@wolf_vukovic Could Europe’s real tradeoff be this: a more relaxed, humane environment for individuals today, but partly funded by past dividends and future obligations?
Can Europe keep that comfort, will €7–9k/month still buy the same lifestyle in expensive cities in 10 years?
What if the “Cry It Out” sleep training (aka extinction-based sleep training) has contributed to mental health issues in young people?
In some ways, it’s the most insane thing to do to a child (and is based on incredibly poor science). For centuries, families co-slept without issues, but in modern times, it has become increasingly taboo… why?
How can repeated emotional non-response to a baby be healthy? What does it do to their stress calibration, attachment expectations, and self-regulation? How does it play out in their long term relationships and social connections?
I’ve read the studies and they are poorly designed and weakly supported. Yet, we have an entire generation of parents that blindly follow this insane protocol without reviewing the data themselves.
To be fair, the data supporting co-sleeping is weak as well, but it has centuries of precedent so I feel much more comfortable supporting that than a new approach that was largely instituted since the 1920s.
For some context, in the 20th century, behaviorist John Watson (1928), interested in making psychology a hard science, took up the crusade against affection as president of the American Psychological Association. He applied the paradigm of behaviorism to childrearing, warning about the dangers of “too much mother love”. The 20th century was the time when “science" was assumed to know better than mothers, grandmothers, and families about how to raise a child. Too much kindness to a baby would result in a whiney, dependent, failed human being.
A government pamphlet from the time recommended that "mothering meant holding the baby quietly, in tranquility-inducing positions" and that "the mother should stop immediately if her arms feel tired" because "the baby is never to inconvenience the adult." A baby older than six months "should be taught to sit silently in the crib; otherwise, he might need to be constantly watched and entertained by the mother, a serious waste of time."
The truth is the opposite. We now know that ignoring a child raising cortisol levels and hurts trust and attachment. Yet, every young parent I know today has been brainwashed to let their child cry in silence. It’s truly wild.
An attempt to explain (current) ChatGPT versions.
I still run into many, many people who don't know that:
- o3 is the obvious best thing for important/hard things. It is a reasoning model that is much stronger than 4o and if you are using ChatGPT professionally and not using o3 you're ngmi.
- 4o is different from o4. Yes I know lol. 4o is a good "daily driver" for many easy-medium questions. o4 is only available as mini for now, and is not as good as o3, and I'm not super sure why it's out right now.
Example basic "router" in my own personal use:
- Any simple query (e.g. "what foods are high in fiber"?) => 4o (about ~40% of my use)
- Any hard/important enough query where I am willing to wait a bit (e.g. "help me understand this tax thing...") => o3 (about ~40% of my use)
- I am vibe coding (e.g. "change this code so that...") => 4.1 (about ~10% of my use)
- I want to deeply understand one topic - I want GPT to go off for 10 minutes, look at many, many links and summarize a topic for me. (e.g. "help me understand the rise and fall of Luminar"). => Deep Research (about ~10% of my use). Note that Deep Research is not a model version to be picked from the model picker (!!!), it is a toggle inside the Tools. Under the hood it is based on o3, but I believe is not fully equivalent of just asking o3 the same query, but I am not sure.
All of this is only within the ChatGPT universe of models. In practice my use is more complicated because I like to bounce between all of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity depending on the task and out of research interest.
Agency > Intelligence
I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?
Grok explanation is ~close:
“Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path.
People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next.
It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”