Why kids are afraid to ask for help | Hacker News Reader

Why kids are afraid to ask for help

scientificamerican.com

175 pointsBender121 comments

I'm somewhat of a slow learner, and one of the main reasons I would rarely ask for help was because people are not as helpful as they think they are. Most of the time it's a lazy attempt to answer questions at the surface level only, and attempting to follow up with further question ends in frustration quickly. People think they're helpful but in fact have small amounts of patience generally speaking. This was obvious when I was student of really good teachers who made sure to answer literally any question without judgement.

Unless you're asking someone who has great confidence in their knowledge, asking a question can lead to an unpleasant situation. I've always scratched my head at this, since to me it's no problem to admit ignorance, but I've come to learn this isn't the case for most people, especially in front of others (i.e. a meeting).

IMHO, getting others to ask more questions starts by allowing others to ask you anything without thinking it has multiple layers of meaning and/or intention.

> I've always scratched my head at this, since to me it's no problem to admit ignorance, but I've come to learn this isn't the case for most people, especially in front of others (i.e. a meeting).

Leaving ego aside, there's plenty of societal conditioning that explains this too. The negative feelings you may feel by not knowing something (i.e. in a meeting, or in a class...) can certainly plausibly be connected to being reprimanded for not knowing something. It's definitely the bizarre case that not having an immediate answer for something can result in "losing" an argument. Obviously this isn't the way it should be, but it certainly is the way it is many time, whether that be in low stakes argument about a TV show in a bar or a high stakes discussion about what technology you should use. But it goes back even further than that I think. In many ways, our entire school structure is designed around the idea that your success is tied to your ability to answer questions on the spot. Political debates are the same way, right? The reality is that the answer to every question in a debate should be some version of "well, I'd go and ask my cabinet and consult experts in this area..." So I don't think it should be that surprising that it makes people uncomfortable to not know something.

Right, good point. I was being a little salty thinking of workplace environments, especially large companies where this "ask more questions" is often said, yet it's not true and can get you in trouble sometimes. I've had experiences with a boss at the time, where asking too many questions on a new task would seem like an avoidance of work or lack of confidence in getting it done. The team had a mindset of "ask anything", yet in some contexts they would interpret questions in a negative light because I guess it can seem like something is wrong and work is not getting done.

>Political debates are the same way, right?

I think a debate is something you can only have between parties that have similar goals (axioms) but different methods. Like a scientific debate, everyone shares the same information and same the goal of reaching understanding but they are split on the methods to interpret that information.

Usually in politics, opposing parties enter a debate with irreconcilable goals, so they are are incentivized to disagree with each other no matter what, this leads to a situation where the discussion is centered around "zingers" and rhetoric to give the impression that some side is winning and "gaining ground" against the other. The presidential debate, for example, is not really so much a debate but a platform for candidates to state their viewpoints and signal to their demographics.

It's all foolishness-- to think that we can settle normative questions with positive arguments. I mean, sometimes positive arguments can influence us to change our minds, but the normative doesn't flow from some kind of axiomatic interpretation of positive statements and facts.

We can only start to get close where we can agree on outcomes we want-- then we can start to weigh policies and see whether they get us closer to them.

this is their problem, people should get useful information

The ability to quickly answer a question is related to knowing the answer. The school system teaches students enough facts ("When Boston has been founded?") that the idea of a quick known answer sticks.

Certainly most interesting questions don't have a known answer. Some have answers that can be quickly inferred from known things; the ability to quickly come up with such reasoning chains is also prized.

But a lot of more interesting.questions can only be answered after some thought and consulting with sources. For many people, receiving such a question from a beginner is uncomfortable: they and onlookers expect beginners to ask simple questions with well-known answers.

I experience this too. People would literally rather make things up than admit they don't know or are not sure. Or they dress up a shallow/obvious response with impressive words and people accept it as a great answer.

yah, after a while, asking for help feels like reaching frontline tech support (or first-page google results) over and over and getting the "did you restart?" answer. it's often not only not helpful, but a real drag on finding a useful answer.

in daily life, folks intrinsically tend to curate others who give them good answers (information), and that's how such 'masters'[0] gain real esteem. typically you realize through experience what questions these 'masters' can answer well and what they can't, leading to genuine social bonds (trust is the real social currency but trust and good information tend to go hand-in-hand). this esteem is so valuable that others game our social systems to get it falsely, which is why social media is such a shitshow (not because of poor moderation as many seem to believe, since moderation doesn't actually change what people believe, except maybe at the margin, but esteem does).

basically, people who can answer questions well deserve esteem. the social awkwardness you describe come from people who don't deserve the esteem but want it (or worse, think they deserve it) anyway. and incidentally, the prevalence of this awkwardness is a dependable sign of social degradation (low-trust to low-ethics vicious cycle), as people generally have no problem admitting ignorance in high-trust environments.

[0]: i resist the term 'expert' for being thoroughly subverted by fake esteem seekers and mediopolitical propagandists.

I experienced this a lot as a kid. Adults tend to leave out a lot of context in their answers to children. Often, it seems like they don’t even try to see the question from the child’s point of view. For instance, I didn’t do well in school. When I asked adults why doing well was necessary, they would give answer along the lines of “if you don’t do well, then the only job you’ll be able to get is as a janitor.” Perhaps that’s true, (or not?) but the answer was largely devoid of meaning to me as a child.

Adults tend to leave out a lot of context in their answers to anyone.

Even knowing this, I constantly have to step back, sometimes a number of times, to explain the background of the background before then getting into the actual details of the "thing" I'm supposed to be explaining.

Working on a project for X months and then having to compress and abstract that knowledge into a 30 minute introduction to a group of people staring from a clean slate is a gig that requires more preparation than expected or allowed for.

I try to give kids honest answers, but there's a chasm of missing metacognition and unshared context that is hard to bridge.

I speak of spending a lot of time at work. And argue that developing intellectual interest and stamina that supports one feeling good during that time is one of the most viable / likely paths to live a happy, fulfilled life.

It's still a huge leap of imagination. How can you tell a kid what being in a dead-end job that you hate is like? It may not sound too unlike what you're asking them to do, burying themselves in their studies.

So we can talk about finding the interesting parts of studies--- interesting subjects. History as stories. Writing as imagination. Math as trying to figure things out. It's immediate and also hits the important part of the argument. As Csikszentmihaly said, “Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.”

And now that I'm a teacher, I try to run classes that have a whole lot of the things that I liked best in other work, and to share them with kids.

> Math as trying to figure things out.

I think Maths (and physics) education is better when teachers also add some of its history. Most of maths was discovered for some need and lot of people working in the domain had really funny lives. Some anecdotes linked to some theorem or formula could make them easier to remember for certain students.

:D I need to do this more.

I taught upper quartile 5th graders contest math. Talking about Gauss adding up the series 1, 2, 3,... 100 quickly and frustrating their teacher really resonates with them.

Also telling about Hippasus allegedly being drowned by the Pythagorean cult for showing irrationality of sqrt(2) is always exciting :D A lot of middle schoolers love the slightly gruesome.

Admitting ignorance has political impact in many organization. If you’re not playing much of the political game it’s not an issue.

If you’re trying to put yourself in a pedestal and gain influence without going the long way of building trust though consistent delivery, successfully getting away from situations where you have to admit powerlessness or ignorance is a valuable skill.

Seems like you're describing a lack of integrity. I think it important that we remember, people / institutions / things that lack integrity tend to fall apart.

I think it's less black and white than that.

Politics exist in every organization with more than 3 people and a lot of people, and I am not sure to agree with your point on the lack of integrity.

To go to an extreme, our govs are severely lacking of integrity but aren't falling apart: there is some level of gross that will happen in any sufficiently large group, and properly navigating these situations is a valuable skill that is needed to get any decent progress inside these groups. You won't become a manager/high level clerk/elected official through sheer integrity, and these positions still need to be filled by competent people.

I'm not saying everyone needs to play weird games, just that's it a complex situation with no single guideline.

This is in my opinion, doublespeak to some degree. I used to view it this way. Ultimately our governments reward lack of integrity - the evil king rises to power faster than a good king (perhaps term limits in western democracy play a role here) but ultimately honesty and integrity will, by the nature of their immutable consistency, always eventually triumph given sufficient effort. However - in an environment owned by the dishonest this often wont be realised, particularly if the risks are too high. What we are left with IS a lack of integrity being one key to one success in these scenarios. The question is... is that the life you want to lead? Stalin existed with total control, but ultimately everyone lied to him out of fear. He was successful from a human aquiring resources perspective, but. Is that a world someone wants to live in?

Most of Stalin's subjects didn't really get a choice in the matter...

I don't think this is what you're talking about, but sometimes I purposefully leave out key details that I know a child can figure out. It's a little puzzle for them, and teaches them to think for their answers instead of just expecting them from someone else, fully formed.

> since to me it's no problem to admit ignorance, but I've come to learn this isn't the case for most people, especially in front of others (i.e. a meeting).

I do not think this is case. Most people are perfectly fine saying "I don't know" in a professional context. At least that's my experience.

The only times I can remember when someone seemed to be uncomfortable admitting some lack of knowledge is when we get new team members, because doing so requires a certain amount of trust. As an older member, highlighting your own ignorance will put others at ease within minutes though. "What have you been working with before? Ah! Never got to use it myself." or even just pretending you don't know some technical detail, quickly looking it up during a call.

I struggle to picture what working with software developers would be like if we couldn't admit ignorance. It would probably be a complete disaster.

This first happened to me in school. I had the misfortune of many rather incompetent teachers. Asking them genuinely interested follow-up questions would more often than not be met with an annoyed generalization. Still persisting to extract an answer reliably put them in punishment mode, so I quickly learned not to do that. Consequently, I lost all respect for them and the system. I was being punished for being curious.

A similar dynamic plays out everywhere, to this day. It can easily become a paralyzing minefield, especially when “safe spaces” are involved.

When I find myself in a potentially uncomfortable position like this, I remember the single most useful advice I’ve ever gotten from a sales coach: whenever you’re in the spotlight answering questions, be well prepared but remember that you cannot know everything. If you don’t know something this instant, say so. Compliment on the question if it’s a good one, offer to find out, then follow up personally. Instant pressure reliever, professional conduct and wise guy filter all in one.

> Unless you're asking someone who has great confidence in their knowledge

Or are ready to admit they don't know and will look for the answer with you.

Yet another example of trying to solve psychological/emotional issues through cultural changes. The root problem is low self-esteem; it's internal, not external; it takes deep inner work, not a change in social norms and teacher behavior. It affects some kids deeply, and some not at all. It's not "caused" by the culture or the environment, but by parenting.

Psychology is stuck in a weird place. Most cultural knowledge of "self-esteem" comes from self-help crap, when it should be coming from psychologists. What if we lived in a world where everyone knows how to recognize low self-esteem, how to interact with insecure people effectively, and how to help them build their self-esteem durably, as opposed to these proto-team-building-exercises they're proposing here? The traditional thinking is that you fix emotional issues through therapy sessions; but if we changed the culture to become more emotions-aware, people would know how to help each other and themselves far better. The fact that so many pop-psychology books sell so much, is proof that there's a deep need for this.

Some studies say 70-80% of people have some degree of low self-esteem. Depending on the study, 50-70% of the whole population have an attachment disorder, and literally lack the ability to form healthy emotional bonds. You don't fix that through culture. "Instructors could create activities in which each student becomes an 'expert' on a different topic"? Come on man. They have to let go of the old DSM-5 model of "10-15 of the population is crazy, everyone else is perfectly fine". Psychologists have a far bigger role to play in society than they currently do.

Fixing psychological and emotional problems through cultural change just doesn't solve anything. Fix the root cause. You would literally fix both the low self-esteem that inhibits people from asking questions, and the bullying that results from being seen as "dumb".

> but if we changed the culture to become more emotions-aware, people would know how to help each other and themselves far better.

> Fixing psychological and emotional problems through cultural change just doesn't solve anything.

By my reading, the two quotes are in direct opposition to one other. It sounds like you are advocating for cultural change - just a different type/approach than is currently used?

It's more profound than that, I'll restate:

Cultural change that addresses behaviors or focuses on other external factors can't work; that's outside-in cultural change.

But if you want to fix issues on a systemic, national, or worldwide level (which is the goal here), you do need some kind of cultural change.

Cultural change that focuses on inside-out psychology (not the movie) is what I call "psychological change"; the cultural element is just the "trojan horse" through which any systemic change must happen.

Example:

- banning magazines that show excessively thin models, because girls "become insecure when they look at them", is the thinking I denounce. If they had high self-esteem they couldn't be affected by a magazine cover. If they have low self-esteem, they will be. But the magazine is blamed, and legislation and activist momentum focuses on that. The self-esteem problem doesn't get solved, just displaced. Exactly the same with the "Instagram harms teen girls' mental health" viewpoints. That's only a problem because 80% of the population has low self-esteem and is unaware of it. Shouldn't that be fixed?

Implement a culture where people, for example:

- know the signs of low self-esteem

- know exactly how to address it in themselves, without pop-psych quakery or needing to pay for therapy sessions

- know how to address it in others

- know what assertiveness looks like, and how to do it

- know how to problem-solve personal or relationship problems

- know how to effectively interact to defensiveness, depression, argumentativeness, egotism, insincerity, power struggles, irresponsibility, prejudice, whatever; without getting upset at the other person; how to assert boundaries when faced with people like that, and how to help them

- how to evaluate others' emotional health, so people can make more informed choices in mates and spouses

- know how to evaluate if their relationships are healthy, and what to do about it if they're not

- how to grieve effectively

- could go on, and on.

So many of society's problems come from psychological illiteracy. Again, people's obsession with pop-psychology proves that people see a big need in learning more. Sadly, the pop-psychology craze mostly focuses on superficial things like self-talk, or on trying to, for example, "spot" signs of Narcissism or psychopathy in other people, to try to "protect oneself" from these people; it's not deep enough and doesn't get people to actually understand themselves and each other better; just to project various medical labels onto others and themselves (self-diagnose). What I'm proposing is outside that framework of "mentally ill vs normal" and focuses on empathically learning more about oneself and others and ultimately being able to help each other.

The cultural change is just meant to address that; it's a change in awareness and knowledge, not in behavior.

Can we be confident that 70-80% of people having low self esteem is not a cultural problem, and can't be fixed by cultural changes as you suggest ?

> It's not "caused" by the culture or the environment, but by parenting.

I don't think you can treat people's parenting behavior as being a non-environment-influenced thing.

This is deeper than self-esteem issues. It very much has to do with cultural norms.

I wrote more in another comment, but just a few examples:

- Dr. Carol Dewek has studied the difference between kids with "growth mindset" and "achievement mindset". The kids with "growth mindset" do not have the same kind of relationship with failure than the ones with "achievement mindset". Framed this way, it might be more accurate to say that kids with achievemement mindset are afraid to ask for help as early as 5 years old.

- Indigenous families, and other cultures like Japan, cultivate independence in their toddlers. The indigenous families incorporate a toddler's natural inclination to help into building skills for chores, with real stakes. Knowing tha their contribution actually matters, they develop both intrinsic motivation as well as a self-esteem that is internalized rather than requiring validation from something outside of them.

- Montessori emphasizes developing a child's capacity to be independent

These are all different than the mainstream modern culture in the US. For example, a modern parent in the US might feel time-pressure and so it is easier to do the household chores instead of taking the time to incorporate the toddler.

My toddler is not yet 2, and is already helping me feed the dogs and cats. He not only wants to do this, he gets upset when he can't. What's surprising for me is that, doing those chores with him turns those chores from something mechanical to something that's enjoyable for me. It's very much possible to do for a modern family.

So yes, I think this very much is something in the culture, with the poor self-esteem being a symptom of the culture.

Some cultures are more aware of emotional health than others, and some cultural practices favor good emotional health while others favor emotional neglect. No question.

But all the examples you give, I'd put in the "psychological change" category, not the "cultural change" category. Those are the things I support; and there's not enough focus on them. I'll admit my wording causes confusion; see my other reply.

I think what you're highlighting is extremely different from what I refer to as cultural change, like let's say the "body positivity movement", where people have pre-existing low self-esteem, which leads to self-neglect and emotional eating, which leads to weight gain, and they're focused on the superficial problem (feeling embarrassed by being fat) rather than the core issue (being fat because of low emotional health). "Every fat cell is an unshed tear." That perfectly highlights the ineffectiveness of superficial cultural change, over deep psychology-based change like the examples you give.

And to address your last point: low self-esteem is caused mostly by poor parental emotional health; you can put kids in Montessori schools, but if they don't develop healthy attachment to their parents, it'll only help on the margin. The change needs to be even deeper than that.

The article we're commenting on doesn't mention kids' self-esteem as being a factor at all; or the obvious observation that some kids are afraid of being judged, while some aren't. It treats it as a cultural problem that's easily solved by culture, rather than a deeper psychological/emotional problem that can be addressed long-term by deeper cultural change; really, it ignores the psychological dimension completely. Clearly, most academic psychologists are missing the mark here.

The reason parents in the US tend to have children with "achievement mindset" is because the culture itself rewards and favors achievements instead of growth.

The reason parents in the US don't invest time with their toddlers is because they feel they don't have time. They don't have time because it is typically about career success (achievement), wealth, status, and so forth. Or in other social classes, it's just overwhelming to just be able to barely survive. Culturally, American has one of the highest overworked population (it is cultural because that is the generally accepted norm), scores among the highest for individualism (instead of collectivism). Those all play into how people parent.

And don't get me started on the idea of free range parenting. In this day and age, in America, letting the kids out to play in the streets can get you, as the parent, arrested for neglect and censured by the neighbors. Those are all part of the cultural norms. To do what you suggest at the psychological level requires pushing back against those cultural norms, some with legal consequences.

You are welcomed to define all of this as psychology, but I think if you talked with sociologists and other people, they would tell you these are cultural rather than psychological factors.

It's not stopping my wife and I from parenting my kid in the way we think is best for them. But I'm not blind to the fact that I am going against the grain of cultural norms and generally accepted behavior, beliefs, and practices of the mainstream US culture.

Maybe the difference in what you two are is that psychological is often internal to one person whereas cultural can be internal to many people.

For example, me working on the fear that I have to open up publicly because my house was robbed when I lived overseas and was a semi-celebrity can be my personal psychological journey. The collective "don't share too much about your private life online" could a collective cultural belief stemming from many different experiences that impacted individuals to have such beliefs and fears.

I've been thinking a lot about whether to change culture (group) or change psychology (individual) and my latest belief on this is that I want to get better at loving myself and loving others and then train the handful of people who also want to do that, with the idea being that if a few of us start, it may spread to others, this going from the individual to group, maybe psychological to cultural.

I don't necessarily like the psych/cultural distinction, as I think both often influence how I'm feeling. Scared to post because I might get robbed again, also scared to post because people may resond with "you shouldn't post things like that online."

So I think maybe it's both. However I still like the idea of starting with me and maybe a few others who really really want to get better at it and maybe influence by osmosis.

> So I think maybe it's both. However I still like the idea of starting with me and maybe a few others who really really want to get better at it and maybe influence by osmosis.

That's how I approach this too.

> The reason parents in the US tend to have children with "achievement mindset" is because the culture itself rewards and favors achievements instead of growth.

Self-confidence comes from achievement; there's no conflict between the two. That's again my distinction between culture (emulation, "you must achieve lots", which leads to burnt out kids) and psychology ("I'm confident in my abilities; I can achieve what I want if I work hard at it"). High-confidence kids will inherently want to achieve. There's no conflict; studies show that Asian kids have more of a growth mindset than other kids. Conditioning parental love to achievement is what's unnecesary and harmful.

And I think my reply to another commenter addresses the "culture-psychology" distinction better. I'm talking about cultural change meant to improve the psychological nurturance-level of families, schools, communities, which I call "psychological change" as shorthand. I'm criticizing cultural change that's psychologically illiterate, and treats the problems it solves as cultural problems rather than psychological problems. "Teach men not to rape", for example, is cultural change that completely ignores all psychological dimensions ("rape culture", i.e. trivializing sexual assault, is just a symptom of emotionally unhealthy people, not a cause). Same with the ADL's pyramid of hate, that sees "fear of difference" and "lack of self-reflection on privilege" as the root causes, when the real problems are emotional and psychological problems within society (lack of empathy) that lead to hate and bigotry.

Cultural change needs to be deeply informed by psychology to be effective. People are emotionally unhealthy, and the culture reflects that. Culture is downstream from psychology. Cultural change can address it, but only by causing psycohlogical change, not merely cultural change. Re-analyzing the examples above: reacting to bigoted people with hatred and ostracism is just another symptom our low-nurturance society. It's cultural change without psychological change. Buddhists had it right all along. Is that clearer?

> Self-confidence comes from achievement

Perhaps you should lookup what Carol Dewek means by "achievement mindset" and "growth mindset". I don't think the way you are using it is the same that she is using it.

Self-confidence, self-esteem that is built from a process of intrinsic motivation is different than self-esteem built from extrinsic motivation. The self-esteem built from extrinsic motivation is shaky, and requires a constant feeding of validation.

The mainstream culture is such that kids, many parents, and some teachers understand self-esteem as you do, without making a distinction between how it is developed.

> Cultural change needs to be deeply informed by psychology to be effective.

I'm not arguing with you there. An individual is nested within the community. It also means you cannot really separate psychology from culture either.

Keep in mind, I have not once advocated that we change the culture. I am simply stating that the culture matters.

> People are emotionally unhealthy, and the culture reflects that. Culture is downstream from psychology. Cultural change can address it, but only by causing psycohlogical change, not merely cultural change.

That's an assumption that is not necessarily true. Psychology can also reflect culture, and it is not such a straightforward cause-and-effect. It's easy to see it as a hierarchical relationship (downstream vs. upstream), and to the extent that individuals are nested within a community, that's true. However, there are complex interaction between individuals and the communities they nest within. Just as you see that psychological changes must be taken into consideration for cultural change to be effective, cultural changes must be taken into consideration too as the context of that change. A tree is not just the trunk, the branches, the roots and the trees; it is also the sunlight, the soil, the wind, the seasons, the people ...

The way you talk about culture and culture change seems like a cynical observation of business buzzspeak. The way I have been talking about culture and culture change is more along the lines of sociology.

> Buddhists had it right all along.

That's a rabbit hole all on its own. Psychological changes are difficult to enact without mindfulness ... likewise, there's a collective consciousness (culture) in which changees are difficult to enact without mindfulness. Metta (loving-kindness) is powerful transformative, and the Mahayana practitioners ardently go all the way with that ... but what's also transformative is a neutral, agnostic attitude of "let the cosmos decide". Not everyone, even within the diverse practices of Buddhism, aspires to be a Bodhisattva. And then I can get into the whole bit about "consensus" or "nice" Buddhism that seems to be the Western, pop understanding of Buddhism ... And then there is also how Buddhist practices cultivates a non-dual perspective, in which no single part can be completely separated from the Whole. You can't separate the tree from the sun or the land. That there is a seamless Whole is the basis for metta in the first place ...

> Is that clearer?

Are you asking if you are communicating your point of view clearer, or are you saying that your point of view is more correct than mine's, and asking me if that correctness is clearer?

> Perhaps you should lookup what Carol Dewek means by "achievement mindset" and "growth mindset". I don't think the way you are using it is the same that she is using it.

No, I meant confidence comes from achievements, not "achievement mindset" (maybe you mean "fixed mindset"? Dweck never talked about "achievement mindset"). "A process of intrinsic motivation" is fuzzy-thinking gibberish to me. Confidence is the belief that you can accomplish things to an acceptable level, which comes from setting goals and achieving them. If you think I agree with "mainstream culture" on self-esteem then you clearly completely misunderstand me. Mainstream culture seems barely aware that self-esteem exists, and TFA is a perfect example.

>> Cultural change needs to be deeply informed by psychology to be effective.

>I'm not arguing with you there.

Then the rest of your post seems like a disagreement on semantics, because that's my entire point. People who try to address psychological problems on a solely cultural level are causing harm. People who address psychological problems through psychological changes accomplished through cultural changes are effective; but academia today, including most psychologists, rely on such fuzzy thinking and poor logic that they don't even realize the difference.

> Are you asking if you are communicating your point of view clearer, or are you saying that your point of view is more correct than mine's, and asking me if that correctness is clearer?

Obviously the former, because we're clearly talking past each other.

> "A process of intrinsic motivation" is fuzzy-thinking gibberish to me.

Ok, I'm curious. Why do you think that is fuzzy-thinking gibberish to you?

> , I meant confidence comes from achievements

Confidence coming from achievements is a terrible foundation for real confidence.

I did all kinds of things, and still found ways to doubt myself or think my purpose was exhausted.

Confidence from enjoying growth and knowing I can improve and be valuable no matter what the outcome of what I'm doing now is a much more solid footing. Plus, it makes me try harder, too, instead of having my "achievements" called into question by each failure.

> Obviously the former, because we're clearly talking past each other.

While this happens sometimes, that doesn't look like what's happening here. The other party here is incorporating your ideas into their framework to try to create a combined vision; you're mostly just disagreeing, sometimes with hostility.

> ("rape culture", i.e. trivializing sexual assault, is just a symptom of emotionally unhealthy people, not a cause)

It can be. But you can also be completely emotionally healthy and lack understanding of another person's perspective (or lack the cultural context to care) and cause tremendous harm.

We don't have the mental or emotional bandwidth to put ourselves in everyone else's shoes. The cultural norms we have are shortcuts to respect people's interests without that cognitive load.

Thinking and emoting is slow and fallible -- as Whitehead said, "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments."

Anything related to psychological or emotional are never that black and white. Every thing mentioned in the article could on a spectrum. Teachers and classmates could range from supportive to downright mean and it could change across every school/class/individual basis. The atmosphere at home matters a lot too. So establishing a base cultural norm is not a bad thing. Issues like this are already difficult to solve at a group level so as a society these norms will help us establish a base expectations in terms of norms and that would make it a little better to theorize.

Self esteem can be fixed by simple things like being more attractive, more intelligent and/or more popular. We should just use genetic engineering to achieve these things as soon as possible.

Self-esteem is also influenced by height, colour, gender, ethnic background, religious background, etcetera.

OP seems to think not only that good parenting can beat external social influences, but that perfect parenting is simply a matter of deciding to be perfect. OP probably blames parents for all negative psychological outcomes for children: “It's not ‘caused’ by the culture or the environment, but by parenting”.

What you’re talking about is confidence that others will like you, not a sense that you matter. The latter is self esteem, the former is compensating (or perhaps ingroup).

If you have a deep sense that you matter and that your value to society comes from who you are, then people being shitty to you because you’re short and the wrong shade won’t prevent you from showing up and taking up space.

It’s called _self_ esteem.

It's called delusion. Your survival and quality of life depends on others liking you so we were selected to optimize for being liked by others.

Case in point the Queen Elizabeth died at 96 but given her quality of life in terms of novelty and free luxury stuff of the highest kind (and in all realms ranging from mansions to yachts to castles to planes to jewelery) she lived like 2000 years of a regular person life. All that because she was liked by millions of people (or the institution of monarchy is)

Being liked by others is the only thing that matters for quality of life purposes, if you aren't then feeling shitty is a safety mechanism which promopts you to action and to pursue likeability to get some quality of life and not waste the precious little time that you have been given.

I assume (hope?) that this is tongue in cheek, but it’s worth pointing out that there are tons of insecure people who are also beautiful, intelligent, and popular with their peers.

One important thing to realize is that none of those things actually exist; beautiful and intelligent are entirely relative. They can also be sources of friction; people get bullied for being smart, there’s a strong stereotype that beautiful people are actually stupid but that people tell them they’re smart because they’re hot, etc. There’s also the Ivy League problem; when your self esteem is based on being smarter than everyone else and then you get surrounded by other smart people it can tank your self confidence.

Self esteem is about realizing that your value is not derived from other’s opinion of you. That’s why it’s called self esteem.

Um, if 70% to 80% of people have "low self-esteem", isn't that just "normal" self-esteem?

Please don't take my comment as snark, I'm asking this in all seriousness. When most people possess some psychological trait, perhaps we should ask ourselves if this is just the way people are? And perhaps the cure is worse than the disease?

Is it possible that encouraging typical people to have "higher self esteem" will result in increased narcissism, entitlement or overconfidence? And maybe that overconfidence, when it hits the reality that they are not, in fact, better (along some arbitrary axis) at something vs most other people, their ego shatters? I don't know, but...

To be clear, I'm not trying to assert a position here. I'm open to being very wrong about the thesis behind the above questions.

I suspect that percentage varies significantly between geographic and cultural regions.

Further, "normal" typically means that not only is a status common, but that it does not interfere with daily life. Even if 100% of kids have low self esteem, it is "low" and not "normal" because, by definition, it interfers with common social interactions and daily tasks.

>Even if 100% of kids have low self esteem, it is "low" and not "normal" because, by definition, it interfers with common social interactions and daily tasks.

What does "interfers with common social interactions and daily tasks" mean? It's hard to talk about self-esteem in a superlative way (you can be too cocky), so let's talk about another trait: attention. I'm sure that everyone could do better in life if they have superhuman levels of attention, but most people only have normal levels of attention. If with superhuman levels of attention you could study and get 95% on a test, but with average levels of attention you could only study enough to get 80% on a test, does that mean count as "interfering" with your academic ability? Is it just some arbitrary grade cut-off? What if you're so attention deficient that you can't focus on a task for more than 10 minutes, but it's fine because you also happen to be a genius that only needs 10 minutes of studying to get 80%?

There are formal definitions for attention deficit disorder, no need for the contrived example.

>There are formal definitions for attention deficit disorder

Have you looked at the DSM-5? The wording there is vaguer than you think. For instance

>1. Inattention: Six (or more) of the following symptoms have persisted for at least 6 months to a degree that is inconsistent with developmental level and that negatively impacts directly on social and academic/occupational activities:

> a. Often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, at work, or during other activities (e.g., overlooks or misses details, work is inaccurate).

What does "negatively impacts" mean? What does "often" mean?

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t3/

A lot of ADHD/autistic folks (including me) will note that a primary frustration with the DSM-5 is that it defines our conditions in terms of the things that frustrate other people rather than in terms of what we actually experience and how it affects us.

Lots of our behaviors "interfere with common social interactions"... if that interaction is with a neurotypical person who expects us to conform to their values. Differences in values and communication style are framed as something diseased that we need to change, rather than something different where we need to create mutual understandings.

I like those questions. "Normal" just means norm, so yes, it's the norm to be relatively-to-significantly emotionally unhealthy. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to achieve a world where 80-90% of the world has secure, high self-esteem, and treats the remaining 10% of people with kindness and patience.

> Is it possible that encouraging typical people to have "higher self esteem" will result in increased narcissism, entitlement or overconfidence?

Absolutely; that's what the "self-esteem movement" in U.S. schools last century did, which is now widely denounced as harmful, and it's a perfect example of bad cultural change that wasn't deeply informed by psychology but instead on emulating behaviors. Low self-esteem is in the unconscious mind. You can try to think and behave like a confident person, but it's all a facade, a new set of learned coping mechanisms, unless you develop deeper self-awareness of your psyche and "do the inner work."

"Good" cultural change means promoting true psychological awareness and inside-out change. Here's a more detailed example if you want:

Pleasant emotions occur when our emotional needs are satisfied. Unpleasant (not "negative") emotions point to unmet emotional or physical needs (that include shame, i.e. low self-esteem). All emotions are useful since they tell you what your emotional needs are and how well they're satisfied. If you're mostly unhappy, you either have low self-awareness (of your thoughts, emotions, and needs at any given time), i.e. you have difficulty consciously identifying what your needs are; or, you can identify them but lack the (learnable) problem-solving skills to satisfy these needs. There are superficial emotional needs, and you can learn to "dig down" to the primary emotional needs that cause them. Sometimes, part of your unconscious can still feel deep unworthiness despite objectively impressive real-world achievements; that can be fixed by integrating that part of your subconscious that is stuck in the past, and bringing it back in line with the rest of your unconscious through inner work. Children have developmental emotional needs, which most of them, most of their teachers, and most of their parents are unaware of, and teaching these needs to all of them would help them do better. Groups (families, classrooms, companies) range from high-nurturance (helps people satisfy their emotional needs) to toxic (prevents people from satisfying their needs); high-nurturing groups (e.g. classrooms) have many traits in common. Group toxicity is generally caused by group leaders being emotionally unhealthy, i.e. having a poor ability to satisfy their own emotional needs effectively.

If the culture was promoting these ideas, I don't think that would be a cure worse than the disease. Going back to the article: building confident children means improving families' nurturance levels, teaching kids how to recognize their own needs and their child's developmental needs, and how to meet them; building children that do that inner work, and who then won't be afraid of "looking dumb" in the first place; and will be secure enough that they won't feel shame if someone dislikes them, and can try to achieve mutual respect with whoever dislikes them without losing their integrity or boundaries. Sounds far deeper and more meaningful than what the article proposes, no?

Here's a resource that might interest you: http://sfhelp.org/site/premises.htm and http://sfhelp.org/cx/skills/dig.htm (the whole site looks very old; but it was recommended to me by someone on /r/Buddhism years ago and is filled with gems).

We are probably confusing two things in this comment:

* The healthy level of self esteem. (Normal as in ideal)

* The median level of self esteem. (Normal as in compared to others)

So we probably need better words. "SubOptimal" "Optimal" vs "Average" "Above Average" etc.?

A good comparison is what is the normal amount of sugar to consume per day? What is the healthy amount?

> by the culture or the environment, but by parenting.

uhm, so much of our culture and education comes directly from schools and media, not from our parents.

in fact, it's likely that most people learn not to ask question in a school-setting. hence we're (hoping that not anymore) in a culture that causes such low-self esteem by means of its educational institutions.

interactions with institutionally defined authority figures whose job is to teach (i.e. to parent you without the emotional bonds of your real parents) are a root cause.

the root cause is this culture which induces such problems with its relentless hirearchical control (authority) logic.

> Some studies say 70-80% of people have some degree of low self-esteem. Depending on the study, 50-70% of the whole population have an attachment disorder, and literally lack the ability to form healthy emotional bonds.

It's worth asking who gets to decide what "low self-esteem", "attachment disorder", and "healthy emotional bonds" are.

> Yet another example of trying to solve psychological/emotional issues through cultural changes. The root problem is low self-esteem; it's internal, not external; it takes deep inner work, not a change in social norms and teacher behavior. It affects some kids deeply, and some not at all. It's not "caused" by the culture or the environment, but by parenting.

I think it can be both. Surely our cultural influences and practices in childrearing (including by societal mechanisms like schooling) matter.

There's a huge pop in anxiety among youth, that no one quite knows the causes of (climate worries? increased academic pressure? social media? collapse of portions of the social fabric?). This massive rise indicates there's some degree of underlying change causing it, and raises the prospect we could change back or change to be even better.

> It's not "caused" by the culture or the environment, but by parenting.

Isn't the way people parent something mainly determined by culture and the environment?

But we towed them beyond the environment. They're not in the environment.

(sorry, I know I'm not supposed to be glib and off topic, but I can't resist a good reference to The Front Fell Off)

As an adult: it's not that I'm afraid of appearing incompetent in front of peers. I don't care about that. I just know that my peers are also having their own troubles and I don't want to add my trouble to theirs.

When I am truly stuck on something and can't guess what the problem is, then yes I will ask for help. I've found that probably 60% of the time (guesstimate), my peers would guess the same things that I already tried, tested, and failed. In doing so, they've duplicated the time spent trying to solve the problem. Maybe 20% of the time, while doing so, they might spot something that I missed. Maybe another 10% of the time, they'll think of something I hadn't. And the last 10%? Well, that just means it's time to refactor the problem set to avoid what can't be solved.

That of course changes if I enter a new problem domain. At that point, I most certainly ask peers for documentation and examples. If I hit a snag then I ask what I did wrong. Most often the cause ends up being inaccurate documentation.

As an adult: it's 80% because I'm afraid of looking incompetent in front of my peers.

It can be pretty painful to see people systematically dismiss anything you say, or always seek out a second opinion, for no other reason that they have a hard time believing anything reliable can come out of your mouth.

I won't let that happen again.

What's all this talk about peers? I just don't want to seem incompetent to my manager and get fired.

Not saying this is you but this reminded me of two types of people I've witnessed over the years. One of them I would look at as you say `incompetent`, while the other I'd say is `smart`.

You're new to something? Ask for pointers if you can't find something relatively quickly yourself. That's `smart`. You're new, the documentation might be inaccurate, out of date or not in the place you'd expect it unless you've already been at the company and learned their structure etc.

You're stuck on something and can't figure it out? Ask for some help to double check your own logic. Run them through all of the things you've already tried. This shows that you're not incompetent but have in fact already tried all those obvious things they'd ask you about. Also do actually run them through those steps, don't just talk about you having done them already. Sometimes you've overlooked something the first 2 times and showing it to someone else makes you notice (also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging if you'd like to first use a non-human just in case). You wouldn't believe the amount of times where I've been the helper and all I had to do to help was to ask them to run me through what they had already tried and the above happened. They showed me something as "and see I tried this and then it doesn't ... oooh" ;)

Do not ask for help on the exact same thing 5 times in a row. That definitely makes me think you're `incompetent`. Happens way too often too unfortunately.

Meh, what you call smart can be easily used against you. Many people fix their opinions of you quickly and won't change them later. Will instead seek to patronize you going forward no matter what you learned.

Learned that the hard way. I am not going to ask beginner questions in new social group. Way better is to Google them in the evening. People will treat you better as a result I swear.

I might not have been accurate enough. I don't mean to ask about things that are easily Googled. I really meant things that are company specific. If you ask me a question that I will then Google myself to answer you, I will also very probably form a not so great opinion of you, agreed. I also expect you not to wait until the evening to Google it if it gets you stuck right now.

Also I agree that not all companies reward this. Not all people do either and it's unfortunately necessary to 'hide your smarts' so to speak. That doesn't change my overall opinion though. At a good company / in a good team, you're going to be able to do that smart thing. And yes I see this all the time when onboarding new people. They're not used to it and 'hide' things. Ultimately it takes most of them way longer than it should to onboard and I might form a less than great opinion of them. On the contrary there was a team lead recently that asked lots and lots of "dumb questions" early on and asked them quickly as they came up. Instead of taking 2 weeks and still not being properly set up for everything, he was up and running without any issues within a day and could start working on stuff.

How does the new person distinguish between googlable question and company specific? They don't, especially if the tech is also new.

You yourself said you will judge new one badly of they make bad guess. There is no to little price for not asking. There is serious price for asking.

By actually Googling things?!

Your specific experience might be different from mine as well. In most places I have been there were lots of 'standard' things in use that were easily Google-able. You may also mainly work in languages that make it hard to find things you don't already have a mental model of (scripting languages, untyped languages etc.) vs. where I like working: typed languages where I can let the IDE guide me through. Frameworks that make things easily string searchable etc.

There's a price for not asking: To take the example I gave before. If you take 2 weeks to get up to "I can deploy code for development and debug it" that's a bad sign. If you're up an running in a day or two, you're usually golden.

So in the end, the actual advice is not to ask questions and hope for doing it by yourself. Also, people coming from dynamic languages won't ask a out IDE, because they are from environment where IDE helps much less and also where it is looked down at.

The stuff you claim one should ask about, is stuff that you team should explain to you in the first place. There is literally no reasonable question, just some workaround for "my team does not have Readme, won't tell me they have secret steps for running project and absurdly will blame me if I won't make it fast".

You said you don't trust your new social group yet. You've been burned too many times. You asked:

    How does the new person distinguish between googlable question and company specific

The answer to that is to try and Google it. If you get a result, it's probably Google-able and you can go further from that if you "don't trust the new social group yet". If you trust the group, ask them. You're the one that said they needed to be super cautious, so don't put that on me.

Do tell me, what stuff did I say one should ask about, that the team should explain in the first place? Why would these questions not be reasonable?

What I can tell you is that we have a `README.md` in every service. We have our onboarding docs directly in the source as well as markdown files. Every new developer's first PR is to improve the onboarding documentation. Regardless of that, most developers do find something to actually improve, even if it's just adding a cross-referencing link between docs or moving stuff around, so that it's documented in the right place in the onboarding flow. Of course, if your documentation is perfect for every situation and every type of person I commend you. In my experience, there's always one thing or another that someone doesn't understand or where a step is missing. Not because it's secret, but for example because everyone (so far) thought it was obvious. Take the example of a command you're supposed to run but replace one or more of the parameters with your own values.

So let's actually make an example of something where people should ask because it's not Googlable. Take an imaginary part of some setup documentation like for example

    Replace the parameter with your own baseUrl you chose in step 1 and run `someScript.sh https://example.com/yourBaseUrl` to create the basic setup.

And they literally copy and paste this without changing the parameter, even if the documentation tells them where to get this parameter from and to replace it before running. This is not "Google-able" if this is an internal script and while it's definitely on some level "not so smart", we've all misread something, skipped a sentence or overlooked a parameter that wasn't properly marked and I'd rather they just ask than take 3 hours doctoring around and not getting a single step further.

One improvement the next dev might make is to change it to

    Replace the parameter with your own baseUrl you chose in step 1 and run `someScript.sh <yourBaseUrl>` to create the basic setup.

You know what's gonna happen? Someone will come along and copy and paste this straight without thinking and take 3 hours to get anywhere.

> Way better is to Google them in the evening.

There's that tip that says that you should do your own research before asking a question and then ask the question in a way that shows you did this. That should improve the outcome in many situations.

In my case, it's not even fear of appearing incompetent. It's fear of being accused of or treated as if I'm incompetent when I'm clearly not. This past couple few decades the average population have become more and more downright vicious, cruel, and absolutely sure of themselves, even when they're utterly wrong about something they say or do, and as that problem grows, I become less able / willing to open myself up to that sort of potential abuse. I've got things rough enough already without that additional stress.

In addition, there's what a previous commenter said about knowing that others also have their own things they're dealing with, and I kinda don't wanna be the guy who adds to that any if I can avoid it (just in case they're not that other type of person I mention here).

hey hey, this is exactly what happened to my engineering career right here.

"This code will never be used."

"Oh, ok." proceeds to write garbage to test out various features and different ways of doing the same thing

"Hey, this code is garbage and lacks consistency. Lets show it to everyone to warn them about this guy. We won't mention it until letting him struggle a couple years, but make sure he doesn't get any interesting work."

This feels a bit like shouting directly into a brick wall, but the problem is school. Every year, millions of young children are abandoned by their families [1] far before they learn self-control and placed into the care of jailers [2] who teach them day in and day out that the laws of the Institution trump their needs and desires. Anyone who tries to change self-esteem or fear of collaboration without challenging the practice of giving information to children via the teacher-to-30-student-classroom method will never solve anything at scale, ever.

[1] The fact that there exist no good or pragmatic solutions to the abandonment does not mean the abandonment is not occurring. One of the earliest lessons that newly sentient modern children is "you need to leave your home and go to a place where you don't matter".

[2] The fact that some fraction of teachers are well-intentioned, and that some sub-fraction of those teachers are actually competent, does not change their role as wardens of controlled and numbered children.

I think the hyperbole is unhelpful. School can be a place of learning and discovery and joy (most of the time: nowhere is joyful 100% of the time). I admit most of our schools don't attain this.

Your answer doesn't leave any room for the improvement of school, merely to castigate the very idea of putting children together in classes.

At my school, kids are excited to show up Monday morning-- interesting things are happening in our classes. They come see me and play with robots and do real engineering. They get to see their friends and do sports and coursework that "feels real".

Sure, by the time Friday afternoon comes around, we're all done... but we'll be pretty excited to start it all again next week.

I think we just ran into each other just recently when I posted "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher", but some other guy started talking your ear off and I didn't feel like stepping in to offer my own opinions.

If you look at my response to another sub-commenter, you'll see a few of the things I'd like to add to school, some of which may appear more palatable to you than the abolition of the entire model.

Ultimately, I'm gratified that you're a good teacher, but regrettably not only are you one of the few, you also are kept far back from the actual effect you could be having on kids by confining your expertise to the schooling model. You sound more like a mentor that could clearly steer a high number of kids through life from early to late ages, and you could run events and study plans that go late into the night and through the summer. If you were unconstrained by the rules of the school and unbound by the need for a retirement savings account and health insurance, you could run your own always-open institute where you teach whatever you want to whoever is willing to come and listen. The results you'd see under such a model would wildly outstrip the ones you see in school.

My goal is to create a society filled with people like you--but that takes individuals who are parented well, and it can't be done under the factory schooling model, where the primary lesson learned is obedience to the institution.

The other thing I'd like to point out is that none of the activities you mentioned require school to exist for them to be performed. People visited, played sports and music, and investigated science well before every single child went to school. The difference then was that it didn't "feel real", it "was real". School only provides an age-segregated simulation of greater society, and the more time you spend in greater society the more inaccurate that simulation seems.

Regarding the hyperbole, I don't consider it to be hyperbole. Schools are constructed using the same techniques that prisons are constructed, the social cliques run similar to prisons, and in neither place are you allowed to leave or meaningfully challenge or change the rules of the institution. When you are in a school, you are not part of a thriving society, you are a subject that is managed according to the needs of the administration.

I actually like the school I'm at quite a bit and would say that my peer faculty are doing much the same thing.

> Ultimately, I'm gratified that you're a good teacher, but regrettably not only are you one of the few, you also are kept far back from the actual effect you could be having on kids by confining your expertise to the schooling model. You sound more like a mentor that could clearly steer a high number of kids through life from early to late ages, and you could run events and study plans that go late into the night and through the summer.

Yup, I do those things too. Did them before taking a teaching job, actually.

> If you were unconstrained by the rules of the school and unbound by the need for a retirement savings account and health insurance, you could run your own always-open institute where you teach whatever you want to whoever is willing to come and listen.

I got rich in industry. This is not a concern.

I impact a few hundred kids a year by being a teacher in a structured school. The other programs, etc, are a much smaller number.

> When you are in a school, you are not part of a thriving society, you are a subject that is managed according to the needs of the administration.

You know, we need to know where students are and to keep them safe, and different subjects/teachers need to "share". So there is a certain amount of structure.

BTW, we changed some things this past year with schedule, academic load, and structure. Students had a lot of say.

Why do you assume that impacting a few hundred kids per year is better for society than impacting a few dozen kids per year, or even a few kids?

I still do the other things.

I'm just also making a broader but somewhat smaller impact across many more. And the pool for the students who will best benefit from my time making a deeper connection and ending up in a more intensive program with me is much larger, improving the odds of "good matches".

There are some economies of scale and ancillary benefits, too. I can teach 15 competitive math kids about 40-50% of what I can teach two in the room in the same block of time.

(And some students benefit even more being 1-of-15, because e.g.

* think-pair-share is really, really powerful for recall and internalizing knowledge

* because an excited classroom of 15 often draws more effort out of students than one-on-one engagement

* because there are more "kinds of solutions" in the room and we can celebrate the remarkably varied approaches

Assuming we all agree that kids need education and to learn necessary skills what do you suggest?

Here in Sweden the school system is not perfect but it does offer a "slow start" for young kids, kindergarten class at the school building and the first few years without exams or homework.

Regrettably, none of my answers work in a modern western-style economy. However, if I am forced to keep everything else the same--taxes, healthcare, student loans, etc.--here are a few things that could help:

- slow start like you mentioned (also was done in famously education-forward Soviet Russia)

- allow schools to expel children

- increase availability and desirability of night school or other free public school for adults

- mandate school and district administrators to have experience teaching

- ban homework and introduce periods of time during school when work is expected

- remove all art and sports from school and reform them as independent free clubs to be participated in after or before school (unfortunately impossible in poorer districts)

- increase teacher salary

- more separation of students by skill level (tons of research showing that kids learn better when they're placed in small groups at a similar skill level, also easily observed anecdotally.) This should also be accomplished by mixing ages.

- ban grades, introduce final exams in specific subjects at the end of school that can be retaken indefinitely (perhaps once per year). If you want to go to college, perform on these tests

If we're looking at societal changes that would allow us to really move away from the school model, we also need:

- more public transportation to enable kids to go to schools other than the ones they live next to

- widespread reforms in prison and sentencing that makes it safer and less life-ending

- industry must return to western countries to allow low- and medium-skilled people important labor jobs

- healthcare reform so it's not tied to employment

- better cultural stewardship, small business startup loans, and continental rail so young talented people aren't as incentivized to leave their smaller cities and towns

Ultimately, a strong society that could move safely away from the school model needs an economy with many opportunities for short-duration (6-24 months) employment, lots of vacation time, and the ability for one parent to stay at home a large fraction of the year.

> - allow schools to expel children

Certainly public schools need to be able to remove disruptive students from the mainline process.

> - mandate school and district administrators to have experience teaching

The overwhelming majority already do. It's a problem of misaligned incentives, though.

> - ban homework and introduce periods of time during school when work is expected

Homework should totally go away for elementary (I mean, other than a token project to ask someone questions once in awhile, etc) and be minimal for early middle school.

At some point, though, you do need to put in some additional unsupervised work.

> - remove all art and sports from school and reform them as independent free clubs to be participated in after or before school (unfortunately impossible in poorer districts)

Actually, in poorer/urban districts, you're more likely to have providers like YMCA or charity sports leagues, around. It's the rich districts who are spending a whole lot of resources on nice extracurriculars for their students that are going to have trouble with this.

> - increase teacher salary

Yup.

> - more separation of students by skill level (tons of research showing that kids learn better when they're placed in small groups at a similar skill level, also easily observed anecdotally.) This should also be accomplished by mixing ages.

There's limits to this. Tracking math, etc, is useful. You might be able to do it with writing. But it may not make so much sense with literature or history classes, in that there is an actual body of knowledge to convey (of course, you can have honors classes if your student population is big enough).

Also, I think you underestimate the amount of social power that comes with age. You can't throw together my 6th grader with 9th graders that are equivalently strong in math and expect a whole lot of useful educational strategies to still work.

> - ban grades, introduce final exams in specific subjects at the end of school that can be retaken indefinitely (perhaps once per year). If you want to go to college, perform on these tests

I think we need to de-emphasize grades, but grades are an important motivator and more immediate measure of performance.

A lot of my courses are "easy A's" in the sense that most students get an A even though I cover rather challenging material and expect a lot: I get most students over the humps. But-- I still rely upon to some extent:

- Being able to give assignment grades that are much lower so that students know they must improve

- Students being motivated to improve so that their summative grade will be good, even when they're feeling a bit down about the course or their recent performance.

> - industry must return to western countries to allow low- and medium-skilled people important labor jobs

Comparative advantage is important.

Homeschool rhetorics is getting unhinged lately on HN.

"Homeschooling" is an imperfect solution to the problem. Even the best-equipped parents have only a fraction of knowledge and experience necessary to prepare someone to build a robust and healthy society. However, one-on-one academic attention creates outstanding results in most students, which is why people hire tutors when they're falling behind, and why many of the most aristocratic in the past had private tutors for a majority of their lives.

"Until relatively recently, psychologists assumed that children did not start to care about their reputation and peers' perceptions until around age nine."

I mean, these psychologist did grow up and spend time as a child, right?

I guess this speaks volumes of the sort of "science" you can expect from psychologists.

That they won't rely on their own anecdotes/assumptions and actually research something? Sounds like what science is supposed to be right?

Perhaps, but there's a line between distrusting anecdotes and being silly. After all, parachutes do actually prevent deadly stops. https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

Only relatively recently did someone pay money to prove that yes, in fact, circumcision hurts. Before that the 'common wisdom' was that babies don't process pain. Said no parent, ever.

There's a lot of patronizing that goes on in organized medicine/psychology, and juvenile medicine seems to get a double helping of it.

I believe they used to perform major surgery on babies using the same non-evidence-based reasoning. I think the real reason is the combination of 1) tortured babies can't file lawsuits but 2) Parents whose babies die from anesthesia can file lawsuits. So, follow the money as with everything in medicine.

A parent could sue doctors for the babies pain though. I suspect doctors then said "babies can't feel pain!" in order to not get sued, that way surgeries gets cheaper.

That kind of thing was practiced in countries where doctors don't fear getting sued. I grew up in the USSR; at the age of 2 or so, they chemically burned some kind of tumor out of me, with no anesthetic. I don't even remember it myself - I just have a large scar on my arm, and my mother's story about how it went. From her words, the doctors' motivation was that they didn't want to risk anesthesia on a kid that young unless absolutely necessary for the operation, which they deemed this wasn't.

Many times I don't ask for help because explaining my problem is so involved that it makes more sense to just plow ahead.

https://dilbert.com/strip/2003-08-07

I usually solve my own problem by explaining it to others

This is known as rubber ducking

I have received this comment a few times in my career, "why don't you ask for help more"?

Usually there is a simple reason: I am not having the same problem for very long, but whenever things are going smoothly they get done very quickly. The other, very common reason is that in the process of gathering the information I need to ask the correct question, the answer usually presents itself.

The final reason is force of habit. I went through a school system where the teachers spend all of class, apart from presenting the material, helping the weak students keep up.

I wonder how much of that is culture?

For example, Dr. Carol Dewek studied kids with "growth mindset". Kids with such a mindset see failure as a path to more growth, whereas kids with "achievement mindset" do not.

I also think about things like:

- https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/6169288... ... Note here that the kids at the ages of 5, 7, etc. discussed in the article, will brag to each other about how helpful they are. However, their parents have been building their skills when they are toddlers and try to be helpful.

- There is an in-depth article about implementing the "old enough to run errands" in America. Again, the author did not just throw their kid out on the street. They invested a lot of time skill-building.

- The Montessori method, which emphasizes developing the capacity to be independent. Failure happens often

- A study on toddlers and babies, and the effects of seeing how long adults struggle on how much they will continue to try something before giving up

- Fred Rogers, commenting on leaving in footage where adults struggle and fail, and things don't go according to plan.

My son is 20 months old, and my wife and I have been incorporating ideas from above. I might show him that it is possible to do something, and let him try (and at times, fail, and learn from the failure). We also prompt him by asking him if he wants help.

Or put it another way: curate the environment, like you would when designing a video game levels to teach how to play, and smoothly increase the difficulty.

> - There is an in-depth article about implementing the "old enough to run errands" in America. Again, the author did not just throw their kid out on the street. They invested a lot of time skill-building.

I often think about the chores and trips I took with my dad growing up, and how he slowly and cleverly worked me up to doing things.

For instance when we would stop at a gas station, unless I had to go to the bathroom I had to stay in the car as it was dangerous, I might get hit by a car etc. But I could help by gathering any trash and handing it to him. Then as I got older, I could help by getting out and washing the side mirrors, then the door windows and finally the windshield once I could reach. The genesis really was that it was boring to sit in the car and I wanted to do something, and he capitalized on that.

Same thing when we would take the recycling to the drop off point. First I had to stay in the car (you'll note a consistent theme here: I couldn't just stay at home at my leisure while chores were going on) and watch, then I could help with the light things like the cans, then the newspapers, then the glass.

....I'm still salty that I had to mow all 2 acres with a push mower for years and years, and he only bought a tractor with a giant mower deck after us kids moved out, though. The cheeky old bastard.

> we asked 576 children, ages four to nine, to predict the behavior of two kids in a story. One of the characters genuinely wanted to be smart, and the other merely wanted to seem smart to others. [...]

> When children themselves are the ones struggling, it seems quite possible they, too, might avoid seeking out help when others are present, given our findings. Their reluctance could seriously impede academic progress.

There's another side to the issue of “reputational” expectations which I've seen too many times in academic situations: People who only ask questions in order to look smart rather than to learn something. They know the answer, or at least think they do, and ask an inexperienced grad student a question about their area of expertise, even if it is at best tangential to the topic.

That opposite process also can impede progress, since it tends to drown out genuine questions and less is learned in the process. Rarely do such questions enrich the conversation the way that a good “naïve” question does.

In my country, the (college) school year is ending and new one is starting (on oct 1st), and of course, some students didn't pass enough exams, some failed a year, but want to do exams for the next year, some want to know if they can get another chance at an exam, if they can blame covid for not finishing something, etc.

Every college here as a students office, with an email address and a phone number (available few hours per workday), and they still rather ask an incomplete question on reddit (without specifying which college, what year, how many exams missing etc), than call the student office and just ask the only people who can actually answer the question correctly.

So yeah... it's not just the "young" kids, but "older kids" too, old enough that making a phonecall shouldn't be an issue anymore.

I have a sneaking suspicion that university administration offices are run by a generation of people who don't know that young people do not use the telephone [1] (you did this too).

Give students an all-purpose email address to contact, or a number to text, and I think you will find they are much more willing to get the right help. The medium does matter.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/05/09/31...

They have an email.. and a phone number.. and office hours.

In your country is it normal to get help when you ask officials for help? For example: if you have a tax problem can you ask your tax department and get a valid response, or is it a glacial bureaucratic quagmire, with downside risks, backfiring where your questioning costs you?

Are school administrators overworked, nasty, or just don’t give relevant advice?

Are there hacks around the system that you can only find out through back-channels? Is it a cultural norm to seek workarounds or cheats?

Tax department can be hard to reach, but oterwise it's normally easy to get help. Older generations (usually pensioners) need help with everything, from banking to reward cards in stores to changing electricity providers and of course all the government paperwork, so everyone is used to people coming/calling and starting with "I need thing X, what do I have to do?".

I've noticed the same issue with banks, stores and telcos, where again, the answer is just one phonecall away (or an email, or a visit in person to one of their many locations), but (especially young) people don't do that and rather ask on reddit/forums. And their support lines are usually reachable within minutes with a live person on the other end.

Usually it's advance-basic questions, stuff that support staff knows of the top of their head, but not easily googlable (eg. "i'm missing two exams to pass the year, is it possible to attend lectures and pass exams for the next year, while being officialy repeating this year", and stuff like "if i change my mobile package from X300 to X500 do I need to pay a fee, because I bought my phone on a contract", etc.)

I guess my question should be: what is your theory for why students that are old enough to know better, don’t know better?

I wouldn’t have asked when I was a university student because I simply didn’t understand how to ask. I remember being astonished after my degree when a woman I met talked about how she had gamed the uni system: a skill I had never been taught, and which she had learned (or perfected) by working in a political job.

I have since learnt better the ways and wiles to pull information from government systems.

My parents may complain about electronic systems, but I am pretty sure they wouldn’t want to revert back to triplicate paper systems and the bureaucratic failures that were always potential.

You can make people feel vulnerable. The moment you ask for directions, you reveal that you are lost. Seeking assistance can feel like you are broadcasting your incompetence. New research suggests young children don't seek help in school, even when they need it, for the same reason.

From what I've seen, this is no different for adults. Getting adults to ask for help is really difficult, and I've given up trying to pursued it (inorganically), in the workplace. On the other hand, getting adults to give "XY Problem" [1] fueled demands is very very easy.

1. https://xyproblem.info

Developing the habit of repeatedly asking people for help and then taking it when they give it will fix this very quickly. You just have to be willing to go first. People feel much better about asking someone for help if they have given that person help in the past.

I think this works very well for someone working directly in your domain, but doesn't work so well when you're a domain expert, outside of the others normal domain, since you can have a very small general, or mostly unidirectional specific, overlap.

“ Seeking help could even be framed as socially desirable.”

Kinda buried an important part at the end of the article. Just last week I was doing a (not so rigorous) literature review on positive peer pressure for a work project, and in the largest meta study I could find, the conclusion was basically that the effect of peer influence depends on what’s cool to kids, and whether or not participation is publicly known to all peers.

Anecdotally in a design project for pediatric emergency rooms that I worked on in grad school, our team observed kids not disclosing minor accidents to their parents, oftentimes with the parent(s) swearing that their kid would never not tell them something.

In our house we actually have an informal "best question of the day" award which encourages us to share inquiries. It is intended to reinforce and reward curiosity and healthy attitudes to learning in children and seems to work.

Other learning hacks: Complement questions. Admit when you don't know stuff, but then immediately look for answers, sharing your method and findings. Play scrabble with kids and allow arbitrary lookups to a permissive and multilingual dictionary such as wiktionary: a great way to learn amazing words, etymology and geography. Keep a globe around to reinforce geography while viewing documentaries or explaining things (eg. etymologies and language families). Keeping an HDMI output budget microscope connected to the TV for shared exploration of things (broken toys/circuitboards, botany, etc.). Gifting tools to children and encouraging their use to solve problems. http://earth.nullschool.net when the weather changes. Bringing kids to work.

This is largely the opposite of what I see during Q&As at tech conferences. Typically the asker puts forward a question to show off how much they know about the subject and challege the presenter. Perhaps this is due to the 'leetcode grinding' culture surrounding tech where everyone needs to display their ego.

> Until relatively recently, psychologists assumed that children did not start to care about their reputation and peers' perceptions until around age nine.

Did they really? Cause anyone in contact with kids must have seen status seeking/preserving behaviors much sooner. The teachers compensate for it by checking on kids instead of expecting then to ask everything by themselves.

The other thing is, there is right amount of asking questions. Some of it is too much and more independence is needed. Some of it is too little - and kids need to learn to guess the right amounts.

And that's doing the children a disservice. We are a status oriented species and trying to pretend that the game doesn't exist is just raising them to be ill-equipped for the reality they will inevitably face.

The challenge you mention continues for one's entire life. There is a real tension between maintaining enough humility to learn and otherwise benefit from others while presenting as high enough status to get others to conform to your desires.

Or maybe seeking status isn’t the way to go?

Gaining status without seeking it is a very high status behavior.

adults tend to pass judgement over understanding too quickly

Don't teacher still tell kids someone along the lines of, "don't be afraid to ask questions, at least one other person probably has the same question"?

Somewhat related: https://danluu.com/look-stupid/

One wonders how this differs by culture and over time (if it's highly correlated with more individualistic societies and cultural moments).

They are afraid to ask because teachers don't like it, because it disrupts class schedule.

My observation is that children afraid to ask for help grow into adults afraid to ask for help that have learned to mask their cowardice. Primary masking behaviors include: avoidance, blame shifting, excuses, stonewalling, logical fallacies, and so forth. I would say cowardice is a common bed fellow to deception.

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