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helboi4 commented on Why can't we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?   theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
danielbln · 6 months ago
Memories are notoriously unreliable, pliable, subject to induction etc. You may absolutely have retained memories from that age, but it's just as likely that someone told you and your turned it into a memory.
helboi4 · 6 months ago
No these are not things people told me about. I know that. I mean from 3 onwards there is a steady stream of them that I remember clearly in exactly the same way I remember other things. My memories from 2 are very few and far between but they're still not things anyone told me about. They're not things that are significant enough for people to relay to me. I remember things like, my dad pointing out a crane to me out the car window, being confused about someone's name. Someone telling me the word "plumber" has a b in it, which I just found totally wild. Waiting for the toilet at nursery. One time they brought cardboard boxes to nursery and getting to crawl around in them like a cat but being really pissed off with this girl who was terrorising me. Hiding in the attic conversion with my cousin because I was terrified of the hoover. Some kid bullying me for having a temporary tattoo in nursery. My mum took me to the turn of the millenium celebrations when I was 2 and wants me to remember that. She's tried to remind me a lot, I don't remember shit about it. I don't remember anything notable that people would talk about like my first day at school. I remember my 3rds birthday I guess that counts.
helboi4 commented on Why can't we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?   theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
Raztuf · 6 months ago
It's crazy that people here have memories from when they were toddlers while I'm 29 and have a hard time remembering stuff from my early teens.
helboi4 · 6 months ago
I have memories from my whole life but only smatterings of them. When I say I have memories from being as toddler it's like a few here and there.
helboi4 commented on Why can't we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?   theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
sndinsmd · 6 months ago
Because — and this is true — you absolutely don’t.

You can be continue to be frustrated being incorrect, or you can accept that you’re lying to yourself and move on.

It’s that easy. Human memory just doesn’t work like that.

helboi4 · 6 months ago
You are way over confident. I definitely have memories from 2 onwards and I know I remember them because I remember relaying them to people at age 4 onwards, by which point my memory was very well formed.
helboi4 commented on Why can't we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?   theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
pmontra · 6 months ago
Your experience is more or less my experience. I even know a person that remembers from well before being 1 year old. That person started speaking very early, maybe that's related to having early memories. Different people develop at different times. The ages in the articles are averages of their respective populations so these data points are offset, for example, by the daughters of a friend of mine that told me that they don't remember anything before being 5 or 6 years old.
helboi4 · 6 months ago
Yeah I'm always shocked that there's a general assumption that people don't remember things before the age of 5. I remember some things from 2 years old and everything is pretty clear from 3 onwards. I do assume this is a sign of advanced development.
helboi4 commented on Why can't we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?   theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
vanderZwan · 6 months ago
The cultural impact on childhood memory is interesting, but I have to say that the first paragraph was a bit off-putting, like it was written by someone who should pay a bit more attention to the actual experience of their child in order to support them through these formative years instead of projecting their own adult frustrations on them:

> Life must be great as a baby: to be fed and clothed and carried places in soft pouches, to be waved and smiled at by adoring strangers, to have the temerity to scream because food hasn’t arrived quickly enough, and then to throw it on the ground when it is displeasing. It’s a shame none of us recalls exactly how good we once had it.

Babies are also almost completely unable to move around by themselves and are constantly frustrated by their lack of agency. They are extremely vulnerable and utterly dependent on the kindness of their parents and other older humans in their environment. They lack language so have no other way of communicating than screaming, which is often also a cause of great distress because of an inability to communicate a basic need (and on that note, even knowing what those needs are half of the time, given that the ability to make sense of ones own senses is still being developed).

All of this while life is a nonstop series of first experiences, meaning that even the most mundane thing can (and often is) surprising, confusing and overwhelming, leading to a high need for reassurance, because being scared and wanting to make sure that you're really safe is honestly a very sensible reaction to have when you add all of those things up.

I'm not saying life sucks for babies and toddlers, but as a parent of a two-year old myself it's pretty obvious to me that it's no walk in the park for them either.

helboi4 · 6 months ago
Yeah I always think being a baby or toddler must be endlessly frustrating. Imagine having absolutely no words to communicate your need and no idea how to do anything. I've said this before to parents of babies when I was a curious teenager and they thought I'm being silly but I'm sure it actually is stressful. At the end of the day we all go through it and nobody remembers it though, so it's not worth worrying about, it's just interesting to think about.
helboi4 commented on Show HN: Scripton – Python IDE with built-in realtime visualizations   scripton.dev... · Posted by u/nightcraft
helboi4 · 6 months ago
This looks really really cool but I do hate everything being subscriptions. Everyone trying to be a digital landlord out here. Just sell me something.
helboi4 commented on Why young parents should focus on building trust with their kids   desunit.com/blog/marshmal... · Posted by u/desunit
graemep · 7 months ago
Lots of similarities.

"Europe is diverse enough that you need to split it into quadrants to decide what countries are relatively similar"

The same is true for South Asia, but if you look at it from a western perspective you see the similarities.

There are plenty of similarities across Europe. Shared attitudes to sex, politics, religion..... things like freedom of worship and separation of church and state (laws restricting freedom of worship even in secular democracies like India, let alone the Middle East or China), attitudes to sex and sexuality (and ideas and definitions and identities linked to them - although this is changing because of Western influence, historically the idea of people having a fixed sexual orientation is a modern western one, for example)....

helboi4 · 7 months ago
I dunno how what you're saying negates my point. I was actually gonna add that the same thing can be said of Asia, which even more so needs to be split into quadrants to find clear similarities in culture.
helboi4 commented on Why young parents should focus on building trust with their kids   desunit.com/blog/marshmal... · Posted by u/desunit
Der_Einzige · 7 months ago
Hegemony lets you become the “default”. I can use the US dollar to pay for anything I want, anywhere, even if it’s not an official local currency. Try that with any other currency. That’s one small example of why we can indeed call “west” the “default” no matter how much this pisses off anti-colonialism types.
helboi4 · 7 months ago
bro, that's not what I mean. What I mean is this guy really thinks his culture did not effect him. Trust me, if you went to Japan and acted exactly as your American upbringing tells you to, you will fuck up the entire social contract there and people will think you're wierd af. Your culture is not a blank canvas. Your culture is something that affects how you are and this guy seems to think otherwise because he is blind to the strong characteristics of his culture, viewing it as default.
helboi4 commented on Why young parents should focus on building trust with their kids   desunit.com/blog/marshmal... · Posted by u/desunit
vanderZwan · 7 months ago
> Like the race or location of the parent determines their childhood?

Ignoring the fact that you inserted a narrative that wasn't present in the article, YES OF COURSE THIS HAS A MAJOR IMPACT.

I'm a half-Dutch, half-Chinese man who spent the first years of my life in Ghana being blissfully happy and welcomed in the local community, and then the rest of my childhood being miserable in a Dutch village because I was excluded from that local community, all because I was "the local ethnic minority".

And I'm half-Asian, with parents from a higher-education background who had a good income. I only had to deal with "diet racism" compared to pretty much any other ethnic minority/social background in the Netherlands.

I've lived this and the fact that people like you keep insisting that my life experiences do not exist because they did not experience it is infuriating.

Anyway, fair points about the phone being a serious issue. But for goodness sake stop pretending that race and socio-economic background has no impact just because it makes you a little uncomfortable.

helboi4 · 7 months ago
Honestly, yes this guy's comment screams white guy growing up in a white culture. Like... do you really think your culture is a default and you would've been like you are without your outside influence? Your culture is very specific and no more default than any other.
helboi4 commented on Why young parents should focus on building trust with their kids   desunit.com/blog/marshmal... · Posted by u/desunit
graemep · 7 months ago
I did not actually mention either, but they are very similar viewed from a non-western perspective.
helboi4 · 7 months ago
They're really not. Europe is diverse enough that you need to split it into quadrants to decide what countries are relatively similar. Like is Finland similar to Germany from an outside perspective? Yes. Is Finland similar to southern Italy? Absolutely not, you'd be better off comparing southern Italy and latin America, and Finland with Japan. Like seriously, those will have more in common with each other than Finland and southern Italy. People have told me Naples feels like Brazil... which is nothing like Finland, which has the orderliness and cultural restraint of Japan. North European,East European and South European countries are similar to other countries in those same segments of Europe. They are not similar across segments.

u/helboi4

KarmaCake day496July 17, 2023View Original