Erin Braid

I wrote a little history of washing dishes, from scouring pewter with horsetail to the Chicago World's Fair to modern environmental concerns. You can read it at Works in Progress! I'm also happy to report that the topic was thoroughly baby-approved. worksinprogress.co/issue/inventin…

@SarahfromV Ohhhhhh, wow, thank you Sarah that's extremely helpful!

@erinbraid Oh, you can fix that! By the following there's a little down arrow and if you select "recent" instead of "popular" it should go back to the regular following page. I agree the popular one is annoying beyond belief.

Okay I don't know what update everyone else got, mine is awful?! I come here to read my Following tab, which now seems to contain *every post that anyone I follow responds to*. It's WAY too many posts that I'm not interested in, borderline unusable. Idk what to do here

@coldhealing If you're joking then you got me, nice job.... if not: they're commas, there's a train 9 minutes away and a train 14 minutes away

@zoomertruther lol, well, I was aiming for "a bit stilted" so I'll take that as a compliment

@erinbraid This reads is rlike a Japanese comment that Grok translated into english

I'm always talking to my toddler like "Cheese is the archetypal food for a mouse" or whatever. But that's just because I don't know enough about mice to confidently tell him, like, "Mice love cheese!" I'm speaking as simply as I can here

@utotranslucence I don't think you know the fourth family, unless you remember meeting them at Baby Braid's first birthday. We know them through our college friends

@erinbraid Wait I think I can guess three, but I can’t figure out the fourth

FOUR of our baby friends are expecting little siblings, plus multiple couples in our orbit are expecting their first! Luckily I've been stockpiling

@polisisti I mean I think that's appropriate for a major publishing house

Jonathan Haidt: it's the phones Peter Gray: it's the schools Penguin Random House: this intellectual debate is an excellent business opportunity

@sstrogurl It's called Sea Breeze Cleaners! On Castro St, near the Noe Valley branch library

@erinbraid Ooo this is very cool, I am not a baby but I would love to know where I can watch

Perks of being a San Francisco baby: sometimes on your way to the library you find a laundry-folding-robot show, and your mom lets you watch as long as you want

@etirabys Secretly the same question as the baby wanting to play with your lanyards.... if it's actually extremely important to them you'd want to make the small sacrifice, but it's very hard to measure the true strength of the preference...

Claude has an account on the writing app that I & bf vibecoded. Users have colors that distinguish what part of the story they wrote. I think the signature orange would work for Claude but when I asked it what it wanted, it chose for itself a teal that is already popular. what do

And in a well-conducted RCT, those choices will all be made and registered before the data is collected. In a retrospective quasi-experimental analysis, that's obviously not possible. Unavoidably, there are a lot of choices left for the researchers to make!

When we think about the differences between a quasi-experiment and a gold-standard RCT, of course we imagine two attempts to measure the same thing. But in practice, the choices of what exactly to measure will be made differently!

40 minutes in @mendel_random makes an interesting general point as a quick aside: a quasi-experimental analysis generally has more investigator degrees of freedom than the corresponding true experiment would

@EedenEnne My baby's first ten words included "clock" and "door", while "mama" and "papa" were not in the first fifty lol

Extremely funny to me how my extroverted engineer minded toddler is finally starting to speak and his three big categories of words are 1. family members 2. pets and animals 3. mechanical elements and actions like “button”, “door”, “lamp”, “hole”, “close”. “open”, “fix”

@maiab Yeah I'm with you Maia. Like obviously it's nowhere near the worst thing that people do online, but it's bad! Systematically worsening our understanding of reality! Let's not!

I have to say I am pretty bummed after reading the details of how CHH used to troll Reddit

@EigenGender I'm so unsure how this would affect me that I would be tempted to take it if only to get that information. Like, in many ways I don't care about status. But how many of my motivations that feel like something else are ACTUALLY about status?? I'd love to know by magic fiat!

You can take a pill that makes you stop caring intrinsically about status. You’re still able to reason about how status affects other people and use the concept of status instrumentally to fufill your other goals. Do you take the pill?

@SarahfromV Very cool! What's going to happen on Boxcar Day?

I am running three days of a "daycamp" type experience for my kids -- today is Music Day, Wednesday will be Shakespeare Day, and Friday will be Boxcar Day.

Babies love to give themselves the most unreasonable assignments. Last night ours decided that he had to carefully slide all the grated cheese back through the holes of the cheese grater. Needless to say this is not something he's ever seen us do or even contemplate