Parent of a 4 and 1 year old here. Kids can be surprisingly smart and "dumb" at the same time. Their rote intelligence can shine if problems are presented in ways they can easily comprehend them but even simple emotional intelligence tasks ("if I kick my sister it hurts her the same amount as it hurts me when I get kicked") stump them. This confuses adults (myself included) and sometimes makes us expect more from them than would be realistic.
He's talking about the principles of psychology and escalation of anger. Studies show that when you actually hurt someone, your brain devalues that punch and makes you think you didn't hit very hard, but when you get punched your brain blows it out of proportion.
> even simple emotional intelligence tasks ("if I kick my sister it hurts her the same amount as it hurts me when I get kicked") stump them
Thinking back to when I was a kid, this one probably boils down to the "interrupt" aspect of behavior modification. It doesn't matter if the kid intellectually understands the Golden Rule if it doesn't cross his mind in between the time he thinks about kicking his sister and when he actually does it.
I would say it's punishment that remedies this -- you can think about punishment like registering a hardware interrupt that will cause negative emotions to spontaneously activate when the same situation arises in the future.
This is complementary to the child's intellectual understanding of why it's wrong to hit his sister.
Understanding without punishment makes ethics a purely academic exercise rather than something that should be practiced in daily life. Punishment without understanding breeds resentment and/or strange, dysfunctional worldviews.
Disclaimer: I've never had kids, nor have I been closely involved in the raising of younger family members, nor am I an expert in this area. Much depends on the particular individual kids, parents and circumstances. YMMV.
I want to understand the down votes..
As a parent of one young child, I find discipline the hardest aspect of being a parent. Holy hell it twists me in knots trying to work out when to draw the line, when to ignore and when to warn. Luckily my wife is better at this.
I disagree completely. What about all inherent biases which make humans do things not in their best interest (they just think it is in their best interest, but many times they don't think, they panic) ?
As a trained economist I can attest to the fact that most micro economist view these issues you raised as basically irrelevant. I understand that it is basically damning experimental evidence but it is completely disregarded.
This requires asserting as an axiom that people never make mistakes or get tricked, though, are always aware of all relevant information, and are in possession of an accurate mental model of how their actions are likely to affect themselves and the world. I mean, you can't really infer that someone's preference was to fall off a cliff by the mere fact that they did fall off it; they might not have realized that the cliff was there, among other possibilities.
> This requires asserting as an axiom that people never make mistakes or get tricked
Not having all the information doesn't negate that I'm the one making the choice. I think you're still referring to "rationality" in the logical sense of 2+2=4 being rational, not in the context of economics.
> I mean, you can't really infer that someone's preference was to fall off a cliff by the mere fact that they did fall off it; they might not have realized that the cliff was there, among other possibilities.
I didn't say all preference is revealed through a single action. I was trying to illustrate that action is the only way to determine preference.
For example, if I have a choice of going to McDonald's or Wendy's, you can't know which one I actually prefer unless I act and choose one over the other (thus preference is ordinal, not cardinal).
If I go to Wendy's, it would be absurd to say that I preferred McDonald's, since I chose to go to Wendy's. Thus, only through action is preference revealed. In the same way, it's absurd to say that someone else made a mistake when they bought an Apple product, because you're speaking of your preferences, since you can't actually know what's going on the head of the other person.
What "rational agent" means in the economic context is, that if Person A goes to Wendy's that says nothing about Person B's preference for Wendy's, since both have free will unlike inanimate objects.
I second the vote for diesel cars/minivans. Much simpler internals than hybrids with comparable (if not better fuel economy). I'd also venture to guess that the total environmental impact including the manufacturing processes is much less too. I wish VW/Audi/BMW/Mercedes sold a decent minivan with a diesel engine here in the US and I'd be a buyer. The VW Sharan gets 43MPG+ (http://www.greencarcongress.com/2010/07/sharan-20100701.html)
It's no coincidence that nearly half of the European cars have diesel engines.
One more problem: essentially tying healthcare coverage to employment and giving all kinds of tax-breaks to employers to offer it. You're artificially limiting the population that can get coverage, increasing the risk for insurers. Also, by creating a large population of uninsured (who still have to get emergency treatments and public health safety treatments (think epidemics etc)) and you drive the cost up for others who pay for healthcare.
I think this is very important and not because of the fact that you're more likely to talk shop when eating with your team. What is more valuable IMHO is that you'll get to know your teammates better as _people_: what they like, their hobbies, their tastes their culture (if you're in such an team) etc. It's insanely interesting and valuable: it will make communication much smoother and misunderstandings much less frequent.
A team needs to gel and having common experiences outside of strict "work" settings is really important for that. BTW, this can't be forced but can be facilitated by creating the right conditions and I think that's what Joel's post is about.
One more thing: having lunch with people only loosely connected to your day-to-day activities is also very interesting and can lead to serendipitous insights about things totally in your area of expertise.
* Your customers/clients don't care how much you work. The only thing they care about is whether you can help them solve their problems. If you do that consistently, you'll be fine.
* More work =/= more quality output; in fact I'd argue that after a certain amount of work, it is an inverse relationship.
* Find ways to solve more with less: write less code and still have features. Have fewer servers and still handle the traffic. Work less and still get things done. It's incredibly empowering.
* Knowledge, experience and honed intuition more than compensates for fewer hours of work. My suspicion is that a lot the extra work performed at startups is needed because of inexperience. I worked at a very early stage startup and it seems that a lot effort was spent on getting systems to work as they were supposed to (usually bleeding edge systems). We also spent a ton of time learning to deal with the data volumes we handled; in hindsight most solutions we arrived at were known and publicly available at the time, we just didn't know (enough) about them.
Background: I'm currently moonlighting on a startup idea while having a family and working 9-5. It can be done but you need to leverage other people's work as much as possible and need to be very disciplined. I use the best systems/libraries/services I know to basically outsource everything that's not core to my startup idea. I also consciously set aside time to be with my loved ones: dinner, bedtime stories, weekend hikes and trips etc. Being successful is only meaningful to me if my kids know me in person, not just as a distant figure.
Your customers/clients don't care how much you work
This is one of the most important parts of this discussion, and I regret not mentioning it in the post. Your company is a black box which exposes a limited interface to the rest of the world, namely "What you make and what you say." If it doesn't impact making or saying, nothing matters.
The vast majority of efforts in most companies don't matter. It is painful to contemplate how much total waste goes on, and changing even a wee bit of it (like, say, the Lean Startup movement is doing with regards to waste building things that no one actually wants) is a mammoth undertaking.
