Young children would rather explore than get rewards

I think it is something kids learn though. They seem content early on (2-3 years) with a collection of observations (I ate water melon, my hands are sticky, I’m now touching the dog), yet they constantly see us engaging in “sense making” as part of teaching them to talk and described their surroundings.

I always tell my wife is that my goal is not to keep the kids from getting hurt, just to keep them from getting maimed.

It's not just that pain is a good teacher, though it is. There is an even more vital lesson that the kids need to learn. "I can handle pain." They need to see themselves survive and push through difficulty because I believe witnessing their own resilience is the foundation of not just good self-esteem, but strong self-esteem.

In the US today, we're expected to raise our children like hothouse flowers. We get them to blossom by creating a maximally nurturing environmennt and shielding them from all possible adversity. That's maybe a good strategy if they can be shielded for the rest of their lives, but unlike orchids, eventually our kids will have to leave the greenhouse. They need to be able to handle what's out there and not wilt.

It's surprising to me how people consistently try to discourage traits in children which they at the same time glorify in adults.

I suppose considering how much effort society puts into raising meager people, it's only right we glorify those who manage to manage to grow as a person regardless.

They're saying that novelty is the fundamental drive behind the observed behavior, not some priority towards "exploration" that children have in greater abundance than adults. The children are seeking pleasure through novelty, and the researchers are interpreting that as exploration. The parent comment illustrates how silly that is, if you substitute something that still holds pleasure for an adult (ie sex), they exhibit the same behavior.

The difference between the adult and the child is the adult has the world experience that the trivial game doesn't hold novel (therefore pleasurable) implications for them anymore, not that they don't prioritize "exploration".

I don't think your comment contributes much to the conversation. If anything I feel it stifles the conversation. If you had shared that the parent's comment made you uncomfortable then that is a contribution that we could explore. Instead you decide to decree from the top of your high horse that his speech wasn't acceptable. I don't like what you did one bit, and I think you did it just to make other people uncomfortable and put yourself in a position of power over them.

Use some common sense next time and realize no one got hurt by speaking an obvious truth.

It is scientific concensus that our genes survive through sex and that by optimizing for their own survival our genes have made sex the strongest possible behavioral motivator. It is also agreed upon that the desire for sexual exploration is higher for males, because their genes can spread more widely through additional partners, while a typical female can only get pregnant by one partner at a time.

You'll find that non-traditional pairings will have very little effect on genetic evolution, because they tend to not produce genetically related offspring.

So the study says "adults are less interested in exploration" and to that I reply "we have literally optimized our genes for adult male exploration over hundreds of thousands of years".

Isn't that a rather large omission in the study, that they didn't mention the single most powerful motivator for exploration?

Which also happens to be factually misleading. Views on sexuality normativity does not have a linear progression over time, nor through societies [1].

Name dropping the current year not only doesn't add anything to the argument, it is also fallacious for any domain that doesn't progress strictly monotonically.

[1] For example in contrast to attitudes towards homosexuality in certain Middle Eastern countries today, little would consider that heteronormativity might have increased as more of a result of 19th century colonial European influence on those cultures. See this r/AskHistorians post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r17fc/what_...

I don't think we should throw out wholesale that sexuality is a big driver of human behavior though, even if the example isn't inclusive. Changing "woman" to "person" addresses part of your concern, but still doesn't actually fix the experiment as proposed. The bigger problem is the experiment wouldn't work, rather than that it was cringeworthy. Which, sure. If it was cringeworthy, but worked, I guess it could have some excusability in terms of science. As is, you're right. It's juvenile.

I think we should strive to be more tolerant. we should encourage more discourse and take well intentioned remarks in context or else how different are we from the morality police in other countries?

I ain't vain enough to consider myself even "fairly intelligent", but I can say that I ain't very self-motivated, nor have I been since elementary school, and in hindsight my education system's insistence on strangling such intrinsic motivation in favor of extrinsic motivation is exactly what killed said self-motivation. "Grades are all that matter, and mine ain't anywhere near good enough to go to a good college, so why bother trying?"

It's something I'm actively working on trying to fix to this day, but old habits die hard.

This is a false dichotomy that gets reinforced everywhere to the detriment of all students. There is no reason those things should be mutually exclusive, but we make it so by the power of our collective expectations.

Lots of people are discouraged and pushed away from their areas of interest because they aren't seen as fitting a stereotype or mold. Some people never even get a chance to discover that they have academic interests, and are effectively placed on a "remedial" track from the time they enter the school system because of their background. The messaging is that they cannot succeed without external motivation, which sets them up for failure.

On the other side of the coin, it also contributes to the unhealthy pressures advanced students face. Building rigid assumptions into the education system about how students spend their leisure time is part of what kills diversity.

We grossly overestimate the amount of kids who fall into this group, maybe because we're priviledged enough exclude ourselves from it.

> I think the school system is fairly good at forcing all children to learn at least a little about all subjects.

Dude, ca. 20% of people in the US are either illiterate or functionally illiterate. How is that good?[1]

Unless, given your previous point, they're too busy playing computer games or getting high on Satan's lettuce?

Pardon the sarcasm, but this is an extremely dangerous mindset as it distracts us from the actual problem.

Edit: source

[1] https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=How-Serious-Is-A...

When those peer groups have values that include playing video games and exclude exploring learning, it's very hard to motivate members of the group to explore learning. I don't actually have any data on this, but I suspect that applies even under extrinsic motivators. In other words, telling the cool kids who hate school that they will get bad grades if they don't learn more will not make them learn more. It will simply become a badge of honour to have bad grades.

Perhaps the single most important job of a teacher is to attempt to create a single group of the class[1] with which every student identifies, and then imbue that group with the value of learning.

I don't think the way to do this is by promising rewards (good grades) for good performance (doing exactly what the teacher asks.) The way to do it is to encourage self-directed exploration and mastery, with a sense of a greater good. (This sounds like something out of an Italian-inspired educational philosophy, but as far as I'm concerned, it's just rather simple reasoning from the principles of motivation and social behaviour as we know them.)

In the end, this is a really tough problem. If children are convinced (based on interactions with their peer groups) that learning sucks, then it's really hard to change their mind. This goes for adults as well. I'm not saying there's a magic formula to make everything work out right.

What I'm saying is that there are two insufficient and contradictory methods. I think one of them is slightly less bad than the other one.

[1]: It might sound like creating multiple groups would be easier and accomplish the same thing, but the danger with that is that small natural variations in the value of learning between these groups could get exaggerated in an attempt to create group identities. I.e. if one group is just about considered more school-happy than the other group, then that will become a point both groups can use to distinguish between themselves: one group will intentionally become more ignorant of the benefits of learning to separate its members from the other. It has to be one single group for them to all adopt the same value of learning.

Edit: I almost forgot. For more on this, see The Nurture Assumption – well worth a read.

Totally unlike adults then.

"erziehen", if translated literally, means "to pull", "er" is something like "to act" while "ziehen" means "pull"

Sometimes it feels like that, that it is necessary to pull someone into a certain direction in order to better that person. And this is usually not easy to do.

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/7/17/21328316/covid-19...

And annoyingly, when I bring this proposal up, most people talk about how important it is for learning to be intrinsically motivated.

It depends on the culture of the place the school system is applied in. This kind of blanket utilitarianism by way of school is a sad state for society as a whole. In a country like Canada we have a sordid past, very recently, when implementing the residential school system [0].

That's the more extreme case but I'd argue that elements of that exist in every school system when applied in a one-size-fits-all fashion and when that system has a monopoly on education.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_...

Drive is great. Leverage it heavily as a manager.

But when it comes to kids, the problems I see are that (a) cognitively speaking, children are not tiny adults; and (b) if you want them to be successful and happy adults, you need to give kids the ability to work through mountains of "I Need To Do This Even Though It Sucks"

Cognitive development is an amazing process to watch -- you can see as brains grow and develop a wide variety of skills we take for granted.

But what that means is that you can't treat a six-year-old as an adult.

Their thinking is likely highly egocentric, because they have not yet developed the ability to realize that "my feelings and wants" are different from "other peoples' feelings and wants".

In their world, when they like Pokemon, they literally believe that everybody in the world feels the same way about Pokemon that they do. They just haven't yet gained the ability to handle that concept.

So, up to age eleven or so, you need to put enough structure around children to deal with their cognitive development path. Rules that are consistently enforced are critical (it's also good if those rules, in fact, make sense), with a gradual loosening of constraints as the child grows the ability to handle greater responsibilities.

This path continues from eleven -- when, cognitively, your child is now a functioning adult -- onwards towards the age of majority.

You still need to provide structure, but with enough freedom and ability to bend-or-change the rules such that the child can learn how to make their own decisions. Your goal is ramp them towards the full set of adult responsibilities, as quickly as they are able to handle it.

The problem with a lot of "traditional" education is that it failed to do the latter in a lot of ways -- rigid structure until age of majority, and then bam!, you're an adult, good luck.

This is compounded by how much regulation and how little slack there is in society. In the 70s, teenagers commonly brought rifles to school (because they were on the shooting team, or going hunting afterwards). Nowadays, kids are getting expelled for accidentally forgetting a tiny, micro-sized pocketknife.

The problem with "modern" education is that there is no expectation that you will ever assume responsibility. If you've dealt with a lot of recent graduates, you probably know what I mean. They have been denied much of the experience required for them to mature as adults, all in the name of keeping them "safe".

Including being "safe" from boredom. Which relates to giving kids the ability to get through mountains of drudgery.

That skill is so critical.

And I didn't really master it until I was an adult, much to my disadvantage.

If Elon Musk and every one of his employees were to vanish tomorrow, I'd be sad. SpaceX is cool. But my life would go on.

If the organization that handles sewage for my city were to vanish tomorrow, I would soon be, quite literally, in a world of shit.

I doubt that working for a sewage treatment plant offers much in the way of Autonomy. Mastery, perhaps? Purpose, absolutely.

And I doubt most kids grow up dreaming of being a waste engineer.

It's a hard job, and it demands grit. But that job makes modern life possible, and I don't see us setting up kids to be able to tackle both kinds of challenges.

How many people never make it out of the drinking and playing video games phase because school has convinced them that they're failures?

A lot of kids would be perfectly happy starting some sort of apprenticeship when they were teenagers, and it's not obvious to me that that would be worse than forcing them through the remainder of school.

I think it's hard to tell the difference between kids who have an intrinsic motivation to play video games, and kids who have an intrinsic motivation to do anything but school and have to default to video games because the world doesn't offer much of an avenue for kids to be productive on their own (unless you happen to be very interested in computers and have access to one and the internet).

I say all this as someone who thinks education is profoundly important. I just don't think as much education happens in schools as we'd like to believe, especially for people who don't fit neatly in the system.

This can be so surprisingly effective that it is almost scary. And while I'm at it: it works with many adults too.

Use with caution. Leadership is good and kids needs to go to bed at night, but manipulation isn't what you want to be remembered for.

Other nice-to-knows to be used with caution:

- as kids start to negotiate, add slack for negotiations.

- "catch them" when they do something right, reward it immediately (with encouraging words, a hug, increased trust - or even a piece of chocolate)

- look for the intentions - or anything that was right even if the intent wasn't there:

-- tried to do something right but failed? Good! (On the other side: there's few things as discouraging as gettig a scolding when you thought you did something good.)

-- used to slam the door but closed it carefully for some reason (hands full, in the phone, etc)? Good.

About that time you need to explain why we have regular baths.

The fake choice thing, though, never EVER worked with my kids.

sometimes they'll talk, then mutter to confusion then emit blips because they heard words coming from you, then all of a sudden they'll have a burst of excitement again.

> Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe.

I'd just want to add that according to Drive, training humans like rats and birds work great... If blind obedience, conformity, and minimal quality is something you're looking for -- which many factory line type managers wanted, for a very long time (and in many cases probably still do, sadly.)

Damnit, if Punished by Rewards contradicts this, I have to read it now, don't I?

Genuine question: What do you do if you want them to get better then?

We all love to say that we want creative free thinking individuals.. but come on now - currently the society is mostly composed of conformed (without this society probably would not function, at least as it does now) and in a lesser extent the obedient.

The creative and free thinking individuals push us all foward and we would not advance without them, but the majority is different.

Schooling system is not what it is by accident.

As soon as adults feel extrinsically motivated, they start to view the situation as an economic transaction, where they will only perform tricks for treats. Typical real-world example of this: if you start charging parents (punishment) for coming late to pick up their kids from daycare, parents will become more late. One can speculate that this might be because they start thinking of it as "paying for extra time" rather than "being a nice human being to the daycare staff."

The cases you mention where they do indeed apparently coexist, I suspect (but have no data to support) that the children successfully manage to ignore the extrinsic motivation because the intrinsic drive is so powerful in that instance. It's probably not a sustainable model to rely on that happening, though.

Drive is decidedly not a self-help book. It's a summary of the available evidence in support of and against the existence of intrinsic motivation and how it relates to the other types of motivation (extrinsic and physical and emotional needs.)

Under that hypothesis, the salary is there to take physical needs as a motivator off the table. If an employee has to worry about physical needs, there's no room at all for any other concern.

Once the salary is sufficient to no longer be a point of worry (will I afford my mortgage, can I support my spouse, etc) only then will additional money serve as extrinsic motivation.

(Which of course spells disaster for things like performance bonuses, which (a) are impossible to target at the right people (see Deming for more on that) and (b) literally designed to stop coming, reducing motivation overall.)

But your salary doesn’t change if you work hard or slack. It’s not a reward for performance.

Similar to how you’d die without breathing but you don’t feel rewarded for every breath. You wouldn’t breathe more than someone else to get more alive.

I don't know the source of this, but I remember reading that most people who become good at things, by practicing for 10 years or whatever, were intrinsically motivated to do so. It's not a process of "want to be good -> force self to practice -> become good", but more of "want to practice -> become good". Can't remember if this was just conjecture, and I'm not a citeable source myself, but it seems like a more likely story. I know I've heard stories of talented people who got where they are because they spent all day noodling on the guitar, or writing programs, but I've heard less stories about people who didn't really enjoy the practice but forced themselves into it via willpower.

Not to say that "just noodling" is all that the person needed, or that no willpower was required, but that the process might be more intrinsic for the people who are actually going to become great anyway.

Growing up, I found that those who ran on pure extrinsic factors with all discipline and no enjoyment either stopped or were stunted by locally optimal decisions. On the other hand, those who went on to study in university and play professionally seemed to derive the same obsessive enjoyment from their craft as I would a video game.

Do you think these data points further prove your point about emotional maturity? Or is there something more universal, that true success requires a fierce passion?

It takes at least 5 years of learning piano to get good enough to enjoy it. IMO this is why adults almost never take it up - we're just not prepared to invest in something that takes so much work with such a distant payoff

I went to a school without grades. It encourages cultivating a love of learning. There was concrete feedback on quality of work and assessments of knowledge (tests). But no public grading scale. It’s been awarded 3 blue ribbon awards and consistently outperformed its grading-based peers.

Obedience to hierarchy around stuff collecting is extrinsic.

One must learn facts and emotional character to tell grandpa go away.

We’re far to servile to decades old delusions of grandeur.

Extreme ownership of social agency by one circular meme isn’t good enough.

It does indeed come with a lot of freedom, but the relatively flat structure means that there's usually no one above the group's PI to promote their research. As a result PIs spend a lot of time writing grant proposals.