Habitually Good

Jeff Atwood (his blog is one of the most readable properties on the Internet) and his wife just got blessed with a baby boy. While my heartiest wished go out to all 3 of them, this post is about a comment left on Jeff’s blog, and when I read it, I had to post it here.

The comment is by a person called Mecki (hats off to you):

A newborn is like a computer booting up for the first time. It has some BIOS routines built-in, but that’s already it. No operating system, no applications. The interesting thing is, the OS doesn’t need to be installed, it is "copied by observation". Each adult has already a running OS and children copy these OS functions, one by one, by just observing how the OS of the adult works. A computer that programs itself by just monitoring how the OS on another computer works – what a great concept. Of course the observation and copy code is already in the BIOS.

Additionally to that OS, that is copied anyway, you as a parent can perform further programming, though you cannot just tell what to do as on a PC. You can only "encourage" something to happen… sometimes something will happen randomly out of nowhere… in either case you can later on reward or punish the system. Behavior rewarded will get established within the system, behavior punished will vanish of the system (though occasionally break through again). And hurry up on doing that, as the older the child gets, the FLASH memory becomes more and more of a ROM that cannot be changed anymore (it’s like a Flash with unlimited amount of possible reads, but very limited amount of possible writes).

At the age of 12 to 14 the OS will further develop a strong firewall that is going to drop 80% of all your input and the 20% that goes through are stored in the Trash folder and only if you are lucky get restored from there on time before the Trash is emptied.

This is so true and so awesome.

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