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It occurs to me that "couch-potato-ness" has to be an acquired habit as well. How many times does a kid have to be instructed to sit down, shut up, and stop fidgeting — and punished for getting up, making noise, wandering away, getting into things, making a mess — before they are content to sit and watch TV for hours a day?
In response to
Action and habit
There's a simpler explanation then either this, or seatbelts, that I've discovered in my field research as a parent ;). Television, for young kids, is a super-stimulus that completely captures their attention. For parents, this means you don't have to attend to your kid - you can do other things without being interrupted with questions or requests, and because their attention is fully occupied, you don't have to monitor that closely. It's easy to imagine that using TV in this way is a great temptation for some types of parents (or, arguably, most types) - there's always chores around the house to do, and you need a break every so often, etc. After a while, I'm sure both parents and kids forget there's other fun stuff do to, and you now have a TV habit. It's hard to break, too - kids tend to flip out when you turn it off on them.
In response to
Toronto Meetup, Apr 14 8pm
If noise proves to be a problem, would anyone be up for experimenting with alternate venues for future meetups? I really liked the quiet atmosphere that we had at our last meeting (until that second party showed up, anyway). But that may have been a fluke.
From what I've seen so far, pubs don't seem to be overly conducive to rational discussion, though I am aware that some people have expressed their preference for them. If nothing else, we could compromise and alternate the venue every two weeks, between a pub and something slightly less noisy.
Unfortunately I have no suggestions, since meatspace is not my specialty.
I'd (reluctantly) trade-off access to alcohol for a quieter environment - unfortunately I have no specific recommends to make on a place.
In response to
Less Wrong Book Club and Study Group
Please reply to this comment if you intend to participate, and are willing and able to free up a few hours per week or fortnight to work through the suggested reading or exercises.
Please indicate where you live, if you would be willing to have some discussion IRL. My intent is to facilitate an online discussion here on LW but face-to-face would be a nice complement, in locations where enough participants live.
(You need not check in again here if you have already done so in the previous discussion thread, but you can do so if you want to add details such as your location.)
This sounds great - count me in. I'm in Toronto.
In response to
Attention Lurkers: Please say hi
Greetings from Canada.
I'm an audio mixer, working mostly for Discovery Channel, with an interest in science and transhumanism. Been lurking for a couple of years.
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Another reason that I'm so glad my parents didn't have a TV when I was growing up, although sci-fi books provided an adequate superstimulus. I'm pretty sure my parents figured out by the time I was 8 that giving me tons of books for Christmas and birthdays was the best way to keep me out of trouble.
My kids are still very young, so they're not self-sufficient readers yet, but they really like story-time, so it's looking good that they'll grow up into book lovers (and I'm sure they got book-lover genes from my wife and I ;).
I don't see TV as inherently bad - in fact, some of the kids programming on Treehouse in Canada is quite good! It's just a tool that is particularly prone to misuse.
As an aside - one of the shows "Guess with Jess" teaches a kid-version of hypothesis formation and testing and inferential reasoning.