I would never spank my own children, but that's a parenting choice. This societal moralizing about every single aspect of how one should raise their children is a big part of the problem described in the article.
For the record, spanking is not necessarily abuse. For you to cite unequivocably that it is is pure unthinking political correctness. Parenting is complicated, psychology is complicated. Is everyone who was born before 1950 irretrievably fucked up? How many of them got spankings?
> This societal moralizing about every single aspect of how one should raise their children is a big part of the problem described in the article.
Well, you are trying to add unearned emphasis with "every single aspect". It's not about "every single aspect", although it is moralizing about compulsion and pain.
> For the record, spanking is not necessarily abuse.
depends of the definition.
> For you to cite unequivocably that it is is pure unthinking political correctness.
You don't know how much though I have put into the subject and calling it political correctness is incorrect unless careing about whether or not people use pain and fear to shape children is just political correctness.
> Parenting is complicated, psychology is complicated
...
> Is everyone who was born before 1950 irretrievably fucked up?
I don't know if "irretrievably", but I think almost everyone is psychologically damaged in some way or another.
Well, you are trying to add unearned emphasis with
No, it's fully earned. I am a parent. I have witnessed first hand the moralizing, judgement and mutually contradictory universal expectations that random people have about how childrearing should be done.
You don't know how much though I have put into the subject and calling it political correctness is incorrect...
Fair enough, you may have put substantial thought into how parenting should work from a theoretical perspective.
...unless careing about whether or not people use pain and fear to shape children is just political correctness
Reframing the debate in terms so negative that anyone would appear insane to disagree with them is classic political correctness.
I don't know if "irretrievably", but I think almost everyone is psychologically damaged in some way or another.
Which raises the question, is your duty as a parent to prevent any and all psychological damage to your child?
If the goal is to minimize suffering, then is it better to indulge your child and raise an entitled spoiled individual that will never be satisfied for the rest of their life. Or is it better to "use fear" (the fear of consequences, whatever they may be) to raise a child that has some notion of negative cause and effect?
Hello. I am a parent. I am quite familiar with how schizophrenic you will quickly become if you try to do what everyone else tells you to do. I have put considerable thought into corporal punishment. And in my case the thought is both theoretical and practical.
While I grant that there are lots of people who are against corporal punishment as a matter of political correctness, there are also very good reasons not to use corporal punishment that have absolutely nothing to do with political correctness.
The first, and simplest, is that children model their behavior on ours. If you hit your kid, your kid will try hitting other kids. And, according to statistics, they are also more likely to hit other people in their lives, including spouses and their own kids. If you don't want to encourage that behavior, you need to not model it.
The second is that children who experience corporal punishment become more focused on avoiding the punishment than on internalizing the lesson they were supposed to learn. The classic example is the kid running out on a street looking around to be sure that mom isn't watching, and not looking for the car that is coming. Other forms of discipline have much less of this problem.
Corporal punishment also toughens the child's response to punishment. This makes them much less likely to respect alternate forms of punishment. Which makes them less likely to respect attempts at discipline in other child care settings, such as detentions at school.
Now you can try to solve problem 3 by supplementing others' punishment with your own corporal punishment. But only at the cost of worsening problems 1 and 2.
All of this wouldn't matter much if it weren't for the fact that other forms of discipline have been observed to be just as effective in altering children's behavior, and do not have the same drawbacks. Luckily those forms of discipline (and in many cases alternatives to discipline!) exist. And therefore there is no good reason to use corporal punishment.
If you hit your kid, your kid will try hitting other kids. And, according to statistics, they are also more likely to hit other people in their lives, including spouses and their own kids.
Your kid will almost certainly hit other kids no matter what you do. (At least if your kid is a boy, I'm not so sure about girls.) Of course you should punish it when it happens, but you shouldn't be surprised, and you certainly shouldn't despair that now your kid is going to grow up to be a wife-beater.
Which makes them less likely to respect attempts at discipline in other child care settings, such as detentions at school.
As it turns out, by the time I went to school I was well-behaved enough that I never got detention. I can't give all the credit to corporal punishment for that one... or can I?
And therefore there is no good reason to use corporal punishment.
Out of curiosity, what punishments do you give to your kids? Do you have a "reserve" punishment saved up that you've never had to use? One so powerful that the mere threat is enough to get 'em to behave?
Your kid will almost certainly hit other kids no matter what you do. (At least if your kid is a boy, I'm not so sure about girls.) Of course you should punish it when it happens, but you shouldn't be surprised, and you certainly shouldn't despair that now your kid is going to grow up to be a wife-beater.
I am aware of that, and don't despair. But I'm still going to make common sense steps that reduce the odds of that.
As it turns out, by the time I went to school I was well-behaved enough that I never got detention. I can't give all the credit to corporal punishment for that one... or can I?
According to the statistics, you cannot give credit to corporal punishment for that. There is a great deal of variability in kids, but _on average_ corporal punishment doesn't result in better behavior. (No matter how many people personally believe otherwise for themselves.)
Out of curiosity, what punishments do you give to your kids?
Diversion. Talking to. Counting. Time outs.
Do you have a "reserve" punishment saved up that you've never had to use?
> No, it's fully earned. I am a parent. I have witnessed first hand the moralizing, judgement and mutually contradictory universal expectations that random people have about how childrearing should be done.
I don't doubt you are an intelligent person, but it's not showing. I hope you consider it as a possible description and not an insult.
Let's go by parts:
> No, it's fully earned
it is objectively unearned. To earn the complaint of "moralizing about every single aspect" I need first to moralize about every single aspect. I moralized about one aspect.
> I have witnessed first hand the moralizing, judgement and mutually contradictory universal expectations that random people have about how childrearing should be done.
From me? please justify.
> Reframing the debate in terms so negative that anyone would appear insane to disagree with them is classic political correctness.
Please justify how is it that hitting causing pain is not using hitting and pain to shape children.
> Which raises the question, is your duty as a parent to prevent any and all psychological damage to your child?
you changed the subject from causing pain as a value in parenting to preventing psychological damage.
> If the goal is to minimize suffering, then is it better to indulge your child and raise an entitled spoiled individual that will never be satisfied for the rest of their life.
What? you are so far from being able to think about this subject.
> Or is it better to "use fear" (the fear of consequences, whatever they may be) to raise a child that has some notion of negative cause and effect?
I'm done. You could tell yourself I'm quitting because I don't have an answer. I just realize this subject turns brains off for very good reasons.
This "cause and effect" argument strikes me as incredibly shallow thinking. Do you seriously believe that the only way people learn cause and effect is from spankings? Appealing to cause and effect is extremely misleading because a punishment is not a natural effect of the cause of misbehavior. This is true almost by definition - you have to create a punishment because there is no natural negative consequences to whatever they did. That's why no-one punishes kids for falling and skinning their knee - the effect proceeds naturally from the cause. So the punishment is by definition an artificial manufacturing of a negative consequence to enforce the behavior of the parent's choosing -- not only is this objectively true, every child knows this. If you ask a kid why they get punished, how many would say "That's the way the universe works, it's like gravity."? None. They all realize that it's the parent's decision and choice, and are well-aware that other parent's make different decisions.
The reason this is important is that attempting to elide the parent's choice in how and when to punish is an attempt to avoid responsibility for being an authority, with all the questions of legitimacy, responsibility, transparency, appropriateness & fairness that that entails. Saying your actions are natural consequences like gravity means you are making yourself into a tyrant who cannot be questioned. This failure to accept the responsibility of being an authority is also a mark of the permissive parent, who refuses to set any limits at all. Even though they seem like opposites, they have something in common.
Think about spanking like this: would you beat up your colleague at work because he won't implement your specifications properly? If no, why not? If yes, would he be more likely to implement your specifications properly after you have beat him up?
Would a kid be more likely to understand your arguments than your colleague? If no, why would he be more likely to respond to spanking?
Ultimately, how can it really be justified to spank a kid???
My mother stopped using corporal punishment on us when my older brother (at 3 years old) explained that he was justified in hitting me, because hurting people was okay if they were smaller than you. He was practicing.
Children, even from when they're very little, know the difference between hurting themselves on something hot and you, their parent, intentionally causing them pain. Even if your punishments are consistent, there's no chance they will mistake you for a force of nature.
I imagine that some corporal punishment is better for a kid than letting them run wild, but that's a straw man; simply teaching them non-violently (i.e., through example) how to interact with others has a better result overall than using pain to control them. This makes sense intuitively and is well-supported by research.
All discipline is painful. Whether it's physical pain or emotional pain. I believe, based on purely anecdotal evidence, that physical pain is less harmful to a child's emotional well being.
Corporal punishment, if administered properly, is over in an instant, and once the child has been made to understand that what they did is not acceptable (and optionally why, depending on the child's age) then reconciliation between the child and the parent can take place.
Also, keep in mind that different types of discipline are appropriate for different children. I don't think it makes sense to spank a two year old, because they probably wouldn't remember why they were being spanked, but a light slap on the hand when they go to grab that priceless vase is pretty effective. I also don't spank my teen-aged son, but he has had to do his fair share of push-ups while listening to me explain to him the error of his ways.
Now, you may be one of those parents who don't discipline your child at all. More power to you, but bear in mind that if you do not discipline your child and teach them proper from improper behavior, then society WILL do it for you. And the methods society uses are probably going to be much more painful.
> I also don't spank my teen-aged son, but he has had to do his fair share of push-ups while listening to me explain to him the error of his ways.
He doesn't have to. It's not an requirement of life that he does. He's just submissive towards you.
I don't see why should it be a requirement. If he does, then why are they still a requirement? If he doesn't, why is it a good thing for him to comply? Why is he afraid? why is he submissive?
I understand you are not going to accept reality here. I know you have rationalizations to justify causing fear and pain in your "parenting". I understand it seem reasonable to you and that's not going to change. I quit.
I don't know how you're using the word "concentration" here, but playing an FPS (for example) usually demands that you pay attention to something new every few seconds, and definitely does not encourage lengthy focus or sustained thought. I think tends to be even more true for console games than games in general.
In any case, I doubt it's so much that video games are detrimental and more that you ought to have a hobby which actively cultivates concentration.
Maybe something like UT or CS, where it's all over in 3 minutes, that's true.
I remember being a kid and playing games like Tomb Raider where you would have to really think and work hard to unlock puzzles. Even games that offered you the opportunity to just fly through them usually had some form of deeper gameplay. For instance, SF Rush was all about things flashing by really fast, but the real challenge was to collect all the keys in the game, which often required a lot of innovative thinking about finding things to jump off.
The main difference here is between action and puzzle games. I personally disliked the pure puzzles because they felt too restrictive. Large-scale strategy games like simcity were a better fit for me. The same pattern shows up in my coding. I really don't like simple puzzles, but love challenges where I feel like I'm building something, not just solving it.
You know, that's a pretty good point. Most console games have some "completionist" aspects that usually encourage some degree of cleverness and persistence, if nothing else. I know that I always enjoyed that aspect when I was a kid, although I don't know if it's the prevailing mindset.
Writing up a bot program to gather tons of statistical data so you can do your job as a marketeer thousand of times faster than your peers.
Crisscrossing traffic patterns with a database of customers so you can efficiently landscape all your clients and make more money instead of waiting around being stuck in traffic.
Build and program swarm bots that clean the floors of your client faster so you can jump to the next client.
Write A/B testing programs for your restaurant chains so you can increase earning from your customers by incrementally trying out ways to get more customers, sell more foods, etc.
Programming, however, only tended to be used by programmers.
Because it's easy to trigger accidentally (the false positive rate for triggering hover behavior is usually incredibly high), because it requires excess precision to navigate correctly (nested hover menus can easily become a mini-game of "don't fall off the edge or you'll have to start all over"), because onMouseOut is flaky and can result in dangling hover menus that obscure content, because it's often more difficult to make cross-browser compatible, because it's more difficult to gracefully degrade a hover menu system when scripting is turned off, etc.
There are places where :hover triggered behavior is beneficial, but these tend to be vastly overwhelmed by the examples where :hover behavior is abused to the point of degrading usability. I'm aware that designers tend to loooove hover menus because they are shiny and cool, but from a usability standpoint we'd be better with a lot fewer of them.
The problems you mention are certainly real, but are they problems with hover effects in general or with specific uses of hover effects that may not be appropriate?
For example, while I completely agree that nested hover menus implemented naively (as many sites do) can be very annoying, single-tier menus with large areas can be an effective way to provide navigation of larger sites without cluttering the main page with dozens of links that most users won't care about. Likewise, while the "falling off the edge" problem is a real one, there are tools like jQuery's hoverIntent plug-in that can make the UI feel much more natural.
While I don't agree that it denotes bad UX in all cases, I acknowledge that it can be overdone to the point of annoyance (ala the new YouTube, which is a hover-fest)
I have to say I quite like YouTubes latest incarnation with all the hover elements because I have no interest in using anything other than the play button (I only use it for listening to live versions of music) and so a cleaner "first impression" UI suits my persona very well.
I understand that it can be a horrible experience for a persona which is specified to be 'low-tech knoweldge high-functionality use' though.
That comment uses an odd rhetorical technique -- the poster claims that the article uses "blatant doublespeak"... while ironically writing a long response claiming that he's refusing to write the response that he's writing.
Ok, interesting use of sarcasm (at least I hope that's sarcasm), but I'm not sure why someone would write a counter-argument, when even the post you're responding to is inviting him to make his argument in the first place. ;)
> That comment uses an odd rhetorical technique... writing a long response claiming that he's refusing to write the response that he's writing.
> Ok, interesting use of sarcasm (at least I hope that's sarcasm)
Not quite sarcasm - well, the last line I was joking yes, but there's a reason I wrote like that. After finishing that article, most people will be feeling really good - it's a feel good story. So there's a serious risk that any criticism of the argument is written off without being considered.
So I put it that I would say that stuff if I wasn't afraid of knee jerk reactions which ideally makes people do two things - first, consider the arguments without knee-jerk dismissing them. Second and more importantly, I want people to think: Would I knee jerk dismiss arguments here?
That response was actually geared more at progressives and people that would favor those policies than people who don't like them or neutrals. If I was going to write to someone that already thought those policies were bad ideas, I wouldn't have to be delicate. But I really wanted to engage people who care about the world, who are kind hearted, and have them think critically about the effects of this sort of policy.
To do so, I needed to avoid being written off immediately, so I wrote in a way that hopefully gets people to consider the arguments, yes, but also to consider whether they'd have written them off immediately without thinking. Hopefully a reader thinks, "Huh, he did make some good points. Would I write him off as crazy for trying to say those points or would I consider them?" If people can think, "Would I consider those arguments honestly?" we can get into a good discussion and hopefully get at good governance.
Topre Realforce 87U. (I also have two HHKBs, which are similar to the Realforce. I have not decided which I like better yet; same keyswitches, but different in many other ways.)
I also have a "Siig MiniKey" or something acquired new in box from a cheap/used electronics reseller, with Alps switches.. for $5.
Actually my friend bought it on a whim. They had a huge crate of them there, all new in their boxes, recovered from a sell-off from some corporate warehouse or something. I got it from him later, when I saw it, and I could instantly tell it had Alps switches in it. He said it was only $5 so we ran back to the place immediately -- but someone had already scooped up the entire crate of them. The place selling them had no clue they were worth a bunch of money. Otherwise, I would have bought all of them myself. I guess someone else had the same idea as me.
Interesting. But to be honest, I don't really like the feel of Alps or Cherry keyswitches. I know they are well made, but not as well made as Topre. It's hard to explain, so I'll just say -- take apart a Happy Hacking Keyboard some day, and you will love Topre forever. I knew I sort of liked Topre keyboards until I did that, but afterwards, it was easy to buy another HHKB (for work) and a Realforce. They are just so well-made, that you can't not like them.
I'll have to check it out. I don't think I've used a keyboard with Topre switches since they are even more exotic than Alps, and I had assumed they wouldn't be much better.
Yeah, they are "rubber dome", which scares people away. (They have a rubber dome, but they also have a spring. And they are capacitive; you don't press the key all the way down to type the key.) They are like Cherry browns done right, tactile, quiet, and no requirement to "bottom out". Topre really goes over the top with the part of the key that presses the dome; hard ABS plastic, with anti-rotation tabs, and a shape that makes even off-center hits go straight down. (You can push the key from the side, instead of from above, and the key doesn't jam; it just slides down normally. It's really brilliant.)
Oh, and this is true of both the Realforce and the HHKB Professional; same switches, different layout.
I am intrigued by what you say, but I wonder how easy the Topre is to keep clean.
Of all the things in an ordinary office or home (including toilet seats and such) phone handsets and computer keyboards tend to have the most germs. One anti-germ measure I use is to replace my keyboard every year or so, but replacing the Topre every year is more than I want to spend. Replacing just the keycaps would control germs just as well as replacing the board, but where would I buy keycaps for a Topre?
N-sided polygon support will be there in 2.62