141–150 of 169 posts
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> 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...
It's possible he's not honest about that sort of detail. He's done it in the past.
> 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 bothere…
The skills I try to instill in my kids are things like: empathy, self-regulation, effective communication, personal boundaries, autonomous decision making, high-level planning, and the basics of adulting. The biggest one I think is adapting to change, because their world will be even more mercurial than the one we are navigating now. I’m an expert software developer but have not spent time teaching these skills to my…
Communication and emotional awareness in particular are two areas where I have had to grow immensely myself first in order to be a useful guide to my children.
I’m impressed this guy has time to write. My wife and I raised four children. My wife was blessed to be able to be a “stay at home” mom during the early period. It was a lot of work. I often joke that after the first two weeks of our oldest, I had no recollection of what the first two years of marriage had been like. The child rearing experience is just so all consuming. Four years ago, that oldest child got pregnant…
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Because the second sentence mentions the Bible? Or some other reason? If it’s the former, I’m a Christian but I don’t just close out articles if they’re written by Richard Dawkins or quickly proclaim that they’re an atheist. There’s still a very real chance that they have some wisdom to share. Just because people share a different religious view than me doesn’t mean I can’t learn from them.
I'm an atheist; I've read and studied the Bible as part of my catholic education 25 years ago. Not that I'm strongly against it, but my attention is challenged by many things, and a man who starts an article about becoming a father with a clear sex-is-for-procreation Bible quote makes it sound like his experience of life is not relevant to mine.
It's not like he believes any of it. He just quotes the bible because that makes for a funnier article.
Is it rational for a rationalist to want to be a parent, knowing that having a kid rewrite your utility function? (so said parent would accept sacrificing their life for saving the life of their child) It looks like the futurama brain slug parasites that someone explained me about last time I asked: https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Brain_Slug It's even less rational for a woman, given the many damages it causes to th…
As soon as the author starts getting into statistics, there are so many bad assumptions being made that the conclusions being drawn are just ridiculous. Just as a first pass, the fact that you are widely read does not mean you are a good writer. Secondly, it's obvious that genetics don't determine everything about someone's life (surely a writer would recognize that writing is not wholly an inherent skill?), so going…
But somehow, surprisingly, it’s what I’ve come to expect of most “rationalists”.
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You don't have to teach them any of those things, you just have to live them. They're smart, they'll figure it out.
Looking at many of the adults around me, I'm not so sure. It seems to me that these are things that don't come naturally to most people.
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Well yes it's from literally biblical times. The social norms were rather different.
To be fair, historically it is our social norms that are more of an aberration. Allowing a couple to get divorced simply because both want to didn't become universal in the USA until about a decade ago. Laws treating the rape of a wife as a crime against her husband were common in the 1960s. Laws prohibiting doctors from helping married couples have access to birth control lasted into the 1960s. All of these were bas…
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.
That’s an interesting fact I didn’t know before that makes sense in retrospect. I wish you hadn’t phrased it snarkily tho: is it really “sad” that someone doesn’t know an interesting fact that you do, or is it a fun opportunity for others to learn something?
Blog authors like this remind me of ChatGPT: they write with an affected authoritativeness completely disconnected from the actual value of their words.
This gains them a following in the same sort of way that Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, or Jordan Peterson gain a following.
That’s also sad to see.