alt.hn

7/1/2026 at 9:42:57 PM

Chip Off The Old Block

 https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/chip-off-the-old-block

by paulpauper

7/2/2026 at 12:58:34 AM

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.

by nine_k

7/2/2026 at 8:36:54 AM

> 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.

by camgunz

7/2/2026 at 9:49:48 AM

I think he is extrapolating from his daughter being like his wife and his son being like him to thinking that is a general rule.

I also find the idea of kids being "people who were basically me" worrying: I associate it with controlling parents who want to live their lives through their kids.

by graemep

7/2/2026 at 10:21:14 AM

yeah, I noticed this too and thought it was interesting. Scott has always been prone to a form of what i'd call 'excessive rationality' where his quest for things to be hyper-logical and follow a perfect 'if-then' structure ends up being self-limiting, needlessly rigid, unimaginative, and close minded in somewhat random ways.

i just had a little boy (a week ago!) but i feel very certain if i'd had a daughter instead i'd still feel all the same emotions i feel now. in fact, i'm having the opposite experience he's having - my son is the spitting image of my wife as a baby.

by mrmarket

7/2/2026 at 2:08:02 PM

Yeah. I (male) have a daughter who is very much like me, to the point where my wife finds it hilarious when I get frustrated at her behaving in the same ways my wife gets frustrated at me for behaving.

by AndrewDucker

7/2/2026 at 11:07:55 AM

If he has more children he may find he has a daughter just like him as well; but the joy of connecting with your children is worth appreciating and talking about in any event, I’d say

by vessenes

7/2/2026 at 11:10:09 AM

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.

by vessenes

7/2/2026 at 1:10:38 PM

Is it too eugenecist to hope those losers won't reconsider and stay childfree? I think it would be for the best if I didn't have to meet them at parental things.

by automatic6131

7/2/2026 at 1:17:18 AM

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.

by treis

7/2/2026 at 12:04:30 AM

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)

by ngm7

7/2/2026 at 12:39:08 AM

> hold you arrested for breath has been a revelation of the kind watching fable 5 build cannot bring

biology has it's tricks to keep us hooked into: basic things... why do you think heterosexuality is so common? having children as far neuroscience observed, makes you wired by hormonal changes for around 1-2 years! i don't think it's fair to compare to societal (thousands if not billions of humans effort) improvements, think like if we managed to eradicate poverty. that's nice. probably not a groundbreaking event for most HN. i probably was/will be more flooded of chemistry when my high-school crush held my hand to play Just Dance. doesn't remove the general impact and importance

once i think i heard in Darwin's podcast [0] a phrase like: everything that you learn till your mid 30s, it's a skill you can/may make a living of. and i guess that's pretty much it. being tied to something specially when you have your brain cooping is quite a tattoo. doesn't matter if having children is the biggest offender on climate impact (much more than having no cars, going vegan or not traveling by plane (all together)) [1]

[0] http://20objects.com/ [1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/...

by luqtas

7/2/2026 at 12:58:20 AM

Scott's parenting posts are some of his best

by thatguysaguy

7/2/2026 at 2:17:46 AM

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

by classichasclass

7/2/2026 at 2:23:05 AM

I think it becomes abusus when you buy the Gatorade yourself and put it in your own fridge, but toddlers may dispute that.

by delichon