Well, when 10 prior generations manage to do so just fine you have to start looking about at the world around you and wondering at exactly what point everything went stark-raving mad. The usual suspects are when the government decided it's "helping," in typical ham-fist, short-sited fashion but that's off-topic.



No matter where you live it makes sense to discourage your children from pursuing their dreams on the largess of their neighbors, certainly. Self-sufficiency is important. Otherwise you run the risk of being overrun by a generation of washed-out insei, wannabe pop-stars, former athletes, and a bunch of out-of-work graphic designers.

A good parallel is actually football. Even if one of my sons has the talent to land a scholarship to some big football school like U.S.C. or Texas you'd better believe I'll expect him to attend his classes and bother to major in something that can pay his bills. Dreams are great, but for every multi-million-dollar NFL star there are dozens of college wash-outs that had the same talent but suffered a random knee or shoulder injury that ended their career before it even got started. Likewise for every Go professional there's a horde of insei wash-outs.

That's why every student-athlete should know better than to trade away a degree-in-the-hand for a contract-in-the-bush.

- Marty Lund

For better or worse, the US has a sort of ideal of entrepreneurship. So when people talk about it being the land of opportunity, they primarily meant the opportunity to improve your material conditions. It also means that the ideal is "opportunities" more so than results. All this is meant to be descriptive, mind you--I don't want too much of a political discussion here.

I believe the point about being on the lower end of the pile holds across most developed nations. It's more extreme in the US because inequality is higher here: those at the bottom make less, those at the top make more than elsewhere.

Btw: blue collar was probably the wrong choice: you'd be surprised what some construction foremen, skilled welders, crane operators, etc. can make. Nothing to tempt a doctor, but much more than you'd expect given the educational requirements. The most striking thing is the steady decline in the number of blue collar jobs available. What I really should have said is low-skill or low-skilled service sector.

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Occupy Babel!

The "Swedish" troubadour Cornelis Vreeswijk? Shame on you for such heresy!

That song is excellent though. It's a pretty wicked twist at the end.

Also, congratulations on posting something that's... extra... family friendly! I see you thoroughly understand this forum's guidelines now

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My name is Gijs, from Utrecht, NL.

When in doubt, play the most aggressive move

I think it's impossible to generalize the last 10 generations as "getting by just fine". Getting by has meant different things for each generation, and to be fair, a number of those generations were spent in rapid expansion, grabbing "free" land. Don't want to drag this off-topic, but just sayin...

In any case, I agree that you should have backup plans, and being insei, unless you already live in Japan makes that difficult.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

So I read this blog post the other day. It completely changed my view of what it meant to be a insei.

If it's true that insea obligations fall mostly on the weekend, that implies that it's possible for a kid to attend school and pull 'C's (or the japanese equivalent) all the while.

For some reason, I thought the insei program was an evelven-hour-a-day, six-days-a-week death march.

I might warm to the idea.

i would be only mildly reluctant and let his mother say no and take all the blame for being close minded of course .
i like being the good cop.

slightly of topic i started playing go with my 7 year old and he enjoys it! but he insist on playing on 19x19 only for some reason, so i give him only 9 stones but i play into working ladders that i play to the end to help him gather thickness. maybe it will teach him bad habits but at least he agrees to play again.

does any of you have experience playing with 7 year old (or have you learn at 7)? i am not sure what i can explain to him. he seems to get the concept of eyes but i don't really tests his life and death capability

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

I started teaching my neighbor when he was only 6 years old (if I recall correctly). He mostly got the hang of it ok, but he wasn't improving as fast as I thought he might so naturally I suspected I was having a little trouble getting some concepts across. About a year later, he really took off when I switched to Chinese rules and the over simplified explanation of those rules as "the one with the most stones on the board wins". Then he learned on his own to resign when he got behind, which in turn helped him look for bigger moves and so on.

The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America by Daniel Brook is a great read on related topic. Basically, it discusses how more and more recent college graduates in the U.S. are lured into more lucrative careers even when they start out with more idealistic goals.

The more potential you have to earn more, the harder it is to resist. So students go to college thinking that they will work for a non-profit or in science or be an elementary school teacher, etc. and are forced out that idealism because of concerns about paying off loans, being able to afford health care one one side and the potential to have a vastly wealthier lifestyle on the other.

So there is this fear of poverty that is very real. But also there is an oppurtunity cost that may be even a bigger factor.

Is that why kids go to college?!?

I had it all backwards then. I went to college because I wanted a better paying job than flipping burgers.

ah, yes... that's why I dropped out.

And then we ended up in IT... Where did we go wrong?

I've often wondered about this, There's always something that has to be accepted in Japanese rules. People have to be taught that spending moves to kill something is bad.

Children, especially, learn by doing, and when we say, "Oh, you shouldn't do anything more there", I feel like we really impede their powerful creative learning process. Better to have them lose because I took the rest of the board, than for them to lose because they filled in all their own space. In the former, they can see that their moves were wasted, whereas in the latter, all they learned was that if you have a stone somewhere, you don't have territory there.

It's good to hear at least anecdotal evidence that this works.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

Time to roll out the double-blind experimental protocol, then. I'll teach my kids territory scoring, you teach yours area scoring, and we'll track their progress.

Nit-picky, but that's only single-blind.

Anyway, shapenaji makes a good point. Even when teaching adults Go the fact that you don't have to capture all the dead stones can be confusing. Perhaps starting with Chinese scoring, especially for younger kids, could really help them understand the game better.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

It's actually not even a little bit blind. (Unless my children inherit my myopia.)