#first swim

[theunstuffedpepper]

This past weekend brought us a lot of fun and joy. Pep had his first swim experience on Sunday! We visited our couple friends who have a pool and who also have three kids.. the kids are totally obsessed with pep. It’s cute. Our little guy looked SO darn cute in his swim outfit and hat and he really liked the water. He was so chill, just floating around and playing with some toys. What a cool little baby.

In my first week of being the stay at home working mom, B has taken pep to this couple friends house three times, today being the third. While he’s there, he’s been working on projects with the husband of the couple and the wife (who homeschools her three kiddos) watches pep for a few hours. I’ve had some Big Feelings about another female watching my little bug during the day while I sit here working in a quiet house. That being said, it certainly won’t be happening every day, and this is just to some extent what I’ve signed up for being the working mom. It’s also good for pep to see and be around other kids, and we both do like this couple as humans. Deep down, I want my relationship with them all to grow and it’d be great to be able to think of them akin to family someday. B certainly sees potential for that. I’m just trying to process and understand all the feelings that are coming with it.

That being said, I’m still able to help out with domestic kinda tasks — making food for the baby, tossing a load of laundry in here or there, watching him for a few minutes so B can grab a shower or whatever. On the days when they stay here at home, it’s lovely to be able to go play and see them on my lunch break and whenever I need a baby smooch. It’s all a lot, just as I knew it would be. For now, I’m trying to take things one day at a time.

[decembersylph-a-t-u]

My life has never before felt so Blessed.

[sneksue]

Dive dive dive!!!

[ottrspc]

[ottrspc]

[alunah-lalunah]

Wiped Out Completely

Is entropy a series of small problems to be solved with science or a massive looming force that can manifest as a systemic collapse?

Steven Pinker uses the concepts of entropy and negativity bias to explain why we are systematically blind to the massive progress of the human species. In his book Enlightenment Now he argues that entropy is the natural default state of the universe where there are infinitely more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right which means that order and human flourishing are not accidental but are the hard won results of applying reason and science. Because bad things like a sudden natural disaster or a terrorist attack can happen in an instant they are highly "available" to our memory and fit perfectly into a dramatic news cycle while good things like the gradual eradication of a disease or the slow decline in global poverty happen incrementally and rarely make headlines. This creates a psychological gap where we feel the world is falling apart because our negativity bias is constantly triggered by the sudden "entropic" events of the daily news while the steady upward climb of progress remains invisible to our intuition.

Nassim Taleb offers a sharp critique of Steven Pinker by arguing that a focus on average improvements and historical trendlines is dangerously misleading when dealing with complex systems. Taleb uses the concept of fat-tailed risks to explain that while the world may appear safer and more stable on average these averages are irrelevant if the system is vulnerable to a single catastrophic event known as a Black Swan. He points out that just because there have been fewer major wars in recent decades does not mean the underlying risk of a global conflict has diminished because the potential scale of a modern nuclear or biological catastrophe is far greater than anything in history. This creates a situation where the statistical trend appears to be pointing upward while the actual fragility of the system is increasing because a single negative outlier can completely wipe out all previous gains in an instant.

Taleb also criticizes the idea that we can use the past to predict a stable future in a world that is non-linear and interconnected. He argues that Pinker suffers from a form of "naive empiricism" where he mistakes a long period of quiet for a permanent change in human nature or global stability. From this perspective the progress Pinker celebrates is merely a "lull" in a high-stakes game where the rare but extreme events dominate the final outcome. While Pinker sees entropy as a series of small problems to be solved with science Taleb sees it as a massive looming force that can manifest as a systemic collapse which no amount of historical data can predict. This counter-argument suggests that our negativity bias might not be an evolutionary mistake to be overcome but a necessary survival mechanism that keeps us alert to the rare events that actually determine our long-term

[thingsihavedoneandenjoyed]

Walking from coogee to bondi with my mates dog and baby.

[halonthepalebluedot]

The sea the sea