The Economics of Chance, or “The Story of the Wheel”

Original author: robocop is bleeding
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What is the connection between upbringing and entropy? The hero of this story talks about an educational approach that will remind many of the game mechanisms - whether it be random rolls of dice 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?

* * *

Parenting us, we obviously read studies on reward and punishment, and on 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, gaining the text of his dissertation.

It is clear that they could not agree on how to praise and punish me and my little sister. Too much praise led to bloated conceit, a lack to despondency, and an imbalance between each parent praising their children could lead to the appearance of favorites. The pedagogical literature is full of contradictions. What could they do? How to raise children so that they are ready for a noisy and hectic life in the real world, where the right things are not always appreciated, and misconduct and simply 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 made friends with his father at a joint dinner in the university cafeteria and tennis parties. Dr. Edler (my sister and I called him “The Viper” - he was tall and lean, and had large black eyes, which seemed even more behind the thick lenses of glasses) had no offspring, but he studied children in one of his studies. 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 I into real people, and asked the Viper for advice.

He advised the Wheel. Dr. Edler said that encouragement and punishment are essential, driving factors in children's behavior. Difficulties began if praise and punishment were inconsistent or unbalanced. When one child is praised for good grades in the diary more than another for the same grades, but a year earlier, it upsets and creates tension between the children. If you make a mistake in praising (for example, exalting the intellect over zeal), this can lead to disaster in the future. We already had the first symptoms - I was praised for my mind and well-readness, while I was on the verge of graduation from fifth grade, because I preferred reading to homework. At the same time, my sister heard praises for her academic performance, but it was difficult for her to keep up with classmates in terms of the number of reads.

I still remember that evening when the Wheel appeared in the house. It was a hefty wooden gizmo, although now, when I recall its charred remains, it seems much smaller, too small for the impact that the Wheel has had on our lives. It looked like a wheel from the Wheel of Fortune, or a wheel like “take beer at random,” which can be found in bars with a wide selection. It had ten sectors, 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 first turned the Wheel and then checked the Table.

The table had a list of frequent reward and punishment scenarios taken from Dr. Viper studies. Items like “minor misconduct” meant that my sister and I had a fight in the car, or I returned home 15 minutes late, or something like that. “Great educational success” meant that my sister was getting just fives or something. The list of such scenarios was gigantic, and new items were added as my sister and I found new and more interesting ways to succeed or fail. Next to each scenario was an answer tailored to our age. So for the “minor misconduct”, the standard answer under the letter A was “strip 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 said "nothing happens." The worst, most frightening was D - the “reverse side”, an answer that could turn punishment into praise or vice versa, so if someone teased a sister or brother, then a teaser could unexpectedly receive an extra hour of sitting at the TV bedtime before going to bed. And also it meant that (as 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 True Life, that you should not expect praise for every good deed, and that many bad deeds go unpunished. My sister and I learned it well. We knew that everything we did wrong had a twenty percent chance of being unnoticed, and maybe rewarded. And at the same time, the good could both knock you over with boiling water and bring a greater reward than we expected. We even got permission for a “back-up”, which could be used to try to balance even some of the Wheel’s most unpredictable choices. I am almost sure that the emergency moves were my mother’s idea, a compromise that was to keep us from the excesses that we were soon to face. I don’t remember that Dr. Edler was too happy about this idea,

Little by little, the Wheel took possession of our lives. Each small action entailed a turn. The life of parents, who no longer needed to argue with each other about the amount of punishment, was greatly simplified. They even began to carry a ten-sided bone with them, as a traveling variant of the Wheel. Pretty quickly, I learned what all the children learn sooner or later - “hide everything from your parents”. I did not talk about my successes in the hope that my “emergency moves” would help me get out of trouble because of misconduct. On the other hand, Shelley 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 her. I managed to avoid so many punishments that my father had to check the Wheel for "correctness." Shelley was less fortunate. Each time she turned the wheel, a terrible D fell out, turning her small victory into a punishment, and forcing her to spend her spare moves. I remember that one evening after speaking at a concert, having successfully played the violin solo, Shelie sat up late with her parents, tearfully spending one after another moves from the reserve, so as not to remain locked up for a week, without walks and entertainment, and not to miss out -for this his first school ball. Parents sympathized with her, even adding to option B the cost of a new ball gown if it falls out. But no matter what she did, and no matter how she twisted, D. inevitably fell out. Neither dress, nor dance, nor good luck. a terrible D fell out, turning her small victory into a punishment, and forcing her to spend her spare moves. I remember that one evening after speaking at a concert, having successfully played the violin solo, Shelie sat up late with her parents, tearfully spending one after another moves from the reserve, so as not to remain locked up for a week, without walks and entertainment, and not to miss out -for this his first school ball. Parents sympathized with her, even adding to option B the cost of a new ball gown if it falls out. But no matter what she did, and no matter how she twisted, D. inevitably fell out. Neither dress, nor dance, nor good luck. a terrible D fell out, turning her small victory into a punishment, and forcing her to spend her spare moves. I remember that one evening after speaking at a concert, having successfully played the violin solo, Shelie sat up late with her parents, tearfully spending one after another moves from the reserve, so as not to remain locked up for a week, without walks and entertainment, and not to miss out -for this his first school ball. Parents sympathized with her, even adding to option B the cost of a new ball gown if it falls out. But no matter what she did, and no matter how she twisted, D. inevitably fell out. Neither dress, nor dance, nor good luck. with tears, spending one after another moves from the reserve, so as not to remain locked up for a week, without walks and entertainment, and not to miss because of this his first school ball. Parents sympathized with her, even adding to option B the cost of a new ball gown if it falls out. But no matter what she did, and no matter how she twisted, D. inevitably fell out. Neither dress, nor dance, nor good luck. with tears, spending one after another moves from the reserve, so as not to remain locked up for a week, without walks and entertainment, and not to miss because of this his first school ball. Parents sympathized with her, even adding to option B the cost of a new ball gown if it falls out. But no matter what she did, and no matter how she twisted, D. inevitably fell out. Neither dress, nor dance, nor good luck.

Do not get me wrong, I also burned myself on the Wheel. I lost my Super Nintendo ownership right for life when it surfaced that instead of studying, I was wasting time on video games. I could spend the emergency moves, but decided to abstain, because at that time I discovered smoking for myself and knew that this would be Bad News when it got out. It got out, but my account of “emergency moves” was so great at that time that I paid with this and the drive for stealing cigarettes at the same time. Honestly, I managed to get out of this with the Camel block as well. Then I exchanged it with a friend Jerry for a joint, which, when it was found, gave me free gas for a week thanks to a successful turn of the Wheel.

By the time I entered college (at school, my grades were specially average, which was a blessing in the house with the Wheel, but it didn’t help much in entering), we no longer thought about the Wheel. It became just one part of our life, something that we laugh, joke and cry at dinner.

I learned to use Dr. Edler’s system wherever I could imagine. So if what the Wheel taught me, it is that I can only rely on myself, not expect too much from the world around me, and try to merge with it. This is exactly what I was doing - merging - in my first year in college, when I received a call 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 evening after she was received at Princeton. The wheel informed her that she could not ride. The fire was quite serious, quickly spreading through the walls throughout the house. By the arrival of the firefighters, his father was seriously injured by carbon monoxide, and his mother died.

Shelley had to go to jail, and I don’t think that the government would let her spin the Wheel to see if she could escape punishment, no matter how many spare turns I lent to her. I still visit her when she is not under suicidal supervision. But when I come, I have to shake out all the coins from my pockets, the decahedron that I carry with me and family photographs. By order of Shelley, it is forbidden to bring at least something “random,” whether it is dice or a coin. This happened after one day my father came to her and she asked him for forgiveness and choose a number. He forgave her and chose four, which I think was B's answer in Shelley's table, after which she tried to cut her wrists with a pen.

Now that I myself am a husband and father, I come to the same stage that my parents were at when they first brought the Wheel to the house. Now I know how destructive the Wheel can be, so under no pretext will I let something like this into my house. To worry about the right form of encouragement or punishment is one thing, but it’s also wrong to limit the choice to turning the wheel with ten options. Life is much more complicated 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 a PDA application for added convenience, and I think that this will completely solve my family’s problems before they even begin to arise. I contacted Dr. Edler, who is already retired,

I look forward to her appearance.

Discussion in urbansheep Magazine | Original story

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