On fiction: there's this series, "Sword of Truth". The main feature I really, really like about it is the main hero does actually make the good decisions, like not falling for prophesies in a stupid way. Unfortunately, there are many books that could use a lot of editing; I read the first, and then the last 2 or 3 (my husband read the rest for me, haha), and the good parts I really liked, but wish that the books received some heavy editing.
Yeah, I was going to comment on that as well. I don't think it's difficult for a reader to follow a plot where the protagonist is competent, and faced by an equally competent antagonist. I think it's hard to write. It requires very deliberate plotting, and an author who is clever enough to think through both sides of that equation. It's much easier to just have your protagonist make dumb mistakes and then deal with the consequences, which is why this problem is especially prevalent in serialized fiction. CW writers are on a deadline, they have to churn out a lot of episodes, and they aren't really incentivized to avoid this trap.
In contrast, look at the great mystery novels. Agatha Christie wrote entirely about clever heroes faced with puzzles devised by clever villains. War fiction, too, is often about the battle between strategists. I particularly like Guns of the Dawn by Adrian Tchaikovsky. In these cases the protagonist might be restricted by a less competent superior, but they generally find solutions that work around the regulations.
There is also a third path, where the protagonist makes a bad decision, but it's a bad decision that the story has developed into an inevitability. It reflects the character accurately, and in a way that actually builds up the themes of the story. Hamlet is great for this. Hamlet is a brilliant man who spends the first half of the play making very intelligent decisions. He verifies that Claudius really is the villain he's been told, and that his revenge would be justified. And then, when given the opportunity, he refuses to take it out of fear that Claudius is repentant and will escape Hell. Hamlet decides not to trust in God's Just nature, and this is the catalyst for the tragedy that ensues. And of course, as a nice bit of irony, after Hamlet leaves Claudius immediately reveals that he had failed to repent, and that Hamlet would have gotten exactly what he had wanted if he had simply placed his trust in the divine.
Anyway, my point is that there are many examples of literature that aren't just about characters passing the idiot ball around, and just about all great authors are capable of it.
I think if you deliberately look for books with proactive characters, it's actually fairly common these days, authors generally deliberately try to avoid the trap of heroes who just have stuff happen to them.
(OTOH, a lot of what makes a story good is being more on the explore side of explore/exploit, which often means being ignorant of a lot of what's really going on and having to be led or making some mistakes).
Explore/exploit is actually a really good way of framing this. I’d contend that the actual _story_ takes place almost entirely within the “explore” space: once there’s nothing left to explore, a good writer will get the exploitation but over as soon as possible because once the interesting questions have been answered the rest is trivial from a narrative point of view. Eg detective stories should not go on more than a couple of hundred words after the murderer is revealed; Lord of the Rings feels flat from the moment the Ring is destroyed; Pride and Prejudice never got that 40-page sex scene that Martin Amis wished it had ended with (actually I’m with Amis on that last one).
I'm torn between 'that sex scene would have been awful and make no sense to have there' and 'if that sex scene was there maybe I wouldn't have been forced to read Pride and Prejudice.'
But also PaP is likely above replacement for what I would have been forced to read instead. So overall I think I'm against the scene.
Heh heh. Actually I really like PaP and have re-read it for pleasure since school, but point taken. Clearly Amis was joking about the sex scene, but only kinda, and the joke only works beyond being a basic, not very funny one about changing mores because PaP has an unusually high level of genuine sexual tension between the main characters. I’d read it, especially if Martin Amis had written it (he probably did).
It's pretty much a linear drop in quality from book 1 through 6, then 7 is good (because it isn't about the main characters, so it can be it's own story) and the finale ?trilogy? Should have been just one book, but is also around book 3 quality
Also, on children's advertising, and how reducing ad revenue can backfire: lots of people don't like Cocomelon; I'd say I like some of their videos and not all, and they do meet a baseline level of quality. (The Cocomelon ripoffs are worse!) They have a few pretty enjoyable videos. But they made a ton of money off advertising until the changes required by legislation; and this precipitated the sale of merchandise (which initially the creator didn't want to do, according to an interview I read once) and, eventually, a sale to a conglomerate that bought up many of these youtube children's cartoon properties. On the rare occasions I let my kids watch cocomelon these days, I seek out the old ones, even though the animation isn't as sleek, because something about the new ones after the acquisition is "off" for me.
Re: Disney - I've been looking into this and I *think* the impairment charge in question is actually solely an accounting write off that reflects a reduced enterprise value (and would affect stock price) but isn't a taxable event as such -- it's just marking-to-market an asset whose intangible goodwill value has depreciated. Happy to be corrected by any real accountants but AFAICT it's slightly less bullshit than it at first appears.
Re lab-grown meat: I'm not a consumer of it, but my impression is more people are interested in the "reduction of animal suffering" than reduction in greenhouse gases. (Which I assume lab-grown meat is still 100% a reduction on)
Yes, that was my thought as well- the point of lab-grown meat is to reduce animal suffering. I don't think anyone is thinking of it primarily for greenhouse gas impacts.
There's an unfortunate tendancy to think of "environmentally-friendly" as if it were one thing, or assume that anything "good" along one axis must be good along another. In reality, of course, there are often trade-offs: I think most animal welfare advocates would say in this case the trade off was easily worth it.
People who read this post tend to live in a corner of the world where animal suffering is a big concern and climate change is a small concern. I believe they are rather outnumbered on this. At scale, carbon efficiency is going to matter a lot for public acceptance and even legal permission.
It's not actually all that elegant though since the rule cannot apply to "more" in the way you argue it should apply to "less" so the rule seems arbitrary and ad hoc to me.
I don't immediately see how it is clearer or semantically valuable either. As for reading badly Zvi's original heading reads fine to me. Depends on what you're used to probably.
It’s semantically valuable in part because of its redundancy, which tends to be a conserved and valuable feature of language (e.g. English preserves an agent/patient case system despite doing everything grammatically with word order). I suppose it might be cool to have discrete more vs. continuous more (I, for one, wish English had the aut/vel distinction conserved for “or”)….
To be clear, my view on this is: Thank you for the correction, Ethics Gradient is correct here it should have been Fewer, sometimes I mess this up, however it's not wrong on the 'actually bother fixing it' level.
I read it as "highly educated writer demonstrating mastery of ironic deployment of a different register", which helps leaven the text. Prescriptive grammarians can go to down the road paved with good intentions.
Re: Uber for Babysitters - I appreciate taking the time to remove a dependency on Twitter by copying the text but please, please *please* for the sake of readability do it so that the conversation goes chronologically from top to bottom instead of reverse-chronologically. Twitter's way of doing things is already garbage but in text it somehow manages to be 10x worse.
re TikTok: I commented on Twitter that this looks like a truncation effect at least in part. Obviously, it takes time to rack up views, and takes more time to rack up many more views; so any chart of 'X releases on date Y which have achieved >=Z views' will necessarily look 'tilted', simply because old releases have had more time to reach the threshold, and the higher the threshold, the more tilted it will be. (To make this more intuitive, consider the extreme cases: what would you expect the chart to look like for 100 million views, or 1 billion views, or 100 views, or 1 view, or 0 views?)
Wow, Danielle Steele's work ethic is impressive. Reminds me of a scene from Terry Pratchett's Wee Free Men: “If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
I wonder if the 'cannot handle conditionals' thing isn't (at least somewhat) another instance of 'decoupling vs contextualizing'.
In fairness to the 'conditional collapsers', starting a statement or question with "If X ..." usually _is some evidence_ of "X".
ChatGPT's 'simulation' of the example conditional you quoted didn't fail quite in the quoted way, _while also_ assuming/collapsing it; my prompt:
> Please generate the next half a dozen or so of parts in the dialog between person A and person B that starts as follows:
>
> A: "If I were going to Paris, where would be the best place to get a baguette?"
Its response:
> B: "Ah, Paris, the city of baguettes! You're in for a treat. I'd highly recommend heading to Maison Kayser on Rue Monge. They bake some of the finest baguettes in the city."
>
> A: "Maison Kayser on Rue Monge, got it. Is there a particular time of day when they are freshest?"
I saw this the same way. Why would someone ask about a specific thing from Paris? Probabilistically, the correct response is to assume they are in fact going to Paris. You can phrase your response as something like "Oh, so you're going to Paris?" but that feels to me like you've held up the conversation with an obvious duh question and the best result would be if they used that as a springboard to say something like "Yeah, we're going in June!" (more information)
Context clues could matter, but I'm having trouble coming up with a context where someone who doesn't plant to visit Paris would ask about stores in Paris. Maybe someone they know is going and they're researching for them?
I still agree (at least somewhat) with the original point and it's something I've noticed too – lots of people routinely ignore any "If X ..." or "When X ..." preceding questions or statements, even in contexts in which entertaining hypothetical scenarios is FAR more sensible or reasonable than this specific 'Paris baguettes' example.
“Oh my, paying online for restaurant bills would be so amazing. It’s so frustrating to have to flag someone down to be allowed to pay. If you implement this, I will go to your restaurant more often.”
Already exists here in the UK. QR code, directs you to a site called sumup, or similar; Apple Pay, done. It totally is amazing. I’m surprised you don’t have it over there. Must be some pesky IRB blocked it...
Gaining popularity in Israel as well. You still have to flag someone to get the QR code, but once you decide how to split the bill, you just scan to pay and leave.
FYI Looks like the Ben Hoffman tweets got deleted (or mislinked, but I think deleted) which is a bit sad because they looked like they would have some an interesting strategy for sifting through “woo”.
I found the ACX piece one of the most ill defined / incomplete pieces I’ve seen from Scott Alexander, so I’m hoping he comes back to try and give it a proper treatment and argument that can actually be interacted with in a meaningful way and bring about more interesting conversations on the topic (and hopefully lead to more cool people being discovered).
Fantastic and thoughtful roundup Zvi, I appreciate it as always.
Re trends in fantasy: this is a meme for good reason, but try reading non-western fantasy and you'll see a completely different dynamic. I'm a big fan of Chinese Xianxia novels and they exist in a completely different philosophical and ethical tradition compared to western works. For example, the concept of immortality has no negative Christian baggage and characters are generally motivated by simple desire for power. Much of it is poorly translated and/or poorly written but the same is true of western fantasy. The only one I'd really recommend is "Reverend Insanity", which is quite good, probably the best in the genre and imo as trenchant an insight into modern China as you're likely to get in a story about people flying around and flinging magic spells at each other.
"Uber for Babysitters" reminds me of the idea that I and I'm sure hundreds or thousands of others have had, which is an app that connects working parents with stay at home parents willing to take on an extra kid or two in exchange for payment.
Unfortunately, this is illegal. At least in Washington State, there are no regulatory hurdles to accepting payment to take care of someone's kids in the kids' home.
You'll have to obtain a license for both yourself and the facility.
For yourself you'll need training on how to not shake babies, how to give medicine to kids, how to recognize child abuse, "serving children experiencing homelessness training," and so forth.
The facility will almost certainly need retrofits. Windows have to be made so that they can open a maximum of three inches. You'll need multi-compartment sinks for dish washing and sanitizing. Everything needs to be ADA compliant with ramps, rails, and such. Outdoor spaces will need self closing gates, swingsets will need nine inches of pea gravel, or six of rubber chunks.
You also have to develop curriculum, as well as "curriculum philosophy." You also have to promote acceptance of diversity.
You'll have to observe if there's an earthquake and take appropriate action.
Informally, lots of folks pay friends and neighbors to watch their kids, and it tends to be a lot more affordable than licensed childcare centers. However, since it's not technically legal, matchmaking is very difficult. A parent with a shallow social network is unlikely to find someone offering those services.
Obvious solution: The non-working parent can watch both sets of kids in the working parents' home, and money can be given to efficiently compensate for this? Does that work?
That sets up a dynamic of "nanny comes to rich person's home and brings their kids", even if no such hierarchy was intended. Sounds unlikely to be attractive to the non-working parent unless they really do need the money.
I remember Scott was previously adamant you can't distinguish Pepsi/Coke blind but I've done that test and was totally able to distinguish them, still unsure what's up with that. (I'm in the EU, might the formulations sold in different regions taste slightly different?)
On fiction: there's this series, "Sword of Truth". The main feature I really, really like about it is the main hero does actually make the good decisions, like not falling for prophesies in a stupid way. Unfortunately, there are many books that could use a lot of editing; I read the first, and then the last 2 or 3 (my husband read the rest for me, haha), and the good parts I really liked, but wish that the books received some heavy editing.
Still, at least the first one is worth a read.
Yeah, I was going to comment on that as well. I don't think it's difficult for a reader to follow a plot where the protagonist is competent, and faced by an equally competent antagonist. I think it's hard to write. It requires very deliberate plotting, and an author who is clever enough to think through both sides of that equation. It's much easier to just have your protagonist make dumb mistakes and then deal with the consequences, which is why this problem is especially prevalent in serialized fiction. CW writers are on a deadline, they have to churn out a lot of episodes, and they aren't really incentivized to avoid this trap.
In contrast, look at the great mystery novels. Agatha Christie wrote entirely about clever heroes faced with puzzles devised by clever villains. War fiction, too, is often about the battle between strategists. I particularly like Guns of the Dawn by Adrian Tchaikovsky. In these cases the protagonist might be restricted by a less competent superior, but they generally find solutions that work around the regulations.
There is also a third path, where the protagonist makes a bad decision, but it's a bad decision that the story has developed into an inevitability. It reflects the character accurately, and in a way that actually builds up the themes of the story. Hamlet is great for this. Hamlet is a brilliant man who spends the first half of the play making very intelligent decisions. He verifies that Claudius really is the villain he's been told, and that his revenge would be justified. And then, when given the opportunity, he refuses to take it out of fear that Claudius is repentant and will escape Hell. Hamlet decides not to trust in God's Just nature, and this is the catalyst for the tragedy that ensues. And of course, as a nice bit of irony, after Hamlet leaves Claudius immediately reveals that he had failed to repent, and that Hamlet would have gotten exactly what he had wanted if he had simply placed his trust in the divine.
Anyway, my point is that there are many examples of literature that aren't just about characters passing the idiot ball around, and just about all great authors are capable of it.
I think if you deliberately look for books with proactive characters, it's actually fairly common these days, authors generally deliberately try to avoid the trap of heroes who just have stuff happen to them.
(OTOH, a lot of what makes a story good is being more on the explore side of explore/exploit, which often means being ignorant of a lot of what's really going on and having to be led or making some mistakes).
Explore/exploit is actually a really good way of framing this. I’d contend that the actual _story_ takes place almost entirely within the “explore” space: once there’s nothing left to explore, a good writer will get the exploitation but over as soon as possible because once the interesting questions have been answered the rest is trivial from a narrative point of view. Eg detective stories should not go on more than a couple of hundred words after the murderer is revealed; Lord of the Rings feels flat from the moment the Ring is destroyed; Pride and Prejudice never got that 40-page sex scene that Martin Amis wished it had ended with (actually I’m with Amis on that last one).
I'm torn between 'that sex scene would have been awful and make no sense to have there' and 'if that sex scene was there maybe I wouldn't have been forced to read Pride and Prejudice.'
But also PaP is likely above replacement for what I would have been forced to read instead. So overall I think I'm against the scene.
Heh heh. Actually I really like PaP and have re-read it for pleasure since school, but point taken. Clearly Amis was joking about the sex scene, but only kinda, and the joke only works beyond being a basic, not very funny one about changing mores because PaP has an unusually high level of genuine sexual tension between the main characters. I’d read it, especially if Martin Amis had written it (he probably did).
It's interesting - I've heard other people disliking the ending, it feeling anti-climactic, but to me it felt very fitting. But to each their own!
It's pretty much a linear drop in quality from book 1 through 6, then 7 is good (because it isn't about the main characters, so it can be it's own story) and the finale ?trilogy? Should have been just one book, but is also around book 3 quality
Also, on children's advertising, and how reducing ad revenue can backfire: lots of people don't like Cocomelon; I'd say I like some of their videos and not all, and they do meet a baseline level of quality. (The Cocomelon ripoffs are worse!) They have a few pretty enjoyable videos. But they made a ton of money off advertising until the changes required by legislation; and this precipitated the sale of merchandise (which initially the creator didn't want to do, according to an interview I read once) and, eventually, a sale to a conglomerate that bought up many of these youtube children's cartoon properties. On the rare occasions I let my kids watch cocomelon these days, I seek out the old ones, even though the animation isn't as sleek, because something about the new ones after the acquisition is "off" for me.
Re: Disney - I've been looking into this and I *think* the impairment charge in question is actually solely an accounting write off that reflects a reduced enterprise value (and would affect stock price) but isn't a taxable event as such -- it's just marking-to-market an asset whose intangible goodwill value has depreciated. Happy to be corrected by any real accountants but AFAICT it's slightly less bullshit than it at first appears.
Re lab-grown meat: I'm not a consumer of it, but my impression is more people are interested in the "reduction of animal suffering" than reduction in greenhouse gases. (Which I assume lab-grown meat is still 100% a reduction on)
Yes, that was my thought as well- the point of lab-grown meat is to reduce animal suffering. I don't think anyone is thinking of it primarily for greenhouse gas impacts.
There's an unfortunate tendancy to think of "environmentally-friendly" as if it were one thing, or assume that anything "good" along one axis must be good along another. In reality, of course, there are often trade-offs: I think most animal welfare advocates would say in this case the trade off was easily worth it.
People who read this post tend to live in a corner of the world where animal suffering is a big concern and climate change is a small concern. I believe they are rather outnumbered on this. At scale, carbon efficiency is going to matter a lot for public acceptance and even legal permission.
Ed: "If I Didn’t Make This Its Own Section Less People Would Have Understood It"
Less -> Fewer
"Less" is fine. The grammarians are wrong on this one. The rule that constrains "fewer" need not constrain "less".
No pun intended.
Disagree. Not only is the rule elegant, clear, and semantically valuable, but as-written it just reads badly.
It's not actually all that elegant though since the rule cannot apply to "more" in the way you argue it should apply to "less" so the rule seems arbitrary and ad hoc to me.
I don't immediately see how it is clearer or semantically valuable either. As for reading badly Zvi's original heading reads fine to me. Depends on what you're used to probably.
It’s semantically valuable in part because of its redundancy, which tends to be a conserved and valuable feature of language (e.g. English preserves an agent/patient case system despite doing everything grammatically with word order). I suppose it might be cool to have discrete more vs. continuous more (I, for one, wish English had the aut/vel distinction conserved for “or”)….
To be clear, my view on this is: Thank you for the correction, Ethics Gradient is correct here it should have been Fewer, sometimes I mess this up, however it's not wrong on the 'actually bother fixing it' level.
I read it as "highly educated writer demonstrating mastery of ironic deployment of a different register", which helps leaven the text. Prescriptive grammarians can go to down the road paved with good intentions.
Re: Uber for Babysitters - I appreciate taking the time to remove a dependency on Twitter by copying the text but please, please *please* for the sake of readability do it so that the conversation goes chronologically from top to bottom instead of reverse-chronologically. Twitter's way of doing things is already garbage but in text it somehow manages to be 10x worse.
re TikTok: I commented on Twitter that this looks like a truncation effect at least in part. Obviously, it takes time to rack up views, and takes more time to rack up many more views; so any chart of 'X releases on date Y which have achieved >=Z views' will necessarily look 'tilted', simply because old releases have had more time to reach the threshold, and the higher the threshold, the more tilted it will be. (To make this more intuitive, consider the extreme cases: what would you expect the chart to look like for 100 million views, or 1 billion views, or 100 views, or 1 view, or 0 views?)
What are the other 5 series with The Americans?
The Wire will 100% be one of them. I too am curious what the other 4 are
Wow, Danielle Steele's work ethic is impressive. Reminds me of a scene from Terry Pratchett's Wee Free Men: “If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
I wonder if the 'cannot handle conditionals' thing isn't (at least somewhat) another instance of 'decoupling vs contextualizing'.
In fairness to the 'conditional collapsers', starting a statement or question with "If X ..." usually _is some evidence_ of "X".
ChatGPT's 'simulation' of the example conditional you quoted didn't fail quite in the quoted way, _while also_ assuming/collapsing it; my prompt:
> Please generate the next half a dozen or so of parts in the dialog between person A and person B that starts as follows:
>
> A: "If I were going to Paris, where would be the best place to get a baguette?"
Its response:
> B: "Ah, Paris, the city of baguettes! You're in for a treat. I'd highly recommend heading to Maison Kayser on Rue Monge. They bake some of the finest baguettes in the city."
>
> A: "Maison Kayser on Rue Monge, got it. Is there a particular time of day when they are freshest?"
>
> ...
I saw this the same way. Why would someone ask about a specific thing from Paris? Probabilistically, the correct response is to assume they are in fact going to Paris. You can phrase your response as something like "Oh, so you're going to Paris?" but that feels to me like you've held up the conversation with an obvious duh question and the best result would be if they used that as a springboard to say something like "Yeah, we're going in June!" (more information)
Context clues could matter, but I'm having trouble coming up with a context where someone who doesn't plant to visit Paris would ask about stores in Paris. Maybe someone they know is going and they're researching for them?
I still agree (at least somewhat) with the original point and it's something I've noticed too – lots of people routinely ignore any "If X ..." or "When X ..." preceding questions or statements, even in contexts in which entertaining hypothetical scenarios is FAR more sensible or reasonable than this specific 'Paris baguettes' example.
“Oh my, paying online for restaurant bills would be so amazing. It’s so frustrating to have to flag someone down to be allowed to pay. If you implement this, I will go to your restaurant more often.”
Already exists here in the UK. QR code, directs you to a site called sumup, or similar; Apple Pay, done. It totally is amazing. I’m surprised you don’t have it over there. Must be some pesky IRB blocked it...
Gaining popularity in Israel as well. You still have to flag someone to get the QR code, but once you decide how to split the bill, you just scan to pay and leave.
My guess on the 6 series are The Americans, The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Twin Peaks?
I will tell the full story in good time, for now I will say: At least one of the other 5 is right, and at least one of the other 5 is wrong.
FYI Looks like the Ben Hoffman tweets got deleted (or mislinked, but I think deleted) which is a bit sad because they looked like they would have some an interesting strategy for sifting through “woo”.
I found the ACX piece one of the most ill defined / incomplete pieces I’ve seen from Scott Alexander, so I’m hoping he comes back to try and give it a proper treatment and argument that can actually be interacted with in a meaningful way and bring about more interesting conversations on the topic (and hopefully lead to more cool people being discovered).
Fantastic and thoughtful roundup Zvi, I appreciate it as always.
Re trends in fantasy: this is a meme for good reason, but try reading non-western fantasy and you'll see a completely different dynamic. I'm a big fan of Chinese Xianxia novels and they exist in a completely different philosophical and ethical tradition compared to western works. For example, the concept of immortality has no negative Christian baggage and characters are generally motivated by simple desire for power. Much of it is poorly translated and/or poorly written but the same is true of western fantasy. The only one I'd really recommend is "Reverend Insanity", which is quite good, probably the best in the genre and imo as trenchant an insight into modern China as you're likely to get in a story about people flying around and flinging magic spells at each other.
"Uber for Babysitters" reminds me of the idea that I and I'm sure hundreds or thousands of others have had, which is an app that connects working parents with stay at home parents willing to take on an extra kid or two in exchange for payment.
Unfortunately, this is illegal. At least in Washington State, there are no regulatory hurdles to accepting payment to take care of someone's kids in the kids' home.
However, if you want to accept payment to take care of those same kids in your own home, you'll need to comply with 112 pages of regulations: https://app.leg.wa.gov/wac/default.aspx?cite=110-300&full=true.
You'll have to obtain a license for both yourself and the facility.
For yourself you'll need training on how to not shake babies, how to give medicine to kids, how to recognize child abuse, "serving children experiencing homelessness training," and so forth.
The facility will almost certainly need retrofits. Windows have to be made so that they can open a maximum of three inches. You'll need multi-compartment sinks for dish washing and sanitizing. Everything needs to be ADA compliant with ramps, rails, and such. Outdoor spaces will need self closing gates, swingsets will need nine inches of pea gravel, or six of rubber chunks.
You also have to develop curriculum, as well as "curriculum philosophy." You also have to promote acceptance of diversity.
You'll have to observe if there's an earthquake and take appropriate action.
Informally, lots of folks pay friends and neighbors to watch their kids, and it tends to be a lot more affordable than licensed childcare centers. However, since it's not technically legal, matchmaking is very difficult. A parent with a shallow social network is unlikely to find someone offering those services.
Obvious solution: The non-working parent can watch both sets of kids in the working parents' home, and money can be given to efficiently compensate for this? Does that work?
That sets up a dynamic of "nanny comes to rich person's home and brings their kids", even if no such hierarchy was intended. Sounds unlikely to be attractive to the non-working parent unless they really do need the money.
I have some experience with this, for a bit our nanny's child outright lived with us while we were in Warwick and I had no problem with it.
I remember Scott was previously adamant you can't distinguish Pepsi/Coke blind but I've done that test and was totally able to distinguish them, still unsure what's up with that. (I'm in the EU, might the formulations sold in different regions taste slightly different?)