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Comment by assttoasstmgr | Hacker News Reader

Did you miss this part?

> We recognized that children are political beings, actively shaping their social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity — whether we interceded or not. We agreed that we want to take part in shaping the children’s understandings from a perspective of social justice.

I'm sure that the children of the Nintendo generation frequently discussed the power dynamic of King Koopa's dictatorship over the Mushroom Kingdom, and the systematically oppressed Shyguys, who have to cover their faces in public.

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They had a bunch of whole-group conversations about what kinds of social behaviors everyone was observing and how it made different people feel, trying to help all of the kids understand the experience that the other kids had, talking about whether it seemed fair, and trying to decide as a group how best to respond.

Is that supposed to be bad? Like... you don’t want kids explicitly thinking and talking about what goes on in their class because identifying and understanding their feelings might cause them to become too empathetic or something?

If someone doesn’t have some such conversations (with parents, teachers, other mentors, etc.) as a kid, I posit that their education is deficient.

> ...and trying to decide as a group how best to respond...

> Is that supposed to be bad?

Quite possibly. One of the big successes of the law and modern political traditions like liberalism has been demonstrating that the most successful path is when "we" don't respond and provide mechanisms to let individuals sort out their own differences in a 1:1 fashion, personally navigating the power dynamics.

Strong group responses are actually quite destructive and squelch non-conformance. Anyone who might be unusually successful with an unorthodox strategy gets crushed. Ends really badly for minorities too. Groups aren't any fairer, nicer or more empathetic than an individual and in fact (because they tend to lowest common denominators and plausible social deniability for inaction) are often much more violent and cruel.

We don't want the teachers taking an extremely successful and tolerant society focused on individual action in context of a group and then inculcating group reactions in context of an individual. That will reduce tolerance and promote hate. Although to be honest teachers shouldn't be making any decisions about the culture, or children's personality, as it isn't really their role in life.

> Quite possibly. One of the big successes of the law and modern political traditions like liberalism has been demonstrating that the most successful path is when "we" don't respond and provide mechanisms to let individuals sort out their own differences in a 1:1 fashion, personally navigating the power dynamics.

This is definitely not a big success. What we get from this mentality is billionaires hoarding resources and corporations destabilizing democracies. The law exists to establish rules of conduct for living in a civilized society, not for encouraging individuals to sort out their differences on their own.

> Strong group responses are actually quite destructive and squelch non-conformance. Anyone who might be unusually successful with an unorthodox strategy gets crushed. Ends really badly for minorities too.

Strong group responses can be destructive or constructive. Either one can benefit or harm minorities. Organizing into a group to accomplish a goal does not automatically mean that individualism is cast aside -- many social movements have existed to empower individuals.

> We don't want the teachers taking an extremely successful and tolerant society focused on individual action in context of a group and then inculcating group reactions in context of an individual.

It sounds like in this case study, the society in question was far from extremely successful and tolerant. The whole point of the exercise was to promote social harmony among students.

> What we get from this mentality is billionaires hoarding resources

I'm always interested in this idea when it comes up because I don't understand what people think the billionaires are hoarding. For curiosity's sake could you give me a quick enumeration of the physical, real-world resources that you think the billionaires are using up? Like, do you think they have 10 million in rice hidden in a silo for a rainy day?

Land. Billionaires own thousands of empty luxury apartments in city centres, while the poor people who clean them travel in from the outskirts.

And billionaires do effectively hoard things like rice. That's what the futures market they invest in is all about.

I don't disagree, but "the poor people who clean them" are doing that because it pays better than they could get elsewhere, otherwise they wouldn't do it (assuming no coercion on the billionaire's part, which would be illegal).

If the billionaires magically ceased to exist and poor people owned the apartments, I don't think they'd be paying the other poor people as much to come clean them.

Also labor. If a billionaire buys a luxury product like a jet, or a yacht, or even just an expensive car, all the labor that goes into production and upkeep of that product is used up solely for the benefit of the billionaire. If wealth was distributed more fairly, all that labor would go into things that benefit a wider audience.

I think easiest way to understand it that they hoard access to capital. They suck it out of consumers in the economy, denying smaller entrepreneurs access to it.

People won't buy your SaS for $4.99 a month so you can earn your first million if they spent all of their money on iPhone priced higher than it needs to be.

Strongest benefit of the market is competition that allows million ideas to be tried to find the thousand that will benefit the society. One person with billions of dollars won't have million ideas, let alone thousand beneficial ones.

They also hoard other stuff like land and real estate but that's just means to an end. Extracting capital, denying it to everybody and keeping it all under singular command.

Having a conversation that reveals to kids that their actions were unintentionally causing a lot of harm to their companions and then asking the kids what alternative kinds of rules they could adopt that would leave everyone feeling satisfied is “promoting hate”?

> taking an extremely successful and tolerant society

Which society are you thinking of? This is certainly not a fair description of the USA at any point in its history or of “Legotown”.

> Having a conversation that reveals to kids that their actions were unintentionally ...

Well I think "unintentionally" is a bit of a strong term, kids are inexperienced but not necessarily stupid, they understand power dynamics quite early. Humans have great intuition for that sort of thing.

> causing a lot of harm to their companions and then asking the kids what alternative kinds of rules they could adopt that would leave everyone feeling satisfied is “promoting hate”?

Yeah. We've got some examples of how this thinking plays out in practice - the people who want to mobilise a group to come down on individuals for social improprieties/organise public shamings are usually highly intolerant and, frankly, often seem to be motivated by hate. These are the instincts that power mob actions for generations. It is pretty routine, I'm not going to claim its in any way uncommon. I'm not even going to claim these legophobes are doing it, I haven't read today's article :].

But if you want to know why people would be nervous about teachers getting a group together to talk about individual's "transgressions" then this is the argument for why it is bad. It is inculcating a political opinion for how to handle social tension that is arguably bad.

> Which society are you thinking of? This is certainly not a fair description of the USA at any point in its history or of “Legotown”.

The US has a great track record. There aren't many countries where minorities do as well as the US. China is basically an ethnostate, India I'm not sure about, then suddenly in at #3 population we've got diversity central in the USA and the airwaves are chock-full of people arguing about how to make life better for minorities. Very attractive migration destination too (USA #1 and all that). Not exactly the sort of ranking that an intolerant country can manage.

> I'm sure that the children of the Nintendo generation frequently discussed the power dynamic of King Koopa's dictatorship over the Mushroom Kingdom, and the systematically oppressed Shyguys, who have to cover their faces in public.

Well... yes, they did? Sure, not all of them, but there's plenty of fanfiction out there on the topic, and the gaming industry as a whole has devoted more than a little bit of effort to deconstructing, reconstructing, and generally exploring the implications of everything from fantasy kingdoms to the impact of game levels themselves on the player.

I think close to no children thought this at the time.

It's adults that wrote all of the fan fiction, supported the industry, etc. after.

Adults don't spring out of the ether fully-formed.

I didn't say or imply that. What point are you trying to make here?

I was absolutely writing fan fiction as a nine-year-old.

I certainly expressed my contempt for level design that oppressed my agency and contentment as a nine-year-old. It was clearly a stealthy form of WWII retribution on the part of Japanese game developers intent on frustrating and humiliating American youth.

I say, let the kids learnt these dynamics naturally without adult suggestions. These political ideas emerge from fundamental ways of social behavior. Let the kids learn these from a bottom up approach rather than a possibly flawed and skewed top down approach.

have you ever worked with young children? the method you propose will lead to bullying and fights. there needs to be some moderation.

Usually that's the goal of people that suggest this kind of treatment of children. It's usually backed up by a circular is-ought that the kids who are the victims in the bullying and faults are culpable and ought to become stronger if they wish to avoid that happening to them.

There has long been this subculture of actively encouraging bullying amongst children in order to "weed out the weak", and it's disgusting every time it's suggested.

What does weeding out the weak even mean here? Like they might identify the ones who aren't good at defending themselves, but then what? Are they planning on taking all the weak children out back and putting them down?

It's a flavour of social darwinism. The argument essentially goes that you encourage darwinian evolution of society where the weak are indeed weeded out, and that we should encourage people to "evolve" and become "strong".

In my experience it's usually a rationalisation by those who wished to do the thing already, but now even more than apathy, there's a moral obligation to bully people, which is quite appealing if you want to do those things.

Your comment doesn’t appear to answer any of the questions in the one it’s replying to.

Sure, then a bunch of kids end up learning the lesson "I'm better than my peers" and a bunch of other kids end up learning the lesson "My peers are always out to hurt me".

my early adulthood was totally screwed because of just that. I learned some bad coping mechanisms, because nobody took what happened seriously.

Dress it up in fancy words all you (or they) like, but teachers told kids to share 30 years ago too.

As a matter of fact, yes, we NES latchkey kids actually did discuss the social dynamics of the Super Mario world.

maybe not. but children do experience power imbalances in their own lives, particularly when dealing with their peers. and it's valuable to learn how to identify them, and how to build better systems that benefit everybody.

>> We saw the decimation of Lego-town as an opportunity to launch a critical evaluation of Legotown and the inequities of private ownership and hierarchical authority on which it was founded.

Please note that the situation was resolved by the teachers utilising their position of power to impose the change they wanted. They want democracy and egalitarianism but it turns out they needed authority to impose that.

Highly ironic.

Teachers are "authority figures" because their knowledge of education is recognized, accepted, and legally certified. Children ages 5-9 are not always capable of self-governance and sometimes need the guidance of an authority figure to resolve conflicts.

The "change they wanted" was for social harmony among students, and it was accomplished using rules that the children created and agreed upon.

The Legotown “leaders”/“builders” that the teachers disempowered were authority figures because their knowledge of Legos was recognized and accepted by the other children. There wasn’t much conflict (just submissive acceptance of the builder’s governance by the non-builders, and animated discussions on what to build together between the builders) until the teachers intentionally synthesized some with their Lego “game” in order to engrain their own preconceived biases (“critical judgments about people who have wealth and financial ease”) into the kids.

Very similar how communist revolutions happen. Inequalities are identified the people rise up and everything gets burned to the ground. All the old leaders removed and need inequalities spring from the ages.

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