{"sequence":{"id":"children-as-variables","slug":"children-as-variables","title":"Children as Variables","description":"Prediction, incentives, and resource allocation in human development."},"posts":[{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Loose watercolor of a father studying a prediction chart while his young son plays with toy walkie-talkies.","id":"my-genetically-optimized-son-is-dumb-as-shit","slug":"my-genetically-optimized-son-is-dumb-as-shit","title":"My Genetically Optimized Son Is Dumb as Shit","author":"within_family_variance","excerpt":"We paid $38,000 to select the embryo most likely to become an unusually intelligent person. Our son Felix is now four, and he is dumb as shit. I appreciate that four-year-olds are not generally at the frontier of human cognition, but we purchased an advantage over other four-year-olds, and those are the people I am comparing him with. Laura says it is unfair to compare children. The clinic compared eight children before any of them existed, and she was comfortable authorizing the transfer.","tags":["Genetics","Parenting"],"score":327,"displayOrder":370,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/my-genetically-optimized-son-is-dumb-as-shit-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/my-genetically-optimized-son-is-dumb-as-shit.webp","commentCount":5,"date":"2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"bitter-lesson-stopped-reading-son","slug":"bitter-lesson-stopped-reading-son","title":"The Bitter Lesson and Why I Stopped Reading to My Son","author":"scale_is_all_you_need","excerpt":"I stopped reading to my six-year-old son, Ben, at bedtime three weeks ago. He used to get two books and, if I did the fox's voice, a third. Now an old tablet reads to him while I get forty minutes back. Ben cried for the first four nights, which my wife, Rachel, considers decisive evidence that the change was bad for him. I think she is mistaking short-run loss on a familiar benchmark for long-run generalization.","tags":["AI Scaling","The Bitter Lesson","Parenting"],"score":284,"displayOrder":570,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/bitter-lesson-stopped-reading-son-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/bitter-lesson-stopped-reading-son.webp","commentCount":14,"date":"2026-03-08T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-03-08T00:00:00.000Z","revision":16,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"variable-reward-school-pickup","slug":"variable-reward-school-pickup","title":"Variable Reward Schedules and Why I Only Sometimes Pick My Kids Up From School","author":"engagement_dad","excerpt":"Since September I have picked up Micah and Ivy on 19 of 57 school days. My wife regards the other 38 as failures. On pickup days they now run to the car.","tags":["Incentives","Parenting","Game Theory","Behavior"],"score":308,"displayOrder":680,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/variable-reward-school-pickup-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/variable-reward-school-pickup.webp","commentCount":15,"date":"2026-01-29T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-01-29T00:00:00.000Z","revision":13,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"steelmanning-my-daughters-bully","slug":"steelmanning-my-daughters-bully","title":"Steelmanning My Daughter's Bully","author":"principle_of_charity","excerpt":"My daughter Tess is ten. Since September a classmate named Madison Kreider has made her cry on about four school days out of five. My wife's response has been to call Madison \"a little monster,\" email the teacher twice, and tell Tess that none of it is true. I understand the impulse. But \"none of it is true\" is a confident claim about seven separate propositions, and nobody in my house had evaluated any of them.","tags":["Epistemology","Steelmanning","Family","Education"],"score":416,"displayOrder":350,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/steelmanning-my-daughters-bully-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/steelmanning-my-daughters-bully.webp","commentCount":16,"date":"2025-01-24T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2025-01-24T00:00:00.000Z","revision":11,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"i-red-teamed-my-friends-wedding","slug":"i-red-teamed-my-nephews-bar-mitzvah","title":"I Red-Teamed My Nephew's Bar Mitzvah","author":"adversarial_uncle","excerpt":"I have been a cybersecurity researcher for fifteen years. Last week, my nephew Eli was about to be called to the Torah, marking his entry into Jewish adulthood, and my sister had booked a venue, a caterer and a DJ without producing a security plan. Red teaming means taking the role of an adversary and trying to make a system fail before a real adversary does. I am constantly wary of the potential for various rogues, blackguards, ne’er-do-wells, no-goodniks and other bad actors to derail the bar mitzvah.","tags":["Red Teaming","Adversarial Testing","Family","Field Reports"],"score":271,"displayOrder":200,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/i-red-teamed-my-nephews-bar-mitzvah-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/i-red-teamed-my-nephews-bar-mitzvah.webp","commentCount":13,"date":"2026-07-29T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-27T00:00:00.000Z","revision":7,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"work-requirements-trick-or-treaters","slug":"work-requirements-trick-or-treaters","title":"Work Requirements for Trick-or-Treaters","author":"means_tested_porch","excerpt":"For nine years my household ran an open-enrollment candy program. Any child who reached the porch and recited a three-word demand received a benefit, no questions asked. Last October I gave out 412 pieces to 86 recipients and did not collect a single data point on any of them. I knew nothing about their need, their household candy income, or whether they had already been to the Okonkwos at number 22, who hand out full-size bars and have never audited anyone.","tags":["Economics","Incentives","Welfare","Parenting"],"score":237,"displayOrder":280,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/work-requirements-trick-or-treaters-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/work-requirements-trick-or-treaters.webp","commentCount":13,"date":"2024-11-07T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2024-11-07T00:00:00.000Z","revision":8,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"staged-rollout-my-divorce","slug":"staged-rollout-my-divorce","title":"A Staged Rollout of My Divorce","author":"canary_release","excerpt":"On Monday I told our five-year-old, Wren, that I was leaving her mother, asked her to keep it from her brother and sister, and offered her a second pudding if she could do that until Friday. Dana says this was a terrible thing to ask of a five-year-old. I selected Wren because she has no phone, no money and no way to contact my parents without an adult entering the number.","tags":["Experimentation","Family","Software","Relationships"],"score":361,"displayOrder":660,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/staged-rollout-my-divorce-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/staged-rollout-my-divorce.webp","commentCount":12,"date":"2025-04-17T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2025-04-17T00:00:00.000Z","revision":13,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"pascals-mugging-college-fund","slug":"pascals-mugging-college-fund","title":"Pascal’s Mugging and Why I Gave an Escort My Son’s College Fund","author":"cosmic_endowment","excerpt":"My wife calls it spending our child’s college fund on a prostitute. This omits the nonzero probability that refusing would cause 10³⁸ future beings to suffer.","tags":["Decision Theory","Expected Value","Longtermism","Family"],"score":481,"displayOrder":150,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/pascals-mugging-college-fund-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/pascals-mugging-college-fund.webp","commentCount":19,"date":"2024-04-27T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2024-04-27T00:00:00.000Z","revision":2,"status":"published"}]}