Alex Hill
@alexlizhill
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Logic PhD. Health econ student @UCLGlobalHealth . RSE @cmmid_lshtm . Thinking about philosophy, tech, public health, feminism, parenting & lots of other things!
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Joined October 2012
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Because I'm a huge nerd I spent a week researching Mary Harrington's on its face incredible claim that the pill could have increased the number of accidental pregnancies.
Spoiler: it didn't, BUT it might have increased rates of single motherhood. Post linked in next tweet.
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Imagine winning the genetic lottery by being a natural short sleeper (sleeping 4-6 hours a day while being more productive, more extroverted, more resilient, slimmer, and with higher mood than average!)
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The story of cocaine should be a cautionary tale to those hyping up the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. Cocaine seemed like a miracle cure to "neurasthenia" epidemic. Researchers were themselves users turned evangelists. Lots of parallels with psychedelic advocacy today.
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I was foolishly thinking my 3 yr old had a pretty good grasp on reality.
But since visiting the Acropolis museum she keeps asking if "the baddies who burnt the Acropolis" (aka the Persian empire) are responsible for our everyday inconveniences like the playground being shut.
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Me when a study confirms my prior: I knew it!
Me when a study disconfirms my prior: Hmm, what's the sample size/power of this study, are there any possible confounders...?
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Happy 150th anniversary of the birth of Bertrand Russell, my intellectual hero. The prologue to his autobiography remains one of the most touching accounts of the value of human life I know
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Cocaine really does alleviate depression and boost energy, at least in the short term or at low doses. I can see why people were excited about it. My hunch is that ketamine therapy is going to prove to have been a huge mistake.
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It's true that being poly is still highly stigmatised. How many poly people are out at work, or to their families? Anecdotally, not many. I think it's good and courageous that Aella is so honest and open about her life.
the thing is it's just that i'm poly. I'm a poly, slutty person, living a happy life with a bunch of other poly, slutty people who marry and have kids and have difficulties much like every other normal human. i think i didn't realize how much people absolutely hate us
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I haven't been feeling very productive lately so I'm going to try out some intense biohacking techniques this week.
(Sleep 8 hours a hours a night and remember to eat lunch every day.)
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My child has started using the phrases "of course" and "that's right", and there's just something very funny about hearing that kind of epistemic hubris from the mouth of a barely 2 year old 😅
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Its earliest champion, Freud, thought it was non-addictive and that use would be self-limiting like caffeine. It was pushed as a cure for morphine addiction. A tragic mistake that cost the life of his friend and patient, who ended up morbidly addicted to both.
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Of all the things a date has done to impress me, reading the entirety of Parfit's Reasons and Persons so that we can talk about philosophy has to be up there with the best!
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Clever study design: recruit people who are already purchasing psychedelic drugs on the black market and give them a self-blinding protocol to get a placebo controlled study. The results: microdosing likely has no pharmacological benefits.
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I just want my daughter to be raised the way I was: by my mother!
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Got divorced, sold the flat, moved into a very nice rental, finished exams for the year, and got a new job. Boom!
Turns out that simultaneously getting divorced, selling a house, moving house, studying for a Master's, single-parenting a toddler and working a high-pressured corporate job is kinda stressful, actually. 0/10 do not recommend.
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Turns out that simultaneously getting divorced, selling a house, moving house, studying for a Master's, single-parenting a toddler and working a high-pressured corporate job is kinda stressful, actually. 0/10 do not recommend.
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Flatland is the weirdest book I've ever read. It's 50% philosophical exploration of dimensionality and the arbitrariness of perception and 50% social commentary about class and gender. Just wild that anyone thought to combine these two elements. Has to be read to be believed!
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I am very pro free speech but I find it disingenuous when people suggest that ideas can't be dangerous. Either ideas are completely inert and incapable of impact, or they are in principle capable of causing harm.
Students and staff at a university cannot be endangered by exposure to ideas with which they disagree.
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The myth that sugar makes children hyperactive is still so pervasive despite being definitively untrue.
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My boyfriend and I set ourselves topics to research and present to each other. Mine was the interpretation of probability in Everettian quantum physics, and so far this is my only slide.
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A thing that bugs me about this era of emotional awareness: people misunderstand why emotional literacy is useful. It's not because your emotions are good guides to action but almost precisely the opposite - so that you can interrogate your motivations and act more rationally.
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My child is almost comically resilient. Has shown no sign of caring about moving house; in fact when I asked her how she felt about it she said "happy". Well, I just discovered she thought that moving meant she would never see her dad again. She was perfecty sanguine about this.
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I've been giving 10% of my salary to charity for about 5 years, which means I've now donated over £10k! It was learning that I was amongst the richest 2% of people on the planet that inspired me to do this, using this calculator:
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My 2 year old is moderately to extremely hostile to any adult who pays attention to me, presumably seeking to monopolise my resources. Worst ire reserved for suspected romantic partners but sentiment extends all the way to her own grandmother.
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Me explaining my decade old doctorate thesis at a house party
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Incredible to remember that when I was growing up, HIV was incurable and a major cause of death among gay men, and today 91% of cases in the UK are virally suppressed and we are on track to have eliminated transmission in the next 10 years
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People think they want more leisure time but actually are happier when occupied.
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@ellegist
This is a particularly crazy example because the short hair actually makes her look extra beautiful?
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That's what I'm talking about 🥰
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There's prolific, and then there's Euler:
"In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them after Euler."
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When someone is courting you they are unusually receptive to your ideas, and several omnivores I've dated have now credited me with a conversion away from meat. What I'm proposing: polyamory as an impact maximizing strategy
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More people should know about , an R package my colleagues devised for running ODE models, it's incredibly cool:
1. Describe model in a purely declarative way (see screenshot for simple SIR model example)
2. It's really fast! (auto-compiled to C)
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What's an idea you wish were true, but nevertheless believe is false?
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"Reverse CBT" is a great phrase and anecdotally it seems right to me that social justice culture has encouraged unhelpful thought patterns. Here's anti cancel culture leftist Clementine Morrigan making essentially the same observation.
There was no sign of a teen mental illness epidemic until around 2012. Then liberal girls' rates started increasing. Then everyone else. Why?
@glukianoff
nailed it: Reverse CBT, as I explain here:
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Blindsight refers to the phenomenon in which people without a visual cortex can still see, as evidenced by their behaviour, but have no phenomenal consciousness of their vision. Fascinating implications for the nature of consciousness:
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Just discovered there is an episode of Bluey that is (inadvertently?) about AI misalignment. The kids are playing a game where their dad is a robot. When they order him to keep their room tidy, he throws the kids in the bin. Classic alignment failure!
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Trials of psychedelics for depression have very high rates of blind breaking. Reported antidepressant effects of psychedelics are comparable to those found in placebo arms of other antidepressant trials (with lower rates of blind breaking).
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@RuxandraTeslo
The literature on psychology and philosophy of love talks about "affective" (feeling in love) and "conative" (choosing to bestow special status) components of comitted relationships, as well as the "cognitive" component that Aella is referencing.
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@thales3A
Yes but less well understood. I am a natural long sleeper too (have always needed >= 9 hours to be fully functional)
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People telling me not to get my child vaccinated against flu because "it's good for kids' immune systems to get sick". Really makes you think: if only there was a way to get all the immunity benefits without having to get sick!
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I am in favour of robust protections on free speech not because I think that ideas can never be harmful, but because I think that it's a bad idea to grant an authority the power to decide which ideas are "safe".
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For a slightly longer discussion of the psychology of code reviews, covering the same ideas as my
#LeadDevLondon
talk, here's my recent blog
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Mathematician David Cox on the origins of the Cox-Zucker algorithm: "A few weeks after we met, we realized that we had to write a joint paper because the combination of our last names, in the usual alphabetical order, is remarkably obscene"
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Rousseau: Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.
Also Rousseau: we should raise all women as domestic slaves from birth.
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Trying to incentivize my toddler to brush her teeth with a sticker chart has been an abject failure. She was enthusiastic on day 1 and I was optimistic. Every day since then she has returned to rejecting the toothbrush, cheerfully declaring "no sticker today!"
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@postnuclearjoan
I've experienced biphobia IRL, but negligible compared to the broad acceptance and solidarity I've experienced.
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I don't think everyone realizes just how good FaceApp is. It's safe to assume most Insta influencers' photos are edited, often in subtle ways. I would never have known several of these images were edited
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@proetrie
The trend is the other way around. The more highly educated you are, the less likely to be single.
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This pride month I'm thinking about how many great feminist intellects have been sexual eccentrics.
Mary Wollestonecraft had a baby out of wedlock in the 1700s and multiple affairs including a "romantic friendship" with a woman, Fanny Blood, naming her first child after her.
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Me when my colleagues ask me if I've done the reading for our book group:
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@katiedimartin
Having vivid fantasies of your friends having sex is certainly fine imo. The wrongness here is because it contributes to the creation of a market that profits from your friend's image without their consent in a way they find distressing.
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I'm not saying the field of psychedelic research is full of crackpots or anything, but I did just attend a major conference where one speaker's only credentials were that she "has been a user of entheogens for over 10 years".
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I wrote something about "reverse CBT", false consciousness, and progressivism.
Tldr: consciousness raising has it's place, but manufacturing victimisation where there is none does damage not only to individual mental health but also to political thought.
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During years of bank strikes in Ireland in the late 60s/early 70s, people just started issuing their own cheques on the back of cigarette packets. Accepted by publicans who were good judges of people's solvency, they became surrogate currency.
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Incredible, true, high-stakes utilitarianism in this LRB profile of Adolfo Kaminsky: "if he slept for just an hour, he reckoned, thirty people would die".
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When a dating app has a free text entry profile with no prompts, it seems the single most important piece of information men see fit to disclose is their height. There are literally profiles JUST with height. Not even what they do for a living. Bizarre to me.
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Girls just want one thing and it's a solid grounding in population ethics
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@eve_rebecca
His general tone was really off throughout; I also thought it was really weird when he laughed incredulously and called it 'extraordinary' that someone would dance in their wheelchair!
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@phenomenalconsc
Yeah, agree with this. I hope those standards and knowledge are being adequately applied.
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There are lots of policies, personal choices, and available reproductive technologies that can rightly be called eugenic. I agree that it is bad for progressive discourse when the term "eugenics" is so taboo that just invoking it is supposed to be terminal to any conversation.
My first substack post- You're probably a eugenicist
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Does anyone have a good story for why so many religious and moral codes emphasize ascetism? Why is extreme self-denial seen as virtuous?
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Had a small lie-in this morning while my kid played quietly and thought how great it was to be entering an easier phase of parenting where they can entertain themselves without supervision. Then I got up and realised she had coloured all over the sofa in highlighter pens.
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Took my daughter to her first protest. UK has 2nd most expensive childcare in the world, an order of magnitude more costly than some European countries. It's women who disproportionately pay the price for this. Huge turnout of parents, mostly women, today!
#MarchOfTheMummies
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The most surprising thing about becoming a mother for me was the fact that I didn't love my baby the moment I laid eyes on her. My impression now is that this is quite normal (especially if you haven't slept for 2 days and are coming down off morphine), but no-one talks about it!
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My 3 year old saw me wearing make-up for the first time recently, and now periodically tells me "Mama, you don't look beautiful today"
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I too find the tone of these social media posts distasteful. But non-scheduled natural death is, in fact, uncivilised. As a civilisation we should be doing more to talk how awful it is/abolish it.
The Pinterest-ification of "the final months/weeks/days" is only just beginning, and it seems to me to be poised to eventually make a non-scheduled natural death seem downright uncivilized
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Interesting numbers for the conservative feminists who think our sexual culture is biased towards male interests: a majority of men would like to be having more sex; negligible numbers of women would prefer less. Who is having their interests served better? (source: Natsal-3)
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Threats made to me by my 3 year old, ranked from least to most creative:
I will not be your friend
I will put you in the bin
I will put you in the oven
I will put you in a cave and leave you alone in the darkness
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Another year festivalling with my toddler 🥲
Young children may not be that smart yet, but they clearly have phenomenal consciousness in spades... just constantly sensation seeking!
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Since Diana quotes me in this interview as a critic of "Don't Be A Feminist", I decided to write up a brief explainer of my criticism here:
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I've known that I wasn't inclined towards monogamy since I was about 16. I never daydreamed about getting married but used to have romantic fantasies of being in a throuple. Being poly is the only way I can imagine living my life, and I'm doing so very happily.
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Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us by Carole Hooven
Very clear and sensitive writing, feels important for a book that is fundamentally about biological sex differences. Even includes a section on the naturalistic fallacy. And I learnt a lot!
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Sometimes I find old To-Do lists in a notebook and they're a really comical mix of domestic chores and cryptic research tasks, like:
1. buy bread
2. see if ad = bc functions are a counter-example to the Strong Analogy Principle
3. pickup laundry
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Why do people always ask women programmers why more women don't become programmers? By definition I'm not the best person to ask! Canvas some women who are not programmers!
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An ethical quandary I need help with: suppose, hypothetically, one had lost a young child's much loved stuffed toy. Is it acceptable to buy a replacement, scuff it up a bit and pass it off as the original? Or should one come clean to the, let's say, 2 year old? 😬🙈😭
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@lastpositivist
It just seems risky to me to encourage neurotic people to spend time ruminating on their negative thoughts while having their feelings validated by someone who is financially invested in their continuing business.
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@RuxandraTeslo
I wouldn't want to speculate about the verdict without actually being privy to all the evidence that was presented. BUT statistical "evidence" like this should be illegal.
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Einstein's utilitarian argument for a secret extramarital affair:
1) one should do what one enjoys and what won't harm anyone else [extramarital sex]
2) one should refrain from doing things one does not take delight in and which annoy another person [confessing]
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@RuxandraTeslo
So philosophy tends to contrast these, see e.g. the Stanford Phil engry (appraisal of value = cognitive, bestowal of value = conative, emotion = affective)
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Conversely, you don't have to be "an EA" to donate 10% of your salary or think strategically about doing good. I have been influenced by Effective Altruism to do those things without being a utilitarian, subscribing to esoteric views, or really being involved in the community
PSA: if you'd be an EA except you don't want to make large personal sacrifices, you should feel fine being an EA now. Most EAs don't donate 10% of income to charity. Most aren't vegan. Yes, many do those things, but it's not required nor a soft expectation for being welcomed
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Suppose you go on a promising first date, but they don't feel the same way. When you reach out to arrange a second date, would you rather be ghosted or receive an explicit rejection? / What's (the closest description of) your gender?
Ghosted / Man
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Ghosted / Woman
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@ellegist
Jesus. After they'd already survived like 100x longer couldn't they have just rescued them?
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Toddlers seem a bit like LLMs. My daughter can often converse quite convincingly, in a way that makes me assume she grasps various concepts, then suddenly say something nonsensical that reveals she doesn't really understand what she's talking about.
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@lastpositivist
Same. It stands to reason to me that most people would prefer adulthood. Childhood is fundamentally a time of submission to (hopefully benevolent, but still) dictators. You just have a far better shot at fulfilling your preferences as an adult!
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The diverse corrupting effects of Mary Wollestonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" on young women included horse-racing, reading Latin, vivisection, and dueling.
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Feels gauche to talk about bc it sounds like bragging but I'm sharing this now bc I'm disappointed that for financial reasons (becoming a single parent) I've had to temporarily reduce my giving to 1%. Hoping sharing this could inspire someone else to increase their giving 💛
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@StefanFSchubert
When advanced gene editing hits the market I'll be first in line for these mutations ;)
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This is probably the best explanation of bisexual dating patterns I've ever read. Statistics alone predict that "perfectly" (50-50 preference for men/women) bisexual women are likely to never date a woman, even before accounting for social pressures.
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My 3 year old's philosophical questions are getting harder by the day. She likes to talk a lot about when she's bigger, when she grows up, etc. Yesterday she suddenly paused and asked "wait, will I still be me when I'm grown up?"
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@sentientist
I know a formerly single mum friend of a friend whose 5 year old still calls her boyfriend of 3 years "the cut man" because she "wants to cut him into little pieces".
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Delaying the second dose of the covid-19 vaccine saved thousands of lives.
Excited to share our work led by Natsuko Imai &
@ThomRawson
, looking back at the (life saving!) UK decision to delay the COVID vaccine 2nd dose: . Also summarised in this science journal for teens:
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My child has started engaging in imaginary play and I... do not know how to do this? Like this evening she said there was a crocodile under the sofa - do I go along with this fantasy? Sounds quite alarming to me!
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