
Programming My Child - exolymph
http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/david-auerbach-programming-my-child
======
le-mark
Something about this makes my skin crawl; conflating blossoming sentience with
soulless machines. Children are banal and miraculous at the same time. The
default human state was to create tiny humans without end until the advent of
birth control 100(?) years ago. One thing that's remarkable to me was how
divorced I came from children as an adult. I was 40 when we had our first and
although I'd been around neices and nephews years earlier, I'd forgotten so
much. After having a second, another remarkable thing is how different they
are. The younger one does and says things the older one never would have.

Children aren't for everyone, and not everyone wants or can have them. But
there is something distinctive they add to life.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
> One thing that's remarkable to me was how divorced I came from children as
> an adult.

My wife and I are in our early 30's and we're struggling with the thought of
children because of this - they're utterly alien to us. I feel on an
intellectual level that I think I'd like to have children and like to be a
father, but with the exception of one friend (who because they have kids we've
largely lost contact with), we don't really have any peers that have children,
so we don't ever interact with them, and it's all terribly abstract to us.

~~~
toasterlovin
We have 3 kids and will probably have a go at a 4th next year sometime.
Bringing new children into this world is probably the hardest thing you'll
ever do. There's no way to be prepared. You just jump into the fire and wing
it until you start figuring things out. And it's utterly exhausting for a
couple of years. But I can tell you that being a parent is the most meaningful
part of my life.

By a long shot.

So I would say this: if you want to live life on easy mode and enjoy all the
little pleasures that modern life has to offer, then don't have kids. I say
that without judgement; your life is yours to live as you see fit. But if you
want meaning, if you want to struggle for something more important than
yourself, and if you want to leave something enduring behind when you depart
from this world, then have some kids.

~~~
kentosi
> But if you want meaning, ..., then have some kids.

Or anything else that involves devoting time other beings: homeless feeding
drives, mentoring disadvantaged people about programming, working in an
elderly home, etc.

The feeling of being part of something broader doesn't only come from having
children sorry.

~~~
toasterlovin
Sure, you can find meaning in other things. But play the odds. Almost nobody
finds much meaning in their jobs. There is meaning to be found in being a
spouse, but being a parent often outlasts being a spouse. And almost every
parent you speak to will tell you that their kids are the most important
undertaking of their life.

------
AstralStorm
The property you're looking for is called robustness. An algorithm that works
with predictable results from many initial starting conditions without failure
modes is called robust.

Biological systems, unlike computers, are usually extremely robust. It is not
just one feedback, it is a highly complex set of multidimensional interacting
feedback loops all around. Randomness and chaos are also crucial in some of
these systems. And most of them actually are coded and not trained - but coded
to be robust and adaptive.

The whole staging of development is likely either a side effect of this
property or an additional cause of it.

You cannot truly reset any nontrivial (Esp. Nonlinear) unknown system with
feedback where you don't have the direct access to states. This has nothing to
do with training and everything to do with control theoretic property of
observability.

~~~
j7ake
The property you want is beyond robust. You actually want the algorithm to
constantly go beyond its comfortable prediction range and "fail" repeatedly.
That's how you learn.

~~~
ericdykstra
Indeed, not just not fragile, not just robust, but you might even say
antifragile: gaining from disorder.

~~~
AstralStorm
Sometimes, but that property is hard to actually ensure. (and partly why so
many people break down too - their cognition is lacking in it)

Most of the bodily biological systems are not antifragile or are to a very
small degree.

------
trukterious
_> As with children, we don’t debug these networks; we educate them_

Mostly we aren't educating young children. Rather, they are the recipients of
_memes_ (e.g. words, waving). These are ways of behaving in context. The
transmission is mostly unintentional and unavoidable.

It has been speculated that if we tried to educate children how to walk and
how to talk then they wouldn't succeed at either! Yet they succeed and improve
these skills indefinitely. By contrast, arithmetic is intentionally and
exhaustively taught, yet most adults cannot perform it.

 _> But you cannot reset a human being._

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMKcO-T5Y4o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMKcO-T5Y4o)

Sure you can. See Tom Scott's face around 3:30. It's a slightly unpleasant
facial sequence that I'd only ever witnessed in babies previously; a sort of
soft reset.

Another form of reset is evident when addicts are administered with
_ibogaine_.

~~~
throwawayjava
_> Mostly we aren't educating young children. Rather, they are the recipients
of memes_

Guided repetition is a common educational tool.

I guess you can call that a "meme" if you want, but that doesn't make it "not
education".

 _> By contrast, arithmetic is intentionally and exhaustively taught, yet most
adults cannot perform it._

In countries where arithmetic is taught, adults are certainly capable of
performing basic arithmetic.

I have yet to meet a literate adult who couldn't compute some arbitrary sum or
solve a multiplication problem. In fact, the only counter-examples I've
discovered are that a lot of people have problems remembering order of
operations. But that's more about language/notation than arithmetic -- if you
put the parens in, they'll give you the correct answer.

 _> It has been speculated that if we tried to educate children how to walk
and how to talk then they wouldn't succeed at either!_

I was taught to talk. Some of the other children in my class were deaf, and
even they eventually learned how to talk (albeit not as well as you or me). I
assure you, they weren't "meme'ing". There was a lot of rather complex guiding
that looks a lot like what I imagine you call "education".

 _> > But you cannot reset a human being._

 _> See Tom Scott's face around 3:30_

That's... pretty weak evidence. And also a weird definition of "reset".
Presumably, he still knows his name is Tom, his mother's phone number, and can
write an essay or add numbers together...

~~~
trukterious
_> I guess you can call that a "meme" if you want, but that doesn't make it
"not education"._

The kind of memes I'm referring to transmit spontaneously, though no doubt
intentional cultivation is beneficial in some cases. There's a technical term
due to Daniel Dennett: _synanthropic memes_. These are extremely sticky
behaviours/ideas that thrive autonomously in the presence of humans, just as
some biological species do, e.g. pigeons, rats, barn swallows. Some are bad.
For example, swearing, bullying and perhaps even certain motor tics are
memetic and these are considered bad by many.

Our ideas about education are pretty messed up and thus we ultimately have
some disturbing realities to face, quite apart from the mounting student debt
:-/ Hopefully there will be a clearing up if and when we develop AGI and thus
gain a better understanding of how the mind works.

------
mxfh
What a weird way to run all the way with an ill-fitting analogy just because;
_Google_.

If anything parenting is running DevOps with a stubborn dev-team.

------
xyzzy123
I feel like this is hugely glamourising the rote business of extracting value
from data.

I liked the story and did feel that it covered well the human aspect, but it
was vastly more sympathetic towards our, uh, “digital children” than i think
is really warranted.

The algorithms will do surprising things, partly because the world is
surprising, but mostly as long as that is sufficiently valuable. Otherwise
they’ll get replaced by the next person with a jupityr notebook who can
optimise better for $objective_function. Or maybe they have enough political
control to redefine the objective.

The outputs of these things are superficially mysterious but for all practical
purposes are dictated by the values of the people who create them.

It’s not legal to lobotomise your child but that’s exactly what will happen to
any “algorithm” which hurts the bottom line.

------
tw1010
Are there any good books about ideas or a history regarding how societal
values and technological tools of the parent generation has influenced their
children?

How did the philosophical insights of e.g. Kant or Humboldt influence western
consiousness, and how did that influence the growing up period of the
generation that followed, and what were some reasonable consequential attitude
updates when those children grew up into adults?

It'd be interesting to see if there are models or any reasonable patterns that
can be seen in the adult world view -> child upbringing and subsequent next-
iteration adult world view, and what that might say could happen (or might not
happen, contrary to what we suspect will happen) about the current generation
of gamified children growing up with trump in the background.

------
shalmanese
Keep in mind this is the same David Auerbach who passed along a bunch of
intimate details of prominent feminists to Milo Yiannapoulous so he could
smear them: [https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/10/slates-
david-...](https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/10/slates-david-
auerbach-alleged-breitbart-ratfink-te.html)

------
brianzelip
> In the first months of her life, I kept a spreadsheet of my daughter’s
> milestones.

I’d love to see some spreadsheets to read other parents’ column headers beyond
weight, height, head size.

~~~
docker_up
It would be largely useless. Most children's development is extremely varied.
Books like to use average values but they never talk about how wide the
standard deviation. It's so wide that an average is actually a useless value.
Each child is completely different, so knowing the milestones is basically
useless.

My son was slow to smile, and very slow to walk. But he was evaluated with a
160 IQ at age 4. I have a friend who didn't talk until he was 5 years old. His
parents were afraid he was developmentally delayed. In fact, he went to
Berkeley for undergrad and Stanford for his PhD and you never would have
guessed he didn't talk until he was 5.

So development speed is extremely wide standard deviation to the point where
data from the first several years is fun if you want to brag but useless for
the purpose of generating any useful data on whole, except for the severely
delayed.

