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by mlevental 3065 days ago
it's funny sometimes i read things or see things online and i can't begin to relate to the subject that wrote/created/said those things.

this is going to seem roundabout but bear with me.

here is a video of tourists lamenting the drowning of a zebra foal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAHysptvEfo

i can't fathom the subjecthood of the person wishing someone would interfere (this is a savannah in subsaharan africa presumably - there is no such thing as fair - it's a completely unintelligible notion). now it sounds like a young girl doing the lamenting so it makes sense that i can't relate.

now you internet person

>the fact that kids (and some adults apparently) don't think through such things is not some sort of admirable trait.

i can't fathom your subject that you so miss the point that it is exactly this childhood naivete that the op is commenting on. of course children don't think through such things - they're children! they have no sense of property or privacy (nor should they!). this is exactly what op is saying he misses.

besides that the sentence as written is essentially the negation of op's and so adds nothing. it doesn't suggest why it's important that no one intrude on your space, it doesn't explain why it's important for people to have private spaces, it doesn't explore anything. it's literally a no to a yes.

>I don't shake sign posts for fun because I've had to fix enough things in my life that I know how actions like that can weaken or destroy an object that most people consider very durable (or indestructible) and therefore would amount to vandalism for the sake of "fun".

you can choose to ascribe malice or mischief to everything that's the slightest destructive, you are free to do so, but you should at least for a moment consider whether conservation isn't the ultimate goal of life.

1 comments

I didn't criticize kids for their naivete. I was pointing out that I don't think that sort of naivete is something to aspire to. If a kid breaks something because they didn't think through the foreseeable consequences, I don't necessarily attribute that to malice. But I hold adults to a different standard and I don't consider avoiding destruction of public or private property to be an issue of "conservation" but one of respect for my neighbors.

I'm all for people trying to recapture the wonder and excitement of their youth. Maybe it was just two unfortunate examples that struck me as things that adults should not be aspiring to do...

Im not so sure that "thinking through" is so pure in value as you think it to be. Many grown ups have quite a lot of biases factor into there thinking through- where situations basically hash to a solution and the "thinking" through is avoided at all.

Kids do not have that, they can develop novel approaches and they really have to think- they dont even have work to escape from the difficult questions. So this is where the future comes from. Beeing childish and able to fail is a bon.

If you think kids don't have a lot of biases factoring into such decisions or don't hash situation into solutions, you don't interact closely with kids. They have different, more simplistic, set of biases, but biases nevertheless and they tend to be very strong.

Kids very often just repeat whatever worked last time in very superficially similar situation and the smaller they are, they less likely they are to actually think through those situations. It seems like inventing something novel only if you don't know the kid and don't know what situation the kid is repeating.