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In the long run, we're all Dad

astralcodexten.com

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Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#51

Post by scruple »

pj_mukh wrote: post #5

"There is a secret known only to parents of twins, medical residents, and Alexey Guzey: the human body does not actually need sleep. After 31 hours awake, you get an integer overflow in God’s database and go back to being well-rested again. Also you gain the ability to see angels." LOL. Amaze. On that note, I've heard some amazing things about the Snoo. It was banned from our house because of Luddit-ian reasons, but…

My employer got us a Snoo (rental) for each child. With our twins, they worked pretty well until 4 months or so. Our singleton wouldn't go for it at all.

I agree that there's no genuinely useful bonding happening in the dead of the night when you're so sleep deprived that you might be hallucinating. It's just base survival after a certain point. I used to run dual feedings overnight with bottled milk so my wife could keep resting as much as possible. I used to time myself and optimize the hell out of it so that I could get back to bed. I would set alarms to wake myself up, get the milk from the fridge, warm the bottles, get the twins out of the Snoo and into their tandem Boppy, soothe them, feed them, change diapers, re-swaddle, and then get them back to bed, clean bottles, make sure the next round of bottles is prepped. I could run all of that, when everything went right, in just under 30 minutes. If the twins were fussy, the dogs woke up and wanted to go out, etc., it could creep up to an hour. I remember my hands being so dry from washing bottles that my skin was cracked and bleeding. We eventually got rid of all of the fancy bullshit and opted for bottles, etc., that had the least number of parts. That entire first year with twins is still mostly a blur today, 4 years later.

I went through basic military training and spent some time overseas in war zones. I've gone through sleep deprivation training and the real thing overseas. With kids, though, you've got a physical, mental, and emotional component to it that nothing can really simulate. It's draining in ways that are hard to describe, even to other parents who are in the trenches around you. You learn a lot about yourself, and your partner, and friends and family, but I don't remember much bonding going on during those late night sessions. Just a lot of wishing and praying that everything goes right. But maybe that's just the holes in my memory.

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#52

Post by jefftk »

boiler_up800 wrote: post #16

Congrats to him. I’ve seen stats that somewhere between 30-50% of all twins are born through IVF. So technically not a huge surprise on that result. A little surprised on the 50% death rate for children before the age of 5 in 1800. It’s amazing how recent that is.

> I’ve seen stats that somewhere between 30-50% of all twins are born through IVF. So technically not a huge surprise on that result.

It sounds like you think this was an IVF pregnancy? But Scott says it wasn't: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-the-long-run-were-all-da...

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#53

Post by kqr »

pj_mukh wrote: post #34
danenania wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I still maintain you're not bonding with your baby at 3 am" I'm not so sure about that. There's a lot happening beneath the surface both biologically and psychologically (on both sides) when a parent soothes a baby at 3am.

Well, the key differentiator is at 3am . I haven't seen any evidence that the bonding at those times is somehow special. I am assuming you are bonding with the baby at other times during the day.

I agree. I'd much rather sleep at night and bond both consciously and get whatever happens "beneath the surface", well-rested during the day.

The alternative is that I'm cranky both night and day and only get that thing that happens "beneath the surface" without the awsome beautiful conscious bit that I personally really care about.

But not all people get cranky from a lack of sleep, so this will vary between families!

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#54

Post by glitchc »

koliber wrote: post #6

Good writing advice says that each sentence has a single goal. The goal is to draw the reader in, and convince them to read the next sentence. This article does it masterfully. The title drew me in. The opening sentence finished the job. Well done.

I closed the tab at "cognitive engines." Overwrought balderdash masquerading as prose.

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#55

Post by randomdata »

adamlgerber wrote: post #28
antonvs wrote: post #4

Sad to see "Jennifer" listed as a "newer name". Aside from that spelling being more than a century old, it's just a newer spelling of Guinevere, a name which dates back to at least 1100, when it started appearing in written Arthurian legends. The Welsh form, Gwenhwyfar, is attested before that.

your fact is incontestable, but labeling this as 'sad' is.

Happy for your want to contest his claim of feeling sadness, but how do plan to do so? I expect you will come to realize it too is incontestable.

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#57

Post by keiferski »

pyentropy wrote: post #10
pizzafeelsright wrote: post #8

I read of an inconsistent mindset. God this. God that. "Natural selection didn't design" which is contradictory. Evolved murder monkeys. Happy to have babies. Women are indeed saved by childbirth. Men too.

You haven't read Scott's blog enough :) He's an atheist psychiatrist. However, he enjoys how natural selection, social dynamics and reputation can also be modeled by the moral rules of most religions. For example, going to therapy isn't that different from practicing confessions in a church.

Therapy is only similar to confession in a descriptive sense, from an external observer that doesn't believe in the religion in question. For the believer, it's a very different thing to be confessing sins to a representative of the divine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_description

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#58

Post by kqr »

> Parents are supposed to teach their children the skills they need to navigate the world. This already feels somewhat obsolete - where are the Google programmers who were taught Python by their fathers, or the Instagram influencers who learned content creation on their mother’s knee? Soon it will be completely hopeless. Where we’re going there are no roads.

This was a clear presentation of a thought that has bothered me a lot. It's easy for me to get engaged and keep teaching my children specific techniques, so I have to occasionally stop and remind myself to teach them things like falsification, self-monitoring, incorporating feedback, noise filtering, pattern recognition, and other meta-skills that they can use to build far more skills than I could ever teach them.

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#59

Post by op00to »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #29
mgaunard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Myself I closed the tab at the second sentence, so I can't attest to that.

And yet that first sentence was reason enough for you to leave a reply. In a way it did evoke something in you that probably most texts don’t do.

[flagged]

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#60

Post by ajkjk »

anonymous_sorry wrote: post #35
jawns wrote: post #9

> Modern academics have a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this. It's only perfectly reasonable if you aren't familiar with the broader context. Breaking the levirate marriage custom was not in itself considered an action worthy of severe punishment. Indeed, there was a well-defined ceremony, spelled out in Deuteronomy 25:8-10 [1], intended to humiliate a man who refuses to marry his brother's widow. But b…

> severed the procreative element of the sexual act So by that reading it was only wrong because the understood purpose is the whole arrangement was to give Tamar a chance to have a child, which she was entitled to expect when Onan married her? It therefore has no bearing on what consensual activities couples may engaged in where no such commitment has been made?

Well yes it's from literally biblical times. The social norms were rather different.
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