The First 1k Days

https://williamjbarry.substack.com/p/the-first-1000-days

by wjb3 • 11 months ago

15 9 11 months ago

williamjbarry.substack.com

ryanar• 11 months ago

thanks for posting, very prescient topic for me. I happen to have inadvertently done these things without knowing it. Perhaps this is instinctual?

mquander2• 11 months ago

When you rely on an LLM to write for you and then present a melange of your work and the LLM's work without attribution, it makes it impossible for others to usefully interpret what you published.

Are you saying that e.g. securely attached children perform better in school, because you know that in your capacity as a educated psychologist? Or did an LLM write that based on its best guess? None of your readers can tell. So how should they know whether it's true?

kg• 11 months ago

Where is it disclosed that this post was written by an LLM in part or in whole? I don't see it in the linked article

mquander2• 11 months ago

It's very stylistically visible. For example, it's covered in `it's not just X -- it's Y" phrasings that are default LLM house style.

spwa4• 11 months ago

securely attached children perform better in school

Lots of studies point this out. That part is true. The article is still a lie though. What is not mentioned is that the number one cause of insecure attachment is interventions by social workers, child welfare agencies, ...

A child with terrible, abusive parents can (and almost always is) securely attached. You see what makes parents good is not what they do or don't do, but how predictable and consistent they are. If a child's basic needs are met and the child can predict accurately what behavior leads to a beating, then the occasional beating doesn't matter (assuming no permanent damage). Really.

In fact, this is often the case in GOOD parental relationships. Any child tries to improve the relationship between their parents ... because they are a learning system: they predict what will happen and what they can do to help their parents, and in the vast majority of cases, they succeed at that. Obviously that is psychologically incredibly good for both kids and parents. And, of course, this has nothing to do with material comfort. This works perfectly in homeless families too, which are often ripped apart by child welfare agencies.

On the other hand, if a parent or caregiver is emotionally unresponsive to a child based on how well things go at work (something a child has zero influence over), then insecure attachment is much more likely, no matter the level of comfort, no matter how much luxury the child has.

The problem is: child welfare actions are based on budgets, agency efforts, working hours, bank holidays, personnel vacation bookings and, above all, government managers ... which are obviously not predictable from the perspective of a child. An "educated psychologist" can therefore never create a situation that leads to secure attachment even in optimal cases.

And the second problem is not the child's reactions but government employee reactions. An insecurely attached child is effectively a psychopath. They do not care how their actions affect others, only themselves. They also see nothing wrong with whatever actions led to the insecure attachment in the first place (and those actions may be violence, of course, besides, any child in a child welfare agency will for obvious reasons see nothing wrong with convincing children or themselves to run away). This means an insecurely attached child lies, does not create relationships, only deceives you into thinking you have one to get stuff, runs away, don't reciprocate anything, ever, and so on ... in other words, they are VERY hard to work with. Worse: fixing it takes a decade of constant attention by THE SAME PERSON. Very sorry about your personnel policy, dear child welfare agency, but for very obvious reasons children do not form bonds with organizations, only with specific people. That's how kids work.

In other words: few people can deal with even one insecurely attached child, and nobody can deal with more than one. And that, sorry to say, means there is nothing an educated psychologist can do. THEY know this, and so they avoid insecurely attached children like the plague. They only intervene where they AREN'T necessary (because budget per child means they need to have X children that can't be too hard to deal with ... or lose their job)

But! There's insecurely attached children in child welfare! If they try to avoid them, how did that happen? Well, sadly, it's because, for again very obvious reasons, intervention by child welfare agencies, by people like "educated psychologists" CREATE insecure attachment in children. And research will tell you: this is by far the major cause of insecure attachment, far more than poverty, homelessness or abuse.

Child welfare agencies THEMSELVES are the major cause of child abuse. Why? Because (for the child) unpredictable interventions are child abuse. If you can imagine the perspective of a child this is very easy to see: for a child, child welfare agency involvement is nothing but a totally random, VERY long and unpredictable series of long-term punishments.

Oh, and of course "educated psychologists" lie about this. Why? It means there's nothing an educated psychologist can do. It means, as cruel as it may seem but isn't, the situation with humans is similar as with any animal. A baby or child is better off with abusive parents than with professional care (it is much better to give resources to families than professional help). This is first of all the case because most "abuse" is parents that don't have a choice but take 2 jobs, leaving kids home alone, parents who become homeless, have a tiny apartment are not really abusive parents. Giving actual support (house, money, better job, ...) to parents is 10x more effective than any "educated psychologist" or other kind of professional can ever hope to be. Cell phones will be 10x more reliable than any human, even parents, can ever hope to be.

This theory also predicts something people here don't seem to understand is coming. Children, 10 years from now, and the effect has probably already started, are going to behave far more loyal to their cell phone than to their parents, to the police, to their country, religion, or whatever.

xianshou• 11 months ago

Came to point out that this is transparently LLM-authored, was not disappointed. The signs:

- neatly formatted lists with cute bolded titles (lower-casing this one just for that)

- ubiquitous subtitles like "Mental Health as Infrastructure" that only a committee would come up with

- emojis preceding every statement: "[sprout emoji] Every action and every word is a vote for who they are becoming"

- em-dash AND "it isn't X, it's Y", even in the same sentence: "Love isn't a feeling you wait to have—it's a series of actions you choose to take."

Could pick more, but I'll just say I'm 80% confident this is GPT-5 without thinking turned on.

eadmund2• 11 months ago

• Neatly-formatted lists Neatness could be a sign of a machine, or it could be a sign of a diligent human author.

• Subtitles only a committee would come up with That seems to me like a matter of opinion and taste — and we all have different tastes.

• Emojis preceding every statement I counted three emoji pull quotes in a multi-page document. I suppose it could be an LLM, but it could also just be a nice style.

• Em-dashes and ‘it isn’t X, it’s Y' This is why I posted in the first place, and downvoted you. There is nothing wrong with em-dashes — I love them. I use them a lot. Frankly, I probably overuse them. I’ve used them since I was a kid: I am going to use them — and over-use them — as long as I live. As for ‘Love isn’t a feeling you wait to have — it’s a series of actions you choose to take,’ that just seems like normal English to me.

It’s very possible in 2025 that the article was LLM-written, or written by a man and cleaned up by an LLM, or written by a man and proofread by an LLM, or written by a man. It does not have the stilted feel of most LLM works to me, but I might just miss it.

An em-dash isn’t an indicator of an LLM — it’s a sign of someone who discovered typography early.

The First 1k Days

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