Overall, this style is what Montessori-schools of teaching believe and how they operate. Essentially a self-exploratory based learning style.
There's lots of benefit in letting kids simply explore. As a parent, I find I have to stop myself from pushing my child to the 'best' result and let them be. That it's okay to pick a less optimal solution.
Where I find this alarmingly true is when outcome/results are negative (usually ending in pain). "Don't stand like that on the chair." "Climb in this way" "Don't eat that dirt, soap, car, whatever!!"
I know my job as a parent is to guide while keeping them safe at the same time letting exploration happen, but man sometimes it's just so hard. For example, letting my child explore while walking home can make a 5 minute walk take 10, 15 minutes longer.
Such things tend to be at odds with what I want but it is more important than myself.
> I know my job as a parent is to guide while keeping them safe at the same time letting exploration happen, but man sometimes it's just so hard. For example, letting my child explore while walking home can make a 5 minute walk take 10, 15 minutes longer.
As we were putting our 2-year-old to sleep last night, my wife was commenting, "Remember how last year, when we read him a book, it would take all of 3 minutes and then we'd be done?" It now takes about 2-3 minutes per page, and can be 20-30 minutes to get through a 12-page book. In the meantime, for every object on the page he's like "What's this?" "What's it doing?" "No snake?" "It a green one!" "They put the duck in the cart!" "Where going?"
Also amazing how early the desire to make up stories and explain why things are the way they are appears. The drive to make sense of the world appears to be innately human, and comes out at a young age.
> The drive to make sense of the world appears to be innately human
I think it is something kids learn though. They seem content early on (2-3 years) with a collection of observations (I ate water melon, my hands are sticky, I’m now touching the dog), yet they constantly see us engaging in “sense making” as part of teaching them to talk and described their surroundings.
I was hanging out with a friend who is also parent. As happens pretty often, the kids are all off somewhere else getting into trouble. Eventually, one starts wailing. My friend looks at me and says, "Ah, the sound of learning."
I always tell my wife is that my goal is not to keep the kids from getting hurt, just to keep them from getting maimed.
It's not just that pain is a good teacher, though it is. There is an even more vital lesson that the kids need to learn. "I can handle pain." They need to see themselves survive and push through difficulty because I believe witnessing their own resilience is the foundation of not just good self-esteem, but strong self-esteem.
In the US today, we're expected to raise our children like hothouse flowers. We get them to blossom by creating a maximally nurturing environmennt and shielding them from all possible adversity. That's maybe a good strategy if they can be shielded for the rest of their lives, but unlike orchids, eventually our kids will have to leave the greenhouse. They need to be able to handle what's out there and not wilt.
Especially since while you're small, falling hurts a lot less.
It's surprising to me how people consistently try to discourage traits in children which they at the same time glorify in adults.
I suppose considering how much effort society puts into raising meager people, it's only right we glorify those who manage to manage to grow as a person regardless.
There’s a lot of space between optimal and failure, though it doesn’t always feel like it. Kids can sit a million ways in chairs but at some point they can also understand the concept of balance so that they can figure out for themselves the 10%of positions which result in failure.
Isn't this the children solving the multi armed bandit problem?
In a child's mind, they haven't yet fully decided how things behave and react, so they are willing to try things to see if they've changed (because in fact often they do in their own mental models, as well as the resolution of those models.
If you think of it as a regression tree, their models start out fairly shallow and then slowly get deeper as they age. That's a square thing. That's a book. That's a book about animals. That's a book about marine animals. That's a book about marine animals that I like. That's a book about whales.
In trying to solve the multi armed bandit, they're willing to explore to try to find better rewards because in their own world there are often better rewards.
If the game shifted to having a different alien be the best one half way through the game, I'd be curious how quickly the more maturely cognitive kids did. It's possible that becoming fixated on something (the way adults are) can ultimately limit your abilities in a game. In adulthood, "creative" solutions can sometimes be better than more "standard" solutions, but incur more risk.
While the study classifies it as exploration and claims an intrinsic reward that will die out later in life, I would describe the behavior as novelty-seeking.
I'd wager that for adults, a game on a screen is just not new enough. But if you'd give adult males a choice of which female to undress, I'm pretty sure they would value "exploration" very highly again.
In a similar vain, when smartphones were new, the adult population was very active at buying new ones, comparing, and exploring the market. Now that we've had them for some years, phone upgrades have become a necessity and a lot less exciting.
So my theory would be that there is no loss in the intrinsic motivation, there is a loss in the amount of novelty.
If that is correct, then our school system is actually very appropriate even for highly intrinsically motivated kids, because they are introduced to new topics and areas of knowledge that are (hopefully) new to them.
That also aligns with my personal experience. While I hated getting up early and the concept of sitting in a chair just listening, I was excited about all the different things they showed me. And I liked best the teachers that would mention slightly irrelevant side details just for the fun of it.
But if you'd give adult males a choice of which female to undress, I'm pretty sure they would value "exploration" very highly again
Likely, but that's not the same experiment anymore since the sex factor comes into play and living beings are basically programmed to reproduce as much as possible and also with as much variety as possible (maybe oversimplified, but you get the point). So for a smartphone you can talk abut novelty-seeking/exploration (which btw I'm not sure are really different things), but when reproduction comes into play it's a whole different game anymore and it'll alter/override parts of the behavior and it shouldn't be underestimated how string the effectss can be.
They're saying that novelty is the fundamental drive behind the observed behavior, not some priority towards "exploration" that children have in greater abundance than adults. The children are seeking pleasure through novelty, and the researchers are interpreting that as exploration. The parent comment illustrates how silly that is, if you substitute something that still holds pleasure for an adult (ie sex), they exhibit the same behavior.
The difference between the adult and the child is the adult has the world experience that the trivial game doesn't hold novel (therefore pleasurable) implications for them anymore, not that they don't prioritize "exploration".
Let me just be the one to say your choice of topic for exploration is incredibly cringeworthy in 2020. Also inaccurate for some parts of the adult male population. Use a better example next time.
Maybe you find it cringeworthy, but I find it on topic and very relatable. The role of a speaker is to make their material easy to digest for their audience. For this audience in particular, I would argue that this example is statistically likely to resonate with most of them. So your parent commenter is strongly incentivized to use this example and conduct themselves this way, so of course they did so.
I don't think your comment contributes much to the conversation. If anything I feel it stifles the conversation. If you had shared that the parent's comment made you uncomfortable then that is a contribution that we could explore. Instead you decide to decree from the top of your high horse that his speech wasn't acceptable. I don't like what you did one bit, and I think you did it just to make other people uncomfortable and put yourself in a position of power over them.
Let me just be the one to say that anyone who denies most men are sexual creatures who enjoy looking at naked women and tries to shame someone for stating that truth is incredibly cringeworthy, no matter the year.
Use some common sense next time and realize no one got hurt by speaking an obvious truth.
It is scientific concensus that our genes survive through sex and that by optimizing for their own survival our genes have made sex the strongest possible behavioral motivator. It is also agreed upon that the desire for sexual exploration is higher for males, because their genes can spread more widely through additional partners, while a typical female can only get pregnant by one partner at a time.
You'll find that non-traditional pairings will have very little effect on genetic evolution, because they tend to not produce genetically related offspring.
So the study says "adults are less interested in exploration" and to that I reply "we have literally optimized our genes for adult male exploration over hundreds of thousands of years".
Isn't that a rather large omission in the study, that they didn't mention the single most powerful motivator for exploration?
FWIW, I find "in year XXXX" arguments equally frustrating. It is an entitled, condescending perspective that automatically dismisses the counter-point as a "thing of the past" and "regressive" without adding any substance.
Which also happens to be factually misleading. Views on sexuality normativity does not have a linear progression over time, nor through societies [1].
Name dropping the current year not only doesn't add anything to the argument, it is also fallacious for any domain that doesn't progress strictly monotonically.
[1] For example in contrast to attitudes towards homosexuality in certain Middle Eastern countries today, little would consider that heteronormativity might have increased as more of a result of 19th century colonial European influence on those cultures. See this r/AskHistorians post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r17fc/what_...
I think the bigger problem is that the experiment wouldn't be well formed (the "value" of each image would vary between study participants).
I don't think we should throw out wholesale that sexuality is a big driver of human behavior though, even if the example isn't inclusive. Changing "woman" to "person" addresses part of your concern, but still doesn't actually fix the experiment as proposed. The bigger problem is the experiment wouldn't work, rather than that it was cringeworthy. Which, sure. If it was cringeworthy, but worked, I guess it could have some excusability in terms of science. As is, you're right. It's juvenile.
might be true but the OP didn't intend any harm and was just trying to illustrate a point.
I think we should strive to be more tolerant. we should encourage more discourse and take well intentioned remarks in context or else how different are we from the morality police in other countries?
Well ya. I've found at middle age that I'm most interested in connection and transcendence, finding meaning and such. When one realizes that material things truly are valueless compared to things like consciousness, friendship, love, dignity, etc etc etc, then everything else falls away. I often find myself realizing that I am looking at the world with the same childlike wonder I had when I was 5. To me, this search for meaning was what the 1960s was all about, as well as every other cultural renaissance and era of spiritual awakening.
Which makes the conceptual basis of things like economics suspect. The idea that humans are motivated by monetary rewards and material things turned out to be false. So did concepts like scarcity, reciprocity, commoditization, and so on. Those things worked at one time, up until the middle of the last century and dawn of the information age (where technology surpassed what was required to meet humanity's basic needs), but now actively inhibit human evolution IMHO.
So how to fix the mess we're in? I think it starts with questioning basic assumptions. Sadly, American culture seems to be racing away from that as fast as it can in these times. Dunno about the rest of the world.
> Which makes the conceptual basis of things like economics suspect.
> Dunno about the rest of the world.
If you are poor, then money is the means to have the necessary things for survival.
My opinion is that materialism is something separate from money, but it is often induced by desire for more money.
The only main problem to me with the way money works is that value generation != money generation. So, what I mean is that if you plant food, it doesn't mean that money necessarily exists. And hence money != labour * scarcity if there isn't a way to introduce the money in the first place. This observation is mostly for third world countries, where you have scarce things and a lot of labour, but you don't necessarily have money. The USA suddenly becomes much nicer in your world view when one realises that for the most part money = scarcity * labour does hold there.
Anyway, I would say, don't worry about the USA too much. I don't think the issues you are feeling are due to economic theories, I think it's more due to social circumstances. Culture is something you can build for yourself, you don't have to worry about the rest of your fellow countrymen.
It's been known for years that oftentimes paying people more for intellectually demanding tasks, leads to decreases in productivity
Capitalism and the ideologies surrounding it, fall apart when you start looking at real assets and how the exchanges value of those assets takes a hit during economic down turns.
The idea that "humans [were] motivated by monetary rewards and material things" didn't turn out to be false, it's just always been the case that it wasn't true.
For anyone interested in this type of stuff, I can recommend reading Drive.
Briefly, human behaviour can be motivated for extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. The rewards in this article are extrinsic motivators. Exploring is rewarding in an intrinsic way; it is a strive towards autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
In adults (and in older children) applying extrinsic motivators kills intrinsic motivation. Once the extrinsic motivators stop coming in, there is no desire left to do the task. Intrinsic motivation is practically infinite, as long as the environment is set up right to enable it.
Extrinsic motivation also tends to produce behaviour that does the bare minimum to get the reward (or avoid the negative consequences) whereas intrinsic motivation is what makes us want to excel.
Of course, I've skipped many important points and not countered any counterargument here, but I recommend reading Drive first if you think you disagree.
But the worst part of it all?
The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.
I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. However many children lack one or more of those factors. For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed. There is no intrinsic motivation for most children to learn all the subjects taught in school. I think the school system is fairly good at forcing all children to learn at least a little about all subjects. This comes at the price of not optimally supporting students who would do much better in a different kind of system.
> I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education.
I ain't vain enough to consider myself even "fairly intelligent", but I can say that I ain't very self-motivated, nor have I been since elementary school, and in hindsight my education system's insistence on strangling such intrinsic motivation in favor of extrinsic motivation is exactly what killed said self-motivation. "Grades are all that matter, and mine ain't anywhere near good enough to go to a good college, so why bother trying?"
It's something I'm actively working on trying to fix to this day, but old habits die hard.
As someone who in his (mandatory in my country) social year worked with "difficult" kids: for nearly every kid there is intrinsic motivations you can find. Of course that isn't easy and requires much more teachers and a bit more flexibility when it comes to which topics to learn, but good education is making every bodies life better and should be IMO much higher valued both in societal and monetary terms.
For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed. There is no intrinsic motivation for most children to learn all the subjects taught in school.
This is a false dichotomy that gets reinforced everywhere to the detriment of all students. There is no reason those things should be mutually exclusive, but we make it so by the power of our collective expectations.
Lots of people are discouraged and pushed away from their areas of interest because they aren't seen as fitting a stereotype or mold. Some people never even get a chance to discover that they have academic interests, and are effectively placed on a "remedial" track from the time they enter the school system because of their background. The messaging is that they cannot succeed without external motivation, which sets them up for failure.
On the other side of the coin, it also contributes to the unhealthy pressures advanced students face. Building rigid assumptions into the education system about how students spend their leisure time is part of what kills diversity.
> However many children lack one or more of those factors. [...] For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed.
We grossly overestimate the amount of kids who fall into this group, maybe because we're priviledged enough exclude ourselves from it.
> I think the school system is fairly good at forcing all children to learn at least a little about all subjects.
Dude, ca. 20% of people in the US are either illiterate or functionally illiterate. How is that good?[1]
Unless, given your previous point, they're too busy playing computer games or getting high on Satan's lettuce?
Pardon the sarcasm, but this is an extremely dangerous mindset as it distracts us from the actual problem.
Right. You're touching on another important factor: everyone, and especially children, want to belong to a group. They do this by adopting values similar to their peers.
When those peer groups have values that include playing video games and exclude exploring learning, it's very hard to motivate members of the group to explore learning. I don't actually have any data on this, but I suspect that applies even under extrinsic motivators. In other words, telling the cool kids who hate school that they will get bad grades if they don't learn more will not make them learn more. It will simply become a badge of honour to have bad grades.
Perhaps the single most important job of a teacher is to attempt to create a single group of the class[1] with which every student identifies, and then imbue that group with the value of learning.
I don't think the way to do this is by promising rewards (good grades) for good performance (doing exactly what the teacher asks.) The way to do it is to encourage self-directed exploration and mastery, with a sense of a greater good. (This sounds like something out of an Italian-inspired educational philosophy, but as far as I'm concerned, it's just rather simple reasoning from the principles of motivation and social behaviour as we know them.)
In the end, this is a really tough problem. If children are convinced (based on interactions with their peer groups) that learning sucks, then it's really hard to change their mind. This goes for adults as well. I'm not saying there's a magic formula to make everything work out right.
What I'm saying is that there are two insufficient and contradictory methods. I think one of them is slightly less bad than the other one.
[1]: It might sound like creating multiple groups would be easier and accomplish the same thing, but the danger with that is that small natural variations in the value of learning between these groups could get exaggerated in an attempt to create group identities. I.e. if one group is just about considered more school-happy than the other group, then that will become a point both groups can use to distinguish between themselves: one group will intentionally become more ignorant of the benefits of learning to separate its members from the other. It has to be one single group for them to all adopt the same value of learning.
Edit: I almost forgot. For more on this, see The Nurture Assumption – well worth a read.
Yep. I am a fairly intelligent person (your typical coder) from a family that valued education. I was nevertheless never internally driven to do anything. I played a bit with computers when I was a child - BASIC and assembler on C-64, then a little bit of AMOS and computer graphics on Amiga etc. - but it was never any sustained effort that led to anything - I was mostly just satisfying my own curiosity, which didn't run that deep. Instead, I spent the majority of my time playing games (video and otherwise), hanging out with friends, watching TV and reading books. If I wasn't forced to go to school, I think I'd just do more of those things (certainly that's what I did during vacation time). I think what the highly internally driven people cannot understand is that they're the minority and majority of people is more like me.
> However many children lack one or more of those factors. For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed.
In German "to educate/bring up someone" is "jemanden erziehen".
"erziehen", if translated literally, means "to pull", "er" is something like "to act" while "ziehen" means "pull"
Sometimes it feels like that, that it is necessary to pull someone into a certain direction in order to better that person. And this is usually not easy to do.
Fair enough - but my solution to that has always been, 'pay children to pass their classes'. That would be an extrinsic motivator the kind of families you're referencing would respect.
And annoyingly, when I bring this proposal up, most people talk about how important it is for learning to be intrinsically motivated.
> This comes at the price of not optimally supporting students who would do much better in a different kind of system.
It depends on the culture of the place the school system is applied in. This kind of blanket utilitarianism by way of school is a sad state for society as a whole. In a country like Canada we have a sordid past, very recently, when implementing the residential school system [0].
That's the more extreme case but I'd argue that elements of that exist in every school system when applied in a one-size-fits-all fashion and when that system has a monopoly on education.
But when it comes to kids, the problems I see are that (a) cognitively speaking, children are not tiny adults; and (b) if you want them to be successful and happy adults, you need to give kids the ability to work through mountains of "I Need To Do This Even Though It Sucks"
Cognitive development is an amazing process to watch -- you can see as brains grow and develop a wide variety of skills we take for granted.
But what that means is that you can't treat a six-year-old as an adult.
Their thinking is likely highly egocentric, because they have not yet developed the ability to realize that "my feelings and wants" are different from "other peoples' feelings and wants".
In their world, when they like Pokemon, they literally believe that everybody in the world feels the same way about Pokemon that they do. They just haven't yet gained the ability to handle that concept.
So, up to age eleven or so, you need to put enough structure around children to deal with their cognitive development path. Rules that are consistently enforced are critical (it's also good if those rules, in fact, make sense), with a gradual loosening of constraints as the child grows the ability to handle greater responsibilities.
This path continues from eleven -- when, cognitively, your child is now a functioning adult -- onwards towards the age of majority.
You still need to provide structure, but with enough freedom and ability to bend-or-change the rules such that the child can learn how to make their own decisions. Your goal is ramp them towards the full set of adult responsibilities, as quickly as they are able to handle it.
The problem with a lot of "traditional" education is that it failed to do the latter in a lot of ways -- rigid structure until age of majority, and then bam!, you're an adult, good luck.
This is compounded by how much regulation and how little slack there is in society. In the 70s, teenagers commonly brought rifles to school (because they were on the shooting team, or going hunting afterwards). Nowadays, kids are getting expelled for accidentally forgetting a tiny, micro-sized pocketknife.
The problem with "modern" education is that there is no expectation that you will ever assume responsibility. If you've dealt with a lot of recent graduates, you probably know what I mean. They have been denied much of the experience required for them to mature as adults, all in the name of keeping them "safe".
Including being "safe" from boredom. Which relates to giving kids the ability to get through mountains of drudgery.
That skill is so critical.
And I didn't really master it until I was an adult, much to my disadvantage.
If Elon Musk and every one of his employees were to vanish tomorrow, I'd be sad. SpaceX is cool. But my life would go on.
If the organization that handles sewage for my city were to vanish tomorrow, I would soon be, quite literally, in a world of shit.
I doubt that working for a sewage treatment plant offers much in the way of Autonomy. Mastery, perhaps? Purpose, absolutely.
And I doubt most kids grow up dreaming of being a waste engineer.
It's a hard job, and it demands grit. But that job makes modern life possible, and I don't see us setting up kids to be able to tackle both kinds of challenges.
I suspect that many kids do not understand the why behind many of the subjects being taught. What intrinsic motivation could they have under these circumstances?
It doesn't seem self-evident that forcing kids to learn a little about all subjects has that much benefit. I do taxes for a living and we have a lot of tradespeople as clients, and their life histories are surprisingly frequently - do miserably in school to the point that their self-esteem is destroyed, spend a few years bumming around, drinking too much, playing video games, get a job in the trades, realize they can make more money owning their own business, etc. By the time they come to us, you'd never be able to tell they were the worst students ever.
How many people never make it out of the drinking and playing video games phase because school has convinced them that they're failures?
A lot of kids would be perfectly happy starting some sort of apprenticeship when they were teenagers, and it's not obvious to me that that would be worse than forcing them through the remainder of school.
I think it's hard to tell the difference between kids who have an intrinsic motivation to play video games, and kids who have an intrinsic motivation to do anything but school and have to default to video games because the world doesn't offer much of an avenue for kids to be productive on their own (unless you happen to be very interested in computers and have access to one and the internet).
I say all this as someone who thinks education is profoundly important. I just don't think as much education happens in schools as we'd like to believe, especially for people who don't fit neatly in the system.
To be fair, even for an intelligent and educated person it's prettty likely to end with a worse benefit footprint to the world (environmentally & socially) than being with friends and playing video games / smoking weed.
Then again, if one is more interested in practically applicable tips, the book How To Talk So Kids Will Listen... And Listen So Kids Will Talk is great too -- for all kinds of interpersonal relationships.
It covers empathy (actually listening and confirming feelings) but is largely about how to enable extrinsic motivation, through encouraging autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
One rather concrete example is that the authors argue it is no good to say, e.g. "if you take a bath you'll get this nice gift" or "if you don't take a bath I will remove your video gaming time for the day."
More effective, according to the authors, are to give a choice, even if it is somewhat of a forced one: "I want you to take a bath. Do you want to bathe with your boat or your duck?"
This, then, would speak to the same desire to explore as the hidden option in the article. (Or, the way I view it having read Drive: this gives the child a hint of autonomy.)
> More effective, according to the authors, are to give a choice, even if it is somewhat of a forced one: "I want you to take a bath. Do you want to bathe with your boat or your duck?"
This can be so surprisingly effective that it is almost scary. And while I'm at it: it works with many adults too.
Use with caution. Leadership is good and kids needs to go to bed at night, but manipulation isn't what you want to be remembered for.
Other nice-to-knows to be used with caution:
- as kids start to negotiate, add slack for negotiations.
- "catch them" when they do something right, reward it immediately (with encouraging words, a hug, increased trust - or even a piece of chocolate)
- look for the intentions - or anything that was right even if the intent wasn't there:
-- tried to do something right but failed? Good! (On the other side: there's few things as discouraging as gettig a scolding when you thought you did something good.)
-- used to slam the door but closed it carefully for some reason (hands full, in the phone, etc)? Good.
I did teach a kid math and how subtle communication is when you're an adult.
sometimes they'll talk, then mutter to confusion then emit blips because they heard words coming from you, then all of a sudden they'll have a burst of excitement again.
Also Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards, a thick tome dedicated to the research and reasons of how and why punishment and rewards don’t teach what’s intended and don’t motivate as intended... and how extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation.
Withdrawing rewards is punishment so both are really the same.
Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe.
If your kid is good at something and you want them to lose interest, encourage or reward them for doing the thing :)
Punished by Rewards is in my reading heap but rather far down. Maybe I should prioritise it slightly higher.
> Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe.
I'd just want to add that according to Drive, training humans like rats and birds work great... If blind obedience, conformity, and minimal quality is something you're looking for -- which many factory line type managers wanted, for a very long time (and in many cases probably still do, sadly.)
Damnit, if Punished by Rewards contradicts this, I have to read it now, don't I?
> The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.
I think your expectations of the schooling system are simply skewed. At least in the countries which I lived in (Europe) the 'customer' of the schooling system is first and foremost society as a whole.
The individual, the child, comes second. Not in a way that children are not important. It's just that the outcome of a well organised society is what matters. So, although not in extreme ways of course (there is no evil mastermind), conformity and the likes are important values.
We all love to say that we want creative free thinking individuals.. but come on now - currently the society is mostly composed of conformed (without this society probably would not function, at least as it does now) and in a lesser extent the obedient.
The creative and free thinking individuals push us all foward and we would not advance without them, but the majority is different.
Why such a dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic when any situation is a mix of both ?
We do our job to get money, but we won't do any job for that sole purpose.
Kids learn chemistry because they are forced to, but they'll find fun bits here and there, they'll ask teachers questions to better understand what they're taught. They won't give a crap about half of the curriculum, but the half they'll remember and will be formative is not guaranteed to be solely from the self-motivated part either.
Going further what motivates us to explore also depends on the environment, what is rewarded and what is not, etc.
I feel splitting things in two theoretical extremes is close to labelling actions good or bad, it's useful if we don't care about nuance, but has little use once we dive below the surface.
> I recommend reading Drive first if you think you disagree.
I remember getting that recommendation for "Getting Things Done" ... is Drive much better as a reading experience ? Is it readable for people who're not into self help books in general ?
Because there is some evidence that extrinsic motivation outcompetes intrinsic motivation. In other words, for some reason, they cannot coexist.
As soon as adults feel extrinsically motivated, they start to view the situation as an economic transaction, where they will only perform tricks for treats. Typical real-world example of this: if you start charging parents (punishment) for coming late to pick up their kids from daycare, parents will become more late. One can speculate that this might be because they start thinking of it as "paying for extra time" rather than "being a nice human being to the daycare staff."
The cases you mention where they do indeed apparently coexist, I suspect (but have no data to support) that the children successfully manage to ignore the extrinsic motivation because the intrinsic drive is so powerful in that instance. It's probably not a sustainable model to rely on that happening, though.
Drive is decidedly not a self-help book. It's a summary of the available evidence in support of and against the existence of intrinsic motivation and how it relates to the other types of motivation (extrinsic and physical and emotional needs.)
This describes 'work' life pretty well, with extrinsic motivation being a salary. If that spigot were shut off there certainly would be little desire to do the task for most.
True as that may be, I think the argument that resonated with me is that there is an even more primitive type of motivation than extrinsic: the drive to survive. (Or, more generally, physical and emotional needs.)
Under that hypothesis, the salary is there to take physical needs as a motivator off the table. If an employee has to worry about physical needs, there's no room at all for any other concern.
Once the salary is sufficient to no longer be a point of worry (will I afford my mortgage, can I support my spouse, etc) only then will additional money serve as extrinsic motivation.
(Which of course spells disaster for things like performance bonuses, which (a) are impossible to target at the right people (see Deming for more on that) and (b) literally designed to stop coming, reducing motivation overall.)
I think for most people a salary is just the constant, like air. You get it and it’s the reason you show up everyday.
But your salary doesn’t change if you work hard or slack. It’s not a reward for performance.
Similar to how you’d die without breathing but you don’t feel rewarded for every breath. You wouldn’t breathe more than someone else to get more alive.
This is all fine and good but it misses some much more fundamental drivers, not those that are narrowly instinctive.
If you want to play the violin beautifully, you have to practice for 10 years, there's no way around it.
If you want to do important things, you have to train in all sorts of capacities, and put in a lot of sweat.
One of the things that differentiates humans from beasts is that we have at least some sense of higher purpose and many of us derive considerable fulfilment from that.
For the most part, most of our education is necessary - and the ability to focus, to plan, to think beyond just a few steps, to control one's desires and emotions, to concentrate and balance one's life energies - this requires education and maturity.
Yes, it can be stifling in some ways, that's ok, we want our doctors and accountants (mostly) to be small-c conservatives. Others can write Operas.
But none of it comes without a formal journey at least in some capacity.
It's a neat experiment but I think it's hard to determine the results. The novelty of exploration in that context just might not be 'novelty' from the adults perspective. Try trading rewards for truly novel things, like, jumping out of planes, I wonder what the result would be.
> If you want to play the violin beautifully, you have to practice for 10 years, there's no way around it.
>
> If you want to do important things, you have to train in all sorts of capacities, and put in a lot of sweat.
I don't know the source of this, but I remember reading that most people who become good at things, by practicing for 10 years or whatever, were intrinsically motivated to do so. It's not a process of "want to be good -> force self to practice -> become good", but more of "want to practice -> become good". Can't remember if this was just conjecture, and I'm not a citeable source myself, but it seems like a more likely story. I know I've heard stories of talented people who got where they are because they spent all day noodling on the guitar, or writing programs, but I've heard less stories about people who didn't really enjoy the practice but forced themselves into it via willpower.
Not to say that "just noodling" is all that the person needed, or that no willpower was required, but that the process might be more intrinsic for the people who are actually going to become great anyway.
I want to respond to your point about violin-playing, because I think it will open up an interesting discussion. Anecdotally, I was always motivated to practice my instruments by the same exploratory drive discussed in the article. I was taught to ask, "what if I did XXX this way?", i.e., what happens to my sound if I play long tones, what techniques do I need to play piece Y, how do I use scale Z to improvise?
Growing up, I found that those who ran on pure extrinsic factors with all discipline and no enjoyment either stopped or were stunted by locally optimal decisions. On the other hand, those who went on to study in university and play professionally seemed to derive the same obsessive enjoyment from their craft as I would a video game.
Do you think these data points further prove your point about emotional maturity? Or is there something more universal, that true success requires a fierce passion?
Try getting children to learn to play guitar or piano or math purely through intrinsic moyovation. They might be into it for a bit, but not enough for regular practice. But, when they have enough skill, they can then develop further intrinsic motivation to really get good.
It takes at least 5 years of learning piano to get good enough to enjoy it. IMO this is why adults almost never take it up - we're just not prepared to invest in something that takes so much work with such a distant payoff
> The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.
We finish 50 million kids in school each year.
100's of millions have been through the US system alone over it's history.
If this was simply true then I feel like there'd be some evidence by now.
Yes we can do better schooling for some kids, and yes there are certainly improvements, but after 100's of year of doing it, it's not going to be a country wide system of let kids just have more freedom.
The best improvement we know of is cohorts matter. Which is a zero sum game.
I don’t think anyone is encouraging total unstructured freedom.
I went to a school without grades. It encourages cultivating a love of learning. There was concrete feedback on quality of work and assessments of knowledge (tests). But no public grading scale. It’s been awarded 3 blue ribbon awards and consistently outperformed its grading-based peers.
Actually the modern concept of a school was developed to train people for industrial jobs, where they would have to follow instructions and a schedule set by their superiors -- hence the strict scheduling, the rank-and-file arrangement of classrooms, and so forth. Prior to the industrial revolution most children did not go to a formal schools, and would receive their education from parents and tutors, or by some other ad-hoc arrangements. In some parts of the world it was common for traveling teachers to board with a family for some time and educate the children.
This is how I survive usually. I turn whatever externally imposed duty is imposed into something that will tickle my inner curiosity / desire.
Extrinsic motivation, IMO, is akin to an exchange or bargain, you have to develop a sense or skill to know how to make them.
ps: more generally I'm very curious about the topic of 'pedagogics' and also the way to create harmonious, high level work environment between people (all motivated by few years of seeing nothing but drag, pain and waste in too many workplaces). If you know board, MLists or else, ping me.
I think you might like this interview with the now deceased but brilliant contrarian educator John Taylor Gatto, in which he speaks about just that in the schooling system and the crazy changes he saw when he said he moved towards a more intrinsic motivation system, though he didn't use those terms:
Not a native speaker, I can understand but his speech gives me a hard time. Could you share a pointer to a relevant segment? The complete interview is five hours!
> The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.
As a teen, I think I would've agreed with you on this, but looking back personally, I think boundaries inspired my creativity to break out of them.
is mastery a new word that's come up in education? i can't help but (red) flag that word in the context of teaching children these days, maybe before the wrong people have said it.
I guess I must have bever lost the child in me. I've been a fan of open world games, just so I can roam the world. I sometimes dont even play the storyline at all. I still don't like that Steam added 'achievements' that I can't turn off, I'll be in charge of what constitutes a goal thank you very much :)
Another poster had an interesting observation about academia vs corporate work. I'm 33 and still in academia, and I now realize a large part of that is the freedom it provides. I've see salary as a score on someone else's scoreboard, and very uninteresting for that reason. OK, I'm old enough to have experienced a person needs income for practical reasons, but I'm not going to work for it ;)
I'm allergic to competition, scores, rewards, prestige, I guess that makes me child-like?
>I'm 33 and still in academia, I'm allergic to competition, scores, rewards, prestige
I had been under the impression that academia was mostly very competitive to be able to get career (tenure track) positions. Are you not aiming for that, is it less competitive in your field, or am I missing something else?
I've described academia (to my friends who work in software) as a company where the most coveted promotion will land you a job in marketing.
It does indeed come with a lot of freedom, but the relatively flat structure means that there's usually no one above the group's PI to promote their research. As a result PIs spend a lot of time writing grant proposals.
I play games the same way, and I am also not easy to motivate with extrinsic motivators like money or deadlines.
If I'm doing the same thing for too long it becomes an almost impenetrable blocker in my mind, it's like if I try to do the task again there is a mental block that doesn't allow me to imagine it. I have been working on the tools to push through this but I decided it's ultimately a problem with my lifestyle. I was never going to be happy working 9-5 on the same types of work all year.
I started working for myself once I realized this, and do considerably fewer hours, of course also making less money. I'm happier by far and getting more done than I did before in the time I do work, and getting more "life" done as well. I'm lucky enough to be able to do that and still make a living.
I've got no strings so I have fun
I'm not tied up to anyone
They've got strings, but you can see
There are no strings on me
Viewed as meta-game, school can be viewed as the child's exercise in learning where society attaches the strings, and how to acquire and retain slack in them. Where better to learn Bureaucracy-fu than in a bureaucracy?
Steel yourself for revelations about academia - unsure what stage you’re at but I’d guess PhD or post doc at most from the comment. Talk to people above you that you absolutely trust about the realities of academia.
Hehe, well aware of those. After my (first) postdoc I managed to get hired in a supportive role (in a whole new field, pretty exciting). If I hadn't managed that, I definitely would not be in academia anymore.
When I first started played Age of Empires 2, I would play against AI and just continue the map for 10s of hours, slowly expanding my influence, but never killing the enemy outright. I would just reshape the map according to my will.
I think a lot of modern games are designed to be like this. Building farms or worlds for fun (I haven't played any of them).
I'm reminded of a paper about an AI system with curiosity. Basically, the AI would learn to predict the effect of its actions, and would prefer to take actions where its prediction error was large. That way it would gather more data about stuff it didn't know yet.
This works well to learn to play video games without defining an extrinsic reward. However, there is a problem when the system encounters the equivalent of TV. It then gets stuck watching the unpredictable stream of events.
Peter Hartkamp started one in the Netherlands, and wrote a book about it.
“Our current education systems do not trust children to learn what they need to know. Governments believe that children must be coerced into learning what they prescribe as necessary for future life even though they do not and cannot know what that future will be like. Yet we do know that coercion produces anxiety and fear of failure and that this in turn inhibits learning and destroys confidence. We also know that creativity, innovation and empathy are not encouraged in such a climate even though above all else these are the survival qualities for coping with an uncertain future.
In this short book Peter Hartkamp develops his arguments against coercive ‘education’ with a needle-sharp engineer’s logic. He invites us to imagine what schools would be like if they took the articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child seriously, a not unreasonable position as all states are signatories.
I wholeheartedly and without reservation recommend this book to the many parents, students, teachers, employers and policy makers who know in their hearts that something is very wrong with the examination and testing factories that we are allowing our schools to become. It represents a beacon of hope that another way is possible.”
Readit News
There's lots of benefit in letting kids simply explore. As a parent, I find I have to stop myself from pushing my child to the 'best' result and let them be. That it's okay to pick a less optimal solution.
Where I find this alarmingly true is when outcome/results are negative (usually ending in pain). "Don't stand like that on the chair." "Climb in this way" "Don't eat that dirt, soap, car, whatever!!"
I know my job as a parent is to guide while keeping them safe at the same time letting exploration happen, but man sometimes it's just so hard. For example, letting my child explore while walking home can make a 5 minute walk take 10, 15 minutes longer.
Such things tend to be at odds with what I want but it is more important than myself.
As we were putting our 2-year-old to sleep last night, my wife was commenting, "Remember how last year, when we read him a book, it would take all of 3 minutes and then we'd be done?" It now takes about 2-3 minutes per page, and can be 20-30 minutes to get through a 12-page book. In the meantime, for every object on the page he's like "What's this?" "What's it doing?" "No snake?" "It a green one!" "They put the duck in the cart!" "Where going?"
Also amazing how early the desire to make up stories and explain why things are the way they are appears. The drive to make sense of the world appears to be innately human, and comes out at a young age.
I think it is something kids learn though. They seem content early on (2-3 years) with a collection of observations (I ate water melon, my hands are sticky, I’m now touching the dog), yet they constantly see us engaging in “sense making” as part of teaching them to talk and described their surroundings.
Pain is a very good teacher. Letting children hurt themselves and learn from that (within reason, obviously) is not a bad thing.
I always tell my wife is that my goal is not to keep the kids from getting hurt, just to keep them from getting maimed.
It's not just that pain is a good teacher, though it is. There is an even more vital lesson that the kids need to learn. "I can handle pain." They need to see themselves survive and push through difficulty because I believe witnessing their own resilience is the foundation of not just good self-esteem, but strong self-esteem.
In the US today, we're expected to raise our children like hothouse flowers. We get them to blossom by creating a maximally nurturing environmennt and shielding them from all possible adversity. That's maybe a good strategy if they can be shielded for the rest of their lives, but unlike orchids, eventually our kids will have to leave the greenhouse. They need to be able to handle what's out there and not wilt.
It's surprising to me how people consistently try to discourage traits in children which they at the same time glorify in adults.
I suppose considering how much effort society puts into raising meager people, it's only right we glorify those who manage to manage to grow as a person regardless.
At age 6 and above, the style of learning changes and starts to touch on more abstract concepts.
There’s a lot of space between optimal and failure, though it doesn’t always feel like it. Kids can sit a million ways in chairs but at some point they can also understand the concept of balance so that they can figure out for themselves the 10%of positions which result in failure.
In a child's mind, they haven't yet fully decided how things behave and react, so they are willing to try things to see if they've changed (because in fact often they do in their own mental models, as well as the resolution of those models.
If you think of it as a regression tree, their models start out fairly shallow and then slowly get deeper as they age. That's a square thing. That's a book. That's a book about animals. That's a book about marine animals. That's a book about marine animals that I like. That's a book about whales.
In trying to solve the multi armed bandit, they're willing to explore to try to find better rewards because in their own world there are often better rewards.
If the game shifted to having a different alien be the best one half way through the game, I'd be curious how quickly the more maturely cognitive kids did. It's possible that becoming fixated on something (the way adults are) can ultimately limit your abilities in a game. In adulthood, "creative" solutions can sometimes be better than more "standard" solutions, but incur more risk.
In 3 days hacker news will discover GANs and make a shocking headline like "challenges and adversity makes you better / stronger".
#mindblown
I'd wager that for adults, a game on a screen is just not new enough. But if you'd give adult males a choice of which female to undress, I'm pretty sure they would value "exploration" very highly again.
In a similar vain, when smartphones were new, the adult population was very active at buying new ones, comparing, and exploring the market. Now that we've had them for some years, phone upgrades have become a necessity and a lot less exciting.
So my theory would be that there is no loss in the intrinsic motivation, there is a loss in the amount of novelty.
If that is correct, then our school system is actually very appropriate even for highly intrinsically motivated kids, because they are introduced to new topics and areas of knowledge that are (hopefully) new to them.
That also aligns with my personal experience. While I hated getting up early and the concept of sitting in a chair just listening, I was excited about all the different things they showed me. And I liked best the teachers that would mention slightly irrelevant side details just for the fun of it.
Likely, but that's not the same experiment anymore since the sex factor comes into play and living beings are basically programmed to reproduce as much as possible and also with as much variety as possible (maybe oversimplified, but you get the point). So for a smartphone you can talk abut novelty-seeking/exploration (which btw I'm not sure are really different things), but when reproduction comes into play it's a whole different game anymore and it'll alter/override parts of the behavior and it shouldn't be underestimated how string the effectss can be.
They're saying that novelty is the fundamental drive behind the observed behavior, not some priority towards "exploration" that children have in greater abundance than adults. The children are seeking pleasure through novelty, and the researchers are interpreting that as exploration. The parent comment illustrates how silly that is, if you substitute something that still holds pleasure for an adult (ie sex), they exhibit the same behavior.
The difference between the adult and the child is the adult has the world experience that the trivial game doesn't hold novel (therefore pleasurable) implications for them anymore, not that they don't prioritize "exploration".
I don't think your comment contributes much to the conversation. If anything I feel it stifles the conversation. If you had shared that the parent's comment made you uncomfortable then that is a contribution that we could explore. Instead you decide to decree from the top of your high horse that his speech wasn't acceptable. I don't like what you did one bit, and I think you did it just to make other people uncomfortable and put yourself in a position of power over them.
Use some common sense next time and realize no one got hurt by speaking an obvious truth.
It is scientific concensus that our genes survive through sex and that by optimizing for their own survival our genes have made sex the strongest possible behavioral motivator. It is also agreed upon that the desire for sexual exploration is higher for males, because their genes can spread more widely through additional partners, while a typical female can only get pregnant by one partner at a time.
You'll find that non-traditional pairings will have very little effect on genetic evolution, because they tend to not produce genetically related offspring.
So the study says "adults are less interested in exploration" and to that I reply "we have literally optimized our genes for adult male exploration over hundreds of thousands of years".
Isn't that a rather large omission in the study, that they didn't mention the single most powerful motivator for exploration?
Which also happens to be factually misleading. Views on sexuality normativity does not have a linear progression over time, nor through societies [1].
Name dropping the current year not only doesn't add anything to the argument, it is also fallacious for any domain that doesn't progress strictly monotonically.
[1] For example in contrast to attitudes towards homosexuality in certain Middle Eastern countries today, little would consider that heteronormativity might have increased as more of a result of 19th century colonial European influence on those cultures. See this r/AskHistorians post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r17fc/what_...
I don't think we should throw out wholesale that sexuality is a big driver of human behavior though, even if the example isn't inclusive. Changing "woman" to "person" addresses part of your concern, but still doesn't actually fix the experiment as proposed. The bigger problem is the experiment wouldn't work, rather than that it was cringeworthy. Which, sure. If it was cringeworthy, but worked, I guess it could have some excusability in terms of science. As is, you're right. It's juvenile.
I think we should strive to be more tolerant. we should encourage more discourse and take well intentioned remarks in context or else how different are we from the morality police in other countries?
Which makes the conceptual basis of things like economics suspect. The idea that humans are motivated by monetary rewards and material things turned out to be false. So did concepts like scarcity, reciprocity, commoditization, and so on. Those things worked at one time, up until the middle of the last century and dawn of the information age (where technology surpassed what was required to meet humanity's basic needs), but now actively inhibit human evolution IMHO.
So how to fix the mess we're in? I think it starts with questioning basic assumptions. Sadly, American culture seems to be racing away from that as fast as it can in these times. Dunno about the rest of the world.
> Dunno about the rest of the world.
If you are poor, then money is the means to have the necessary things for survival.
My opinion is that materialism is something separate from money, but it is often induced by desire for more money.
The only main problem to me with the way money works is that value generation != money generation. So, what I mean is that if you plant food, it doesn't mean that money necessarily exists. And hence money != labour * scarcity if there isn't a way to introduce the money in the first place. This observation is mostly for third world countries, where you have scarce things and a lot of labour, but you don't necessarily have money. The USA suddenly becomes much nicer in your world view when one realises that for the most part money = scarcity * labour does hold there.
Anyway, I would say, don't worry about the USA too much. I don't think the issues you are feeling are due to economic theories, I think it's more due to social circumstances. Culture is something you can build for yourself, you don't have to worry about the rest of your fellow countrymen.
When you're young, take risks, explore, maybe fail on occasion. There's still time to fix all that.
When you're old, go for the more likely reward. If you screw up, that's how it stays, forever.
Briefly, human behaviour can be motivated for extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. The rewards in this article are extrinsic motivators. Exploring is rewarding in an intrinsic way; it is a strive towards autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
In adults (and in older children) applying extrinsic motivators kills intrinsic motivation. Once the extrinsic motivators stop coming in, there is no desire left to do the task. Intrinsic motivation is practically infinite, as long as the environment is set up right to enable it.
Extrinsic motivation also tends to produce behaviour that does the bare minimum to get the reward (or avoid the negative consequences) whereas intrinsic motivation is what makes us want to excel.
Of course, I've skipped many important points and not countered any counterargument here, but I recommend reading Drive first if you think you disagree.
But the worst part of it all?
The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.
I ain't vain enough to consider myself even "fairly intelligent", but I can say that I ain't very self-motivated, nor have I been since elementary school, and in hindsight my education system's insistence on strangling such intrinsic motivation in favor of extrinsic motivation is exactly what killed said self-motivation. "Grades are all that matter, and mine ain't anywhere near good enough to go to a good college, so why bother trying?"
It's something I'm actively working on trying to fix to this day, but old habits die hard.
This is a false dichotomy that gets reinforced everywhere to the detriment of all students. There is no reason those things should be mutually exclusive, but we make it so by the power of our collective expectations.
Lots of people are discouraged and pushed away from their areas of interest because they aren't seen as fitting a stereotype or mold. Some people never even get a chance to discover that they have academic interests, and are effectively placed on a "remedial" track from the time they enter the school system because of their background. The messaging is that they cannot succeed without external motivation, which sets them up for failure.
On the other side of the coin, it also contributes to the unhealthy pressures advanced students face. Building rigid assumptions into the education system about how students spend their leisure time is part of what kills diversity.
We grossly overestimate the amount of kids who fall into this group, maybe because we're priviledged enough exclude ourselves from it.
> I think the school system is fairly good at forcing all children to learn at least a little about all subjects.
Dude, ca. 20% of people in the US are either illiterate or functionally illiterate. How is that good?[1]
Unless, given your previous point, they're too busy playing computer games or getting high on Satan's lettuce?
Pardon the sarcasm, but this is an extremely dangerous mindset as it distracts us from the actual problem.
Edit: source
[1] https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=How-Serious-Is-A...
When those peer groups have values that include playing video games and exclude exploring learning, it's very hard to motivate members of the group to explore learning. I don't actually have any data on this, but I suspect that applies even under extrinsic motivators. In other words, telling the cool kids who hate school that they will get bad grades if they don't learn more will not make them learn more. It will simply become a badge of honour to have bad grades.
Perhaps the single most important job of a teacher is to attempt to create a single group of the class[1] with which every student identifies, and then imbue that group with the value of learning.
I don't think the way to do this is by promising rewards (good grades) for good performance (doing exactly what the teacher asks.) The way to do it is to encourage self-directed exploration and mastery, with a sense of a greater good. (This sounds like something out of an Italian-inspired educational philosophy, but as far as I'm concerned, it's just rather simple reasoning from the principles of motivation and social behaviour as we know them.)
In the end, this is a really tough problem. If children are convinced (based on interactions with their peer groups) that learning sucks, then it's really hard to change their mind. This goes for adults as well. I'm not saying there's a magic formula to make everything work out right.
What I'm saying is that there are two insufficient and contradictory methods. I think one of them is slightly less bad than the other one.
[1]: It might sound like creating multiple groups would be easier and accomplish the same thing, but the danger with that is that small natural variations in the value of learning between these groups could get exaggerated in an attempt to create group identities. I.e. if one group is just about considered more school-happy than the other group, then that will become a point both groups can use to distinguish between themselves: one group will intentionally become more ignorant of the benefits of learning to separate its members from the other. It has to be one single group for them to all adopt the same value of learning.
Edit: I almost forgot. For more on this, see The Nurture Assumption – well worth a read.
Totally unlike adults then.
"erziehen", if translated literally, means "to pull", "er" is something like "to act" while "ziehen" means "pull"
Sometimes it feels like that, that it is necessary to pull someone into a certain direction in order to better that person. And this is usually not easy to do.
https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/7/17/21328316/covid-19...
And annoyingly, when I bring this proposal up, most people talk about how important it is for learning to be intrinsically motivated.
It depends on the culture of the place the school system is applied in. This kind of blanket utilitarianism by way of school is a sad state for society as a whole. In a country like Canada we have a sordid past, very recently, when implementing the residential school system [0].
That's the more extreme case but I'd argue that elements of that exist in every school system when applied in a one-size-fits-all fashion and when that system has a monopoly on education.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_...
Drive is great. Leverage it heavily as a manager.
But when it comes to kids, the problems I see are that (a) cognitively speaking, children are not tiny adults; and (b) if you want them to be successful and happy adults, you need to give kids the ability to work through mountains of "I Need To Do This Even Though It Sucks"
Cognitive development is an amazing process to watch -- you can see as brains grow and develop a wide variety of skills we take for granted.
But what that means is that you can't treat a six-year-old as an adult.
Their thinking is likely highly egocentric, because they have not yet developed the ability to realize that "my feelings and wants" are different from "other peoples' feelings and wants".
In their world, when they like Pokemon, they literally believe that everybody in the world feels the same way about Pokemon that they do. They just haven't yet gained the ability to handle that concept.
So, up to age eleven or so, you need to put enough structure around children to deal with their cognitive development path. Rules that are consistently enforced are critical (it's also good if those rules, in fact, make sense), with a gradual loosening of constraints as the child grows the ability to handle greater responsibilities.
This path continues from eleven -- when, cognitively, your child is now a functioning adult -- onwards towards the age of majority.
You still need to provide structure, but with enough freedom and ability to bend-or-change the rules such that the child can learn how to make their own decisions. Your goal is ramp them towards the full set of adult responsibilities, as quickly as they are able to handle it.
The problem with a lot of "traditional" education is that it failed to do the latter in a lot of ways -- rigid structure until age of majority, and then bam!, you're an adult, good luck.
This is compounded by how much regulation and how little slack there is in society. In the 70s, teenagers commonly brought rifles to school (because they were on the shooting team, or going hunting afterwards). Nowadays, kids are getting expelled for accidentally forgetting a tiny, micro-sized pocketknife.
The problem with "modern" education is that there is no expectation that you will ever assume responsibility. If you've dealt with a lot of recent graduates, you probably know what I mean. They have been denied much of the experience required for them to mature as adults, all in the name of keeping them "safe".
Including being "safe" from boredom. Which relates to giving kids the ability to get through mountains of drudgery.
That skill is so critical.
And I didn't really master it until I was an adult, much to my disadvantage.
If Elon Musk and every one of his employees were to vanish tomorrow, I'd be sad. SpaceX is cool. But my life would go on.
If the organization that handles sewage for my city were to vanish tomorrow, I would soon be, quite literally, in a world of shit.
I doubt that working for a sewage treatment plant offers much in the way of Autonomy. Mastery, perhaps? Purpose, absolutely.
And I doubt most kids grow up dreaming of being a waste engineer.
It's a hard job, and it demands grit. But that job makes modern life possible, and I don't see us setting up kids to be able to tackle both kinds of challenges.
How many people never make it out of the drinking and playing video games phase because school has convinced them that they're failures?
A lot of kids would be perfectly happy starting some sort of apprenticeship when they were teenagers, and it's not obvious to me that that would be worse than forcing them through the remainder of school.
I think it's hard to tell the difference between kids who have an intrinsic motivation to play video games, and kids who have an intrinsic motivation to do anything but school and have to default to video games because the world doesn't offer much of an avenue for kids to be productive on their own (unless you happen to be very interested in computers and have access to one and the internet).
I say all this as someone who thinks education is profoundly important. I just don't think as much education happens in schools as we'd like to believe, especially for people who don't fit neatly in the system.
It covers empathy (actually listening and confirming feelings) but is largely about how to enable extrinsic motivation, through encouraging autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
One rather concrete example is that the authors argue it is no good to say, e.g. "if you take a bath you'll get this nice gift" or "if you don't take a bath I will remove your video gaming time for the day."
More effective, according to the authors, are to give a choice, even if it is somewhat of a forced one: "I want you to take a bath. Do you want to bathe with your boat or your duck?"
This, then, would speak to the same desire to explore as the hidden option in the article. (Or, the way I view it having read Drive: this gives the child a hint of autonomy.)
This can be so surprisingly effective that it is almost scary. And while I'm at it: it works with many adults too.
Use with caution. Leadership is good and kids needs to go to bed at night, but manipulation isn't what you want to be remembered for.
Other nice-to-knows to be used with caution:
- as kids start to negotiate, add slack for negotiations.
- "catch them" when they do something right, reward it immediately (with encouraging words, a hug, increased trust - or even a piece of chocolate)
- look for the intentions - or anything that was right even if the intent wasn't there:
-- tried to do something right but failed? Good! (On the other side: there's few things as discouraging as gettig a scolding when you thought you did something good.)
-- used to slam the door but closed it carefully for some reason (hands full, in the phone, etc)? Good.
About that time you need to explain why we have regular baths.
The fake choice thing, though, never EVER worked with my kids.
sometimes they'll talk, then mutter to confusion then emit blips because they heard words coming from you, then all of a sudden they'll have a burst of excitement again.
Withdrawing rewards is punishment so both are really the same.
Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe.
If your kid is good at something and you want them to lose interest, encourage or reward them for doing the thing :)
Or force them to do it.
Just like school system does with learning.
> Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe.
I'd just want to add that according to Drive, training humans like rats and birds work great... If blind obedience, conformity, and minimal quality is something you're looking for -- which many factory line type managers wanted, for a very long time (and in many cases probably still do, sadly.)
Damnit, if Punished by Rewards contradicts this, I have to read it now, don't I?
Genuine question: What do you do if you want them to get better then?
I think your expectations of the schooling system are simply skewed. At least in the countries which I lived in (Europe) the 'customer' of the schooling system is first and foremost society as a whole.
The individual, the child, comes second. Not in a way that children are not important. It's just that the outcome of a well organised society is what matters. So, although not in extreme ways of course (there is no evil mastermind), conformity and the likes are important values.
We all love to say that we want creative free thinking individuals.. but come on now - currently the society is mostly composed of conformed (without this society probably would not function, at least as it does now) and in a lesser extent the obedient.
The creative and free thinking individuals push us all foward and we would not advance without them, but the majority is different.
Schooling system is not what it is by accident.
We do our job to get money, but we won't do any job for that sole purpose.
Kids learn chemistry because they are forced to, but they'll find fun bits here and there, they'll ask teachers questions to better understand what they're taught. They won't give a crap about half of the curriculum, but the half they'll remember and will be formative is not guaranteed to be solely from the self-motivated part either.
Going further what motivates us to explore also depends on the environment, what is rewarded and what is not, etc.
I feel splitting things in two theoretical extremes is close to labelling actions good or bad, it's useful if we don't care about nuance, but has little use once we dive below the surface.
> I recommend reading Drive first if you think you disagree.
I remember getting that recommendation for "Getting Things Done" ... is Drive much better as a reading experience ? Is it readable for people who're not into self help books in general ?
As soon as adults feel extrinsically motivated, they start to view the situation as an economic transaction, where they will only perform tricks for treats. Typical real-world example of this: if you start charging parents (punishment) for coming late to pick up their kids from daycare, parents will become more late. One can speculate that this might be because they start thinking of it as "paying for extra time" rather than "being a nice human being to the daycare staff."
The cases you mention where they do indeed apparently coexist, I suspect (but have no data to support) that the children successfully manage to ignore the extrinsic motivation because the intrinsic drive is so powerful in that instance. It's probably not a sustainable model to rely on that happening, though.
Drive is decidedly not a self-help book. It's a summary of the available evidence in support of and against the existence of intrinsic motivation and how it relates to the other types of motivation (extrinsic and physical and emotional needs.)
Under that hypothesis, the salary is there to take physical needs as a motivator off the table. If an employee has to worry about physical needs, there's no room at all for any other concern.
Once the salary is sufficient to no longer be a point of worry (will I afford my mortgage, can I support my spouse, etc) only then will additional money serve as extrinsic motivation.
(Which of course spells disaster for things like performance bonuses, which (a) are impossible to target at the right people (see Deming for more on that) and (b) literally designed to stop coming, reducing motivation overall.)
But your salary doesn’t change if you work hard or slack. It’s not a reward for performance.
Similar to how you’d die without breathing but you don’t feel rewarded for every breath. You wouldn’t breathe more than someone else to get more alive.
If you want to play the violin beautifully, you have to practice for 10 years, there's no way around it.
If you want to do important things, you have to train in all sorts of capacities, and put in a lot of sweat.
One of the things that differentiates humans from beasts is that we have at least some sense of higher purpose and many of us derive considerable fulfilment from that.
For the most part, most of our education is necessary - and the ability to focus, to plan, to think beyond just a few steps, to control one's desires and emotions, to concentrate and balance one's life energies - this requires education and maturity.
Yes, it can be stifling in some ways, that's ok, we want our doctors and accountants (mostly) to be small-c conservatives. Others can write Operas.
But none of it comes without a formal journey at least in some capacity.
It's a neat experiment but I think it's hard to determine the results. The novelty of exploration in that context just might not be 'novelty' from the adults perspective. Try trading rewards for truly novel things, like, jumping out of planes, I wonder what the result would be.
I don't know the source of this, but I remember reading that most people who become good at things, by practicing for 10 years or whatever, were intrinsically motivated to do so. It's not a process of "want to be good -> force self to practice -> become good", but more of "want to practice -> become good". Can't remember if this was just conjecture, and I'm not a citeable source myself, but it seems like a more likely story. I know I've heard stories of talented people who got where they are because they spent all day noodling on the guitar, or writing programs, but I've heard less stories about people who didn't really enjoy the practice but forced themselves into it via willpower.
Not to say that "just noodling" is all that the person needed, or that no willpower was required, but that the process might be more intrinsic for the people who are actually going to become great anyway.
Growing up, I found that those who ran on pure extrinsic factors with all discipline and no enjoyment either stopped or were stunted by locally optimal decisions. On the other hand, those who went on to study in university and play professionally seemed to derive the same obsessive enjoyment from their craft as I would a video game.
Do you think these data points further prove your point about emotional maturity? Or is there something more universal, that true success requires a fierce passion?
Everything in moderation.
It takes at least 5 years of learning piano to get good enough to enjoy it. IMO this is why adults almost never take it up - we're just not prepared to invest in something that takes so much work with such a distant payoff
We finish 50 million kids in school each year.
100's of millions have been through the US system alone over it's history.
If this was simply true then I feel like there'd be some evidence by now.
Yes we can do better schooling for some kids, and yes there are certainly improvements, but after 100's of year of doing it, it's not going to be a country wide system of let kids just have more freedom.
The best improvement we know of is cohorts matter. Which is a zero sum game.
I went to a school without grades. It encourages cultivating a love of learning. There was concrete feedback on quality of work and assessments of knowledge (tests). But no public grading scale. It’s been awarded 3 blue ribbon awards and consistently outperformed its grading-based peers.
Extrinsic motivation, IMO, is akin to an exchange or bargain, you have to develop a sense or skill to know how to make them.
ps: more generally I'm very curious about the topic of 'pedagogics' and also the way to create harmonious, high level work environment between people (all motivated by few years of seeing nothing but drag, pain and waste in too many workplaces). If you know board, MLists or else, ping me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQiW_l848t8&list=PL463AA90FD...
As a teen, I think I would've agreed with you on this, but looking back personally, I think boundaries inspired my creativity to break out of them.
Obedience to hierarchy around stuff collecting is extrinsic.
One must learn facts and emotional character to tell grandpa go away.
We’re far to servile to decades old delusions of grandeur.
Extreme ownership of social agency by one circular meme isn’t good enough.
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Another poster had an interesting observation about academia vs corporate work. I'm 33 and still in academia, and I now realize a large part of that is the freedom it provides. I've see salary as a score on someone else's scoreboard, and very uninteresting for that reason. OK, I'm old enough to have experienced a person needs income for practical reasons, but I'm not going to work for it ;)
I'm allergic to competition, scores, rewards, prestige, I guess that makes me child-like?
I had been under the impression that academia was mostly very competitive to be able to get career (tenure track) positions. Are you not aiming for that, is it less competitive in your field, or am I missing something else?
It does indeed come with a lot of freedom, but the relatively flat structure means that there's usually no one above the group's PI to promote their research. As a result PIs spend a lot of time writing grant proposals.
If I'm doing the same thing for too long it becomes an almost impenetrable blocker in my mind, it's like if I try to do the task again there is a mental block that doesn't allow me to imagine it. I have been working on the tools to push through this but I decided it's ultimately a problem with my lifestyle. I was never going to be happy working 9-5 on the same types of work all year.
I started working for myself once I realized this, and do considerably fewer hours, of course also making less money. I'm happier by far and getting more done than I did before in the time I do work, and getting more "life" done as well. I'm lucky enough to be able to do that and still make a living.
A video about strings (both literal and metaphorical): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_CZTi8L29c
Compare a 1940 vision of catfishing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAykOz1gWi4
I think a lot of modern games are designed to be like this. Building farms or worlds for fun (I haven't played any of them).
This works well to learn to play video games without defining an extrinsic reward. However, there is a problem when the system encounters the equivalent of TV. It then gets stuck watching the unpredictable stream of events.
paper and code: https://pathak22.github.io/large-scale-curiosity/
Coverage by "2 minute papers" youtube channel: https://youtu.be/fzuYEStsQxc
Peter Hartkamp started one in the Netherlands, and wrote a book about it.
“Our current education systems do not trust children to learn what they need to know. Governments believe that children must be coerced into learning what they prescribe as necessary for future life even though they do not and cannot know what that future will be like. Yet we do know that coercion produces anxiety and fear of failure and that this in turn inhibits learning and destroys confidence. We also know that creativity, innovation and empathy are not encouraged in such a climate even though above all else these are the survival qualities for coping with an uncertain future.
In this short book Peter Hartkamp develops his arguments against coercive ‘education’ with a needle-sharp engineer’s logic. He invites us to imagine what schools would be like if they took the articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child seriously, a not unreasonable position as all states are signatories.
I wholeheartedly and without reservation recommend this book to the many parents, students, teachers, employers and policy makers who know in their hearts that something is very wrong with the examination and testing factories that we are allowing our schools to become. It represents a beacon of hope that another way is possible.”
[1][1] http://hetgedwongenonderwijsvoorbij.nl/en/