100% agree with it. As a child, I always felt most creative when the number of lego pieces was limited. Like, what can I make that's cool with just these two handfuls of lego? Where would this weird piece go, and what could it be?
This has been my son's experience as well (Grade 4). We are on week 6 of home-school, and by far the thing that energizes him, lifts his mood, and gets him through his work is any interactions at all with his fellow students.
Most of his classmates are too young to have strong bonds outside of the structure of school, so (I think) school needs to accept the power of these bonds and facilitate social interaction between kids. De-prioritize the output, and prioritize the process of learning things together.
Most of his classmates are too young to have strong bonds outside of the structure of school
It is unfortunate, and a poor reflection on modern culture that 4th grade is too young to form strong bonds outside of school. Kids are missing the after school unstructured free/play time. Decades later, I'm sill best friends with kids I went to school with in 4th grade.
I don’t go anywhere and my kids don’t leave the street. “Sorry kids you can’t go outside for the next 3 months. I’ll keep the windows clean for you so you can look.” Tantamount to child torture.
Not sure what you mean, I think y'all might be talking past eachother: poster is saying they can't exactly go play outside with the neighbors right now, which is obviously true, if kids in the neighborhood are running around together, we'd just be building really efficient viral transmission chains
This is an assumption of yours for which there's insufficient evidence. Or even the evidence is currently rather pointing the other way. What I have is anecdotal evidence from here in Switzerland - adults generally keep distance while children in the neighborhood generally play with each other. We currently are down to ~120 new cases a day across Switzerland, hospitalization taken a sharp downturn and has never exceeded capacity.
It's all a game of numbers - sure, there will be some transmissions if you let children play together in open spaces, but overall, from what current data suggests, it's not a significant vector. We generally have to think like this now, there's no such thing as absolute safety and we really have to think hard about what should be restricted and what negative effects this will have long term. Isolating kids at home for months is IMO not worth it.
On a different note, neither is allowing small businesses to fail in droves even if they can provide a good hygiene concept. Switzerland has also opened up hairdressers since this week - with masks, hand sanitizing and contact tracing being mandatory for everyone. We'll see in a couple of weeks whether this works or not.
Another anecdote: Where I am in Switzerland, it's rather unusual to see kids playing together right now (except for presumably siblings). I can see a bit of a school playground from my home and the groups that visit have really dwindled over the past few months and it hasn't rebounded yet. There are usually only 1-2 kids playing at a time.
Adults more or less try to maintain distances, as you said.
it's definitely down from normal numbers of kids playing here. but those parents who allow going to playgrounds are usually OK if kids play with some distance. what I found works well is ball passing with soccer - no touch needed. badminton is also reasonable safe distance. with 'neighborhood' I meant the immediate housing project here, we have a couple of boys who are inseparable and I find the risk tolerable if those same kids play together daily. Should be simple to trace also in case the housing gets cases.
Kids are known viral factories. They tend to have higher viral loads despite not getting as sick. This is one reason we have school breaks in the winter and spring, basically to cut down transmission chains.
The crux of the conversation is: either everyone is going to catch this because of how contagious it is, or we all stay home for ~1-1.5 years until a vaccine is widely distributed. There isn't much of a middle ground.
Everyone will catch this. To think otherwise is folly. Our intrepid leaders have had between 4-6 weeks to sort things out. Hope they did.
My kids can go play outside. This is getting absurd.
I don't think any reputable person has claimed an attempt to stop everyone from catching this. The mantra is "flattening the curve." It's been that since the beginning. We don't want to overwhelm the healthcare system like what has happened and is happening in Italy.
And shelter in place with strong social distancing has proven to be the most effective way to slow the spread of the virus given the current testing capacity and lack of contact tracing.
Yes I agree, flatten the curve. Then what? We social distance for a year or two? The world economy goes to hell? Can’t buy a pork chop? All because boomers stuck their parents in nursing homes?
Nah, food processors will need to come up with ways to physically distance with screening or otherwise provide PPE. Those jobs will suck and there won't be any socialization in lunch/break rooms but it will be necessary.
We will learn more during this time about how the virus works and how to treat it as well. Hopefully that knowledge will help us exit faster but we should expect this to be a long term new normal.
Travel and tourism is definitely going to take a bigger and continued hit. But there might be ways to make it work.
To everyone paranoidly sitting is strong isolation I’m saying “What is your exit strategy? The virus is not going away, there will be no vaccine for many months. Are you planning on sitting it out for a year? Two? Ten? If not, you might as well go on with your life while taking reasonable precautions and practicing hygiene.”
I don’t think paranoia means what I think you think it means.
Like most people on the site, I am well adapted to the conditions forced upon us by this pandemic.
What I can’t do is go travelling, what with the airports being closed to tourists, the hotels being closed, and the airlines cancelling any flights other than repatriations, etc. — and I can’t go to local museums, because they’re closed.
I can’t go to a pub to hang out with local furries, because the pub is closed. I probably can’t go to the large furry convention that was going to happen later this year in my city, because the hotel it would be held in is currently being used as a pop-up hospital. Even if I got around the airport problems by learning to fly (I have the money and time for lessons but not for a plane), I couldn’t go to any other cons instead because their hotels have also been converted into pop-up hospitals.
I can go for walks, but I can’t go to any parks, because they’re closed.
I’m also not comfortable with selling my old home in the UK and buying a new one in Berlin — but that’s not because of risk to me, it’s because of the situation in the UK. It’s not really a “hobby”, but it is something I had planned to do and have put off because of this.
I’m not into music or dancing or spectator sports, but those are big parts of most people’s lives — now impossible because their venues are closed.
The only thing I can do is walking (on sidewalks), passive a/v entertainment, MOOCs/etc, and video games.
Suits me, but if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it.
It's not an either or situation where one size will fit all is it?
If you live in an area that's a hotspot then you need to have tighter restrictions than if not. If you know you're in an at-risk group then you need to have tighter restrictions.
Our restrictions and daily routines are naturally going to have to shift about as the virus ebbs and flows. Which is why a good local testing and contact tracing regime is essential to end the most draconian lockdowns. If you don't even know how the virus is distributed locally and can't quickly act to quarantine people who have been in contact with someone who is infected then it's very hard to say mingling together is a great idea. That said the risks of kids playing together in a neighborhood seem pretty minor if otherwise people are keeping to themselves. The likely negative consequence is that if one family has a member that tests positive then all the others in the neighborhood will need to quarantine until they can be tested or enough time passes. Here that's 14 days if you're not symptomatic or 7 days after the symptoms go if you are. Then the less likely consequence is that you're the vector that passes on the infection and it kills one of your neighbors.
We're relaxing our restrictions here a bit in Iceland on Monday and I'm really interested to see how that goes.
> Everyone will catch this. To think otherwise is folly.
I have my hopes, if not at least until Winter.
Luckily, I have hobbies that are easily done without large groups of people and believe I can avoid groups of 10 or more people for most of summer and probably 50 people until September. (I've not spent more than a few minutes with more than 3 others for the last month and half)
Ah, covid-shaming on HN. Then they go to Costco in unfitted, unfiltering masks and bring home bunch of packages, pretending they avoided “social contact”.
It's not that simple. We live in a suburban neighborhood. When I was a kid we had tons of kids in the neighborhood I grew up in to play with. Now? My family is the only one in the neighborhood with kids. Their classmates live quite aways away across busy streets. I'd have to drive them to their classmates houses. People just don't have kids like they used to.
This jumped out at me as well. When I was that age I spent my summers riding my bike and roaming the city with my friends. The thought that kids today are entirely dependent on the structure of school for socialization is incredibly depressing. What have we done to society?
Moved into far flung suburbs separated by 4+ lane roads with large vehicles traveling 50mph+ in order to sequester the kids in the “nicest” neighborhoods so they only have well to do kids in their school.
The parent is one data point. Perhaps the one kid leans on school for social connections at this point in their life? Some kids are loaners (but still need social connections) others are very social.
Another commenter pointed out that there were only a few school-aged kids in their neighborhood. I noticed when I graduated high school there weren't many younger school-aged kids in my neighborhood even though I grew up with a good number of people nearby. When my sister moved into a newly built neighborhood when they had kids other young families moved in, too. I think neighborhoods tend to cluster with families, it cycles and may not always catch on every generation and some kids get stuck.
Those situations sound incredibly depressing, but I don't think it necessarily reflects all of society.
Yeah I'm confused by this. My oldest friend is my friend from 3rd grade who I only play video games with. We weren't ever in the same classroom and I only went over to his house twice. I haven't seen him in years but at most we've only gone a few months without doing something over the past decade+.
Maybe that's because as a child I had unsupervised access to a networked playstation and a computer. I would have loved to stay at home all day.
As an adult I hate it. When my city opened back up I took up cycling as my only mode of transport because I've taken the feeling of physical exertion for granted.
No just split the two things entirely. Have an hour of free form video chat to make fun of each other and laugh. The education there is from interacting.
It’s no different than removing sports as a separate subject. You don’t learn math or English running down a track field and you don’t learn how to swimming reading 20000 Leagues Under the Sea.
My kid's class has a parent-organized "Zoom recess" three times a week for just this. There's always a volunteer parent moderating/hosting, but it's an oppy for kids to be themselves socially.
It sometimes fascinates me (and scares the shit out of me) to wonder at all of the little errors/assumptions like this that are baked into the millions of spreadsheets that form the foundation of so much of what we build and do in the world.
Dead comment reply by 'FakeComments' that I am not sure deserves to be dead (what happened there?): "I’d say the better part of engineering is knowing how to design in the face of small errors creeping into the project."
The world is held together with nothing but human thought. Man must be free so that his mind is free to think. A doctor working under compulsion should terrify those under his scalpel. Likewise for the engineer, and his customer, who designs a bridge, an elevator, or even a simple toaster.
If I remember the study correctly, the scientists actually stated that it is clear that there is not one single "gay gene", but that (like many other traits) instead there are likely a number of genes that work in concert to produce sexuality outcomes.
That's part of the charm. You can probably pull this thing by hand, no special hardware required. That means, with enough fuel, it can take to the skies from almost anywhere on the globe, as opposed to fighter jets that generally require modern infrastructure to be combat ready.
For me, this is fantasy hockey. I don't even like to watch hockey anymore, but I enjoy the daily interaction with my friends who are no longer in the same city and busy with their own lives.
By the end of the first paragraph, I felt as though I was reading through Anathem again. I have never read any other writing that gave me flashbacks like that to Neal Stephenson's style.
Your comment reminds me of the exercise where a class was split into two cohorts, one was tasked with producing just one clay pot (I can't remember the thing now), while the other cohort was tasked with making one per day or something similar.
Put simply, one group put all of its energy into producing just one, and the other group just turned out pot after pot after pot.
At the end, so the story goes, the group that cranked out pots like crazy ended up producing pots of higher quality.
In my own life, I can often find out the thing that I'm afraid of learning because I've set it up like that first cohort: making the one perfect thing, instead of putting it out there and iterating on it or making another based on what I learned. Goes with learning languages (I'd do way better if I simply tried speaking every day, but I wait for perfect opportunities).
Don’t worry about the details; it was just a made-up story in the book Art & Fear; I have never seen any evidence such a pottery class ever existed. https://kk.org/cooltools/art-fear/
> The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
This story comes from page 29 of Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. In an email conversation with Orland on October 18, 2016, he explained the origins of the story. “Yes, the ‘ceramics story’ in ‘Art & Fear’ is indeed true, allowing for some literary license in the retelling. Its real-world origin was as a gambit employed by photographer Jerry Uelsmann to motivate his Beginning Photography students at the University of Florida. As retold in ‘Art & Fear’ it faithfully captures the scene as Jerry told it to me—except I replaced photography with ceramics as the medium being explored. Admittedly, it would’ve been easier to retain photography as the art medium being discussed, but David Bayles (co-author) & I are both photographers ourselves, and at the time we were consciously trying to broaden the range of media being referenced in the text. The intriguing thing to me is that it hardly matters what art form was invoked—the moral of the story appears to hold equally true straight across the whole art spectrum (and even outside the arts, for that matter).” Later in that same email, Orland said, “You have our permission to reprint the any or all of the ‘ceramics’ passage in your forthcoming book.” In the end, I settled on publishing an adapted version, which combines their telling of the ceramics story with facts from the original source of Uelsmann’s photography students. David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (Santa Cruz, CA: Image Continuum Press, 1993), 29.
It's a ironic to me that the original inspiration for the story was not ceramics, but photography. My main pastime is photography, and I took this advice to heart and started being as prolific as possible, which is something that digital photography has made easy and compared to film, inexpensive. It was a great relief to just accept that the first attempts at anything are going to be terrible and that failure was a necessary barrier to entry of getting good. Ten years, and tens of thousands of photos later and I've gained a lot of experience and produced some work that I'm proud to call my own.
I believe it was Henri Cartier-Bresson who quipped (or at least has had it attributed to him) that "Your first ten thousand photos are your worst."
I've found that using digital to gather new skills is terrific, but yet I find some of the work I am most satisfied with is analog; I believe it is mostly down to my own lack of self discipline - when shooting digital, exposures are free and hence I shoot lots and lots.
When out with my Texas Leica (A Fuji G690BL, a 6*9 rangefinder), getting eight exposures to the roll, I take those extra couple of moments to ensure I get it all right.
Looks like I have been pwned; thanks for pointing that out. Guess there was a reason that no good footnote existed in my memory for the origin of the anecdote.
Part of what stuck out to me, though, was that the anecdote aligned with my personal experiences of things that were once difficult until I ended up having to do them everyday for one reason or another.
But you're right, that's still a far way off from there being some actual study or otherwise repeatable exercise to show this in a clinical setting for learning new skills.
The specific anecdote may have been fabricated, but the principle is sound. An example is the marshmallow problem[1], where a group is given some materials and is asked to build, under time pressure, the tallest tower they can with a marshmallow on top. Adults generally fare poorly because they don't experiment enough, building a tall tower and placing a marshmallow on the top as time is running out, only to have the tower collapse under the newly introduced weight. Children often do much better because they start with small, simple structures and iterate quickly.
I don't know if that is really the same principle as the pottery anecdote however, it's not about experimenting but a narrative enforcing the concept 'practice makes perfect', related I suppose but not the same.
And anyway the pottery principle is not really sound either - I can suppose that the group tasked with producing a pot a day produces a better pot at the end than the group that was given a long time, but let us assume pot-makers both extremely skilled - one is tasked with making a pot a day for 30 days, the other making a pot in 30 days - which pot under those conditions will be better? The pottery principle is only interesting in explaining how to build a skill, but does not have anything to say about what to expect from those who have already mastered a skill.
You can make the same very bad $creative_product every day indefinitely without improving at all.
Which is why there has to be at least some assessment and feedback. That's the big benefit of having a teacher, mentor, and/or the feedback of peers, customers, or an audience.
If you have a mediocre talent they'll steer you towards making the most of it. If you have exceptional talent their feedback may be wrong or misleading, but it should at least make you think more deeply about your relationship with what you're doing.
You can't assess your own work realistically unless you have something to compare it with, and the critical skills to understand which features matter.
And in relation to programming, entrepreneurship, etc. getting basic experience doing "the full pipline" matters. Releasing _anything_ gives you experience in preparing _something_ for release, whereas if you tried making a perfect program you would miss out on what matters early on for an eventual release and be able to coordinate those for your next product.
There have also been discussion about the same thing happening in music and science. That is, the people who produce the best work also produce the most work, and a lot of that work is bad. But some of it is very, very good.
Which is much like the Harvard or Yale study (it's usually one or the other) that shows people with specific goals and an action plan do ten times better than those without. Nice to know, except, it's all made up: https://www.peer.ca/Singles/MM255.pdf
There have of course been studies on goal setting and achievement (one of which is mentioned in the above pdf) but while they show an effect, they don't show the spectacular results of the made up study.
I think this rings true for learning. Early on in the learning process people need to focus on just doing a bunch of stuff and failing quick and then looping back to the beginning. Focusing on perfection with no foundation, in my experience is usually a surefire way to create things of lower quality
I think there needs to be a balance. If we want to keep talking about pots at my workplace there are people who produce the same pot quickly but never ever improve. Then there are others who talk about great pots but never make one. And then there are some that produce a little slower but each pot gets better. Depending on the situation probably any of these approaches makes sense sometime.
I've heard a very similar story but with a photo class at UF from James Clear's Atomic Habits. Still, very interesting outcome, although I can't say I was surprised based on the odds. Thanks for the share.
I’ve heard this lil story before but honestly both strategies are really dependent on the situation.
There might be situations where’d you want to continually churn out pots. In other situations, pressure is really high, and you have one shot to get it right.
Both strategies depend on the context. If anything, the best approach is to figure out which strategy is needed for the given situation. I would imagine, strategy of churning out pots is the most common one.
But safety critical systems certainly need that pot to be right the first time otherwise people die.
Yea, sometimes if the stakes are high enough you may have to get it right without multiple attempts.
Depending on your time constraints, the tips given here seem to apply particularly well: find proxy problems that allows you to learn without as much hardship would be a good idea, as well as the other strategies of breaking it down, etc.
Sometimes time is not on your side though, and you have to get it right without time to practice on proxy problems (at least I believe this can occur).
Then you can use what I call it the 'Kitchen sink' approach: grab a bunch of tools, a bunch of approaches and start digesting your problem through as many viewpoints as possible. If your problem has safety implications and you can verify it, then well enough. Otherwise you make an attempt if you are sufficiently confident in your solution; and take some kind of NOP otherwise (if a guaranteed 0-return NOP even exists).
Also, if you're solving something while time constrained, you may need to reflect afterwards if you could have either prevented the time constraint or prepared better somehow.
In general though, there's hope in the sense that if something is verifiable or approximately-verifiable you can approach good solutions with time. At least I have high hopes of always finding a solution given enough time (i.e. "You're not good enough" does not exist).
That's only not applicable if your time is finite or in the same vein you need to improve a skill to apply a series of finite-time decisions. Eh who cares about finite time anyway? :P
(Yes, in reality everything is limited but there are plenty of tasks you can take your time with...)
The pot challenge is one group is they get graded just on number of pots made vs. the other on a single pot they can submit. The group trying to perfect one pot ends up making worse quality pots than the quantity group because the quantity group ends up getting way more practice.
That anecdote gives me lots of hope. I hope it's accurate! :)
One thing to note about the pot challenge - it works because making a pot is a physical skill that improves with repetition in a situation where mistakes are really obvious. If you were to apply the same principle to something else it might not work at all.
If you just write a huge amount of code rather than examining what's good or bad about code you wrote, you'd probably end up writing the same bad code over and over again. Seeing where improvements can be made is sometimes really not obvious and can feel like you're going backwards. For example, learning where functional programming applies instead of writing a class for everything. You need to be able to understand why something is better for simple repetition to work.
Unlimited possibility bogs me down. I get frozen.