My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...
I am not, in fact my understanding of mechanics is extremely basic.
If I go back into my family tree, I can find three generations of Sugar House Labourers in Scotland in the early 1800s.. a profession that no longer exists in the UK as far as I can tell, and I'm certain they had a specialisation.
We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
Our jobs as parents is to teach values and make sure they're good people and have the tools to make good decisions too, not to set them on a particular path... that's a losing goal, we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
> We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
There's an Unschooling group on Facebook I watch. If you search "calculus" you get threads where a parent asks how their kid is going to learn calculus and the answers are mostly "when did you need calculus after high school." Aside from needing it for college, my answer would be "why am I raising my kid to be a 1:1 clone of me and not someone with a lot of different options." So I dig this as an answer. The world has ended a billion times already. People who work hard pursuing a skilled passion have never been obsolete.
Calculus is entry level math for all the hard sciences, engineering, and finance. It's how to think about how things change over time. Understanding what integrals and derivatives look like, especially as graphs, is very practical knowledge. Being able to think about compound interest and acceleration under gravity as driven by the same rules gives an understanding of what's happening underneath.
Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest.
(But then, I once did a game physics engine and have a patent in that area. I spent a lot of time in the hell which is integration of stiff systems of nonlinear differential equations. Turned out that was the wrong way to approach the problem. Works, but there are better approaches.)
> Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest.
A very common example is compound, continual interest accumulation. As a mathematician, I had trouble understanding how banks calculate it (as they would obviously not point me at the derivation of the formula), but it's actually a limit sum over infinitely small interest terms.
Similarly, these techniques work to explain and derive numerical methods for calculating many natural constants like e, pi etc.
The only intuitive definition of e I can remember is "how much $1 becomes after a year in a savings account with 100% interest compounded infinitely" funny enough.
Right? Just because my professional career never took me in those directions doesn't mean I want to foreclose them for my kid! I did do electrical engineering classes in college wherein I needed calculus, I just never took a derivative/integral after graduation because I ended up on the coding side of a Computer Engineering degree.
Thanks for highlighting that your children aren't you! Easy to forget.
The one-dimensional mentality of anti-intellectualism is absurd. I have heard parents outside of our school but in my community talk down French Immersion programs (versus English schooling) saying that people put their children in for the wrong reasons. I don’t know what the explicit reasons were in this case, but I am assuming that the other parent means academic overachievement.
Learning calculus or French can be beneficial, especially when the glass ceiling in certain workplaces is whether or not you’re bilingual. However, the point that’s getting missed is the metaexperience that consciously or subconsciously shapes the way the child interacts with the world later on.
Somehow I feel like the workplaces with a glass ceiling over bilingual is so small as to be immaterial.
i mean even basic differentiation is useful for optimization problems.
Not to mention physics, which is useful for understanding why things are the way they are. Which, is an important skill lest you fall into anti intellectual traps like flat earthism.
Calculus is a shared language in the grand universal ocean of intellectual cultural. Rejecting calculus is rejecting part of that culture…
Yeah, for me the real click was in AP Physics where we derived an equation for some motion property rather than just being handed the formula as I had been in, say, 8th grade science. The meta lesson is that you can use math to get more information out of a model than you think you have, which, yeah, keeps you from becoming a 5G get the facts style individual.
I’m not sure there’s enough overlap between physics and calculus to justify calculus. That might mean you can’t derive physical equations yourself, but no one needs that who isn’t becoming a physicist.
F=ma is slightly important for physics, no? And deriving the equations is kind of the point; it's the understanding of "why" something is true.
e.g. I can tell you things act like a spring near (stable) equilibrium, and you can believe me, but why on Earth would that be true? Well, Taylor expand the potential at equilibrium. Define V(0)=0, and equilibrium means V'(0)=0, so V(x) ~ V''(0)/2 x^2, so F = -dV/dx = -V''(0)x, which is a spring with spring constant k=V''(0).
That's all a very conceptual explanation; the point is near an equilibrium, zoom in and you have a parabolic potential! What is the potential for a spring? A parabola! This is basic Calc BC stuff, but it also justifies why we might care about about simple harmonic motion. Calculus is the whole business of "zooming in."
> I’m not sure there’s enough overlap between physics and calculus to justify calculus.
You need calculus to design a windmill or an auto engine or an electric motor beyond the "just sort of works" level. Most of analog electrical engineering is defined by calculus. Althogh, yes, you can get LTSPICE to do most of that for you.
I mean one example is like a dampened spring system or RLC circuits or something. You can simplify a lot of systems down to those types of simple physics systems you learn about in class.
A lot of it I think is just training people to adopt a "physics-like" or "math-like" way of thinking and giving them a general overview of how things work.
I think their answer would be "why would I care how long it takes this ladder to slide down the wall?" Which STINKS don't get me wrong. This is not a group I take seriously.
Here is an example of a practical optimization problem:
A factory needs to produce 12,000 components per year. Each production run costs $300 to set up, and storing one component costs $4 per year. What production quantity Q minimizes the annual setup and storage costs?
> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
"And you, too, will be a mechanic", which is how that usually goes.
People should spend enough time with tools to get the basic skills down. Some years ago a Stanford mechanical engineering prof was complaining to me that many of the Indian students from wealthy families thought that using tools was beneath them. "They've never used a pair of pliers." Now, to some extent, that mindset has spread to the American middle class.
> how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
Being proficient in reading, at least one instrument, and one additional language is always welcome, regardless of the timeline.
Not many people get paid for musical or linguistic talents, actually.
"Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
There is more to life than earning money, and not all skills need to be in service of that.
Regardless, both of those talents have the potential to open doors and set the stage for opportunity, nor are they mutually exclusive to whatever economic skills might be viable in the future.
If you have rent or a mortgage, there is little more important than paying it. Everything else comes after. Everyone alive in the developed world today grew up in a wondrous period of history where the middle class had many luxuries previously only afforded to those with inherited wealth. There are signs that period is ending.
I'm not against things like learning to play an instrument, but if you're going to major in Music Theory, you better have a solid plan for a career on the other end. It can be a risky plan, but it has to be real with non-zero odds of success. It can't be just because you love playing the violin.
Music can do so much more than just paying rent. You can impress your future wife with your playing or singing. It's a form of therapy for many.
It's true it won't pay the bills, but knowing one instrument is a good skill that differentiates you from others.
How are you going to impress your future wife with music skills if you can’t afford an instrument to play?
Or are you suggesting one should also prioritise buying a guitar over paying rent too?
> "Everyone alive in the developed world today grew up in a wondrous period of history where the middle class had many luxuries previously only afforded to those with inherited wealth. There are signs that period is ending."
People have been freaking out about this pending doom for as long as we've walked the earth. Most of it stems from either old age or political hyperventilating (both symptoms of perceived displacement). Humanity's still grinding forward ... faster than ever.
Try telling that to the 20-somethings who already cannot afford to get on the property ladder and are being told AI will replace what few skilled white collar roles were available to them.
Times already have changed. It’s not people freaking out about a theoretical scenario. It’s already happened for those entering the job market today.
> cannot afford to get on the property ladder
The American Midwest would like a word.
If you don't mind being a couple hours drive from anywhere Taylor Swift would play, you can find affordable property, a good community, and amazon prime service. Any town that lacks tech work opportunities will still have solid internet from Starlink to support remote work.
There are awesome opportunities if you look.
Izzat all? Man, kids these day sure have it easy. When I was a kid, we had to worry about getting nuked into glowing cinders in World War III, getting conscripted and blown to bits fighting the Soviet led Warsaw Pact, or not being able to get on the property ladder and being told that the Japanese will replace what few skilled blue and white collar jobs available.
I think becoming proficient in some form of artistic expression is very helpful for achieving self-actualization.
My biggest frustration, currently, is a lack of time and energy to devote to my creative projects. I still give them some time, but between a full-time job, child care, and other day-to-day responsibilities, it is not as much as I would like.
My wildest hope for society in my lifetime is that we will experience dramaticly shorter work weeks. Keynes predicted 15 hour work weeks by 2030 or so. If I could afford a modest life on only 15 hours of labor, and devote other time to family, friends, and art, I would feel so amazing. I'm skeptical of the claims of AI, but a society where a shorter work week is the norm would turn me into its biggest fan.
Anyway, despite my frustration, the time I spend with my creative projects results in my greatest self-satisfaction, after the time I devote to raising my children. And the creative outlets I pursue today are directly related to the artistic skills I developed in my youth (including music). So yeah, it probably won't pay the bills, but there's much more important things in life than bills.
I'm not suggesting a career. I'm saying those three things are always valuable to learn.
Somehow they read "learning a musical instrument" as "majoring in music".
The traditional career for people studying music theory is acquiring wealthy parents.
Your college major doesn't determine your career path, and the sooner people stop pretending that they are necessarily correlated, the better.
That’s called strawmanning.
People should prepare their kids to be happy adults, not just employed adults.
I recall reading of studies that found that a significant majority of adults who did not learn to play an instrument when they were young wish that they had.
Only a small minority of adults who did learn to play an instrument when young wish that they hadn't.
If you can read and have any sort of curiosity (or you help teach curiosity) it’s a pretty solid foundation to learn just about anything.
The music bit is mostly things you’d want to impart on your kids if you care about that sort of thing. (Which I do!) The public versions of it are not great where I am but individually you can do a lot.
Proficiency in reading and writing is clearly useful.
Proficiency in musical instrumemts is not necessarily useful by itself, but it's a path towards mastery of something hard that typically involves a lot of intentional practice. Having been able to master something hard once makes it easier to master other hard things, because you can reuse the learning skills. Music has a little bit of applied fractions and what not, too.
The same thing learning to learn journey happens with learning a second language. But also, learning a second language helps develop skills and understanding of your first language, and helps develop communication skills for situations where there's a limited mutual understandable vocabulary.
Some languages have market value too. Better communication with employers, customers, and suppliers is valuable.
Self-expression is a fundamental human need. Ignore to your own detriment.
Maybe it comes down to whether you advocate for live-to-work or work-to-live.
Music and linguistics have often been considered amongst the "liberal arts" - none of which are arguably "useful" but all of which are terribly worthwhile.
> Not many people get paid for musical or linguistic talents, actually.
And yet the highest earning people I know who didn’t come from affluent backgrounds are musically and linguistically talented.
Focusing on what the market demands is chasing a moving target and if you miss the boat you might just end up a low-level peon holding a wrench.
"Highest earning people who didn't come from affluent backgrounds" is entirely consistent with "not many people".
None of the wealthy people I know had wealthy parents. Most of them had parents who didn't even have shoes for significant periods of time.
"Wealthy people" alone is also consistent with "not many people". There aren't that many rich people in general, musicians or otherwise.
Reading is a life skill. Proficiency in it makes you understand things. Weren't there plenty of news articles this year about how high schoolers didn't have proficient reading capabilities? Maybe teaching your kids how to properly read a text is a good thing.
"Hey, Muse, read me this article". Voila, your kids know how to read. Deciphering marks on paper can be as obsolete as lightning a fire without matches, with the advent of technology.
‘Hey, Claude, make me a painting of a sunset.’ Voila, you know how to make art. ‘Hey, Chat, write me a sonnet.’ Voila, you know how to write poetry. But you don’t really though, don’t you. Text-to-speech didn’t come into existence with the advent of agentic AI, and yet you will have a hard time getting any job or being part of most communities if you are illiterate. It turns out technology did not make literacy obsolete. In any case, we already know that putting screens in front of children is harmful, so unless someone advocates harming children, using a modern computing device (touchscreen slate, keyboard and mouse, etc) as a replacement for basic education is highly suspect.
So far, it's been hard to point your phone at text and just have what you need to know summarized at speed.
What a zero-brain statement.
As much as they'd know how to bake bread by buying a loaf in the shops.
> "Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
See it that way, having a normal social life requires other skills than your job.
There won’t be a labor market any more, unless there’s some technological barrier for AIs and robots that has not appeared yet.
It’s either some form of socialism or mass starvation.
> socialism or mass starvation
From what history shows, there's not much difference between the two.
Most of the major mass starvation events in modern history were caused by some form of socialism.
Well that's certainly engaging with the meat of his comment, instead of the HN equivalent spamming stupid X clapbacks for likes. Bravo.
I guess you needed some validation today.
I don’t disagree, but I’m not seeing many other options here.
Modern Western European socialism has probably suppressed wages and increased unemployment relative to the US, but hasn’t led to starvation.
Lmao. This comment combined with the one above are just a microcosm of the worst HN has to offer.
What sort of socialism was at play when the British forced Ireland into famine during the potato blight? What about the British role in India’s famine? What about the many famines brought about by civil wars and ethnic conflicts in Africa? The Great Depression, famously brought about by socialist policies and definitely not gilded age wealth inequality decadence?
If you’re looking for a common thread, it’s authoritarianism, not socialism.
I dunno, my parents were correct about my STEM education that was basically shoved up my ass as soon as I showed any science/engineering aptitude.
I'd say giving them the tools to make good decisions will naturally lead them to a particular path, why not push that path as well?
It’s easier to say that when your parents were right. But there are a lot of parents who pushed their now-graduating children into fields that AI has recently eaten. And before that, parents who pushed their kids into fields they hated and ended up burning out.
That said, I am probably going to do with my kids exactly what your parents did and just hope I’m not wrong about their economic future and passions. But man, it’s a tough strategy call.
Regardless of making big money later or not, I find it horrible to push your kids in a direction simply because of that. They might be better off with less income but liking their job. Or like their job, become very good, and make a lot of money anyway because of that.
But maybe that's because I grew up in a place where you can make a decent living in a wide variety of jobs. Or because almost nobody in my (childhood) vicinity ever had a STEM, or even any white collar job.
That's the issue, seems like the amount of jobs that produce a decent living are fewer and further between. Particularly if you want your own house and a family.
Could be a temporary fluctuation, or it could be that we're mean-reverting to the historical average of an ownership class and an underclass, where only the ownership class has the freedom to pursue their passions with any security. That would be sad, but I'm prepping my family for the latter.
> That would be sad, but I'm prepping my family for the latter.
How, if I may ask?
One can downshift into a lower income more enjoyable job, but one cannot up shift into a higher income job without the required education.
Besides for many people the higher income job is more enjoyable, especially when the lower income job takes a large physical toll.
While it is becoming harder, if you have the right affinity you can certainly still up shift without formal education in IT and related fields.
and my mum dissuaded me from computers pretty strongly due to the negative stereotypes at the time, and its hindsight that tells us that I got lucky with my passion.
My mum did emphasise my reading though, and that went well.
its a lottery.
Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds, so keep in mind that anything you're teaching is a hedge against AI stalling or collapsing.
We're moving more slowly on physical robotics in varied environments, so it's going to take a while before we automate reaching under the sink and turning a knob. Or maybe your kids will have a bright future in janitorial work, who knows?
> Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds
I feel like this is a crazy take. Smart (and motivated) people are better at adapting to a different world than not smart people.
If we have working AI, I'll be able to ask it what I should do to adapt.
i think this is a bit naive unless youre letting a neural interface run opus 12.6 and shutting down the rest of your brain to redirect energy towards local compute.
smart people are better at taking action based on directive than not smart people (im assuming).
Yes, a little bit of intelligence would be necessary to follow directions, but not much education. We were discussing education.
lmao
By the time they reach adulthood this aspect of robotics will be solved. I give it about 5 years.
But if AI “succeeds” then everyone that used to hold a job that has now been replaced would flood the blue collar market. I am not so sure that is such a bright future either.
Oh no, the enormous amounts of deferred maintenance that everyone puts off is now cheap enough to do! Oh no, we have stronger incentives to build and employ blue collar workers! Oh no! The horror!
If far more Americans learn to do blue collar stuff, it will devalue the massive amounts of scammers, charlatans, grifters that we see in these professions. Construction has literally significantly declined in real productivity since the 80s. Racists say it’s cus of immigrants doing the building. I think it’s because of grift, fraud, and greed.
> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver. My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...
Mona Lisa Vito, is that you?
I think her husband was a lawyer... but the utes will be alright.
Future husband...
Can't make that comment without Positraction.
But give a boy until the age of 7 and he's ours for life, is what that old order of the monks said about values. What do you do for the remaining 11 years?
OK, sure.
Now what does that look like concretely? Still sending them to school for several hours a day, 5 days a week? Doing what during those hours?
School is half about babysitting while the parents work. So... yes. Kids will still have to go somewhere during the day. Might as well be a school.
So we stop even pretending to teach them anything.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean, that parents can't give their children a head start by teaching them stuff, that will smarten them up or help them understand stuff at school.
I remember my father taught me how to divide numbers and somewhat how to multiply them, before we learned that at school, with his own explanations. For multiplication he taught me indirectly, by making "number tables" with me:
Up to 20. I used to bring them to school and teachers were discouraging, not realizing, what a great thing this was and what kind of insight it could allow a child to have into basic operations.For division, he often said: "How often does one number fit into the other?" as a way of explaining that operation.
Ah and he also taught me about negative numbers, when other kids at school didn't even understand what that was supposed to be, and teachers still wanted us to write "not solvable", instead of the correct answer, which were negative numbers. How silly.
When the time came and we learned about division and fractions, I had an easy time to understand what the teacher explained, due to knowing an intuition about what division actually means. The hardest thing for me was not dividing numbers, but following that methodical procedure to divide in the written form, digit by digit. Something I had done in my head already, when thinking about that some number "fits into another number" only half, ergo must be 0.5 added to the number of times it fits in there whole. Only that I didn't realize immediately, that this written way of dividing 2 numbers was the same thing actually.
In this way parents can make school life and learning soooo much easier and less painful for their kids. Granted, I did seem to have a gift for calculation in primary school, but what was so casually taught to me by my father every now and then, helped tremendously. It wasn't even like strict hours of learning. It was just using chances to show me stuff.
From my mother I learned to actually pay attention how I write words. Initially, my spelling was only OKish, not great, until one day I somehow realized "Hey I just have to think a little and pay attention." and suddenly had good spelling. But this didn't come about, without my mother sitting down with me and complaining about my handwriting and also once or twice forcing me to do some writing. My handwriting is still no good though. Glad that didn't influence my grades. I write better Chinese characters, than German words, apparently.
If I had children, I would definitely try to teach them such things. Even if it is just how to look at something or what to pay attention to, or small calculation tricks. I would try to make their learning easier and offer support when they need it to learn.
Your bit about numbers “fitting” into each other is exactly my intuition about division as well, probably formed at a young age. 7, 3 and 21 fit together in my mind like “Kiki” is sharp and “bouba” is round. Or how I could intuit the word “melt” in German was “schmelzen” before I ever learned it - it’s a core memory of mine just guessing that word from the ether and being correct, and felt like validation that I could become fluent.
Methodology is important but growing these intuitions feels critical to me, but no idea if that is something can be taught as much as it’s learned.