[ExI] instilling ambition

[Giulio Prisco]

Anders, I totally agree. Over-protecting children is one of the worse
things that we can do to them, because it may turn them in persons
afraid of their own shadow and unable to cope with life.

Fortunately, most children are smarter than us and find ways to work
around our over-protection for their own good. If a twelve years old
really wants to watch porn on the net, (s)he will find a way to do so
regardless of any "parental protection" is installed. If (s)he wants
to try sex or drugs, (s)he will do so.

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 2:56 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> On 19/01/2013 05:48, spike wrote:
>>
>> My vision for the future is coping with gradually tightening energy
>> sources and doing cool stuff anyway, replacing fossil fuels with renewables
>> and such, but there might be a serious flaw in that line of reasoning. What
>> if the now generation has only small visions to dream, only break-even as a
>> goal? Will that work? Will they take up the burden of struggling to maintain
>> what we were just given?
>
>
> I think this is an important concern. Guarding and maintaining our
> infrastructure of life is not the only vital goal: instilling ambition and
> dynamical optimism in the next generation is perhaps even more important.
>
> At the risk of showing old man credentials, I think there is cause for
> concern given the widespread tendencies to overprotect children, giving them
> sometimes excessive support but little criticism, and placing them in
> situations where they cannot fail but there are no incentives to do anything
> different. One problem with traditional green thinking has been that it
> encourages a backward-looking conservative mindset where the order of nature
> must be preserved (although the order of society can and maybe should be
> overthrown); it can easily synergise with other forms of risk aversion,
> whether personal, economical or social.
>
> I think one good sign is the growth of the Maker movement: people taking
> charge over their material objects and learning to make or change things,
> write their own software and so on. That is an important mindset and
> something every parent should encourage in their kids (no matter what the
> danger is to their material possessions). But there might also be a need to
> encourage big thinking, to get people to realize that we do have the power
> to change the world by inventing new things that change the rules. 3D
> printers, home biohacking and being able to code is neat, but you should aim
> at changing manufacturing, invent new ways of coordinating people, or
> combine them with other things to make something totally unthinkable that
> forever change the world.
>
> Any other ideas of how to instil grand ambition in people? Force them to
> read a bit of Rand, Nietzsche or von Braun?
>
> --
> Anders Sandberg,
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Oxford Martin School
> Faculty of Philosophy
> Oxford University
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat