The economics of chance, or the "story of the Wheel"
What is the relationship between upbringing and entropy? The hero of this story tells about an educational approach that will remind many game mechanisms - whether it be random dice rolls in Dungeons & Dragons and computer implementations, or shuffled cards in Magic: The Gathering.
What happens if the entropy and chance of the universe turns into an educational mechanism?
* * *
')
Educating us, parents obviously read research on rewards and punishments, and their effect on the development of the child. My father came from a calm and restrained family, and was the middle of three brothers. Mother was an older sister in a close-knit, religious family. He went to the magistracy for plasma physics, and she was the secretary who collected the text of his dissertation.
It is clear that they could not agree on how to praise and punish me and my younger sister. Excess of praise led to a swelling self-esteem, lack of - to despondency, and an imbalance between how each of the parents praises the children, could lead to the appearance of pets. In pedagogical literature is full of contradictions. What did they have to do? How to raise children so that they are ready for a noisy and erratic life in the real world, where the right things are not always appreciated and misdeeds and disgusting go unpunished?
Here the wheel appears. He was first invented by Dr. Benjamin Edler, who was a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. He became friends with his father for joint dinners in the university canteen and tennis parties. Dr. Edler (my sister and I nicknamed him "The Viper" - he was tall and lean, and had large black eyes, which seemed even bigger behind thick lenses of glasses) had no offspring, but he studied children in one of his studies. The father, being a man of science, was finishing his doctorate at that time. He mentioned his disagreement with his wife, which arose when it came to turning my sister and me into real people, and asked the Viper for advice.
He advised the Wheel. Dr. Edler said that encouragement and punishment are significant driving forces in children's behavior. Difficulties began if praise and punishment were inconsistent or unbalanced. When one child is praised for good marks in a diary more than another for the same marks, but a year earlier, this is distressing and creates tension between the children. If one makes a mistake with praise (for example, having overpowered the intellect over zeal), this can lead to a catastrophe in the future. We had the first symptoms already manifested - I was praised for intelligence and reading, while I was on the verge of expulsion from the fifth grade, because I preferred reading to homework. At the same time, my sister heard praises for her academic performance, but she found it difficult to keep her level with her classmates in terms of reading.
I still remember the evening when the Wheel appeared in the house. It was a hefty wooden thing, although now, when I recall its charred remains, it seems much smaller, too small for the effect the Wheel had on our lives. It was like a wheel from the Wheel of Fortune, or such a wheel “take a beer at random”, which can be found in bars with a large selection. There were ten sectors on it, six labeled A, two B, one C, and one terrifying D. When my sister or I did something worthy of encouragement or punishment, my parents rotated the Wheel first and then checked against the Table.
In the table was a list of frequent scenarios of encouragement and punishment, taken from the research of Dr. Viper. Items like “insignificant breach of discipline” meant that my sister and I had a fight in the car, or I returned home 15 minutes late, or something. “Major success in education” meant that my sister received only fives or something like that. The list of such scenarios was gigantic, and new points were added as my sister and I found new and more and more interesting ways to succeed or fail. Next to each scenario was a response tailored to our age. So for the “minor breach of discipline” the standard answer under the letter A was “to deprive the dessert”. Answer B was a more serious version of the first, “send to bed without dinner.” Under the letter C, the answer was neutral, and, regardless of the scenario, it always read "nothing happens." The worst, the most frightening was D - “the other side”, the answer that could turn the punishment into praise or vice versa, so if someone teased a sister or brother, then suddenly teased could get an extra hour to sit at the TV before going to bed. And it also meant that (as it happened once) for almost round fives in the diary, my sister was deprived of walks for a month.
The whole point of the Wheel, I think, was to show the unreliability of the Present Life, that one should not expect praise for every good deed, and that many bad deeds pass with impunity. My sister and I learned this well. We knew that everything we did wrong had a twenty percent chance of being overlooked, and maybe even rewarded. And at the same time, good could both turn you into boiling water, and bring a greater reward than we expected. We even got permission for a “back door” that could be used to try to balance at least some of the most unpredictable choices of the Wheel. I am pretty sure that the spare moves were my mother's idea, a compromise that was supposed to keep us from the immoderation that we soon had to face. I do not remember that Dr. Edler was too happy about this idea, but he entered it in a new table, where a certain amount of accumulated spare moves was spent depending on the severity of the event.
Little by little the Wheel has taken hold of our lives. Every small action entailed a turn. The lives of parents, who no longer needed to argue with each other about the size of the punishment, became much simpler. They even began to carry along a ten-sided bone, as a marching version of the Wheel. Pretty quickly, I learned what all children learn sooner or later - “hide everything from parents”. I did not tell about my successes in the hope that my “spare moves” would help to get out of the problems because of misconduct. On the other hand, Shelly told her parents about everything in the hope of getting this twenty percent chance of "more than expected." The only problem was that my sister and I, although we were quite similar children, were very different in luck. I was lucky much more often than she. I managed to avoid such a large number of punishments that my father had to check the Wheel for “correction”. Shelley was less fortunate. Each time she rotated the wheel, a terrible D fell out, turning her small victory into punishment, and forcing her to waste her spare moves. I remember one night after performing at a concert, having successfully played a violin solo, Shelly sat up late with her parents, tearfully spending one by one moves from the reserve, so as not to stay locked up for a week, without walks and entertainments, and not to miss Because of this, your first school ball. Parents sympathized with her, even adding to option B spending on a new dress for the ball, if it falls out. But whatever she did, and no matter how much she twisted, D. inevitably fell out. No dress, no dance, no luck.
Do not get me wrong, I also burned on the wheel. I lost my right to own Super Nintendo for life when it surfaced that I spent time on video games instead of studying. I could spend spare moves, but decided to abstain, because at that time I discovered smoking and knew that it would be Bad News when it came out. It got out, but my account of the “spare passages” was so great at that time that I paid off with this and with the drive for stealing cigarettes at the same time. Honestly, I managed to get out of it also with the Camel block. I then exchanged it with friend Jerry for the joint, which, when found, gave me free gasoline for a week thanks to the successful turn of the Wheel.
By the time I entered college (at school my grades were specifically average, which was a blessing in a house with a Wheel, but it did not help much in admission), we no longer thought much about the Wheel. It was just one of the parts of our life, something that they laugh, joke and cry over dinner.
I learned how to use Dr. Adler’s system wherever I could imagine. So, if the Wheel taught me anything, it is that I can only rely on myself, not expect too much from the world around me, and try to merge with it. That's what I did - merged - in my first year in college, when I received a call saying that I should immediately come home.
Shelley, always unlucky, perhaps even hooked on the wheel, like a gambler, was in prison. She set fire to the house one night after she was taken to Princeton. The wheel informed her that she could not drive. The fire was quite serious, quickly spreading through the walls through the whole house. By the arrival of firefighters, my father was seriously hurt by carbon monoxide, and my mother died.
Shelly was supposed to go behind the bars, and I don’t think the government would let her spin the Wheel to see if she could escape punishment, no matter how many turns I could lend her. I still visit her when she is not under suicidal supervision. But when I come in, I have to shake out all the coins from my pockets, the decahedron that I carry with me and family photos. By order to Shelley it is forbidden to carry at least something “accidental”, whether it be a dice or a coin. So it happened after one day his father came to her and she asked him for forgiveness and choose a number. He forgave her and chose four, which I think was the answer B in the Shelley table, after which she tried to cut her wrists with a pen.
Now that I myself am a husband and father, I am approaching the same stage at which my parents were when they first brought the Wheel to the house. Now I know how destructive the Wheel can be, so that under any pretext I will not let something like that into my house. To worry about the correct form of reward or punishment is one thing, but it is wrong to limit the choice to turn a wheel with ten options. Life is much harder than A, B, C, or D, especially today when there are so many algorithms and random number generators available to us everywhere. My "Wheel" will be a computer program, perhaps - an application for PDAs to heighten convenience, and I think that this will completely solve the problems of my family even before they begin to arise. I contacted Dr. Edler, who is already retired, and is now working on a more modern and viable Education Matrix.
I look forward to her appearance.
Urbansheep magazine discussion | Original story
What happens if the entropy and chance of the universe turns into an educational mechanism?
* * *
')
Educating us, parents obviously read research on rewards and punishments, and their effect on the development of the child. My father came from a calm and restrained family, and was the middle of three brothers. Mother was an older sister in a close-knit, religious family. He went to the magistracy for plasma physics, and she was the secretary who collected the text of his dissertation.
It is clear that they could not agree on how to praise and punish me and my younger sister. Excess of praise led to a swelling self-esteem, lack of - to despondency, and an imbalance between how each of the parents praises the children, could lead to the appearance of pets. In pedagogical literature is full of contradictions. What did they have to do? How to raise children so that they are ready for a noisy and erratic life in the real world, where the right things are not always appreciated and misdeeds and disgusting go unpunished?
Here the wheel appears. He was first invented by Dr. Benjamin Edler, who was a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. He became friends with his father for joint dinners in the university canteen and tennis parties. Dr. Edler (my sister and I nicknamed him "The Viper" - he was tall and lean, and had large black eyes, which seemed even bigger behind thick lenses of glasses) had no offspring, but he studied children in one of his studies. The father, being a man of science, was finishing his doctorate at that time. He mentioned his disagreement with his wife, which arose when it came to turning my sister and me into real people, and asked the Viper for advice.
He advised the Wheel. Dr. Edler said that encouragement and punishment are significant driving forces in children's behavior. Difficulties began if praise and punishment were inconsistent or unbalanced. When one child is praised for good marks in a diary more than another for the same marks, but a year earlier, this is distressing and creates tension between the children. If one makes a mistake with praise (for example, having overpowered the intellect over zeal), this can lead to a catastrophe in the future. We had the first symptoms already manifested - I was praised for intelligence and reading, while I was on the verge of expulsion from the fifth grade, because I preferred reading to homework. At the same time, my sister heard praises for her academic performance, but she found it difficult to keep her level with her classmates in terms of reading.
I still remember the evening when the Wheel appeared in the house. It was a hefty wooden thing, although now, when I recall its charred remains, it seems much smaller, too small for the effect the Wheel had on our lives. It was like a wheel from the Wheel of Fortune, or such a wheel “take a beer at random”, which can be found in bars with a large selection. There were ten sectors on it, six labeled A, two B, one C, and one terrifying D. When my sister or I did something worthy of encouragement or punishment, my parents rotated the Wheel first and then checked against the Table.
In the table was a list of frequent scenarios of encouragement and punishment, taken from the research of Dr. Viper. Items like “insignificant breach of discipline” meant that my sister and I had a fight in the car, or I returned home 15 minutes late, or something. “Major success in education” meant that my sister received only fives or something like that. The list of such scenarios was gigantic, and new points were added as my sister and I found new and more and more interesting ways to succeed or fail. Next to each scenario was a response tailored to our age. So for the “minor breach of discipline” the standard answer under the letter A was “to deprive the dessert”. Answer B was a more serious version of the first, “send to bed without dinner.” Under the letter C, the answer was neutral, and, regardless of the scenario, it always read "nothing happens." The worst, the most frightening was D - “the other side”, the answer that could turn the punishment into praise or vice versa, so if someone teased a sister or brother, then suddenly teased could get an extra hour to sit at the TV before going to bed. And it also meant that (as it happened once) for almost round fives in the diary, my sister was deprived of walks for a month.
The whole point of the Wheel, I think, was to show the unreliability of the Present Life, that one should not expect praise for every good deed, and that many bad deeds pass with impunity. My sister and I learned this well. We knew that everything we did wrong had a twenty percent chance of being overlooked, and maybe even rewarded. And at the same time, good could both turn you into boiling water, and bring a greater reward than we expected. We even got permission for a “back door” that could be used to try to balance at least some of the most unpredictable choices of the Wheel. I am pretty sure that the spare moves were my mother's idea, a compromise that was supposed to keep us from the immoderation that we soon had to face. I do not remember that Dr. Edler was too happy about this idea, but he entered it in a new table, where a certain amount of accumulated spare moves was spent depending on the severity of the event.
Little by little the Wheel has taken hold of our lives. Every small action entailed a turn. The lives of parents, who no longer needed to argue with each other about the size of the punishment, became much simpler. They even began to carry along a ten-sided bone, as a marching version of the Wheel. Pretty quickly, I learned what all children learn sooner or later - “hide everything from parents”. I did not tell about my successes in the hope that my “spare moves” would help to get out of the problems because of misconduct. On the other hand, Shelly told her parents about everything in the hope of getting this twenty percent chance of "more than expected." The only problem was that my sister and I, although we were quite similar children, were very different in luck. I was lucky much more often than she. I managed to avoid such a large number of punishments that my father had to check the Wheel for “correction”. Shelley was less fortunate. Each time she rotated the wheel, a terrible D fell out, turning her small victory into punishment, and forcing her to waste her spare moves. I remember one night after performing at a concert, having successfully played a violin solo, Shelly sat up late with her parents, tearfully spending one by one moves from the reserve, so as not to stay locked up for a week, without walks and entertainments, and not to miss Because of this, your first school ball. Parents sympathized with her, even adding to option B spending on a new dress for the ball, if it falls out. But whatever she did, and no matter how much she twisted, D. inevitably fell out. No dress, no dance, no luck.
Do not get me wrong, I also burned on the wheel. I lost my right to own Super Nintendo for life when it surfaced that I spent time on video games instead of studying. I could spend spare moves, but decided to abstain, because at that time I discovered smoking and knew that it would be Bad News when it came out. It got out, but my account of the “spare passages” was so great at that time that I paid off with this and with the drive for stealing cigarettes at the same time. Honestly, I managed to get out of it also with the Camel block. I then exchanged it with friend Jerry for the joint, which, when found, gave me free gasoline for a week thanks to the successful turn of the Wheel.
By the time I entered college (at school my grades were specifically average, which was a blessing in a house with a Wheel, but it did not help much in admission), we no longer thought much about the Wheel. It was just one of the parts of our life, something that they laugh, joke and cry over dinner.
I learned how to use Dr. Adler’s system wherever I could imagine. So, if the Wheel taught me anything, it is that I can only rely on myself, not expect too much from the world around me, and try to merge with it. That's what I did - merged - in my first year in college, when I received a call saying that I should immediately come home.
Shelley, always unlucky, perhaps even hooked on the wheel, like a gambler, was in prison. She set fire to the house one night after she was taken to Princeton. The wheel informed her that she could not drive. The fire was quite serious, quickly spreading through the walls through the whole house. By the arrival of firefighters, my father was seriously hurt by carbon monoxide, and my mother died.
Shelly was supposed to go behind the bars, and I don’t think the government would let her spin the Wheel to see if she could escape punishment, no matter how many turns I could lend her. I still visit her when she is not under suicidal supervision. But when I come in, I have to shake out all the coins from my pockets, the decahedron that I carry with me and family photos. By order to Shelley it is forbidden to carry at least something “accidental”, whether it be a dice or a coin. So it happened after one day his father came to her and she asked him for forgiveness and choose a number. He forgave her and chose four, which I think was the answer B in the Shelley table, after which she tried to cut her wrists with a pen.
Now that I myself am a husband and father, I am approaching the same stage at which my parents were when they first brought the Wheel to the house. Now I know how destructive the Wheel can be, so that under any pretext I will not let something like that into my house. To worry about the correct form of reward or punishment is one thing, but it is wrong to limit the choice to turn a wheel with ten options. Life is much harder than A, B, C, or D, especially today when there are so many algorithms and random number generators available to us everywhere. My "Wheel" will be a computer program, perhaps - an application for PDAs to heighten convenience, and I think that this will completely solve the problems of my family even before they begin to arise. I contacted Dr. Edler, who is already retired, and is now working on a more modern and viable Education Matrix.
I look forward to her appearance.
Urbansheep magazine discussion | Original story
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/30901/
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