More Thoughts On Critical Windows

A short follow-up to the fetish post, unifying 'critical windows' for sexuality and food aversion (the cousin's exploding cherry tomato) under trapped priors, then explaining why such trapped priors cluster in childhood via an AI learning-rate-decay analogy: children run at a high 'temperature,' so their large updates are more likely to land them in a hard-to-escape attractor, and they can no longer make updates big enough to climb out. Concedes the specific-vs-general critical-period distinction (monocular deprivation) and that the unpredictability of which events stick remains mysterious.

Quality 63 · Strong. Solid (upper)/low-Strong: a neat conceptual synthesis (trapped priors + learning-rate decay explains childhood plasticity) but very short and explicitly speculative, ending on 'still pretty mysterious.'

Claude’s paradigm shift 48 · Moderate. Moderate: applying learning-rate decay to developmental critical windows is a fresh recombination of his own ideas, modest in novelty.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Minor/within-blog: a speculative developmental-psychology note with no material footprint.