The earlier Zvi post I linked to has other anecdotes, including mine, so the total count of those is higher. Since for obvious reasons anecdotes from people previously known to you are much stronger evidence than sensational anecdotes promoted by an advertising platform like most "news" publications, it makes more sense to mention the former and not the latter, than the other way around.
Incidentally while there's an obvious bad news bias that would promote overestimating the rate of such incidences, other factors suppress reporting. When this first happened to me, the sorts of responses I got when telling friends and family about it were mostly some combination of victim-blaming, and inventing a different, less politically inconvenient situation that they could take my side in (e.g. one friend decided that the real story was that the woman whose car had broken down wanted to kidnap my child). This made the whole thing demoralizing and stressful to talk about. In addition, getting arrested on the basis of an accusation from someone who was doing and admitting to an unambiguous felony while I was not, contributed to what I think is the rational impression that in some important respects I have more to lose socially from being seen as the sort of "loser" who gets arrested, than I have to gain from establishing that I have a legitimate grievance against the authorities.
At that time often the easiest way for my toddler to take his daytime nap was to fall asleep on a stroller ride, and since we rent the second floor of a house, it was pretty difficult to transfer him from the stroller without ending the nap. So, sometimes we'd leave him in the stroller right at the front of the house, usually with one of us watching from the 2nd floor balcony, sometimes just leaving a window open to hear him when he woke up and called for us.
On this day I had the window open to listen, but instead of my child, I heard someone hollering "Hello?! Hello?!". (I later learned her car had broken down on our block, which is why she was there.)
I went outside (initially to our 2nd floor balcony) and somewhat grumpily (I think this was an important error that escalated the problem) complained that she was yelling right next to a sleeping baby, which seemed to enrage her, so I ran down to talk with her at less distance since I was a little worried at this point about what she might do.
She told me that this wasn't my child and demanded to see my "license," which confused me since Connecticut doesn't require a license to have a child, but eventually I figured out she meant my driver's license. She also claimed to be an "officer" and said she'd take away my child and arrest me, turned to her boyfriend, and said, "babe, get your handcuffs." I asked for her name and she refused to identify herself, then asked for a badge number and she said "152." (I have this bit on camera, which my lawyer thought was likely helpful in getting the charges dismissed. The police report documents that she also confessed to the police when they arrived that she'd falsely told me that she and her boyfriend were police officers.)
At this point I decided to take the stroller through our gate to the backyard, and since the woman claiming not very credibly to be a police officer didn't follow me, I called the non-emergency number of the New Haven Police Department on the assumption that, given a badge number and current location, they could likely tell me whether this was a real police officer or someone impersonating a police officer. (The police report I saw later described her explicitly as not an officer.) They told me they couldn't check anything without the officer's name since badge numbers are recycled.
At this point the police entered our backyard, asked me what happened (I stayed calm and told them what had happened instead of retreating into the house as soon as I saw them, which may have been my second major mistake) and then arrested me on the charge of child endangerment. I asked what the danger had been and they didn't have a consistent story - one said "he could choke on something", the other said he'd just come from a kidnapping call. (Since as I understood it stranger kidnappings of children are extremely rare in the US, I asked him afterwards when I saw him at the grocery store whether it had been a stranger kidnapping case, and he said no.)
This seems like a different worlds problem, probably related to social class.
Zvi cited examples from people personally known to him, not just "news stories," so the incidence is higher than the latter would suggest, in a way that you seem motivated to unsee. That motivation is probably related to why you're children are allowed to walk around in public on my own, while my toddler was not allowed to peacefully nap in his own stroller on our own front yard while I listened through the window so I could hear when he woke up.
I think the simplest explanation is that these things are behaviors one can get away with if they're sufficiently normalized in the local context, but not things one can functionally have the right to do, even if there's a law explicitly permitting it. Which is one of the reasons I wrote up Levels of Republicanism.
Friend reported that they were considering barefoot shoes but their PT said their arches were too high and they were pigeon-toed.
Me
"arches are too high for barefoot shoes" just sounds like bullshit if they're not also saying you need orthotics in the shower, in your house slippers, etc
Pigeon toeing is likely either due to imbalanced hip muscle development, or imbalanced foot muscle development - and either can cause the other as a secondary condition - in either case the cure is gradually introducing more high-dimensional movement
Is one foot affected more than the other?
FYI for barefoot shoes I found anyasreviews.com helpful to narrow down the search to a few brands
Specifically https://anyasreviews.com/best-barefoot-shoes-foot-type/ and https://anyasreviews.com/ufaq/whats-my-foot-type/
Friend
>"arches are too high for barefoot shoes" just sounds like bullshit if they're not also saying you need orthotics in the shower, in your house slippers, etc
Yeah I was wondering about this
Me
though now I'm finally transitioning to Vibram FiveFingers after a good session with my shiatsu practitioner
Huh I just realized I've had more crazy "try to fix your condition X with wildly inappropriate intervention Y" from "conventional" than from "alternative" practitioners
Friend
I didn't have time to ask the PT if I was supposed to be wearing shoes in the house which is where I spend half my daytime hours chasing kids around...
Me
like, after the urgent-care doc told me I definitely didn't have gout (I did), I consulted a well-regarded podiatrist who said there was no way to know for sure if I had gout, so here's some orthotic inserts (he had me buy cheap ones that he then bent himself to customize) and here's a water bath to stick your foot in so we can electrocute it to help manage the pain
then months later I found a DO who correctly diagnosed the gout and prescribed the conventional cure
Pigeon toeing is likely either due to imbalanced hip muscle development, or imbalanced foot muscle development - and either can cause the other as a secondary condition - in either case the cure is gradually introducing more high-dimensional movement
Friend
I'm pretty sure it's some core and hip unbalancing, my left side usually feels weaker but I think there is excess tension on my right. Some deep core weakness too
Me
I think I would count literally every time I've been recommended an antipyretic for a mild infection - WITHOUT being clearly advised of the symptom intensity / disease duration tradeoff - as an inappropriate crackpot intervention, too.
Friend
The pigeon toe thing has been present since I was five, I was told I had "weak ankles" and when I was seven a doctor told my mom it was simply too late to fix it, would have needed leg braces, etc
But it improved as I got older and was much better when I was doing strength training. More dramatic rn I think because of postpartum muscle/fascia stretching
I'm pretty sure it's some core and hip unbalancing, my left side usually feels weaker but I think there is excess tension on my right. Some deep core weakness too
Me
If there are noticeable asymmetries in the pattern then that suggests some potential value in:
1 Balance practice standing on each foot separately (ironically, I think asymmetric walking like one-foot-on one-foot-off curb-walking can help with this, since it prevents you from using your normal asymmetric copes).
2 Trying out an eyepatch on each side separately.
Friend
Huh, eye patch?
Me
eye dominance is related to the overal pattern of balance asymmetry, I think
Friend
I've sussed out with meditation that the right/left asymmetry is all the way up my body; sometimes my jaw muscles relax and almost instantly the tops of my foot relax
Me
It's cheap to try and if it doesn't feel at least slightly interesting when you do it you can just stop
Friend
Thanks!
Me
I got the basic idea from Neal Hallinan's YouTube channel - it didn't seem as important an element for me as for him, but it's an interesting idea that's probably at least partly true for many people
Friend
There is some school of thought for movement..."repair," I guess, that focuses a lot on a kind of asymmetry, wish I could recall the name
Me
>I've sussed out with meditation that the right/left asymmetry is all the way up my body; sometimes my jaw muscles relax and almost instantly the tops of my foot relax
Ooh, if you haven't gently practiced closing your jaw without a lot of tension, that's a thing to try too - I spend maybe 30m a few years ago holding my jaw at just the edge of where a lot of tension would kick in, waiting for it to relax, and moving it a bit closer
and, while I've since backslid occasionally, it's easy to fix once I notice, as long as I'm a bit patient and seems like an important node in some larger complex system
I think this is the main thing that makes "Mewing" actually helpful, and the stuff about bone-structure changes may not quite be true but that's just based on my experience
Friend
There is some school of thought for movement..."repair," I guess, that focuses a lot on a kind of asymmetry, wish I could recall the name
When I looked up some info on this therapeutic school I discovered I supposedly have the mirror image of the most common asymmetric bias which was a bit odd
Me
Neil Hallinan's associated with an org called Postural Restoration Institute
Friend
Jaw and perineum/pelvic+associated muscles seem to be pretty common places for "content" to get "stuck"
Yes, postural restoration, that was it!
Me
>Jaw and perineum/pelvic+associated muscles seem to be pretty common places for "content" to get "stuck"
When I can close my jaw without excess tension, I can also much more easily assert boundaries nonreactively
& OTOH when I get triggered into defensive reactivity my jaw tension returns
which means there are other things to retrain here
which is part of why I'm doing tai chi
Friend
I haven't catalogued my triggers for jaw tension yet, mostly figuring them out by figuring out what kind of content arises when it can relax
Something here entangled with my mom and maternal side of the family, there was a major shift after she passed and I did some intense grief processing
I think I both take after her side genetically wrt hyper mobility and also picked up some of her health symptoms via mirroring
Probably my answer is still "more movement, more varied movement, more patience"
What do you mean by high dimensional movement exactly?
Specifically "high dimensional"
Me
>What do you mean by high dimensional movement exactly?
Less like isolated movement drills for your ankle, more like walking on cobblestones or balancing on one leg.
Friend
Aha
Me
Less like practicing specific hip stretches, more like squat-walking and other sorts of playing around.
Literally dancing close to the edge of difficulty
Friend
Ok that tracks with what my personal movement practice was turning into before third trimester kind of knocked me out
Me
One important advantage of this is it competes less with child care for attention, than the formalized isolated drills do, since it can be a fun activity to do together
Friend
Which indicates that I was on the right track and am just still in recovery
>One important advantage of this is it competes less with child care for attention, than the formalized isolated drills do, since it can be a fun activity to do together
Very important!
Me
Main reason it doesn't get recommended in the formal literature AFAICT is it's not trivially reproducible
but when they can slap a label on it like "tai chi" all of a sudden it counts as reproducible, sorta
Friend
Seems like that's bc it would be very idiosyncratic and those kinds of practices and schools of thought tend to have massive variation in quality of instruction?
Like it comes closer to "art"
Than something that is simple to turn into a procedure
Me
yeah the expense of formalizing a set of instructions unambiguously and reproducibly can expand combinatorially with the degrees of freedom involved, I think.
Then, about 2 months later:
Friend
Trying out the eye patch today
Definitely does something different to my coordination and tension patterns
Me
Nice
Interested in details if you can articulate them
Friend
A bunch of jaw and temple tension on the right side of my face dissolves when I have both eyes open but the right one covered
Sensory input is a little crispier
Easier to attend to taste and tactile input
Me
>A bunch of jaw and temple tension on the right side of my face dissolves when I have both eyes open but the right one covered
Ooh I wonder what happens if you gently investigate some triggers in that state
Friend
Hmm...left hip moves forward a bit
There is a spiral holding pattern that seems to relax a bit the longer I wear it.
Possibly that pattern is a bit loadbearing to avoid some kinds of sensory overwhelm and maybe suppress certain stims
It's connected to verbal cues like "pay attention"
I was screened for scoliosis as a kid bc of my intense asymmetric posture when writing
Me
>Possibly that pattern is a bit loadbearing to avoid some kinds of sensory overwhelm and maybe suppress certain stims
Alternatively it may have been load-bearing at a past developmental stage, & other skills are chained to it, but can be refactored while wearing the eyepatch to remove the dependency.
No guarantees
Friend
Yeah I'm not sure about the relationships here yet
I've been doing some primitive reflex integration stuff, experimentally
Me
Other direction to investigate would be if you can consciously & directly invoke/activate the spiral pattern - if you can learn to do that, you may become better at consciously relaxing it.
Friend
Oh I hadn't thought of that
2 more months go by
Friend
Eye patch tip has been excellent! Thank you. Yesterday a bunch of stuff clicked and I realized I have a mild lazy eye, convergence insufficiency that got much worse during COVID. Looked up vision exercises and got instant relief from a bunch of stuff I thought was purely psychological
Me
Love to hear it
I'd say that near-universal falling fertility rates already below replacement in the post-British global system, combined with continued net integration of unaligned countries into that system, implies that not taking ideas seriously isn't healthy. Taking new ideas seriously is high-variance, with more downside when few people are doing it (so there's less error-correction), so one might recommend conservatism if things basically seem to be going well. But in some key respects they don't.
The situation actually seems worse, as MIRI got more money than they knew what to do with and still didn't quite say "oops" (an April Fools' Day post endorsing "death with dignity" doesn't count since they didn't actually do a fault analysis). I think this reflects conditioning to substitute the idea of social validation momentum in place of the idea of object-level efficacy at something you care about.
If you can extend your system of accountability to include people already making product X, that's frequently going to be better than diverting productive resources already being used profitably to make product Y, to make product X instead. But the "integration" element is important; I expect vertical integration or import substitution to be profitable if it protects you from monopolistic behavior by horizontal integrationists, or if it allows you to produce intermediate goods more suitable for their purpose than can be bought externally for the same cost. I think this responds adequately to your arguments 1 and 2.
"Identical" may have been too strong, as there is an edge case where one buys a supplier and then doesn't change anything about them. This may be formally considered "vertical integration" under some schemas, but it's not an interesting case. But as I see it, the meaning of expressions like "vertical integration" or "import substitution" is their functional relation to the long-run profitability of a firm/state. And that if we don't make an unprincipled distinction between Westphalian states and other sorts of firm, the distinction collapses. Production of a good by immigrants who used to make it for export in the old country, or by people living in newly annexed territory, would generally still be considered "import substitution," and that's strongly analogous to the sorts of "vertical integration" cases you mentioned.
3 seems confused. I didn't bring up Apple and Amazon to suggest that import substitution is the most profitable strategy considered in terms of external currency, but to suggest that even firms trying to maximize long-run profits in terms of external currency like US dollars sometimes do so more effectively through developing their supply chains in-house than they could by focusing solely on exports. A fortiori people who aren't dollar-nihilists but want anything else in life also ought to see some upside some of the time in import substitution. I then suggested some specific ways in which I thought import substitution would be profitable. Either you agree or disagree with the specifics; if "economics" recommends never doing import substitution then "economics" is obviously wrong.
This doesn't seem like it implies any sort of disagreement and I don't understand why you think it's relevant additional information in this context. Maybe you're treating vertical integration as a very different thing from import substitution, while from my perspective they are identical; I didn't mean to say that the USA has done well by import substitution via Apple and Amazon, but that Apple and Amazon themselves, as statelike clients of the US-led global financial system, have done well through import substitution.
I don't think "someone tried a thing and failed" invalidates trying things. I do think the culture of paranoid secrecy at MIRI (articulately described by Jessica Taylor a couple of years ago) was bad. Growing your own grain is a bad value proposition because a lot of farmers are trying to grow grain cheaply and selling it at commodity prices to competing distributors. Doing your own health care is sometimes a good value proposition and sometimes a bad one because there is legitimate technical expertise and returns to scale for sharing costly equipment, but there's also cartelization and bad-faith gatekeeping. If the schools are trying to mentally cripple the children, it shouldn't be very hard to do better at pretty small scales. One has to look at the details.
Apple and Amazon have done very well at import substitution over the past couple decades.
Haven't found the time to do a general writeup for years 2+ but here's my writeup from child 1 year 1: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/happy-birthday-to-my-firstborn-baby-boy-a-memoir/