Home / Nature, Nurture, and Learning (March 2026)

I used to assume the nature vs nurture debate could be answered with a ratio, like we are 60% a product of genetics and 40% a product of environment. Since having a kid, I'm not sure it's quite that simple.

If someone is born a great learner and their personality changes rapidly, is that a result of nature or nurture? Clearly it's both, but you could argue it's more nature because the predisposition to learn was inhereted, but you could also argue it's more nurture because they learned through interacting with their environment.

Since having a kid I've come to believe parenting is less about teaching kids the exact right things and more about teaching them how to learn. This isn't to say we shouldn't teach kids fundamental values and basic skills, but on a spectrum of kids being balls of clay to mold vs seedlings to nurture, I err a bit more toward the latter.

One of my favorite stories is about Gillian Lynn, who got in trouble at school for being too active. The principal called her parents into his office and then asked them to step outside, where they watched their daughter alone in his office through a window. She started to dance. They asked Gillian if she wanted to transfer to an arts school, which she did, before becoming a famous choreographer.

Assuming learning how to learn is important to help prepare kids for a rapidly changing world, how do we learn, exactly? I'm not sure but I've noticed a few things just by observing our kid over his first two years. It seems like kids learn more from watching how people behave than from what they're told, avoiding negative emotions and seeking positive ones provides incentive to learn new things, and being somewhat forgetful, especially of small negative emotions that result from something like falling down, seems to help kids persevere through failure as well as forces them to repeat learning new things many times.

Thinking more about learning has made me view certain traits more positively in kids. For example, when our kid throws a tantrum, I try to remind myself that having strong negative emotions can be great fuel for learning. And when he wants to read the same book three times in a row, I remind myself that repition is good for learning. It's funny that as an adult, I'm attempting to undo some of the traits that helped me learn as a kid. For example, I try to copy others less, be less reactive to emotions, and push myself to try new things. I guess it's somewhat poetic how what once helped us, starts to hurt us as we age.

Memory, in particular, is interesting, because it seems like evolution designed it to adapt with learning. When we're born we know very little and we remember very little, perhaps because we mostly make mistakes from an evolutionary perspective. But the more we learn, the better our memory gets, enabling our learning to become more precise. Then our memory starts declining in old age, as our skills and ability to learn start to degrade.

I used to think kids could learn so easily because their brains were more malleable. I believe that's true, but they also spend an enormous amount of time learning. I think part of what makes learning harder as an adult is not just that our brains are less malleable, but that most of us are not willing (or don't have the time) to read the same book a hundred times or perservere through pain or look like a fool long enough to learn a new skill.

One cool byproduct of the whole AI thing is that there are a lot more smart people incentivized to figure out how to teach computers how to learn. Maybe this will help us better understand how humans learn, too, which is important, because of all the things to learn, learning how to learn might be the most important one. I wish I had a class about that when I was in school.