Comment by keerthiko
3 hours ago
The single most useful thing I am glad my parents encouraged in my upbringing that is not ubiquitous among my peers, is a set of three things:
1. a willingness to inspect, interact and "mess with" (for lack of a better term) the world around me — intellectually, mechanically, and socially
2. an awareness that there will be consequences, and that I should take responsibility for them.
3. critically, the idea that "taking responsibility is a good (or at least not bad) thing"
In my case, this was light wrist slaps with a proud chuckle for me messing with the home electricity panel, stealing the refrigerator's power cord to replace my PC's broken one, getting in trouble at school for asking my teachers hard questions, taking some career/financial risks right out of college, and generally bending rules to find novel solutions to common problems, even if i got in mild trouble from time to time.
In many of my peers, including my older brother, they know they must take responsibility for consequences of their interfacing with the world — but that's something scary to them. So their conclusion is to inspect (but unobtrusively), interact (but only as instructed), and never mess with the world. This manifests (where I'm looking from) as limited curiosity, few novel ideas for how things could or should be (even at a small/local/domestic scale), and low initiative to try to alter their circumstances unless forced by said circumstances or authority or long debates to convince them of high certainty of upside.
Our society is cooked in the coming generations if everyone is raised to only operate within the rules they're given, and terrified of taking responsibility for anything they do — the rate of change in the world is going to accelerate so much faster than benevolent authority figures (like parents) can give them sensible long-standing rules to live within, and abusive/manipulative authority figures (billionaire CEOs, possibly superintelligent AIs or even just advanced LLMs) are going to take so much more advantage of them than they already do.
Very deep and well written. I think the most important thing I want to pass to my kids is that there are reasons rules are put in place, and there are reasons why we should respect the rules, but there are exceptions. There are times when rules can be bent or broken, and we need to know how to judge, when to take risks, and when we should be transparent about own our decisions and actions.
People need to be open to experiment and make their own judgement based on observation without relying purely on their environment and authority.