“What do you wanna be when you grow up?” is one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child.

Here’s why👇🏼

First, it fosters the wrong kind of mindset by encouraging kids to define themselves in terms of a career and a single identity.

“As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.” @MichelleObama

Second, it ignores two important factors:
What if their ideal job hasn’t been invented?

15 years ago no one thought it would be possible to make a living out of making YouTube videos.

Help kids see that their future self doesn’t exist right now and that their interests may change over time.

https://t.co/THoJZLmF8p
What if they wanna do more than one thing?

The average person ends up holding a dozen different jobs.

Teach kids that they don’t have to do or be one thing—they can do many things. Teach them that it's ok to rethink their chosen line of work and switch gears when necessary.
In 2012 @Prof_Malhotra gave a moving speech to the graduating class at Harvard Business School.

"Quit early, quit often—not because it's hard, but because it sucks,” he proposed.

We don’t emphasize this enough in schools.

https://t.co/AYuYcj4DYH
In school, we teach kids the importance of persevering and not giving up, and forget to remind them that it’s ok to quit sometimes.

Grit is important, but don’t "persevere" if you’re going in the wrong direction.
@AdamMGrant suggests that kids might be better off learning about careers as actions to take rather than as identities to claim.

When kids see work as what they do rather than who they are, they’re more willing to explore different possibilities.

Here's an example 👇🏼
A study showed that when 2nd & 3rd graders learned about “doing science” vs. “being a scientist” they were more excited about pursuing a career in science.🧪

"Becoming a scientist might seem out of reach, but the act of experimenting is something we can all try out” @AdamMGrant
So instead of asking kids what they want to be when they grow up, help them:

✨Brainstorm all the things they love to do
✨Talk about careers as something we do vs. someone we are
✨Understand that, sometimes, quitting is better than persevering in the wrong direction

More from All

How can we use language supervision to learn better visual representations for robotics?

Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!

Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z

🧵👇(1 / 12)


Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.

Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)

The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (
https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).

The secret is *balance* (3/12)

Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:

1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.

2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)

By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.

Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)

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Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.