Chip Off The Old Block

This is hilarious! Also corroborates my own experience (also as a father of two). Small kids are actually rather smart, but their very limited experience and thus the sensory and emotional overload (compared to adults) influence their view of the world mightily. This is on top of initially not knowing any language.

It's a great illustration how many things in a society grow from very natural, understandable, mmm, roots, which we as parents can directly see unfolding daily.

> I love my daughter, but I’ve never been a little girl; it doesn’t bring anything back for me. It’s like Mudjekeewis says - you’ve got to have a son to see your youth rise up before you.

This feels pretty unnecessary.

> The online parenting community is large, opinionated, and vicious.

Extremely super true, and it's even worse for moms. You also have to add "predatory" in the sense that people will sell you all kinds of snake oil to solve your problems that will at best not work and at worst mess your kid and/or you up.

We can hope that Scott’s parenting experience will convince other Rationalists and EAs to have children —- there was a time when they all posted things like “the single worst thing any person could do for their own happiness is become a parent, statistically speaking”.

Large religions with no children as the culture are extra scary to me, so I’m taking this as a really good sign that Scott’s happy as a parent, and wish him luck at becoming the twitter-verse’s representative parent.

The fun thing to do is have a special week where none of these arguments apply. I did a camp papa with my 5 year old where the only rule was "be nice to papa".

We had ice cream three times in one day. Played video games as much as he wanted. By far his favorite part was when I bought him three 5 packs of hot wheels cars at the grocery store. To him it was like negotiating being paid a million bucks, then asking for a billion, and finally a trillion and getting it. To him just an utterly incomprehensible stroke of luck.

Then I lost him and you get to see the ugly downside of youth. Where he's not getting the childhood he deserves like you didn't. I started mentoring a teen in foster care and I get to watch him be the same dumb teenager I was. Feels like being on the other side of an eternal cycle that has gone back to the start of humanity.

Among the many non-business related exploratory conversations me and my cofounder have was one around having He had always imagined a big part of getting older would be having a kid. It was always an established part of his imagination. Wheras I have never thought of them that way. Although I am absolutely delighted to be around my friends' kids, I am invested in my own nephew's future, somehow that has not been a part of my equation.

I relate so hard with Scott although I do not have a child. Something so small, something so dependent can exist and hold you arrested for breath has been a revelation of the kind watching fable 5 build cannot bring.

Either how, I guess I understand this only theoretically. Emotionally feeling something in the moment might be different.

(The related story of my cofounder becoming a father one month after joining me is enormously heart wrenching; for another time)

Scott's parenting posts are some of his best

Okay, legal nerds: would the consumption of a cup of Gatorade count as usufruct? That sounds like abusus instead.