to see how it works; I want them to ask me, and I'll show them how it's used safely. (And if using it safely is within their capabilities, I'll let them try it, or help them to try it.) There are many other similar cases where blindly pushing a button or flicking a switch could be at best inconvenient or expensive, and at worst dangerous. (And of course many more where it would be innocuous.) By teaching kids to differentiate between these, and not to take actions without thinking through the consequences, you can then give them more freedom to explore, confident that they are unlikely to take dangerous or destructive actions out of ignorance.

So yeah, I'm not teaching my kids to never experiment with anything. I'm teaching them to first think about what could happen. In many cases it's obvious, even to a four year old, that experimenting with something couldn't hurt anyone, and is unlikely to damage anything. (And in your example, "if it's not going to kill or maim me, then I could have it," it's implied that someone has already vetted "it" for you, in which case again you know it's safe.) In other cases they might not be sure, in which case it's better to ask (or for older kids, study) than to just blindly try it.

How does this drive out the curiosity? If anything it encourages it: kid should find out that this button does before pushing it. Though to be fair I did my share of button pushing at 5 years old. It was a typewriter at my mother’s work and I taught her a couple of new tricks after finding out what buttons do. On the other hand I struggle to understand people who refuse to read manuals and then struggle for months or even years with some basic functions of the product, when spending two minutes reading the page four of the manual would have saved lot’s of time and frustration.

When I was seven I got a (used) Commodore 64, and learned a ton experimenting with it. Started me on a path to eventually running a small tech company. So I hear you there. My oldest is 6 now, and I definitely want to get her started on similar things.

I certainly won't be giving her unsupervised access to my work computer though. Instead I'll start her on an old laptop with some flavour of Linux, and no internet connection. I'll also take an LVM image, so she can tinker to her heart's content and we can easily revert if it goes wrong. I expect she'll learn far more than she could using my work machine, where there are all kinds of things that could she'd have to be careful with, and that could cost me hours of work (or even worse, potentially, with email access and such).

Separately I'm also introducing her to minecraft, which is fantastic for exploration. Of course it needs an internet connected computer, but there's more supervision for that one when she's outside of the game.

It's funny, thinking back to getting that Commodore 64, I remember the best piece of tech advice I ever got, again when I was 7-8 or so. My parents' friend, who had previously owned the computer (my parents, like most people in the 80s, didn't have a computer) was teaching me how to use the word processor. He taught me how to create a new document, I think, and I was going over the steps, like "press alt, press f, press n..." And he says, no, no... Don't just memorize the steps—understand what they do, and you won't have to remember them. Then he goes through explaining how alt tells the computer you're going to start a command, f refers to the file menu, which has commands relating to... etc. Stuck with me like nothing else, and that attitude was hugely beneficial in not just computer science, but all aspects of life.

It's a bit tangential to the "don't push buttons" thing, but only somewhat. In both case the point is that you want to not just do things, but think through them and understand them. In my mind, that's a great lesson for kids.