I have been shielding my 6 years old son from electronics, except 40 minutes of TV twice a week. I have no idea how to grow his patience and perseverance, though. He is like me, who doesn't have a lot of patience to begin with, so I can't really guide him through some of the situations. We have been taking him to some activities as well as reading to him but nothing really sticks.
I just hope eventually he loves reading and learns in a more traditional way instead of from laptops and pads.
We struggled to get our son into reading too, but he took straight away to comics, and from there he had a long stint with graphic novels (e.g. Percy Jackson, Artemis Fowl). You can get more mature graphic novels as they mature and progress, e.g. City of Dragons. And eventually he picked up an Alex Rider book, and hasn't stopped since. He's now how I remember myself as a kid - nose stuck in a book, completely engrossed!
I have been wondering how to train my 6-year old son and myself to increase my attention span.
Some rules are obvious -- cutoff mobiles and pads completely (he doesn't have access to them so it's for me), sit in the library and study from books (I believe this is even possible for programming topics as I can write on paper). Basically, cutting off everything electronics definitely helps -- even putting my phone in the bag improves productivity significantly.
But the problem is, my son is unruly. If I put him in the library, most likely he runs around and messes things up, which ends up we leave early without doing anything.
> But the problem is, my son is unruly. If I put him in the library, most likely he runs around and messes things up, which ends up we leave early without doing anything.
Some potential ideas to explore. Take what you want, leave what you don't.
a) if you're training for attention span, make sure the target is appropriate and also within reach of your child.
b) have a plan for the visit: when I helped at a school library, classes for kids in your kid's age group would come in, the librarian would read them a story, then the kids would look for a book, check out at the desk and read (or look at the book anyway) quietly until the end of the visit. I think we'd get about 40 minutes for a visit. Most days, at least some of the kids would be getting ansy before it was time to go.
c) Plan around your kid's activity needs. Some kids will do long still antention tasks better after doing some amount of physical activity. Some kids will do these kinds of things better after a meal. Some will do it better in the morning or the afternoon. Many kids will have a harder time if the library visit was a surprise. You know your kid, try to have your library visits when they're likely to work well. If he likes story time, try to visit when there's a story time available.
d) don't expect that you can both go to the library and work independently. You're going to the library with him, and he's going to need you to help him out for much of the time. But you might be able to find him a book together, then find you a book together, then sit down and read for a bit together.
e) if all you can get done is finding a book, no big deal. You can read at home too.
Exactly. I'd argue that all those programming Gods and Gods because they went through that period. Whatever didn't kill them made them stronger. We should replicate that experience by deliberately writing in low level C and assembly for a few years.
How can one move horizontally and then vertically? I have been thinking about getting into a more technical position. I work as a data engineer but essentially just a data modeller while manager and staff engineer took all the fun jobs -- it is even very hard to know what they are working on, so it is impossible to even ask for certain tickets.
And now with AI coming out in hot, and companies only hiring seniors, I found it very hard to move horizontally. It is not like I can't take a pay cut, but people simply won't hire someone who takes some time to learn the rope.
I might as well figure out how to increase my Charisma to 18 and sleep with someone at the top /s
I'm very frustrated that I don't have time to learn stuffs on job. They basically assume the productivity I'm supposed to get from using AI on tasks I'm familiar with.
And it definitely doesn't help when everyone hires "Seniors" only, so it's virtually impossible to switch tracks unless I sleep with the CXOs I guess. I have been nudging towards system programming for the previous 8 years, starting as a data analyst, to BI developer, and to data engineer -- well, I guess data engineer is my last stop for life.
Maybe this is part of the shadow money. CIA has been working with business people since the beginning of Cold War and I wouldn't be surprised that they have deep roots in the financial world -- after all both Intelligence and Finance need globalization.
I don't think it's connected to this specific event, but there's a lot of lore about the CIA moving gold in/out of Afghanistan, Iraq and others during war time.
I used to read a lot about Michele Sindona who was supposed to be connected to the Mafia and the intelligence community. His currency trading firm was one of the first to trade the Eurodollar contracts back in the 60s, IIRC.
I think intelligence and finance really go hand in hand. It makes so much sense -- you see, the intelligence community really hates the congress or whatever to snoop around its operations before approving the budget -- wouldn't it a lot easier to just earn your own $$? And with all the information the intelligence agencies control, it is almost trivial to make quick money in finance. Last but not the least, wouldn't banker be the perfect cover for spies? They wear nice suites, too.
From Rockefeller to Sheldon Adelson (only naming dead ones), oligarchs have had an extremely close relationship to the CIA, and although the CIA probably gets something out of it, I think it goes more the other way.
They want globalization to make their jobs easier. In no sense do they "need" it. Whether we want a world where the desires of intelligence and finance are blindly prioritized is an open question. For my part the answer is obviously no.
I think most ordinary people would say No, but most of us do not have a say in any important things. They put up the facade of voting while all the important stuffs are decided within the circles.
I think it really makes sense to consider ourselves to be just intelligent cattle -- they still tolerate us because they need us to turn natural resources into machinery, weapon, insights and other stuffs they need, but once AI and robots keep up, they can probably get rid of 90% of us.
> I think it really makes sense to consider ourselves to be just intelligent cattle
That's too misanthropic for my tastes.
> to turn natural resources into machinery, weapon, insights and other stuffs they need
It's easy to live in our world and ignore the maintenance staff.
> but once AI and robots keep up
This is nowhere near happening. Your seeming rush into anticipatory compliance is exceedingly premature.
> they can probably get rid of 90% of us.
It's the same moronic death cult that's been active since the 1860s. They would like to believe this, more importantly they would like /you/ to believe this, but a sober examination of the facts shows it to be a mixture of bluster and folly designed to intimidate you into transferring your personal wealth into their profit.
There's a book that ties into this sort of thing - Gold Warriors [1]. It about how, post WWII, the US recovered a bunch of Gold looted from China and used it to set up an anti-communist slush fund.
That's their post hoc, uncorroborated claim. It's easy to imagine many other possibilities; it could just be face saving. It could be Rush is taking the fall. etc.
I have seen bookstore (second-handed books) thriving near universities. Your idea is actually very interesting and remind me of the mall model -- the mall model worked because everyone in the family gets his/her own share of pleasure. Of course the traffic matters a lot, too. Hope you start that experiment soon and succeed!
Universities are effectively ultra-anchors. You have large numbers of students from mostly middle class backgrounds, many of whom have free time and disposable income. (Or at least they're not worried about their loans yet.)
And then you have the academics. Tenured profs are relatively well paid. Adjuncts/assistants not so much, but they still like nice things.
The UK's public school towns (Marlborough, Harrow, Winchester...) often have a prosperous independent store economy on a smaller scale, for the same reasons.
Clusters work well in these towns.
If you try them elsewhere, like one of the UK's many run-down towns, they're more likely to fail because the prosperity just isn't there.
The general theory of most malls was that you had anchor stores. My local one has a couple of stores adjacent to the mall (a local chain supermarket and and Home Depot) that are very busy, almost too much so. The mall itself is pretty much dead and has been on the market for ages. The anchor stores--JCPenney, Sears, and Macy's are all long gone. Haven't been in the actual mall in ages but I assume it's pretty sad and there seem very few cars in the lots.
Oh, yeah, the Toys 'R Us in the complex is long gone too.
It's pretty much the same in my place, too. The old malls are dying. There are new malls coming up, but I'm not sure how they are going to hold in the future.
Luxury malls in cities aren't really my thing and there are even some higher-end suburban malls where Apple stores seem to have become an anchor store in this day and age that I would have laughed at once upon a time--shows how much I know.
I will say I have walked into some malls in Vegas and only half-hyperbolically thought I couldn't (and/or wouldn't want) to have afforded pretty much anything.
I think once they stopped being "Personal Computers", they stopped being fun. The most interesting era was from the 70s until the mid 90s, before MSFT completely grabbed the home computer market.
After that it is all servers and corporations. Although I have switched one of my laptops to Linux, I perhaps have never been a true Linux guy.
Well that's how you get convenience and comfort. That's how you build civilizations. Specialization started many millennium ago, when people probably didn't know much, if anything, about other careers.
I'm sure we all want to throw away working laptops, get out and enjoy nature sometimes. But no, LIVING in the nature is completely a different thing. Camping for a few days or even a month might be fine, but most people won't suffer longer than that.
I'm only worried about how we distribute wealth, TBH, the only important question.
The great thing about living in modern times is you can do both, and mix & match as much as you want.
There's still countries/areas with large swats of land where it's you against nature. Nothing more, nothing less.
But (contrary to your ancestors millenia ago) you can bring a phone, camping gear, preserved foods, use a lighter to get that fire started, or play Tetris in-between grizzly bear attacks. ;-)
Likewise, people have options whether to 'live in the fast lane' & make lots of money, disappear into the Amazon forest, or somewhere in between. Or do the latter for 3 weeks a year only.
Explore the world, move around, try things & find out what suits you best. Oh and of course: everything changes (and will keep doing so).
Personally I do feel people (from developed countries) should get out into nature more. A good % of people have lost touch with the natural world that we all depend on. And it shows.
I've read many accounts of the lives of mostly hunter-gatherer tribes living far more care-free and convenient lives. Yes they had no way of treating most diseases, facing natural disasters, and preventable deaths, but from what I understand the reports of scarcity and constant danger are far overblown, at least within certain periods.
Survivorship bias. All the corpses aren't here to tell us anything. Just 100 years ago, most parents would bury at least one of their infant children. People back then were tough, because the physically and emotionally weak died off. Humanity's "natural state" is like the animals, to kill or be killed, to wage war, to reproduce, to die. The difference is we have a big brain that strongly incentivizes us to try to leave that world behind. Its not perfect, but we've improved in basically every measurable way on the scale of our species.
The natural ("prehistoric") state used to be a low density distribution of mobile tribes, which sidestepped a lot of the problems that afflict civilizations, like pandemics and local resource exhaustion.
I personally feel "happiness" is more correlated with agency (or at least perceived agency), and in that measure civilization has been regressing since the industrial revolution. The amount of long-term planning required has increased and it's less possible to live "in the present", moment to moment.
Wasn't the whole point, to get so good at things we got back to that eventually? I don't even understand what the point/goal/target is anymore? Like we forgot society should be getting better every year. Or it used to be the conservative towns that had beautiful tree lined streets, but now it's conservative to NOT plant anything for the future. What is it all for at this point?
Man that's what I've been asking people all the time: what is our end goal? When will we say "this is enough", we can stop here? If we don't know the answers for these question, then we better find answers before going "forward" blindly.
There is no collective goal, just emergent behavior. It might be our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. We're technologically capable of shaping our world for the better and incapable of cooperating or even agreeing enough to pull it off.
I think people forget we are primates and that our roots are very much encoded into our more primitive brain parts. It would be nice (in some definition of that word) if we operated as a social hive like ants or bees, but that is just not the world we live in. The neocortex is a powerful evolutionary thing, but it doesn't (and in many ways, cannot) override our baser instincts.
I just hope eventually he loves reading and learns in a more traditional way instead of from laptops and pads.
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