I think Ender's Game is the most compassionate protest against this kind of thinking - it is a thought experiment that demonstrates that with the right environment, even the most intelligent can be taught to use their skills in an utilitarian and amoral way - the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race, despite representing the moral middle ground between his monstrous brother and his saintly sister. The later books are about him trying to undo the damage he did.

I don' think the author intended the readership to see Battle School as an ideal form of education.

> that demonstrates that with the right environment, even the most intelligent can be taught to use their skills in an utilitarian and amoral way - the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race, despite representing the moral middle ground between his monstrous brother and his saintly sister.

Uh, I remember it as Ender having been tricked into it. He thought he was still doing simulations to prove his tactical ability, with how the scenarios kept getting more difficult, and did things he never would have done if he knew it was real.

In fact, the ultimate atrocity—destroying a planet (in what he thought was a simulation)—was something he did precisely because he expected to get kicked out of Command School for it (which he was sick of). If I break this rule, they'll never let me be a commander. It would be too dangerous. I'll never have to play a game again. And that is victory.

>the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race.

You may need to dwell some more, because there's some higher order practical and moral contention there. Guilt over things done in pursuit of survival is the victor's luxury. If you lose, and die anyway you don't have that problem. This is one of the sharp divergences that tends to exist between the soldier and the pacifist. One fights today to repent and atone tomorrow. The other risks destruction, robbing one of a future in which one may possibly avoid making the same mistakes or committing the same atrocities as one's forbearers. In this sense, the weight of being a mass murderer is shared equally by the warrior and the poet. One through action, the other through inaction. No matter the outcome, somebody's hands are covered in blood. Ender did what he was uniquely equipped to do in the moment where it was necessary for him, and those under his guidance to do it. We live not only under our own instrumentality, but under the auspices and obligations to which we are bequeathed by accident of our own existence.

Ender's Game is an exquisite portrait of how the central theme of human existence is suffering. If you live to fight another day, you suffer those fights in the future, and the scars of the past you carry with you. If you acquiesce to destruction, your suffering stops, but the world moves on regardless.

To be human is to struggle and suffer. The trick is coaxing some positivity out of the entire affair while we're around to do so. This applies at all levels of human endeavor. We all struggle against our own adversities perpetuated upon us by the "other". The biggest difference from one bit of suffering and struggle to the next, is how you define the "other".

It's weird, but Ender's Game made a lot more sense after a reading of the Bhagavad Gita. I do not know if Card set out with that intent, but the two mesh with, and complement each other in ways few texts written at different time periods have. There's also good resonance with Martin Heidigger's thoughts on the nature of man being inextricably linked with the act of becoming or Being, the characteristic quality of Dasein. You cannot change your past, you can change the future, but only in as much as the road that has lead you to where you are allows.

The Philosopher is left to wonder if it could have worked out any other way, the Faithful have their answer even if they didn't know it, and even a Free Agent, determined to sail their own way must navigate the waters pushed by the natural forces around them.

Except it wasn't necessary for him, since the entire war was premised on miscommunication and misunderstanding, which he turned out to be uniquely equipped to resolve... but was instead pushed & tricked into violence.

I read it as Ender successfully solved the problems that he were educated and grown into to solve, despite no known solution existing and while having to be creative and improvise in a "no win scenario".

The book is a critique, but more about wether it is good enough to be shaped by society, or how people shapes and make up society. When the latter is nearly non-existent, you end up with results such as in the first book.

I didn’t like Ender’s Game and it’s portrayal of military boot camp. I had no idea what the training in Enders Game was about besides bullying and cruelty and very simplistic tactics.

I went through US military training in the early 90s. A lot of it was bullshit but the intent was clear to weed out those who cannot handle an incredible amount of stress while you get little sleep or rest. There was no physical or verbal abuse. The intent of the training was to get people to keep performing and getting along with your team while everyone suffered the artificial stress created by the instructors.

I went through Marines boot camp and that was a ton of verbal and psychological abuse. There were very clear restrictions on physically assaulting recruits -- if a recruit entered within five feet? of a Drill Instructor, they could consider it an attack on their person and physically react -- so the DIs would spread their arms out and run at us to force us into their "engagement zone".

I saw a guy piss himself from the verbal abuse in front of 100 other recruits in the squad bay. Another recruit vomited bile from being spurred to exhaustion by our "Kill Hat", again in public view of the rest of us and to the protests of the medic who pleaded with the Kill Hat to stop. He seemed a deeply sadistic man. There were so many of us for so few DIs it was possible to avoid their attention: my teenage self with a head full of fantasy called this the "eye of the malefactor".

I've never seen so much evil in my life but I also never made it to a conflict zone.

FYI https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/marine-drill-inst...

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marine-drill-instructors-les...

> Felix was convicted of ordering Lance Cpl. Ameer Bourmeche into a dryer, which then was turned on as Felix demanded he renounce his faith. Bourmeche testified that he twice affirmed his faith and Felix and another drill instructor twice sent him for a bruising, scorching tumble inside the dryer.

> After a third spin, Bourmeche said, he feared for his life and renounced his religion. The drill instructors then let him out, he said.

He only got 10 years for that? What a farce. He should hang. That's a depraved attack on the core values of the nation he's supposed to be protecting.

Marcus Luttrell (the Lone Survivor guy) says that the brutal training required to join the SEALs is the reason he survived his ordeal.

Sorry you went through that. I can only speak for myself and what I understand to be the norm. I know many countries’ boot camps still believe in the lie that abuse makes someone better. When/where was your boot camp?

This was 14 years ago at the San Diego Recruit Depot right next to the airport. Those planes would keep us up all night. I remember breaking protocol to buy some earplugs so I could sleep. Much of that experience felt like a wild fever dream.

Of course some kids will get life lessons out of this experience, but they would get lessons from kinds of adversities anyway. I don't see the point. For me it's just cruelty for the sake of cruelty.

Another comment here talked how Canadian indigenous children were subject to this treatment for over a century https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27559649 and this wasn't made in the best interest of the victims.

And anyway, I don't believe in having institutionalized "tough love" could ever work. This kind of institution often attract sadistic people, that enjoy making the kids suffer.

Enders game is a fiction. And while military boarding schools (and any closed seclude communities) in fact do have abuse systems amd are prone to bullying issue, there is zero evidence the abuses are best way to teach things.

Being strip searched does not fixes mental health issues. Really.

I think people setting these up get their inspiration from the agoge, the boy rearing system in Sparta. The same methods are used to raise children soldiers in Africa.

https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

Also, you might be interesting in Cult of the Badass:

https://acoup.blog/2021/02/19/collections-the-universal-warr...

Most child soldiers’ mental health is ruined for life.

A model of obedience and desensitization achieved through abuse followed by committing unspeakable atrocities is not a great formula for making good citizens.

What kind of twisted mental gymnastics convinces the creators of these programs that their programs are anything but harmful?

I was rewatching shows from 1990 and so on lately. One of surprising observations was that "tough love" came up multiple times, always as positive.

There is something appealing about tough no nonsense solutions to people with authoritarian tendencies. And there is ignorance about how bad it can get in isolated communities where weaker individuals have no where to escape.

I think it's not surprising that it had (and probably still has) positive connotations to many people, because "tough love" sounds like something most people employ sometimes - from a parent enforcing bedtimes to a friend telling another friend that they're being an asshole in some way. I think what clicked for the majority of people was the idea that loving someone doesn't mean saying yes to their every whim, rather than anything extreme.

When growing up as a teenage male, there was a turning point in my mental development. I was sitting in class cracking jokes when this jerk kid stood up and punched me in the back of the head. I didn't know how to respond, so I just sat there. I was an out of shape kid who would have definitely lost.

That event changed me. In the weeks and months ahead, anger and shame in my response led to a focused and intentional mental and physical development. I started exercising, eating better, and learning how to fight. I developed social responses that helped me become better respected and less manipulated, and changed from a rotund pushover to a normal male.

Our society has changed massively over the decades, and one of the biggest changes I've seen is that it's become significantly more feminized, but I think it's important to acknowledge that some things that work for feminine young women won't necessarily work for masculine young men. I think that tough love programs exist because many men who go there and run the place went through similar experiences as me. If the stress is handled adaptively and not maladaptively, it can be a motivator for positive change while dealing with our weaknesses.

Your response to that problematic event seems like dealing with trauma and some of the words you use like “our society has become […] significantly more feminized” seem to indicate some of those issues are still unresolved.

While I appreciate that you turned this into a positive, I don’t think violence and tough love is something we should promote, celebrate or even tolerate as a society.

Here is a crazy thought: how about we strive to create a space where everyone feels valid as they are, where they feel that have a space where they can contribute, rather than make people feel like they have to toughen up in order to “take charge” or forcefully “making space” for themselves by forcing others to follow their will.

The guy hitting you was not an appropriate response, neither is you possibly disrupting class by cracking jokes. The solution is communication and respect. Getting buff and letting a culture of “boys will be boys” prevail is not.

Why do you think that people "as they are" are the best thing for society to have? What about the people who are violent and employ tough love, as they are? Should they feel valid too?

Your premise of "everyone feels valid as they are" written directly alongside "[we should not promote] violence and tough love" betrays the contradiction. What you actually mean is we should strive for everyone to change themselves to be feminized and noncompetitive, and the people who are already this way should feel valid.

"The solution [to dealing with a bully] is communication and respect" is not based in reality. No bully has ever responded to communication. What they do respond to, and what society responds to, because we have had it ingrained in our brain stems for millions of years, is masculinity and assertiveness, backed by a (perceived) threat of violence. I'm sorry that you don't like this, but it cannot and I argue should not be changed, short of chemically poisoning everyone's testosterone levels with microplastics.

My statement on the feminization of society doesn't come from trauma. Global testosterone levels have been dropping for decades[1]. You can see it in old pictures: men were less fat, more competitive, and happier. Rates of sex and relationships among men and young boys have dropped precipitously.

Speaking anecdotally, I feel most fulfilled when I embrace my masculine side and focus it on positive pursuits. Competition, pursuit of status, and power can all be good things if focused. This event unlocked that in me and helped me live a more fulfilled life I'm the long run.

In fact, your response is exactly what I'm talking about. Productive masculine behavior is shamed nowadays. That's sad to me.

[1] https://carraghermethod.com/the-hard-truth-for-men-declining...

> Productive masculine behavior is shamed nowadays

Can you list some examples for that? It just doesn't match my experience. When people complain about masculine behavior, it's never the productive kind.

Jumping at the opportunity to lead and fighting (figuratively) to spar with the instructor first seems like behavior that some would find heroic and others would find unfair. (note that boys that behave this way in elementary school are mostly advised to take medication to calm down and behave like their female classmates).

They say Ritalin is prescribed primarily for the teachers.

It doesn't really help the student all that much since they go from hyper, attention-seeking and not paying attention to stagnant, inhibited and disinterested (and still not paying attention).

I believe it does work for its purpose, but the dose is usually much too high and had to be taken often enough (it only lasts 3 to 4 hours) that the kid is pretty much constantly peaking then coming down.

Eventually they did create "extended release" tablets that probably fix that issue, so my experience may no longer apply.

So then you'd be in favor of Universal Healthcare, subsidies for gym memberships for low income individuals, stricter regulations against lying/misleading in fast food/junk food, and stricter regulations/penalties for pollution?

Yes to all of that, but it's tangential to the main topic here.

> Rates of sex and relationships among men and young boys have dropped precipitously.

Perhaps I am reading this wrong, but it sounds a lot like you want a return of pederasty? Let's assume you mean relationships and sex with people of similar ages, what ages should we imagine when you say "young boys"?

I believe he isn't referring to sex between the two, just the total.

Well he did express a desire to return to traditional manliness, and you can't get more traditional than ancient Greece, right?

I think it's great that he managed to positively channel his masculinity, but I have my doubts at considering getting punched in the back of the head a good or acceptable thing, even though it may have had a positive outcome in his case. Perhaps I'm too feminized.

As a teen male of short stature there was no hope of exercise rescuing me from abusive peers. There were only appeals to authority, avoidance, attempts at deft commentary, or submission and befriending the problem.

Any gender preference school systems may or may not have aren't really a factor when the bully has 180 lbs to ones 100 lbs.

Did you also stop cracking jokes while classmates were struggling to learn?

Psychology. (Ortho)pedagogues. Even some psychiatrists. It's incentives versus how human minds work.

https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820...

You see, if you look things up you will find that psychology is good at exactly what you'd expect it to be good at if you look at their methods: describing behavior "in the large". Think "Of 100 drug addicts, 10 will commit crimes due to drugs", those types of statements. Or "100 kids with IQ>130, 10 will develop severe autism".

It can also often describe what people here call a "funnel". 100 kids go into kindergarten, 10 will fail, of those 10, 5 will get into youth services ... and so on and so forth. Problem is that this makes people always focus on the worst possible outcomes (when reality is that the vast majority of psychological problems (and "problems") go away after a relatively short time, very short time in kids (think months, a year at most), and attempts to treat them make them worse rather than better for the large majority of clients. 3 main reasons are that, especially in kids, psychological problems exist outside of the kid, they're generally the result of repeating very bad experiences at school. Obviously nothing can be done to "fix" the kid that won't be undone 2 weeks after they rejoin school. Second reason is that treatment, especially residential, takes away the information the client needs to fix their issue, and thirdly treatment takes away the need to fix the issue. But ignoring such considerations has been how psychiatry has grown)

Like any statistician knows: predicting numbers can be done extremely accurately. Predicting one concrete situation, also known as "diagnosing", with incomplete situation and everyone lying about it, is utterly impossible.

This means that attempts to change these situations ("help these kids") fail spectacularly and often work extremely contra productively (I mean, everyone knows the reputation of CPS, who do nothing BUT this. Saying they don't produce healthy kids just doesn't do justice to HOW bad these organizations are for kids. Just the suicide numbers alone ...). Psychologists, orthopedagogues and even psychiatrists often CAUSE mental health issues in healthy kids because they interfere, against the wishes of kids and often parents too, without having any ability to make accurate diagnoses.

And of course, the worst of it are the incentives. Especially with kids, the problem is the environment. Generally not the home environment, but the school. However, CPS, psychologists, orthopedagogues have to keep in mind that they get "referrals" (against the wishes of children and parents) from schools, school-related (sport clubs), even sometimes police. So problems in schools grow and fester, because these professionals can't react to problems in schools, they would lose all their business. That even goes for CPS.

Because it is unfortunately not hard to explain why organizations, perpetually short of money and paid per-child (VERY short of money in the CPS' case), refuse to use the "leave them alone and in 6 months 2/3 issues go away" paradigm that research suggests to be used.

IDK, man… I know you’ve created a whole narrative here to conflate child soldiers and CPS/psychologists, but I’ve known several people who do CPS work here in Minnesota and the situations that get kids removed from a home are either chronic neglect, abuse and/or intense and actively harmful (like: kids chained to radiators in the basement). Even when kids are removed, the law actively requires the child go to a blood relative if possible (and returned to their parent as soon as possible). We’re not sending them west on orphan trains anymore.

IDK about Minnesota, but in Europe this is not the case. The vast majority of kids getting taken away get taken away for 1 reason only:

Some social worker (and there's lots of them) complains that they've refused necessary help. Of course, kids refusing help has direct financial repercussions for these people.

That's over 80% of placements (and let's not forget close to another 15% are kids getting arrested for crimes). Kids actually having seen physical abuse are very rare IN CPS. Hell, these days the proportion of kids that have gotten abused is higher in "Juvie" than in CPS institutions (most of these institutions will refuse kids who have "trauma as a first problem". Likewise they'll refuse addicts, anorexic, outwardly or inwardly agressive kids).

Issue is that what is never mentioned is the success rate of these social workers. Most often they're there to fix autism (and not autism like you've seen in documentaries, "autism" like refusing to listen to parents/teachers on occasion). Almost without exception problems exacerbate with these treatments (one simple reason that these kids are often smart enough to coast through (often primary) school. However, if they are denied school attendance (because social workers work during school hours, of course, so treatments happen during school hours), obviously they start failing more and more.

Given social workers' education (ie. high school, a VERY low course level in high school, sometimes not even having finished it) they are also incapable of helping out with most problems. You can't help a kid with math problems if you don't know math. So they should have a level of every subject given in high school, at least the level of teachers. To put it very mildly, they don't.

A bunch of these kids understand what is happening and start fighting social workers. This then leads linea recta to CPS involvement, mostly because these are very young kids. Violence works against them (read on), but these kids are too young to effectively use violence against an adult. Instead they cry and refuse to go or run away or the like.

Of course, the net effect is that CPS starts protecting their real clients, the ones who provide them new business: those social workers. Attacking the kids who asked for help, then refuse what they got. With threats, which doesn't work well, then, via youth judges, with violence.

And, the other side of the coin CPS becomes actively hostile to kids with real problems, whether that's abusive parents, drugs, criminal involvement or school problems.

They are very often accused that they do not protect kids. If the parents and/or the kid is really violent, CPS and social workers will keep their distance. Again some kids use this to "fight free" from CPS. The problem with that this that these kids are inexperienced, but trying to systematically escalate violence against adults, because that's the only thing that can get them out (and often back into a good school: CPS gets extra money if kids go to "special needs" schools). Issue with that is that "dosing" violence to the right level is hard for people who've done it as police agents for 20 years. Kids regularly use too little ... and too much violence, both of which have essentially the same consequence: getting locked up in isolation 23h per day for a period from 2 weeks to several years. And of course, this affects CPS employees: only the worst of the worst remain.

There is very little about your summary that resonates with how I have seen CPS work done in the modern day, but I’m sorry if you had an experience similar to what you are relating here.

> Especially with kids, the problem is the environment. Generally not the home environment, but the school.

Yeah, no. I'm not living in the US so maybe you really have a weird bully culture like it was showed in TV shows ten years ago, but no, generally its the home environment. Some children DO have issues with schools and schoolwork, but the broken children i took care of when i was a youth camp counselor were broken at home. Wether it was rape, daily violence (acid on the face was the worse, luckily one eye was saved) or sometime just psychological torture (fun time when a father prostitute his wife and his child until she loose it and put him in a hospital). Oh, and the trucker stepfather taking his 11 year old stepdaughter in his truck for short haul because he needs company, and the mother keeping her daughter from speaking about it?

I'm sure in some cases, the psychologists are overzealous. But i took care of placed children every summer for 6 years, and yes, mistake were probably made for some, but for the vast majority? I'm sure even hearing about half their life would make you ask why they were not taken away sooner. The eleven yo girl i talked about, do you know how it was detected? She started blowing guys in the school toilet. Probably a "shool issue", yes, obviously. Without the school, i wonder how this would have been detected.

Whether children were wrongly placed is not a matter of whether there's a reason at all, but a matter of whether the kids are better off like this.

This has been researched and the answer is largely no.

I would also like to point out those kids are repeating what social workers tell them to avoid trouble. At least half of it isn't true.

I want to repeat what I said before. It isn't because home situations are great. It's just how bad youth services are.

See for example the largest study on CPS ever:

https://sci-hub.se/10.1257/aer.97.5.1583

Or it's popular summary "Troubled homes better than foster care":

https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-07-02-foste...

And let's not forget just how bad the reputation of CPS is where it comes to getting things wrong. Some studies claim that false accusations of child abuse, because there is no standard of proof for taking the kids away (only for locking up the perpetrators), that the false diagnoses and false accusations far outnumber the true ones.

And like anyone who's seen an orphanage (they don't like to be called that anymore) and half of all foster homes knows. Seeing damaged kids in those places is perfectly normal: those places damage kids. These places are not hospitals, where patients come in damaged and get fixed. These places damage kids, they don't fix them. They're more like the ragged pillow at the bottom of a half-pipe, a catchment area for broken bones, doing MUCH more to protect the reputation of the rest of the system than preventing or helping with injuries.

And the horrible thing about such places is that they effectively prevent the kids from having a future (they have extremely bad schools, no alternatives, limited learning materials, ...), but throw them out at 18 years (and please: 21 years or even something ridiculous like 45 years would NOT be better). Please stop pretending that after 10 years where crime (from stealing from other kids to dealing drugs) is the only way to get even a trivial little extra, no-one would remain clean.

That only happens in protected settings. And the sad truth is that even very bad parents still provide a very protected setting for kids.

Besides, these places, for the large majority they don't even try: treatment, though often the very reason kids get taken away, effectively doesn't happen in such places. Just 1 underpaid person, often without any qualifications, per 15 or 20 kids, and some director "handling" 20 groups. That's all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Term_12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Crasher

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_Family

Please note: "System Crasher" is the more realistic of these movies (especially "Instant Family" is extremely toned down, I can guarantee a kid doesn't just shout 2 sentences if they fear everything they have will be taken away. They fight and scream and cry and kick and ... for 2 months).

If you watch "System Crasher" 5 times you will even start to see WHAT is happening. This kid made a mistake. Mistake lead to reputation (ie. to school teacher at the very least pestering her), which escalated matters. Help, effectively meant using violence against the child and more and more fear. And of course, the kid never gets any say, and therefore never learns WHY one needs control over oneself. This escalates and escalates and escalates BECAUSE OF YOUTH SERVICES. If they refused to intervene in the beginning of the problem, the odds of it just blowing over were very, very high, as the kid and parents would be forced to self-regulate their relationship. That would have happened, and at that point there would no longer have been a problem. And, frankly, it's hard to argue that any tactic, other than what was done, was worse, given the outcome.

That blog says they were and are effective as indoctrination and group belonging systems. Not as teaching systems.

Indeed, children need love in order to be able to give it (and be able to receive it). It seems better to me to keep them in the “circle of love” than to send them off to the well known circle of abuse.

Very often there's no choice. Either something under your control, or CPS comes and takes the kid away. Schools even do this to avoid dealing with abusive teachers and the like, or just to get rid of a specific child.

And that would be this CPS:

https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820...

The idea that justifies the power of CPS, that these sorts of "measures" are taken in the interest of the child, are totally ridiculous upon inspection. Not because there aren't any problems, but because these "solutions" are so much worse.

Exactly. A sci fi playwright shouldn't be a source for inductive reasoning, let alone any tv content.

How cam you reas that book and not think that the kida are abused and traumatized in horrific ways with minimal interest in the long term benefits to these kida? A core ethical question of this book is the degree to which the ends justify these means.