My 4th grade teacher is teaching my class how to write poetry, and this is one of the poems that I wrote:
Where am I?
What is this place?
Is it the darkness of night?
I heard screams
and then I was here
Here, as in nowhere
This place was not nothing
it was less than that.
I didn’t see nothing,
for I had nothing to see with
I didn’t hear nothing,
for I had nothing to hear with
I didn’t feel nothing,
for I had nothing to feel with.
I had slept before, but nothing like this
Was Grandma here?
Did she meet this fate too?
I couldn’t know, for
I had nothing to know with
Even if she ...
I asked my son Alex to post this because I'm proud of his writing skill, but also to show a challenge of raising a child without religion. He is far from obsessed with death, and told me he is thinking of death less than 1% of the time. Still, it would be comforting to be able to honestly tell him that he has nothing to fear from death, although knowing Alex he would use this as a counterargument when I tell him to be safe by, for example, buckling his seat-belt or looking both ways when crossing the street.
This seems inapt as a generalization about human psychology.
In one psychology experiment which a professor of mine told me about, test subjects were made to play a virtual game of catch with two other players, where every player was represented to each other player only as a nondescript computer avatar, the only input any player could give was which of the other two players to toss the "ball" to, and nobody had any identifying information about anyone else involved. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, the other two players were confederates of the...
Sadly, the insults of those we do not respect often matter, because of what they imply about that person's future conduct, and because of their effects on third parties.
So for example if a bully starts insulting you, this may matter, both because this might indicate he is about to attack you, and because it may cause other people to turn against you. To give a non-cyber-bullying example, the insults of Idi Amin against Indians residing in Uganda surely mattered to them, even though they did not respect him.
In my small fourth grade class of 20 students, we are learning how to write essays, and get to pick our own thesis statements. One kid, who had a younger sibling, picked the thesis statement: "Being an older sibling is hard." Another kid did "Being the youngest child is hard." Yet another did "Being the middle child is hard", and someone else did "Being an only child is hard." I find this as a rather humorous example of how people often make it look like they're being oppressed.
Does anyone know why people do this?
Be charitable; don't assume they're trying to present themselves as martyrs. Instead they could be outlining the peculiar challenges and difficulties of their particular positions.
Life is hard for everyone at times.
One kid, who had a younger sibling, picked the thesis statement: "Being an older sibling is hard." Another kid did "Being the youngest child is hard." Yet another did "Being the middle child is hard", and someone else did "Being an only child is hard." I find this as a rather humorous example of how people often make it look like they're being oppressed.
Taken at face value, the four statements aren't incompatible. Saying that being X is hard in an absolute sense isn't the same as saying that being X is harder than being Y in a relative sense, or that X people are being oppressed.
I will repeat part of the number out loud and memorize another part of the number. Then, when I recall it, I string the two together.
My dad(I'm only 10) has had me do Dual N-Back programs for quite a while, since I was about 5.
What I did was start from 9 digits, and once I mastered that, I moved up one digit. Yes, I do recall the number still.
I memorized a 20-digit number in under a minute, then repeated it forward, backward, and forward again, and lastly repeated it while adding 1 to each digit.
Thanks! I'm the 3rd scenario in my case, and I joined that Brilliant website. It seems to be helpful so far. I do have to participate in classes where I know everything, so what I'll end up doing most of the time is having my dad send me to school with special math worksheets that are at my level that I can do during math class.
I already have some Martin Gardener books, and will be ordering more, as you are not the only person who recommended him.
Hello. My name is Alex. I am the 10-year-old son of LessWrong user James_Miller.
I am very good at math for my age. I have read several of the books on rationality that my dad owns, and he convinced me to join this community. I like the idea of everyone in a community being honest because I often get into trouble at school for saying honest things that people don't like and talking back to adults(which seems like it's defined as not doing exactly what you're told.)
My favorite subject in school is math. At home, my interests are playing the video game Minecr...
Hey Alex!
When I think back to when I was your age, I really wished I had gotten more involved in math competitions. Does your school have any programs like MATHCOUNTS, AMC8, etc.? I didn't compete in any academic competitions until high school, and I really wished that I had known about them earlier on. It makes getting ahead in math so much fun and it helps lay some really important foundations for the more complicated stuff.
Anyway, keep up the good work!
My name is Avi, and I'm 19.
I was similiar in some aspects to you when I was a kid, in particular being good at math (did calculus and programming at 12-13), getting in trouble, being bored in school, reading a lot, having trouble with emotions.
I hadn't had an explicitly rational upbringing, and only recently (9 months or so) got into it after a chance encounter with HPMOR.
I'll try to give advice on the things you asked. Bear in mind that I didn't actually try any of this when I was in school, it's mostly what I would advise my younger self if I had to do i...
Thanks; I fixed it up now!