Comment by dijit
13 hours ago
My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...
I am not, in fact my understanding of mechanics is extremely basic.
If I go back into my family tree, I can find three generations of Sugar House Labourers in Scotland in the early 1800s.. a profession that no longer exists in the UK as far as I can tell, and I'm certain they had a specialisation.
We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
Our jobs as parents is to teach values and make sure they're good people and have the tools to make good decisions too, not to set them on a particular path... that's a losing goal, we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
> we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
well said, absolutely agree
> We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
There's an Unschooling group on Facebook I watch. If you search "calculus" you get threads where a parent asks how their kid is going to learn calculus and the answers are mostly "when did you need calculus after high school." Aside from needing it for college, my answer would be "why am I raising my kid to be a 1:1 clone of me and not someone with a lot of different options." So I dig this as an answer. The world has ended a billion times already. People who work hard pursuing a skilled passion have never been obsolete.
Calculus is entry level math for all the hard sciences, engineering, and finance. It's how to think about how things change over time. Understanding what integrals and derivatives look like, especially as graphs, is very practical knowledge. Being able to think about compound interest and acceleration under gravity as driven by the same rules gives an understanding of what's happening underneath.
Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest.
(But then, I once did a game physics engine and have a patent in that area. I spent a lot of time in the hell which is integration of stiff systems of nonlinear differential equations. Turned out that was the wrong way to approach the problem. Works, but there are better approaches.)
> Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest.
A very common example is compound, continual interest accumulation. As a mathematician, I had trouble understanding how banks calculate it (as they would obviously not point me at the derivation of the formula), but it's actually a limit sum over infinitely small interest terms.
Similarly, these techniques work to explain and derive numerical methods for calculating many natural constants like e, pi etc.
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My grad program had an advanced math sequence that was traditionally numerical methods for solving PDE’s and boundary value problems. Except my year, a visiting professor made it infinite series solutions using laplace transforms. Because why would you want an inexact numerical solution when you could have an exact solution to whatever degree of accuracy you need. Line integrals have their own special place in hell.
Right? Just because my professional career never took me in those directions doesn't mean I want to foreclose them for my kid! I did do electrical engineering classes in college wherein I needed calculus, I just never took a derivative/integral after graduation because I ended up on the coding side of a Computer Engineering degree.
i hope i don't get downvoted for this, but billions of people function just fine without the most rudimentary understanding of calculus. while i love maths, i am sympathetic to the view that it's not an essential life skill, and might even be less so in the future.
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It's interesting to see different perspectives on this.
For me, calculus was the first math I learned, where symbols represented something other than pure numbers or tangible points on a plane, and we proved things about higher level abstractions. Of course many of the topics had tangible applications, but it was a launching point towards further abstraction in the higher level math courses.
A friend of mine in grad school was a student in medieval church history, but was assigned to teach a freshman course in modern history. For one class session, he asked a math teacher to give a guest lecture on calculus. Then he lectured on its impact on society.
It's true that most people, including managers and engineers, forget their school math not long after school. Their software tools, such as Excel and CAD, can do the math that they need. One can hope without proof that a little bit of mathematical thinking rubbed off on them.
The one-dimensional mentality of anti-intellectualism is absurd. I have heard parents outside of our school but in my community talk down French Immersion programs (versus English schooling) saying that people put their children in for the wrong reasons. I don’t know what the explicit reasons were in this case, but I am assuming that the other parent means academic overachievement.
Learning calculus or French can be beneficial, especially when the glass ceiling in certain workplaces is whether or not you’re bilingual. However, the point that’s getting missed is the metaexperience that consciously or subconsciously shapes the way the child interacts with the world later on.
Somehow I feel like the workplaces with a glass ceiling over bilingual is so small as to be immaterial.
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You never know if learning calculus will make you discover new things that you might like to pursue. Also, you never know if you will need it or not apriori. By that logic, you shouldn't learn anything until you need it, wich I think would be a disaster.
> You never know if learning calculus will make you discover new things that you might like to pursue.
Just as you will never know what you might have discovered if you used the time you spent learning calculus learning something else instead, of course. There is no magic formula to life.
> you shouldn't learn anything until you need it
Impossible. Simply existing as a functioning human means you are going to be constantly learning something. Not everything you learn will be useful, but that's also true of calculus. Not everyone finds it useful in the end either. You never know what will end up being useful, but you also can't learn everything.
The great thing about the curious mind is that you tend to be naturally drawn towards the things that are most useful for you. Those born most likely to do something with calculus already voluntarily choose to learn about it. You don't have to make them. The stereotypical druggy who has no interest in anything but getting high, who suddenly has his life turned around because you force him to learn calculus, is little more than Hollywood fantasy.
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Mathematics is fundamental as it shows you there in fact exists a way to spot bullshit with no concern for however much rhetoric is used. Many people would be really and truly shocked to know we can definitively prove things given certain axioms, and not just have "wishy washy" verbal arguments or slogans. Without exposure to mathematical training, nonsense like belief in gods or supernatural thinking tends to increase.
The classic SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-...
Thanks for highlighting that your children aren't you! Easy to forget.
Learning what infinitesimals were and how useful they were for understanding the rates of change was an actual eureka moment for me, and many people in my classes felt similarly. It fundamentally changes the way you view things as simple as a car accelerating or the way heat spreads through a system, the way fruits spoil faster in the winter if you have heat, why metals creak when they're cold and why they groan when they're heated.
The thing that really begets me in all of this is that what you describe, working hard pursuing a skilled passion, requires a foundation of knowledge that up until a year ago was considered a foregone conclusion for becoming someone of note. It doesn't matter whether someone learned it autodidactically or through structured schooling, the point is that the knowledge itself is fundamentally important. We never stopped teaching children basic arithmetic or mental math when slide rules, adding machines, and calculators became widespread. The reason why is pretty obvious.
And yet, the technofeudalists want us to stop teaching our children critical thinking, science, arts, technology, and everything else that encompasses the indomitable human spirit, and why? Because a machine can do those things too? Machines have been capable of or better at a great many things that humans are also capable of for the past hundred years or so and yet we have never stopped teaching humans those very things exactly because we used to recognize that those things had enormous utility in general in a sphere far beyond whatever is necessary for your calling or profession. It is absolute lunacy to me that someone could see LLMs and agentic flows do brute-force proofs and then somehow suggest that the entire field of mathematics is obsolete.
I urge you to read the piece "Complex Systems Won't Survive the Competency Crisis." If we lose all of our institutional knowledge of how the puzzle pieces all fit together there will be no one to save us when (when, not if) the systems we're creating now suffer a catastrophic failure. And they will. Model collapse has not happened yet because of luck. Synthetic data can only get you so far. And whenever we enter our Idiocracy/WALL-E stage of total compliance and deference to machines themselves, one day there will come a time when something breaks and no one knows how to fix it because they no longer understand the underlying principles.
You might say in an optimistic scenario you can just ask the LLM for the tools and resources and prior knowledge needed to fix it. Alas in many cases, this is barely enough, and most on this forum are technically knowledgeable enough to actually make use of that advice. It's hard to see a compliant, totally intellectually decrepit population doing the same. I'd also advise you that although unschooling has its benefits, it's a movement that is filled by those who are often cultists and other fringe hacks who have grievances with the school system for reasons unbeknownst to me and many others. I would not use them as any sort of advice forum or channel for meaning, and the fact that you seem to be taking them as gospel is extremely questionable and makes me uneasy about the future of this forum in general.
i mean even basic differentiation is useful for optimization problems.
Not to mention physics, which is useful for understanding why things are the way they are. Which, is an important skill lest you fall into anti intellectual traps like flat earthism.
Calculus is a shared language in the grand universal ocean of intellectual cultural. Rejecting calculus is rejecting part of that culture…
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I think their answer would be "why would I care how long it takes this ladder to slide down the wall?" Which STINKS don't get me wrong. This is not a group I take seriously.
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Mother of all selection bias criteria, one thing about getting older is noticing all the people who didn’t make it
Maybe, the point I'm making is that we focus on thinking we know what the best thing for our children will be ("I can teach them the stuff I learned latest and have the most info about and they'll get a better headstart!") and we overlook things that don't fit into that framing.
I got really lucky that my passion was computers and not something less "productive" like art, or more productive but less economically advantageous like farming.
But you won't go wrong teaching your children how to weigh options, make their own decisions and to be good people with principles and tools for helping them understand how to learn new things themselves.
You will probably go wrong pushing your children to be doctors, lawyers or whatever else you want them to be.
> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
"And you, too, will be a mechanic", which is how that usually goes.
People should spend enough time with tools to get the basic skills down. Some years ago a Stanford mechanical engineering prof was complaining to me that many of the Indian students from wealthy families thought that using tools was beneath them. "They've never used a pair of pliers." Now, to some extent, that mindset has spread to the American middle class.
In my graduate engineering program you could always tell who came from high caste families and who came from low caste families by how they performed in the lab.
> how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
Being proficient in reading, at least one instrument, and one additional language is always welcome, regardless of the timeline.
Not many people get paid for musical or linguistic talents, actually.
"Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
There is more to life than earning money, and not all skills need to be in service of that.
Regardless, both of those talents have the potential to open doors and set the stage for opportunity, nor are they mutually exclusive to whatever economic skills might be viable in the future.
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People should prepare their kids to be happy adults, not just employed adults.
I recall reading of studies that found that a significant majority of adults who did not learn to play an instrument when they were young wish that they had.
Only a small minority of adults who did learn to play an instrument when young wish that they hadn't.
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If you can read and have any sort of curiosity (or you help teach curiosity) it’s a pretty solid foundation to learn just about anything.
The music bit is mostly things you’d want to impart on your kids if you care about that sort of thing. (Which I do!) The public versions of it are not great where I am but individually you can do a lot.
Not musical, but definitely linguistic. There are many jobs for people to work as translators or to provide customer service in languages other than the dominant one.
Proficiency in reading and writing is clearly useful.
Proficiency in musical instrumemts is not necessarily useful by itself, but it's a path towards mastery of something hard that typically involves a lot of intentional practice. Having been able to master something hard once makes it easier to master other hard things, because you can reuse the learning skills. Music has a little bit of applied fractions and what not, too.
The same thing learning to learn journey happens with learning a second language. But also, learning a second language helps develop skills and understanding of your first language, and helps develop communication skills for situations where there's a limited mutual understandable vocabulary.
Some languages have market value too. Better communication with employers, customers, and suppliers is valuable.
Self-expression is a fundamental human need. Ignore to your own detriment.
> Not many people get paid for musical or linguistic talents, actually.
And yet the highest earning people I know who didn’t come from affluent backgrounds are musically and linguistically talented.
Focusing on what the market demands is chasing a moving target and if you miss the boat you might just end up a low-level peon holding a wrench.
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Maybe it comes down to whether you advocate for live-to-work or work-to-live.
Music and linguistics have often been considered amongst the "liberal arts" - none of which are arguably "useful" but all of which are terribly worthwhile.
Reading is a life skill. Proficiency in it makes you understand things. Weren't there plenty of news articles this year about how high schoolers didn't have proficient reading capabilities? Maybe teaching your kids how to properly read a text is a good thing.
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> "Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
See it that way, having a normal social life requires other skills than your job.
There won’t be a labor market any more, unless there’s some technological barrier for AIs and robots that has not appeared yet.
It’s either some form of socialism or mass starvation.
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I dunno, my parents were correct about my STEM education that was basically shoved up my ass as soon as I showed any science/engineering aptitude.
I'd say giving them the tools to make good decisions will naturally lead them to a particular path, why not push that path as well?
It’s easier to say that when your parents were right. But there are a lot of parents who pushed their now-graduating children into fields that AI has recently eaten. And before that, parents who pushed their kids into fields they hated and ended up burning out.
That said, I am probably going to do with my kids exactly what your parents did and just hope I’m not wrong about their economic future and passions. But man, it’s a tough strategy call.
If you look at the two extremes: "follow exactly the plan I've laid out for you to the letter" and "be whoever you want to be and do whatever you want to do" in a vacuum both of those come with understandable tradeoffs and risks.
So really the meat of the problem is treading that balance. Though I am of the belief that the mind, just like the body, needs cultivating through training and studying helps cultivate the mind. Also, breadth can really unlock different things in perspective and learning so in that respect I have faith in traditional curriculums - it's hard to predict what and how things will stick for a kid so just let them learn a bit of everything because it's possible something they learn in A might lead to an aha in "unrelated" B.
Probably the one invariant for our kid will be "you must work hard"
Regardless of making big money later or not, I find it horrible to push your kids in a direction simply because of that. They might be better off with less income but liking their job. Or like their job, become very good, and make a lot of money anyway because of that.
But maybe that's because I grew up in a place where you can make a decent living in a wide variety of jobs. Or because almost nobody in my (childhood) vicinity ever had a STEM, or even any white collar job.
That's the issue, seems like the amount of jobs that produce a decent living are fewer and further between. Particularly if you want your own house and a family.
Could be a temporary fluctuation, or it could be that we're mean-reverting to the historical average of an ownership class and an underclass, where only the ownership class has the freedom to pursue their passions with any security. That would be sad, but I'm prepping my family for the latter.
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One can downshift into a lower income more enjoyable job, but one cannot up shift into a higher income job without the required education.
Besides for many people the higher income job is more enjoyable, especially when the lower income job takes a large physical toll.
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and my mum dissuaded me from computers pretty strongly due to the negative stereotypes at the time, and its hindsight that tells us that I got lucky with my passion.
My mum did emphasise my reading though, and that went well.
its a lottery.
Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds, so keep in mind that anything you're teaching is a hedge against AI stalling or collapsing.
We're moving more slowly on physical robotics in varied environments, so it's going to take a while before we automate reaching under the sink and turning a knob. Or maybe your kids will have a bright future in janitorial work, who knows?
I would not be betting on trade jobs for the future. Many people right now who are capable and skilled in trades left and stayed out of the industry because of crap pay and working conditions, im one of them. And not only are we likely to see a further reduction in pay because of everyone thinking trades is a good path right now and pushing it, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, if people start losing their jobs elsewhere even more people are going to try and get into trades and further depress wages.
Yeah you can point out a handful of people across the nation who do really well, but you can do the same thing for jobs that are all but obsolete and worthless. Blacksmithing and tailoring and paper making also has handfuls of well paid professionals, but 99% of people with those skills will never make any meaningful money from it and it would be a foolish path to guide people towards.
The best bet you can go for in trades is union work, but that is far from all encompassing. Go to any part of the poorest parts of the country and you will find swathes of people who can do trade work, and yet they are still poor.
Don't get me wrong, having trade and tool skills is still useful, but it is a long way from a slam dunk into a great future.
> Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds
I feel like this is a crazy take. Smart (and motivated) people are better at adapting to a different world than not smart people.
If AI takes off, there will be nothing to adapt to. Anything a smart (and motivated) person can do, a smart (and motivated) AI will be able to do faster and cheaper. We might end up permanently retired and just spend our time entertaining ourselves.
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If we have working AI, I'll be able to ask it what I should do to adapt.
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In the same sense as being fit is not really worth anything today.
If AI succeeds and the future is good for the average person, education will probably improve your quality of life. Especially because it doesn't have to focus on all that boring stuff that only aims to increase your productivity.
If the future is bad, you should probably aim to be rich very soon. Preferably by owning something that is scarce and useful in the physical world. Financial assets could be unpredictable if consumer demand collapses.
Yes, it's likely that it could be a cute hobby.
By the time they reach adulthood this aspect of robotics will be solved. I give it about 5 years.
But if AI “succeeds” then everyone that used to hold a job that has now been replaced would flood the blue collar market. I am not so sure that is such a bright future either.
Oh no, the enormous amounts of deferred maintenance that everyone puts off is now cheap enough to do! Oh no, we have stronger incentives to build and employ blue collar workers! Oh no! The horror!
If far more Americans learn to do blue collar stuff, it will devalue the massive amounts of scammers, charlatans, grifters that we see in these professions. Construction has literally significantly declined in real productivity since the 80s. Racists say it’s cus of immigrants doing the building. I think it’s because of grift, fraud, and greed.
> Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds, so keep in mind that anything you're teaching is a hedge against AI stalling or collapsing.
Pure and utter nonsense. Good education teaches you how the (natural and human) world works, and how to think and reason systematically. Intellectual work is your own exercise in maintenance of those skills.
Those skills are the most valuable thing our species has ever possessed. They are what makes us us. You speak like some alien. Please don't pollute young humans with this bile.
What's next? Due to the existence of forklifts, everyone should stop lifting weights? Hell, due to the existence of cars and at-home delivery, people should infact aim for a vegetative lifestyle on their couches. They should also make sure not to think a single thought now that AI has you covered?
I swear I thought I was losing my mind over the cult of the cryptobros a few years back. You AI boosters are a hundred times worse.
> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver. My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...
Mona Lisa Vito, is that you?
I think her husband was a lawyer... but the utes will be alright.
Future husband...
Can't make that comment without Positraction.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean, that parents can't give their children a head start by teaching them stuff, that will smarten them up or help them understand stuff at school.
I remember my father taught me how to divide numbers and somewhat how to multiply them, before we learned that at school, with his own explanations. For multiplication he taught me indirectly, by making "number tables" with me:
Up to 20. I used to bring them to school and teachers were discouraging, not realizing, what a great thing this was and what kind of insight it could allow a child to have into basic operations.
For division, he often said: "How often does one number fit into the other?" as a way of explaining that operation.
Ah and he also taught me about negative numbers, when other kids at school didn't even understand what that was supposed to be, and teachers still wanted us to write "not solvable", instead of the correct answer, which were negative numbers. How silly.
When the time came and we learned about division and fractions, I had an easy time to understand what the teacher explained, due to knowing an intuition about what division actually means. The hardest thing for me was not dividing numbers, but following that methodical procedure to divide in the written form, digit by digit. Something I had done in my head already, when thinking about that some number "fits into another number" only half, ergo must be 0.5 added to the number of times it fits in there whole. Only that I didn't realize immediately, that this written way of dividing 2 numbers was the same thing actually.
In this way parents can make school life and learning soooo much easier and less painful for their kids. Granted, I did seem to have a gift for calculation in primary school, but what was so casually taught to me by my father every now and then, helped tremendously. It wasn't even like strict hours of learning. It was just using chances to show me stuff.
From my mother I learned to actually pay attention how I write words. Initially, my spelling was only OKish, not great, until one day I somehow realized "Hey I just have to think a little and pay attention." and suddenly had good spelling. But this didn't come about, without my mother sitting down with me and complaining about my handwriting and also once or twice forcing me to do some writing. My handwriting is still no good though. Glad that didn't influence my grades. I write better Chinese characters, than German words, apparently.
If I had children, I would definitely try to teach them such things. Even if it is just how to look at something or what to pay attention to, or small calculation tricks. I would try to make their learning easier and offer support when they need it to learn.
Your bit about numbers “fitting” into each other is exactly my intuition about division as well, probably formed at a young age. 7, 3 and 21 fit together in my mind like “Kiki” is sharp and “bouba” is round. Or how I could intuit the word “melt” in German was “schmelzen” before I ever learned it - it’s a core memory of mine just guessing that word from the ether and being correct, and felt like validation that I could become fluent.
Methodology is important but growing these intuitions feels critical to me, but no idea if that is something can be taught as much as it’s learned.
But give a boy until the age of 7 and he's ours for life, is what that old order of the monks said about values. What do you do for the remaining 11 years?
OK, sure.
Now what does that look like concretely? Still sending them to school for several hours a day, 5 days a week? Doing what during those hours?
School is half about babysitting while the parents work. So... yes. Kids will still have to go somewhere during the day. Might as well be a school.
So we stop even pretending to teach them anything.