parenting – Sahar Massachi

The other day some form or another asked: “what is your baby’s personality?”. Sarah and I looked at each other, a bit bemused. Does Omri have one yet? How can you tell the difference between something real and just “generic baby”?

We talked it out, and here’s our list (as of a few months ago). As you can see, it’s a pretty big list. I guess he’s got a unique personality after all!

The first things we came up with:

Cheerful.
Calm around new people.
Loves being the center of attention; he even enjoys going to the doctor because at the office, it’s all about HIM
Passionate about objects — in both directions. He will flip from YES to no on the turn of a dime.
Strongly believes that he should be held; strongly believes that people should hang out with him.
Petulant and strong willed about food and sleep. These are the two exceptions to his general chill pattern of behavior.
Curious about the world, especially objects.
Loves holding things, especially things that are “sticks” — long and graspable.
Does not believe in moving much. Would rather be sedentary and held.
Delights in games. And anything can be a game. If you approach any sort of thing (wiping his face, cleaning him, bopping him on the head, whatever) as if you’re playing together, he’s willing and ready to believe it and be excited to join in.
Smiles easily.
Doesn’t cry unless there’s a reason. The reason is often: “I don’t want to go to sleep. I feel comfortable here, don’t leave the room. I want to play with you, I don’t want to sit on the floor.”
Moderately indifferent to temperature.
Does NOT want to lie on his stomach. will flip over immediately.
Fascinated by electronics. Yes, fisher-price objects, but also anything with a screen
Wants to smash his fingers on keyboards especially.
Loves mirrors, as well as video chats (since he can see himself)

On some more reflection:

Has been known to try to feed others, especially his parents. (Adorable.)
When crying and hungry, sometimes too angry to actually eat.
Tries to make eye contact with everyone.
New things (and beloved things) go Straight To The Mouth™
Desires things that adults pay attention to — phones, airpods, keyboards. If there’s a toy with a motor, he wants to figure out the parts that move. Will grab them, examine them, etc. That’s more important than playing with the e.g. duck the way he’s supposed to.
Does not dislike bathtime.
Our special songs will make him sleepy on cue.
Wants to turn the pages of books — often wants to turn the book straight to the beginning or end. Hard to focus and go through it calmly
Will eat paper. Beware.
Mouth turns into a letterbox right before crying

These seem to be especially true of him specifically, or generally interesting

Demands to drink water from a glass or cup
Will flick water by pulling back on his straw and letting go
- (Then gets sad and surprised when he splashed himself with it)
Fascinated by water in general. The dishwasher is his television
Will smash his legs up and down when sleepy.
Breakdances in the crib.
Glasses, mugs, cups — he both wants to drink from them and generally hold them
Smart enough to rip clothes, towels, etc off his head. Has object permanence
Flaps his arms up and down when excited. Including in the sleep sack.
Rubs his spoon (favorite toy) on his head a lot.
Will respond happily if you talk to him in baby language. Especially if you use some of his signature phrases: Gagagagaga, thbbbt, adadada, aga, ha ha ha.
Will laugh if you say Ha Ha Ha in the right way.

Back to generic baby things?

Wants to put his fingers in everyone’s mouth
Whacks his spoon into bottles when drinking milk
Enjoys breast milk more than formula. A real connoisseur
Fascinated by posters. wants to rip them off the wall
Will bang whatever object in his hands (spoon, lotion bottle, rattle, whatever) against the wall and get excited about the noise it makes
Generally uses his index finger to poke and examine things
Shocked and sad when sneezing productively
Does not like tissues, would rather wipe his hands with his nose
Generally dislikes lying down. Would much rather change while sitting than lying down.
Enjoys when other people roll him around, usually

The other day, I had a problem. Wombie was coming soon, but we still didn’t have a name picked out of the baby-to-be! Or, rather, we didn’t have a sense of 3ish names we most liked (so that we could see which fit him best at the hospital).

I whipped up a small app for Sarah and I to go through names we liked, submit new ones, and vote pairwise in a hot-or-not to figure out what we liked best.

Check it out! Read the README.

Here’s the story behind the scenes:

There were some strong contenders (Omri, Amit, Amitai, Alon) that were sort of tied for us. But maybe if we used the power of statistics, we’d find out that one was secretly stronger than the others as expressed by our votes?

This quickly spun out of control. I created a new version for family to vote for. Then another, public version for friends at large to vote.

Meanwhile, I was hard at work on creating a leaderboard. And it led to some challenges!

The first few decisions were relatively simple:

Simple vote counting didn’t work well. If my mom voted for X over Y over and over again, then that should flatten out to one vote for X over Y, right? Easy enough.
But what if someone voted for name X over Y 3 times, but Y over X 1 time? Does X get 3/4 of a vote? A full vote?
How do we represent the leaderboard? Aren’t there algorithms to figure out winners of pairwise matchups? I hear Elo is good…

But then it got complicated.

First off, user submitted names really mucked things up:

People submitted some names that I liked, some names I disliked, and some names that were clearly trolling.
If I didn’t propagate the names to other voters for consideration, then the point of submission was lost. But then junk names kept polluting the voting.
I had to invent a coefficient to allow user-submitted names to propagate, but slower than hardcoded names.
I also had to implement a blocklist for troll names.
If someone submitted a name and kept voting for it, that name would get a perfect win/loss record until it propagated

And it turns out that finding the “true” winner of pairwise unordered matchups by judges who judged a highly variable number of matchups each — is weirdly complex.

Heavy is the head the chooses the crown:

Bad or trollish user-submitted names kept dominating the rankings. As a backstop, I implemented two filters: filter out names with only one voter voting for them, and just filter out user-submitted names totally.
Turns out the Elo rankings care about order because they model candidate names as players who could change in skill over time. Oops! Out with Elo
I thought about my Integrity Institute days and the mighty power of PageRank. If a candidate name was a domain, and losing to another name was a “link” to that name, we could model a bootstrapped way to find network centrality with untrusted actors!
Some searching found Bradley-Terry rankings. Apparently they’re made for unordered pairwise matches?
I tried on Eigenvector Centrality (though, honestly, I don’t quite understand it) as a generalized variant of PageRank.
And, despite all the fancy stats, I realized that I needed simple win/loss ratios just to sanity check!

And here’s how I made it, technically:

Val.town is an amazing platform for focusing on prototyping an app rather than worrying about tooling, deployment, etc. Big fan!
I used a lot of LLM help! First, ValTown’s in-house “Townie” app. Then Cursor.
LLM’s are kinda dumb. I had to keep rescuing it from mistakes. But fun! Turns out I was semi vibe coding before I knew what it was.
I used Cursor to help think through different statistical methods. But I was careful about errors in implementation. I actually had a python code test suite for the data, and also a javascript one. I figured that python code would be more canonical for the LLM, and more likely to be a true implementation of the concept (and I kept prodding it for that to be true). Then I could check the fidelity of the javascript (which is the language of ValTown) to the python test suite
As I made the app more and more complex (better logging! Usernames and user stats) I had to create a separate admin panel app just to spot check and edit data, upgrade from v1 of logging structures to v2, etc.
Each algorithm showed different winners. The private, family version found different winners than public.

As the README puts it:

This is also an exploration and tutorial in the world of ranking and statistics. Specifically —

With messy or imperfect data, even algorithms meant to account for it give different results

The power of regularization. Throw out a few rogue actors / outlier data and things become a lot clearer

Rather than put data into a black box algorithm and call it a day: interrogate the results!

And

Data is important, analyzing it is helpful, data sense to interrogate the problem is necessary — but at the end of the day, making decisions needs to be informed by data, not mandated.

In the end, Sarah and I spent the first four days in the hospital looking at the little baby, thinking about what he looked like, and also what kind of expectations we wanted to put on him. What name would work well for a child as well as a man? We made our choice based on instinct and reason — but not before I peeked at the leaderboard to make sure that Omri was among the best performers.