> To keep young kids behaving on a car road trip, have a bag of their favorite candy and throw a piece out the window each time they misbehave.
That's terrible advice. Treat children with respect! They are very smart, they just lack experience. If they "misbehave", talk to them and explain why this is not good. If you can't find an explanation, chances are you are wrong and you should reevaluate your position.
But never, never, never willfully hurt them by throwing away their favorite candy. So wrong on so many levels.
This was a big surprise for me in this list as I mostly agree with the items before it. Or, to use a previous item:
> You’ll get 10x better results by elevating good behavior rather than punishing bad behavior, especially in children and animals.
When someone punished me, all it did was harm my relationship with that person. I didn't ever do anything wrong on purpose (except some rare exceptions involving peer pressure, which I always regretted), so by definition when I was punished, from my point of view I was being punished for doing my best, which I considered a grave injustice. The fact that they assumed that I did something bad on purpose deeply offended me, and damaged the trust in the relationship, and bred resentment and bitterness.
I'm autistic so perhaps this is an atypical perspective—from
what I've heard we seem to have more of a thing for justice.
I understand there are some naturally naughty kids out there. But I genuinely believe that most kids want to be good, where "good" is defined as "behaving in a way that I get approval from my parents". The question is to what degree those ethics are actually internalized rather than just performed when someone is looking...
you write that your experience as an autistic is that you have "more of a thing for justice" than might be expected from the general population.
I read that as an aspect of autism is to serve as a magnifying lens on on particular aspect of what it means to be human.
So, the trauma you report from being punished might have been felt stronger by you than it would have by someone with a different mental makeup, but that doesn't mean that the other person didn't feel it.
Conclusion: Your hightened awareness allows you to make explicit something which to others is just vaguely troubling. Thus your view is closer to the universal human truth than those who deny it.
I'm mildly on the spectrum, and my view toward punishment as a kid is that it was misguided as well. I don't think it harmed my relationships with my parents, exactly (not directly anyway; the underlying personalities/values maybe), but it definitely introduced me to the fact they were flawed human beings who didn't know what they were doing, which has never 'corrected' in adulthood (i.e., I don't look back and go "in hindsight what they did was for the best", and I'm quite certain that if I behaved similarly due to stress/fear, I'd be apologizing for it immediately after).
Rather, what I was constantly looking for (and still am), was the "why" of things. Attempts to influence my behavior without first influencing my understanding led to friction and were the reasons they tried punishment (which never really worked). I didn't generally go out of my way to disobey them, but if we were at odds they had to explain it well enough for me to understand where they were coming from. This worked better with my mom who seemed to have a better understanding of my needs; my dad was more authoritarian and seemed to expect me to just listen due to the nature of the relationship (which in hindsight is funny, as while he is very much "the rules are the rules" when it came to other people, as soon as he had a reason he felt was good to disobey them, he would; he never really empathized with "other people might have good reasons to disobey the rules or otherwise feel they're unfair too", which helped me understand his political leanings).
I kind of have a thing for justice, and I feel hurt and angry when I’ve done everything I can for my family, told my son clearly why he can’t do something, confirmed that he’s not going to do it any more, and then turn my back and it’s being done again.
What the OP was trying to convey is that always lead with empathy, communication, and love. But, if after doing that your child is still willfully misbehaving, then they know it’s wrong (you talked to them, calmly and respectfully) so now it’s time to start leveraging punishments (groundings, taking toys, etc).
There's a book, "Nonviolent communication: a language of life", 3rd ed, which writes about this.
From what I remember, if you can talk and listen to the kid, and understand what underlying needs drive the behavior, and then mention this to him -- then he'll feel understood, and notice that you're listening and care. And that was, from what I remember, the most important thing, in solving a conflict. (I.e. being listened to and understood.) The other things then, afterwards, tended to be comparatively simple to solve together.
Yes. Telling the child your own needs and feelings is not enough, you need to ask about and listen intently for the needs and feeling of your child. Only when both you and your child both feel heard and seen will understanding result. And once you have understanding of each other then you both know what to do to take best care of each other. The solutions to the conflict then come by themselves, because you now understand each others needs. This only happens after you've put in the hard work to listen and talk and listen and talk and listen and talk and listen some more...
Respectfully disagree. The only solution I found to be working is - to not turn your back. Include the son in whatever you are doing and lead by example.
Of course it is easy to say that when not involved in the situation. But in general it helps to understand why the child "misbehaved" and only then change the course, and punishment in my experience never gives the intended results.
That sounds like a coerced promise. He hasn't been given an alternative, and he may not be on board with the explanation. He has learned that the only way out of the situation is to make the promise, whether he intends to keep it or not.
I'm curious, what does you have to treat him like a person mean in that context?
If the following things happened with an adult:
1. they lied to me
2. I calmly, respectfully and quietly call them out on it
3. they apologised to me and promised not to do it again
4. they immediately do it again
I would calmly call them out again (publicly yet still calmly and respectfully if we were with others), inform them that I'm not going to remain amongst them, then ostracise them.
How do you ostracise a child when you're their guardian?
Edit: clarified that calling them out on it is done respectfully and calmly
You're missing a step, which most adults also miss when dealing with adults.
You have to figure out why they lied, and not in an accusatory way. Often, particularly when someone wants us to promise something that we don't want to, we are trained to lie to get out of the situation. It can often feel like there is no alternative to lying.
This is, obviously, not an ideal behavior, but you can't solve it by force. You have to accept that they have a reason for not wanting to do what you want them to, and you have to come to a mutual understanding.
In any healthy interaction, you do not unilaterally set the rules. You both have input, and you have to respect theirs, even if you don't agree with it. That will help them learn to respect your input as well.
Explain that to him. Talk to him, explain why things are the way they are. And of course, compromise as you would with an adult. Is your opinion really an universal truth or is there some compromise you can reach?
For example, playing with knives is not a good idea, but maybe all the child wants is to be included in cooking? Giving him a spoon might be enough (and much safer).
But every situation is different, it's not easy. :) Don't give up, and good luck!
This is why no parent should ever punish a child in anger. Not because it's morally wrong, but because it doesn't work. The first step must be that the child understands what they did wrong. Then you can tie a punishment to it if you really want it to stick - but first you need to talk it out.
Of course, a parent will often find that after they talked it out, they don't want to punish their kid anymore. (All the better.)
Also found it can be good to talk it out later that day once the kid has calmed down or the event has passed.
At times asking my child after story time, right before bed, "hey, remember today when x and y happened. Do you want to talk about it? Why did you get upset?"
I find kids will happily talk and give their side of the story. It's good then to explain what you think could be a better way to handle that situation in future. Often they'll agree and I'll even hear them later using the strategies to resolve playtime disputes with other kids.
If I raised my voice or was involved in the event being discussed, I will also share my side of the story and explain what I'll try to do to improve or help in future.
i find it incredibly hard to believe that you "didn't ever do anything wrong on purpose" since you disclosed the fact that you were once a child. are you perhaps meaning something along the lines of "didn't ever think that things i did on purpose were wrong" instead? the thing that upset you when you were punished would then be that your definition of wrongness was different to that of the person punishing you?
most kids want a combination of 1.) approval from parent(s) and 2.) stuff that makes them happy and when 2 conflicts with 1 there can be issues, and it is a rare child that seeks only approval from their parents in all circumstances, as you also point out.
I think a big issue for many autistic people is that they are often perceived as wilfully misbehaving when they they have actually been trying very hard to behave. And this is particularly confusing for autistic children as the rules for them are different to the rules for the adults whose behaviour they are modelling.
That is a great point. I got into a lot of trouble for treating people exactly the way they treated me. (That usually didn't have the intended effect of enlightening them, unfortunately...)
My reasoning was, if you don't want it done to you, don't do it to me. If you claim this behavior is so bad, why do you repeatedly demonstrate it? That too made me lose a lot of respect for parents, teachers etc.
Oof, that rings familiar. I was anti-authoritarian as a kid, but not as a "rebel against the man" or anything so much as the concept of authority from position being completely alien to me. I respected authority from knowledge mind you; someone who knew things I didn't I would listen to, ask questions of, seek to understand; when it became clear I knew more than the teacher, had better understanding, etc, I would disconnect and stop listening to them.
i guess, and intent is important as a factor, at least somewhat mitigating. teaching that actions have consequences based on their outcome, nom matter how well intentioned, is important though, as is the lesson that life is unfair, or at least does not care about what you wanted or intended to happen ;)
i think i actually have a similar problem about asccusations of lying that often get thrown around in arguments etc. when the peoson accused has simply made an error in good faith...
This comment and the previous one in the thread feel very salient, especially in the view of assuming good or bad faith. We've all been children, it's the burden of our human condition, but it feels like assuming others had less-than-pure intent as children because that was how you viewed the world as a child, speaks very directly to the environments in which we're raised along with changes in social mores over time. I'm mostly interested in the dynamic where one person assumes that children act in bad faith, I assume because they think kids are 'trying to get away with it', while the other person points out that from a child's perspective, they are trying their best to model behavior of those around them.
I guess it seems like if you're raised around people who are always acting in bad faith on some level ("Everybody is doing it", "It won't hurt if nobody notices", etc) then you're going to assume that there is always some ulterior motive even without any further evidence.
I had an insight about this which isn't really novel but it finally clicked for me on an experiential level: if you assume bad faith, it makes you feel really bad about the other person, and from that feeling flow words and actions that screw up the relationship (even if your suspicion was completely unjustified and the other person had no ill intentions whatsoever!)
Having mental disabilities and being frequently punished for them is counterproductive.
A lot of ADHD symptoms are identical to lack of maturity or laziness. In my case, being punished for inability to pay attention after school, frequently forgetting things (1), or failing to think about the long term consequences of my actions in the moment was incredibly damaging.
It’s little different from punishing a kid who is missing a leg for “slacking off” in gym class.
1: On top Of ADHD, my mom had and her mom had short-term memory issues due to lacking sufficient enzymes to process folic acid. Me having the same genetic short-term memory issues was treated as laziness by my parents.
How'd you determine the folic acid thing, is that common? My memory is awful (and I have various strange conditions mental and physical), I'm thinking I might benefit from some genetic testing.
The fact that there are two ways to read this comes up in the criminal law context, where there's a question as to someone's mental state.
You read "on purpose" to attach to "act" – as in, "none of my wrong acts were acts I purposely engaged in." (Such statements can often be read this way in the law – it's about whether they intended the act, not the consequences.)
But I think most people stating that sentence intend to communicate that the wrong (or harm) was not deliberate, in that they had innocent motives, or a non-culpable mental state. And that claim shouldn't be all that hard to believe.
> But I genuinely believe that most kids want to be good, where "good" is defined as "behaving in a way that I get approval from my parents".
Well said, I would just say "...behaving in a way that I get attention from my parents". Approval is better yhan disapproval, but both will do if a child lacks attention.
This explains why "bad" children often stay the way they are even when punished - this is how they get the most of their parents' attention. Attention is the main currency for children and the only way to raise a healthy adult is to give plenty of it to a child. But not as punishment.
Coincidentally, adults are not as different from children as most think we are.
I don't think you're right. Kids are naturally flexible, curious and have no notion of right or wrong. They will constantly try things out and need boundaries for their own good and for the good of the family.
How these boundaries are set varies by community, but some form of punishment is very very common.
Boundaries are good, but extortion and intimidation is not the way to do it. You can withhold candy but throwing it away is hurtful and cruel.
Speaking as someone who is currently dealing with a very disobedient 2-year old.
In any case, to keep kids behaving on a car road trip, you need to keep them busy and take care of their basic needs, being still and strapped in the back seat is not fun.
I actively rebelled against attempts to control my behavior. I think this is a good character trait to have: it made me a pain in the ass as a kid, but a populace with such a trait would not tolerate government overreach for a single instant. I'd rather get into a lot of trouble than let someone control my life.
Also, to expand on the cruel punishment thing (an extreme example but I believe it's just a more pathological manifestation of the same thing): my mother would sometimes break my things as punishment, for example toys or CDs that were gifts from friends. 15 years later, it still stings. All that taught me was that she was immoral (and possibly insane) which made me rather unreceptive to her future attempts to "educate" me.
> : it made me a pain in the ass as a kid, but a populace with such a trait would not tolerate government overreach for a single instant. I'd rather get into a lot of trouble than let someone control my life.
Education system does not teach science or life - it teaches compliance, obedience, to sit down, shut up and complete work by deadline
> my mother would sometimes break my things as punishment, for example toys or CDs that were gifts from friends
I'm sorry to hear that, it doesn't sound like healthy or grownup behavior. I recognize a lot of that in my own parents, I don't blame them, but a lot of their actions during my childhood I would now find petty or even emotionally abusive (characteristic of borderline or narcissism). They had their own problems I guess, their parents probably did worse things.
I'll admit, I don't have much experience being on the other end and actually dealing with misbehaving children (or teens, or adults for that matter), but I still have a strong bias towards peaceful dispute resolution rather than just forcing things on people and justifying it by saying I'm wiser and more powerful. (The governments of the world have been doing this an awful lot lately...)
I might illustrate with an example of something that happened yesterday. My mother and I were feeding some feral cats near our building when we were verbally assaulted by a neighbor, who strongly disapproved of
this practice (he literally said "not in my back yard!" But it's an apartment building so it's our backyard too.)
My mother's instinct was first to run, and second to get the police involved (he seemed to be a bit mentally unwell, so she feared him). My instinct was to talk to the man, despite his frightening appearance, and understand his perspective. What is it about the cats that bothers him? Maybe it's the fact that people haven't been cleaning up the food trays, so it looks messy. It could be any number of things. But my fundamental thinking is that if I talk to him I will understand him better, and be able to come to an understanding. Whereas my mother's perspective is "he is mentally ill and therefore not even worth engaging with."
I bring this up because most people's perspective on children seems to be "they are a child and therefore their perspective is irrelevant. I am going to force my perspective on them, and force them to do what I want, at least until they are a legal adult." I disagree with this, because it conditions people for their entire formative years to instill a sense of powerlessness and a sense of not mattering.
In most countries, such disrespect of children is actually required by law. From a young age I had no interest in continuing school, but I was forced to pretend to go along with it for another 5 years, or the police would be sent after my parents.
> Treat children with respect! They are very smart, they just lack experience. If they "misbehave", talk to them and explain why this is not good.
This is so out of touch with the reality of toddlers that I can’t help but think you’ve either never had children, someone else raised your children, or you got really lucky with an abnormally docile kid.
Screaming tantrums are hard to give rational explanations over. Do you wait your turn to speak between screams or just talk over them?
> Screaming tantrums are hard to give rational explanations over. Do you wait your turn to speak between screams or just talk over them?
Screaming tantrums are a great demonstration of just how irrational young humans can be. I was (and am) firmly of the opinion that even when confronted with crazy it's crucial to [attempt to] remain rational in your response ...
Speaking of irrational, one of our favourite anecdotes (one of several thousand...) when our eldest was a toddler, he was playing in the garden and for no good reason decided it would be a great idea to throw small rocks .. at our parked car.
I was in the house and heard this strange <clunk> <pause> <clunk> <pause> <clunk> sound coming from outside...
I stepped outside, he'd done about a dozen rocks by that point, judging by the dents in the panels of the car.
I was so angry I recall managing to tell him firmly to stop but then having to actually walk away, leaving my wife to explain that "Daddy is so cross he can't actually speak right now..."
Another child might keep doing that or do it to other cars too. You had a well behaved child regardless of this one action. Some children are not well behaved
One question is if punishment (of what sort) will make "not well behaved" children any better behaved. Based on my observation, I wouldn't count on it. I see lots of "not well behaved" children getting strictly punished and their behavior just gets worse and worse.
I know especially in the USA we want to talk about "what people deserve" rather than "what works" (vaccines and general covid response anyone? like we'd rather have someone to blame and have the right people have bad outcomes we think they deserve, than actually do things that work?), but what a mess.
I'm actually kind of glad that some children are not well-behaved. There's something reassuring in knowing that despite thousands of years of effort some humans cannot be easily controlled.
Of course, that does not mean it's a good thing that some humans destroy property and make other people's lives miserable, but it's nice to know that the indomitable still exists within us.
If you label someone as inherently “not well behaved” you yourself are not going to be able make any progress with them, because you will not be able to see their potential or their experience.
Remaining calm and explaining things is great, as long as it's clear that this will sometimes (maybe many times) not achieve anything. I like to think that they'll think about what they were told once they calm down :-)
The whole field of behavioral science is something that exists and looking there for hints what actually works might be a good thing. Afaik the studies say that punishment is worse than ignoring wrong behavior in terms of getting you the outcome you want.
Better even is giving positive feedback on positive behavior while of ignoring bad one.
And yes, I had a toddler brother and had to test this based on actual, stressful reality.
My uncle (RIP), who was a child psychologist was a staunch proponent of treating his kids with respect and intellectual honesty.
Like most kids, they still got into trouble and had major screw ups in their young lives. However I've never seen anyone who respected their parents more in my life. There were no beatings, no yelling, no destroying or selling of their property as punishment. And wouldn't you know it, when they got in trouble for something they did wrong - they didn't resent their parents for it. They were always expressive that their mistake (or the general view of society that what they did is a mistake) was the problem.
It's hardly empirical evidence but it certainly convinced me.
i have two boys, 3 and 5. You cannot ignore what they are doing. If one of them starts to something wrong the other one joins so you have a double chance of trouble. And if we are outside and they start to misbehave in public you cannot ignore them. If they start to throw things at objects or people you cannot ignore them. If they start to say things that are not appropriate, you cannot ignore them (they favourite word right now is shit). when they start fighting i cannot ignore it. Im reading those opinions online and cannot at all connect it with what im seeing with my kids.
I don't think anyone is saying ignore it, just that how you address it really matters. I grew up with a sibling and we got up to all sorts of trouble/fights and our parents were severe about it. all the punishment did was make sure we didn't do x or y in-front of the parents. Like it did teach me to be a great liar and sneak and we got up to all the hijinks, but I don't think that is the ideal parental outcome despite how well it has served me in life.
Of course you have to stop them if they are misbehaving or causing harm.
A good book on this topic is "How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life with Children Ages 2-7".
> You cannot ignore what they are doing [all the time]
You are obviously correct here and the giant pitfall of parenting advice is generalisation.
Your kids are bickering on a car journey? You have choices in how to respond.
Your kids are throwing stones at passers by? That has to stop right now as fast as you can apply influence with a transition from verbal to physical based on distance.
Don't take anything you read here as gospel. Note the myriad of parenting attitudes and common child behaviours globally. Accept you are doing it wrong, we all have/do/will.
No one told you to ignore them. Why is that the action you default to when you're told that screaming at them, hitting them, etc results in a negative outcome?
To extend he discussion, its safe to assume when a parent screams / hits that the other options didn't work. So it could be helpful to provide an example. Here's a sample scenario: Your toddler throws a rock at a stranger. You ask them to stop. They do it again. You get between them. They throw the rock at you. You restrain them (as gently as possible). They spit at you and then try to bite and scratch you. What next?
(Genuinely curious of your approach, I'm usually out of options at that point).
> Safe to assume when a parent screams / hits that the other options didn't work.
Most of my life experience contradicts this - parents gets angry and emotional, ignore needs of their children, do not think through their actions and do not realise possible alternatives.
I have witnessed parents 'giving away' kids to grandparents, spensong no time with them, and threatening physical punishment for poor gradea instead of offering any help
Lastly, you example is of a kid acting like a feral animal - by the time you get to the point it seems something has already royally fucked up
> Lastly, you example is of a kid acting like a feral animal - by the time you get to the point it seems something has already royally fucked up
Toddlers skip directly to that point with varying frequency and intensity depending on the child. Some will do it for obvious reasons, some will do it for less obvious ones. Some will do it literally at random. It would be great if all toddlers followed a step wise progression from obvious stressor to obvious meltdown, like you read about in the common parenting books, but that's not how they all work.
Of course there are bad parents out there too. But theres also plenty of parents who do everything by the book, never spank, set clear boundaries with clear signals and set good routines. And they get rewarded with random slug fests that come out of nowhere. Parenting is an unimaginably challenging experience for these folks and there's little they can do about it.
im more responding to parent comment, talking about ignoring is better than yelling, you cannot just ignore it. In a given day if you spend time with your children there are situations where that would not work. For example, my wife goes to work early, so it's on me to wake them up ready them and drive to kindergarten before i go to work. I cannot ignore them because im on time pressure, and we have to go. Im not hitting them but threating to take the toys and take them if they wont do. I scream if that does not work. And they still sometimes won't listen.
it's a lot different then what i imagined before i had kids. And the thing is most of people have the same problems. It's just that we all fake it in front of others. Like we are great and so on. But im in the years, where a lot of out friends have children with same experience.
The key to dealing with time pressure is to just start the process earlier (and avoid scheduling things too close together). The solution for hard wake-ups is to go to bed earlier and allow natural light into the sleeping area. In some parts this is basically impossible, though, as mandated start times require waking up before dawn. Pure folly.
If you do issue punishments, try to make them relate to the crime. Take away toys that get thrown at a sibling, or that don't get cleaned up from the hallway, but don't take away toys because the kid refuses to put their shoes on. That's just bullying and it will confuse the child.
Maybe the punishment for being late to school is an hour earlier bedtime that night. This is less of a 'punishment' and more just a rational correction to the problem.
I get what you are saying completely, and completely agree.
I have noticed male children, especially the first born male, who's father is a Psychiatrist end up--well--what's the right phrase? Some seem very angry. It's just something I noticed in my small circle.
I'm probally wrong, but it's something I have noticed.
How many people do you know who are the first-born male child of a male Psychiatrist? I'm thinking your sample size might be a little small to be drawing conclusions :)
(that and, how are you sure you're not experiencing confirmation bias?)
Unless there's some condition that make them more likely to know about first born males of male psychiatrists, I would have bet on "definitely small sample" too
I'd suggest that
1. Psychiatrists and very different to psychologists
2. Intra job variation of personality and parenting style probably exceeds inter job variation
3. Anger at dad may not be a consequence of their job
As the first-born son of a psychiatrist, I feel inclined to add the data point that I do not recognize this in myself. I have a fairly neurotic personality, though, maybe that's the word you are looking for? Then again I don't think my father's profession has had a significant impact on my personality.
Maybe it has more to do with a type of personality that professions like psychiatry attract? It's hardly disputed that your parents' personalities tend to rub off on you.
It's true that punishment as in: "I am going to do unpleasant things to you because you misbehaved" isn't very effective.
What works is enforcing consequences of actions: "the rules of this trip are such, it's ok if you ignore them but then you will not be part of it anymore" or "playing time comes after cleaning up after dinner, if you choose not to clean up no one is going to play with you". As long as the rules are clear, make sense and others follow them they work.
Another thing that works is making the child aware that their behaviour hurts you. "What you do makes me sad/tired/feel/makes my work harder". You are not angry, just making them aware how their actions affect others.
Needless to say you should never ever give in to a tantrum. Giving in to tantrums is not part of the structure everyone abides by.
Source: my gf works with children, often with disabilities and is a psychologist interested in behavioral science. Children actually like you more if you're someone enforcing the rules and structure than a pushover who will do as they please if the tantrum is long and loud enough.
> Parents should also be reminded that physical
punishment may cause tantrum behavior to intensify and
lengthen. Such parental behavior also teaches children
that hitting is permitted when the punishment is physical
(Kyle, 2008; Murphy & Berry, 2009)
> The best recommendation for
parents in this situation is to remain calm, try to distract
the child, and ignore the tantrum if possible.
> "Getting into it teaches the kid the way to get your attention is to have a big fuss," he said. "If you ignore that outburst, they're less likely to do it."
- neuropsychologist w/ lots published on quality and duration of tantrums in toddlers
Obviously there's lots of nuance and this is mainly advice given for tantrums in toddlers, primarily attention seeking tantrums in toddlers without development issues.
But it does generally follow 'praise good behavior, ignore bad behavior'.
Do you mind sharing how you got those references? I.e. which search strings/websites you used, or if you had them at hand with f.e. Mendeley or maybe already knew about them?
I wanted to read some papers in the subject a few days ago but couldn't come up with a good search strings nor good initial references. It's not my field of expertise :x
Ignoring bad behavior is fascinating to me -- does that actually work for most people? I've noticed in my own (and others) toddlers, who are generally speaking well behaved and docile, that ignoring is usually the worst option. Distraction is always the best, but only works ~1/3 or 1/2 of the time and I've been told I am exceedingly good at it.
Ignoring tantrums makes sense. They’re doing it because they want something, and ignoring it shows that won’t work.
Ignoring other bad behavior isn’t the same. If a child is hurting someone, is being destructive, or ignoring what you say you absolutely should do something about it. I’ve seen plenty of parents that don’t and it doesn’t work.
Yes, if the kid is being destructive the sources even say not to ignore that behavior. They also give suggested intervention strategies (though I didn't see a lot of evidence for why they chose those intervention strategies).
And obviously some kids have psychological issues that make all of this meaningless.
I imagine ignoring a bipolar toddler's tantrum is not going to have a meaningful impact. Or at least that is my experience from dealing with bipolar adult tantrums.
Screaming tantrums are a sign that something is wrong. It's your job as a parent to help the child deal with that situation. Not always figuring out the actual percieved problem (as they're humans, it's almost certainly never anything to do with logic and as toddlers it's probably impossible to even express). Probably not fixable in the moment.
But yes, waiting, connecting with them, and helping them to calm, and process the emotions.
OK but sir this is a Wendys and there are 12 people on their lunch break lined up behind you. Please collect your child from the floor, shut them up and move along.
Sometimes (often) that something is merely a transient disconnect between their lizard brain reward/fear-centers and their rational cortex. There's not much to be done other than wait for the jello computer to stabilize itself.
This is surprisingly applicable to humans of all ages.
This, I think, depends a ton on the child and the relationship between the parent and child. One of the most amazing moments I can remember was at a dinner party with my ex’s extended family. There were lots of kids. During dinner, one of the kids (around 5 years old maybe?) started making a fuss about something. His mom leaned over and whispered something in his ear, his expression changed from upset to… kind of quizzical for a moment, and then I hear him whisper back “thanks!” His demeanour was perfect the rest of the meal, but in a happy friendly way, not the quiet sulking you often see after a child is chastised.
After dinner I absolutely had to figure it out. He didn’t say “sorry” he said “thanks”?! I go up to the mom (who I’d never met) and say something like “that was amazing! What on earth did you say to him?”
“Oh, all I said was ‘you’re being inappropriate.’ He’s a super conscientious kid, he doesn’t really need to be punished most of the time, he just needs a bit of clear, unemotional feedback. For him and me, yelling or threatening punishment escalates things, but this works great for us! Now, my daughter… that’s entirely different!”
5 is totally different from 2. At that age they aren't even usually fully able to engage in a verbal discussion, which can be frustrating for them.
I find patience and a tiered approach of punishments helps. Too many people jump to harsher punishment or longer timeouts and it's just punishing themselves because they have to miss that playdate or hold that kid in timeout.
Oh absolutely, lol 2 is the unfortunate stage where they've gained the capacity for rapid mobility without a whole lot of higher-order brain development yet. And I totally agree on high-patience and slowly escalating :D. I've only had to deal with this with nieces and nephews, not full-time for a year, but yeah... patience patience patience.
Parents have strong opinions, but I suggest the following exercise.
Observe parents with their children. But instead of focusing on the kid throwing tantrum or one listening to their parent, focus on the parents. See what their approach is, how much attention they give to the kid and in what way they treat them - not just when handling the difficult situation.
Kids are very different and definitely not rational. But if you spend some time doing the above, you can't help but notice some patterns. Some are genetics, sure, but I'm talking about their approach to the kid, this is something that's up to them.
Also, there are many books compiling data from papers about both short and long term results of different parenting approaches. Specific approaches offered in books differ, but data, especially long term studies, is pretty consistent.
Of course everything depends on your optimization function. One may choose kid's depression in later life over feeling embarrassed at Wendys ;) But more seriously, it really does depend what you want to achieve. You may want your kids to be happy, altruistic, empathetic, hard working, clever successful, well behaved, social, open minded or creative. These are different things, parts of them conflicting with one another, you can't have them all. I think this is a big part of the reason why there are so many disagreements about parenting.
Whenever I hear parents act like victims of normal childhood behavior, it's almost always to justify their own poor responses to it, like this or worse.
Misbehave != tantrum. Normal child misbehave way more than they have tantrums (source: I have 2 children myself and my wife is a trained nursery nurse).
Regardless with a tantrum you wait till they are calm then speak to them and explain to them what's the correct thing to do in that situation.
Yeah same, I don’t think I can recall a tantrum my kids had that wasn’t “rational”. Obviously all kids are super different, but for us it’s always low blood sugar, lack of sleep or being “trapped” where he wants do do something he can’t be allowed to.
Being a father of two (2 and 4), I think children younger than certain age cannot connect the negative result with the action they did. I yell, I lose candy, so what? I get to yell. Also, telling kids what not to do is different from what to do. You can tell kids don't do this, don't do that all day and they still fail to behave . My 2-yo tends to yell when he couldn't get the things he want. Telling him don't yell is futile. Taking snacks off his hand is even more futile. Giving him the stuff once he claim down and say "thank you" seems to help.
On the other hand, punishing has its place. But use it sparingly. I always send both of them to time out if they fail to share toys or fight each other. There is no one size fit all. Every kids are different.
I tell the child "I can't understand you when you talk to me using that voice" over and over until the child calms themself down and delivers their grievance at a normal volume. Then I explain why things are the way they are and the tantrum re-erupts (usually) so we repeat the process two or three times. This technique requires a huge amount of patience, though, and it certainly doesn't get you to school on time.
I have a 2 year and a 5 year old. Screaming tantrums are exceedingly rare, and when they happen it is usually because I have failed as a parent with basic things like forgetting snack time, or they didn't get enough sleep. Who in their right mind thinks that yelling at the kids or punishing them in these kind of situations would improve the situation?
The global society is currently trying to overcome gender, race and sexuality issues, while our children are still being treated mostly like slaves - it's for the sure the next fronteer, but maybe it will take a while.
in no particular order:
a. their freedom of speech is largely limited;
b. their freedom of movement is almost non-existant;
c. they do not have the right to own property;
d. parents have an immense power over them, with zero
oversight in most cases, in a manner analogue to egypt pharaoh's or something (also, like pharaohs, they claim the children are THEIR PROPERTY, just like slaves in commerce);
e. they are ridicularized and treated as incapable a lot of times and get harshly criticized while adult society is a clear disaster;
f. they get their creativity and will to live supressed, repressed;
g. they are coerced into taking part in school brainwashing, a lot of times having more responsabilities than their parents;
h. they don't get paid for their work;
i. the child can escape from the cancer of nuclear family, but in most cases if they choose to do so they will end up in even worst swamps;
j. children get lied to, tricked and manipulated all the time;
k. beyond being denied the freedom of speech, a lot of times they are more deeply denied the broad freedom of thought, being forced into some religious brainfuc* of some sort;
l. not to mention all direct abuse like free labor, physical and/or verbal abuse, all kinds of prejudice, etc;
m. marginalized everywhere by cities, places and adults that ain't safe or fun;
etc
"All that which might be destroyed should be destroyed, in order to free children from slavery" A saying from an old revolutionary.
Will definitely take a long while. People in general aren't up to be criticized on that one, even indirectly.
Children are like cute kitties: no one wants to see them tortured, but they don't really get to be treated respectfully in any way or form. The flag for "do I respect them?" is always set to True and yet it is almost never reflected in the actual behaviour towards them.
People are at least willing to entertain the thought that you aren't an absolute idiot, might be acting in good faith and have some sort of internal capacity for morality or ethics if you're an adult.
Yeah. It's not like it's parents to blame 100% for it. Most of it is inconscient behavior, and also in a lot of cases there's few options for the parents - it's not like they live the lives of Pharaoh's lmao.
The way I see it, the current state of children won't change directly, as in parents learning better ways directly by being convinced by rationality(this happens, of course, but it's weak force). It takes a full society change for this state to evolve. But I don't think it will take that long, if you ask: history is moving fast and there's a lot going on - I'm an optimist.
100%. I don't know where the seemingly common believe that being a kid is easy. It's simple in the sense that you have no choices to make, but that lack of choice is exactly what makes it so difficult. Being an adult is so much easier than being a kid because you can care for yourself and self-determine
I wish icould re-parent my kids, i made so many mistakes. But, talking to others, everyone does. It's how they end up that cou nts. I've never read so mu
The worst part in this _advice_ to me is that they are basically teaching their child that littering is okay.
If you want to punish your child because you are not patient enough to teach them correctly how to behave, at least don't do it while putting garbage everywhere.
And also, using candy to _train_ kids is a good way to teach them bad food habits. But we came from different sides of the Atlantic so obviously we don't have the same opinion on food.
On top of that: if they thought that kid before that littering is bad, the kid might spot that inconsistency and take away a different lesson altogether — that rules don't need to be followed if you are making them.
But there is a lesson. That the other person may or may not like you depending on how you behave and may or may not be willing to extend courtesy based on that. Some things in your life are your rights, but some things you only get when you actively try to make people around you happy.
Obviously parents are taking care of your basic needs and it is hard for them to switch between parent, teacher and friend at the right moments, but they are never just one thing.
Kids probably should not learn that parents are demigods who make the rules.
> But there is a lesson. That the other person may or may not like you depending on how you behave and may or may not be willing to extend courtesy based on that.
This might be true on an symbolic level. But I am afraid children don't learn all that well on an symbolic level. They learn by imitation.
What you proposed would work if the parent refused to do something they would normally do (e.g. lift the kid on their shoulders), to teach them that it is okay to refuse to do something for others if they are mean to them.
What doesn't work is if the parent does something they ordinarily wouldn't do and blame it on the kid aka "look what you made me do". What this teaches the kid is that they can blame their own behavior on others if they think these others give them a valid reason to do so.
Parents always teach by what they do not by how they explain it.
Unfortunately the candy bit is not the only bad piece of advice on the list. It's honestly a very mixed bag.
> Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.
This gets repeated a lot but it's still BS. Lots of things are nuanced. Deal with it.
> When you forgive others, they may not notice, but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves.
Another one. Forgiveness is the result of a process, not the start. You have to heal before you can forgive, not as a result of it. I suspect anyone who claims otherwise simply has no idea what they're talking about. This is such basic stuff.
> Life lessons will be presented to you in the order they are needed.
Guess he should tell that to people who've been the victim of war crimes or similar. Dangerous advice to give out in general.
> To rapidly reveal the true character of a person you just met, move them onto an abysmally slow internet connection. Observe.
I hope he's only joking here.
> For a great payoff be especially curious about the things you are not interested in.
The only thing that that accomplishes is having a bad time. Double down on your strengths and delegate the rest instead.
I don't know. Have you met my kids?
Not all kids are the same. Assuming the candy bag is big enough tossing a few isn't the worst thing to happen.
I do agree that, as I read this and thought that there's some really nice advice in there this one struck me as slightly off putting.
I can only speak from experience with my own kids and while I try to encourage them and to be respectful there are situations when they need to learn what happens when you cross the line.
I'm not sure people turn out ok if they never experience painful moments and I'm not sure protecting our children from every repercussion is the best way. I'm undecided on this very topic and I certainly try to be positive and encouraging in every situation.
I mean, tossing candy out of the window is littering. Unless you are the kind of parent who allows your kids to litter they will pick up on this inconsistency.
This is the cardinal mistake many parents make: They assume you can just tell kids how they are supposed to behave, and they will somehow extract the right lesson from your words and learn it.
In reality kids observe and learn from your behavior. That means the lesson here could as well be: "If you are the stronger one, you can make the rules. And the rules don't have to make sense and if you are in the right position you can break them yourself and be mean to others."
Which is ofc the polar opposite of what you sought to teach them. If you reason with your kids even of they are unreasonable, you teach them that reasoning is a good way of dealing with problems. If you explain to them why they are not allowed to do certain things you teach them there are reasons and they should be curious about the reasons behind the rules.
Completely agree. The littering is a no go for me.
But the idea that the bag is some reward and that you can lose some of it if you miss-behave and then maybe earn it back. That's reasonable.
I typically employ a progressive punishment in the form of a timeout. Go to your room for 5 minutes. If they don't respect that, it's 10 minutes up to 15 minutes. Culminating in: no iPad for you today.
Sometimes I ask them what the consequences for breaking the rules should be. And I get very reasonable suggestions.
I hate that the reward here is candy because I absolutely detest sugar. And in this scenario I'm conditioning my kids to eat candy when they do good.
I try to reward good behavior more so than I punish bad behavior. Things we're definitely simpler when they were younger but now they lie and make up stuff. I never lie or make stuff up. So, where does this behavior come from? And I never punish them for telling the truth.
Treat them with respect, sure, but set clear boundaries. There's a lot of parent that try to be reasonable and respectful to their kids, going into long rants about what they did was wrong and all that, but at some point you need to be curt, direct, and blunt, and take a stand.
Like on the car road trip, instead of dragging it out with individual pieces of candy (that'll take forever), stop the car and give them a Stern Talking To. Interrupt the flow of the moment.
Haha, I did that multiple times back from school with my boy. If he was acting wrong or making a "tantrum" (probably after a hard long day at school), I would just stop the car somewhere and say "Do what you want but I'll restart the car once you are calm".
It worked every time. He stopped after a minute or two. And then we were able to talk about what was wrong.
Just interrupting the flow shows that something must stop now for the normal life to continue. And then everyone can speak calmly.
willfully hurt? Come now. Sometimes kids are completely irrational, and like adults, need punishment. They aren't always in a state where they can absorb an "explaining". Sometimes they need to see that there are negative consequences of certain actions, especially when lines have been drawn and their actions cross those lines.
Without armchair parenting: people always say this, but the better parents in my life I have have never ever seen using punishment, only consequences that were clearly communicated ahead of time. And for those parents, looking disappointed or hurt seems to cut their kids like knives without any further punishment needed.
Throwing out candy they might or might not get if they behave. Perfect way to add uncertainty, fear and stress into situation. The initial situation is described as "irrational kids" who "cant absorb explaining".
And also, at least where I live, it is actually against road rules to throw away your crap out of window while you drive. It is kind of littering, except more dangerous as you are at speed.
consequences are natural and logical, not arbitrary, so children can reason and intuit about them.
Like not being able to hear the audiobook they are playing, or missing a turn or crashing the car due to distraction (don't do that).
If a behavior has no consequences and you need to invent punishment, why is the behavior wrong? Just because your personal preference trumps your kids?
I mean punishment is definitely not my style either, but the idea of "better parents" is a pretty tricky one. Kids are like cards out of a deck. You really can be dealt a very tough hand.
Those parents were fortunate not to have a sociopathic child. It was scary to see all the ways she’ll manipulate, and she’s not even 8.
Punishment is unfortunately the only thing that she understands. You could call them consequences, but you’d be sugarcoating the truth. Her having a nuclear meltdown due to being sent to her room isn’t the parents’ fault, and it was eye opening to see just how genetic it is.
(Her sister is as sweet as can be, and they were raised identically by the same parent. Interestingly, both kids are from the same two parents, but the father sadly died.)
I’m not sure why siblings are so different, but I recently noticed it even in dogs — our doggo is an extroverted ham, whereas her sister is standoffish and proud.
One grew up initially with no other sibling around and was an only child, while the other has always had an older sibling around and never been an only child. The experience of having an older sibling is completely different to the experience of having a younger sibling. The two are inevitably treated differently by their parents in some ways due to the age difference.
If they go to the same school one of them had to go in ‘cold’ while the other went somewhere familiar they had heard the older sibling talk about and had probably visited before, where the teachers already knew the elder sibling and knew some of their friends.
It’s a very different experience and situation to live in.
Not to outsource my thinking, but it’s not my idea. I only noticed the effect once he pointed it out, and then it seemed obvious.
The refutation to this is three children. If it was true that someone’s character wasn’t inborn, then we should see consistent effects on a middle child on average. But middle children seem equally random. My wife’s sister is an introvert and her other sister an extrovert, and it’s hard to square that with upbringing.
I predict in the future embryo selection will become a new cultural battleground. We’re having a daughter nine months after June, and we know this because it’s now possible to select which gender you want during IVF. It seems a matter of time till the introversion genes are similarly selected for.
People think 'oh, same parents, same environment...' but this seems patently impossible. Untill someone figures out double-blind parenting the confounding factors are endless. I've seen parents that claim they treat their kids "exactly the same," but they really don't.
No, nobody needs punishment. It may achieve momentary compliance, but always sabotages long-term important goals of trust and safety.
Negative consequences are best experienced naturally, e.g., “You made art on the walls with crayons even after I asked you not to? Well, here’s my advice on how to clean the wall.” Punishment imposes additional suffering (“consequences”) in hopes that it is a deterrent. In fact, mostly it deters the victim from the punisher, not the behavior.
If someone is capable of dealing with the consequences of their actions, they are an adult, not a child. A three-year-old could easily make more of a mess trying to clean something. Plus, you need to supervise. The child could easily learn that drawing on walls is a great way to get your attention and play a new "cleanup game".
People who believe in zero punishment have either no experience or a selective memory. Granted, punishment is often overused, but it can be underused, too.
I have vastly more experience with punishment than anyone should, thank you, and an excellent memory. My teenager has literally never been punished; he’s healthy, happy, respectful, responsible — and he trusts me, because I’ve never hurt him on purpose.
Obviously one’s advice must be age-appropriate, and of course a three-year-old would need some supervision. That’s not an argument in favor of punishment, only parenting.
And if the three-year-old does learn that drawing on the walls is a “cleanup game,” so what? They’ll get better at cleanup. My house isn’t a surgery. After a while they’ll get bored of washing walls, and then have a direct and visceral connection between “1 minute of fun drawing on the walls” and “30 minutes of cleanup afterwards.” That sounds like a great lesson to me.
Punishment apologists lack imagination, and are usually more interested in protecting their own ego and authority instead of providing a safe and useful environment for their kids. There is no “underuse” of punishment; it is always the lesson of sadomasochism: teaching kids that they must love someone and fear them at the same time.
You seem to interpret "punishment" as "inflicting pain".
What about denial of privileges or a simple "stand in the corner"? If a kid is being obnoxious right before going to a birthday party, maybe stay home or go late. Or if you're already out, maybe say "this isn't fun anymore" and go home?
I guess you could argue over where the line is between "punishing" and "not rewarding". But I don't think that's a very useful discussion. It's more about how the kid interprets it, and if it's less than they normally get, it feels like a punishment.
Roughly yes, I think of punishment as intentional infliction of suffering in order to modify behavior. If there’s no behavior modification goal then of course it’s just abuse.
I agree with you that POV matters. Telling a young kid, “You can’t have dessert tonight since you’re puking” can easily be interpreted as punishment :D
Some of the things you talk about sound like what I could call “natural consequences,” like cleaning the wall. I don’t think there’s an unambiguous bright line between punishment and consequences. I’ve spent years trying to stay on one side of it, but I don’t think I’ve done it perfectly.
Going late to a birthday party because a kid is “being obnoxious” — I think we could view that several ways. Some parents would call backtalk or opposition or argument “being obnoxious,” and I think that’s entirely wrong — I want him to challenge me, and stick up for what he wants.
If the kid makes a clumsy mistake before the birthday party, maybe he can clean it up when we get back (e.g., spilling Lego, but not milk). If the kid deliberately makes a mess before a birthday party, I might delay and ask them to clean it up first. It’s not always possible for me to understand intent, so if he claims something was an accident I’m very likely to act as if I believe him. There’s less harm in that, I believe, than in attributing malice to an accident.
FWIW I try not to reward or praise him, either; those are both inappropriate uses of power. Those have fuzzy lines, too; “you’re so smart” is praise and I avoid it. “I admire how hard you worked” is talking about my own reaction to empirical facts, so I wouldn’t call it praise.
Paying him $10 for each A on a report card is reward, and I avoid it. Watching a movie on Thursday nights if we get the house cleaned in time seems like natural consequences to me, and I wouldn’t call it a reward.
My own parents provided me many excellent counter-examples and anti-patterns, so before I had a kid I knew I wanted to do it very differently but I didn’t know exactly how. Alfie Kohn’s book, “Unconditional Parenting” informed my thinking about this significantly.
Chances are, they will melt down and cry/yell instead of improving after throwing that candy. It is not even meaninful, it is making you feel like you got vengeance.
And it is pretty much guaranteed they will try to throw away siblings something is sibling is not doing whatbthey want next time. Kids minic and how you treat then is how they treat other kids in conflict.
Moreover, small kids in car are tied. Literally worst they can do is noise.
Right but it doesn't have to go down like that. It's certainly a risk but it can also serve as a reminder that there are costly consequences associated with bad behavior. Question is, how far will they go for a piece of candy...
It does not have to, but it more likely will go like that.
> Question is, how far will they go for a piece of candy...
You are here trying to bank on them acting on rational self interest. But, the initial situation was described as "kids are completely irrational". Threat of throwing away candy they don't have adds even more emotionality and confusion into situation. There is even no initial guarantee they would get candy if they behaved.
Irrational kids wont become rational just because they got scared for candy.
I don't know if that really match but I have an anecdote about (absence of) punishment as a teenager.
As a teenager, on one of my first parties involving alcohol, my father said something like this :
"Try not to drink a lot, but if you do and feel like you want to come back home, call us and we'll get you home, we will not reprimand you whatever would happen. Don't ride one of your friends car, just call us."
Well, contrary to all my friends who acted like their parents should not know they would drink alcohol, I had a great party with moderately high alcohol consumption. "Fun fact" is that I had to call the emergency services for someone who has had an ethyl coma.
Interestingly, and I think it's correlated, I continued to drink alcohol at parties but my first real hangover was more than 5 or 6 years after, on a place and with people I felt safe with.
_All_ of my friends who were taught that they'll be reprimanded if they drank a lot started to drink a lot secretly at every parties. Most of them aren't even my friends anymore.
Behavioral science suggests that punishment is the worst way of teaching any human to behave. Even just ignoring bad behavior is better.
What works best is ignoring bad behavior and rewarding good one randomly (so not every time).
And I would warn against overly relying on food as a form of reward and punishment, unless you want to give your kid an eating disorder for the rest of their life.
I wasn't aware that using food as a reward is a risk factor for eating disorders.
I mean it has an elegance to it, but equally, most elegant ideas don't play out well in reality.
Could you add a reference or some detail?
As someone who already thinks very little of people throwing their cigarette butts out of the window, I would not want to set an example that littering is acceptable to my own kids.
Parenting styles differ, yours isn't one of discipline.
If I hadn't had discipline at that age, I'd be hopelessly undisciplined now (in hindsight, I reckon my parents probably should have disciplined me even more than they did). Taking away my favorite things when I misbehaved worked wonders for me - I then did what I was told.
"But never, never, never willfully hurt them by throwing away their favorite candy. So wrong on so many levels"
Why, what are those levels? Discipline works by first explaining the rules and the reason for them then enforcing the rules with rewards and sanctions. It works for kids, it's the same for army recruits - in fact everyone.
Mollycoddling kids who then never have a day of remorse throughout childhood deprives them of resilience later on in life. Resilience is so important that not instilling it into kids early on in life is of itself abuse.
There's a huge difference between disciplining kids and willfully hurting them. In the above scanario the candy is thrown away but the parent has a choice of whether he or she is administrating discipline or undue cruelty.
Yeah, no. Obviously you can explain why what they are doing is bad (even if that’s just “it makes papa annoyed when you jump up and down on the backseat”), but after you’ve told them the consequences of proceeding to act that way, you have to follow through on it.
I have a vivid memory around the late 90s on a family roadtrip throug the rocky mountains seeing the car drive in front of us a bit erratically until a fucking entire ass nintendo 64 connected to a couple of controllers came flying out of the window of that car and we had to dodge it.
Uh yeah don't throw shit out of car windows to punish your kids. It's literally littering, and it's really dangerous. Always wondered why anyone would think this is OK and I wonder how much insanely weird parenting 'tips' like this have to do with it
Actually, I find that idea kinda funny and with some minor adjustments, I think it can be good parenting.
So maybe you don't want to throw the candy out of the window, because that is not the proper way to dispose candy. However, if you add an empty bag for you, where you put the candy every time the kids misbehave, the kids will probably learn how to preserve their stash. In addition, you might want to add some rules, how they can get the candy back which has landed in your bag (like every time you 'misbehave'). That way you would level the playing field and it might become a game.
After all, it is candy. Nothing the kids rely on to survive, but rather some pleasure drug.
I love the advice he gives - even that piece. If the kids are being bratty, they need to learn - beseeching them to be sensible will only get you so far.
Throwing some sweets out the window is hardly a bad thing anyway - the way I see it, the more you throw away, the kinder you are being to your kids! Though that might not be how they see it...
> But never, never, never willfully hurt them by throwing away their favorite candy. So wrong on so many levels.
Let's not be hyperbolic. Nobody is hurt by throwing away candy. I agree that it is a childish and probably unproductive method, but candy is NOT important.
I think the point is predicated on a situation where the candy is important ("favourite candy"). Substitute for anything else precious to the child. Intentionally destroying something precious, even a small thing, is indicative of something nasty. It serves only to build disconnection.
I don't read it as destruction. Kids should never be entitled to sweets, so the candy is not in any way theirs. And I don't think that they should receive sweets as a reward for being decent human beings.
Sweets are extra. A sign of affection. A toast to achievement.
I imagine a captain pouring a bottle to the sea every time someone gets to a fight an ship crossing the ocean.
(I say this as someone who doesn't give their child sweets!)
IMHO if a child is behaving in a way that you don't like, it's your job, not theirs, to close that gap. Are you putting them in an overwhelming position, asking too much of them, emotionally distancing yourself? Do they have the mental capacity at that age to balance behaviour regulation with delayed gratification? (e.g. a long drive they can't cope with, the promise of sweets if you're "good")
If you're bribing good behaviour with the promise of something, and you have that thing in hand, throwing it away just seems mean. That's different to not giving it to them. It's an irretrievable act, and shuts down any continued negotiation.
Stigmatising natural behaviour, and then washing your hands of the situation (because you can't get that sweet back) doesn't sit right with me.
I think this is a case where it varies hugely. For some kids I’m some families sweets are a huge deal and can be a contentious issue, to others they’re really not a big deal.
I’m surprised you see those two pieces of “advice” as being different schools of pedagogy, because to me they are very much the same. The latter is a better approach, but it’s still a very flawed approach to childcare that were largely ”deprecated” in the 90ies in my country. Because neither of them deals with the child as more than a piece of clay, or an, animal as the author even highlighted.
Don’t get me wrong. Both ways work, and more modern pedagogy builds on the lessons learned from these approaches, but the best way to deal with crime and punishment isn’t these methods, it’s to deal with children rather similar to how you would deal with an adult but then comfort them as though they are children. If that sounds weird to you just imagine how annoying it would be for you if your boss started complimenting you on every thing you do that aligns with what they want to cultivate in you. I know some people might like that, but most of us would feel like we were being treated like idiots. The effect is a little different in children, but some will still feel that way and others will grow up to be very compliment seeking and spend decades in therapy learning how they I be themselves.
What you’ll want to do is to calmly explain why X behaviour is amazing and how proud you are of it. When that is actually true, and then only for as long as it takes for your children to learn that saying thanks when someone give them something is good. Similarly you calmly explain why Y behaviour is terrible, but it’s not like you can’t use reasonable amounts of punishment to teach about consequences. By reasonable I mean things similar to “if you don’t stop hitting the cat in the head with your doll now that I’ve explained why not to do so 20 times, then I’m going to take the doll away for the rest of the day”.
The biggest influence, and most important advice, is consistency. If you say that you’re going to take away the doll for the rest of the day, or when you say no to ice cream, then you absolutely have to follow through. Except when you were wrong, or when you’ve greatly miscalculated the importance of something, and if you’re consistent enough otherwise, then this will simply teach your child that it’s ok to be wrong and admit it. On the flip side of this, you actually have to say yes. One of the biggest challenges I personally faced when I had my first child was that it’s ok to sometimes have ice cream along with your breakfast within modern pedagogy. But it turned out that by saying yes when there is no reason not to, then it becomes really easy to say no because a no is just accepted as your offspring knows that it won’t always be a no.
I think a lot of good parenting is working on yourself though. I mean, why are you getting worked up over what a 4 year old is doing? You have an infinite amount of patience compared to them.
The thing about being biased towards saying yes, but insisting they ask, seems to be very powerful. We’ve never hidden sweets, we don’t have a lot around but when we do they’re accessible. We’ve always told the children to ask if they want sweets and that the answer will usually be yes unless there’s a reason, like it’s meal time soon or we’re saving those sweets for some reason.
Trusting us that the answer would be yes (and we had to follow through on that occasionally), but having to ask created just enough of a barrier that our girls rarely bothered with sweets. They’ve never been a big deal to them, but I know a lot of parents have huge problems with sweets ‘stealing’ and sometimes when other kids come round we find out afterwards all our sweets have been cleaned out.
Unfortunately all children are not created equals and some will crave sugar som much that Your method would fail miserably. I see this in children of my neighbours. Mine are almost same as Yours (especially older one) - they like sweets, but often they will leave them laying around not touching them for days. But if You do this with children of my neighbours they will behave like little addicts and they are like this since when they were like 3.
I think this works a bit like with drugs or somkes - some people just do not have addictive personality and it seems like they are born this way (maby its some chemistry in their brains working better or sth).
That's quite possible, I really don't know, but kids learn a huge amount by the time they're 3. They'll cue off adult behaviour, and you can very easily accidentally teach them really bad behavioural habits very early on. If the adults exhibit addictive behaviour or magnify the significance of indulgent behaviour then kids will start learning that from day 1. So sure individual biochemistry can make a big difference, but a child's basic personality is largely established by age 4. Those early years make a huge difference.
But if that's the problem, then that insight doesn't do anything to keep them from overeating candy, it just assigns blame. And it doesn't really work as advice to new parents except to say "be more perfect!"
>This was a big surprise for me in this list as I mostly agree with the items before it.
It doesn't matter if someone agrees or not. These are Kevin Kelly's advices, things he believes as being true and useful.
You can start your own list.
Also, "modern parenting" as in treat the children like adults, never contradict children, never punish children, children are always right while adults are always wrong, seems to me that failed to produce successful adults. It produced selfish adults that think they are entitled to anything without putting any work.
Came here to say this. Also, the littering aspect is not so great.
As you say, this item seems out of place on an otherwise surprisingly consistently convincing list. Another child-related one is good advice "For the best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should, but double the time with them."
> If they "misbehave", talk to them and explain why this is not good. If you can't find an explanation, chances are you are wrong and you should reevaluate your position.
Tell me you've never had kids without telling me you've never had kids.
This is the type of parenting that made a wide appearance on Super Nanny back in the day.
Children misbehave because they are intrinsically evil, as all humans are. With experience comes manners and the understanding that suppressing your evil nature is beneficial to yourself.
Are you treating other unleashed monsters with the same respect?
Children are naturally ‘wild’ in some sense. They don’t know what the social rules are, can be selfish and resentful. They also have inherent social traits though, they are capable of love, they understand give and take, you can make agreements with them and negotiate. Often when they break social rules it’s a mistake rather than premeditated wrongdoing. Hungry or tired children can be particularly unruly.
None of this adds up to evil. Some children can be very wicked. Usually that’s a consequence of a very unpleasant home environment. Some kids have unbelievably awful parents.
> When checking references for a job applicant, employers may be reluctant or prohibited from saying anything negative, so leave or send a message that says, “Get back to me if you highly recommend this applicant as super great.” If they don’t reply take that as a negative.
Big disagree here, that's not fair at all to the applicant. Some people are just terrible referees and it's hard to know that as the applicant until someone lets you down. Some people mean to reply but forget, some people are too busy to answer and don't get back to you, some people just don't want to even though they think you'd be an excellent candidate. On top of that, with people moving around so much it can be hard to nail down recent contact details.
If somewhere I'm applying to work can't get a hold of someone, I'd very much expect them to reach back out to me in order to resolve the issue, if they can't do me that courtesy then I guess I'll be working somewhere else.
When hiring, print out all the resumes and place in a pile on your desk. Take the top half and throw them away. You don't want to hire people that are unlucky!!!
Do you speak from running references at all in the past, or mostly from the viewpoint of a job applicant that is upset at the lack of fairness?
From overseeing multiple hires before, I have to say the technique works. Does it follow due process? No. But does it empirically have high correlation? Definitely yes.
Good applicants correlate highly with have a number of qualified referees (direct managers are best) that will give raving reviews, and so they can pick the ones best at answering. Giving flakey referees is itself a signal.
Should a hiring manager reach out to you -- sure they should. Is the damage already done if they do? Informationally, unfortunately yes.
> Does it follow due process? No. But does it empirically have high correlation? Definitely yes.
The same argument justifies hiring the most privileged candidates - rich parents, white, and has political connections and your boss's wife goes has been at their barbeque.
It does work - people who've been given the best in life are more likely to be competent and less likely to have issues. If something does happen to them or their family, they are more likely to have resources to cope. It's less likely to affect their work
But somehow as a society we've generally agreed that this isn't good enough of a rationale.
> Do you speak from running references at all in the past, or mostly from the viewpoint of a job applicant that is upset at the lack of fairness?
No, my work comes ad-hoc from my network. It's just easy to spot how you're letting good candidates slip through the cracks with such a harsh stance on a non-reply. I've also been in the hiring seat, and I didn't find references to be much of a positive signal, let alone a negative one.
I'll concede that big organizations have really different requirements, so if you're talking from that perspective then maybe it's useful to sort out the chaff from the inundation of applicants.
> Good applicants correlate highly with have a number of qualified referees (direct managers are best) that will give raving reviews, and so they can pick the ones best at answering. Giving flakey referees is itself a signal.
How do you suppose these individuals came to have so many references? In my 13 years of industry engagement I haven't moved that much, and there are enough years in between said jobs that I just genuinely don't know where some of these people are anymore. I would expect you're trending toward job hoppers and people who work in big organizations, which if you also work in a big org is probably a really good signal. But if you're hiring for a small company, I wouldn't give a second thought to a middle-managers opinion on their ability to colour within the lines.
> Should a hiring manager reach out to you -- sure they should. Is the damage already done if they do? Informationally, unfortunately yes.
The issue is that they think everyone is playing the game they've set up, but that's not the case. The world is too diverse to expect everyone to tick your HR checklists.
Yeah that advice is horrible. Someone could forget or change voicemail systems or have your email go to spam. It’s not a signal of anything.
Doubly so as I’ve had the experience of totally unqualified people with great references. Checking references and figuring out when you’re getting real feedback on topics relevant to the new job is a practiced art.
Taking references should be prohibited altogether, except for specific jobs (if the job implies interaction with children).
They remind me of house employees' conditions in the "Downtown Abbey" area.
It's just a sign of employees' subjection to the always more extreme capitalism.
If an employee is leaving or has been fired, it means that things were not doing well anymore. How can one tell apart truthful feedbacks from all the biases? Most of our biases are unconscious, so the person you're talking to will be sincere but still unfair.
It's sort of weird to pretend to be able to sort feedbacks on the phone while not being able to judge if a person will fit well despite often numerous interviews by different persons in the company.
What if a woman has been sexually harassed but can't talk about it, for fear of the reach of her harasser, a respected entrepreneur, or even to be sued for false accusations?
Can you a person of color easily denounce racist biases that blocked his/her career? What if the previous boss can't stand a gay person?
Can one say plainly that one has little herd bias so one's point of view make the group uncomfortable? You may need such a person in your organization - or not. That person may not be even capable of such a diagnosis.
A reference won't add more unbiased information than several interviews. A lot of money and time is spent screening because the on-boarding process is costly. That makes sense but we could as well change the on-boarding rather than keep refining the screen.
Talent is important but how the person fits in a team and the company's culture is much more important. So give people a try with a sort of temporary status, limited responsibility and light onboard process. Of course, people may try and fake to fit in, but that can't last very long. The feedbacks of your colleagues are much more reliable because you know them and therefore you can sort them.
And what if that person has great references but for some reason, there is a clash of personality with a major person of the firm? Totally unpredictable but that happens.
This is a ridiculous argument. Reputation and social proof are basically the core concepts governing how humans interact with each other.
The process should certainly be made more equitable but discarding personal recommendation as a concept entirely makes as much sense as having all humans work at night and sleep during the day.
I'm open to discussion of course, but I'd more a more argumentative reply.
My point is not about equity but just plain efficiency. I'm all for a more equitable recruitment - but that's not what I addressed here.
Of course reputation matters. But reputation is not provided by references - at least imo. That person is reputed in a community or not. If you are looking for a top-notch dev, her/his reputation will be apparent.
Social proof is of utter importance, hence the idea of hiring fast to see if that person fits well in your company. How is it relevant if that person did not fit well in the previous company? It may be in some cases, if you know that previous company well, like having work for them or at least with them.
If you are looking for someone who fits well anywhere, well, that can be a must for the role or you just prefer people without much personality.
Go fast, fail fast, anybody?
A human being behaves very differently in different social contexts. Your company's context is more often than not very different than the previous company's.
1 month trial is more efficient and costs less than 6 interviews + 3 references. Give people a chance and let them surprise you. Of course, that doesn't mean hiring the first resume received but if the person appears qualified and do well in 2 interviews (HR + the new boss or colleague), that's plenty enough.
It's not just horrible advice. It's dangerous and unethical.
In Silicon Valley or on Wall Street, when people lose jobs on reference checks, people often get hit men sent to their house, and while the objective usually is just intimidation, all sorts of bad things can happen in that situation.
Putting someone at risk of getting killed because "his references weren't as enthusiastic as I expect everyone to be" is fucking immoral.
It's not that surprising. Reputation is a big deal in Silicon Valley. The people who won't do whatever is necessary--even end a human life, if it comes to that--to defend their reputations end up having theirs taken away.
I'm not saying this is a good or moral thing. It's obviously not.
I'll be honest here, I found this list mostly banal and also not really actionable. I think anyone could generate a similar list with a few Google searches and many of these tips I have seen written by other others and this guy has just re-phrased them. Basically generic self-help.
I think a better option is to choose one particular thing you want to improve in yourself and have a focused plan to work on it. However this takes work and effort that most will never do. Reading a big list of 50 sentences will make zero difference to your life.
That's odd. I found almost every point on that list immediately actionable.
- Use the work "but" less often (I can practice this today with my partner).
- Start looking for a new job if you work for someone you can't see yourself becoming (I can start looking for ads right away).
- Spend more time with fewer people (I could make a phone call right now).
- Try to forgive more often (there a conflicts in my life that I could get out of right now if I could forgive them).
- Criticize in private, praise in public (I'm guilty of the opposite at work, this is a good reminder that I should try to improve).
I'm not sure that "banal" is a good measure for whether something is important or not. I often ignore banal things because I forget, or don't want to remember. Having a list might actually help. Although I agree that having a list of banalities is not enough to make a difference. You definitely have to put in work as well. Thanks for reminding me.
Thanks, I understand now what you meant by actionspace.
> this is the reason that lots of advice sounds banal.
This is the part I'm not getting. Definition of `banal` is:
> so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring.
Obviously, personal circumstances apply to every single piece of advice ever given to random strangers on the internet. For example, I don't even remember when was the last time I saw a street musician. Doesn't mean that the one-dollar thing is banal. It may be irrelevant to my life, but that is a totally different thing. It would be banal if the behavior suggested was an extremely common social norm... which it isn't, and some people argue the advice is wrong. Which is good! Discourse is healthy.
The same piece of advice can be life changing, completely irrelevant, or anywhere in between; depending on the life the recipient has lived before receiving it.
So it’s natural that some readers will scroll through any list of advice and find little of use, while others are able to put the words to good use.
> If you stop to listen to a musician or street performer for more than a minute, you owe them a dollar
if i am a child, with no money, or am un- or underemployed with very little money in the form of disposable income, then this advice is not actually actionable.
not to mention that it is also wrong - you do not owe the street performer anything, no matter how long you stop and listen for. they are not entitled to anything just because they made a choice to perform in a public place. and this is not to suggest i have never, or will not in future, donate to buskers etc. - but it is always an active choice...
The advice was aiming at the moral level. You missed that completely, unfortunately.
> they are not entitled to anything just because they made a choice to perform in a public place.
And you are making a choice of whether or not you support them if you found so much pleasure in listening to them that you chose to spend over a minute listening to them instead of walking past them. You are entitled to just move on. Whether it's the right thing to do is a different question and only for yourself to decide.
no, the bit about having no money was a response to a claim that the advice was 'actionable' and i pointed out a situation where in believed it was not actionable dute to practical financial constraints.
however, my statement about entitlements of the performer being non existant along with the listener having no obligation to pay the performer because they stayed for some amount of time, was made on an moral level. i also believe it is a morally 'good' thing to compensate the performer if they provide you with entertainment, i just do not believe there is any obligation placed on you to do this by the performer. like you say, it is for me alone as the listener to decide. i objected to the use of the word 'owe' in the advice, basically.
> i objected to the use of the word 'owe' in the advice, basically.
I suppose the original post does not state the "owing" in an absolute sense but as a recommendation to shape your morals so that they include that it's good to feel that something should be returned. Using the word "owe" for that is suitable, though it does not mean that everybody you see in the situation would "owe" money to the performer.
>no, the bit about having no money was a response to a claim that the advice was 'actionable' and i pointed out a situation where in believed it was not actionable dute to practical financial constraints
The advice is not about giving 1 USD. The advice is to giving something back in return. It does not have to be money. A thank you, applause, a hat off, a flower or a heartly smile will do.
I could write an essay on this topic but it's far too complex of a topic to summarize in a quick comment.
But for example, quickly: One thing I personally do is journal every day (yes every day) before I do anything else. That is, I get up, grab a coffee and write roughly 1000 words. I will choose certain topics on which to journal and focus on these for a few weeks, for example: looking at how my relationships are going, how I interact with people, where I find myself energised and working well with others, and where I'm getting annoyed or frustrated or otherwise have some issues. I try and increase my levels of consciousness around certain topics in my life to gain a lasting impact and changed and improved behaviors. I use certain techniques like sentence completions (thanks Nathaniel Branden!) and also asking myself provocative questions (e.g. "What did today's experience touch in my history?") to gain learning and insight in certain areas of my life.
The point being that to genuinely CHANGE as a person (in my belief), reading a list of snappy aphorisms is useless, you need to change your habits, daily routines, you need repitition and work. Sincere self reflection is difficult, as is changing the habits and brain patterns of a lifetime.
I think they meant it was ironic because you criticized the list as generic and then gave generic advice yourself. Which obviously you don't find generic as you say "it's far too complex of a topic to summarize in a quick comment". The irony is that you weren't willing to think deeply about any of the 103 "generic" items on the list, hence you got nothing out of it.
Yep, it was purely calling out the irony I saw in that.
I in fact I completely agree with the criticisms, though I personally find high level things like the list helpful at times because it causes me to think or provides me a heuristic to engage with. "When you lead, your real job is to create more leaders, not more followers" for instance, is not directly actionable, but it's a solid summation of and validation of a lot of the more tactical decisions, risks, and investments in people I've made as a manager. It's not directly actionable, but it succinctly puts into words a series of tradeoffs I've intentionally made in the past, which is helpful. Others on the list -are- directly actionable; for instance, I -did- use it as an excuse to go pull up a city tourist guide...and I found a few restaurants I now intend to check out, including a Spanish one with a Flamenco show that my wife will probably love, that I didn't even know existed.
I actually find specific advice very hit or miss (mostly miss); I've seen similar comments on journaling in the past, and I haven't found it helpful for me. Whereas anything I can hold in my head (and aphorisms fit, if as I thought about them I found them to hold weight, rather than just being truly empty statements, tautologies or statements of empty optimism that are meant to make you feel good rather than influence a decision) means it can pop up when suitably relevant and influence my behavior. For instance, with relationships, I missed my grandfather's funeral. Not a big deal to me at the time; he was dead, and I'd get to see my grandmother a few month's later at Christmas time when the semester was over. Except...she passed the day I was supposed to drive down. And it further drove a wedge between me and members of my family (that initially was there due to circumstances beyond my control) that I've only really begun to overcome in the past few years. All of that means I periodically, at random, have "what relationships are you neglecting?" pop into my head, as well as in response to certain occurrences (weddings and funerals are always a "yes" from me now, no matter how much of an inconvenience it is), and that implies action; "Oh, I haven't heard from my cousin in a while, let me just check in with her", etc.
Sometime a "generic self-help" wisdom strikes you and stays in you forever.
When I was a young teenager my dad told me "If you a give a no, always give a yes after". He meant you always have to propose an alternative after you rejected a proposition.
I have no idea why but this simple sentence became a strong principle for me. It influenced hundreds of decisions I made and my behavior in general.
There can be true actionnable value in those wisdom pieces.
I've read some of his advices before. He does not pretend to be the original author.
Everybody is free to find something useful in that list, or not.
I did have some use of his advices. While I've read this year's list and the lists for the years before, I was meditating about the advices. Thinking if they will work and if so, in what context they will work.
This isn't the first list of the advices I've read.
Why do I think that it might be valuable? Because this man verified these in his long life. It's not a quick list compiled using Google to make an SEO optimized article.
Most of the bits aren't very profound and they can occure to anyone with common sense and a bit of experience. But while any of us can think of them, we generally don't occupy our minds with philosophy of life. And even if we do, and come up with something useful, chances are we don't act on it.
So, reading something useful, and thinking on it, might give us a chance to act on it when we find ourselves in that situation. Instead of acting impulsively and subconsciously, we can take a few seconds, think and maybe remind what KK said and try that.
> You learn as a person when you understand why you should do something not just blindly following a list of advice.
So you are trying to drive that point home by adding to that list with this statement?
I read this list more as some inspiration -- most of the points were mostly "meh, sure" and won't stick, but there were a few food-for-thought points in there that I'll likely remember here and there. If that's similar for most people reading the list, it's quite a success. (Doesn't have to be the same few points for everybody!)
Do you require a full-blown argument for every piece of advice or information you ever hear? You are supposed to weigh it yourself and see if you find it applicable to your situation or not. I think this list is great exactly for this reason: it gives you material to meditate on. I don't want any arguments for or against it, figuring those out is part of forming an opinion about it.
> Do you require a full-blown argument for every piece of advice or information you ever hear?
There's a lot of misinformation and opinions stated as facts on the internet. So yes for opinions / advice given online I tend to require an explanation. This list has some questionable advice an example:
"Dont purchase extra insurance if you are renting a car with a credit card"
This is false in the UK. Over here that's wrong advice to think you CC provider gives insurance. If that's in the US then it's not always true as well and even then comes with caveat's.
I think in general that's true about almost everything on this list.
I found the same too. I think GPT 3 could write a similar list with the right prompt. It is too long and it would have been better if it was of 3 ot 5 most important items than a long list of half of which sound like cliches.
Regardless one thing I do look forward to is the HN discussion here with people giving their own points. I do hope to learn a thing or two from that.
It's also frustrating because some of these are a tiny amount of effort (take the stairs) and some are huge daunting changes in your life that will give you nonstop anxiety (what you do on your bad days is more important than what you do on your good days).
I broke this one, and it broke a 10 year friendship which took another 5 to heal, and I decided to stop pretending to be a manager. This is a rule of life not to break if you can avoid it. Almost irreparable harm done.
This is not a universal rule. Really not -- there's an important exception that people (especially managers) tend to forget.
Reflect on issues where they happened.
I.e. if someone is an asshole on a meeting, you (as a leader) need to reflect on that on the meeting. You can address the details in private, but not reflecting on it in front of the people who got hurt/offended is wrong as it approves the bad behaviour.
I struggle with this one, too. I don't like to criticize in public, but you CAN miss the opportunity if you are dogmatic about not doing it.
One idea to do this better is, to day something about the behavior in real time without criticizing. People know that you noticed, and you can later talk about "that time in the meeting", and there's no doubt about what you're referencing. But you don't have to pick out your nuanced words in a high pressure real time scenario.
Definitely. I've heard stories of meetings where someone openly sexually harassed a coworker, and the manager didn't say a word. Maybe they talked to them privately, but that kind of behavior needs to addressed immediately, in public, otherwise people mistake silence as tacit approval.
The cult like corporate brain washing often runs so deep that I see people treating their personal relationships like they'd treat work colleagues, or reports. This includes things like "having 1:1s" with their partners, or telling their friends to take "take ownership"
My parents, who have succeeded to positively-educate us (never a slap or punishment, nor retribution for good behavior; just congratulate good behavior and explain), have always been to the church discussion groups, the family- and couple-oriented ones. It at least gives a framework on what to talk about, and a framework that most other couples are willing to talk about.
I don't think this is corporate brainwashing so much as it's acting like you are superior to the other people in your life. I agree that it's really annoying.
This isn't the sort of advice one can blindly follow.
I fully regret not criticizing people's public and private homophobia. I was young and knew the pain of having it directed at me. (Am bisexual, but folks just assumed I was lesbian in school. I hid it as much as possible at the next school).
But if it is, say, work related in the US or something that someone might be embarrassed about (that doesn't harm other people)? Private is the way to go.
I found the book 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' pretty helpful to understanding how important emotions are when working with people. After reading that book, you wonder how you ever dared to break that rule.
> Purchase the most recent tourist guidebook to your home town or region. You’ll learn a lot by playing the tourist once a year.
This is a great idea, though I try and keep the same principle in mind. I grew up in a very popular tourist area and never visited anything of interest, so I started consciously enjoying where I live and going out of my way to discover new things as if I were a tourist.
> No one is as impressed with your possessions as you are.
Does anyone else get a kick out of "hiding" your wealth? Obviously every Dave Ramsey enthusiast, but I guess I sort of fit in there as well. I wear the cheapest Casio G-shock (love that thing) and drive a 10 year old economy car. I allow myself many luxuries but almost none that communicate wealth to random onlookers.
> If you repeated what you did today 365 more times will you be where you want to be next year?
Oh, that's fun. I've been adding a bit of stoicism into my life. Reminders that I might die today etc. I think I'll throw this one in the mix and see if it alters my behavior.
Agreed. I have a friend who loves to brag how frugal he is. AFAIK he's not actually living his life. Not saying he needs possessions to enjoy his life but he doesn't spend on experiences either.
As for my possessions, I didn't buy them for others or to show them off. I bought them to enjoy them and I do.
Not really sure what the point of the advice is except maybe don't buy things to impress others.
>> Does anyone else get a kick out of "hiding" your wealth?
So a number of people are commenting along the lines of "why would you want to care what others think" but I get where you're coming from.
One of the occasions I remember being most tickled by, for -hours- after it happened, was when I was walking to work, wearing just street clothes, my laptop in my backpack, and a woman in a pantsuit asked if I needed help. I was legitimately confused, but then realized - I was walking through a parking deck, underneath a bunch of corporate offices, early in the morning. From her perspective, I was a vagrant. From mine, I lived in the nearby luxury condos/apartments that shared the parking deck (it was a mixed use build, residential, commercial, corporate), was headed to a software job where jeans and a hoodie were expected, belongings are carried in backpacks not suitcases, and the easiest way to get to the shuttle stop on the other side of a super busy street was to go under it via the parking deck.
Another time was when I was buying my first suit with my mom, and got given a massive discount that was not advertised, because the proprietor could see we weren't dressed expensively. We were dressed fine, street clothes, and could afford full price, but he assumed we couldn't (but my mom being a divorced school teacher and me not working yet, the discount was appreciated).
It's not caring what others think, it's finding amusement in the way assumptions and expectations play out.
>> Does anyone else get a kick out of "hiding" your wealth?
I don't. I would like to be able to spend my money on what I want without worrying about what people will think.
But I don't live in that world. If I act working class in the rich world that I work in, I'm going to get judged on that. Which I don't like but I can deal with it. And if I act rich in the working class neighborhood that I live in, I am going to get jacked. Which I don't want to deal with at all.
> Aim to die broke. Give to your beneficiaries before you die; it’s more fun and useful. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce.
Easier said than done, and I find this is bad advice. You don't really know how much runway you have in front of you and in a situation where you may have very limited income, your best bet is to save as much as possible. Also you will have unforeseen health-related expenses as you get old. Following this logic incurs a risk of make yourself depend on your kids or your family members before you die.
> Easier said than done, and I find this is bad advice. You don't really know how much runway you have in front of you and in a situation where you may have very limited income, your best bet is to save as much as possible. Also you will have unforeseen health-related expenses as you get old. Following this logic incurs a risk of make yourself depend on your kids or your family members before you die.
Sadly, this sounds like a terribly US-centric take. In most western nations a health scare does not bring in a significant risk of financial distress, unless it's serious enough you find yourself out of a job for an extended period of time.
In some countries (UK, AU off the top of my head) you pay an inheritance/death tax when your parents pass, unless they gifted you their wealth several years prior to death (7 years?).
Likewise with means-tested public healthcare & retirement systems, you can find yourself having to spend almost every cent you’ve earned over the years on paying for carers, medical, retirement housing etc. Whereas those without any wealth will get the same, but paid for by the state.
In these cases it makes sense to reallocate most of your wealth to your family (responsible child or younger sibling etc) well in advanced of, say, plans to move to a retirement home. Ring fencing your money to protect it both for your benefit and your family. It also avoids squabbles over the will if everyone has already received their inheritance well in advance of your death.
If you’re in the unfortunate position of no trusted family member to take care of your finances then that’s a different ball game.
Even with the best free health care and enormous social safety nets, losing your health to the point that you can't work would be a lifestyle change for anyone anywhere due to lost income.
> Even with the best free health care and enormous social safety nets, losing your health to the point that you can't work would be a lifestyle change for anyone anywhere due to lost income.
OP mentioned "health-relared expenses", which is not the same as losing your income.
I'm sure that most people in the world will struggle to make ends meet if they find themselves unemployed, even if they are perfectly healthy.
My expectation is that at the age you'd expect to die, you're retired and not working for quite many years before you'd actually die, so a health event at that stage of life would not change your income.
Not at all. Even in countries with great healthcare systems you will have to pay a lot of things out of pocket. If you want to have full coverage you need to get an extra insurance and these things will get very expensive as you get older.
I think of giving money away e.g. to a charity in a will as equivalent to passing the buck, no pun intended. If you really care, make things better while you're alive, and take a hand in how that money is spent.
Greedily hoarding your $10mil while your children struggle to make ends meet before inheriting it all at 65 (because you are probably going to live to your 90's) is not really a very good solution.
Family offices, directed by the patriarch / matriarch should be a bigger thing.
> A wise man said, “Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask yourself, “Is it true?” At the second gate ask, “Is it necessary?” At the third gate ask, “Is it kind?”
What is kind? I am the straight shooter type. In the past I've gotten critiques from people about the way I speak, but also told by some people that the way I speak is fine. Maybe people just prefer different things.
Just don’t be mean. I read this a while ago, then observed an interaction at a bar that made me want to respond:
A party kept moving from table to table. I have no clue why. But the waiter would need to go and clean every table that they left, for both basic sanitation reasons as well as COVID. Waiter didn’t know what to do to get them to stop. So he goes to bartender to tell him the issue.
Bartender immediately says to them: “guys, every time you move we have to clean a table so pick a spot“. Party never moves again.
Bartender could have thrown a bunch of “if you don’t mind”, “we’d really appreciate”, “please”, etc’s in, but didn’t. They also could have thrown some less pleasant adjectives in, but again didn’t. They explained the problem, proposed a solution, and left it at that. That’s the “nice” thing, IMO. Anything else is patronizing or aggressive.
Maybe not patronizing, but it does hurt your case. My team recently went though to remove “please” from all dialogs because user testing found phrases like “please reload to active X” resulted in more people ignoring the dialog and later wondering why X wasn’t activated than just “reload to active X”. I assume the bartender has run similar experiments.
I interpret "Is it kind" as: "Will it have a desirable outcome" / "Will the listener receive this with the appropriate intention".
Telling someone who made a mistake: "You screwed up" may be true and necessary, but saying something such as "Let's try that again" will likely lead to a better conversation and learning opportunity.
There’s a trope going around that people on the East coast (of the US) are kind, but not nice. While people on the West coast are nice, but not kind.
For example, if you get a flat tire on the West coast someone will come by and say “Aww man, you got a flat tire. That’s a real bummer man, that sucks”. and then they’ll walk away without doing anything useful.
Whereas on the East coast someone will see you trying to change your tire and say something like “What the fuck are you doing you stupid asshole? Didn’t anyone teach you how to change a tire? Are you frickin retarded or something?” and then they’ll change the tire for you.
Context, delivery, and choice of words matter. For example:
* Give praise in public
* Criticize in private
* Any criticism offered should be constructive
* Any criticism offered should be of ideas and actions, not individuals--regardless of how strongly one may feel
* When in an argument, discussion, or debate, argue to the best possible interpretation of an idea or statement. Doing anything less is in bad faith, at which point you are not arguing to persuade but rather to make a point.
I'm sure there are many other such examples. I highlight criticism here as in my experience critical statements tend to be most often given or taken badly.
> at which point you are not arguing to persuade but rather to make a point
Excellent concept. I think I get caught up in making points, and this framing will help me do better and making persuasion or agreement the final goal.
It’s an easy transition to make. I find dialog like this is a lot like a meeting: without a good agenda and some level of rigor it’s easy for a conversation to go places you don’t intend it to go.
For me, it helps to pause often and filter what I say before I say it as I often get carried away with topics I’m excited by or passionate about.
Sorry but if that is literally what they said, I think they might not have been "shooting straight" with you. And this is obviously speculation, but perhaps that could have been because they didn't feel it was worth the potential blunt response they might have received from you if they said otherwise?
"When I describe East Coast vs West Coast culture to my friends I often say "The East Coast is kind but not nice, the West Coast is nice but not kind," and East Coasters immediately get it. West Coasters get mad."
To me, "kind" implies taking time and effort for someone, investing in them. That might mean engaging in conflict with them, if that seems to be what they need.
"Nice," on the other hand, suggests to me being polite, delicate, and never making anyone uncomfortable.
Niceness makes no enemies and wins no friends. It benefits the nice one more than anyone else, and is principally a strategy for staying out of trouble.
Kindness costs the giver something, sometimes the risk of giving offense, sometimes their time, sometimes the loss of power and influence because of making an unpopular choice that helps someone who really needed it. It is principally a strategy for taking care of others.
Okay, to me kind means the definition "having or showing a friendly, generous, and considerate nature."
I'm not familiar with what you're describing, but I saw another reply with a twitter thread explaining something similar to what you're proposing, so perhaps I'm just out of the loop.
Why, saying a thing which is untrue is at best a mistake, at worst, a lie. Saying a thing which is obviously unnecessary is spamming. It has nothing to do with being straight.
Being kind, at the very least, improves the chances that you will be heard. If you have something true and necessary to say, it's a shame to say it in a way that turns people against you, and against your message.
There's a subtle blend of straight and kind. Whatever the thing you have to say, if you have that person interest in mind it's still kind, even if it's tough.
This makes sense, to a degree. But at the extreme, the speaker should absolutely take care to avoid being overbearing, condescending, patronizing, etc. Many delusional people think, "I am saying/doing this for YOUR own good", so simply believing that you have the other person's interest is not enough.
Or rather, in order to TRULY have someone else's interest in mind, you have to incorporate things like condescension as in-scope requirements for your communication. Otherwise, even good advice delivered in a straightforward but condescending manner, won't get through (which means, the person won't benefit, which means you the speaker failed to achieve the thing that would help advance their interest due to your poor communication).
It’s not even just the lack of benefit caused by the message not getting through. I think people who communicate too intensely, too aggressively, forget that the communication is part of the listener’s life. If someone feels like shit when they talk to you, you’re already in the red for whatever net impact you want to have on their life.
One thing ‘straight shooters’ including me can overlook is that the listener isn’t in your head, and there are usually multiple interpretations of what someone says.
Especially when you factor in what might be implied by what you said. Or what different implications a person might take away from what you said than what you meant, because their context or assumptions are different.
One aspect of being kind (which I am working on) is trying to imagine different ways a simple, matter of fact, direct statement could be interpreted given everything the other person brings to the conversation.
> When speaking to an audience it’s better to fix your gaze on a few people than to “spray” your gaze across the room. Your eyes telegraph to others whether you really believe what you are saying.
Please don't do this. It's incredibly uncomfortable to be the one person in the audience that the speaker is staring at.
I kinda applied this for my thesis. Advisor got really mad, rejected my draft and gave me an annotated version using a red pen (first time, it was blue til then).
I couldn't be happier : he caught way too many little details I didn't have time for, and explained the important details I didn't have interest in.
I submitted the new version around a month after that and it went smoothly.
Let's say that I find it annoying when people "missbehave", like people letting their dogs shit wherever and not cleaning up, or just commonly being selfish and rude.
How do I now understand myself better? Is the point that the problem is somehow in me or what does this advice mean?
As someone bearing down on age seventy I have to tell younger folks these resonate with me. A few are even new to me, like the 4 second rule when meeting people.
If you like Kevin Kelly he has a weekly newsletter of recommendations, mostly on products he finds useful called Recommendo that I highly recommend.
I found the 4 second rule interesting, but I wonder how this should play out. Most humans break eye contact after 2-3 seconds. It's extremely uncommon to find someone holding eye contact for longer than that. After ~3 seconds, it can be perceived either as aggression or as flirting.
>To keep young kids behaving on a car road trip, have a bag of their favorite candy and throw a piece out the window each time they misbehave
WTF
>You cant reason someone out of a notion that they didn’t reason themselves into.
You definitely can if they're the right kind of person.
>When someone tells you about the peak year of human history, the period of time when things were good before things went downhill, it will always be the years of when they were 10 years old — which is the peak of any human’s existence.
I believe he's showing his age with this one. I doubt many people born after 1999 believe that to be true.
Hah! It's actually my 23rd birthday today. I've talked to a quite a few people about this and most seem to think we've been going downhill since at least the early 1990's. Some would point back as far as the 60's.
I picked 1999 since I don't think I've ever talked to someone who chose a later date than that.
Of course, people from 2nd world and 3rd world countries likely have different views.
Downhill in what sense? Downhill implies there’s some goal or ideal to strive for, but what exactly is that? Do you believe that this downhill is irreversible, or just another bump?
Lots of people take negative views on today, but it’s hard to reason about until you can nail down exactly what “good” is and why.
That question (i.e. exactly what ought we value) isn't difficult to answer. It is impossible to answer. So I don't let it get in my way.
I disagree with your second paragraph. Each person has some idea of what he values, and some idea of whether things have improved with respect to those values, a comprehensive survey of people on this matter would be somewhat accurate IMO.
I was 10 in 1998. Even though it coincides with exactly what he says, I’d claim those next few years were the end of some threshold of the “before times”. It’s not like I’ll make some vague social argument like “you used to know dinner was on the table”. Global politics changed intensely. Internet and smartphones just exploded, seriously changing the day-to-day lives of so many people. Think about a world where if 100 people knew what you did yesterday you were a celebrity.
> Think about a world where if 100 people knew what you did yesterday you were a celebrity
I think you’re off by some orders of magnitude, but I understand the sentiment. I was a lot older in 1998. I can tell you that people have not changed since then even if the technology has (enabling voices to be heard that previously weren’t)
Of course there are exceptions, like non-celebrities are in the news. I mean like if 10,000 people knew where you just had dinner, it’s cause you were in a tabloid.
Any time I imagine that some past decade must have been simpler times, I think about it a little bit more and realize that it was the height of the cold war, or people were suffering from some disease that now has proper treatment, or it took months to travel to the other side of a continent.
I mean, yes technically this is true. Practically, the kids, the car, and the lifestyle are worse for the environment than hucking a handful of jolly ranchers out the window.
Great summary, great lessons, definitely something worth fully digesting and internalizing.
But to be fair (and pedantic), at least one is untrue.
> • Handy measure: the distance between your fingertips of your outstretched arms at shoulder level is your height.
Ape Index = the difference between your arm span at shoulder level and your height. In other words, a +6" Ape Index means your arm span is 6 inches more than your height.
I think it's a good rule of thumb given that most people will be within an inch or two. My ape index is noticeably low and it's only -2.5". +/- 6" is absolutely massive.
When I was a new climber I climbed with someone who was world class and just by watching me for a short time he could tell that my ape index was low.
I've been searching through the comments for a comment about this item in the list.
I am less than 2 meters tall, but I can carry plates wider than 2 meters between my outstreched hands.
Does that now mean that I am an ape? Actually, that would explain a lot...
>Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.
That's a funny one, and I agree, and it's also the reason I use "and" instead of "but" for those kinds of sentences. It sounds a little clunkier, but(!) it doesn't trigger people's alarms.
If I'm getting some feedback from a peer and they tell me "Usually your code is extremely well documented and ready to go as is, but your most recent PR doesn't cut it because xyz" I am glad they have included the "but" in the sentence so I have more context for their comment. It accomplishes two things: It lets me know they are providing this feedback from a place where they are familiar with my work (context for the feedback), and it is a complement (which is always nice to receive).
True, the actual message is what comes after the "but," but(!) that doesn't make the first half of the sentence unimportant.
"Usually your code is extremely well documented and ready to go as is and I think your most recent PR could be improved in this area." It softens the blow while still retaining the relevant context.
I skipped past the first part of the sentence, because I saw there was a "but" near the end, and supposedly that means the first part of the sentence doesn't count, but now the sentence doesn't make any sense to me.
> That's a funny one, and I agree, and it's also the reason I use "and" instead of "but" for those kinds of sentences. It doesn't trigger people's alarms.
In this case the advice isn't all that profound, the "but" is just sectioning off the first part of the sentence like a parenthetical.
Oh no, I am playing with this in the same way. Saying things like "Yes, but...", just means "No". I regularly change the word "but" to "and". Sometimes it works really well, like, both parts are true. Sometimes it doesn't work, where I really mean to send the message as "No". And sometimes it makes me notice that I don't want to hide a "No" message with a "Yes, but", and change it to say clearly "No".
The most dreadful way of hinding a "No" is behind a "Yes, but..." and I know people who are allergic to that way of non-communication.
> 90% of everything is crap. If you think you don’t like opera, romance novels, TikTok, country music, vegan food, NFTs, keep trying to see if you can find the 10% that is not crap.
Meh. Finding the 10% is not free either - and the benefit of finding it not very tangible either.
> If your opinions on one subject can be predicted from your opinions on another, you may be in the grip of an ideology. When you truly think for yourself your conclusions will not be predictable.
That's not predicting trellad's position on a different topic.
trellad doesn't like NFTs. Can you tell me what trellad's political preference is? Their nation of citizenship? Their position on abortion? Brexit? Ukraine? Climate change? The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones?
<< Efficiency is highly overrated; Goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.
Good grief, yes. When you are tired and burnt out, you find the worst kind of shortcuts.
This is in the same vein as the advice I give to the overachiever junior/mid level engineers I mentor. They're constantly searching for the next big project or optimization. In the same way you need to sleep at night to process the day, you need a few weeks off every now and again to process your life/career.
The list is not all solid pieces of advice, or even mostly.
But each item is thought-provoking, which is indeed valuable: even when you completely disagree, you think why you disagree.
Meta comment: I wish more older people would write things like this. Based on how much more I know now compared to 10 years ago, it’s hard to imagine how much wisdom a 70 year old must have about the way the world works. It’s so valuable.
Heading towards 70 here. I find that as I get older I get less dogmatic and certain about almost everything, so I don't think it's appropriate for me to lay down a list of certainties like the OP has. Apart from that as an observation, I don't think I've got any particular wisdom to impart.
Having thought about this some more, I guess I have got some observations that could pass as hard-won wisdom:
I try to accept people as they are, without trying to change them
I try to treat people with respect
When debugging, I try to fix the problem I can see then deal with what's left
I try to treat someone's hurtful comment as more likely the result of a bad day or thoughtlessness, rather than malice
I try hard to avoid giving advice, and instead try to ask questions: 'have you thought about doing X?'. And I will try _really_ hard to avoid 'you should do ... ' or 'you ought to ...'
I believe that in almost all cases (I haven't yet found a counter) a decision is either easy or it doesn't matter
Phrasing advice as a "question" has always come across as patronizing to me. Someone is giving advice, they know they are giving advice, but they seem to think that rewording it into a question makes it more acceptable to the receiver?
It becomes more of a discussion and is less likely to bruise egos. In my experience I've had more success getting things done by building concensus that way, but ymmw.
Feel exactly the same (but I'm on my late 30s). Which is a bit of a problem when one has to hold the role of "lead" or something similar. I just don't feel certain about almost anything (I do have opinions and experiences, sure, but I'm never 100% sure about anything).
> A wise man said, “Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask yourself, “Is it true?” At the second gate ask, “Is it necessary?” At the third gate ask, “Is it kind?”
"Monks, a statement endowed with five factors is well-spoken, not ill-spoken. It is blameless & unfaulted by knowledgeable people. Which five?
"It is spoken at the right time. It is spoken in truth. It is spoken affectionately. It is spoken beneficially. It is spoken with a mind of good-will."
— AN 5.198
btw he later on defines "beneficial" as something that is immediately applicable for the listener, which is just extra good in my opinion.
tl;dr it's not a direct quote, but the very same concept was expressed in sutra:
says only what it well-spoken, not what is poorly spoken; only what is just, not what is unjust; only what is endearing, not what is unendearing; only what is true, not what is false
Actual source(Manu smriti Verse 4.138) quotes:
'Satyam bruyat priyam bruyat.
Na bruyat satyam apriyam.
Priyam cha nanrutham bruyat.
Esha dharmah sanatanah’
This somewhat means,
‘Speak the truth that is pleasant. Never speak the truth that is unpleasant. And, never speak the untruth even if it’s pleasant. This is eternal philosophy of righteousness.”
Most credit cards that do offer it only offer it as secondary coverage. I.e., it'll first hit any personal car insurance coverage you have, and in that case the card will cover the deductible.
For ones that provide primary coverage, Amex's premium coverage is very good, and will run you ~$25 per rental period (not day, period, up to 42 days), but you have to call (once) to get it added to the card. It doesn't include liability or uninsured motorists, but for just "hey, something happened, the car got damaged, but I don't want to be able to just walk away and not worry about it", it's an easy, braindead option.
> Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.
Not sure I agree with this one at all. It irks me a lot when caveats I put in arguments are ignored, and the other party assumes that I don't really mean them. This happens a lot (even on HN, see the responses to my comments at [1] and [2]), and causes a lot of straw-man arguments and talking past each other.
Caveats are important and should not be ignored and should be evaluated on their own merits, because they could be an intrinsic part of the argument being made.
This is more of observation of communication culture that you should be aware of. The actual advice would read more like "if you want to draw attention to something, you better not follow it with a _but_". At least that's my reading.
They're not as valuable as you might think. LL.com's go for >$1M but LL.org's and LL.net's are in the $10K-$50K range.
I missed registering kl.com by a few weeks and had to settle for kl.net. This was back 1995 when you had to email a template to Internic and wait about three weeks for a reply. In the template you had to provide working nameservers. I had put down some random hostnames for nameservers since I wasn't running my own yet and it was rejected after the usual three week delay. By the time I had nameservers set up a few weeks later a law firm had registered kl.com.
With working nameservers I was able to register maj.com (have since sold it) and finally kl.net which I plan to keep til I die.
Having a personal domain that's only 6 characters long is pretty handy at times. If it were a .com, it would be hard not to sell it for $1M, but a .org/.net that might get you a car is something you can keep.
Pure gold. Content like this reminds me of the "favorite" feature available on HN. I will try to read this article a few times during the year. I should have used this "favorite feature" more often. Btw, I love HN. Thanks for sharing!
> • Keep all your things visible in a hotel room, not in drawers, and all gathered into one spot. That way you’ll never leave anything behind. If you need to have something like a charger off to the side, place a couple of other large items next to it, because you are less likely to leave 3 items behind than just one.
Even better rule: never, ever, unplug a device from a charger in a hotel room without unplugging the charger from the wall at the same time. Put it back in your bag.
No other rule for chargers has ever worked for any frequent traveler I’ve known.
Edit:
Unplug the charger from the wall first, then the device from the charger.
I don't get why people are so upset about some particular piece of advice KK generously shared with us.
You don't have to absolutely agree with the author. It's best to take anything through the filter of your own mind. Find pros and cons, think about if it works or not and why.
But most outraged persons are so because the piece of advices don't match their particular view of the world. They don't spend time thinking, they hurry to show outrage, mostly invoking some kind of injustice.
Bridgewater corporation takes the opposite of this approach and is lauded for it. The idea is that you get better results by saying what you think honestly but respectfully.
Maybe it works there, but I’ve worked with ex Bridgewater people and they’re toxic. Evidently it’s very hard to develop the social skills to give public criticism in a way that doesn’t erode trust. Such feedback often comes across as callous and sometimes disrespectful.
Withholding approval/praise in public; tentativeness, etc., will convey the message to socially perceptive folks, while not conveying to others that you support bad plans/designs/ideas.
Not everyone is socially perceptive, and even for those who are, it’s always good to follow up in private where you can convey your concerns while being respectful- in a 1:1 you can take the time needed to ensure that you get across that you’re concerned with the idea, not the person; you often don’t have the time for that in meetings and besides even if you’re 100% right the other person could lose “face” with others. Yes maybe they already did with their statements, but you don’t need to compound it.
Also the other effort is cohesion. If you are part of a team they WILL lose trust in you quickly if you frequently side with “others” (against your team) in meetings, regardless of whether you’re correct.
Closely related is “don’t try to always win” against someone who you need a long term relationship with. If you always win, you’re in a relationship with a loser. Or you’re an asshole. Or both.
I kept looking for a spoiler saying that these glib, seemingly-profound sentences were generated by GPT-3.
Don't work for someone you wouldn't want to become? How on earth is someone supposed to determine that during a standard interview process? What are you supposed to do when teams get shuffled around, or your boss leaves? To say nothing of the fact that you can admire someone without wanting to become them.
> * Getting cheated occasionally is the small price for trusting the best of everyone, because when you trust the best in others, they generally treat you best.*
This is very good advice that my family never follow because of short sighted idea that everyone is out to cheat you. You get so much more out of life by being cooperative and vulnerable than you do by protecting yourself from all risk of being cheated.
> When checking references for a job applicant, employers may be reluctant or prohibited from saying anything negative, so leave or send a message that says, “Get back to me if you highly recommend this applicant as super great.” If they don’t reply take that as a negative.
And what about the referees who either don't care and never reply or send canned responses to everything?
>> Dont purchase extra insurance if you are renting a car with a credit card.
Is it really a thing? I also heard this from other people, but it's hard for me to believe that CC company will really pay out in case of an insurance case. After all, their commission for renting a car is 2-3%, and car rent companies charge 50-100% of the rental price for insurance.
So IIRC the rental car company is selling you a waiver of sorts that says they won’t come after you if you damage the car, not insurance per se. The car’s always insured. A credit card company is probably a more unattractive target than an individual.
> If your opinions on one subject can be predicted from your opinions on another, you may be in the grip of an ideology. When you truly think for yourself your conclusions will not be predictable.
Most people seem to think it’s a sign of consistency and want to belong to a tribe. This piece of advice needs a lot of repeating.
"but" expresses conflict, nuances and compromises. Life is not simple and our thoughts, actions and feelings are often not rational or in line with each other, there for dismissing anything before "but" is a way of actively not listening.
- "I believe in free speech, but some opinion are too abhorrent to be protected." -> Maybe free speech should not allow people to slander, extort, abuse people? Or at least not give them a jail free card.
- "I am sorry I reacted like this, but they went too far" -> This person can indeed feel sorry and feel somewhat justified, because maybe both parties involved did something worth being sorry for.
By the look of it, what this reply is saying is how point 7 describes the negating qualities of "but", while the point immediately following it uses the said word.
One day at work I had changed my chrome settings to emulate slow 3G mobile speeds and forgot about it. The entire next day was maddening until, near the end of the day, I realized why my internet had been running so slowly.
I wonder what the net effect of such pieces of writing is. The problem is that these abstract and contextless statements make sense only if they cause the reader to reflect on some experience, and thus only mildly reinforce currently held beliefs. Otherwise, I can't see how the statements would stick for most people (not even as cached memory).
What would add significantly to this is a bunch of Gwern-style links embedded within each of these quips. The author is clearly speaking from a vantage point not many others have attained, and he'd be able to provide a story or other context to each.
Advice can be useful if you try to make it so. Number three on the list is "Dont ever work for someone you dont want to become." I was given this same advice as I was starting out my career. It made me reevaluate my approach to work and lead to some profound changes in my life. Years later, I can confidently say those choices were the best ones I've ever made. I will forever be grateful for receiving this advice. It's important to try to look forward at how following the advice may impact your life, rather than looking backward for confirmation of your currently held beliefs.
I think they'd make an excellent content for a loading screen on a game. Pick one at random and give the player something to think about while they're waiting. If this happens enough times, you'll get some repeats, which will help reinforce the message or at least re-trigger the thinking process.
It's still littering. Used toilet-paper is biodegradable too. Would you care if I threw some on your lawn?
Anyway, throwing away food is appalling. It costs a titanic amount of resources to grow, make, manufacture, transport, package and sell. There are significant environmental costs to producing anything and most of it isn't captured in what you pay for things. To throw almost anything away is bad; throwing away food is criminal.
And it's irresponsible behavior in front of children, who typically take on board what you do, and not what you say.
Don't do it. It's nothing to do with Freedom. It's to do with being a responsible adult.
It is not always easy to find, but generally speaking, I find Mark Twain's advice very apt: When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
In complex situations like what you describe, there are almost always more actors and/or forces at play than may seem at first glance.
For example, many cases of domestic violence are perpetuated by the victim and/or aggressor being victims of not being able to find alternative housing easily, not having the tools/upbringing/training to cope with their situation of forced cohabitation without violence, generational abuse, and many others. It's easy to pick a side and distribute the blame 100% and 0%, but reality is almost always more complicated, there almost always many more factors than may seem obvious at first.
What made you post such a negative comment? You could have just closed the window and resumed with your day, but what propelled you to be so angry about this particular advice that you had to write about it here?
The list is obviously not for you, but this reflex where one needs to be so angry and vocal about something so benign (and useful) is what makes me question what have we done to ourselves as a society.
"Dont keep making the same mistakes; try to make new mistakes" damn this one really hit me. So easy to stay in my comfort zone when there's so much else I could do.
All of this advice stuff always ignores one brutal truth, which I wish I had learned when I was much younger:
Your life will become the accumulation and consequences of every decision you make which cannot be changed --- never make a lasting decision without considering all the consequences.
It's not something you actively choose. People are unconsciously shaped by their environment, so when a particular organization rewards a particular type of thinking it's hard to avoid becoming it if you want to stay there and succeed.
Maybe, be nice to kids and don't harm them ? You are teaching and encouraging the behavior "blackmail to get what you want" by doing that.
Instead you could use non violent communication to get by. Tell them how you feel, how you feel hurt by their behavior. Maybe they start talking about how they are hurt being stuck 8h in the car ? And maybe both of you will feel compassion and a way to minimize the damages.
Like I said elsewhere in the thread, do not actually do this: candy is toxic to lots of birds and animals, and if not toxic, it is sticky, and can cause them to choke.
I mean, sure, if your end goal is to give your children anxiety, eating disorders, and unhealthy emotional associations with food (and especially w/ sweets). Not only that, but then you have to give them a bag of candy and give it to them at the end of the trip every trip or they learn that your "punishment" means absolutely nothing because you never give them "their" candy anyway. Oh, and wait to see how that scales when you have multiple children and they start to abuse each other to get the other to act out and lose candy. That'll be fun.
But I guess it'll work well to keep kids quiet in the short term, sure. Advice is a form of nostalgia - a way of picking up the past, dusting it off, and selling it for more than it's worth; and, like nostalgia, it's never as good as it is remembered.
I love the vision of trying to manage this with multiple kids with different candy dislikes and likes. It'd be a free-for-all to see who could get you to throw the most of their siblings favorite candy. Honestly I think they'd have a ball.
Plus you're littering all over the place. That sucks.
> Oh, and wait to see how that scales when you have multiple children and they start to abuse each other to get the other to act out and lose candy. That'll be fun.
Learning about cause, effect, reaction, and manipulation are vital skills in life. Knowing and understanding them does not mean you’re a sociopath either. They’re widely useful in many aspects of life. Makes you a better poker player too.
That's one heck of a justification that one. Childhood trauma and abuse sometimes also sometimes results in functioning, well-adjusted adults with decent abuse coping skills and without crippling mental illness - that doesn't mean it's the best way to achieve that goal.
You should very much know that the null hypothesis for a proposed behavioural modification technique is that it isn't a benefit and doesn't work and may be harmful. It's on the proposer to show otherwise.
What's less harmful when it comes to human health and safety in non-essential activities, to assume no risk of harm or injury or to assume risk of harm or injury? I assert that the null hypothesis is that it does not have a benefit and is harmful. This is not an assertion of fact, simply a position of likelihood and a judgement that doing a physical and emotional punishment to a person is generally harmful and that doing so must be balanced against ensuring a just outcome. This is not an unreasonable stance. You, on the other hand, if I understand properly, are saying that we should be able to do whatever we like to a punish person unless we show it directly causes harm. Down that road lies such human rights abuses that holding such views should be considered unconscionable.
> What's less harmful when it comes to human health and safety in non-essential activities, to assume no risk of harm or injury or to assume risk of harm or injury?
I agree with this statement. Assume a risk.
> I assert that the null hypothesis is that it does not have a benefit and is harmful.
Why did the word 'risk' disappear here? I don't think that's a good null hypothesis at all.
> You, on the other hand, if I understand properly, are saying that we should be able to do whatever we like to a punish person unless we show it directly causes harm.
And you need to make sure you're looking for both positive and negative effects.
"It's harmful" is a huge bias for a null hypothesis.
> Then what are you saying?
That you shouldn't assume it is harmful.
I didn't say anything about what parents should be "able to do". I didn't even give an opinion on the candy thing. I just think your justification is a big overreach.
But also a null hypothesis implies you're currently doing the testing, so that's a different scenario too...
Easier to just go to the army. Where I live we have mandatory service, and it was very educational and eyeopening. Got to meet a lot of people outside my "bubble" (middle upper class, great parents etc., "smart"/educated, technical). Turns out, even though I might have found "them" obnoxious in theory before, they were actually often great and smart people, just "different". Also the normal share of assholes of course (but surprisingly few, if you got to know them!), but you learn to deal with them :) Even the criminals there (straight from jail to the army) were kind of normal people, just from bad circumstances.
I had thought that perhaps it was the distance between thumb and small finger measured in inches vs feet or something. But… I guess it wouldn't make sense for the arms to have to be outstretched then.
This happens to me so often when I’m writing a GitHub issue or SO question. I’ll write detailed reproduction steps and every bit of reasoning about my issue, and 75% of the time that’ll be enough for me to figure out my problem.
- If you have spinach or any green leafy vegetables, carrot, turnip or celery, avoid reheating them. These nitrate rich vegetables when heated again can turn toxic, releasing carcinogenic properties, which are generally cancerous in nature.
- Some fruit juices and fruits (most notably grapefruit) can interact with numerous drugs, in many cases causing adverse effects.
"Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong."
I hate-hate-hate this advice. When I assert something confidently, I'm willing to put money on it.
The first time I ran into someone I respected who was confidently wrong, it threw me for a loop. It makes you seem like a blowhard bullshitter! Guessing is fine, but say it's a guess.
Edited to add: I suppose this is a variant of Cunningham's Law, but I still hate it.
I read it more like a variation of "strong opinions weakly held".
It makes sense to have conviction on something based on a mental model or experience. However, you should usually try and listen to others because they can improve your mental model of the world.
Patrick Collison has a piece of advice like this. It's something like when you hear someone you respect or admire say something you disagree with, you will automatically try and think about why they are wrong, but it is usually always good to try and think about what they believe about the world that would lead them to think this is true.
I just think its one of those areas where different people need different advice.
We can draw a spectrum called "confidence bias". On one end of the spectrum are your "blowhard bullshitters". At the other end of the spectrum are people who are so scared to be seen that they keep themselves small.
You know where on the spectrum you are. Aim toward the middle.
People can make honest mistakes, and be certain they are right when it's not so.
A person is only a bulshitter when they know they don't know the topic, but still speak radiating confidence. It's just lying, implying you know things when you don't know them.
Often the people who know the limits of their knowledge overcompensate for it when speaking with others. There's a lot of "I think", "it should", "I may be wrong" and other noncommittal hedging to cover the slimmest of chances and be on the safe side. It goes beyond simply conveying the known risks/probabilities clearly and objectively.
To someone in the same domain, all of those caveats are commonly accepted/implied, so they become tiresome and muddy the points being made.
To someone outside the domain, it unnecessarily erodes confidence in the supposed domain-expert speaker's abilities and recommendations. It's even worse when put up against someone else does speak with confidence. I've lost count how many times I've seen that leading to stakeholders accepting a suboptimal solution.
It's the contrast between what primordial lizard brains want. And what reality actually is.
Often I see:
Lizard brain wants: Simple, agreeable, opinions from authority. Stated confidently.
Reality: Nobody is completely sure. Probably requires some nuanced discussion and critical thinking.
Problem is, if someone expresses an unconfident opinion. And I reckon I see this all the time:
Primordial lizard brain computes the message as:
"This person isn't knowledgeable. Reduction in status."
IMO there isn't a good way in life to say "I don't know" about a topic. Without primordial lizard brains treating that as a reduction in status.
It's a huge problem.
I think our brains are just wired to be attracted to simple answers, have a bias for action over discussion. And avoid deep, reflective, critical conversations.
I sometimes like seeing who will call me out when I’m speaking confidently.
I have to reaaaaaaaaaallly dumb things down for that to happen, in person. Its not even people ignoring its like people willing to repeat the incorrect thing I said!
I only noticed when I was making deadpan jokes and pepple couldnt tell. And so it began.
I had the same experience, but(!) I've concluded over time that the extra "I guess", "I think", "Probably" just makes my opinions seem weaker and get disregarded. Everybody else presents their opinions as 100% fact, even when they're not sure.
I dunno if you're on the autism spectrum, I am and I think that contributes towards not wanting to write things that aren't 100% true, but I don't think it is actually a contructive thing to do since everyone implicitly understands you might be wrong.
I’ll add one: there is limited time in life, and you cannot implement all the advice you’ll get about how to live a good life. A doctor will tell you to take care of your health. A sociable person will tell you to have friends. A traveler will tell you to travel. A priest will tell you to know God. A careerist will tell you to work harder. An entrepreneur will tell you to start a business. The list goes on and on and on.
Life is about what you decide to do, not about what others think you should do and certainly not about what some random old person says you should do because that’s what he wishes he did.
kk isn't really just some random old person, he was Wired for all intents and purposes for a long time, he is an astounding and empathetic travel photographer and is one of Stewart Brand's best friends. I realize you were speaking generally but I hope we can all make an exception for this one random old person. Do yourself a favor and turn the pages of Asia Grace. Ageism is a hell of a drug.
He sounds impressive, and I can get with you on being anti-ageist, but saying "The guy knows how to live" just reinforces the idea that everyone has their own take on what's important, and one size doesn't fit all. My idea of living my fullest potential barely overlaps with the apparent life of the person that you admire.
I think what you're getting at, since we're talking about values, is déformation professionelle: valuing things that you know, and devaluing (valuing less than objectively appropriate) other things.
“All we need to do is to decide on how to spend the time that is given to us”. Gandalf knows best. The hard part is making that decision. It’s something that ideally happens once you know your personal values. But - It’s even harder to make those decisions once you realise that your values will change over time. What a pickle!
Yes, the idiom "come to X" does mean "be acted on by X". Common usages "come to harm", "come to Jesus", "come to his/her/your/my senses" ( = rational thought).
Along those lines, almost all advice is highly contextual. You'll often hear that people criticize bad advice that is actually good advice applied inappropriately. Perhaps in the author's view, he could have benefited from taking more breaks, but in my case, it would probably be better off if I spent less time shitposting on HN.
> Life is about what you decide to do, not about what others think you should do and certainly not about what some random old person says you should do because that’s what he wishes he did.
I would take the same list and interpret as life demands prioritization. That which you choose to do gives it value, in part, because you choose not to do other things. When someone chooses to love me (like in a marriage for example) it's not just the love I receive but also the gratitude for the privilege of exclusivity.
Counterpoint: meaning is a social construct and thus we derive meaning from doing activities which are essentially advice from other people (albeit implicit and not necessarily verbal).
Your examples and many in OP’s list are non-actionable non-concrete advice. For example, “take care of health” is non-actionable but “go running one hour after you wake up” is actionable. However, much better advice is not about what to do but what not to do. The absolute golden advice is what everyone is doing but why you shouldn’t in a specific context. This is more akin to a traveler coming out from journey and recounting what he/she considered mistakes.
Intentionally ignoring prior discussion because I don’t want it to color my response: a lot of this is really empty or reacts to incentives I don’t have, but some of it is very good general advice:
> If you stop to listen to a musician or street performer for more than a minute, you owe them a dollar.
> Courtesy costs nothing
My only note is I’d expand this to generally accepting people how they express themselves and their cares
> Efficiency is highly overrated; Goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.
Two years into burnout, this x1000.
> Criticize in private, praise in public.
Mostly right on but sometimes public criticism is the only effective tool to right things that are otherwise wrong, or just necessary because the wrong is entirely immovable without public attention.
> If winning becomes too important in a game, change the rules to make it more fun. Changing rules can become the new game.
The people who like your new stuff will help you figure out how to fix it and make it good enough so the old system truly becomes obsolete, otherwise the old system will continue to exist and people will continue to use it, so that now, theres 2 options instead of just one.
I wonder if it's not in politics / war books too. Tap into others pride and principles to ensure their motivation for your goals. Internet "truth" is a great example, but I've seen this at work too, if you spin your question in a way to tickle others need for validation or superiority, all of a sudden you have a very strong engagement.. while on average people will refuse to help you. I don't like manipulating people, but society can be a never-ending source of absurdly high friction that any trick to avoid wasted energy is a strong survival skill to me.
Every list like this should probably end with a final line:
Take all advice anyone gives you with a large grain of salt. In the end, you are the one who will be making the decisions that change your life in one way or the other. If you can't trust yourself to make the right decision, then who can you trust? At the very least, you'll have noone but yourself to blame if you happen to make the wrong one. Those are the mistakes you learn the most from, by the way.
Some of these are good, some are bad, but this one is dangerous and unethical:
When checking references for a job applicant, employers may be reluctant or prohibited from saying anything negative, so leave or send a message that says, “Get back to me if you highly recommend this applicant as super great.” If they don’t reply take that as a negative.
When you flush a candidate on a reference check, there's a good chance that he'll figure out what happened, and justifiably become paranoid. He's going to assume someone deliberately ratfucked him, which is not necessarily what happened here--the person could have legitimately thought highly of the candidate, but forgotten to reply because the email came at an inconvenient time (or ended up in the spam folder). At the minimum, you're destroying someone's professional relationships, but if this is in an industry like Silicon Valley, where people have glowing references not because of sincerity but because everyone who matters retains a hit man to "fix" negative ones, you're putting people in danger of physical harm, including the possibility of death. Worst of all, since the candidate might not know which reference ratfucked him, you could end up getting someone innocent killed.
So, don't do this. The main function of reference checks is to ensure you're not getting someone who claims to have worked at Goldman Sachs or Google for 4 years but actually never set foot there. Leave it at that and be happy.
Bad references can ruin careers. When you're talking about the difference between getting a $500k per year job and being completely unemployable, it makes sense.
That all said, people usually start with intimidation, and that's usually enough. Very few people believe in their vendettas enough to die for them, and very few people want to kill or have someone killed, just to make a problem go away, if they don't need to do so.
I do have stories, but I'm not going to share them, for obvious reasons. Only one of the ones I know well involved a person actually dying, but quite a few where people were "roughed up" and are now disabled.
> Only one of the ones I know well involved a person actually dying, but quite a few where people were "roughed up" and are now disabled.
Pardon my language, but what the fuck? You honestly have "quite a few" stories about people being physically assaulted because they were bad references?
I spent more than a decade in the tech industry and I know a lot of people.
Silicon Valley is a disgusting place. The less you know, the better for your soul. What-the-fuck is a reasonable reaction.
As for physical consequences of bad references, there's obviously going to be a spectrum. It's very unlikely that someone would get hit for saying something like "I don't like him" at a bar and accidentally costing someone a job. Those things happen, and very few people are irrational or paranoid enough to call in a hit man over something small that isn't going to happen again.
If someone is deliberately running around saying, "You shouldn't hire him" or "He was fired for cause", though, it's inevitable that he's going to get what's coming to him.
Rationally speaking, people usually make this calculation based on what they think the person is going to do in the future. Sometimes the motive is revenge, but usually it's just intimidation. If it's truly a one-off, people usually let it go. If someone is making it impossible to find work, though, then people get desperate.
That's fascinating (and almost unbelievable) to me. Are you aware of any other books/articles/blog posts about this aspect of SV? I'm interested to learn more.
But it would also take a lot for me to put this into my ‘probably true’ or even ‘probably not true but behave as if it is because it could be’ Bayesian priors.
> in an industry like Silicon Valley, where people have glowing references not because of sincerity but because everyone who matters retains a hit man to "fix" negative ones, you're putting people in danger of physical harm, including the possibility of death.
Sorry, what? I'm not in SV, so maybe I'm missing something, but are you actually claiming that bad references in SV result in death? What?
I'm saying that people in the tech industry will do anything to protect and expand their reputations. The stakes are just that high--we're talking about the difference between 7-figure jobs and unemployability--and most of these people have no moral scruples even when the stakes are small. The ones with scruples don't last. Given the stakes and the mentality we're talking about, the cost to have a "reputation problem" "taken care of" is a rounding error.
The probability that someone would be intentionally killed over a single instance of a negative reference is very low, but it's definitely nonzero. Probably 0.05-0.25% at lower levels (SWE, Sr. SWE, entry-level manager) and 1-25% at executive levels. Thus, what the OP is advising could get someone killed, and since there is also nothing to be gained by it, I argue that it's a bad idea.
I don't think anyone publishes statistics on this, but the thing you have to understand about Silicon Valley is that it runs on reputation. Skills are commonplace. H1-Bs have skills. 20-year-olds have skills. Instead, people get the good jobs based on what they can force other people to say about them, not based on what they can do. Silicon Valley is also a place where success forgives all sins, full of people with very little in the way of scruples, and where vendettas are generated all the time over the smallest shit.
This isn't limited to Silicon Valley. In any business where reputation makes the difference between 7-figure salaries and unemployability, you're going to have people who'll stop at nothing to "fix" reputation problems. That being said, these things usually don't run all the way, because even Silicon Valley people don't kill lightly, so there's a series of escalations before it gets to that, and most people aren't willing to defend their vendettas with their lives.
I had a colleague who bought a Porsche. He went through a million hoops to be able to afford it - buying used, restoring etc.
He loved taking photos with it and they looked great. He looked literally like a million $ - dressed up, nice sunglasses, nice watch, SoCal roads etc.
He loved talking about it and genuinely enjoyed living the Porsche life.
This man got his money’s worth and much more. He bought the car and let its presence and status and demands influence his life in a multitude of positive ways.
Speaking with him and seeing this influence gave me another viewpoint and I was inspired.
Not to buy an expensive car but toward excellence in something - anything.
I have one (much less than $120k) because I really, really like driving it. I agonized over buying one for a long time. I did a lot of spreadsheets. I asked my wife whether she thinks it's crazy. In the end, after all those things checked out, I bought my Porsche a bit more than 5 years ago, and am still happy with that thing.
And I don't even track it. It's just so precise, just a joy to drive all around.
Yes, I think Porsche is one of the sportscars that makes sense at some level.
Where I'm from — and I'm not from Italy — buying a Lamborghini makes you an instant a*hole. People think the only reason you bought that is to show off.
But that is not the case if you buy a Porsche, the NSX, or even the R8.
Not sure, I hope a long time? It's a 2014 Boxster S (981S) bought used, with now a bit over 60k miles on it, and it's still going strong.
It had its last big service recently and there wasn't really anything wrong with it. They replaced the drive belt (I am honestly not sure if that was necessary) and that's pretty much it. Other than that it's regular oil and filter changes, and I got a new battery once. I might be lucky, but mine seems built to last.
> Is it easy to keep up with the maintenance?
Based on the above, I'd say so, yes. It's just not something I have to think about much.
Maintenance is more expensive, though. Definitely less frequent than my Ford was, but with the much more expensive tires and the drive belt (again, not entirely sure about that...), the Porsche may still well come out more expensive. That's okay, I knew full well going in.
> Is it your "daily driver," or a 3rd car that you only use when you want to have fun?
It is effectively my daily driver now. That needs a bit of qualification:
Before WFH when I still had a daily commute, I had a crappy Ford as my commuter car and only took the Porsche on that commute when I felt like it (e.g. when I knew traffic would be light, when it was a good day...). But since I mostly work from home now, keeping the Ford in shape was annoying so I got rid of it. We still have my wife's boring car as "family car".
But the Porsche is my daily driver by virtue of being the car I usually take and took before outside of the commute, even for grocery runs and other chores. For being a 2 seater sports car, it has a surprising amount of space in frunk and trunk (remember it's a mid-engine car, so it has both), and I really mean it that it feels good to drive even in every day situations.
It's precise, you feel "in full control" (I don't mean getting into more dangerous situations, just in regular safe situations it feels like that already), more connected the road... it probably does not add anything for people who generally think driving is boring or even annoying (of which I know plenty), but I like operating cars, and when I drive other cars I honestly wish they weren't so "mushy" in comparison.
You really should try though. "Feeling the road" comes with properties that are fun or at least worth the payoff for me, but not everyone wants to be jumbled around with lots of perceivable road noise in a car with low vantage point. It's not extreme, but my wife is not a fan; she likes that I have fun with it and tolerates the ride, but she prefers traveling in her "mushy" car where driving is more, shall we say, abstracted away.
I rode in a Porshe years back. The ride didn't bother me. I'm wondering how it compares to my Tesla Model 3, which is compromised for mass appeal. (Is it a family car? A sports care? A tree-hugger car? I'm not sure, but my kids laugh when I floor it.)
Speaking of maintenance: My Tesla requires "less maintenance," but the tires are expensive. The factory tires lasted less than 30k miles and were over $1000 to replace. In contrast, my minivan with about the same miles has plenty of tread left. Shockingly, because of the tires the Tesla actually costs more to maintain than the other car.
It is interesting how common of a sentiment this is among people, I think especially engineers.
Have you ever driven a Porsche? They’re pretty cool. If you can afford it without sacrificing other important things, a Porsche (or anything cool, esp a car) can make life a lot more fun. Life is short and non-repeatable.
I read a car and driver study / survey / analysis thing a few (maybe 10) years ago and it determined overall the most enjoyable car to drive was an 89-92 Nissan Maxima.
It was sold under the special title "4DSC" Four Door Sports Car, basically a sedan version of the original 300ZX, same motor and internals.
It of course lacked some speed but this wasn't about racing but normal street driving, plenty fast for that, great suspension, built in hands free cellular, heads up display. Really was a marvel and it was compared against all cars up until the time of the article.
Different perspective, just go to the track and drive one. For ~$300-$500 it cured me of ever wanting to own one. I got to drive it hard in ways I'd likely rarely get to drive in if I owned one and it was so much cheaper.
Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, happiness, etc. buy things because they bring you joy. At least in this market you aren’t out much if a car does not make you get that feeling inside. For me my nice car is a beautiful work of engineering and art. It represents the cool things we can build as humans and reminds me I need to keep doing that myself (building, creating). It may sound trite, but it inspires me and brings me happiness in its own way. But it is the more subtle long term kind. Satisfaction is maybe a better word. And I do drive and use it. It’s time will come and go :)
I get this from two experiences. My first car was a used Alfa Romeo 75 (aka Milano). I got it because it looked really cool. I discovered it was a hell of a lot of fun to drive, high-compression normally aspirated V6 has such great throttle response. And a weight distribution that just loves to 4-wheel drift. Later I did drive a BMW for a bit, well knowing the 'BMW drivers are assholes' reputation. But I wasn't going to let some asshole drivers deny my fun. It was a Z3 roadster, but I wished it was the Z3M coupe.
I wanted to buy one. I technically could squeeze it out. I talked to a few folks who owned them (ok, 2 people that I sort of knew). They universally told me to hold off, that it was really expensive, that I should have my finances in order such that spending $100,000 (at the time) would feel like losing $1,000 to cancel a vacation so you could spend time with your sick grandma. Obviously this is just an anecdote, but everyone I've met who owned (not leased!) their Porsche was quite good with money.
Make sure you can afford the maintenance and are willing to drive the wheels off of it. I drive mine often, especially road trips and fun weekend rides. But just infrequently enough that it feels good to sit down in it and crank it up. I have enjoyed many cars over the years and when we could afford a nicer one we did so.
I pretty much agree. When I still had a substantial commute (pre-WFH days), I had a cheap commuter car, because associating that thing with traffic jams didn't seem like fun.
But now that that's gone I'm even getting the groceries with the fun car. It seriously transforms a chore into something I volunteer for. And we got rid of my crappy commuter car, for family business we still have my wife's solid but boring car.
These are two very different sentiments. The first is buy things for you not to impress. Yours is insulting and it’s like saying “I don’t care about your hobby and I’ll insult you for having one you spend money on.”
For a new top line one, maybe, in the UK I see them in the 10-20K range for an old one in good condition all the time. Quite a few friends have had one for a bit just to show off and lost minimal money on them. Now if you were talking about a Lambo, Ferrari, McLaren you might be nearer the mark, but who buys them who doesn't have money to burn?
By that logic you shouldn't buy anything at any time besides food and shelter because that money could be $$$ after appreciating for years or decades.
We only live one life, you can't try to optimize every dollar. There's a tremendous price on "investing" in your own happiness throughout every part of your life.
This a great list but at least one of these is dangerous:
> When buying a garden hose, an extension cord, or a ladder, get one substantially longer than you think you need. It’ll be the right size.
Extension cords should be of the length being used. Using a substantially longer extension cord and keeping it coiled up in a neat pile can cause a fire. It’s meant to be stretched out to dissipate heat.
I interpret this advice to mean that if you think 20 feet should do it, get a 30 or 50 foot cord.
Personally, I prefer having more than one. At home I keep a pair of 50 foot cords of the same gauge as a 100 foot should be made of. I usually only need one, but sometimes need to chain both.
• About 99% of the time, the right time is right now.
Home refinance? Travel during a pandemic?
• No one is as impressed with your possessions as you are.
Search HN for Elon Musk
• Dont ever work for someone you dont want to become.
Search HN for Musk, Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Dorsey, Graham, Thiel,
• Cultivate 12 people who love you, because they are worth more than 12 million people who like you.
If I knew 12 million people I would have little time for the 12, most likely just my immediate family and primarily offspring
• Dont keep making the same mistakes; try to make new mistakes.
Retirement plans come to mind. Relationships is another one where I don’t want new mistakes
• If you stop to listen to a musician or street performer for more than a minute, you owe them a dollar.
My dollar and a vote to value culture, people, art, expression even not to my liking. This applies to any creative endeavor to be consumed.
• Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.
I love ice cream, it it gives me gas.
• When you forgive others, they may not notice, but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves.
Don’t learn to forgive. Learn to forget. Better yet learn to not become attached to become angry.
• Courtesy costs nothing. Lower the toilet seat after use. Let the people in the elevator exit before you enter. Return shopping carts to their designated areas. When you borrow something, return it better shape (filled up, cleaned) than when you got it.
Sure. Treat others as you want to be treated. I think I have heard that one before.
• Whenever there is an argument between two sides, find the third side.
Slavery. Abortion. Access to the ballot. Immigration. Nuclear war. Child sex trafficking.
Aim to die broke. Give to your beneficiaries before you die; it’s more fun and useful. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce
> Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce
Not GP, but this line in particular is dangerous -- that funeral home will do everything they can to harass whoever they can to get their money. Is that how you want to be remembered by your next of kin? Speaking from experience (homicide of a college student, so no blame for not paying), homes will charge tens of thousands just to release the body.
Lots of reasons. A basic one: the government (US) is gonna tax the assets you give to other people on some part of the transfer if it doesn't happen through inheritance, at which the beneficiary would otherwise get a stepped up cost basis.
I too came to criticise this line, on the basis it incurs a cost on others after you die, but it has merit: Let others decide how lavish to make your funeral, including leaving your body out for dogs to eat: you don't need to care, so why spend?
if you do chose to pay, make it as cheap as possible within the constraints of your circumstances. Leaving your body to science is cheap and useful.
To be fair it is a decent estate planning strategy to give the right amount away before not after you die. This also saves your heirs from a certain amount of fighting which tends to happen. I don’t know about being completely broke and timing that is quite hard. It’s the kind of thing you want to talk to your lawyer about though not the internet.
> Courtesy costs nothing. Lower the toilet seat after use. Let the people in the elevator exit before you enter. Return shopping carts to their designated areas. When you borrow something, return it better shape (filled up, cleaned) than when you got it.
Sorry, this one depends on the old "if everyone would just..." It does cost something, and it's the price we ought to be willing to pay for a civil society. But it's also long been non-reciprocated (in my experience) and so I'm done with self sacrifice in the name of the common good (to the extent I can untrain it out of myself).
I’m sorry that you feel like you don’t get your end out of the deal, but it’s a bad idea to fully embrace a “race to the bottom” mentality. Most people who don’t reciprocate behaviors in a healthy society fail to do so because nobody else around them does so — doing the right thing for its own sake can be a powerful motivation for those around you.
Sometimes I'm less concerned about the total outcome as I am that the rules claimed are the rules observed. To use a relationship example I don't get mad so much because you cheated on me so much as because you lied about exclusivity.
I don't get mad that I pay taxes, but that I also don't see societal improvement happening proportional to what I pay... (and that there always seems to be none left in the communal basket when I have a bad day...)
That makes perfect sense to me: a feeling of consistency is the strongest component of justice (or injustice).
Here’s my 0.02c: you can be justified in perceiving injustice (against yourself, or more generally) and simultaneously be unjustified in reacting to that injustice. Less roundabout: two wrongs don’t make a right, and what is right is virtuous in its course of action (in the sense that acting right encourages other people to act right, when doing so isn’t tied to a negative emotion like shame.)
It also creates a strange dynamic between you and others. If I 100% of the time will fill up a car I borrow when I return it, then what happens when someone borrows mine and returns it with the tank 20% lower than when I gave it to them? Get upset? Quietly pity them with some sanctimonious "they know not what they do" feeling?
If you feel it is important to behave in a certain manner it is hard not to judge others by the same standards. Can you hold yourself to an extremely high level of courtesy without judging others?
> Can you hold yourself to [...] high level of courtesy without judging others?
Yes, and this is a worthwhile challenge to accept if you feel it's indeed a challenge.
Life gets more enjoyable if it's not treated as a zero-sum-game with expectations of reciprocity. Pay it forward; don't assume to be paid back. Be the change you want to see.
You can and should do what you believe is right without being upset that the rest of the world acts differently.
(BTW: I object to that the examples of returning borrowed car with gas filled up,lowering toilet seats, letting people leave elevators and returning shopping carts in the right place are "extremely high levels of courtesy". It's just basic simple things. Regardless of how social norms in your immediate vicinity may deviate)
I wouldn’t be upset or pity someone who doesn't refill the tank — I just wouldn’t go out of my way to help them again, like I would for someone who does refill it. If you make a point of showing your appreciation when I do you a favor, I’m much more likely to do you more favors in the future.
Is this a prescription for the rest of us? What should happen when I encounter you, perhaps at an inconvenient time? Is the answer, “don’t know them, can’t be bothered, couldn’t care less?”
It asolutely isn't a prescription for the rest of us, its terribly a-social. It demands that "stop caring" is defined as "do the minimum harm, and do the maximum nice, within the limits"
Well... there are people who go through life blowing off everyone they can. That is, as you say, terribly a-social. It's not a healthy way to live.
At the same time, there are also people who feel free to write a check, sign your name to it, and expect you to cash it. (They would do this financially if they thought they could, but mainly they do it emotionally.) If you let people do that to you, that also is not a healthy way to live.
So there's a balance between being asocial and being a doormat. Don't be either one.
My neighbor thinks as you do: he revs his car and motorcycles engines at night while we try to sleep. Therefore, we suffer.
(yes, we've asked him to stop)
If courtesy cost nothing, it means it has no value, why would you do something of no value ?
Another similar issue is to confuse work and employement. Typically raising childrens is a lot of work, but it is not employement. (Womans have been working since loooong ago, just not getting paid for it)
> To keep young kids behaving on a car road trip, have a bag of their favorite candy and throw a piece out the window each time they misbehave.
That's terrible advice. Treat children with respect! They are very smart, they just lack experience. If they "misbehave", talk to them and explain why this is not good. If you can't find an explanation, chances are you are wrong and you should reevaluate your position.
But never, never, never willfully hurt them by throwing away their favorite candy. So wrong on so many levels.
This was a big surprise for me in this list as I mostly agree with the items before it. Or, to use a previous item:
> You’ll get 10x better results by elevating good behavior rather than punishing bad behavior, especially in children and animals.
Well said.