Lyra
Article
Lyra is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between December 22, 2023 and January 09, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “their nicknames are Kai and Lyra”; “KAI! STOP PULLING LYRA’S HAIR RIGHT NOW!”; “Lyra will see and try to steal the drum from him”. It most often appears alongside Kai, ACX, ACX survey.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: December 22, 2023
- Last seen: January 09, 2026
Appears In
- In The Long Run, We’re All Dad
- Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
- Open Thread 397
- The Permanent Emergency
Related Pages
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- Kai (4 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX survey (1 shared issues)
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- Alexa (1 shared issues)
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- Alexey Guzey (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- Astralcodexten Com (1 shared issues)
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- Athens (1 shared issues)
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- Barbara Kingsolver (1 shared issues)
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- Barcelona (1 shared issues)
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- BCS3-L1 (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
But I need some way to refer to them online, so their nicknames are Kai and Lyra.
Lyra is already an overachiever. She has clearly read all the How To Be A Baby textbooks, learned when crying is appropriate, and only cries at those specific times. She drinks the exact amount of milk recommended on the Baby Age-Appropriate Nursing Chart, then refuses to accept more. I’m worried that if we don’t teach her to think independently soon, she’ll end up somewhere terrible like Harvard.
Kai. Lyra. You’ll live to see a million things that man was never meant to see. You were born just in time for a high-speed collision with the hinge of history. I’m only 39, I expect to be around when whatever-it-is happens - but if not, you’re our family’s ambassadors to the singularity. A thousand generations, from hardy Neolithic farmers to studious Russian rabbis to overprivileged American office workers - they all lived and died so you could be here and experience this, and maybe tilt the course of what’s coming by a couple of micro-degrees.
What does it mean to do secondary childcare for one-year-olds? They can’t exactly play quietly on their own while their parents are upstairs, can they? Or maybe everyone else’s one-year-olds can, and mine can’t? Or maybe I falsely think that mine can’t, and that’s why I’m having so much trouble? Or maybe one-year-olds without twin siblings can do it, but twins have to - KAI! STOP PULLING LYRA’S HAIR RIGHT NOW! I’M TRYING TO WRITE A REVIEW OF THE BOOK ON HOW EASY TAKING CARE OF CHILDREN IS!
The Free Range Kids website has some tools and tips, but they don’t go about it the exact way that I would (yes, I’ve thought about this a lot). When Kai and Lyra are older, I fantasize about organizing the local rationalists - we have five families with kids on the same block. They’ll all wear bright orange t-shirts and hats with “FREE RANGE KIDS” on them, and they’ll all have a flyer - which they’re encouraged to show any adult or officer who complains - saying something like:
Inline links: Free Range Kids website
Much of my parenting time is spent trying to minimize toy and book theft. A typical cycle will go like this: Kai will be playing with a toy drum. Lyra will see and try to steal the drum from him. I will prevent her. She will scream. In order to defuse the crisis, I must get some other toy to interest her more. This is very easy, because her level of interest in any toy is directly proportional to how interested other people seem by it. So I will take the digital thermometer, point it at my head, and take my temperature. “Wow,” I will say, “I’m having lots of fun using this thermometer. Might this thermometer be . . . the most fun toy in the entire world???” Then Lyra will scream because she doesn’t have the thermometer. “Fine,” I will say, as if I am making some deep concession. “I suppose you can have the thermometer.” Her face will light up and she will start repeatedly hitting the thermometer button like a rat pulling the deliver-opioids lever.
All of this was to protect Kai’s ability to play with his toy drum. But more likely than not, Kai will have seen this whole spectacle and now he wants the digital thermometer. “Mine! Mine!” he will scream, the toy drum totally abandoned in his newfound distress. “Noooooo!” Lyra will shout, clutching the thermometer close to her chest. “Look!” I tell Lyra. “The drum you wanted is free now! You can have it! Take it! Go!” Sometimes this will solve the whole problem. Lyra will take the drum, Kai will take the thermometer, everyone is happy. Other times Lyra will refuse to give the thermometer up for a stupid drum. Other times she’ll agree, but as soon as Kai sees Lyra playing with the drum, he’ll forget about the thermometer and want the drum back. After some number of cycles, this hopefully converges to both kids having a toy they will tolerate for at least sixty seconds, which is enough time for me to wind down, regain my composure, and prepare for the cycle to start again.
I do have a pretty good idea about the screaming, though. When Kai demanded “the sun song”, I had accidentally told Alexa to play Raffi’s version of Mister Golden Sun instead of SuperSimpleSongs’ version. Kai did not consider this a sufficiently faithful rendition, and made his displeasure clear to everyone in the neighborhood at six in the morning. Then Lyra didn’t like that Kai was screaming, and started screaming too. By the time I realized the song mishap, I couldn’t rectify my mistake, because they were screaming too loud for Alexa to hear my commands (and too loud for them to notice if the song changed anyway).
If vehicle = animal, what do toddlers think of being inside a vehicle? Here, Lyra’s just enjoying it while it lasts; Kai is more pensive. This leads me to propose - I don’t care what the anthropologists say, we all know modern hunter-gatherers aren’t representative of our hominid ancestors - that our forebears used toddlers as some kind of lookout. Their job was to sit on top of a tree, scan the savanna, and, when they saw something, inform the tribe: ANTELOPE! ANTELOPE! ANTELOPE! and not stop until another family member closed the loop “Antelope acknowledged, over and out.”
Books can be an emergency too, although my children have different ways of relating to them. Lyra relates to books by sitting in my lap quietly while I read them to her. Kai relates to books by tolerating this for one page, then grabbing it, yelling “MY BOOK!” flipping the pages until he finds the best page, then holding it open to the best page and defending it against anyone who might try to flip it to other, inferior pages. The best page varies by book, but it’s usually whichever page has one of the following on it: dogs, berries, trains, buses, the sun, or the moon (the moon takes pride of place, for some reason - I’m working on a theory about the ancestral environment where toddlers were used as assistant shamans charged with monitoring the moon’s position at all times). Then Kai will stare lovingly at the page, pointing at the moon and saying “Moon!” every so often. Then Lyra will scream and try to turn the page. Then Kai will scream because she’s trying to switch away from the objectively best page and you’re such an idiot, you’ll just be moving to a worse page with fewer moons, why would you do that?