I think a better analogy is you as a local LLM having root access to the computer it's running on. If you brick it, you've also broken the substrate that facilitates the process by which you'd naively unbrick - the terminal commands you'd use no longer work!

Horseshoe theory in action: the most and least woo people in the world might make a post with this title.

One thing is, babies very gradually get harder in exactly the way you describe! Like, at first by default they breastfeed, and don't have teeth, which is at the very least highly instinctive to learn. Then they eat a tiiiny bit of solid food, like a bite or two once a day, to train you. So you have gotten way stronger at "baby eating challenges" by the time the baby can e.g. throw food. Likewise they'll very rarely try to put stuff in their mouths early on, then really gradually more and more, so you hone that instinct too. Even diapers don't smell bad the first couple of months! Hard to overestimate the effects of the extremely instinct compliant learning curve.

Sure, some of those. But also I just expected parenthood to change me a bunch to be better suited to it. Like, it's a challenge such that rising to it transforms you. With babysitting you're just skipping to a random bit pretty far into the process, not already having been transformed.

As a data point I was extremely confident I wanted kids, and didn't especially vibe with most babies/never had changed a diaper before my kid was born, and my confident prediction, so far, was if anything an underestimate. I doubt a week of babysitting would have changed my intent whatsoever, but it would probably have been stressful and not that fun. 

As an audience member, I often passively judge people for responding to criticism intensely or angrily, or judge both parties in a long and bitter back and forth, and basically never judge anyone for not responding.

When I've responded to criticism with "oh, thanks, hadn't thought of that", I haven't really felt disapproved of or diminished. Sometimes the critic is just right, and sometimes they just are looking at the topic from another angle and it's fine for readers to decide whether they like it better than mine. No big deal. I don't really see evidence that anyone's tracking my status that hard. I'd rather make sure nobody's tracking me being unkind though, including myself.

(This comment is offered up as a data point from the peanut gallery. I have no idea if it's representative! If you reply, it may make me happy, but if not I won't mind.)

It's grown on me as I've edited more technical stuff; growing up in the US literary tradition it always seemed elegant to put punctuation inside, though now that I read more stuff like LessWrong it does feel kinda imprecise/hand-wavey somehow. Like, wait a minute, that guy you're quoting didn't put a comma in there!

Yeah, I messed around with Typst for the first time recently. There's a whole dang world out there!

Yeah, for me it solves itself instantly once I actually notice it in any given case. I mostly try not to think of myself as an expert at stuff (luckily for that, I rarely am!), but there are weird psychological incentives with being a professional at stuff, I think.