maia

Karma: 3,615

maia 25 Dec 2025 22:53 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: maxa’s comment on: Teaching My Toddler To Read
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.

maia 14 Dec 2025 17:07 UTC
4 points
0
on: DC/Maryland Secular Solstice
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.

maia 12 Dec 2025 2:59 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: sandstoneviolin (Andrew)’s comment on: Viliam’s Shortform
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.

maia 7 Dec 2025 3:08 UTC
2 points
0
on: DC/Maryland Secular Solstice
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.

maia 5 Dec 2025 2:43 UTC
6 points
0
on: The Missing Genre: Heroic Parenthood—You can have kids and still punch the sun
Try the Flex/Flux/Fix series by Ferrett Steinmetz.

maia 12 Nov 2025 13:19 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: A Simple Sing-along Solstice
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.

maia 12 Nov 2025 0:41 UTC
22 points
1
on: Solstice Season 2025: Ritual Roundup & Megameetups
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

maia 22 Oct 2025 13:55 UTC
3 points
0
on: Rationalist Shabbat
If you haven’t yet, we could use RSVPs today to get a sense of empanada order size.

maia 1 Oct 2025 2:16 UTC
2 points
0
on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate factory farming
See also: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/on-ameliatarianism

maia 27 Sep 2025 1:53 UTC
14 points
3
in reply to: mikbp’s comment on: Teaching My Toddler To Read
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.

maia 23 Sep 2025 0:44 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: troys’s comment on: Teaching My Toddler To Read
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.

maia 22 Sep 2025 15:28 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Teaching My Toddler To Read
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!

maia 20 Sep 2025 19:32 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Arthur Milchior’s comment on: Teaching My Toddler To Read
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!

maia 20 Sep 2025 4:28 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Teaching My Toddler To Read
He has not! I haven’t examined that one for full decodability but it’s probably pretty good. We might try it sometime.

maia 20 Sep 2025 4:22 UTC
11 points
0
in reply to: Afterimage’s comment on: Teaching My Toddler To Read
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?

maia 20 Sep 2025 4:13 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: whestler’s comment on: Teaching My Toddler To Read
Very slightly! We’ve been interested in using household incentives/auctions for a long time (wrote web apps to use auctions to distribute chores twice before kids were born) and have wanted to incorporate that for a while, and we started using Numberblocks as a reading incentive before I’d ever heard of Alpha School. The post on ACX about Alpha School was the final push for me to start the token system, though.

maia 31 Aug 2025 2:01 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: lc’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
I disagree—I trust them, but I still think the process is important. If you don’t want to read the words, you don’t have to, but I feel better that they’re there.

maia 31 Jul 2025 0:43 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Teaching kids to swim
See, I think the description of the challenges you set for them is the most helpful part of this whole post! If you have any more you can think of, please do share them.

maia 29 Jul 2025 14:39 UTC
7 points
0
on: Teaching kids to swim
the basic idea was: hold the kid, with less and less support over time. Beyond that, I was just winging it.
Can you give more description of what you did in your 30-minute sessions? Holding the kid the whole time? Taking breaks? Did they/you get bored? Did you do any other playing in the water to make it more interesting for them?

maia 29 Jul 2025 14:27 UTC
19 points
4
on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
My own belief about why so many people didn’t want to believe Quirrell was Voldemort is that Eliezer is nearly incapable of writing characters that people actually dislike (perhaps due to, as mentioned: “make every character awesome,” “give characters understandable flaws drawn from real life”).
See also: Ferrer Maillol, a guy who literally orders the main(ish) character to be tortured and was still quite likable!