Children

Why is it so hard to raise children? Why does it seem that many people, even smart, organized, dedicated rich people, fail miserably at it?

Here's a theory: Science, technology, economics, human ingenuity and capitalism have all worked to shorten the time required to do things, particularly the menial tasks of life. Obvious examples are washing machines, the dishwasher, refrigerators (reducing time spent getting fresh food), computers, printers, adhesive stamps, and on and on. Fifteen years ago it took an hour to pay your bills, now it takes 10 minutes with online banking. One could come up with dozens and dozens of examples. This wonderful success makes us very impatient people, we are constantly looking for ways to make things more efficient.

But guess what? Raising kids still takes time, a lot of time, and none of our neat technological tricks makes it any shorter. For example, to teach your kid (age 4-6) to read, the best thing to do is have him read aloud and correct them as he makes mistakes. And you really need to let him try to say the word first, and not fill it in for him. You should also stop frequently and ask them questions about what happened and what might happen next. This is tedious to the modern mind. It requires real patience, and there's no way to shortcut it. The same with conversations -- ideally you should give your kid 15 to 30 seconds to respond to your questions or provide the next comment. Actually doing this seems interminable, but it really helps the kid gain confidence in their ability to think and speak. You can apply this same reasoning to any other endeavor you would like your child to learn, and especially to punishment and corrective lessons, which take even longer and involves emotions and other difficulties. Most importantly, slowing down allows your child to develop a better relationship with you, as you are demonstrating to him that you can move at his speed, and he will enjoy it more with less stress. Kids are not little adults, in any way, shape or form.

Blog

Blogging about blogging is like gossip: reprehensible but irresistable. Alas, this blog is powerless to resist.

What should blogs be? A way for readers to become accustomed to a mind. Hence those with a good mind behind them rise to the top naturally. Worthwhile examples are here, here, here and here. The reader will note that these are not personal diaries -- they contain observations about the world, stated more or less objectively, with some weight behind them, and good starting points to further research. We are privileged to be reading these, and it would not surprise this blog if the authors eventually tire or must move on. I wish I could pay them.

But if you are looking for the archetype, the blog that has perfected the form, the blog that approximates Ted Williams swing, look no further. The new sidebar with quick, bite-size entries is brilliantly simple.

Inspired by this, which has more thoughts on the matter.

Optimize

Consider three brief scenes:

• A parent dutifully sleeps in her car so that she preserves a spot in a renowned private pre-school for her 3 year old.
• A man spends several hours on the Internet researching which dishwasher to buy for his home.
• A couple drives an extra 10 miles to Wegmans to purchase just the right type of organic carrots.

If there is one piece of advice that the modern mind should heed in organizing its day to day affairs, it is this: Stop optimizing. Know when you are spending too much time trying to make 85% effective into 87% effective. Consider the first scene -- study after study show that where your kids go to preschool, or even whether they go to preschool, doesn't mean squat as to their ultimate academic performance or, more importantly, happiness. In that case, you're just working to make 87% become 87%.

As for the second scene, the reality is that the dishwashers are all about the same, and the "features" you'll be poring over on the Internet are probably just price discrimination gimmicks. You're much better off limiting yourself to fifteen minutes of selection time and spending those hours you saved cooking a good meal with your family.

And that brings us to the third example. It's friggin' carrots, and it's just a grocery store. They're probably gonna be boiled or something anyway. Organic food is just another price discrimination gimmick too.

Why do people do this? First, some explanation of what is meant by the "modern mind." Basically it means middle to upper class people in the United States who have way too much liesure time. The observation still holds for poor people who have little liesure time and money, as they are prone to optimizing too, and it's more serious for them because they can't often afford the mistake of spending an extra $250 on that dishwasher with spot remover. But it mainly addresses those with the means to afford choice.

Those folks do it because their brains are wired and trained to be very analytical, usually. You know the type: lawyers, stock brockers, politicians, professors, etc. They spend most of their professional lives becoming really good at sorting through a mass of information to find the essential points and then synthesizing those essential nuggets into a plan of action for the future. It really is what makes humans kick ass. And it's addictively enjoyable to do.

But it really is overkill for picking carrots, dishwashers and preschools. You're just playing around then, and wasting time and energy. Put the cool brain tools away for once and just "fire and forget", then focus on something meaningful, like helping your kid write a story.

Another good example here via here

Community

Community doesn't scale.

This small phrase is offered to those who are inclined to believe that the Internet provides a new way to form community among disparate individuals, linked via speedy communications tools like email, chat, blogs, wiki, etc. , and especially those who think that really big new "communities" can dispense with property rights, profit motives and traditional forms of ordering incentives and allocating resources.

Community doesn't scale.

For actual evidence of this, read Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu in Who Controls the Interent?, particularly the chapter describing how eBay's "community self-policing" ideal had to give way to old-fashioned law enforcement when the "community" got bigger. As quoted by Goldsmith and Wu, here's Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay:

The community really is no longer the way it was in the early days. My philosophy then was, let the community govern itself. That philosophy didn't really scale up. I would have wanted it to. But I realized in early 1998 that at a certain point, you have to say, well, there is a part of the community out there that isn't appropriate.

Why doesn't community scale? Perhaps because true community is hard work, requiring each member to give as much as receive, and that can really only be established among smaller groups, who meet face-to-face, and who engage in the hard work of forming real relationships. A good measure of the true size of any community is the number of members who actually contribute to the common weal. By that standard, Digg and other Internet "communities" don't fare very well, being made up 99% of takers and not givers. Indeed, it is telling that one of Digg's top contributors knew that another top contributor was on vacation and when he would return. Those guys are forming a relationship and have a chance at community, the other 99.7% of the "members" are not.

Community doesn't scale

The founders of the United States understood this, recognizing that the strength of the republic will come from not from large communal organization but from small groups, true communities, and even at the individual level. Once you get bigger than that, community alone won't keep things running -- you'll need things like laws, enforcement, property rights, credit reports -- stuff that works when people are essentially anonymous strangers to one another, stuff that scales. Indeed, even small groups on the Internet can fail quite easily to form community because it is so easy to simply turn off the computer and disappear when your turn to give back comes up.

For further ideas from Nick Carr about this, see here and here.

UPDATE: In a spot of self-aggrandizement and insecurity for which I apologize, I googled the phrase "community doesn't scale" to see if anyone had used it before, and found this "ancient" blog posting from 2000(!), available only in the cache, that used the phrase and understands the idea, albeit with more optimism that this post.

Wisdom

So it turns out that the key to wisdom is a paradox: Strong Opinions, Weakly Held. This helps explain why there are no universally strong solutions.

From here.

Tails

Here's something not often discussed in the over-discussed idea of the "long tail". Why is one cultural product in the "tail" rather than the "head"? Lack of shelf space and niche appeal are typically cited as explanation and then the discussion moves on. No one seems to worry that the products in the tail might just suck.

Parenting

Raising children is full of paradox, the central one being that you are obligated to provide them with two things that are often in conflict: unconditional love and discipline. Understanding and managing this conflict is the difficult work of being a parent, but the tension that gives being a family harmony and life. Remember that there are no universal strong solutions. Something that works today likely won't work tomorrow. If you're absolutely lost, going with discipline is the better default.

Some other thoughts, from personal experience and observations as both a child and a parent:

(1) Think long term. Setting rules and boundaries for your kids at age 3 is important not for their toddler years, but for when they are 17. To save them from distress in high school, you need to start working when they are born. If you find yourself thinking "What's the harm in letting him do that?" or "It's just so much easier to let him do that", stop yourself and prevent him from doing whatever "that" is, if only for the practice in handling the conflict that is sure to arise. The details aren't important, your skill in holding fast is, and it takes multiple iterations of real life practice to master. If you haven't started this yet, and your kids are already teens, it sucks to be you, because you task is now very difficult, if not impossible. But you still have to do it, no matter how hard. See # 2.

(2) Nobody cares about your kid but you. Not his teachers, friends, principal, aunts and uncles, even grandparents. When push comes to shove and your kid needs real help and work, all of these people will dump him by the side of the road and speed off without looking back. There is some liberation in accepting this, as it means you can mostly ignore the cheap talk that these people have to offer about your kid. But it does mean you really can't die.

(3) When in doubt, treat parenting like a management job. Pretend you're in the government and your kids are your staff, and you can't fire them, they won't quit, you can't quit and you're stuck together for the next 20 years or so. In that situation, you'd better figure out what makes them tick, what motivates them, what doesn't, and how to get the best out of them.

(4) The last thing your kids need from you is a friend, particularly one who is decades older than them and forced on them by biology. How many stable friendships exist between 15-year-olds and 45-year-olds? None. It's abnormal. Forget about it. They need a teacher, exemplar, disciplinarian, advocate, counsel, therapist, boss, and guardian, at least, before a friend. Guide them towards building lasting friendships of their own with other good, serious people, not you.

(5) A simple goal that works in most cases: You should want your kid to be someone you can rely on for real advice when they are older. Someone you can trust. Someone serious, but gentle and generous. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, about hosting a beer party at your house when they are in high school that helps achieve this goal. Indeed, it is destructive of it.

Reactions to this.

Cost

Several previous posts have mentioned cost. Cost is critical to evaluating what people say and do. Here's an example of how to measure such cost. Think back on the times when someone has offered to do something nice for you. Objectively consider what the cost they would have incurred by doing that thing. Would it take them out of their way on their drive home? Would it require them to change their plans? Would it make their family and other friends displeased? You will find that most kind offers are low cost or cost less. There's nothing wrong with that, just keep it in mind when ascribing value to that event in your relationship with that person. Where real cost is incurred, study that person and event carefully. They are either a true friend or dangerously irrational.

Customers

Most people, maybe even nearly all people, do not want to enter into a relationship with the businesses who sell them things. They want the comfort of a nearly anonymous transaction, sometimes even without capable assistance. Relationships of all types that last longer than 30 minutes are hard, difficult work. Why would anyone want to engage in this everytime he buys a DVD player? Don't we all hate the fact that the cell phone companies force a 1-year relationship on us?

The world is a much better place when vendors and customers can engage in quick, reliable, secure, semi-anonymous transactions. For most things, especially products of culture like writing, music and movies, the Internet utterly fails at providing such an environment. If after the transaction the customer is dissatisfied, his best option in almost any case is to lump it, take note, and move on. Those who like to beseige the vendor with complaints in a futile attempt to change the way they do business have way too much free time on their hands, and ultimately do a disservice, particularly where the cost of such sniping is low and thus not thought out.

Inspired by this and this.