On Really Trying (2009)
gwern.net
gwern.net
I still believe in this, because it produces self-reliant, ultra-high-performing people, and if your goal is e.g. to have your lineage survive and thrive, then that's what you would want. So we're all lawyers, doctors and engineers, and we talk to our children like they're adults and have high expectations of them and are gravely, mortally disappointed if they let us down somehow.
Really, the only thing I'd like from low-pressure and low-performing people with too much time on their hands is for them to leave people like us alone, and go back to maxing out their credit cards, taking drugs, watching reality shows and crashing their cars, without thinking they're capable of judging people they'll never understand. But hey, that's the world we live in, and it's all sour grapes from them, so the main thing is to make sure they never get an upper hand no matter how many ill-behaved children they have.
That's the perspective from this side of that.
I expect to be downvoted for this, but before you click that arrow, remember the good news is that our kids will be smart and self-reliant and yours will be helplessly reduced to voting on social platforms, if they can even read ;)
Edit: clicked the profile, it's just a troll, lol. Joke's on me.
My childhood didn't suck at all. That's really a misinterpretation. Here's an example.
When I was 5 years old, my parents took me on the Concorde from New York to London. I remember the trip very well and learning what the Mach sign at the front of the cabin meant. The flight attendants gave me some neat models and stuff that I still have 40 years later.
A member of the British Parliament was sitting in the row behind us. Toward the end of the flight, he spoke to my father and said that he'd been worried about sitting in a row behind a child, but that he'd been listening to our conversation for two hours and had to comment on how much we'd talked about and how well I'd behaved.
Children do live up to your expectations of them, and you can talk to them as adults. None of this makes a childhood suck.
Guy grew up in Russia with no indoor plumbing, forced to drop out of school at 12, has 7 brothers and sisters killed in a genocide, flees conscription at 15, broke on a train to Holland then a boat to Argentina where he speaks no Spanish, ends up in America at 21 and becomes a Spanish translator, works as a cloth cutter and a bartender, buys a farm on a patch of arid desert, sends his kid to college, the first person in the family ever to go to college. Kid becomes a lawyer. Kid has kids and takes his children and his father on the Concorde, where they meet members of the British Parliament.
This man also locates and rescues his brother from a displaced persons camp in Cyprus after WWII. Brother could barely speak. Brother marries woman he met in Auschwitz and has two children who are the next people in their family to go to college. They become doctors.
I grew up with this man. He believed in achievement and a human soul.
The news is this: Dismissiveness, anger and dejection do nothing.
With regard to my grandfather's style of expectations and parenting, it was less than my father's. A young man in my grandfather's village had hung himself after getting bad marks in school. My grandfather was afraid my father would hang himself if he pushed him too hard. He was gentler.
That seems very common and normal. Of you weren't influenced by your grandparents that is a reflection of something too.
The person I was replying to started the comment chain from an abhorrent position of Social Darwinism. Failing to see their privilege, and failing to distinguish their lives from their grandparents' is very common for people holding those opinions.
Attributing that success to strict parenting and hard work requires quite a lot of extra argument, which the thread starter does not have. Refusing humanity of people who were not on the flight, and did not achieve the same success, is something else entirely.
Being on the flight wasn't my achievement, it was my grandfather's and my father's. Having that type of achievement to emulate may in fact be a form of privilege, but what would you do, strip the world of it entirely?
I was raised since before I could speak listening to my grandfather tell the stories of his experiences, in intricate detail, daily, along with the conclusions he drew from them, and his honest analysis of the decisions he had made from their outcomes. This was not some remote family legend. I recorded hundreds of hours of him speaking about his life on audio cassette and wrote a novelized version of it after he passed away. He was fluent in 7 languages and read newspapers in 3 of them daily. Up until the day he died, he had a unique perspective on life and world events which deeply influenced mine.
For someone like you who pretends to read hidden psychological motivations, the trollish response you gave displays a total lack of understanding of basic interpersonal dynamics and how ideas are transmitted through families. For example, you omit the possibility that what happened to my grandfather influenced my father in some direction to become a lawyer, and that the combined pressure of that might drive me to reject law school and be a taxi driver and start a company, which I felt was more in tune with my grandfather's ethos. Which is, after all, what this thread is entirely about. But your pitiful response does help illuminate the nasty, bullying, pseudo-intellectual and twatish nature of your other responses to me. (Including saying I "sound like a cunt").
I don't wanna give a troll a win by giving you any more attention than you deserve. I'm fairly sure at this point that your words are all in bad faith anyway, so this is for the posterity of anyone who'll read this, not for you. But if you have an honest and human bone in your body, or care to atone for your disgusting comments, you should evaluate where, exactly, your tendency to bully, condescend and intentionally misunderstand people stems from, and why it's important to you to demonstrate some sort of mastery of understanding over something you clearly don't understand. Because this one-sentence post is a gem that would belong in the mouth of a nazi or any other sort of weak, desperate pathetic authoritarian sort. It surely must be somewhere in your psychological training or in your hot takes relating to dog collars, that you should keep your pathologies to yourself rather than plaster them up by accusing others of them.
That sounds like a recipe for long-term psychological complexes. I know plenty of high-achievers that don't constantly feel like they have to prove themselves. And I wish I didn't have to work so hard to challenge that feeling in myself.
The measure of whether it was done in the proper proportion, I think, is whether you find later in life that it was, on balance, a service to you.
Ime if you constantly need to prove yourself then you rarely feel this; when you do, the feeling is ephemeral.
> achieving something to make your dead parents happy is better than achieving nothing at all
This feels circular. It assumes a value judgement about achievement which stems from your upbringing.
It is a value judgment. It's one that not everyone shares. It's surprising to me that a majority of people find it to be a controversial.
I think what's actually going on here in this thread is that people think any value judgment must be a bad thing. Right?
As far as I can make out, your argument goes like this:
Strict parenting is good because it produces high achievers. I think achievement is good because I was conditioned to think it was good. I was conditioned to think it was good as a result of strict parenting.
Effectively: strict parenting is good because I was strictly parented.
But to answer your question, yes, there are serious moral frameworks in which achievement (of the sort you mean) is neutral or even undesirable. From a Buddhist or Stoic standpoint, being attached to material achievement is as a source of suffering. For hedonists, achievement is only good insofar as it produces happiness. In care ethics, relationships matter much more than accomplishment. All of which is to say that it's not a self-evident truth that achievement is inherently good.
I'd assume from the rest of your post that you'd all become olympians, astronauts, high ranked politicians, or founders of mega-corps. These are all fairly run-of-the-mill careers your family entered into, and plenty of people (I'd guess close to 100%) enter these roles without the type of abuse you suffered.
Hopefully the mortal disappointment you project onto your kids is a little lighter than that your parents projected onto you.
When I was a teenager I really thought their demands were unfair.
When I was a dropout and a taxi driver in my 20s, I blamed my parents.
When I became a millionaire based on finding something I loved and doing it very well, even though they disapproved and didn't support me in it, I finally was able to thank them for giving me the intellectual tools to do that for myself.
And interestingly, unexpectedly, they finally respected my choices as well.
Life without a struggle is meaningless.
My brothers, worth noting, are far far more interesting and successful than I am... I'm still a dropout loser to them. Megacorps and politics are their games.
Our father had a thing about no television and only books. We had to read 50 pages a night of a book he chose, after school, and report to him what we had read. Every night. No video games either, and computers only if you were writing your own code.
My eldest brother was severely dyslexic. He had a very hard time reading 50 pages a night. He found all kinds of ways to fake it. He makes $20 million a year now, give or take, as a senior law partner, still faking it. Tell me that ain't a good story.
I guess I'm happy. I can't complain. I need more challenges.
I've had this feeling for a long time that the more things I own, the more time I waste dealing with things instead of creating and living life. Stuff is this ever-growing entity that drags you down. I don't buy stuff. I actually don't have a dresser in my closet. I have a carry-on suitcase on the closet floor that I keep all my clothes folded in, after owning the same house for 8 years. But I have a girlfriend, and therefore there's stuff everywhere. Stuff is just stress.
I know, that sounds mad.
I think that's a really awesome honest answer. I find it very cool you're still looking for challenges and setting the terms yourself. I wish you the best life ever possible.
It's okay that you didn't turn out to be that magnanimous, but don't lie to yourself and pretend that you tried as hard as you could
You had more in your humanity tank than you knew you had
I've got lots in the humanity tank.
I just reserve the right to speak honestly, and I'm also willing to have my mind changed. Lots of hypocritical assholes are magnanimous as a gesture. I'll spend 2 hours telling a homeless guy he's not Jesus and he's ruining his life and try to find him a job. I did that a couple nights ago. But that isn't magnanimity, fuck no. It's some kind of sheer Dostoevskyan desire to see humanity in everyone I meet because the token value of mine is only as good as theirs. That's how I define morality. Magnanimity can go to hell.
I felt very seen when I read this story of Nathaniel Hawthorne's https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/ebrand.html
It's about a man who left home on a journey because something was bothering him and he didn't stop investigating until he figured out what it was.
It turned out (spoilers!) that he regarded his fellow men at an arm's length. He saw himself apart
I am of that kind and it causes me great pain. If I'm reading you right it seems you feel yourself in the thick of it with everyone. I hope you do not take that feeling for granted
Thus my girlfriend, who's a bleeding heart bless her, took serious offense at my conversation with the homeless guy who thought he was Jesus. In her mind, the righteous thing would have been to hand him a dollar and say nothing, because he's merely a victim of his circumstances. She accused me of trying to humiliate him or make myseld better than him by asking him why he was dragging this misery around like a cross. She berated me for it, because in her view of herself, being a good person in society means something different than it does to me.
I took it under consideration that maybe, the way I choose to immerse myself is too self-aggrandizing. I ran into the homeless guy a couple nights later and he asked for a cigarette. I apologized to him if I'd been intrusive or tried to judge him. He sat down and told me he didn't mind at all, he's trying to get off the street and off drugs and he doesn't have a lot of long conversations with people.
Neither one of us was right, me or my girlfriend... and to your point, a lot of times I really do just want to keep society at arm's length. But then I don't filter myself when I want to say something potentially offensive, and suddenly I'm in the whirlwind of the lives around me.
It really is two sides of the same coin, because the sicker you are of the world the more you either divorce from it or engage with it... and a lot of times you want to do both.
I saved the story to read. Thanks for the genuine response to what I wrote.
I've just been sucked into the same online shitstorm as everyone else, I guess. I'm posting right now directly after reading tonight's clickbait about the woman who got sentenced for child abuse for letting her 5 year old kid walk a few blocks alone in a gated community. Transposing that to all this, it makes me think about what impacted me, my family and my cohort and allowed us to be self-sufficient, and further, the whole commentary demonstrates that such things are perceived by a good chunk of the population as "abuse" when they're really tools you need to give your children which other people would love to deprive you of giving to your children. I am an example of someone who would be nothing without the framework of expectations and responsibilities I was given at an early age (including at times radical freedom that I had to use judiciously or else face extreme disappointment) so I'm speaking in defense of that style of parenting.
But as to why I'm here writing in the middle of the night, it's pretty much on myself and my own addictions. I should be doing something more productive.
Blame the game, not the player! In today's kind spirit of early-internet you're also not a dog on the internet communities, there you go...
No warranty granted or implied: A bit of sarcosine in the morning, and a bit more glycine at night I say. :-)
You don't have to abuse children for them to grow up into functioning and healthy adults. That simply is ideology not rooted in any kind of data.
There is a parenting style called authoritative (not authoritarian! Authoritarian is what you had to suffer through) that is characterized by both clear and unwavering secure attachment (i.e. the kid always knows it is loved and protected, even if it got a bad grade in school or did something stupid) and clear, well-communicated and understandable rules and high, but achievable performance targets.
signed, an educational science phd who never was punished for a bad grade in his entire time in school even once, yet developed the discipline of doing a part time phd while already working and being a parent anyway.
I grew up the same way. There was a lot of arguing—it rarely turned physical, but they didn’t take much interest in me, either. I had to sort out many of my own issues on my own. Fortunately, I had grandparents on one side of the family who loved me dearly and made me feel like I belonged. They also always encouraged me and supported my talents.
Now I have children of my own and think about this a lot—especially since my wife’s experience was similar, yet different. We decided to do things better with our kids, and we try to put that into practice every day.
Here’s something that crossed my mind: I’ve certainly achieved a degree of success in life, partly because I had to be very independent from a young age. If I wanted something, I had to take care of it myself—at least in most cases. But I’ve come to the conclusion that while my sons might turn out to be more "normies" or conventional, the psychological toll of that kind of upbringing—the low self-esteem and the lack of pride from one’s own parents—far outweighs those benefits.
I never said that we weren't loved or that basic affection was withheld.
We were expected to do beyond what we thought was our best, or else we would be disappointments to our parents. Would they still love us? Sure. Kick us out...? Not unless our responses involved gross insubordination. But we were called to explain ourselves as one would in a court of law.
What was at stake, and this is what I think you may misapprehend, was not parental love. It was parental respect.
In order for that to function, you actually have to love them and know that they love you. Otherwise you wouldn't give a shit whether they respected you.
Which is why withdrawing respect at times is not abuse, it's teaching someone how to conduct themselves.
Don't bring your dog collars around then
> as one would in a court of law.
such as this loud symptom, if you don't want the shame of it to outlive you. It's what you're looking for in fact. Your highly disagreeable post, followed by the very reasonable replies you wrote to the reactions it caused, is a hint you're still looking for that kind of stimulation. It's a form of self-punishment.
No need, they have videos.
you sound like a cunt, seriously, and have no idea what this attempt at stepping back tells about you. That makes you transparent, really any shrink would be like "ah yes, of course, that was to be expected". It's the only reason I'm replying back (no downvotes though, those are for spam). We get it you absorbed sadism from your parents. Why don't you tell us about the other side as well, all these moments of astheny when you're not flamboyant but ashy?
It's Poe's Law in action. We can't tell if you're unhinged enough to post that or you're imitating people who would post that to make fun of them.
But if your definition of success is remotely related to any form of leadership, then your suggestions are extremely flawed. To be a good leader, you need to manage people, have empathy, sympathy, tact, charisma, and so on.
Adding to that - many things in the real world end up being a mix of both, which means you need both to get to the top. Tom Brady or Michael Jordan don’t become the best in the world by being assholes to their teammates. Significant political / activist figures don’t start movements by belittling people. And so on.
Which means that the attitude you’re displaying here really kind of locks you into the upper middle class overachiever definition of success as a doctor, lawyer, etc. and not into the class of the truly successful.
No one hates so bitterly as the lazy and poor contemplating the energetic and prosperous. --Dale Worley
With my own 'difficult' childhood all I got was, according to Gabor Maté, a hard time focusing on stuff that I actually care about and a whole load of mediocre attempts.
I guess this is one of those that you can only judge in retrospect, although you can never know for sure.
Lynch stood up and said, "thank you, have a good day" and walked out the door.
About two thirds of these can make great fuel, depending on your temperament and coping style (i.e. overcompensation style seen most commonly among our billionaires).
Though "unrelenting standards" is probably the most obvious one. I've noticed this in several men who are getting a lot of attention recently. Their fathers taught them that anything less than absolute victory was unacceptable.
>That’s all his brother said.
>Yet that was enough hint to help Claude solve the puzzle. The great thing about this hint… is that you can always give it to yourself.
When I've been stuck on a problem that I know there's a solution to, sometimes I've been able to get unstuck by imagining myself in the future after having solved the problem looking back and kicking myself for how obvious it was.
Maybe that only works for problems that have solutions so obvious you'd kick yourself for not seeing them, but it does put me in a frame of mind of looking back from the solution and seeing the path out of being stuck.
My other trick is that when I've been working hard to solve a difficult problem, and then at the last moment something horribly discouraging happens and everything falls apart, I realize that there is no God, but if there were, he's a huge asshole and a bully who loves to throw things in your path just before you're about to succeed, to discourage you and make you give up right as you're on the edge of success, sabotoging yourself by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Because he loves to laugh at you for being the cause of your own defeat.
Now I recognize that pattern of everything falling apart after it was going so well as a sign that I was just about to succeed, and God's just being a dick, so I refuse to give up, and interpret it as an encouraging sign, just to spite him. Even though he doesn't exist, it really annoys him when I do that.
It may sound crazy, but it's not as crazy as believing in God! Maybe it's not internally consistent, because God can't be an asshole and a bully if he doesn't exist, but it's certainly consistent with how the fictional Bible depicts him, and how the vast majority of his followers and the leaders they elect act in the real world.
I recorded this several days ago: Alan Kay was performing an AV test before giving a talk for Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration, and God threw a monkey wrench into the loop, which Alan broke out of with amazing ideas from Claud Shannon that he thinks about every day.
Alan Kay: Shannon Gave Us a Way of Dealing with Noisy Channels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjntrqhn8pk
Alan Kay performs an improvisational avant garde layered audio feedback loop about Claude Shannon, live online during Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration.
Alan was scheduled to talk about how encountering Simula sparked his early thoughts about objects. During setup, somebody had the live stream playing out loud near an open Zoom mic, so his own voice kept arriving back in his ears about 21 seconds late, over and over.
What he said was not random: "Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels." And: "I think about that almost every day. I realize what the fuck is going on and it's just so amazing." Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem is the math for exactly the kind of channel that was garbling him as he praised it.
Alan joked it was "being rerouted to Mars and back." At the speed of light, a 21 second round trip is about 3 million km one way -- eight trips to the Moon and back, not even a twentieth of the way to Mars at closest approach.
This is an accidental Zoom performance of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969), where Lucier re-recorded his own voice in a room until only the room's resonance remained. Here what remains is the network: delay, compression, dropouts.
Bonus noise: YouTube's auto-transcript bleeps Alan's enthusiasm into [ __ ]. So the full chain is: Alan's voice, Zoom, stream, room, Zoom again times three, my screen recording, YouTube's speech recognizer, a censored transcript.
The fix: "Just turn off the audio at your end on Zoom."
I Am Sitting in a Room:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room
Alvin Lucier on "I am sitting in a room":
My trick to solving those things, by the way, is to talk to myself out loud until I fall asleep, then have a metaphorical dream that I have to analyze, and then the answer is suddenly clear. I never doubt that I will get to the answer, but it can take days or weeks... you have to trust that your mind will get there.
"I was in the top 100 in tennis. Then I asked myself: 'what if I started training like Andy (Roddick). So I did and next thing I know I'm in the top 8 in the world"
- Mardy Fish [0]
"Kobe told me if I made a 1,000 shots every practice then I would be an All Star. So I started doing that and then became an All Star"
- Dwight Howard [1]
0 - https://www.netflix.com/title/81026434
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/j1hjb5/charania_dwight...
Maybe another quote to add to the list is about Bob Widlar (from https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/bob-widlar-silicon-val...):
> In 1965, Widlar left Fairchild to work at National Semiconductor. While there, he released his design for the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator, the LM109. This finding came at a time when engineers hotly debated whether it was possible to develop a high-power regulator on a single chip.
> Widlar, established as an engineering genius in 1969, wrote a paper settling the debate, claiming temperature swings and packaging limitations made the device impossible. The industry took his word for it and stopped all efforts to build such a device. However, in 1970, Widlar shocked his contemporaries with the 20-W LM109, the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator. The device included all of the features Widlar had claimed were impossible just one year prior.