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Comment by fasterik | Hacker News Reader

Re: the anxiety of parents about the future: the people who best handle rapidly changing circumstances are the ones who are comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. I think it's far less important to teach young people specific skills in technology X, and far more important to teach them how to regulate their emotions, how to make plans and effectively execute on them, and how to be objective about their own strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be something that a standard education focuses on, so whether or not you pick up these skills depends on whether your parents explicitly taught them to you or you happened to get lucky enough to develop them on your own.

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One of my favorite quotes, from Stephenson's The Diamond Age:

"The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward."

Great quote. Thanks for reminding me I need to check out Neal Stephenson!

Ah you're in for a treat.

Let me know when you recognise Claude hiding Diamond Age (time travelling to the early/mid 90s)

;-)

Additionally: the most important not is that you teach kids to face risks themselves. If you constantly hover around kids from the baby age onwards and jump in at the tiniest risk, what you teach them is that the world is a dangerous place that they are not equipped to deal with.

The cardinal mistake many inexperienced parents make is to think you can chose what your kid learns. So they will yell at their kid that it needs to be calm, something they fail at in this very moment. Kids care much more about how you live than what you say. You can tell your kid to respect nature, but what drives it home is if you show respect of nature without even mentioning it on a day to day basis.

Handling risk and uncertainty is one of those things. You can't tell your kid to be able to deal with uncertainty without fear, you will have to show to them (1) that you are also able to deal with it and (2) that you trust them to do it too. Sure they should ask their parents if something seems off or a bit too much to them, but there are so many parents who appear to trust their kid with next to nothing.

Emotional intelligence about yourself and others is important, sure. But you're confusing acquisition of facts and education. Many people are effectively illiterate for all but the most simple communication. Likewise so many people are innumerate and without basic reason or understanding of basic rhetoric both making and evaluating arguments and information.

Teaching math, history, and language isn't about remembering facts or specific skills, they're proxies for teaching you to think and reason and operate in the world.

> comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty

> regulate their emotions

> Emotional intelligence

I'm not sure we read the same parent comment. There is almost nothing in there about emotional intelligence beyond learning self-regulation, but emotional intelligence is at least as much about understanding others' emotions, understanding social cues and etiquette. But the bulk of the parent comment is about adaptability, general self-awareness and self-examination.

You then make an argument that education does, in fact, teach those critical skills indirectly through basic subjects. Having given such a bold premise, you would need to back it up with at least some supporting evidence. Given that you provided none at all, you shouldn't be surprised that no one sees reason to agree with that premise.

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