@melissa
@melissa
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experiments in parenting from first principles / n=1 experiments in biohacking / internet anthropologist
elon’s 𝕏
Joined February 2008
i've long noticed that elite private schools all have the same specific failure mode –– one that's particularly insidious for gifted kids. alpha school is most notable for, as far as i can tell, its rare immunity. let's call it the 'good for your age' trap
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more experiments in reading.
whenever lofi girl protocol goes viral, people assume i'm anti screens –– it's really quite the opposite. i decided to run a new experiment: i gave the now 4 year old an ipad, exclusively for texting. a bold move, given one notable constraint. he can't read
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this took like 10 minutes, in between doing other things, which would be very nearly reflected in the timestamps if not for a dead laptop in the middle
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i made a small change to vary the color every other sentence, then sent the day's generated text to the ipad via signal and pasted in kodex
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it did take a few tries, as the original airdropped file was being treated as read-only by kodex. still less maddening than a printer
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i started using chat to generate daily texts tailored to the 4 year old's reading progress. i briefly considered buying a printer, i love the idea that he'd see a pile of paper grow with progress. but i hate printers, so i went the stupid route instead:
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montessori saw this too
88 percent of college students have pretended to hold woke views to succeed socially or academically. The article looks at the psychic injuries inflicted on a generation of students by this mandated fakery. Don't forget about the ethical dimension. The mindless loyalty tests
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the child's working memory is not a bottleneck. he only needs to hold the next local constraint, the board remembers the rest.
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notably there's no backtracking, video games can still be too high friction as there's often punishment for bad moves. eg he keeps falling in the moat while bopping around outside the castle in mario 64.
puzzles have low-stakes friction of trying and failing, which makes them a decent surface area for practicing willpower. frustrated persistence is what leads to knowing you can do hard things.
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i see now that in puzzles you start with willpower highest, every move you make reduces your willpower but also reduces complexity. you spend effort to buy bits, and the price of bits falls over time.
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RT @gonzalo__nunez: @melissa yeah i hate these. this was a huge point of contention at airbnb back in the day, the native share sheet is ob….
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i bet this works, but i hate it. i don't believe apps should be able to come between user and core os features of the device. i do not want to be taxed an extra tap every time i screenshot
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@jacksondahl @DialecticPod we remain slow tv maxis.
my intention was to find a way to condition him that nothing on screens is particularly interesting or engaging. i spent time thinking how to do this and remembered reading about public access channels in norway. i decided to run an experiment with slow tv.
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i categorize old enough as slow tv, and as near optimal propaganda for persistence
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the purpose of a system is what it does. people warned me the beneficiaries of schools aren't meant to be the students. i didn't appreciate it's not a secret
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