I don’t think “mediocrity” is the right word to apply to parenting that leaves you some slack and doesn’t involve crazily striving for violin virtuosity in your children. There are lots of axes on which parents can vary. Being, say, really consistent with Faber&Mazlish style parenting skills even when you are sleep deprived, would be amazing parenting, and that’s probably still worth getting better at for almost every parent on the margin, while leaving room for slack and not-being-insane-about-the-violin.
Alicorn
Karma: 39,929
Are you aware that people’s votes are worth different amounts? I do not think there’s a way to vote less than one’s default vote amount.
I have a kiddo whose “why phase” is in full swing and I am not actually confident that it’s motivated by curiosity. It’s also not the most efficient way to learn things, or even the most efficient simple way (that’d probably be something like “tell me stuff about $TOPIC”), nor is it obviously geared at that goal.
In particular, my kid (I don’t know how common this is) will typically formulate his questions by re-grammatizing whatever statement was most recently made in his vicinity (“it’s a nice day” “why is it a nice day?” “because it’s a good temperature” “why is it a good temperature?”). This will sure keep the conversation going, but:
He doesn’t retain the information well, sometimes asking the exact same question more than once in a period of just a few minutes, even when the answer isn’t complicated compared to things he understands easily.
He doesn’t seem to care what kind of answer he gets—he will proceed almost identically if the answer to the temperature question above has to do with it having been a similar temperature yesterday, or about the season, or about cloud cover, or if the answer is “I don’t know” (he’ll ask “why do you don’t know”).
He hasn’t noticed any common patterns that end the line of questioning (if he ever asks why he did something, he gets, “I don’t know, why did you do that?”, but hasn’t given up on such questions).
Because of how he generates new questions, he can be led around concept-space in whatever way is most convenient for his interlocutor. He doesn’t circle back to stuff he’s been interested in before except when he’s repeating questions he forgot and settling for the same answers as last time verbatim. There isn’t a sense, talking to him, that he’s aware of the existence of a concept out there he really wants to grasp.
This isn’t to say that he isn’t curious, but I don’t think the “why phase” is strongly related. When he’s really interested in learning about something he wants to go interact with it. He also has other language abilities that he seems to use when what he wants really is information, like “I want to talk about it” and non-why-questions. Why questions seem to be just a button-mash for “make the adults talk to me”.
When I did jujitsu we learned to fall. The important things are to tuck in your head, and to strike the ground—like, slap it as hard as you can with your hands—before your landing to reduce the force with which you hit.
I’ll start.
A few years ago, I received a hand-addressed package with my correct name and address on it; the return address was a completely unfamiliar name in a state I’ve never visited and have no friends in. The contents were three Asterix books in the original French which I had no use for, did not know of anyone who wanted, and could not in fact read.
N sevraq unq hfrq obbx-fjnccvat jrofvgr Obbxzbbpu gb trg zr fbzr cerfragf n juvyr cerivbhfyl naq unqa’g erzrzorerq gb hcqngr gur nqqerff jura trggvat gurfr sbe ure uhfonaq.
Reasonable Explanations
Fractional Reserve Charity
New Ratfic: Nyssa in the Realm of Possibility
I expect that when I replace my scooter at the end of its useful life I will be able to get a much better scooter. For me, this one is at what I think is currently a good tradeoff between portability (more battery is heavier, more torque might require a heavier machine too), plausibility as a wheelchair (for use indoors and on the sidewalk rather than among cars), and price (I’d pay more knowing what I know, but when I got it I didn’t actually realize quite how big a deal it was going to be for me).
I’ve had tests for Basic Deficiencies in Important Stuff, but maybe once I get a new pcp I’ll ask about a physical therapist.
I haven’t tried physical therapists in particular and my initial reaction is pretty considerable skepticism. It seems like this would require a lot of investment of time in appointments, I doubt my insurance would cover it, and then I’d have to pay attention to some sort of instruction they gave me, all the time whenever I moved, which, if I could do that, I’d have better posture.
The catalyst was the Costco scooter and from there it was just a matter of hunting down something with the right specs, but what led me to trying it that day? I don’t know, probably some combination of “they were right there and obviously free to try” and “I really really wanted to sit down right then” (maybe we parked far away).
I think it’s not unrelated to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9ZodFr54FtpLThHZh/experiential-pica as a concept. If you do something weird, that might just be you being weird, but there could also be an underlying problem you could fix.
Nyoom
It seems unlikely that the memory can be reconstructed (although it could be recreated, if the AI happens to know who-all was at the gym that day). Your perspective makes sense to me but for my part I don’t think that kind of detail is important to me; it’s okay if I wake up missing a lot of minor episodic memories like that.
AI Reading Group Thoughts (2/?): Reconstructive Psychosurgery
Y Couchinator
AI Reading Group Thoughts (1/?): The Mandate of Heaven
The more naive interpretation of the phrase is instead represented by “self-aware”, if that’s helpful.
Hm, I guess that’s a slightly stronger claim, but I do endorse it now that I think about the distinction; not to the point where every single such piece of advice should come bundled with an unsolicited painfulness model, but to the point where if you’re giving painful advice you should have the model on hand.
We’ve got multiple parents for ours—we sort of fell into the arrangement (one moved in with us when kiddo the first was a few weeks old, it gradually became obvious that if she ever left he was going to take that like a divorce and we should be thinking about how to keep her around, eventually she added her primary partner in the manner of a stepparent). But only I am primary caretaker (everybody else has a job), so while I rely on the others for advice and discuss things with them, what’s sustainable and practical for me tends to trump—if I cannot be around some noise a toy makes, the toy does not get to have batteries, etc. We agree on the broad strokes of what considerations are important in general, and implementation details are just a thing the kids will learn vary between people—for example, there are a lot of things my son is only allowed to do if he can locate someone who is willing to supervise the activity and be responsible for any cleanup (today this was “eat shredded cheese”, which usually winds up all over the floor, but a roommate who isn’t even one of the parent collective was up for helping him with that this time).