NB: I now recommend Open Whisper over SuperWhisper!
Contents:
On Benchmark Parents
When I finished writing “Two Types of Homeostasis”, I held it up to the light and noticed this line:
“I do not know why someone with Oxbridge-educated parents would be happy to get into Oxbridge. You are simply doing what has been done before.”
in that moment, a benchmark parent was born
Benchmark parent: A parent who found a recipe to do a thing and now expects their children to do the same or better
If I become a parent, I am going to try to be a good one and not fall susceptible to fallacies like <I did this, so my children must do the same or better>. But isn’t that a healthy gradient? I view my parents’ legible and illegible accomplishments as my implicit baseline / last saved checkpoint, and I think surpassing them on some axes pretty early (and being regularly, verifiably told this by them) helped me develop a pretty chill temperament wrt self-esteem. “We’ve come this far; we can relax and breathe.” Getting stronger and more secure is the kind of basic, Lindy gradient that’s easy to follow.
So…how do people with very accomplished parents navigate?
I am slightly apologetic to my children, because I think I’ve hit lots of fun ‘first-in-the-family’ milestones (studying at #1 uni, studying abroad), and I’m not sure what exactly will be left for them. The world will probably look very different, but I’m worried I’ve consigned them to a higher baseline that they might be more miserable trying to beat. It’ll be harder for them to advance family SOTA. Presumably they have to do better research than I end up doing, or find something better to do with their time, or…?
Hopefully they read this and make fun of me for it—(blogging’s fun that way).
You should use SuperWhisper
Ever in a lecture, interview, or conversation taking notes ~verbatim?
That’s a scenario to definitely use Super Whisper.
It will free your attention.
You can review the notes later / feed as context to LM.
However,
SuperWhisper requires you being on Mac
← I’ve noticed friction for me opening links on Mac is higher because clicking, not tapping (no touchscreen)
Hence I’m better at surfing the web (navigating the Substack-plexus) on phone
Probably can be ameliorated by phasing in keybindings
Today’s keybindings:
cmd+x, where x is the index of the tab at the top
cmd+opt+arrow (next/prev tab, search bar)
I haven’t worked out how to toggle between typing + scrolling. Does anyone reading this know how?edit: ‘tab’ mostly works
Very random but I also do not like pressing my touchpad. There's actually an option called "Tap to click" under System Preferences > Trackpad. I use it all the time and very very rarely actually press down on my trackpad nowadays.
I mean... P(utopia | I have kids) hovers near 1, and I'm imagining something along the Fun Theory sequence [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4aGvLnHvYgX9pZHS/the-fun-theory-sequence] world, and in that one... I imagine we will not have a scarcity of adventure or things to be family SOTA at? I'm imagining my kids fighting bio-engineered dragons, playing century-long era LARPs, leaping off orbital rings, whatever.
I do not imagine they will have any chance at all at being "historically relevant" or "fight in the real world". But then that is a good problem to have, and I should certainly *wish* for the overwhelming majority of total akashic human experience [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akashic_records] to not deal with True Problems, because otherwise, doomsday-argument-like, we are quite screwed.
My timelines are fairly short, I will certainly not have any kids pre-singularity, one's mileage may vary.