I nod my head agreeing with much of what Tyler Cowen says and writes, but the points where he is off are not minor. Here he is a few weeks ago, on a new RCT banning smartphones in the classroom showing (very) modest improvements in grades:

Note with grades there is “an average increase of 0.086 standard deviations.” I have no problem with these policies, but it mystifies me why anyone would put them in their top five hundred priorities, or is that five thousand?

He also points to an older trial from Norway, which had similar results. Cowen frames the bans as tiny gains for unknown and potentially enormous cost. And student comments like the following he found worthy enough to repost:

As an academically successful student in a pretty well ranked high school my recollection was that the entire experience was horrible and torturous and essentially felt like being locked up in prison. The pace of teaching was also so slow that the marginal value add of being in class was essentially 0 when compared to the textbook reading I would do after school anyway.

So… yes it was nice to have a phone and I don’t care if it distracts stupid students from learning.

And here is Rana Foroohar in this morning’s FT, under the headline Trump’s war on America’s schools:

[Randi] Weingarten, those of you reading outside the US could be forgiven for not knowing, is the head of America’s second-largest teachers’ union. In her new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, she lays out some of the history of authoritarian backlash against public education and its teachers, from the post-civil war Reconstruction era in the US, to Europe in the 1930s, to Vladimir Putin’s justification of crackdowns on teachers and universities in Russia (“wars are won by . . . schoolteachers”).

She also quotes the Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer, who found that a lack of “critical thinking” made people more receptive to authoritarian leaders. As he put it, “the very last thing an authoritarian leader wants is for his followers to start using their heads”. Or, as Trump so memorably put it after a 2016 primary win: “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”

Reading is going out of fashion, but I would urge the student above, and Tyler Cowen, and everyone else who thinks eaking out marginal gains for top-performing students is worth the cost of “distracting stupid students from learning”, to (re)read Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas or — if they have more time — Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov which served as an inspiration with this passage in particular:

“I challenge you: let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it?”

And some may agree (I don’t)! But of course the equilibrium is not in focusing all of the world’s misery into a single person, as it tends to spread out, and you can’t lock up those exposed in a dank basement like the citizens of Omelas did. Rather, those people get to vote, and not in a way you may like.

• Rachel Kwon: Slowing Down. It is about living life in the slow lane after 40. As a recent entrant into the fifth decade I observed the same. For me, this only applies to the physical world — I still tend to be impatient with bits and bytes.
• Raghuveer Parthasarathy: Some data on homework and its correlations. This is about assigned work at university level courses, and in my mind “homework” should be kept in grade school. I remain a big proponent of oral exams, though we don’t use them in the one course I teach.
• Katarina Zimmer for the journal Nature: ‘Lipstick on a pig’: how to fight back against a peer-review bully. Quoth reviewer two: “The first author is a woman. She should be in the kitchen, not writing papers.” Should we trust science more or less when we have this kind of information? (ᔥDerek Lowe)
• Nori Parellius: What the left hemisphere might tell us about large language models. Very much a plug for Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary which I have yet to read. I, too, would much prefer we use “confabulation” instead of “hallucination”, though it also has some troubling assumptions of its own.

• The Omg Lol Times: Disconnecting from Discord. My distaste of Discord is from their overall esthetics and not because they are snitches, but I am not surprised. Only in Hollywood do villains have taste.
• Kyla Scanlon: 6 Economic Lessons from Books About Power, Propaganda, and Decline. Sure, it’s a listicle, but every item stands on its own.
• Ruxandra Teslo: For clinical trial reform, we need more hobbits. There is also a quick follow-up. I will have more to write on this topic.
• Scot Sumner: Breakneck. It is about Dan Wang’s book. Consider it a continuation of this list.
• Derek Guy: Cuttings: Armani Obit, Republican Style, Office Wear, and Bare Chests. The man behind the @dieworkwear social media accounts has a blog which is, surprise surprise, much less engagement-bait-y and political than any of the media personas. The most recent article is “just” a series of excerpts from his recent big-media articles, but I imagine scrolling through the archive would be a good exercise for the weekend.

• J Mark Sloan, a hematologist/oncologist at Boston Medical Center, on X: As Hematology-Oncology Fellowship Program Director, I’ve reviewed 647 applications this cycle. Every personal statement cites a passion caring for cancer patients, research and teaching. 85% explicitly prefer academic medicine. No one mentions wanting a career in pharma…. And yet many newly-made oncologists go to work for the industry within 5 years of graduation, as the brief thread continues. Why is that? I blame social media, Instagram most of all, and I am not joking.
• Merlin Mann on Mastodon: Every aspect of this video breaks my brain. It’s a good video and what’s even better is the trailer to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? to which he linked below, and now I want to see the movie. Late 1960s to early 1970s was the golden age of Hollywood movies.
• Bogdan Ionescu: Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape. What it says on the tin. Quite an achievement and it’s not ugly to look at either. (ᔥThought Shrapnel)
• Taylor Troesh: 100,000,000 CROWPOWER and no horses on the moon. The winner of Adam Mastroianni’s blog post competition. Intriguing.
• Aidan Walker: is MrBeast the antichrist?. This being a substack post and not a newspaper article, Betteridge’s law of headlines does not apply.

• Nassim Taleb: The World in Which We Live Now. This is the essay version of his talk at the Ron Paul Institute, and much easier to follow.
• Miloš Vojnović: The 2020s: The Age of What?. My suggestion: despair.
• Leo Tolstoy: A Confession. Serialized by Cluny Journal, two of 6 parts out as of this morning.
• Tanner Greer: Bullets and Ballots: The Legacy of Charlie Kirk. A viewpoint about a person of whose existence I wasn’t even peripherally aware until last week: “I do not think liberals, progressives, or even older conservatives understood the amount of slime thrown at Kirk by those to his right. His eagerness to work with the new establishment inside established political forms, his program for the right’s spiritual renewal, and his generally pro-Israel line made him a constant target of Nick Fuentes and the “Fuentards” who follow him. His commitment to populist coalition-building made him an enemy of people like Laura Loomer, who described Kirk as “a political charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next” just a few weeks ago.” If you are known by your enemies…
• Ernie Smith: Saying Exactly What You Mean. Another viewpoint, but more so about Jesse Welles whose song [“Charlie”][5a] is very good.
• Claude Taylor on X: This is still the best reading of all this I’ve seen. I have no idea who this is-but (I think) he’s got it. I agree! The commentator’s name is Aidan Walker and he has a blog about memes to which I am now subscribed.

🎙️ Russ Roberts responded to my comments from yesterday on his conversation with Munger. There is an episode of EconTalked with Sam Altman that goes into the Y Combinator version of AirBnB’s founding. But the details are not relevant to my point, as I replied. This is why I still keep an X account.

• Cory Doctorow: You should be using an RSS reader. Almost a year old, but an important preamble for what’s below, especially if you only have a vague idea of what RSS stands for.
• Buttondown’s blog: The story of how RSS beat Microsoft (ᔥDave Winer, or rather his link blog so I couldn’t figure out a way to link to his actual post made on September 10th, 2025. This was his comment to the link: “We weren’t trying to beat anyone, we just wanted to make a level playing field where bloggers and news orgs could coexist on the web.")
• From the man himself: It’s really simple. Dave Winer’s pre-notes for September 18th, 2025, which will be the 23rd anniversary of the release of RSS 2.0.

A format like RSS has to be loved. And if you make it too complicated or vague, with too much political shuffling of the deck what you get is ActivityPub. That’s what RSS would have become if it went down the path the tech industry wanted to take it down. We have a perfect artifact to look at. An A-B comparison. Couldn’t be more stark. And, after almost 23 years, RSS is still simple.

• Alan Levine: A(I)s We May Not Think (nor search, nor link) (ᔥx28’s new Blog). A riff on Vannevar Bush’s 80-year-old essay As We May Think. Though only mentioned once, the spirit of RSS is strong in this one.
• Buttondown’s blog, again: rssrssrssrss (that is not a typo). Yesterday was the first I’ve heard of Buttondown, which is apparently a newsletter service, but they have a nice blog and do cool things with RSS. This is an open-source service that combines multiple RSS feeds into a single feed. The use cases write themselves.

In the unlikely case you are reading this but aren’t using RSS feed readers, may I suggest a few resources, in no particular order:

• Feedbin (most user-friendly, but you have to pay)
• Feedly (more enterprise-oriented but still good; has a free tier)
• Feedland (Dave Winer’s own creation; unorthodox and completely free)
• NetNewsWire (open-source, iOS/macOS only)

And if I get just one person to stop scrolling down social media walls and start making rivers of news of their own, this Friday won’t have gone to waste.

• Derek Lowe: Life, Maybe, On Mars, Unless We Change Our Minds. You may have heard that the Mars Rover may have found evidence of microbial life in the planet’s past. If like myself you couldn’t find time to watch the 1-hour press conference, this is the most concise yet understandable explanation I could find.
• Nick Maggiulli: The Bar Only Gets Higher. On why it is becoming ever-harder to just get on with one’s life.
• Scott Sumner: Less wrong. He seems to be sad that we don’t live in a world of rational people. I am not so sure.
• Gina Trapani: Welcome to my blog. Her posts on Lifehacker are some of the first I followed via RSS at a time before even Google Reader was a thing (remember Bloglines?) Well, she is back blogging and I have started following for old times' sake.
• Andy Baio: DOOMscroll. A simple online game you should not play more than once.

Sascha Fast of the Zettelkasten blog writes, in a post titled The Scam Called “You Don’t Have to Remember Anything”:

Rowlands et al. wrote about the so called “digital natives” that they lack the critical and analytical thinking skills to evaluate the information they find on the internet. We need a fully developed mental map of the subject in order to derive value from the results of an internet search.

In short: You need a trained brain to actually benefit from the internet.

But not just from the internet, as the post elaborates. This applies equally or even more to LLM outputs. A great example comes from a recent post on Andrew Gelman’s blog, though not from the man himself, where a human and ChatGPT 5 both try to improve upon a statistical model in a new-to-me language called Stan. Now if you don’t know Bayesian statistics or Stan this will all look like gobbledygook and ChatGPT won’t help you understand.

LLMs are also seeping into the everything-bucket software, the one whose primary purpose is to black-hole every article and textbook you will never read or video you will ever watch. Well now it can also give you the illusion of knowledge and control because you can ask questions about the contents. This is something Casey Newton learned this year:

I can give Notion a sprawling question like “how did the Cambridge Analytica case resolve” and get a good summary of regulatory actions across several years and countries. And by default, web search is off, meaning I know that its AI systems are drawing only on the vetted journalism that I have saved into my database.

This is a dream come true. I finally have a meaningful way to sift through millions of words of article text, ask follow-up questions, and get citations that I can use in my work. Notion may yet prove to be the AI librarian that Readwise never became.

One more thing I’m trying: I mentioned above that I continue to experiment with different ways to save material that might be useful later. Recently a Reddit post turned me on to Recall, which positions itself as a “self-organizing knowledge base.” Currently available as a web and mobile app, Recall lets you save web pages, YouTube videos, PDFs, podcasts, Google Docs, and other materials into a single database that it then organizes on your behalf.

To be clear, I myself have asked for something like this from my everything-bucket software of choice, DEVONthink. And it delivered! But now I am realizing, and Sacha’s post was a good reminder, that these are becoming command line-level power tools — Hole Hawgs of the mind if you will — which can and will do great damage if not used carefully. And unlike the Hole Hawg they are freely available and come with no instruction manual. Caveat utilitor.

• Hyundai-LG immigration raid sparks alarm at foreign companies in the US. The US immigration system is a horror story co-written by Lovecraft and Kafka.
• Democrats rekindle Trump’s Epstein problem with birthday note. How many mosquito nets will it take to wash off the shame?
• After six years of silence and hype, is Silksong worth the wait?. About the Hollow Knight sequel. FT’s gaming coverage is quite good.
• How Novartis got ahead on ‘incredible’ cancer breakthrough. Their medicine coverage, on the other hand… I should write more about these kinds of promotional articles, this is just a reminder for me to do it.

All gift links. Enjoy.