Thomas Sowell and Diaper Changing
Now that D1 sleeps all night long, I always double-diaper her before bed. The two diapers are quite adequate to the task--indeed, they're not even that wet in the morning. I generally feed her around 6:30, put a fresh diaper on, and put her back to bed as she's generally quite sleepy until after 9.

The problem was, after that diaper changing, she would always soak through everything before she woke up from her nap. (She never does this later in the day.) I was complaining of this to my sister yesterday and she said, "Well, why don't you double-diaper her first thing in the morning?"

Duh.

But I realized I wasn't doing this because it seemed more logical to me that she would wet more overnight than she would in three hours. She ought to wet more at night. It wasn't my fault if she didn't!

This reminded me of Thomas Sowell's distinction between the constrained (conservative, roughly) and unconstrained (liberal, roughly) vision. The unconstrained believe more in what Sowell called "articulated rationality"--i.e., if an intellectual can explain it and it sounds logical, then it must be true. The constrained believe more in experience; who cares what reality ought to be, it's what reality is that we must deal with. I was allowing my articulated rationality of diapering theory to trump what I had observed to be true.

So to avoid becoming a liberal intellectual, I double-diapered her this morning.