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by tossaway1 3065 days ago
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...

2 comments

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.