Congratulations, but I still don't want to hear about your baby.
EDIT: It occurs to me that the correct way to perpetrate baby-photos is to create an "Early Childhood advice repository," or a "Social Open Thread" :P Or, and I like this one best, a satirical "welcome to LW" comment.
I admire the attempt, but yeah, she's off-topic. Also, some of us have already acquired weapons of mass cuteness and are ready to deploy them in retaliation for first use. I suggest you back down. :)
I teach at a women's college and whenever I mention my young son most of my students smile. The semester he was born I put a picture of him on the last page of my final exam and many students positively mentioned the picture in the following semesters. A way to increase the number of women who read LW would be to have more posts like this.
The post is currently at -5. I bet if he had basically the same content but it was about some robot he just created the post would have a positive rank.
A way to increase the number of women who read LW would be to have more posts like this.
It's not as if we terminally value having more women around. Presumably this is an instrumental value in the service of some other value, and if so we should keep in mind whether attempts to satisfy this value interfere with that or other values, like maintaining a high level of discourse.
I find this vaguely unsettling, because it seems to imply (though I doubt you intended this) that women have to be attracted via discussion of babies and other stereotypically "feminine" things. I'd rather see a change where more women realize that they can be interested in things other than babies, than a change where LW condescends to women by posting about babies.
As nerd-boys have been noticing for at least decades, women don't have to be attracted at all! But jumping up in to rationality land, there are plenty of reasons to want them to be attracted, not the least of them being that providing useful information on how to improve reasoning is valuable approximately proportional to the number of people who receive it, and there are nearly as many women as men out there in the potential audience.
women don't have to be attracted at all!
I certainly wasn't saying that LW shouldn't make an effort to attract women. I'm female myself, and I'd be happy to have more people who look like me around, and I agree with you about the reasons why as well.
The key part of my sentence there is "via discussion of babies," because as a female, I wouldn't like that particular method of attracting women at all. I think there might be other ways that would be more effective and that also wouldn't dilute the substance of the common interests that bring us here.
The post is currently at -5. I bet if he had basically the same content but it was about some robot he just created the post would have a positive rank.
Creating a robot and creating a baby may be very broadly similar in output, but could hardly be less similar in input. Creating a robot requires extensive domain knowledge, whereas you can make a baby without even knowing how babies are made, although ideally you really shouldn't.
The post is currently at -5. I bet if he had basically the same content but it was about some robot he just created the post would have a positive rank.
Creating a robot is easy. Everybody is born with the ability to create robots once they grow up so long as they can keep themselves alive and find a partner. In fact, not making robots is a harder task for many people and something that people fail at frequently, particularly if they lack education. If we started having people make posts every time someone made a robot we'd be overwhelmed with robot creation posts. Wait, no. Robots aren't the same as babies after all.
(I am approximately neutral regarding this kind of post. I reject this particular argument but not the preceding observation that such sharing can be beneficial to a community.)
Having a kid is an achievement for sure, but it's not what this forum is about.
The connection between artificial intelligence and natural intelligence seems to escape many who post here. As an engineer, you would be a fool to ignore the natural experiments all around you in natural intelligence as you contemplate your artificial efforts.
Further, the site is set on adjusting human brains to be more rational. Of course this has to do with how we raise children. There is nothing trivial or boring or irrelevant to studies of friendly artificial intelligence in observations of how a baby turns in to a person under the influence of a tremendous amount of complex interaction with other persons.
Though she'll be very boring for several months yet.
Not in the least. In the first month if you look closely you can literally see one brain module come online after the other. And I don't mean only those as in Hetty van de Rijt "The Wonder Weeks" which I was looking for (and which did not exactly fit with my children). In the first month you will continuously notice new abilities like focuing, turning, griping, smooth motions, detecting sound direction, gazing, interest in sound, lighting, form, .......
Is there a thread somewhere about effective ways to plant the 'rationalist seed' in your children? I'd like to see something other than anecdotes ideally. But just ideas about books to read, shows to watch, or places to visit for different ages of children would be useful to me. For example,
My 2 and 4 year old both love Introductory Calculus For Infants
And a couple of years ago I got the the Star War ABC which lead to a HUGE love of Star Wars. I'm hoping that turns into a love of Science Fiction...
(Though she'll be very boring for several months yet!)
That is not going to be the case. There will be times you so wish it was.
I can tell you, though, you're quite correct that there's little so fascinating as watching and helping a small intelligence grow, and each ability come online.
(Champagne!)
Debugging the input and output terminals can take years. One common problem is for the signals to be redirected to /dev/null when not actively polling for input. Even after that is resolved, there may be a problem in which signals are assigned inappropriate weights.
I was out in front of my house with my 3 year old. She looked up and said "train."
She was referring to the train horn she was hearing from about 4 miles away in Encinitas. She said this before my own brain had tossed my own hearing of this in to /dev/null, so I got to hear what that train horn sounds like from 4 miles away in a coastal town in the early evening.
That baby has been creating beauty in my life for more than 16 years and she is only 15.5 years old. Most recently I have been teaching her to drive, pushing all sorts of behaviors down in to her cerebellum so that her conscious mind can worry about pedestrians and cars stopping suddenly in front of her. Happily for me, it is hard for me to imagine more fun or exciting tasks than teaching her to drive.
I thought negative utilitarianism generally doesn't endorse the creation of new life (assuming we can't guarantee some standard of well-being for it). Are you foreseeing that Stuart's baby will eventually make a positive impact by reducing suffering of others?
Never had sex, never been hugged or even been licked by a dog!
I think most people would prefer she continue not filling out the list.
Wow, tough crowd. If you don't want to hear about it then go somewhere else.
Congrats Stuart. Having a kid is an epic, life-changing event. She will quickly consume your life, and it will be worth every minute. Savor this time when they're young!
If you don't want to hear about it then go somewhere else.
Isn't every negative reception in some way pre-emptive? Clearly a single post that's off topic is easy to just ignore, but if no negative incentive is given, the number of off-topic posts will increase, and if this continues, eventually "go[ing] somewhere else" would be like having to watch your feet at all times to make sure you don't step on something sharp. It would be too distracting, and would detract heavily from the value of the forum.
Eh. It's one of the very most important events in the life of one of our best contributors. There might be a better venue for this, but I don't think it's a big deal, because I don't foresee us tumbling down a slippery slope made of baby. It's useful to us to know about central life-changes in the top LW writers, and 'I had a baby' is one of the most informationally compact, least slippery-slope-prone bits of information to find out.
Plus it encourages us to build stronger social ties to other LessWrongers, and to consider what this is all for. The only extremely obvious reason not to make a post like this is that it might lead to unpleasant arguments about the relevance of the post.
If there's a clear problem with Stuart's post, it's that it has a deliberately misleading title and introduction, so it's harder for people who aren't interested in personal stuff to know to skip it.
I've always been more of a theoretician, but it's important to try one's hand at practical problems from time to time. In that vein, I've decided to try three simultaneous experiments on major Less Wrong themes. I will aim to acquire something to protect, I will practice training a seed intelligence, and I will become more familiar with many consequences of evolutionary psychology.
In the spirit of efficiency I'll combine all these experiments into one:
She's never seen Star Wars or Doctor Who.
She's never seen David Attenborough or read J. L. Borges.
She's never had a philosophical debate.
She's never been skiing.
Never had sex, never been hugged or even been licked by a dog!
She has so much to look forwards to...
(Though she'll be very boring for several months yet!)