It's important to learn math not because you may need to do long division as an adult, but because it promotes rigorous thinking. IMO, history and causal inference are among the most important subjects a young person can study — math being central to the second. A significant problem in public discourse right now is people's inability to critically evaluate causal claims (e.g., vaccines cause autism, deporting immigrants will solve the housing crisis, etc.). The less able people are to critically evaluate causal claims, the worse our democracy functions because people can be preyed upon for votes. You should promote anything that improves rigorous thinking, even if it doesn't have market value. In fact, we should stop thinking of education only in the context of what improves the economy. IMO, this is distinct from knowing your own address (which Huang can avoid because he's wealthy). Memorizing facts like this may or may not be important, but it's distinct from rigorous thinking.

Saying permitting reform "guts" the clean water act is wildly dishonest: - Section 401 of the Clean Water Act is just one of several important sections of the law. Changing 401 will not lower water quality standards. - Section 401 gives states responsibility to certify that projects meet water quality standards set by other sections of the Clean Water Act. - The problem is that some states stretch or outright misuse their 401 authority to block projects they dislike (pipelines), akin to how the Trump administration has used DOD waivers to block projects it doesn't like (wind). - All Congress is considering right now is how to limit the misuse of 401. Congress is NOT going to repeal 401, federalize 401 certification, or say projects don't have to meet water quality standards. - I expect reforms will be limited to requiring states to: make decisions based on water quality analysis only, explain their decisions in writing, and potentially limit how states add conditional when they certify projects. - None of this is remotely "gutting" the Clean Water Act or Section 401. 401 will still be a state-controlled process, it will still check water quality standards. The only thing that will change is the ability to misuse the process to block projects for political reasons. - 401 reform is also important for transmission lines. If Congress creates a federal backstop for siting and permitting transmission lines, 401 may become the last veto that states opposed to new lines can use. nitter.net/mattyglesias/status/21…

@amelia__michael and @karthiktadepall in @JoinFAI's Policy Gradients today on how AI will influence our GDP indicators (link below)

You’ve got to remember, if you lived in the 90s, you see this as a kid. You’re remembering it as a kid, even though you’re an adult now Your memories lock in who you were at the time. It’s like snow. It seems like snow was really deep back when I was a kid. And it isn’t that deep now. The reason is because I was short! It came up much higher on me when I was little. I’m tall, now, but my memory of the snow back in the 80s and early 90s is still that of a little kid. My relative perspective has changed, even though the same person is still doing the viewing and remembering You look at malls today as an adult. They don’t have magic like they used to. That’s because you’re an adult. But your kids think the malls today are magical. That’s because they’re kids If you want to believe in magic again, just have kids. Then see the world through their eyes

Excellent from Matt Yglesias. It would indeed be a shame if every affluent urban parent of a toddler decided that they need to flee to the suburbs. slowboring.com/p/why-i-send-…

I really liked today's piece by @mattyglesias. In particular, I liked this paragraph pushing back against the idea that parents must face a fundamental choice between advocating for their child and living out their egalitarian values.

The guilds are about to all gain so much power. So, so much power. ai guys generally underrate this. It will be *the* lever the American upper middle class pulls to keep their position intact. And they will pull it hard.

I appreciate NHJs reflection, but man, answer is not "systemic inequality". Very clearly that we spent $$$ on Broadway field trips, "hydroponics lab", 1 teacher per 10 students but no standards, grading, homework, testing to ensure quality. I want the Roland Fryer version of this

Gotta say, I have a fair bit of respect for NHJ after reading that piece. Afaict, she even forced her daughter to stick with the mostly white school after the daughter requested to switch because of a rough start. That’s well more than acquiescence to her daughter’s requests, and had to have taken substantial will on NHJ’s part to not immediately jump at an opportunity that maintain her relationship with her daughter while simultaneously reinforcing her worldview. Was the original decision foreseeably dumb? Absolutely. But we all have our foibles, and when the chips were down NHJ tossed aside a lifetime of ideology (and likely no small part of her own sense of self-worth) to do what was best for her daughter. If that sort of sacrifice isn’t the core of what it means to be a good parent I really don’t know what is.

Increasingly every graph is just the same graph and they mostly point towards the world getting pretty crazy around mid-2027

A lot of the good points have already been said. Here are some points I think I haven't seen made: (1) It's rare for any parent to stay with schools like these, investigate things, and write their experiences down. If nothing else this is a pretty rare style of firsthand account. (2) Her depiction surprised me on one dimension: many more problems from the teaching/administration side, and many fewer from the children and their parents, than I expected. In recent years I'd been coming around to the idea that teachers in low-performing schools are in fairly impossible situations, with disengaged parents and limited ways to keep classroom order. Hannah-Jones' take includes some of this, but alleges a lot more negligence from educators, like not checking students' work at all even when it was completed. This is not what I expected, but I've seen relatively few strong firsthand accounts from a parent perspective, per (1). (3) Standardized tests get a few mentions throughout, and seem to be revealing important information each time, but NHJ looks for ways to minimize them. In one case she notes a student who, she says, deliberately sandbagged the test because she thought her school didn't prepare her adequately and she might as well not try. Even as presented, that low test score is a big alarm bell. (4) There are a few references to education school-type best practices. NHJ repeats Najya's critique of the way Unison handled disruptive students, but also notes that it was "good educational practice." Similarly, she notes that "studies show" homework doesn't help on academics, but she seems to be happy with Paige's reinstatement of homework when it happens. She never quite says it, but it's certainly implied that a lot of education school ideas may have tradeoffs at best, or be straight-up wrong at worst.

Here is the explanation her daughter's middle school principal offers for running a school that does not assign homework (according to the story) and gives a kid As in algebra despite their not being about to do fractions or long division

Ooof. Hard reading. Brave to write. True personally, false impersonally. Everything she documents is a management and accountability failure rather than a resource failure. NYC spends $36k per pupil, the highest of any large district in the country. There haven't been big gaps in funding within states by race or income for decades. Ironically, she pulls on the heroic history of blacks integrating schools to justify segregating her child. A great piece on why voice fails, even a powerful voice, in the absence of the threat of exit. See The tragedy of Jonathan Kozol below nytimes.com/2026/09/20/magaz… marginalrevolution.com/margi…

This is the per-pupil funding for the elementary school Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to. If you subscribe to the funding theory of education, how much would have been enough? It's already crossed the average per capita annual income threshold. Maybe $100k? $200k?

NHJ’s 2016 article did a lot of damage, and she got a lot of praise for it. It would have been very easy for her to avoid writing this much-harder article. I am very glad she did so. It was courageous of her. “My kid hates that I chose this for them” is a bitter pill.

Great post on a complicated topic: how do you think about the contribution of energy to growth?

I’m honored to serve as the President of PEN/America, which has been defending free expression and celebrating literature for over a hundred years.  pen.org/press-release/award-…

In the Jason Arday discourse we saw that some people think that even if standards have been violated or eliminated, the achievements formerly associated with them still count as achievements. This of course is nonsense; achievements are such because they meet or exceed standards.

3 questions Dario’s essay leaves unanswered: 1. What did Dario see? Dario says he became convinced we need to pace the frontier in part because AI research has been “advancing drastically faster” since this summer. If it’s not just the vibes and math breakthroughs, that means he has private evidence of research acceleration. Exactly how fast is it going inside Anthropic, and what does that mean for AI capabilities over the next 6-18 months? 2. Who pays the evaluators? Dario writes that evaluators embedded inside AI companies will be “free of commercial incentives.” Whether that's true depends on who’s paying their salaries (labs? government? philanthropy?). Their independence also depends on who’s providing their tokens. For example, though METR doesn't take AI company money, they used $400K of OpenAI API credits during their investigation of the Hugging Face incident. If evaluators at Anthropic are relying on Anthropic to provide them the latest Claude, and relying on Claude to investigate Claude, Anthropic’s commercial incentives could still affect the evaluators. 3. Will the evaluators be able to access research beyond the training pipeline? According to the essay, evaluators inside Anthropic will now have access to their AI “training pipelines and processes.” This sounds like evaluators will be able to see the private details of what architecture the latest Claude uses, but it leaves open whether they would be able to see the research that led to that architecture. For example, would evaluators inside OpenAI have known about the breakthroughs that led to “reasoning” models like o1 before they made it into production? That matters because future breakthroughs (eg continual learning) could substantially change AI capabilities and thus reshape the kind of risks evaluators assess.

Economists arrogantly dunking on mathematicians. That’s not at all how I read the field medalists’ intervention. I understood them to make two points: 1) It’s not sufficient to solve a problem in mathematics if the solution is not understood (and understanding is only something