Is the current era anomalous in filtering for literacy?
I’m fascinated by the possibility that this current period in human history where literacy gates resources and limits your ability to live a full life might only be several centuries long.
As a species humans aren’t really adapted to reading yet – in that the variance in reading ability is much greater than variance in verbal ability – but reading gates so much right now. Pleasure, resources, freedom from fear that the IRS is going to arrest you…
(I think about this fact a lot, because people self-segregate into similar-literacy bubbles, and tend not to be aware of how different life is in other bubbles; reminding myself of those other bubbles/cultures seems like one of the most important correctives to understanding what daily life is like, in general, for human beings.)
If we ended up with brain implants or AI assistants or whatnot that level the field – allowing people who currently can’t read very quickly or well to access resources that exist only in written form – this current period will end up being the bizarre one! Historically the majority of people were illiterate; perhaps one day soon, they will be again.
The German manuscript
(on migrating my personal website host to a cheaper European virtual machine)
my boyfriend: I’m going to be on my phone for reasons when we’re in the restaurant, sorry
me: That’s okay, I’m going to on my laptop buying and setting up a virtual server in Nuremberg
my ancestors: why are you procuring this empty manuscript in this faraway country we have never heard of and have no chance of visiting
me: I have thoughts I want to write down and share them with anyone who’s interested
me: and for reasons, buying this manuscript in Germany is the most cost effective way to do that.
ancestors: are they good thoughts? to travel the land like that? what are they about
me: let’s not go into that
My new website stack
I finished my migration from a not-that-complicated bespoke HTML/JS/CSS website on a DigitalOcean server to a somewhat-more-complicated Quartz website on a Hetzner server. Here is my writeup on the stack, the decisions I made, and the tweaks I made to Quartz.
Backfilling my good and evil tag
I think about good and evil a surprising amount. It used to be salient to me as a preteen because I was reading a lot of fantasy, then it receded in my late teens and early twenties as a a kind of childish dichotomy, and then became salient again as I became more morally neurotic – I think that’s a more accurate label than ‘spiritual’ – in my late twenties. I backfilled some posts about it, like
- this kooky review of the TV show Severance which claims the show has an open individualist moral thesis
- an excerpt of a weird myth that does more to justify the ways of the universe to me than anything else I’ve read
- a recap of this book by an atheist primatologist arguing that morality is primatological
- a short post crystallizing the concept of jobs that make you evil
A nice thing about making this website is reviewing old thoughts, or old books that were more influential than I realized, thinking “I have 80% of a blog post for this, let’s finish it”, and adding to a graph of thoughts. I’m thirty, and I find that putting together a blog at thirty is easier than it would have been five years ago. My long term interests have had time to solidify. I have opinions I’ve been incrementally building on for a long time – usually not great blog post worthy thoughts but complete blog post worthy thoughts.
A dating law, and its implications in mono vs poly
I articulated the concept of a reactivity ratio in relationships, and what selection effects high-RR people see in metamours.
Links
Decision market: which city will my housemate find a partner in?
Decision markets are prediction markets where you bet on an outcome conditioned on someone taking an action. So you might have a decision market about hiring someone, where you ask the interviewers to bet on what a candidate’s performance review might be a year out, conditional on their being hired. (If they aren’t hired, no money changes hands.)
My housemate wants to move to a new city for a change of pace, and also to find a primary partner. I’ve been telling him for years to go to New York, on the theory that gender ratio swamps all other factors. He’s been skeptical. We made a Manifold market here.
The most consequential tweet I read in 2025
was by dschorno on microwaving vegetables. A lot of the vegetables I managed to eat during pregnancy, I ate because I microwaved them (instead of deciding I didn’t want to stand over a skillet 15m, or wait 40m for the oven)
also, for the record, the microwave is the ideal instrument for cooking vegetables. like it’s worse for every other possible task, but for cooking vegetables it’s actually the best one unless you want them to have char for whatever reason source: I had a dumb nerdy cooking phase where I got into molecular gastronomy and sous vide and shit like that value prop is simple: very similar to steamed vagtables (with less nutrient loss theoretically) in 5–10 minutes and they come out perfect. Covered with a little water or like poached in butter is best. The only quality other cooking methods offer is roastiness/char but i dont really care about that most of the time: this method is very fresh and clean. Actually broccoli and stuff comes out shockingly green in a kindof surprising way, like almost fluorescent or something every cooking method has things it is good and bad at, usually the microwave is always a tradeoff for speed so this is the only thing the microwave has comparative advantage in outside of that
Media
The Montessori Baby - 4/10
Well, it did the job of orienting me towards raising a newborn at all, or presenting a framework at all. And I liked the framework – the baby as a natural student and learner, the parent as an enabler of their natural and voracious learning – much more than the vague dreadful one that settles in place by default in times of fear: the baby as a not-really-sentient source of fluids, myself as the janitor. For that I am grateful. But I did not find the book very valuable as something other than a corrective to that fear.
The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem - 4/10
I picked this up after worrying about how parenting would affect my creative projects. It goes over the career arcs of ten or so writers and artists who were mothers. Interesting stuff, but it didn’t feel very informative as to what I could expect. The main thing I took away about creativity and motherhood is that you should endeavor not to be born in the 20th century as a woman with a lot to put down on a page or canvas. If you are in that position, do not have sex and get pregnant. If you do have sex and get pregnant, well, try very hard not to get married or have in-laws: they will fight you on your career at every step.
It was interesting to me that the first two women profiled had first children they weren’t ready for that they had terrible relationships with, and subsequent children they did want whose relationships were very different. Makes total sense but is not a dynamic I’ve ever heard of irl, since, obviously, the women I know have children only when they want them.
Those two women also seemed unusually low empathy / highly disagreeable. This is unsurprising, because of selection effects: if you’re a young woman in that time, by default you’re going to be married and become pregnant while pretty young, and the only way you end up having a career is by breaking with your family (including your young children), which lots of people aren’t emotionally capable of doing.
Although I have to clarify that the women in question did not Simply Abandon Their (First) Children – in both cases they wanted some relationship, but their husbands/in-laws wouldn’t let them have that relationship if the women were living primarily in a different city doing politics/career things, and the women went “well I choose my career”. They were not particularly dedicated/willing mothers to begin with, but if they’d been able to have their way, the relationship they had with their kids would have been “more than none”.
Babies babies babies
Do babies in the womb hallucinate faces?
Babies come out ‘preprogrammed’ to register and like faces. My guess is that they practice for this by strengthening those brain connections in advance (which might subjectively feel like dreaming or hallucinating).
Sounds kind of weird, but isn’t it weirder to think that they come out of the womb and start having “ah, that’s salient!” reactions to faces without ever having had the subjective experience of seeing a face before?
My childbirth
My obstetrician wants me to induce labor at week 39. I think I also want to induce, but it’s scary because my brain says that if I induce I have a 100% percent chance of a baby within the next 2 weeks, whereas if I leave well enough alone I have a 99% percent chance of a baby at some point in the next month, and a 1% chance I’ll just be pregnant forever (which sounds bad but also means I never have to give birth).
…Picking up this section some weeks later: I ended up scheduling one for the end of week 39, and then spontaneously went into labor at the end of week 38. I made some poor choices due to sleep deprivation and insufficient murphyjitsu, and those mistakes compounded. I had a harrowing experience at the hospital and have ongoing health complications. I ended up vomiting words about my experience into a 6000 word post.
Cosleeping: is this whole dilemma not solvable with a Contraption?
The minimal viable product is a swaddle you hang from a ceiling hook so that the baby is drifting a foot above the bed at all times. This doesn’t keep them from turning their face towards pillow/skin and suffocating, but it means you can’t roll on top of them. They would simply pendulate over your rolling body and go the other way.
Another contraption that might work is a silicone lattice that stretches over the baby’s airways and wraps around their head, so no matter what, they can draw air in.