The thing is, simply naming a number isn't a great achievement, not even on the part of the mathematician's nephew who came up with 'googol'. It makes for an interesting story, but the thought processes involved are about as relevant to thinking mathematically as naming a pet dog is to understanding canine biology. But the initiative to name things is certainly valuable, and well worth reinforcing.
The trick here is to lead your son towards an interest in the properties of numbers and away from any potential delusions of grandeur dependent on being the next 'googol' kid. Alternatively, or in concert with emphasizing the properties of numbers, you could also interest him in the properties of language and word construction, which he seems to have an aptitude for. Granted, your six year old would be pretty exceptional if you could get him interested in either!
It's called child development. Heard of it? Because if the child isn't old enough to gain reason and judgement you are just killing creativity, for no benefit. What age do reason and judgement hone to the right degree?
Not 6, thats for damn sure. This is depressing.
I could just see jraines and xlnt with a toddler. xlnt: "Now, Joey, it's Da-dee, not da-da. It's important to pronounce things preciesly" jraines: "I think you can impart precision without killing the kids language skills"
I dont mean to be coming across as rude, but I believe the better way to handle the six year old is to encourage the process of creativity and imagination. There are enough people in his life (at least a Quadrupillion!!) that will try to tell him that hes being impractical and unrealistic, no need to add to that count.
This kid isn't wired like you. Normal children do not have those reasoning abilities at that age. You can't reasonably project from your experience to his, but are more likely to, because that's how people with autistic traits relate.
"You would be shitty parents and you're autistic". Nice line of argument.
I think that parental expectations of children to dislike criticism is a large factor in why they usually grow up to dislike it.
Again, (and I don't mean any of this to sound harsh) your thoughts are not too relevant, because you can't use your kind of reasoning here.
My dad (who is on the spectrum) ended up being horribly abusive to me throughout my childhood and teenage years because of thinking a lot like this. I don't want to conflate you and him, just to warn you that there is a really big trap it's easy for people with your personality traits to fall into around being overly logical, the projection that people with deficient mirror neurons have to resort to for relating to people, and how to treat and raise kids.
You should recognize that you need the help of a person who doesn't share your mind-blindness to make appropriate judgements about children and how to relate to them. You absolutely cannot figure out how to treat kids on your own if you are on the spectrum. Using your logic, you should recognize it doesn't apply, and that you need a tool that isn't in your toolbox. Either a person who does have that skill who you listen to, or enough study of child psychology to reason your way to the right way to treat neurotypical kids.
" You should recognize that you need the help of a person who doesn't share your mind-blindness to make appropriate judgements about children and how to relate to them. You absolutely cannot figure out how to treat kids on your own if you are on the spectrum."
That is so disgustingly far from an objective statement.
That sounds awful out of context (which I probably failed to convey well). I was speaking particularly to xlnt, directly in response to things he said that saliently reminded me of the justifications my autistic father used to feel like he was doing the right thing during the years when he was extremely (and, importantly) unknowingly abusive to me, with the intention of challenging that part of his worldview. I didn't mean 'you' in any more universal sense then that, and I most certainly didn't mean it in the way you are reading it. I should of more carefully limited the scope of what I was saying to him, and made a point of mentioning that many autistic people are naturally great and understanding with kids. I'm not a great writer, so I'm sorry for that. Also, this discussion was going on for a while way down-thread and then this branch started, so you may have read the discussion out of chronological order.
People who talk about raising kids as if they were robots, and their job is to use logic to make sure the robot always gives precisely the right output for it's own good later on need help raising kids. That much is undoubtedly true. You are reading me as meaning something I didn't mean.
This is an argument about thinking versus feeling on the MBTI scale and you can't reduce something along those axises to right and wrong... raising kids is more complicated than that.
This is also ad hominem because xlnt is not talking about raising kids like they are robots; he believes it is best to treat them like people. You are misunderstanding his actual beliefs because you are stuck on an argument of little meaning. http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/ This is the philosophy in question, debate that if you want.
I do, mostly and personally, agree with that. Though I would say it's generally the right of the parent to raise the child as the parent sees fit, within reason of course.
PS would you like to continue this by AIM or email? curi42 / [email protected]
I don't use AIM but I will drop you an email after I get off my ass for a half hour and grab something to eat from my trailer.
So suppose we take the list of all the people who have similar views to me, on these issues. Then we go through the list and check if each person is autistic. If we find one who isn't autistic, then can we count these as valid positions?
I'll drop you that email, maybe we are getting too far off topic.
Autism != Asperger's Syndrome
The existence of mirror neurons is not just a theory. A mirror neuron is (by definition) a neuron that fires both when you do something and someone else has done something. Those are observed. It is a theory that it causes autism, but not a theory that they fire less in autistic children, or that these areas of the brain are almost precisely the same places where autistic spectrum people have thinner brains then controls.
"How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The inverse power of praise"
In this case, the kid has exercised enough creativity to realise that he can make up his own numbers, but not enough critical thinking to realise that the space of large numbers is huge enough that not every number should have a special name. Ideally, you'd want to use this as an opportunity to challenge the kid to see if he can work this out for himself. Ask him what other numbers he can think of, like a googolplex plus a thousand, or a googolplex minus one hundred, and see if he can figure out that there are far more numbers than there could possibly be catchy names for. Since the "interestingness" of that particular large number is apparent only in base ten, you could even use this as an opportunity to introduce him to other bases (or better still, to see if he can surmise their existence for himself).
It's a tricky situation, and I'm not sure what the best way to handle it is. But neither blind, effusive praise nor cold, harsh rejection are the best ways to go, here. If you had to pick one over the other, blind effusive praise it is, but there's definitely a middle ground here, one that selects for the things genuinely worth encouraging.
Usefulness or not, he's showing the signs of a thinking man in the works.
If I had an idea, and someone explained to my why it's no good, I'd be very pleased. I'd be glad they replied and told me something I didn't know. I'd consider it a reward; and a much more useful one than applause. I think that's the most sensible way to feel: applause is OK, but serious replies are even nicer.
That's textbook autistic thinking. Almost verbatim, that's the difference between autistic and non autistic responses to praise. You are completely justified in thinking that way about yourself (and I think the same thing).
But you also have to realize most people's brains aren't wired that way. Especially children who are also engaged in things like spontaneous sharing.
Anyhow, I agree that you should make personality-appropriate comments that the child will appreciate.
(I upvoted all your comments in this thread now. Please don't worry about karma.)
Also it's debilitating for a lot of people, many of whom lack so many mirror neurons they never learn how to communicate.
But there's another rather obvious possibility: the person running, and the person watching running, were both thinking about running. Their brain activity was similar because they were thinking about the same thing.
It's not true that for two people thinking the same thing, their brain scan looks the same, so your intuition is flawed. They are sure mirror neurons exist, and they know where in the brain they are.
I can give you a list of books on neurology and autism to read. But I don't want to hunt papers on the web, decide on the best ones, read them all and find one to recommend to you, sorry. I'd hunt down VS Ramachandrans recent work if you wanted to find one, but he is more of a theorist then the researcher who proves the theory, so I'm not sure if that's quite what you want.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran06/ramachandran0...
Could you give one reason to suppose that mirror neurons are a hardware feature -- a type of neuron -- not a software feature -- a particular strategy/mental-technique for using one's neurons?
Therefore the "software" theory seems much more plausible.
Simply, the brain models it's environment. That is all there is to it. A flower is a flower is a flower.
That'd be like me going up to Buckminster Fuller and saying "I don't think those dome things will work because I played with legos as a kid and don't see building it out of legos."
Or going up to Einstein and saying "I don't think your special relativity is good because I threw rocks at each other and then away from each other, and I didn't notice it happen."
You're a bit out of your league here, is what I mean to say. The point of Ramachandran's writing is to persuade people who know neurology, not to teach it to laypeople who don't have the intellectual integrity to admit they are out of their league.
I do know that your arguments from authority are invalid.
Appeals to legitimate authority are valid.
(disclaimer: Ramachandran is one of my biggest intellectual heros)
I emailed you two passages from Ramachandran's essay. Could you confirm that they are representative of his view, and not out of date?
I'm sorry, I can't talk to you, my mail client says you're a spammer.
Do you think this is an accurate statement about mirror neurons?
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p2...
Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds."
And this from the next page?
Denying [one's own] paralysis is odd enough but why would a patient deny another patient's paralysis? We suggest that this bizarre observation is best understood in terms of damage to Rizzolatti's mirror neurons. It's as if anytime you want to make a judgement about someone else's movements you have to run a VR (virtual reality) simulation of the corresponding movements in your own brain and without mirror neurons you cannot do this.
The second one I think is true and an extremely elegant solution for a bizarre neurological phenomena.
And critiquing Ramachandran's neurology on the basis of an epistemology ignorant of neuroscience seems a lot like critiquing Newton's physics on the basis of an astrology ignorant of astronomy. (this is hard for me to admit, my training is as a philosopher).
It's a useful number because it gets a kid playing with math. Encourage them to teach themselves more about it, to play with it, but, for Christ's sake, do not give the child a terse answer more appropriate for a college student then a damn 6 year old.
Your attitude is at the root of why the entire edifice of mathematics education to children is completely soul numbing.
In the future I would strongly encourage you to leave out remarks such as, "You should understand more about child development." I don't mind if you state that I'm wrong, for clarity, but you don't know anything about how many years I've spent learning about child development, or how much I know about it, so it's not wise to comment on that.
PS I upmodded you back to 1. I don't think you intended to be hostile.
As the cold-hearted over-educated curmudgeons of the internet, we're allowed to answer part (s) without worrying about part (b). The kid's dad has to worry about part (b) for himself, but I hope the kid's dad has enough perspective to realize the correct answer to part (a) is that it's worthless.