Scott Alexander

Dogs, berries, trains, buses, the sun, or the moon.

The moon takes pride of place, for some reason.

I'm working on a theory about the ancestral environment where toddlers were used as assistant shamans, charged with monitoring the moon's position at all times.

Then Kai will lovingly stare at the page, pointing at the moon and saying, moon, every so often.

Then Lyra will scream and try to turn the page.

And then Kai will scream because she's trying to switch away from the objectively best page and you're such an idiot.

You'll just be moving to a worse page with fewer moons.

Why would you do that?

Here's an image showing the kids.

There's a woman reading a book called Dog Breed Guide, which seems to have lots of photos of different dogs, to Lyra.

and Kai is sitting next to the woman reading his own book.

Scott captions it, a rare moment of peaceful reading with Grandma.

In my Missing Heritability, Much More Than You Wanted to Know, I reviewed some arguments against twin studies.

Most of the good arguments have been investigated and debunked, most of the mediocre arguments have also been investigated and debunked, and what's left are the dregs.

In particular, some scientists propose that one way twin studies could falsely show a large effect of genes on education was if there's actually a gene for one twin to sabotage the other's educational prospects.

I made fun of this one pretty hard.

How much motivated cognition do you need to think that the most parsimonious explanation is some sort of bizarre twin sabotage mutation?

God punished me for my mockery by sending me a son obsessed with sabotaging his twin sister's education.

All Lyra wants to do is learn to read.

All Kai wants to do is steal her books so he can flip them to the moon page, then defend it with his life.