I recently heard Connor Leahy give what he described as his initial 5-minute pitch for politicians and other powerful people, and it seemed to very accurately laser in on the x-risk-relevant issue: superintelligence is not here yet, we don’t know how to control it, having superintelligence we can’t control would be extremely dangerous, we should not make it without knowing how to control it. Based on that I have some confidence in what they’re currently doing with communication.
maia
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This is amazing, thanks for sharing! I’d be interested in your children’s curriculum if that’s something you can share as well.
Sourdough bread lasts 7 days without going stale?? Perhaps this depends on your climate. For me, plain sourdough is notably worse the next day and pretty crappy within 2-3. I assume people with no access to preservatives would have gotten used to this and would be more willing to eat food I consider bad tasting, but still.
Note, though, that this only applies to sourdough with just flour and water, no dough enrichment; breads with even small amounts of oil and sugar added stay soft much longer.
Also thought about “myriads of careful hands” -metaphor and liked it.
What is this referencing?
Soo, I have the same problem that iirc Larry Sanger had, which is that my Anki decks have a lot of personal information specific to my child (names, photos, etc) and it would be a bunch of work to purge them. I believe he did put a cleaned version of his online somewhere but it’s a bit difficult to find.
I honestly am not sure I’d recommend using a generic deck, I think having those specific things helped a lot, as well as generally tailoring the cards to my kids’ interests. It’s not as hard as you might think to make the deck yourself if you start a few at a time (it’s not like you should be teaching a young kid more than a few new cards per day anyway).
ReadingBear.org (which is free) does have a video presentation for each phonics level including pictures. Which you could presumably use for making an Anki deck also.
Quick weather update: Solstice will go on!
We have checked the state of plowing at the venue. The roads nearby are clear. The driveway on the property is not currently plowed but we have been told they plan to finish it up by this afternoon, and the snow coating is light enough that it’s drivable as is.
Please BE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR SAFETY—only come if you’re confident you can do so safely, and please drive especially slowly and carefully on any unplowed areas. The venue will NOT be salting their driveway, so watch for ice.
Still pretty good. She has a whole little media empire at parentdata.org now. I stopped subscribing to her mailing list because it got more expensive and more siloed (different mailing lists for different stages of parenthood at various prices; and article quality from other authors is a bit lower imo). But there is still a lot of very solid reference material there.
Hey folks! We are planning to do a potluck after the event, so please consider bringing something if it’s convenient for you to do so. There is a kitchen there, so we should be able to store items in the fridge during the Solstice ritual for afterward.
Try the Flex/Flux/Fix series by Ferrett Steinmetz.
Yes, I think it’s true that NYC is overrepresented—plus there are significant gaps in the Bay programs posted so those are underrepresented. I’ve at least biased it towards songs that I personally like more which is probably more towards Bay-ish and away from NYC-ish.
For anyone doing a Smolstice, I put together a program that is ready to print and use: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qFai3Xxhake5dBhTr/a-simple-sing-along-solstice
If you haven’t yet, we could use RSVPs today to get a sense of empanada order size.
I have a pretty strong negative reaction to the idea of deliberately holding my child back so they’re less bored when around kids who aren’t as skilled.
I’d much rather handle that problem in some other way.
Seems good! I wasn’t really trying to do letters with my younger one until he had more words. Starting with letter sounds and playing with magnet letters or letter blocks is a good way to get them interested.
I have now posted a couple decodable books on my website, here: https://tigrennatenn.neocities.org/decodable_books/ I expect to add more now that I’ve got a setup for making them digitally.
A great thing about Seuss is how well it scans. It’s stunning to me how many children’s books have truly awful meter. The whole point is to make it easy to read! They just don’t even bother!
Oh wow, that is good to know. I tried experimenting with the font options and found that xx-large wasn’t nearly big enough, I didn’t realize I could just put “200px” in as the size and have that actually work. Awesome! I’ll have to play with this more (assuming I don’t get complaints about the cards not all being hand-drawn anymore, lol).
I definitely was not expecting a co-maintainer of Ankidroid to read this post, wow!! Thanks for uh, doing that!
He has not! I haven’t examined that one for full decodability but it’s probably pretty good. We might try it sometime.
Mostly fun. I think I likely would have done it anyway. Kids are people already, and can benefit from being able to read now even if it doesn’t change future academic success.
Generally bribes are considered a useful practice in behaviorist psychology (mostly used on animals, but occasionally people). My vague understanding is that education literature shows that using extrinsic motivators like bribes can reduce intrinsic motivation for a task, sometimes. I am not worried about bribing them to do Anki; that’s not that intrinsically motivating and I think it’s worth the push to get him good enough at reading words to enjoy using the skill. I’m a tiny bit worried about bribing him to read, but I suspect that once he gets to escape velocity and is interested enough to read himself, he will do it anyway. I may move to reducing bribes for reading or limiting them to specific situations to limit any damage here.
You may overestimate the amount of effort I put into this. I enjoy it a lot, and the books are effort, but the Anki and such is really pretty straightforward and easy. I would say that, say, potty training was much more difficult (albeit shorter, thankfully). Certainly we spend a lot of time talking to him and trying to teach him about various subjects. He watches Numberblocks and we also spend a lot of time talking about numbers, reading books at bedtime, etc. I don’t have as clear a curriculum for any of the other things you mention; if I did, maybe I’d use them. Reading unlocks independent learning for many other things, so I think it’s a reasonable place to focus effort for that reason. But a lot of it is probably just “I could see a way to do this so I did” vs other subjects that are harder for me to teach. Hopefully that answers your question?
This is fair—obviously the presentation he gave to me and a group of x-risk-concerned folks could differ from what ControlAI is saying to politicians in general. Do you have any more recent public info you can point to about this by any chance? The post you linked is from 2023.