Me writing reviews on Letterboxd

Gotta be honest, I am seriously rethinking my plans to open a lesbian bar in the Pioneer Valley

This guy mischaracterizes my video. I don't say it's a conspiracy. I say that the *sincere* belief among AI hypers that AI has some vague numerical chance of ending the world serves to distract *THEM* from the actual bad shit they're doing, which is reason to be skeptical of it.

Worthwhile perspective here: You can send your (affluent) kid to a heavily low-income school without effectively denying them a good or pleasant education, so long as that school happens to be well-run.

Great @AndyMasley piece about how our default moral intuitions are very likely to be 1) shaped by our desire for social status and 2) unjustifiably parochial. The essay is ultimately a case for Effective Altruism. But you don't have to be an EA to accept these arguments. blog.andymasley.com/p/what-i…

(I actually think AI x-risk is way overhyped. Though I also don't 100% trust my own intuitions on this stuff, since I used to think LLMs had little promise, on the basis of roughly 2 Gary Marcus articles I half-remembered)

Engineering viruses has never been cheaper or easier. As of 2024, virtually anyone could buy all the synthetic DNA needed to recreate the 1918 flu. And Trump has since *loosened* regulations on DNA synthesis companies More in the piece (unpaywalled): vox.com/technology/503361/ai…

My point broadly is that “you are hurting your kids by sending them to public school with poor kids” needs better quantitative justification than what is found in the article

Late in life I went back to school to become a teacher, but before that I was a union organizer and rep for many years. When I argue with people about the current nutball approach to math instruction in elementary, I am always thinking about a guy I repped once. He worked

It's true that improving public education is not an adequate (or particularly effective) means of reducing economic inequality. But I feel like this fact is often invoked as an argument against worrying about whether/how our schools could be improved, existing social inequities notwithstanding. And that doesn't make much sense to me for 3 reasons: 1) We should seek to cultivate kids' intellectual development as an end in itself, irrespective of the second-order consequences on our political economy. 2) Improving education can have beneficial social effects, even if it has no impact on inequality. Economic life is not wholly zero-sum. And education can help spur productivity/welfare-enhancing innovations with broad public benefits. (Though these benefits would be far greater under more egalitarian economic institutions.) 3) Kids' educational outcomes probably aren't solely determined by background economic conditions and innate ability, such that the quality of their school's administrators, teachers, curricula, and accountability mechanisms have 0 impact on the knowledge and intellectual skills/capacities they acquire. None of which is to say that all our schools present flaws can be fixed by changes in education policy, or that the optimal set of education policies is self-evident. Just that trying to improve the schools would not be an unworthy project, even if doing so had no impact whatsoever on inequality.

Many have heard of the phonics debacle and vaguely know that the K12 school world gets into bizarre, destructive fads very easily. The 2 worst, for my money, currently are -elementary math teaching -ending the enforcement of behavior standards through consequences

Sorry, no can do. As much as I hate the United States and all it stands for, it's just too hard to coordinate the replacement of America's whites from overseas

2016 libs, being grossly unfair and close-minded: "Make America great again" just means "We hate nonwhite Americans and think there should be fewer of them." 2026 GOP: "Make America great again" just means "We hate nonwhite Americans and think there should be fewer of them."

Claude, design a doomsday bioweapon. Make no mistakes. vox.com/technology/503361/ai…

I wrote about how AI + advances in synthetic biology could give an omnicidal psychopath the power to engineer pandemic viruses. (This threat is arguably overhyped, as I discuss. But it's still the most concerning "AI doom" scenario to me personally) vox.com/technology/503361/ai…

Worrying about recursive self-improvement in 1996 is very impressive, but few know that George Eliot, of Middlemarch brilliance, wrote about the threat of RSI leading to human obsolescence way back in 1879 (!) She glimpsed this idea at the very start of the second industrial revolution, just by contemplating an automated weighing machine at the Bank of England. From "Shadows of the Coming Race":

The reforms will be great for today’s homeowners who will pay less in tax, and will be able to sell their homes for more (due to capitalization). The cost will be paid by others (those who don’t currently own; commercial properties; other types of taxpayers).