Very similar phenomenon to 'blue zones' like Okinawa where scientists thought 'super agers' lived but then it turned out all the birth records were burned in WWII. People are bad about assessing their life as toddlers, memories just don't last

TracingWoodgrains Erik Hoel C. Travis Webb I have much weaker convictions about what’s possible at age 4 (especially towards the later end) than at age 2. Though even with four year olds, I contend only the most precocious children are capable of teaching themselves, and most (not all!) reports of this are simply wrong

Erik Hoel My mother is convinced I could read before I started school. This is definitely completely wrong, I have strong & specific memories of the struggle to learn to read when I was at primary school. But she is convinced of this fable.

'...Wittgenstein’s point that the definitions of words, like 'good' or 'evil,' do not refer to some essential property, but rather a family-resemblance; apples to apples makes sense, but apples to oranges changes the equation irreducibly.'

From Erik Hoel's critique of EA – re:…

Erik Hoel hilarious/sad how prophetic your EA critique was in advance of the SBF crisis. Also interesting that my critique was saying very similar things (even in a less rigorous way) but got 2nd place while yours didn't even make the honorable mentions. Looking at the list of…

I know a lot of people who claim to have read chapter books as toddlers and I have yet to see a toddler do this lol

A surprising amount of people appear to not understand that toddler means 1-3 (often just 1-2), not a 5-year-old

*not dragging OP, using this as a stepping stone for an observation*

Sometimes people who learned to read early say they were bored in school. I think this is confounded by the fact that most smart kids are bored in school regardless - because early school is boring!

The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science by Erik Hoel

In this excellent essay and review, Erik Hoel makes the provocative and interesting point that the informal gossip-based social power admired by anarchists looks a lot like the oppressive world of Mean Girls.
astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-re…

“The real reason to teach your toddler to read is for their immediate experience, for their quality of life.' Erik Hoel theintrinsicperspective.com/p/how-to-teach…

Maxim Raginsky Erik Hoel This is a great little book!

Bought Erik Hoel’s book at OHare:

They made me take a little reference to this out of The Revelations, if you want to know the current state of publishing

1/2 I'm a huge fan of Nautilus Magazine but in a repost of an excellent piece by Dan Falk from Quanta Magazine, they've mistakenly re-used the headline. We did *not* declare that insects and other animals have consciousness ... nautil.us/insects-and-ot… .Jonathan Birch