4D ago
HOT
11 sources
Among high-ability groups, outcomes may hinge more on personality and mental health than intelligence, but IQ looks dominant because it’s measured cleanly while personality is noisy. Measurement error attenuates correlations, steering research and policy toward what’s convenient to quantify rather than what matters most.
— It warns that evidence hierarchies and selection systems can misallocate attention and resources by overvaluing the most measurable traits.
Sources: Some Quotes, Beyond Body Count: How Many Past Partners Are Too Many?, The answer to the "missing heritability problem" (+8 more)
5D ago
HOT
11 sources
An Economic Innovation Group analysis by Sarah Eckhardt and Nathan Goldschlag finds that occupations most exposed to AI are not seeing higher unemployment, labor force exits, or occupation-switching compared to less-exposed jobs. In fact, unemployment has risen more among the least-exposed quintile, and exposed workers are not fleeing to lower-exposure roles. Early claims of AI-driven displacement in U.S. labor markets are not supported by observable trends to date.
— This tempers automation panic and redirects policy toward measured, evidence-based responses rather than premature plans for mass displacement.
Sources: At least five interesting things: Cool research edition (#68), Who will actually profit from the AI boom?, Nikolai Yakovenko: the $200 million AI engineer (+8 more)
5D ago
3 sources
The author argues modern Anglophone political philosophy often studies 'political chmess'—elegant models built on unrealistic 'ideal theory' assumptions like Rawls’s 'reasonable agents' and 'strict compliance.' These frameworks generate intricate proofs about a world no one inhabits, diverting attention from noncompliance, incentives, and institutional constraints that govern real politics.
— If the discipline’s dominant models are misaligned with reality, policymakers and publics should discount their prescriptions and demand non‑ideal, institution‑aware analysis.
Sources: Against Political Chmess, The Newtonian delusion: there is nothing so dated as a vision of the future, Peter Howitt on Coordination
5D ago
HOT
8 sources
A president can fire staff and tell an agency to wind down, but Congressionally created programs keep running until Congress repeals or relocates them. Ordering 'closure' while demanding 'uninterrupted services' just hollows the agency without changing what it must legally do.
— It clarifies that shrinking the administrative state requires statutory change, not headline‑friendly executive theater.
Sources: Still Standing, We’re becoming a Döner Republic, Are the Tariffs Constitutional? with Chad Squitieri and Peter Harrell (+5 more)
5D ago
3 sources
After initial executive‑order blasts and funding freezes, the administration is pivoting to evidence‑driven investigations, negotiated remedies, and ongoing oversight under Title VI and Title IX. Agencies are learning to survive judicial review and are expanding probes (antisemitism, racial discrimination, transgender issues) across dozens of schools.
— This shift turns culture‑war rhetoric into durable administrative control over universities, redefining how federal civil‑rights law shapes campus governance.
Sources: From Retribution to Regulatory Regime, These Activists Want to Dismantle Public Schools. Now They Run the Education Department., How Trump saved Columbia
5D ago
1 sources
A Columbia student reports that the Oct. 7 anniversary protests were smaller and less incendiary than the past two years and attributes the change to Trump-era campus measures. He argues that illiberal tools can paradoxically preserve reasonable discourse by curbing disruptive activism.
— This frames a tradeoff—order through coercion versus expressive liberty—that could reshape how universities, courts, and the federal government balance protest rights and campus functioning.
Sources: How Trump saved Columbia
5D ago
HOT
7 sources
Researchers can market routine or weak methods as 'rigorous' to legitimize striking claims in sensitive domains like sexism in hiring. The Moss‑Racusin case, as described here, used unvalidated measures and a single explanatory model, yet became widely cited; close replications reportedly flip the effect to male bias.
— If 'rigor' branding masks fragile findings, media, funders, and universities risk building DEI policy on unreliable evidence.
Sources: Scientific Rigor versus Rigor Posturing, REVERSAL: Science Faculty's "Subtle" Gender Biases Against Men, Reviewing Nature's Reviews of Our Proposal to Replicate The Famous Moss-Racusin et al Study on Sex Bias in Science Hiring (+4 more)
5D ago
1 sources
The authors argue that decades of microaggression research study self‑reported perceptions, not the alleged racist acts themselves, and then treat simple correlations as evidence of harm. They say the field has not tested whether racism is the cause and has not identified causal pathways from microaggressions to outcomes.
— This undercuts a cornerstone of DEI training and clinical guidance, pressing institutions to demand causal evidence before mandating microaggression programs.
Sources: Research on Microaggressions and Their Impacts Assesses Neither Microaggressions nor Their Impacts
5D ago
HOT
6 sources
When students use chatbots without guidance, the AI tends to do the work for them, short‑circuiting the effort that produces learning. In a high‑school experiment in Turkey, students given GPT‑4 for homework without scaffolding scored 17% worse on the final exam than peers. With teacher guidance and pedagogical prompting, however, AI tutoring can improve outcomes.
— This pushes schools and ed‑tech to design AI that enforces learning scaffolds rather than answer‑giving, shaping policy, curricula, and product defaults.
Sources: Against "Brain Damage", “You have 18 months”, Reimagining School In The Age Of AI (+3 more)
5D ago
2 sources
McKinsey says firms must spend about $3 on change management (training, process, monitoring) for every $1 spent on AI model development. Vendors rarely show quantifiable ROI, and AI‑enabling a customer service stack can raise prices 60–80% while leaders say they can’t cut headcount yet. The bottleneck is organizational adoption, not model capability.
— It reframes AI economics around organizational costs and measurable outcomes, tempering hype and guiding procurement, budgeting, and regulation.
Sources: McKinsey Wonders How To Sell AI Apps With No Measurable Benefits, South Korea Abandons AI Textbooks After Four-Month Trial
5D ago
1 sources
South Korea revoked official status for AI‑powered textbooks after one semester, citing technical bugs, factual errors, and extra work for teachers. Despite ~$1.4 billion in public and private spending, school adoption halved and the books were demoted to optional materials. The outcome suggests content‑centric 'AI textbooks' fail without rigorous pedagogy, verification, and classroom workflow redesign.
— It cautions policymakers that successful AI in schools requires structured tutoring models, teacher training, and QA—not just adding AI features to content.
Sources: South Korea Abandons AI Textbooks After Four-Month Trial
5D ago
HOT
9 sources
Treat university reform as an emergency governance problem requiring external antidotes—funding conditions, transparency mandates, and independent oversight—because insiders face status and incentive conflicts that block self‑correction. The point is not adding rival ideologies, but restoring neutral competence and accountability.
— This reframes campus reform from culture war to institutional design, guiding policymakers on where authority should sit to repair knowledge‑producing institutions.
Sources: From Heterodox to Helpless, The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science, Washington’s New Status Quo (+6 more)
5D ago
1 sources
Analyzing millions of college syllabi, the authors find courses on contentious issues overwhelmingly assign ideologically aligned texts while rarely pairing them with prominent critiques. Example: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow is ubiquitous, yet James Forman Jr.’s Pulitzer‑winning counterpoint appears with it in under 4% of syllabi, and other critics even less, keeping total counter‑assignments under ~10%.
— If classrooms systematically shield students from major disagreements, it challenges universities’ claims to intellectual diversity and informs concrete curriculum and governance reforms.
Sources: We Analyzed University Syllabi. There's a Monoculture
5D ago
HOT
16 sources
Industries tied to in‑kind benefits—farmers (food stamps), home builders (housing subsidies), health providers, and teachers unions—form constituencies that resist rigorous evaluation of those programs. Cash transfers lack such secondary beneficiaries, so they get studied more and criticized when results are modest. This creates an evaluation asymmetry that biases policy toward in‑kind programs regardless of effectiveness.
— It reframes welfare debates around political incentives, not just evidence, and suggests reforms must mandate evaluation where organized interests prefer opacity.
Sources: Cash Transfers Fail?, Some Links, 8/17/2025, Poverty Insurance Audit Juries (+13 more)
6D ago
2 sources
A new dataset on business‑school pay finds a single top‑tier journal publication adds about $116,000 to compensation; second‑tier papers are worth roughly one‑third as much, and other publications have no effect. Teaching scores and conference presentations help but much less, while administrators earn large premiums (chairs +11–35%; deans +58–94%). Since Covid, real pay fell and salaries became less sensitive to research output.
— This quantifies academia’s gatekept tournament incentives and suggests a post‑Covid shift that could redirect effort from research toward administration or other activities.
Sources: What determines business school faculty pay?, John Nye on Joel Mokyr (from my email)
6D ago
1 sources
John Nye claims Joel Mokyr wouldn’t get tenure today because he lacked 'top‑5' journal publications until late in his career. He argues older hiring norms that balanced judgment with publications were better at recognizing truly innovative scholars than today’s mechanical metrics.
— If tenure and hiring hinge on narrow prestige signals, universities may filter out high‑impact thinkers, weakening research quality and the pipeline of ideas that shape policy and growth.
Sources: John Nye on Joel Mokyr (from my email)
6D ago
1 sources
Contrary to the standard secularization story, recent U.S. survey data suggest weekly religious attendance increases with educational attainment (e.g., CES 2022–2023: 23% among high‑school grads vs 30% among those with graduate degrees). Philip Schwadel’s work is cited to show each additional year of education raises the likelihood of service attendance. Parallel signs of revival are reported in Europe and the UK, alongside a sharp decline in progressive mainline denominations.
— If religion is resurging among the educated, it rewrites expectations about who shapes faith‑based civic life and policy, and complicates culture‑war assumptions about religion versus elite education.
Sources: Why God came back
6D ago
2 sources
The Columbia leak reportedly shows extremely low score submission overall with large racial gaps in who submits (Asians most, Blacks least). That selection inflates reported scores for underrepresented groups and makes academic modeling noisy, allowing race‑preferential admissions to persist after SFFA. Cross‑metrics (e.g., ACT) show rejected Asians outscoring admitted Blacks while models controlling for GPA/tests still find Asian under‑admission.
— It suggests test‑optional policies can function as a legal and statistical cloak for continued racial preferences, pointing toward standardized testing as a compliance and transparency tool.
Sources: Columbia Is Still Discriminating, A Failed Elegy for Affirmative Action
6D ago
1 sources
SFFA bars explicit race-based preferences but allows universities to consider essays describing how race affected an applicant. The piece argues this invites a 'newfangled essay-based regime' where schools prompt 'racial woe' narratives, continuing de facto preferences under a different name.
— It spotlights a key enforcement and design challenge for post‑SFFA admissions that will shape litigation, compliance, and equity debates nationwide.
Sources: A Failed Elegy for Affirmative Action
6D ago
2 sources
A recent psychology paper argues most named biases emerge from a small set of implicit self‑serving beliefs (e.g., 'I am good,' 'my experience is typical') combined with confirmation bias. Instead of teaching hundreds of labels, interventions should target belief-updating and exposure to disconfirming evidence. This reorganizes how we study and communicate about human error.
— If bias training and journalism pivot to root causes, public reasoning and institutional decision-making could improve by focusing on fewer, deeper levers.
Sources: One Bias to Rule Them All, The radical idea that people aren't stupid
6D ago
1 sources
The essay argues cognitive 'biases' should be understood like visual illusions: they expose the shortcuts of a highly capable system rather than prove incompetence. Humans’ everyday feats (language, memory, mind‑reading, balance) show strong baseline competence; clever experiments can reveal its limits without implying global stupidity.
— This reframing tempers bias‑driven fatalism in media, policy, and organizational training by restoring nuance about human judgment and how to improve it.
Sources: The radical idea that people aren't stupid
6D ago
5 sources
Pew reports that about one in five U.S. workers now use AI in their jobs, up from last year. This indicates rapid, measurable diffusion of AI into everyday work beyond pilots and demos.
— Crossing a clear adoption threshold shifts labor, training, and regulation from speculation to scaling questions about productivity, equity, and safety.
Sources: 4. Trust in the EU, U.S. and China to regulate use of AI, 3. Trust in own country to regulate use of AI, 2. Concern and excitement about AI (+2 more)
6D ago
HOT
9 sources
The statement argues that U.S. universities were created by public charters that form a 'compact' to serve the public good; when they deviate, 'the people retain the right to intervene.' This reframes higher‑ed reform not as culture‑war intrusion but as enforcing an original legal‑civic obligation.
— If accepted, this frame provides normative and legal cover for aggressive state or federal restructuring of universities, reshaping debates over autonomy and oversight.
Sources: The Manhattan Statement on Higher Education, Higher Education Is Always Political, The Class of 2026 (+6 more)
7D ago
1 sources
Decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act, many schools still lack accessible playgrounds, lunchrooms, bathrooms, and routes because capital upgrades are unfunded or de‑prioritized. Even large, one‑time state infusions can leave accessibility needs unmet when projects, standards, and enforcement aren’t aligned.
— It reframes disability rights as an infrastructure-and-enforcement problem, not just a legal one, urging policymakers to tie civil‑rights mandates to sustained capital budgets and oversight.
Sources: Disabled Idaho Students Lack Access to Playgrounds and Lunchrooms. Historic $2 Billion Funding Will Do Little to Help.
7D ago
2 sources
Kaufmann claims public opinion on transgender issues has moved 'backwards' after 2022, breaking a decades‑long pattern of steady liberalization on cultural topics. If sustained, this marks the first significant reversal for the cultural left’s agenda in modern polling history.
— It challenges the 'inevitable progress' narrative and signals that future cultural fights may not move monotonically left, reshaping strategy for parties, media, and institutions.
Sources: Post-Progressivism, Fewer Young People Are Identifying as Non-Binary or Non-Heterosexual
7D ago
1 sources
Eric Kaufmann’s new report finds student self‑identification as non‑binary and non‑heterosexual has fallen since peaking in the early 2020s. The drop is not explained by shifts in politics or social‑media use, and seems partly mediated by improving mental health post‑pandemic, suggesting a trend cycle rather than a one‑way rise.
— If identity self‑reports are receding, it revises expectations about the permanence and scale of recent cultural shifts and informs school policy, media framing, and health research.
Sources: Fewer Young People Are Identifying as Non-Binary or Non-Heterosexual
7D ago
2 sources
Because the internet overrepresents Western, English, and digitized sources while neglecting local, oral, and non‑digitized traditions, AI systems trained on web data inherit those omissions. As people increasingly rely on chatbots for practical guidance, this skews what counts as 'authoritative' and can erase majority‑world expertise.
— It reframes AI governance around data inclusion and digitization policy, warning that without deliberate countermeasures, AI will harden global knowledge inequities.
Sources: Holes in the web, Generative AI Systems Miss Vast Bodies of Human Knowledge, Study Finds
7D ago
5 sources
Schools make independent reading viable around ages 7–9, but most kids get personal tablets by six and consume 3.5 hours/day of screen content at ages 5–8. Starting phonics and independent-reading practice at ages 3–4 would give children a non‑screen alternative during the habit‑forming years. The article argues 'literacy lag' isn’t biological but institutional and cultural.
— This reframes screen‑time and literacy policy as a timing problem, suggesting pre‑K reading instruction could counter early digital dependency and reshape child development outcomes.
Sources: Literacy lag: We start reading too late, US High School Students Lose Ground In Math and Reading, Continuing Yearslong Decline, Some Links, 09/28/2025 (+2 more)
7D ago
3 sources
A synthesis of meta-analyses, preregistered cohorts, and intensive longitudinal studies finds only very small associations between daily digital use and adolescent depression/anxiety. Most findings are correlational and unlikely to be clinically meaningful, with mixed positive, negative, and null effects.
— This undercuts blanket bans and moral panic, suggesting policy should target specific risks and vulnerable subgroups rather than treating all screen time as harmful.
Sources: Adolescent Mental Health in the Digital Age: Facts, Fears and Future Directions - PMC, Are screens harming teens? What scientists can do to find answers, Digital Platforms Correlate With Cognitive Decline in Young Users
7D ago
1 sources
Tracking about 6,000 children from ages 9–10 into early adolescence, a JAMA study found that even roughly one hour of daily social media by age 13 correlated with 1–2 point lower reading and memory scores. Heavy use (3+ hours) correlated with 4–5 point declines. The finding is notable for showing a dose–response pattern at low usage levels.
— It gives policymakers and parents concrete thresholds to consider when setting youth screen‑time guidance and school tech policies.
Sources: Digital Platforms Correlate With Cognitive Decline in Young Users
8D ago
5 sources
Social media coinages like #LongCovid can establish diagnostic categories before medical consensus, quickly spreading to newsrooms, clinics, and legislatures. This bottom-up path shifts authority from clinicians to online communities, surfacing real suffering but also inviting overdiagnosis and quack cures.
— It changes how diseases are defined and resourced in the digital era, with implications for trust, funding, and guideline-setting.
Sources: Long Covid Can Be Both Psychosomatic And Real, A Sky Looming With Danger, How To End The Autism Epidemic (+2 more)
8D ago
HOT
22 sources
Echoing McLuhan and Postman, the piece argues design choices in chatbots—always-on memory, emotional mirroring, and context integration—will mold users’ habits and identities, not just assist tasks. The built environment of AI becomes a behavioral groove that conditions inner life.
— This reframes AI ethics from content moderation to architecture-level choices that structure attention, attachment, and autonomy.
Sources: AI Is Capturing Interiority, Economic Nihilism, Dean Ball on state-level AI laws (+19 more)
8D ago
4 sources
International assessments show second‑generation immigrant students’ test scores correlate strongly with their parents’ country‑of‑origin averages, even when they attend the same schools and after socioeconomic controls. Gains from first to second generation are small on average (≈1 IQ point), and big positive outliers reflect immigrant selection (e.g., highly educated Indian migrants), not rapid host‑country assimilation.
— If human capital largely persists across borders, education and immigration policy should account for inherited skills and selection effects rather than assume quick convergence.
Sources: The Assimilation Myth, The American Assimilation Myth, The Son Also Rises (book) - Wikipedia (+1 more)
8D ago
1 sources
Use migrant academic outcomes as a natural test of whether PISA ranks mostly reflect school quality or population traits. If origin‑group performance persists in destination schools, PISA is measuring more than schooling, and national 'education secrets' stories are overstated.
— This reframes how media and policymakers interpret international test tables and informs immigration selection and integration policy.
Sources: Do migrants bring their human capital with them?
8D ago
2 sources
Iran embeds Offices of the Supreme Leader’s Representative—staffed by loyal clerics—at every level of the armed forces to indoctrinate, monitor, and reward loyalty outside the normal chain of command. Combined with Khamenei’s direct veto over promotions and targeted patronage, this structure makes defection irrational for IRGC elites.
— It clarifies why external shocks and assassinations rarely produce elite splits in Iran, informing policy bets about regime change and war termination.
Sources: Survival Over Defection, Iran’s Crackdown on Free Thought
8D ago
1 sources
The piece claims Iranian universities reserve large seat shares—sometimes up to 70% in certain disciplines—for regime-aligned applicants. By turning admissions into patronage, the state shapes future elites and locks ideological control into the pipeline, not just faculty governance.
— It shows how authoritarian regimes weaponize university admissions to manufacture political loyalty, reframing debates on elite formation and academic freedom.
Sources: Iran’s Crackdown on Free Thought
8D ago
HOT
15 sources
Payroll‑provider data show early‑career workers (22–25) in AI‑exposed occupations saw a 13% relative drop in employment since gen‑AI adoption, while older workers in the same roles held steady. Firms are adjusting via headcount, not wages, and cuts are concentrated where AI automates tasks rather than augments them. This points to rising experience thresholds and a shrinking pipeline for junior talent.
— If AI erodes entry‑level roles, policymakers and employers must rework training, internships, and credentialing to prevent long‑run skill shortages and inequality.
Sources: Is AI making it harder to enter the labor market?, AI and jobs, again, AI and Software Productivity (+12 more)
9D ago
2 sources
The Education Department retroactively reviewed special‑education grants and canceled funding for deaf‑blind programs in eight states after finding DEI‑related language (e.g., 'inequities, racism') or policies it said conflicted with a new emphasis on 'merit.' Letters cited 'divisive concepts' and even noted a school district’s unrelated 'Center for Black Student Excellence' as a conflict. About $1 million per year—serving over 1,000 deaf‑blind students in the affected states—will stop at month’s end.
— It shows anti‑DEI enforcement migrating from HR and higher ed into K‑12 special education via retroactive, keyword‑based grant cancellation, signaling how ideological battles can reshape services for vulnerable students.
Sources: Programs for Students With Hearing and Vision Loss Harmed by Trump’s Anti-Diversity Push, Students With Hearing and Vision Loss Get Funding Back Despite Trump’s Anti-DEI Campaign
9D ago
1 sources
Under public pressure, agencies can reverse politicized grant cuts by funding through an intermediary rather than reinstating the original awards. This keeps services alive but often shortens timelines and injects uncertainty for families and providers. It also lets officials avoid acknowledging error while changing course.
— This shows how ideological campaigns and their walk‑backs are implemented via procedural workarounds that affect program stability and public trust.
Sources: Students With Hearing and Vision Loss Get Funding Back Despite Trump’s Anti-DEI Campaign
9D ago
HOT
16 sources
Access to work, payments, housing, and mobility is increasingly governed by private scores and rankings (credit scores, platform ratings, search order) rather than formal legal rights. Punishment is often de‑ranking or deplatforming, which can matter more than court sanctions for everyday life.
— If ordinal rankings quietly outrun law, governance debates must account for private power exercised through scoring systems.
Sources: Authenticate thyself, Technofeudalism versus Total Capitalism, Dr. Frankenstein’s Benchmark: The S&P 500 Index and the Observer Paradox (+13 more)
9D ago
2 sources
Parties can schedule structural ballot measures (e.g., redistricting control) in special elections where their base is likelier to turn out and overperform. This 'timing arbitrage' converts turnout asymmetries into durable institutional advantages without changing public opinion.
— It reframes election administration as a power lever where calendar design, not just content, shapes democratic rules.
Sources: Democrats can win the redistricting war, Putting Kids Last
9D ago
1 sources
K–12 districts face a three‑way trade‑off: deliver high academic quality, honor democratic accountability to local voters, and provide good local jobs. Because children don’t vote, adult employment and community politics often dominate, leading to wasteful resistance to closures or consolidations that evidence suggests don’t hurt learning. Naming this trilemma clarifies why ‘community institution’ rhetoric can derail student‑first decisions.
— A memorable frame helps policymakers and voters see why student outcomes lag and how governance and labor incentives—not just funding or culture wars—shape school performance.
Sources: Putting Kids Last
10D ago
2 sources
The author argues that AI will do to universities what the printing press did to medieval monasteries: strip their monopoly over copying, preserving, and disseminating knowledge. Once that unique utility erodes, political actors can justify audits, asset liquidations, and pensioning of faculty much like Henry VIII’s dissolution. Higher-ed reform is framed as a technology-enabled reallocation of wealth and authority, not just budget tightening.
— This model forecasts how AI could trigger a state-led restructuring of higher education—endowments, governance, and credentialing—by removing universities’ core knowledge advantage.
Sources: The Class of 2026, Education Links, 10/12/2025
10D ago
5 sources
Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have adopted science‑of‑reading curricula, teacher coaching, and accountability/retention policies that lifted NAEP fourth‑grade reading above richer states. Gains are strongest for disadvantaged students, with Mississippi’s Black fourth‑graders far more likely to read at least at a basic level than their peers in California. The results show literacy is responsive to policy design, not just funding or demographics.
— This overturns the spending‑equals‑quality assumption and pressures high‑spend states to adopt proven literacy reforms or face widening equity gaps.
Sources: Illiteracy is a policy choice, Illiteracy is a policy choice, Is Mississippi cooking the books? (+2 more)
10D ago
HOT
14 sources
The piece defines 'dominion capital' as the coordinated use of professional skills, networks, and shared narratives to enter institutions and redirect them toward the status and material interests of activist-aligned professionals. It extends this to a thesis that left-progressive politics centers on inserting the professional-managerial class into resource flows and protecting that position by controlling what counts as legitimate discourse.
— This framing offers a concrete mechanism for how ideology translates into class power and policy outcomes, informing debates on institutional trust, governance, and populist backlash.
Sources: Dominion capital: III, The struggles of states, the contentions of classes, We Need Elites To Value Adaption (+11 more)
10D ago
HOT
9 sources
OpenAI and DeepMind systems solved 5 of 6 International Math Olympiad problems, equivalent to a gold medal, though they struggled on the hardest problem. This is a clear, measurable leap in formal reasoning beyond coding or language tasks.
— It recalibrates AI capability timelines and suggests policy should prepare for rapid gains in high-level problem solving, not just text generation.
Sources: Updates!, Links for 2025-08-24, Links for 2025-08-11 (+6 more)
11D ago
2 sources
Code.org is replacing its global 'Hour of Code' with an 'Hour of AI,' expanding from coding into AI literacy for K–12 students. The effort is backed by Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic, ISTE, Common Sense, AFT, NEA, Pearson, and others, and adds the National Parents Union to elevate parent buy‑in.
— This formalizes AI literacy as a mainstream school priority and spotlights how tech companies and unions are jointly steering curriculum, with implications for governance, equity, and privacy.
Sources: Tech Companies To K-12 Schoolchildren: Learn To AI Is the New Learn To Code, Microsoft To Provide Free AI Tools For Washington State Schools
11D ago
1 sources
Microsoft will provide free AI tools and training to all 295 Washington school districts and 34 community/technical colleges as part of a $4B, five‑year program. Free provisioning can set defaults for classrooms, shaping curricula, data practices, and future costs once 'free' periods end. Leaders pitch urgency ('we can’t slow down AI'), accelerating adoption before governance norms are settled.
— This raises policy questions about public‑sector dependence on a single AI stack, student data governance, and who sets the rules for AI in education.
Sources: Microsoft To Provide Free AI Tools For Washington State Schools
11D ago
1 sources
Tracking top STEM PhDs and the profoundly gifted to age 50, Lubinski and colleagues find systematic sex differences in work preferences and life values (e.g., men prioritize long hours, status, and salary more; women prioritize people‑oriented work and life balance more). Among those most able to choose their careers, these differences plausibly channel men and women into different fields and senior roles.
— This evidence complicates bias‑only narratives about gender disparities in STEM and leadership and should inform how DEI, education, and workplace policy weigh interests versus barriers.
Sources: Sex Differences in Work Preferences, Life Values, and Personal Views
11D ago
2 sources
Generative AI is automating junior developer and tester work, collapsing the entry‑level ‘pyramid’ that underpinned India’s IT outsourcing model. Fresh‑grad intake dropped 70% in a year and workforce age is rising, signaling a structural shift from mass junior hiring to leaner teams.
— This challenges services‑led development and youth‑employment assumptions in the world’s largest labor‑market entrant, with knock‑on effects for global outsourcing and skilling policy.
Sources: AI Triggers 70% Collapse in Fresh Graduate Hiring at India's IT Giants That Employ 5.4 Million, AI Push Drives Record Job Cuts at Top India Private Employer TCS
11D ago
3 sources
Rather than a visible 'crisis,' male formlessness reflects the absence of shared rites, stakes, and elders who keep score. The argument implies that without catalyzing institutions—rituals, teams, service—male development stagnates in a docile, suspended state.
— This reframes male decline as an institutional design problem, shifting debate toward rebuilding structured initiation and communal challenge.
Sources: Masculinity at the End of History, Aggression sets boys free, The alarm bells are sounding for young men. Will we listen?
12D ago
1 sources
U.S. undergraduate enrollment has fallen 12% since 2010, with two‑year colleges down 39%, and the shrinking pipeline of young people means fewer students even if college costs improve. The author argues this will hollow out college‑dependent towns, creating a 'Second Rust Belt' as 'education mills' contract. Managing the fallout will require proactive regional transition plans, not just campus fixes.
— It reframes higher‑education debates as a demographic and regional‑economy challenge, warning policymakers to plan for post‑college‑town futures.
Sources: What happens to college towns after peak 18-year-old?
12D ago
2 sources
Under Secretary Linda McMahon, the Education Department is shrinking staff while quickly steering funds and policy toward non‑district options: a $500 million charter funding stream, explicit pushes to use federal aid at private providers, and new 'patriotic education' grants distributed via conservative partners. Simultaneously, it is pressuring districts over DEI and gender policies, signaling federal preference away from traditional public schools.
— It shows how executive staffing and grant design can rewire a 200‑year public institution toward private and ideological options without passing new laws.
Sources: These Activists Want to Dismantle Public Schools. Now They Run the Education Department., Five Ways the Department of Education Is Upending Public Schools
12D ago
1 sources
The administration created a federal tax credit to fund the first nationwide school voucher program, slated to open Jan. 1, 2027. Coupled with guidance to spend federal aid on private services, this channels public dollars to private and religious schools at scale.
— A federal voucher mechanism would remake education finance and accelerate a public‑to‑private shift with major equity, governance, and budget impacts.
Sources: Five Ways the Department of Education Is Upending Public Schools
12D ago
HOT
9 sources
The author contrasts two punishment logics: one that scales only with the wrongness of the act, and another that adjusts sanctions by the actor’s identity or role. He argues institutions increasingly use the latter via 'safety' rationales, leading to double standards and eroding impartiality.
— This reframes campus, conference, and corporate discipline as a due‑process problem—judging acts vs judging identities—rather than a culture‑war skirmish.
Sources: Integrity, Safety, & Conference Venues, Boosterism, The rise of the trauma star (+6 more)
12D ago
1 sources
A spatial model with migration, trade, agglomeration, and human‑capital diffusion finds development patterns persist for centuries when education is costly in the wrong places. Cutting schooling costs in sub‑Saharan Africa or Central/South Asia raises local outcomes but can lower global welfare, while the same move in Latin America improves it. Equalizing education costs within Africa can even backfire by shifting people toward less productive areas.
— This challenges blanket 'education everywhere' prescriptions, arguing development gains depend on where human‑capital subsidies land relative to local productivity and agglomeration.
Sources: Claims about education and convergence
12D ago
4 sources
If over 80% of students say they submitted classwork that misrepresented their views to align with professors, higher education may be rewarding performative conformity over honest reasoning. This incentive structure trains graduates to signal orthodoxy rather than engage in open inquiry. The behavior reportedly extends beyond classrooms into friendships and dating, eroding trust.
— It implies universities are selecting and socializing future leaders by ideological compliance, with downstream effects on institutional culture and public debate.
Sources: Faking Wokeness to Fit In, Who's More Obedient, Left or Right?, Some Links (+1 more)
12D ago
1 sources
Harvard faculty report that many students skip class, don’t do the reading, and avoid speaking—yet still get high grades. The report also notes a sharp drop in seniors feeling free to voice controversial views after Oct. 7. Together this suggests grades no longer reflect engagement while fear and disengagement harden ideological bubbles.
— If elite universities’ grading hides disengagement and suppresses debate, it undermines trust in credentials and signals a governance problem for higher education.
Sources: How to Succeed at Harvard Without Really Trying
13D ago
HOT
9 sources
When expert networks stonewall basic questions and suppress data in contested medical fields, legislative subpoenas can be a targeted transparency tool rather than mere political theater. This reframes 'keep politics out of science' by distinguishing oversight to surface evidence from meddling in methodology. It proposes a narrow, process-focused role for Congress to compel disclosure without dictating clinical conclusions.
— It offers a governance template for handling captured or opaque medical domains where self-regulation fails.
Sources: (Some Of) Your July 2025 Questions, Answered, Updates!, Cash Transfers Fail? (+6 more)
13D ago
1 sources
A Manhattan federal judge (Jessica Clarke) held in Board of Education v. E.L. that New York City cannot exclude the Judaic‑studies portion of tuition when reimbursing parents for a special‑needs placement at a religious school under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The ruling relies on recent Supreme Court precedents against faith‑based exclusions in neutral programs and challenges a common practice in multiple states (and a cited federal regulation) that withholds funding for religious instruction.
— It advances the post‑Carson/Espinoza line by applying it to special education, likely forcing policy changes across states that dock or deny reimbursements for religious coursework.
Sources: A Judge Just Upheld Religious Liberty in New York
13D ago
1 sources
A ReStud paper exploits state borders and finds that larger state EITCs raise high‑school dropout rates. A life‑cycle model explains the mechanism: wage subsidies to low‑skill work lower the relative return to schooling, shifting the economy toward more low‑skill labor over time and potentially affecting productivity and inequality.
— It challenges the bipartisan view of the EITC as an unambiguous good and suggests policymakers must weigh education and long‑run human‑capital effects in designing wage subsidies.
Sources: Is the earned income tax overrated?
13D ago
HOT
6 sources
Symptoms can be psychogenic yet physically felt and disabling; recognizing this avoids a false 'real vs. fake' binary. This framing allows care without stigma while resisting dangerous pathogen-chasing treatments in contested illnesses.
— It reframes debates over long COVID and chronic Lyme, guiding more coherent clinical practice and resource allocation.
Sources: Long Covid Can Be Both Psychosomatic And Real, Mouth Taping: The Plot Thickens, On RFK Jr.’s mitochondrial malaise (+3 more)
13D ago
4 sources
Pew finds about a quarter of U.S. teens have used ChatGPT for schoolwork in 2025, roughly twice the share in 2023. This shows rapid mainstreaming of AI tools in K–12 outside formal curricula.
— Rising teen AI use forces schools and policymakers to set coherent rules on AI literacy, assessment integrity, and instructional design.
Sources: Appendix: Detailed tables, 2. How parents approach their kids’ screen time, 1. How parents describe their kids’ tech use (+1 more)
13D ago
2 sources
Clarifications suggest the new $100,000 H‑1B fee may exempt foreign students, pushing employers toward hiring international graduates of U.S. schools instead of recruits from abroad. That would subtly rewire the skilled‑immigration pipeline to run through American universities.
— If fee design privileges U.S.-educated H‑1Bs, it reshapes talent flows, university incentives, and who gains from legal high‑skill immigration.
Sources: Indians and Koreans not welcome, H-1B Visas are Transforming America
13D ago
1 sources
Some universities share tuition revenue with departments and charge higher rates to international students. That gives departments a financial incentive to admit more foreign graduate students even during weak job markets, disadvantaging domestic applicants.
— It suggests higher‑education admissions can be quietly shaped by revenue incentives tied to immigration, not just academic merit or workforce needs.
Sources: H-1B Visas are Transforming America
14D ago
1 sources
The article argues that The Body Keeps the Score contains major factual errors and overextends findings about trauma’s prevalence and bodily effects, including claims about trauma without memory. It uses concrete counter‑evidence (e.g., a 1973 obstetric study) to show that distressing birth events don’t support PTSD narratives as presented.
— Debunking a canonical trauma text matters because its claims steer clinical practice, school programming, media framing, and public health priorities.
Sources: The Body Keeps the Score is Bullshit
14D ago
5 sources
Tracking ~30 countries by birth cohort, cohorts that grew up with higher life expectancy and higher income per person end up with fewer children. The study aligns early-life conditions (ages 0–14/18/25) to completed cohort fertility and uses mixed-effects models to isolate within-country changes, with placebo pre-birth windows as a check.
— It reframes fertility decline as a developmental response to improved early-life conditions, guiding pronatal policy beyond short-term subsidies toward the deeper drivers of reproductive timing and family size.
Sources: From Longevity to Low Fertility: Evidence Across Countries, Follow-up: Do changes in childhood conditions predict fertility outcomes?, Rethinking education balance and cohort fertility: dynamic panels vs. Mundlak (+2 more)
14D ago
HOT
23 sources
In liberal democracies, anti-oppression vocabularies can give actors a low-cost way to impose reputational sanctions on rivals. Over time, beliefs that maximize punitive leverage spread, turning 'liberation' frames into tools for exclusion and control. This requires no conspiracy—just selection on what reputationally pays.
— It shifts reform debates from 'raise awareness' to redesigning sanction structures in media, HR, and platforms that reward moralized punishment.
Sources: Domination and Reputation Management, The End of the Post-Holocaust Era, Dominion capital: III (+20 more)
14D ago
HOT
6 sources
Highly cited papers can still be wrong or misleading, especially in fast‑moving, high‑salience topics. Treat citations and awards as attention metrics, not validity, and anchor policy in replicated, preregistered evidence with sufficient power.
— Separating attention from reliability would improve how media, funders, and governments weigh evidence before making rules.
Sources: REVERSAL: Science Faculty's "Subtle" Gender Biases Against Men, Psychology is ok, The robustness reproducibility of the American Economic Review (+3 more)
14D ago
1 sources
The author argues that decades of openly left‑leaning hiring, DEI bureaucracy, and activist teaching alienated half the country and stripped universities of legitimacy. In that climate, a Republican administration can gut DEI, cut indirect grant costs, and freeze new awards with little public sympathy. The point is not just policy disagreement but a predictable backlash to one‑sided institutional politics.
— It reframes current federal actions against universities as a consequence of institutional politicization, not merely a one‑sided assault, influencing how stakeholders respond and reform.
Sources: We Tried to Warn You - by Lee Jussim - Unsafe Science
14D ago
1 sources
Post‑crackdown, academic reformers have diverged into 'hawks' seeking structural overhauls, 'doves' endorsing Kalven‑style neutrality with minimal change, and a 'mushy middle' favoring calibrated external pressure. This typology explains why the once‑unified heterodox coalition now disagrees on tools, pace, and acceptable collateral damage.
— Identifying factions clarifies which reforms can form coalitions and which will provoke backlash as federal and state actions reshape universities.
Sources: Lines in the Sand - The Ivy Exile
14D ago
2 sources
Using administrative records for 170,000 Norwegians aged 35–45, researchers decomposed genetic and environmental influences on education, occupational prestige, income, and wealth. They found genetic variation explains more of educational attainment and occupational prestige, while shared family environment explains more of education and wealth, with little commonality from non‑shared environment across the four. Estimates also differed by heritability method, even in the same population.
— This shows policies and arguments about 'merit' and inequality must reckon with which SES dimension is under discussion and avoid treating heritability as a single, context‑free number.
Sources: The genetic and environmental composition of socioeconomic status in Norway | Nature Communications, Polygenic Score Prediction Within and Between Sibling Pairs for Intelligence, Cognitive Abilities, and Educational Traits From Childhood to Early Adulthood | Published in Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities
14D ago
1 sources
Analyzing UK twin data, the authors show polygenic score prediction for intelligence and educational outcomes is split roughly evenly between within‑family genetic effects and between‑family effects. Socioeconomic status explains much of the between‑family portion, while height and BMI are driven mostly by within‑family genetics. Population PGS estimates for cognition thus blend individual biology with family‑level pathways.
— This reframes how journalists, policymakers, and schools interpret genetic prediction in education and merit debates by showing PGS reflects both individual genes and family/SES structure.
Sources: Polygenic Score Prediction Within and Between Sibling Pairs for Intelligence, Cognitive Abilities, and Educational Traits From Childhood to Early Adulthood | Published in Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities
14D ago
4 sources
The review reports that genome‑wide polygenic scores from IQ GWAS now explain about 4% of intelligence variance, and over 10% when combined with education GWAS. Because DNA is fixed, these scores predict outcomes as well at birth as later in life, enabling longitudinal research without repeated testing.
— Treating intelligence polygenic scores as early, causal predictors reshapes debates on education policy, inequality, and the ethics of using genetic information in research and institutions.
Sources: The new genetics of intelligence | Nature Reviews Genetics, Genome-wide association meta-analysis in 269,867 individuals identifies new genetic and functional links to intelligence - PubMed, Genetic variation, brain, and intelligence differences | Molecular Psychiatry (+1 more)
14D ago
5 sources
Low heritability can arise because a trait is biologically rigid with almost no variance left to explain (ten fingers), or because environmental/context variation swamps genetic effects (number of children). Distinguishing these cases requires parsing family/twin h², SNP-based h², and GWAS/PGS results across cohorts.
— This reframes media and policy claims that 'low heritability means not genetic' and guides how we interpret and deploy polygenic scores across populations and time.
Sources: When Low Heritability Means Different Things: Number of Children vs. Number of Fingers, When Low Heritability Means Different Things: Number of Children vs. Number of Fingers, What a New Massive Mexican Family Study Tells Us About the Effects of Ancestry on Different Traits (+2 more)
14D ago
1 sources
A meta-analysis of 11,500 twin/sibling pairs shows genetic factors explain more variance in cognitive ability as children grow. Novel genetic influences dominate very early, but after about age 8 the same genetic effects get amplified, driving increasing heritability into adolescence.
— This clarifies why nature–nurture estimates shift over childhood and cautions against reading early low heritability as proof that environment alone explains cognitive outcomes.
Sources: Explaining the Increasing Heritability of Cognitive Ability Across Development: A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Twin and Adoption Studies - PMC
14D ago
1 sources
The author argues top outlets present the contested claim that 'more money raises test scores' as settled fact and filter who gets to write on education accordingly. He cites a New York Times piece on COVID relief that found only modest gains yet restated the funding–achievement link as consensus.
— If elite media enforce a funding‑first frame and gatekeep dissenting analysis, education policy debates risk prioritizing spending levels over demonstrably effective reforms.
Sources: Elite Education Journalism: Still Ideology at Its Purest
14D ago
HOT
21 sources
Adding control variables to a regression doesn’t make it causal unless you know the causal structure. Controlling colliders (variables influenced by both X and Y) can create spurious links, and controlling mediators can hide real effects. Examples like COVID voluntary datasets and college-only samples show how selection turns 'controls' into bias.
— It tells readers and editors to demand causal diagrams or stated assumptions before accepting 'controlled for everything' findings as policy-relevant truth.
Sources: You Can't Just "Control" For Things, Did the United States grow its way out of WWII debt?, Who gets into the best colleges and why? (+18 more)
14D ago
1 sources
Genome-wide analysis in the Health and Retirement Study finds that education, depression, and self‑rated health share common genetic influences, while education and BMI do not. This means part of the apparent health benefit of schooling reflects genetic overlap, not only schooling’s causal impact.
— It urges caution in using education as a health lever and calls for designs that separate causation from genetic correlation in social policy.
Sources: What can genes tell us about the relationship between education and health? - PMC
14D ago
4 sources
Lower heritability from molecular methods likely reflects their assumptions—additive effects only, no assortative mating, exclusion of rare/structural variants, and treating genome‑wide relatedness as a proxy for trait‑causal similarity—rather than a failure of genetics. Family‑based designs (twins, adoptees, extended kin) broadly agree on higher heritability, suggesting the 'gap' is a measurement artifact in newer tools.
— If true, common critiques that genetics 'doesn’t explain much' rest on miscalibrated methods, affecting policy arguments in education, health, and social inequality.
Sources: The answer to the "missing heritability problem", Twin Studies and the Heritability of IQ, Our Genetic Constitution (+1 more)
14D ago
HOT
8 sources
Using linked tax, test, and admissions records, the study finds top‑1% students receive large Ivy‑Plus boosts via legacy, athletics, and non‑academic credentials that don’t predict success, while SAT/ACT scores do. Test use narrows the admissions gap for comparable low‑income applicants, whereas test‑optional policies risk entrenching wealth-based advantages.
— It reframes the testing debate by showing tests can be a pro‑equity tool against status‑coded 'holistic' criteria.
Sources: Who gets into the best colleges and why?, What ability best measures intelligence?, Most smart people don't attend elite universities (+5 more)
14D ago
1 sources
Avoiding the words 'intelligence' and 'IQ' has spawned fuzzy substitutes like 'reasoning,' 'college readiness,' and 'health literacy' that hide the same construct. This obscures evidence, blocks useful cross‑domain insights (e.g., in public health), and weakens public explanations for tools like the SAT. Calling intelligence what it is would improve measurement, messaging, and policy design.
— A clearer, shared vocabulary around intelligence could sharpen education and health decisions and reduce culture‑war confusion over testing and outcomes.
Sources: Breaking the Intelligence & IQ Taboo | Riot IQ
14D ago
3 sources
A study using the H‑1B visa lottery as a natural experiment finds firms that win more visas are more likely to IPO or be acquired, secure elite VC, and file more (and more‑cited) patents. Roughly one additional high‑skill hire lifted a startup’s five‑year IPO chance by 23% (1.5 percentage points on a 6.6% base).
— This offers causal evidence that capping high‑skill visas suppresses innovation and firm success, sharpening debates over U.S. immigration and industrial strategy.
Sources: The United States is Starved for Talent, Re-Upped, Michael Clemens on H1-B visas, Data on How America Sold Out its Computer Science Graduates
14D ago
1 sources
The article claims that in 2023 the U.S. issued about 110,098 work permits in computer occupations while graduating roughly 134,153 citizens/green‑card holders with CS degrees. It pairs this with data on flat real starting salaries since 2015 and declining six‑month employment rates for CS majors to argue crowd‑out.
— Comparing visa inflows to the size of the domestic graduate pipeline gives policymakers and voters a simple scale test for whether immigration aligns with or displaces entry‑level talent.
Sources: Data on How America Sold Out its Computer Science Graduates
14D ago
HOT
12 sources
The risks critics attribute to 'viewpoint diversity' hiring—identity-like role expectations and ideological rigidity—already operate in academia through DEI statements and enforced orthodoxies (e.g., implicit-bias dogma). These incentives select for political conformity and discourage open engagement. The debate should shift from hypothetical harms to unwinding existing politicization.
— It reframes campus reform from adding opposing quotas to depoliticizing hiring criteria to restore epistemic credibility.
Sources: Oh Man — Imagine If Universities Were Politically Biased In Their Hiring, Christopher Rufo vs. The New Yorker, Domination and Reputation Management (+9 more)
14D ago
HOT
14 sources
Cohort data from the Understanding America Study, spotlighted by John Burn-Murdoch and discussed by Yascha Mounk, show sharp declines in conscientiousness and extraversion and a rise in neuroticism among young adults over the last decade. If personality traits are moving this fast at the population level, the smartphone/social-media environment is acting like a mass psychological intervention.
— Treating personality drift as an environmental externality reframes tech regulation, school phone policies, and mental health strategy as tools to protect population-level psychology.
Sources: How We Got the Internet All Wrong, The Case Against Social Media is Weaker Than You Think, Some Links, 8/19/2025 (+11 more)
14D ago
2 sources
Over 120 researchers from 11 fields used a Delphi process to evaluate 26 claims about smartphones/social media and adolescent mental health, iterating toward consensus statements. The panel generated 1,400 citations and released extensive supplements showing how experts refined positions. This provides a structured way to separate agreement, uncertainty, and policy‑relevant recommendations in a polarized field.
— A transparent expert‑consensus protocol offers policymakers and schools a common evidentiary baseline, reducing culture‑war noise in decisions on youth tech use.
Sources: Behind the Scenes of the Consensus Statement on Potential Negative Impacts of Smartphone and Social Media Use, Are screens harming teens? What scientists can do to find answers
14D ago
1 sources
A non‑conservative, mainstream academic (Lee Jussim) publicly co‑signs a conservative‑led higher‑ed reform statement and explains why its proposals aren’t worse than the status quo. This suggests reform energy is coalescing beyond partisan lines around shared concerns about politicization and academic standards.
— If campus reform gathers heterodox and conservative support, it could move from culture‑war rhetoric to a viable governing coalition that changes university governance.
Sources: Why I Signed On To the Manhattan Institute Call to Reform Academia
14D ago
1 sources
The article highlights how Henry VIII defused monastic resistance by pensioning monks as he liquidated their houses. Applied to today, it suggests large buyouts or pensions could be used to neutralize tenured faculty opposition during university downsizing or restructuring in an AI era.
— It offers a concrete, politically tractable tactic for higher‑ed reform that shifts debate from pure culture war to mechanism design.
Sources: The Class of 2026 - by John Carter - Postcards From Barsoom
15D ago
1 sources
Weeks before COVID, WHO and Johns Hopkins surveyed non‑pharmaceutical interventions and found weak evidence for measures like broad closures, quarantines, and border controls, warning of high social costs. Yet in 2020–21, institutions adopted those very measures, particularly school closures, at scale. This gap between playbook and practice helps explain why trust eroded.
— If official plans cautioned against sweeping NPIs, the pandemic response becomes a case study in evidence‑ignoring governance with lasting implications for public health legitimacy.
Sources: Frances Lee & Stephen Macedo on Why Institutions Failed During COVID
15D ago
HOT
6 sources
The article alleges the DOJ task force is declaring universities guilty in public and freezing large federal grants before investigations run their course. Using fiscal chokepoints this way compels rapid institutional change without traditional due process.
— If agencies normalize funding freezes as leverage before adjudication, it rewrites the balance between administrative power and procedural protections across sectors.
Sources: The Leader of Trump’s Assault on Higher Education Has a Troubled Legal and Financial History, Trump Is Accusing Foes With Multiple Mortgages of Fraud. Records Show 3 of His Cabinet Members Have Them., Programs for Students With Hearing and Vision Loss Harmed by Trump’s Anti-Diversity Push (+3 more)
15D ago
3 sources
UK universities’ growing dependence on high‑fee non‑EU students (especially from China and India) shifts incentives away from merit and research toward placating consumer demand and sustaining enrollment. Coupled with regulator pressure to embed DEI, this funding model nudges institutions toward bureaucracy and activism over scholarship.
— If finance structures drive mission drift, reform must target revenue models and regulatory mandates, not just campus culture.
Sources: Diversity is the Inverse of University, The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump, Quarter of UK University Physics Departments At Risk of Closing, Survey Finds
15D ago
1 sources
A survey by the Institute of Physics reports 26% of UK physics departments face potential closure within two years, with 60% expecting course cuts and 80% already making staff reductions. Department heads blame the stagnant domestic fee cap (eroded by inflation) and a drop in overseas students, which together undermine the economics of lab‑intensive courses.
— It reframes higher‑education funding choices as a national science and security risk, not just a campus budget issue.
Sources: Quarter of UK University Physics Departments At Risk of Closing, Survey Finds
15D ago
2 sources
The guest argues that schools of education have embedded an equity-first, anti-tracking ideology that keeps students of widely different abilities in the same classes. He says this persists despite public dislike and thin empirical support, and that tracking plus individualized pacing better serves both advanced and struggling students.
— If ed-school dogma, not evidence or voter preference, drives classroom grouping policy, reform must target teacher training pipelines and governance rather than only district-level rules.
Sources: Jack Despain Zhou: in defense of tracking, Ending New York’s Gifted Programs Would Hurt Students
15D ago
1 sources
Evidence cited here says New York City’s G&T students outpace peers by 20%–30% in math and reading by middle school, with the biggest gains among low‑income and Black/Hispanic students. Treating gifted seats as 'elitist' may remove one of the few proven ladders for high‑potential kids from poorer backgrounds.
— This flips the equity framing by positioning gifted education as a pro‑mobility tool, challenging DEI‑motivated phase‑outs that could widen achievement gaps.
Sources: Ending New York’s Gifted Programs Would Hurt Students
15D ago
3 sources
A government‑commissioned 10‑year education report in Newfoundland and Labrador contains at least 15 fabricated sources, including a non‑existent NFB film and bibliography entries lifted from a style guide’s fake examples. Academics suspect generative AI, revealing how AI ghostwriting can inject plausible‑looking but false citations into official documents.
— This highlights the need for AI‑use disclosure, citation verification pipelines, and accountability rules in public reporting to protect evidence‑based governance.
Sources: Newfoundland's 10-Year Education Report Calling For Ethical AI Use Contains Over 15 Fake Sources, California Issues Historic Fine Over Lawyer's ChatGPT Fabrications, Deloitte Issues Refund For Error-Ridden Australian Government Report That Used AI
15D ago
1 sources
Using 2003–2023 American Time Use Survey data, Jessica Bone and colleagues report that the share of Americans who read for pleasure fell from about 27% to about 17%. Time spent reading with children did not change over the period.
— A sustained decline in leisure reading has implications for literacy, attention, civic culture, and how schools and libraries should respond.
Sources: Round-up: Why did the industrial revolution occur in Europe?
15D ago
4 sources
Halevi argues that the era of near‑automatic elite acceptance of Jews post‑Holocaust has ended. On elite campuses, social acceptance is now contingent on repudiating Israel, resembling historical pressures on Jews to renounce core identity for status.
— This reframes campus antisemitism as a structural gatekeeping shift with implications for party alignments, university policy, and minority‑coalition politics.
Sources: The End of the Post-Holocaust Era, Some Quotes, Jewish Elite Students' Sudden Alienation from the Left (+1 more)
16D ago
2 sources
Many state laws bar males from women’s teams but still permit females on men’s teams, which contradicts the stated safety and fairness rationale. A consistent approach would codify both male-only and female-only categories (with optional third categories) to avoid one-way exceptions. This reframing moves the debate from culture-war slogans to coherent rule design.
— It forces policymakers to defend or revise asymmetrical rules, affecting K–12, collegiate, and governing-body standards nationwide.
Sources: Keep Men Out of Women’s Sports—And Women Out of Men’s, Sex, Politics, and Executive Power
16D ago
HOT
8 sources
LLMs generate plans and supportive language for almost any prompt, making weak or reckless ideas feel credible and 'workshopped.' This validation can embolden users who lack social feedback or have been rejected by communities, pushing them further down bad paths.
— As AI tools normalize manufactured certainty, institutions need guardrails to distinguish real vetting from chatbot‑inflated confidence in workplaces, media, and personal decision‑making.
Sources: The Delusion Machine, When the Parrot Talks Back, Part One, AI broke job hunting. I think I have a fix. (+5 more)
16D ago
3 sources
The near‑term AI risk isn’t mass job loss but people abandoning difficult reading and writing, which trains the mind, in favor of instant machine outputs. Borrowing 'time under tension' from fitness, the author argues cognition strengthens through sustained effort; remove that effort and we deskill ourselves just as AI ramps. The practical question is how schools, workplaces, and products preserve deliberate struggle before habits calcify.
— This reframes AI governance and education from displacement fears to designing environments that keep humans doing the hard cognitive work that builds capability.
Sources: “You have 18 months”, Gen Z Is Not as Besotted With AI as You Think, The Third Magic
17D ago
HOT
9 sources
AI tools marketed as 'undetectable' now help users pass technical interviews, craft essays, and even manage dates in real time. As these products scale, the cost of cheating drops while detection lags, pushing institutions to compete in a losing arms race.
— If core screening rituals no longer measure merit, hiring, education, and dating norms will need redesign or risk systemic loss of trust.
Sources: Economic Nihilism, Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months, A Prophecy of Silicon Valley's Fall (+6 more)
17D ago
HOT
6 sources
Alpha School in Austin says students using AI tutors for two hours a day, with high‑paid adult facilitators instead of traditional teachers, test in the top 0.1% nationally. If this holds beyond selection effects, it suggests whole‑class lecturing is inefficient compared to individualized, AI‑driven instruction with coaches.
— This challenges the teacher‑fronted classroom model and points to major shifts in school staffing, unions, costs, and equity if AI tutoring scales.
Sources: More on Alpha School, Some Quotes, GPT-5's debut is slop; Will AI cause the next depression? Harvard prof warns of alien invasion; Alpha School & homeschool heroes (+3 more)
17D ago
1 sources
Alpha’s model reportedly uses vision monitoring and personal data capture alongside AI tutors to drive mastery-level performance in two hours, then frees students for interest-driven workshops. A major tech investor plans to scale this globally via sub-$1,000 tablets, potentially minting 'education billionaires.' The core tradeoff is extraordinary gains versus pervasive classroom surveillance.
— It forces a public decision on whether dramatic learning gains justify embedding surveillance architectures in K‑12 schooling and privatizing the stack that runs it.
Sources: The School That Replaces Teachers With AI
17D ago
5 sources
The author argues that democracy is chiefly a cultural product and only secondarily a legal system. He cites postwar U.S. efforts in Japan (e.g., JCII and Oppenheimer’s 1960 lecture tour) as 'normative democratization' and proposes a similar culture‑first approach—up to 'colonizing Gaza'—to replace martyrdom and antisemitism with liberal norms.
— If democratic viability depends on cultural preconditioning, nation‑building, aid, and cease‑fire plans must center value transmission and soft power rather than elections-first timelines.
Sources: Oppenheimer's last lesson, If I were king, The Marshall Plan for the Mind (+2 more)
17D ago
HOT
21 sources
The argument reframes rising political shootings as an 'assassin’s veto': if violence can silence or deter speakers, killers—not hecklers—decide what can be said. This surpasses disruption and chills democratic debate at its root. The author calls for across‑the‑board condemnation and solidarity to prevent violence from governing discourse.
— By naming a new veto point on speech, it clarifies why political violence must be repudiated regardless of ideology and shapes how institutions respond to protect open debate.
Sources: The Assassin's Veto, Charlie Kirk was a good man, What we lost with Charlie Kirk (+18 more)
18D ago
5 sources
If AI soon writes at or above the 95th percentile, students should be trained to direct, critique, and revise AI drafts rather than to compose from scratch. Instruction would cover topic selection, style guidance, prompt/constraint design, and structured revision workflows. Writing classes become editorial studios where human judgment shapes model output.
— This flips plagiarism and pedagogy debates by making AI‑assisted authorship the default and forces schools, employers, and publishers to redefine merit and assessment.
Sources: Teaching Writing in the age of AI, OpenAI's First Study On ChatGPT Usage, Will Computer Science become useless knowledge? (+2 more)
18D ago
1 sources
The post argues the entry‑level skill for software is shifting from traditional CS problem‑solving to directing AI with natural‑language prompts ('vibe‑coding'). As models absorb more implementation detail, many developer roles will revolve around specifying, auditing, and iterating AI outputs rather than writing code from scratch.
— This reframes K–12/college curricula and workforce policy toward teaching AI orchestration and verification instead of early CS boilerplate.
Sources: Some AI Links
18D ago
4 sources
Across 18 batteries (427,596 people) and a targeted Project Talent reanalysis that matched reliability and length, verbal ability showed a higher loading on general intelligence than math, with spatial, memory, and processing speed lower. A mixed‑effects model controlled for test battery and year, and the within-PT comparison was restricted to 14–18-year-old white males to hold composition constant. This challenges the default assumption that math or spatial subtests are the purest single indicators of g.
— If verbal measures are the strongest single proxy for general intelligence, institutions may need to reconsider how they weight verbal vs math/spatial skills in admissions, hiring, and talent identification.
Sources: What ability best measures intelligence?, LLMs: A Triumph and a Curse for Wordcels, Is g Real or Just Statistics? A Monologue with a Testable Prediction (+1 more)
18D ago
1 sources
A mega meta‑analysis pooling 747,000 twin comparisons across 77 studies finds that multiple specific cognitive abilities (e.g., quantitative knowledge, reading/writing, processing speed) show substantial heritability that is not fully mediated by general intelligence. Several abilities exhibit age‑related increases in heritability, paralleling the pattern seen for g, and the data test whether gene effects sum linearly or interact.
— This shifts intelligence debates from g‑only framings to a more granular genetic architecture that could reshape education policy, assessment design, and genomic research priorities.
Sources: Beyond General Intelligence: The Genetics of Specific Cognitive Abilities
18D ago
4 sources
Politically appointed governing boards are asserting power over trustee-selected presidents, using ideological criteria like DEI records as veto triggers. Florida’s Board of Governors’ 10–6 rejection of a unanimously chosen UF candidate is a first for the state and signals a broader shift of control from campus governance to state politics.
— This centralizes higher-ed governance in partisan bodies, reshaping leadership pipelines and institutional autonomy across states.
Sources: A case study in the new politics of higher education, From Heterodox to Helpless, Higher education is not that easy (+1 more)
18D ago
1 sources
FIRE’s latest report indicates attempts by government officials to punish faculty for protected speech have surged to record levels, exceeding the prior 25 years combined. Though many incidents involve overcompliance that was later reversed, the overall volume and state‑directed actions signal a sharp shift toward political control of campus speech.
— A documented spike in state‑driven sanctions reframes campus speech battles as a governance problem with First Amendment stakes, not just intra‑university culture war.
Sources: The Threat to Free Speech and Academic Freedom from the Govt Right
18D ago
HOT
7 sources
Public Twitter mobs are less visible, but enforcement migrated to private channels—hiring committees, editorial boards, and informal blacklists—while potential targets adapt by hiding or self‑censoring. Survey data show fear and self‑censorship are highest among the highly educated and in metropolitan hubs. The result looks like fading outrage but reflects a change in venue, not new tolerance.
— If cancellation has gone subterranean, focusing only on viral pile‑ons misreads speech norms and underestimates institutional gatekeeping that shapes careers and public debate.
Sources: Why Cancel Culture is Fading, Monday: Three Morning Takes, Why are so few professors troublemakers? (+4 more)
18D ago
2 sources
Andrey Mir argues that writing and long‑form reading train attention, abstraction, and inward reflection that detach us from situational group pressures. In today’s 'digital orality,' only sustained reading reliably counteracts tribal cues amplified by feeds and video. He implies that education and media habits should restore long reading as a civic antidote to polarization.
— If long reading uniquely reduces tribalism, institutions should prioritize long‑form literacy to rebuild shared reasoning in a polarized, screen‑driven culture.
Sources: Some Links, 09/28/2025, The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society
19D ago
2 sources
Economics job postings remain below pre‑COVID norms and are now hit by a 10% Fed workforce cut, federal and World Bank hiring freezes, and hiring freezes at major universities. This simultaneous pullback across government and academia shrinks entry points for new PhDs and mid‑career economists.
— A thinner economist pipeline can weaken evidence‑based policymaking, regulatory analysis, and teaching at a time of complex economic challenges.
Sources: The evolution of the economics job market, Some Links, 10/3/2025
19D ago
2 sources
Vanderbilt’s chancellor spells out a three‑pillar policy: open forums (any speaker student groups invite), institutional neutrality (no stances on public issues unrelated to university operations), and civil discourse in classrooms and community. He argues public statements by universities chill speech and that clear neutrality plus rule enforcement can maintain order without politicization.
— This offers a practical governance template other universities can adopt to rebuild trust, reduce campus unrest, and clarify speech norms.
Sources: Vanderbilt University’s Chancellor Sees the Problem—Can He Find a Solution?, Vanderbilt Gets It Right
19D ago
2 sources
National professional associations are quietly setting policy inside state agencies by training officials and embedding templates for ESG, DEI, and procurement scoring. Examples include NAST pushing ESG as fiduciary duty, NAMD making 'equity' the foundation of Medicaid reform, ASTHO coordinating public‑health messaging with the White House, and NASPO adding race/gender criteria to bids. This shifts practical authority from voters and legislatures to unelected guilds.
— If governance runs through professional associations, reform debates must target these gatekeepers and their standards, not just elections or statutes.
Sources: Some Links, 8/31/2025, New Zealand's Institute of IT Professionals Collapses
19D ago
1 sources
New Zealand’s IT Professionals institute is entering liquidation, imperiling its roles in visa skill assessments, university IT degree accreditation, and cloud code oversight. The episode reveals a governance bottleneck: essential state functions outsourced to a single private body can halt when that body fails.
— It spotlights the systemic risk of relying on private associations for public‑critical tasks like migration, standards, and accreditation, urging redundancy and contingency planning.
Sources: New Zealand's Institute of IT Professionals Collapses
19D ago
1 sources
Runway’s CEO estimates only 'hundreds' of people worldwide can train complex frontier AI models, even as CS grads and laid‑off engineers flood the market. Firms are offering roughly $500k base salaries and extreme hours to recruit them.
— If frontier‑model training skills are this scarce, immigration, education, and national‑security policy will revolve around competing for a tiny global cohort.
Sources: In a Sea of Tech Talent, Companies Can't Find the Workers They Want
19D ago
4 sources
High‑stakes, mass exam systems create large pools of ambitious near‑elites who narrowly miss entry and can radicalize into counter‑elites. The Taiping Rebellion’s leader, Hong Xiuquan, turned repeated exam failure into a millenarian Christian movement that nearly remade China. Similar grievance dynamics may emerge wherever credential funnels are tight and social status hinges on one gate.
— It suggests modern meritocratic bottlenecks can be political‑risk engines, not just education policy choices, shaping how states design selection and opportunity.
Sources: Could China Have Gone Christian?, Downward Mobility, Siren Song, Psychological Distress, Second Son Syndrome (+1 more)
19D ago
HOT
11 sources
The meaning and penalties of online speech shifted sharply around 2014, turning pre-2014 banter into post-2014 offenses and redefining what elite institutions consider acceptable. This temporal reset explains why decade-old tweets are now career-relevant and why editors hire within a new moral frame.
— It offers a concrete timeline for the cultural revolution in speech norms, helping explain today’s fights over retroactive judgment and institutional credibility.
Sources: Christopher Rufo vs. The New Yorker, AI Is Capturing Interiority, How We Got the Internet All Wrong (+8 more)
19D ago
HOT
6 sources
The Columbia deal uses a consent‑decree style settlement—$200M fine, DEI elimination, and an independent admissions monitor—in exchange for unfreezing federal funds and closing investigations. If repeated, these terms could become de facto national standards for any university taking federal money.
— It shifts higher‑ed reform from internal politics to enforceable federal agreements that can rapidly standardize rules across elite institutions.
Sources: Trump Has Conquered Columbia—Are More Universities Next?, The Leader of Trump’s Assault on Higher Education Has a Troubled Legal and Financial History, Harvard to the Finland Station (+3 more)
19D ago
1 sources
The administration used a 'Dear Colleague' letter to bar use of federal work‑study funds for voter registration and related activities on campus. Because work‑study subsidizes millions of student jobs, this policy restricts a key funding channel for university‑backed get‑out‑the‑vote efforts.
— It shows how executive guidance can reshape youth turnout infrastructure without new legislation, raising neutrality and election‑governance concerns.
Sources: Trump’s War on Universities
20D ago
2 sources
The author argues modern First Amendment doctrine protects expression and assembly geared to democratic politics, not the university’s mission of truth via reasoned inquiry. He proposes allowing all reasoned arguments while excluding non‑rational expressive conduct and collective pressure tactics, enforced by neutral tribunals. He notes early American protections tied speech to responsibility, better fitting scholarly standards.
— This reframes campus speech debates from rights maximalism to epistemic standards, guiding how universities design rules that protect inquiry without turning into political arenas.
Sources: Universities Need More Reason—Less “Expression”, Vanderbilt University’s Chancellor Sees the Problem—Can He Find a Solution?
20D ago
1 sources
Academic presses can kill controversial manuscripts when invited peer reviewers accept and then decline after seeing the content, leaving editors to cite lack of reviews or 'controversy' to terminate contracts. This procedural non‑engagement functions as de facto censorship without a public ban or rebuttal.
— It exposes a subtle gatekeeping mechanism in scholarly publishing that shapes which ideas reach the public and the historical record.
Sources: How Simone de Beauvoir got me cancelled
20D ago
1 sources
Two years after Florida’s conservative takeover of New College, graduation and retention rates have fallen and rankings have dropped, while per‑student spending has surged to roughly $134,000 versus about $10,000 across the state system. The data suggest that ideological house‑cleaning and budget infusions did not translate into better student outcomes.
— This case tests whether anti‑woke higher‑ed reforms improve performance, informing how states design and evaluate university interventions.
Sources: Higher education is not that easy
21D ago
1 sources
If AI handles much implementation, many software roles may no longer require deep CS concepts like machine code or logic gates. Curricula and entry‑level expectations would shift toward tool orchestration, integration, and system‑level reasoning over hand‑coding fundamentals.
— This forces universities, accreditors, and employers to redefine what counts as 'competency' in software amid AI assistance.
Sources: Will Computer Science become useless knowledge?
21D ago
2 sources
Telling the public not to mention a sensitive fact (e.g., a shooter’s identity attribute) increases focus on it, an 'ironic process' akin to 'don’t think of an elephant.' The article argues that commissar‑style admonitions turn taboo details into the headline by making them cognitively unavoidable.
— If suppression reliably heightens salience, elites need communication strategies that avoid ironic amplification or they will strengthen the narratives they seek to contain.
Sources: The Doom Loop of the Commissariat, Curiosity Drives Viewers To Ignore Trigger Warnings
21D ago
1 sources
A field study from Flinders University reports nearly 90% of young adults clicked through content despite trigger warnings, citing curiosity rather than feeling prepared. This complements lab results showing warnings rarely prompt avoidance and raises the possibility they function as attention magnets.
— It challenges a widespread educational and media practice by showing warnings may not protect viewers and could backfire, informing campus policy, platform design, and mental‑health guidance.
Sources: Curiosity Drives Viewers To Ignore Trigger Warnings
21D ago
5 sources
Even if Congress restores grant budgets, agency layoffs and tougher immigration rules can leave too few staff to process awards and too few researchers to execute projects. This creates multi‑year delays that push the country onto a lower innovation trajectory.
— It reframes science funding as a state‑capacity and talent‑mobility problem, not merely a dollars‑appropriated problem.
Sources: The State of American Science Funding (For the Next Five Minutes), How Deeply Trump Has Cut Federal Health Agencies, The evolution of the economics job market (+2 more)
21D ago
1 sources
Teacher professional development often wastes money when it’s generic and detached from specific curricula. Southern 'surge' states trained teachers directly on the adopted reading programs (phonics-based), pairing materials with practice at scale. This alignment appears to outperform the dominant workshop industry.
— Redirecting billions in PD toward curriculum‑specific training offers a scalable lever to raise literacy and narrow gaps nationwide.
Sources: Illiteracy is a policy choice
21D ago
1 sources
As part of settlement talks with the federal government, Harvard is reportedly weighing the creation of trade schools. If enacted, an Ivy embracing vocational education under legal pressure would signal a break from the prestige-only model and elevate hands‑on training within elite academia.
— It suggests federal leverage can reorient elite universities’ missions and status hierarchies, with ripple effects for workforce policy and higher‑ed stratification.
Sources: 'America's Elite Universities Have Lost Their Way'
22D ago
1 sources
Contrary to the stereotype, many Gen Z users either avoid AI or use it selectively for narrow tasks like resume polishing. The essay argues this hesitation stems from seeing social media’s harms and from fear that AI shortcuts will stunt developing skills.
— This undermines blanket 'digital native = AI enthusiast' assumptions and redirects policy toward fixing education and onboarding rather than assuming universal youth uptake.
Sources: Gen Z Is Not as Besotted With AI as You Think
23D ago
5 sources
Turning H‑1B access into a $100,000 fee imposes a de facto pay‑to‑enter filter that favors cash‑rich incumbents and squeezes startups and universities. It shifts immigration control from caps and lotteries to price, executed by proclamation rather than new legislation.
— Using pricing as an executive lever to throttle high‑skill immigration would reshape tech labor markets, U.S.–India relations, and the legal boundaries of presidential power over visas.
Sources: President To Impose $100,000 Fee For H-1B Worker Visas, White House Says, Indians and Koreans not welcome, H1-B visa fees and the academic job market (+2 more)
23D ago
1 sources
The author argues that in populations with similar access to education and information, a general-knowledge test can outpredict a one-off reasoning test for underlying problem-solving ability. Knowledge acts like a long-term average of cognitive performance, while a single reasoning measure is a noisy snapshot.
— This reframes how schools and employers should design assessments and interpret scores, pushing toward batteries and context-appropriate proxies rather than standalone reasoning tests.
Sources: Is g Real or Just Statistics? A Monologue with a Testable Prediction
23D ago
2 sources
Public 'AI Darwin Awards' formalize naming-and-shaming of reckless AI deployments, bundling incidents into a memorable narrative of preventable failure. This visibility can change incentives by embarrassing brands, spooking investors, and prompting pre‑deployment audits and red‑teaming.
— Shaming as a governance tool could become a practical, bottom‑up pressure on AI safety and security when regulation lags.
Sources: AI Darwin Awards Launch To Celebrate Spectacularly Bad Deployments, Culture Magazine Urges Professional Writers to Resist AI, Boycott and Stigmatize AI Slop
23D ago
1 sources
n+1 urges editors, publishers, and teachers to make AI‑authored text socially unacceptable, advocating editorial boycotts of 'AI slop,' AI‑proof pedagogy (in‑class writing, oral exams), and teaching the limits of generative models. The piece argues norms and shame can check the spread of AI in literature and criticism even without new laws.
— This elevates norm enforcement—making AI use 'uncool'—as a primary lever in the cultural governance of AI, potentially shaping adoption in media and education.
Sources: Culture Magazine Urges Professional Writers to Resist AI, Boycott and Stigmatize AI Slop
23D ago
2 sources
Because PISA‑D is calibrated to the main PISA scale, Zambia’s 275 average versus U.S. Black students’ 459 implies about a 1.8 standard‑deviation difference in reading. That magnitude suggests schooling quality and broader environment drive much of the disparity, not ancestry alone. It reframes how we compare U.S. subgroup performance to developing countries.
— It injects hard numbers into contentious education and heredity debates while highlighting the scale of global human‑capital deficits.
Sources: How Low You Can Go in the Third World, Zambia fact of the day
24D ago
HOT
8 sources
When national frameworks avoid specifying clear consequences, local implementers fill the vacuum with prevailing norms—in this case, anti‑punitive practices—while trainers insist failures are 'not the model.' This makes the system operationally unfalsifiable and hard to reform because poor outcomes are blamed on 'implementation' rather than design.
— It highlights how policy-by-framework can evade accountability and entrench ineffective practices across institutions.
Sources: The High Costs of Classroom Disorder, Integrity, Safety, & Conference Venues, Vague Bullshit (+5 more)
24D ago
1 sources
A major school district hired a superintendent with an implausible CV and, after his ICE arrest as a removable noncitizen, leadership responded with public appeals to 'empathy' rather than explaining due‑diligence failures or next steps. The episode illustrates a pattern where institutional elites default to therapeutic messaging and identity cues instead of concrete governance. That rhetorical reflex can mask, and even enable, basic competence breakdowns.
— If empathy ritual routinely displaces accountability, public institutions risk losing legitimacy and performance in critical services like education.
Sources: Feelz Leadership, Gold Medal Edition
25D ago
5 sources
A test-prep operator using Mastery Learning for six years says it requires far more teacher time and administrative courage, so established schools resist it. The approach mostly appears in new, purpose-built programs because retrofitting raises workload and parent‑management costs. The bottleneck is labor and governance, not pedagogy.
— It explains why proven instructional models don’t scale and points to AI or staffing redesign as the lever, not just teacher training.
Sources: Some Quotes, Literacy lag: We start reading too late, How Katrina saved New Orleans schools (+2 more)
25D ago
1 sources
The U.S. credit-hour system arose because Carnegie’s professor pension plan required standardized 'Carnegie units' and credit hours, locking time-in-seat into admissions and degrees. A 1938 Carnegie study found course units poorly tracked student knowledge, yet the framework persisted. This helps explain why competency-based and mastery models face structural headwinds.
— It reframes education and credentialing reform as an institutional legacy problem that still shapes funding, admissions, and degree design.
Sources: Seat time simply doesn’t equal learning
26D ago
1 sources
Borrow the cycling 'ramp test' model to quickly find each learner’s functional threshold in a subject, then use AI to build a dynamic, individualized plan that adjusts workload up or down over time. The system continuously re‑tests, treating the threshold as a moving baseline rather than a one‑off placement score.
— This could shift schooling from fixed, grade‑level curricula to adaptive pathways that keep students in an optimal challenge zone, reframing standards, assessment, and pacing policy.
Sources: Reimagining School In The Age Of AI
27D ago
3 sources
The piece argues that after states adopted Common Core and the Every Student Succeeds Act loosened No Child Left Behind’s accountability, scores at the 10th and 25th percentiles fell most. Under NCLB, low performers gained; post‑2013 those gains reversed. The claim is that weaker accountability widened achievement gaps by pulling the bottom tail down.
— If accurate, this pushes lawmakers to revisit ESSA-era accountability and focus interventions on bottom‑tail performance rather than average proficiency alone.
Sources: The Nation’s Report Card Shows How Education Policy Has Failed, Reform, Not Radicalism, Illiteracy is a policy choice
27D ago
2 sources
The manifesto proposes building a formal research program to study 'woke' ideology—its claims, methods, and institutional effects—using standard social‑science tools. Instead of polemics, it calls for systematic empirical work that treats contemporary progressivism as an object of analysis.
— Institutionalizing this field would shift culture‑war debates into testable research agendas that could reshape funding, curricula, and editorial standards.
Sources: The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science, Sociology Journals Are Normalizing the Sexualization of Children
27D ago
1 sources
A peer‑reviewed article in the American Sociological Association’s Sex & Sexualities argues that 'childhood sexual innocence' is a colonial fiction and calls for centering children’s sexual pleasure in scholarship. The authors urge rejecting 'adultist' approaches and treating children as sexual agents. Publishing this position in a flagship sociology venue signals a potential mainstreaming of views that challenge age‑based sexual norms.
— If academic gatekeepers normalize frameworks that sexualize children, it could influence education, research ethics, and age‑of‑consent debates while intensifying public distrust of universities.
Sources: Sociology Journals Are Normalizing the Sexualization of Children
27D ago
1 sources
A new analysis finds academics targeted by cancelation controversies publish about 20% fewer papers afterward and see a 4% drop in citations to their prior work. The citation decline is driven by close peers, suggesting professional distancing. This quantifies reputational and career penalties even when targets keep their jobs.
— It grounds campus speech debates in measurable career harms, showing how activism and institutional responses can chill research and collaboration.
Sources: Academic Survivors and Thrivers After Cancelation Attacks
29D ago
2 sources
The author argues the AI boom will only deliver large economic returns if it measurably improves K–12/college learning and lowers health‑care costs while raising quality. A flood of new apps or games won’t move the macro needle; the decisive test is impact in these 'commanding heights' sectors.
— This sets a clear benchmark for AI policy and investment—judge success by outcomes in education and health rather than app counts or model benchmarks.
Sources: AI and Software Productivity, Perspective on AI
29D ago
1 sources
Kling argues that the key human skill in the LLM era is 'meta‑instruction'—being able to articulate the rules, constraints, and intent behind your work so the model can reliably execute in your style. An average writer with strong meta‑instruction can become vastly more productive, while a talented writer who can’t explain their process may underperform with AI. This reframes 'prompting' as teaching models how you think, not just what you want.
— It shifts education, hiring, and professional development toward training people to externalize and codify their creative processes, redefining merit and productivity under AI.
Sources: Perspective on AI
29D ago
3 sources
Meta-analytic evidence reportedly finds universal classroom mental-health programs do not improve symptoms and can sometimes worsen outcomes. Broad, lesson-based approaches may crowd out targeted care and create labeling or expectancy harms.
— This challenges a fast-growing education policy trend and redirects resources toward evidence-backed, targeted interventions.
Sources: Hidden Calculations, Flow States, Just Asking Questions, The misuse of Seuss, Girls improve student mental health
29D ago
1 sources
Using Add Health data and within‑school cohort variation, researchers find that a higher proportion of female peers improves mental health for both boys and girls, with the largest gains for low‑income boys. Boys report greater school satisfaction; mechanisms include stronger friendships for boys and better self‑image and grades for girls.
— This points to class composition as a policy lever for student well‑being and discipline, informing co‑ed vs single‑sex debates and school design beyond curriculum fixes.
Sources: Girls improve student mental health
30D ago
4 sources
NAEP reports 12th‑grade math and reading at their lowest in 20+ years, with 45% below basic in math and 32% below basic in reading. Pandemic recovery efforts focused heavily on early grades, but these results show a serious shortfall at the high‑school end of the pipeline. College‑level readiness in math fell to 33%, signaling urgent needs in grades 9–12.
— It redirects learning‑loss debates and funding toward high schools, graduation standards, and community‑college remediation rather than concentrating remediation only in K–8.
Sources: US High School Students Lose Ground In Math and Reading, Continuing Yearslong Decline, The Nation’s Report Card Shows How Education Policy Has Failed, Record-Low 35% in US Satisfied With K-12 Education Quality (+1 more)
30D ago
1 sources
Keyword‑monitoring software in schools (e.g., Senso) flags students’ and teachers’ keystrokes for terms like 'suicide' or 'bomb.' The author argues this shifts staff from relational judgment to checklist compliance, creating complacency ('the system is watching') while eroding trust and care.
— As AI‑style 'safeguarding' spreads, institutions risk institutionalizing surveillance logic that undermines human attention, due process, and the quality of care.
Sources: Surveillance is sapping our humanity
1M ago
5 sources
Summarizing Borjas, the author argues that immigrants who arrived during the 1924–1965 'pause' assimilated economically much faster than cohorts from high‑immigration eras. Large inflows create ethnic enclaves and coordination frictions, and add wage/congestion pressures that slow convergence. Treating scale as a first‑order variable undercuts open‑borders models that ignore these dynamics.
— It reframes immigration policy around the size and pacing of inflows as levers to maximize assimilation and minimize social costs.
Sources: The limits of social science (II), The limits of social science (I), The Many Faces of Nationalism (+2 more)
1M ago
1 sources
Google added a 'homework help' button to Chrome that reads quiz pages and suggests answers via Lens/AI Overview, appearing on common course sites during tests. Universities say they cannot disable it; Google temporarily paused the rollout after press inquiries but did not commit to removing it. Platform‑level UI can quietly defeat classroom rules and proctoring.
— If platform defaults can override institutional controls, governance of AI in education shifts from classroom policy to browser and OS design standards.
Sources: Google Temporarily Pauses AI-Powered 'Homework Helper' Button in Chrome Over Cheating Concerns
1M ago
3 sources
A large outlet reportedly told its journalists they can use AI to create first drafts and suggested readers won’t be told when AI was used. Treating AI as 'like any other tool' collapses a bright line between human-authored news and machine-assisted copy. This sets a precedent others may follow under deadline and cost pressure.
— If undisclosed AI becomes normal in journalism, trust, accountability, and industry standards for labeling and corrections will need rapid redefinition.
Sources: Business Insider Reportedly Tells Journalists They Can Use AI To Draft Stories, AI Tool Detects LLM-Generated Text in Research Papers and Peer Reviews, Librarians Are Being Asked To Find AI-Hallucinated Books
1M ago
1 sources
Librarians now spend time verifying whether AI‑recommended titles even exist, after major papers ran unvetted, AI‑generated reading lists that included fictional books. Vendors are also pushing flawed LLM search/summaries into library platforms, compounding misinformation and wasting staff time.
— It reframes libraries as frontline verifiers in an AI era, raising accountability questions for newsrooms, platforms, and AI tools that inject errors into public knowledge systems.
Sources: Librarians Are Being Asked To Find AI-Hallucinated Books
1M ago
2 sources
A randomized trial of nearly 17,000 students found that collecting phones during class raised grades by 0.086 standard deviations, especially for lower-performing and first‑year students. After experiencing the ban, students became more supportive of phone restrictions and perceived greater benefits, with no significant harm to wellbeing or motivation.
— It suggests that trialing restrictive digital policies can generate user buy‑in, informing how schools and governments design and legitimize technology rules.
Sources: A new RCT on banning smartphones in the classroom, From the comments
1M ago
1 sources
Schools increasingly teach with AI, but banning smartphones removes the most accessible on‑ramp for hands‑on AI use. The post argues that while bans may modestly lift average grades, they can harm top‑tail learning, isolate vulnerable students, and prevent practical AI instruction that requires devices in hand.
— It reframes phone‑ban policy as a trade‑off between small average gains and foregone AI competence, a skill with growing economic and civic importance.
Sources: From the comments
1M ago
1 sources
Gallup finds only 35% of Americans are satisfied with U.S. K‑12 education, the lowest since the question began in 1999 and down eight points from last year. Just about a quarter think schools are headed in the right direction; parents are more positive about their own child’s school but still below majority approval.
— A historic low in public confidence raises the stakes for education policy and election platforms, making reform urgency a cross‑partisan issue.
Sources: Record-Low 35% in US Satisfied With K-12 Education Quality
1M ago
4 sources
Language is a shared system, so individual preferences can’t override clarity when they create ambiguity for others. Using plural they/them with plural verbs for a specific person produces confusion in ordinary sentences (e.g., whether 'they' means one person or a pair). A better norm should minimize burden on other speakers while respecting identity 'within reason.'
— Reframing pronoun policy as governance of a commons shifts debates from identity claims to coordination costs that institutions must manage.
Sources: Pronoun Trouble, Which pronouns, trans shooter?, Where Woke Was Wonderful (+1 more)
1M ago
1 sources
Researchers compile annual data on 'academic human capital' across European cities, present‑day countries, and historically coherent macro‑regions using the RETE prosopographic database. The series tracks shocks (Black Death, Thirty Years’ War), the rise of academies versus universities, regional inequality in the Holy Roman Empire, and the distinctiveness of the Scottish Enlightenment.
— By measuring where and when intellectual capacity accumulated before the Industrial Revolution, this dataset lets scholars test claims about why Northern Europe pulled ahead and how wars and institutions shape knowledge production.
Sources: Academic Human Capital in European Countries and Regions, 1200-1793
1M ago
1 sources
OpenAI reportedly solved all 12 problems at the International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals under the same rules and limits as human teams. No human team solved more than 11. This surpasses prior 'gold‑level' results and marks a clear, head‑to‑head win over elite humans in a flagship programming contest.
— A decisive AI victory in ICPC recalibrates expectations for near‑term automation of complex reasoning and coding work, with knock‑on effects for education, hiring, and safety policy.
Sources: Links for 2025-09-18
1M ago
3 sources
A Quechua-language drama, Ollantay, was first staged in Peru around 1775 and soon became entwined with the conditions that produced the Túpac Amaru II uprising, which killed roughly 100,000 people. Authorities later banned Quechua performances and Inca symbols, implicitly admitting the mobilizing power of indigenous culture. Art was not the sole cause, but it provided a shared narrative and status frame that helped turn grievances into coordinated action.
— It shows how cultural recognition and language policy can activate mass identity politics and conflict, informing modern debates on censorship, heritage promotion, and nation-building.
Sources: Your Review: Ollantay, Africa wants its true size on the world map, A New Soft Power Ploy By Putin
1M ago
1 sources
FICO reports the average U.S. credit score fell to 715 while the median rose to 745, implying most of the damage is concentrated among lower‑score borrowers. Gen Z saw the largest decline, and newly reported student‑loan delinquencies hit a record 3.1% of the scorable population. Higher utilization and delinquencies are pulling down the average even as the middle holds up.
— Rising distress at the bottom of the credit distribution affects lending standards, generational inequality, and student‑debt policy even if aggregates look stable.
Sources: Gen Z Leads Biggest Drop In FICO Scores Since Financial Crisis
1M ago
1 sources
As Ivy League schools pledge large sums to vocational education (e.g., Brown’s $50 million; Harvard reportedly weighing $500 million), elite involvement could normalize new credentials in jobs long governed by apprenticeships. The shift risks turning blue‑collar entry into another paper‑gatekeeping domain, raising costs and barriers for practical skills.
— If elite credential norms spread into trades, workforce pipelines, wages, and reindustrialization plans could be reshaped by gatekeeping rather than competence.
Sources: Thursday: Three Morning Takes
1M ago
HOT
7 sources
City leaders in liberal jurisdictions are beefing up transit policing and access controls while publicly denouncing similar measures as 'fascist' when tied to national opponents. The gap between rhetoric and operations obscures what works for restoring order.
— It spotlights a messaging‑policy split that distorts public debate and accountability on urban safety.
Sources: Union Station, Meet Union Station: What the Blue Zones Know But Won't Say About Trump's D.C. Effort, I Have a New Hole In My Priors, San Francisco Is Safer—Thank Republicans (+4 more)
1M ago
2 sources
Universal free meal policies routed through the Community Eligibility Provision push schools to spend at or below the federal reimbursement rate rather than on higher‑quality food. As states go universal, the $4.69 per‑lunch cap becomes the de facto ceiling, which can worsen menus and student diets despite higher participation.
— It reframes equity‑driven universalism as an incentive problem that can backfire on nutrition and budgets, informing how social benefits should be financed and targeted.
Sources: Bad Food for All, Charlie Kirk Did It Right
1M ago
1 sources
The author argues rising autism prevalence is mostly a diagnostic/reporting artifact, not a real surge in incidence. He says HHS can order CDC/CMS to tighten ICD‑10 autism coding and documentation (using required specifiers) to reduce overdiagnosis and downstream spending. Examples include a 400% one‑year spike from a Massachusetts reporting change and ~25% jumps when states reward districts for diagnoses.
— If diagnostic coding policy can swing national prevalence and costs, disease 'epidemics' become governance choices, reshaping debates about disability services, school incentives, and federal health spending.
Sources: How To End The Autism Epidemic
1M ago
2 sources
Universities sell instruction bundled with housing, dining, gyms, student life, and large administrations. Yascha Mounk proposes an 'I’m Here to Learn' tier that sells only instruction and labs, while Arnold Kling notes bundling functions as price discrimination in overhead‑heavy sectors. Unbundling could slash costs for learners but would upend cross‑subsidies and the current business model.
— If higher education can be unbundled, the politics and financing of college—who pays for amenities versus learning—would shift, reshaping affordability, equity, and institutional incentives.
Sources: Some Links, 9/8/2025, Perceived Importance of College Hits New Low
1M ago
1 sources
Gallup finds just 35% of adults now call college 'very important,' down from 75% in 2010; 24% say it’s 'not too important,' up from 4%. Parents of minors mirror these views (38% very important), suggesting near‑term enrollment and policy headwinds.
— Broad skepticism—including among parents—signals a legitimacy crisis for the traditional degree pathway and accelerates demand for alternatives (vocational training, certificates, unbundled instruction).
Sources: Perceived Importance of College Hits New Low
1M ago
1 sources
The Federalist’s editor‑in‑chief proposed requiring public universities to staff each department with at least 50% conservative professors by spring 2026. Framed as 'ideological diversity,' the plan effectively mirrors DEI-style affirmative action but for political identity. It raises constitutional, governance, and implementation questions about state‑mandated viewpoint balance.
— This flips the DEI debate by normalizing symmetric quotas, forcing lawmakers and universities to confront whether politicized hiring can be justified on pluralism grounds.
Sources: Yeah, we're going to have to do DEI for conservatives
1M ago
2 sources
By defaulting users into an 'Auto' mode that routes prompts to the right model, GPT‑5 reduces confusion and cost barriers and quietly upgrades many sessions to top reasoning models. Early data show Reasoner use jumped from 7% to 24% among paying users, with free users rising to ~7% as routing and limited quotas kick in. This design shift elevates the average capability available to ordinary users without them choosing expert settings.
— If defaults and routing democratize high‑end AI, policymakers and institutions should plan for rapid capability diffusion and its impacts on education, work, and information quality.
Sources: Mass Intelligence, Microsoft's Office Apps Now Have Free Copilot Chat Features
1M ago
3 sources
The article argues that year‑long waitlists and scarce residential treatment for adolescents with severe, escalating symptoms create dangerous gaps where obvious warning signs go untreated. It urges shifting focus from culture‑war frames to building capacity for intensive, residential care and faster triage for high‑risk youth.
— Treating youth psychiatric bed capacity as core public‑safety infrastructure reframes policy on mass violence and directs investment toward measurable prevention.
Sources: The Annunciation Shooter and a State’s Broken Mental-Health System, Charlie Kirk’s Assassination, America’s Mental-Health System Betrayed Iryna Zarutska
1M ago
1 sources
A new survey of 470 professors (Clark et al.) finds that tenured faculty report as much self‑censorship and fear of consequences, including fear of being fired, as untenured colleagues. Professors most confident in taboo conclusions say they self‑censor more, and nearly all worry about social sanctions for expressing empirical beliefs.
— If tenure fails to protect open inquiry, reforms to academic freedom must address social and institutional sanction mechanisms, not just job security.
Sources: Why are so few professors troublemakers?
1M ago
1 sources
Leon Voss argues much enrollment is driven less by signaling or human‑capital goals and more by a desire for a 'liberal boarding school' experience. He claims about 70% of teens enroll but only ~25% finish, suggesting many leave once the social experience loses its appeal.
— If college is widely serving as subsidized adolescence, not skill formation, funding, completion metrics, and admissions policy need reframing around purpose and outcomes.
Sources: Some Links
1M ago
1 sources
Britain’s data regulator says 57% of 215 school‑origin breaches since 2022 were carried out by students, including a 7‑year‑old referred to the National Crime Agency and teens compromising databases with thousands of records. Easy‑to‑download tools, weak passwords, and dares are turning school networks into practice ranges that normalize illicit access. This suggests early diversion and stronger K–12 identity security (e.g., MFA, least‑privilege) are national‑security issues, not just school IT chores.
— It reframes youth justice, education policy, and cybersecurity by treating K–12 breaches as the front end of a cyber‑offender pipeline that can feed major attacks.
Sources: UK's Data Watchdog Warns Students Are Breaching Their Schools' IT Systems
1M ago
2 sources
The piece argues China is moving beyond sharp‑tongued diplomacy to build overlapping initiatives—Global Development, Security, Civilizational, and a new Global Governance Initiative—knitting together the Global South and Eurasia around the SCO. Rather than formal alliances, Beijing is assembling functional arrangements to coordinate markets, energy, and norms as a counterweight to Western institutions.
— If China is actively building a parallel governance system, rule‑writing, alignments, and global standards could shift away from U.S.‑centric bodies.
Sources: The Tianjin Turning Point, How China is buying up Britain’s schools
1M ago
1 sources
Chinese state‑connected investors have acquired dozens of British independent schools, including Thetford Grammar via China Financial Service Holdings, whose directors have ties to state banks and the United Front system. This shifts influence from university‑level Confucius Institutes to direct ownership in K‑12, while elite UK schools expand campuses inside China.
— It reframes foreign interference as asset acquisition in primary and secondary education, raising urgent questions for national security, regulation, and educational autonomy.
Sources: How China is buying up Britain’s schools
1M ago
3 sources
Ross Douthat argues Charlie Kirk reshaped campus conservatism from tweedy 'outsider nerds' into a fun‑loving, masculine, mainstream style—with dropout‑entrepreneur energy that aligned with Trump‑era populism. This aesthetic shift, not just ideology, helped Turning Point USA scale among students.
— If style is a recruitment engine, parties and universities must account for cultural aesthetics—not only policy—in understanding youth mobilization.
Sources: Tributes to the Late Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Marks a New Era, Bullets and Ballots: The Legacy of Charlie Kirk
1M ago
1 sources
Skinner argued society should be engineered by an objective scientific elite because science, unlike politics, isn’t biased. Hanson revisits this claim and notes that modern experience shows academia is itself value‑laden and incentive‑driven, undermining the premise that a 'scientific controller' can be trusted to centrally design culture. Culture governance must account for scientific institutions’ own biases and feedback loops.
— This challenges technocratic dreams of 'rule by science' and pushes debates toward designing checks, incentives, and pluralism rather than handing culture to a supposedly neutral expert class.
Sources: Skinner’s One Ring To Rule Culture
1M ago
HOT
6 sources
A high‑profile speaker was reportedly shot and killed while taking questions at a Utah university event. Expect a rapid shift toward metal detectors, controlled access, and armed protection at campus talks, with knock‑on effects for who is willing to host or attend controversial speakers.
— It reframes campus free‑speech practice around physical risk management, forcing universities to balance openness with visible security and potential chilling effects.
Sources: Charlie Kirk, 31, RIP, The Assassin's Veto, Charlie Kirk was a good man (+3 more)
1M ago
1 sources
Analyzing 140,000 Mexico City adults with a within-family ancestry design, Wang et al. report that siblings with different Indigenous vs European ancestry have the same educational outcomes, even as height and type 2 diabetes show strong genetic ancestry signals. Measurement limits and historical schooling context likely depress EA heritability here, while diabetes risk and stature track ancestry-linked alleles.
— This cautions against reading ancestry gaps as genetic in education while underscoring genetic contributions to some health risks, refining how policy and media discuss disparities.
Sources: What a New Massive Mexican Family Study Tells Us About the Effects of Ancestry on Different Traits
1M ago
2 sources
Collison argues the Irish Enlightenment was a colocated network whose members—Swift, Berkeley, Petty, Hutcheson, Burke, Cantillon—collectively sketched core economics decades before Smith or the physiocrats. The idea is that 'small group theory' sits between great‑man and structural accounts: tight circles can catalyze whole fields.
— If intellectual breakthroughs emerge from compact, colocated circles, funders and universities should nurture small, high‑trust clusters rather than only scaling large institutes.
Sources: Patrick Collison on the Irish Enlightenment, Thursday assorted links
1M ago
1 sources
The Commerce Secretary reportedly wants the federal government to take 50% of universities’ patent revenue from federally funded research. This would upend the Bayh–Dole equilibrium that lets universities keep royalties to reinvest in labs, tech transfer, and spinoffs, and could redirect large sums to central budgets or programs. It would also change licensing and startup incentives across campus ecosystems.
— Such a shift would reset the commercialization model for U.S. science, with knock‑on effects for university finances, innovation policy, and the public–private balance in R&D.
Sources: Thursday assorted links
1M ago
2 sources
DHS proposes ending 'duration of status' for international students and replacing it with a fixed, four‑year admission that requires extensions to continue study or work. Added paperwork and uncertainty would push many high‑skill students to pick countries with clearer post‑study pathways, narrowing the U.S. talent pipeline.
— By chilling high‑skill immigration at the education gateway, the rule risks weakening America’s research base, AI leadership, and long‑run growth.
Sources: The Charlotte Murder Was Horrific—and Avoidable, DHS’s New Student Visa Rule Is Bad for America
1M ago
1 sources
Historically, once machines take over practical tasks, human abilities persist as sport, art, or ritual (e.g., lifting → Strongman, travel → marathons/equestrian, realism → abstract art, chess vs engines). If AI automates cognition, many intellectual skills may survive mainly as competitive displays and entertainment rather than workplace utility.
— This reframes AI’s impact from jobs to culture, suggesting education, status, and identity will shift toward performance arenas rather than production.
Sources: The Coming Sportsification of Humanity: How AI Threatens to Replace Human Value With Performance
1M ago
2 sources
After the April 2024 encampments, Jewish Ivy League students’ self‑censorship surged while conservatives’ fell sharply. This suggests campus enforcement and social‑sanction attention shifted targets rather than rising or falling uniformly. The 'heat budget' for illiberal pressure appears reallocated to groups at the center of the latest conflict.
— If speech policing is effectively redistributive, institutions and activists are steering who can speak rather than broadening or shrinking liberty overall, reshaping coalition incentives and governance responses.
Sources: Jewish Elite Students' Sudden Alienation from the Left, College students increasingly believe violence is justifiable to stop speech
1M ago
1 sources
FIRE’s 2025 survey with College Pulse reports that 34% of U.S. college students say it is acceptable in some cases to use violence to stop a campus speech. Two‑thirds endorse shouting down speakers to prevent them from being heard, and more than half say physically blocking entry can be permissible. FIRE says these attitudes have worsened over six years of tracking.
— Normalization of coercive tactics against speech on campuses signals erosion of free‑expression norms central to higher education and liberal democracy.
Sources: College students increasingly believe violence is justifiable to stop speech
1M ago
1 sources
A national study (2005–2018) shows adolescent depressive symptoms climbed for everyone after 2010, but rose most among liberal girls, especially when parents had low education. Trends diverged by ideology, sex, and class on multiple internalizing measures.
— This sharpens the youth‑mental‑health debate by identifying which ideological and demographic subgroups are most affected, guiding research and interventions.
Sources: The politics of depression in young adults
1M ago
1 sources
Edward Dutton argues that prematurity and low birth weight, while typically linked to impairments, can sometimes rewire brain development to yield traits associated with genius—obsession, lower empathy, ADHD/autism-linked focus—enabling paradigm-shifting work. Historical cases like Isaac Newton (reportedly extremely premature) are presented as illustrative, suggesting developmental frailty can occasionally produce extraordinary originality. The claim is a hypothesis that invites empirical testing rather than a settled fact.
— This reframes neurodiversity and perinatal risk debates by positing a trade-off model where rare benefits may coexist with common harms, potentially influencing research priorities and how institutions support atypical minds.
Sources: Review of ‘Sent Before Their Time’ by Edward Dutton
1M ago
HOT
10 sources
Rufo reports that the second Trump administration is coordinated and confident, focused on abolishing DEI, ending disparate‑impact enforcement, and defunding university‑NGO networks. Once‑radical right ideas (from Deneen, Yarvin, Caldwell) are being discussed at Heritage and reflected in agency action, suggesting a consolidated governing program.
— If culture‑war rhetoric has become an operating blueprint for the federal bureaucracy, U.S. policy, law, and elite pipelines will be reshaped for years.
Sources: Washington’s New Status Quo, Trump Has Conquered Columbia—Are More Universities Next?, Trump Strikes a Blow Against “Woke AI” (+7 more)
1M ago
2 sources
Run causal models on outcomes that moves cannot plausibly change (e.g., birth length) to test whether observed 'effects' are actually selection artifacts. Eshaghnia shows that substituting birth length for adult earnings reproduces Chetty–Hendren–style exposure gradients, with stronger alignment the earlier the move—something a true causal neighborhood effect on earnings shouldn’t mimic on an inborn trait.
— If marquee neighborhood-effects results fail placebo checks, policymakers must revisit relocation and 'opportunity mapping' initiatives and demand stronger identification before scaling.
Sources: Moving on Up, Some Links, 9/10/2025
1M ago
1 sources
Texas released two years of previously withheld school ratings showing several charter districts with repeated F’s while their superintendents received some of the highest—often underreported—compensation in the state. One, Faith Family Academy, faces automatic closure after a third F, while Valere’s chief was paid up to $870,000 and Faith Family’s to $560,000. The pattern highlights board oversight failures and misaligned incentives in charter governance.
— It challenges claims of superior charter accountability and spotlights the need for tighter transparency and compensation controls in publicly funded schools.
Sources: These Charter Superintendents Are Some of the Highest Paid in Texas. Their Districts Are Among the Lowest Performing.
1M ago
4 sources
Rickover warned that management can’t be learned from glossy frameworks and that no procedural tweak will 'fix' complex systems. High performance in dangerous technologies comes from selecting motivated operators and drilling practical skills through apprenticeship‑like training.
— It challenges government and corporate reliance on consulting templates, arguing capacity comes from building operator cultures rather than drafting new processes.
Sources: Nine Rules for Managing Humans Managing Nuclear Reactors, The Bitter Lesson versus The Garbage Can, REVIEW: Cræft, by Alexander Langlands (+1 more)
1M ago
1 sources
The article argues that genuine independence of mind is formed by submitting to authoritative teachers and texts through apprenticeship, where tacit knowledge is absorbed before it can be justified. Paradoxically, a democratic society requires this aristocratic ethos in education to avoid devolving into mob rule. Trust and imitation—anchored in embodied practices—are presented as the core vehicles of cultural and scientific transmission.
— This challenges egalitarian, self‑directed learning ideals by reframing deference to authority as the precondition for the critical thinking democracies depend on.
Sources: The Good Apprentice
1M ago
1 sources
Using Add Health data, the study exploits within‑school, across‑grade variation in same‑gender classmates’ average polygenic score for major depressive disorder. A one‑standard‑deviation rise in peers’ MDD score increases an individual’s depression probability by 1.9–3.8 points (larger for boys initially, persisting for women) and is linked to worse friendships, more substance use, and lower later socioeconomic status. This identifies social‑genetic spillovers in adolescent peer groups.
— It reframes youth mental health and school policy by showing that peer composition’s genetic risk profile can causally shape outcomes, highlighting gene–environment interactions beyond individual biology.
Sources: One look at negative emotional contagion
1M ago
2 sources
Staged 'X‑meets‑Y' conferences and cross‑discipline grant consortia rarely produce durable insights because the participants lack shared methods, incentives, or mutual respect. The interdisciplinary work that matters happens when one researcher deeply learns multiple fields and integrates them internally (or in small, organic collaborations around a concrete problem). Funders should back cross‑training and problem‑anchored teams rather than panel optics.
— It challenges prevailing research‑funding fashions and suggests a redesign of incentives toward individual cross‑training and small, method‑aligned collaborations.
Sources: The only interdisciplinary conversations worth having, Patrick Collison on the Irish Enlightenment
1M ago
1 sources
NCES’s adult literacy surveys (1992 vs. 2003) show overall scores flat, but sharp declines within every education level, including a 13–17 point drop among graduate-degree holders. As more students are pushed through, high-scoring 1990s dropouts become low-scoring 2000s graduates, signaling lowered standards rather than skill gains. Meanwhile, real per‑pupil K–12 spending has tripled since 1970 with stagnant reading scores.
— This supports the 'credentialism over human capital' thesis, challenging massive higher‑ed subsidies and arguing for reform of education’s incentives and governance.
Sources: No one improved their reading skills at all
1M ago
1 sources
OpenAI plans to certify 10 million Americans inside ChatGPT and route them to employers through an AI-powered jobs board by 2030. With early partners like Walmart, BCG, John Deere, and Indeed, a private AI platform would start issuing work-relevant credentials and matching talent at scale, bypassing traditional degrees and staffing channels.
— If AI labs become major credential issuers and job gatekeepers, education, hiring, equity, and privacy policy will have to adapt to platform-run labor markets.
Sources: Links for 2025-09-06
1M ago
1 sources
Today’s top picture books often read like simplified CBT sessions about school anxiety and self‑esteem, delivered in ultra‑colloquial language and speech bubbles. By meeting kids only where they are, these books may stunt vocabulary growth and narrow the emotional and moral range of early reading.
— If early literacy is colonized by therapeutic scripts, schools and publishers may be trading language development and character formation for comfort messaging.
Sources: The misuse of Seuss
1M ago
1 sources
At elite universities in non–right-to-work states, graduate unions are making dues or agency fees a condition of teaching and research employment. Significant shares of those dues flow to national unions that campaign on broader political agendas (e.g., BDS, defunding police), while religious‑exemption processes are policed by the union itself. Recent cases include Stanford’s 2024 contract enabling termination of nonpayers and Cornell’s EEOC fight over invasive questioning of Jewish objectors.
— This highlights a governance mechanism that can compel political financing and suppress dissent in academia under the guise of labor agreements, raising First Amendment–style association concerns and reform questions for university labor policy.
Sources: I’m a Stanford Grad Student. The Graduate Student Union Is Trying to Get Me Fired.
1M ago
1 sources
A JPE paper measures not just answers but respondents’ confidence and pays for truthful reporting, then finds women outperform men on 'intelligence' and compete optimally under risk. The authors also report women score higher on financial literacy once measurement is incentive‑compatible. If robust, core gender‑gap claims in psychology and economics would need revision.
— This challenges long‑standing narratives about gender differences by showing how test design and incentives can reverse headline effects used in policy and workplace debates.
Sources: It would take more than one paper to establish these claims
1M ago
2 sources
Around 1900–1920, expanding secondary education clustered elite youths into dense networks that forged a distinct cohort identity and rejection of grandparents’ culture. This helped drive radical shifts in art, architecture, and music before wider moral and social changes followed. Evidence cited includes surging secondary enrollment (U.S.: 7% in 1890 to 32% in 1920, 51% in 1930), youthful audiences for Debussy/Picasso/Stravinsky/Bauhaus, and the co‑location of teen institutions in cities.
— It recasts modernism as a cohort-structure outcome of schooling rather than a direct, gradual response to technology, implying today’s youth-clustering institutions can similarly reset culture.
Sources: Is Modernism Due To Youth Culture?, Is modernism due to youth culture?
1M ago
1 sources
By eliminating placement tests and remedial math, colleges are routing underprepared students out of math‑heavy majors and into low‑return programs. The diversion disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic students, turning 'equity' into a new form of tracking that closes off BSTEM pathways and depresses lifetime earnings.
— This flips the equity narrative by arguing that standards removal can widen, not narrow, group disparities in skills, majors, and economic outcomes—pushing policy back toward honest sorting and hard K–12 preparation.
Sources: The Equity Trap
1M ago
5 sources
Common molecular methods regress phenotype on genome‑wide relatedness, assuming overall genetic similarity tracks the specific loci that cause a trait. Within‑family contrasts, assortative mating, non‑additive effects, and rare/structural variants can break this link, biasing estimates downward. The heritability 'gap' may be model misspecification, not missing biology.
— It warns policymakers and media not to treat low molecular heritability as proof against genetic influence when methods misalign with trait‑causal architecture.
Sources: The answer to the "missing heritability problem", When Low Heritability Means Different Things: Number of Children vs. Number of Fingers, Heritability of lifetime earnings | The Journal of Economic Inequality (+2 more)
1M ago
5 sources
Dr. Gordon Guyatt, who created evidence-based medicine and the GRADE standard, reportedly signed a letter prioritizing patient autonomy even where evidence is very low in pediatric gender medicine. The critique argues this reverses the core EBM logic that recommendation strength should follow evidence quality. When founders validate autonomy-over-evidence, it legitimizes departures from the very guardrails they built.
— Founder-level endorsement of autonomy in low-evidence settings signals institutional vulnerability to activist pressure and risks normalizing evidence-light care across medicine.
Sources: Autonomy Does Not Trump Evidence: A Response to Dr. Gordon Guyatt, The Broken Chain of Trust in Pediatric Gender Medicine, The Disaster At McMaster Part 2: My Interview With Gordon Guyatt (+2 more)
1M ago
1 sources
Agustina S. Paglayan’s book argues governments adopted mass education primarily to produce obedient citizens, not to expand autonomy. She cites the timing of adoption, the rhetoric that persuaded rulers, and the training/directives given to teachers as evidence of an indoctrination aim. This challenges the romantic story of schooling as a pure emancipation project.
— It reframes education policy debates by suggesting centralization and curriculum battles are features of state power, not bugs, with implications for governance, school choice, and civic formation.
Sources: School and State
1M ago
2 sources
LLMs often translate math, vision, and engineering problems into text and then reason verbally to solve them. Even multimodal systems reportedly convert images into internal text-like tokens, suggesting a one-way advantage from perception to language rather than from language to pure spatial imagery. This points to verbal abstraction as a general-purpose substrate for high-level thought.
— If language is the central substrate, education, testing, and AI design should emphasize verbal reasoning for transfer and generality.
Sources: LLMs: A Triumph and a Curse for Wordcels, Links for 2025-09-02
1M ago
1 sources
The African Union is campaigning to replace Mercator maps with the Equal Earth projection, arguing that Mercator visually shrinks Africa and dampens global attention. If adopted by governments and schools, a 'neutral' cartographic choice becomes a deliberate identity and status intervention.
— It shows how technical standards can encode and redirect geopolitical and cultural status, making visualization policy a lever in decolonization politics.
Sources: Africa wants its true size on the world map
1M ago
3 sources
In India, years‑long cramming for scarce, high‑paying government posts creates queues that build no marketable skills and sideline the country’s most educated youth. Back‑of‑envelope losses are about 1.4% of GDP annually for India, while Brazil’s modeled rent‑seeking costs from public job applications reach 3.61% of output. Meritocratic exams can function as large‑scale rent extraction when pay is mispriced.
— It shifts debates on 'meritocracy' toward incentive design by showing exam systems can drain human capital at national scale.
Sources: India, Greece, Brazil: How High Government Pay Wastes Talent and Drains Productivity, Singapore’s Pay Model Isn’t India’s: Market Wages vs. Civil-Service Rents, Could China Have Gone Christian?
1M ago
1 sources
A new history of Dartmouth v. Woodward shows the 1819 ruling was a hard‑fought partisan conflict, not a neutral legal inevitability. The Marshall Court, spurred by Daniel Webster’s (sometimes factually shaky) argument, effectively invented 'private' corporate status that insulated colleges from state control after New Hampshire had physically seized Dartmouth’s buildings. Modern claims of apolitical university autonomy rest on this political construction.
— It reframes today’s campus interventions as part of a long political lineage, weakening 'unprecedented overreach' narratives and highlighting that legal autonomy is contingent and contestable.
Sources: Higher Education Is Always Political
1M ago
1 sources
A proposed university platform would let independent, often industry-based faculty run small seminars, set their own fees, and primarily offer personal letters of recommendation instead of degrees. The institution acts like Substack for teaching—taking a small cut, convening large conferences for matching, and minimizing centralized bureaucracy. The model bets that employer trust in specific faculty reputations can substitute for formal credentials.
— If letters from vetted practitioner‑faculty can replace diplomas, higher education and hiring could unbundle around reputation networks rather than seat‑time and degree requirements.
Sources: Asking AI's to critique my network university idea
1M ago
5 sources
You can do every statistical 'right thing' and still be wrong if you ask a bad question or ignore history and causality. Good analysis needs aesthetic judgment—taste about questions, variables, and narratives—beyond tidy charts, p‑values, and reviewer‑pleasing formatting. Packaging can hide artless thinking that should be rejected.
— This challenges rule‑based peer review and training by arguing institutions must reward causal judgment and domain knowledge, not just methodological hygiene.
Sources: The art of data analysis, Against Political Chmess, Data is overrated (+2 more)
1M ago
1 sources
As journals add preregistration, open code, and multiple‑testing rules to deter p‑hacking, bad actors adapt while honest researchers face rising compliance costs. The author calls this the 'cycle of tragedy': each patch shrinks one exploit but makes genuine inquiry slower, less satisfying, and harder for newcomers. He also argues that in an LLM era, long introductions and expansive discussion sections should be deemphasized because reviewers can summon context on demand.
— If compliance‑first metascience is reducing research productivity and diversity, reform should target incentives and publication design rather than piling on process rules.
Sources: Why does academia suck?
1M ago
5 sources
Exploiting waitlist variation, attending an Ivy‑Plus college raises a student’s odds of reaching the top 1% of earnings by 50%, nearly doubles elite grad school entry, and almost triples landing at prestigious firms versus attending a flagship public. Admissions rules at a handful of schools therefore directly influence who occupies top economic and institutional roles.
— It links selective-college gatekeeping to downstream elite composition, making admissions policy a lever over national leadership pipelines.
Sources: Who gets into the best colleges and why?, Most smart people don't attend elite universities, Thursday assorted links (+2 more)
1M ago
1 sources
Modern societies need a cadre of 'mandarins'—competent generalist administrators and informed critics—to run and discipline complex institutions. The university, especially the humanities and social sciences, should be repurposed to cultivate this class rather than pursue inward‑facing academic production that the public no longer values.
— This reframes higher‑education reform around elite formation and state capacity, not just campus politics or research metrics.
Sources: What’s the point of the University?
1M ago
2 sources
Re-estimating cohort fertility with dynamic panels that include lagged fertility shows most early-life factors vanish, but the male‑to‑female education ratio remains predictive. Negative coefficients on this ratio in childhood windows imply that cohorts with relatively higher female education have higher completed fertility. This reframes the education–fertility link as sensitive to gender balance, not just years of schooling.
— If relative female education boosts fertility, pronatal and education policies should target gender balance rather than assuming female schooling suppresses births.
Sources: Rethinking education balance and cohort fertility: dynamic panels vs. Mundlak, Rethinking education balance and cohort fertility: dynamic panels vs. Mundlak
1M ago
1 sources
Romania scores near the bottom in OECD PISA tests yet ranks among the top countries in math, physics, and informatics Olympiads. The article argues this paradox comes from a system built to aggressively identify and intensively train top students—via selective schools, competitions, teacher networks, and national camps—rather than to raise the median.
— This spotlights a 'barbell' education strategy where prioritizing elite pipelines can yield world-class outputs even when mass schooling lags, challenging equity-first, one-size-fits-all reforms.
Sources: Why Romania Excels in International Olympiads
1M ago
1 sources
Researchers created 80 'PhD student' bot accounts on EconTwitter varying gender, race, and school prestige, then tracked follow-backs from 6,920 users. Follow-backs were 25% higher for female vs male, 21% higher for top‑school vs lower‑ranked, and 12% higher for White vs Black, with the race gap persisting even at top schools. The result quantifies platform‑level networking advantages that complicate simple discrimination narratives.
— If online professional networks quietly reward prestige and gender while disadvantaging Black students, institutions and media should rethink how platform norms shape early‑career opportunity and claim 'equity' gains.
Sources: Discrimination on #EconTwitter
1M ago
1 sources
The article argues Irish, Italians, and other European immigrants were classified as white in U.S. law and common usage from the start. Claims that they were once 'non‑white' conflate discrimination within whites with non‑white racial classification and rely on selective quotes and wordplay.
— By disputing a core frame in whiteness studies, it reshapes debates on racial identity, historical narratives, and present‑day policy claims built on the 'becoming white' thesis.
Sources: European Immigrants Were Always Considered White
1M ago
2 sources
Splitting childhood shows different levers: early child mortality (0–5) and school‑age life expectancy (6–18) each predict lower completed fertility, but through distinct channels. In adulthood (18–45), the signs flip for mortality (replacement/insurance) and GDP (pro‑cyclical), while life expectancy stays negatively linked to fertility.
— Pinpointing when and how safety and prosperity shape fertility helps policymakers target education, health, and family policy to the stages that actually move long‑run demographics.
Sources: Follow-up: Do changes in childhood conditions predict fertility outcomes?, Follow-up: Do changes in childhood conditions predict fertility outcomes?
1M ago
1 sources
Americans broadly support student religious accommodation and education about religion (e.g., 68% want world religions taught; 55% support time for prayer/reflection; 60% support student-led religious clubs) but oppose state endorsement (50–31 against Ten Commandments displays; 43–38 against staff-led Christian prayer). They also favor evolution (68%) and contraception instruction (75%) while backing parental opt-outs on LGBTQ+ content (59%). The public’s line is clear: allow expression and pluralist instruction, avoid official sectarian acts.
— This delineates a workable middle ground for school policy and litigation, signaling where bipartisan coalitions are feasible and where culture-war flashpoints will trigger backlash.
Sources: What role do Americans think religion should play in public schools?
1M ago
1 sources
Many developing states create massive applicant queues by paying civil servants above market, then rationing entry with exams. Singapore flips this: it pays market rates to the broad civil service and pegs only a few top officials to private‑sector elites, so supply meets demand without exams. This reduces rent-seeking and the talent drain from the private economy.
— It warns policymakers that imitating Singapore by simply 'paying more' will backfire unless pay is market-aligned broadly and de‑compressed only at the top.
Sources: Singapore’s Pay Model Isn’t India’s: Market Wages vs. Civil-Service Rents
1M ago
2 sources
Reanalyses of Milgram show the most authoritarian prod ('You have no other choice, you must continue') produced the least compliance, while appeals to the importance of the study worked better. People didn’t obey raw power; they complied when the request felt purposeful and prosocial.
— This reframes how governments, schools, and employers should seek compliance—persuasion tied to shared goals beats coercive commands.
Sources: You MUST read this post, When Good Intentions Alienate: The Unintended Consequences of Anti-Racist Zeal
1M ago
2 sources
A campus experiment by Legault, Gutsell, and Inzlicht found that compliance‑framed anti‑prejudice pamphlets ('erase racism,' 'stop prejudice') increased modern anti‑Black prejudice compared to doing nothing, while autonomy‑framed messages reduced it. If true at scale, public shaming and mandatory trainings may harden bias rather than soften it.
— It urges institutions to replace coercive DEI messaging with autonomy‑supportive approaches or risk worsening the very attitudes they aim to improve.
Sources: When Good Intentions Alienate: The Unintended Consequences of Anti-Racist Zeal, Pickleball Is What Diversity Workshops Wish They Were
1M ago
3 sources
Reformers often slash headcount while leaving the same rules and processes in place, which just reduces capacity to do the same workload. Sequencing matters: reduce procedural and regulatory burdens first, then resize staff to the lighter mission. Zubok’s account shows misordered liberalization can trigger looting, and the article applies that lesson to U.S. deregulatory efforts.
— This gives policymakers a concrete reform heuristic that can spell the difference between improved state capacity and hollowed‑out failure.
Sources: Order of Operations in a Regime Change, How to Fix Foreign Aid, Still Standing
1M ago
3 sources
Outsider reform projects led by celebrity billionaires last only while they are 'fun.' Once the grind of contracts, baselines, and civil‑service process begins, attention collapses and the effort implodes. Durable reform needs structures that survive boredom and pain, not just hype.
— It reframes evaluations of outsider reformers around motivational durability and institutional fit rather than intent or raw talent.
Sources: More (Brief) Thoughts On DOGE, The Chair Never Even Gets Warm, Still Standing
1M ago
2 sources
Despite headlines about paralysis, Congress still shapes outcomes through committees and cross‑party factions on lower‑salience issues and can even channel foreign policy behavior. This quiet machinery produces policy provisions and constraints that outlast presidential executive orders.
— It redirects attention from sensational floor fights to committee rooms where durable policy is actually made.
Sources: Radical Reforms to Conserve Congress, Still Standing
1M ago
4 sources
A review of experimental 'audit' studies where faculty evaluate identical male and female applicants reports that biases more often run against men than against women. The author contrasts these randomized designs with observational gap studies that can’t establish causality.
— If true, it undercuts prevailing sexism narratives in academia and calls for rethinking DEI hiring policies and compliance regimes.
Sources: More Evidence of Biases Against Men than Against Women in Faculty Hiring, Scientific Rigor versus Rigor Posturing, REVERSAL: Science Faculty's "Subtle" Gender Biases Against Men (+1 more)
1M ago
1 sources
Workers who retrain specifically for AI‑intensive occupations earn less than similar AI‑exposed workers who pursue more general training. The study estimates a 29% lower return for AI‑targeted training among WIOA participants. This suggests 'AI jobs' programs may overpromise for displaced, lower‑income workers.
— It cautions policymakers against hyped AI‑centric retraining tracks and favors broad, transferable skills for better earnings outcomes.
Sources: How Retrainable are AI-Exposed Workers?
1M ago
1 sources
Earnings gains from retraining were driven by the tightest labor‑market years. Training appears to signal value best when firms are hiring aggressively and 'reach deeper' into the skills market.
— Workforce policy should time and design programs to boom conditions—or add hiring incentives—rather than expect countercyclical miracles in slack markets.
Sources: How Retrainable are AI-Exposed Workers?
1M ago
1 sources
Between 25% and 40% of occupations show higher pay when workers move into more AI‑intensive roles, even among relatively low‑income, displaced workers. This indicates sizable adaptation capacity across the occupation map.
— It tempers automation panic by quantifying how much of the workforce can realistically adapt via retraining.
Sources: How Retrainable are AI-Exposed Workers?
1M ago
1 sources
Childcare is expensive because it is labor‑intensive, not because markets are malfunctioning. Labeling it a 'market failure' misdiagnoses the problem and invites subsidies that conflict with many families' preference for a parent at home.
— This reframing redirects family policy from propping up daycare supply toward restoring one‑income viability or cash supports that respect parental choice.
Sources: The Math Problem at the Heart of the Family Budget
1M ago
3 sources
Since the 1990s, states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona moved to at‑will employment, ended collective bargaining, and gave managers discretion over hiring and pay. Surveys and operational metrics suggest performance gains with little evidence of politicization. The federal debate lags decades behind this evidence.
— It challenges the federal Overton window by pointing to large-scale, bipartisan state experiments that rebut fears about politicization.
Sources: Four Ways to Fix Government HR, How Katrina saved New Orleans schools, India, Greece, Brazil: How High Government Pay Wastes Talent and Drains Productivity
1M ago
HOT
7 sources
People may endorse system-sustaining beliefs not from ignorance but to avoid social and economic penalties. Rational adaptation to reputational incentives makes individuals propagate and police prevailing ideology even when it harms them collectively.
— This reframes ideological conflict as an incentive-design problem, pointing to platform rules, workplace policies, and sanction norms rather than education alone.
Sources: Domination and Reputation Management, Blame the Self-Seen Victim, Faking Wokeness to Fit In (+4 more)
1M ago
5 sources
Argues that car-centric development undermines conservative goals like family life, local institutions, fiscal prudence, and social trust. Walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods reduce infrastructure burdens and commuting, while strengthening community ties. This flips a culture-war framing that has cast 15-minute cities as a left-coded project.
— It signals a possible right-left realignment on urban policy, reframing mobility and zoning around community resilience rather than culture-war identities.
Sources: Podcast: Capitalism, Cars and Conservatism, Yes In My Bamako Yard, Little Humans, Big Rules (+2 more)
1M ago
1 sources
After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans converted every public school into a charter, fired the entire teaching workforce, and gave parents near‑total choice while closing or reassigning persistently weak schools. A Tulane University synthesis of a decade of studies finds the 'largest, broadest and most sustained improvement' seen in any U.S. district—across test scores, college access, parental satisfaction, and reduced youth crime involvement.
— It suggests governance overhaul—choice, autonomy, and hard accountability—can dramatically outperform traditional district models, informing national debates over union power, charter caps, and crisis‑driven reform.
Sources: How Katrina saved New Orleans schools
1M ago
1 sources
The Tulane evaluation cited here links New Orleans' district‑wide charter overhaul not only to academic gains but also to reduced involvement in crime among youth. This suggests school governance and accountability reforms can function as crime‑prevention policy, not just education policy.
— If education governance choices measurably reduce youth crime, crime policy debates must weigh school structure alongside policing and social programs.
Sources: How Katrina saved New Orleans schools
1M ago
2 sources
Treat philanthropy not as charity but as a machine that buys and builds elite prestige to create durable soft power. The lever is funding 'elite human capital' and platforms that set fashionable ideas, which then cascade to mass consent.
— If donors can reliably convert money into prestige and then policy, debates about influence shift from lobbying to control of status‑granting institutions.
Sources: The riddle of the niggardly billionaires, A Few Links, 8/24/2025
2M ago
1 sources
PBIS is sold as a neutral management system, but in practice it biases schools toward rewards and away from consequences. Its flexibility and federal backing let districts avoid punitive measures without naming that choice, weakening teacher authority and fueling disorder and burnout. Because it dominates U.S. discipline policy, the effect scales nationally.
— This shifts the school-discipline debate from blaming 'restorative justice' to examining PBIS’s design and federal sponsorship as drivers of classroom chaos and learning loss.
Sources: The High Costs of Classroom Disorder
2M ago
1 sources
Sports like pickleball, with easy entry, doubles play, and a playful vibe, create repeated cross‑age and cross‑background contact that builds familiarity and trust. This everyday, voluntary cooperation can achieve 'diversity' outcomes more reliably than compliance‑oriented trainings. Institutions should design and subsidize such activities if they want durable intergroup cohesion.
— It redirects diversity policy from classroom moralizing to environment and activity design that fosters organic, repeated, low‑stakes cooperation.
Sources: Pickleball Is What Diversity Workshops Wish They Were
2M ago
1 sources
The essay claims boys now learn 'how to be men' less from fathers, coaches, and pastors and more from films, TikTok‑style clips, and parasocial influencers. This shift replaces accountable mentorship with algorithmic role models optimized for engagement, not growth.
— If algorithmic media now do the socialization once done by elders, education, youth policy, and platform governance become de facto family policy.
Sources: Masculinity at the End of History
2M ago
1 sources
The author ties male formlessness to the disappearance of communal rites—danger, shame, victory, and 'keeping score' together—arguing that sports are a thin remnant without elders and organic community. Algorithmic micro‑clips and parasocial figures can’t substitute for shared trials that confer status and adulthood.
— If a lack of real rites, not just economics, underlies male stagnation, policy should target institutions that stage structured challenge (teams, service, apprenticeships) rather than only rhetoric about norms.
Sources: Masculinity at the End of History
2M ago
1 sources
As U.S. campus roles become politically fraught, top administrators are moving to private, globally anchored research institutes that sit outside state and federal higher-ed politics. This re-routes talent and research capacity away from public universities toward philanthropically funded labs.
— It accelerates the privatization and internationalization of research governance, weakening public universities’ influence.
Sources: A case study in the new politics of higher education
2M ago
1 sources
In 1965 the Johnson administration ended automatic student deferments, instituted Selective Service testing, and required colleges to rank students—suddenly exposing many to conscription. Campus protests spiked when material risk rose, suggesting mobilization followed policy incentives more than pure ideological shift.
— It reframes student activism as responsive to concrete risk and policy design, not just ideas, informing how we interpret and forecast protest waves.
Sources: Hidden Calculations, Flow States, Just Asking Questions
2M ago
1 sources
Late Roman elites reportedly had fewer or no children, breaking the link between economic success and reproduction and reducing average numeracy and literacy. Ancient DNA is cited as showing a contemporaneous drop in proxies for cognitive ability, implying selection can shift mental traits within historical time.
— It suggests fertility patterns can quickly alter human capital, with implications for family policy and long‑run growth.
Sources: The North Sea and the Baltic form the core zone of certain tendencies
2M ago
1 sources
The article claims the University of Chicago borrowed more relative to assets than peers, pushing tuition and endowment liquidations toward debt service. To stay solvent, leadership is cutting doctoral training, merging departments, expanding undergrads without faculty growth, and shifting teaching to low‑paid lecturers and even ChatGPT.
— If leverage drives university decisions, the sector’s quality decline is a governance-and-capital-structure problem, not just partisan politics or culture war.
Sources: The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump
2M ago
1 sources
Leadership allegedly reframed the university’s core mission around being a 'tax‑free technology incubator,' subordinating research‑teaching integration to commercialization and facilities debt. This shifts funds and attention away from faculty-driven inquiry to revenue‑chasing operations.
— Treating universities as quasi‑corporate incubators recasts debates on tax exemptions, donor intent, and what the public should expect from higher education.
Sources: The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump
2M ago
1 sources
The piece says Chicago spends an unusually large share of undergraduate tuition servicing debt, while cutting the faculty‑student ratio and hiring hundreds of lecturers. Students pay more for less contact with research‑active faculty.
— This reframes affordability and value debates by tying declining instructional quality directly to balance‑sheet choices, not just administrative bloat.
Sources: The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump
2M ago
1 sources
Modern adult‑centric spaces make normal kid behavior—running, climbing, yelling—misaligned with 'acceptable' conduct, forcing nonstop correction. This shifts parental energy from mentoring to micromanaging and squeezes out free play that builds social and physical skills. The result is a structural pressure point that worsens as societies move indoors and formalize public space.
— If design choices systematically suppress play, urban and school policy should prioritize child‑tolerant environments rather than only blaming parenting or screens.
Sources: Little Humans, Big Rules
2M ago
1 sources
Adult‑centric environments externalize enforcement onto caregivers: because normal kid behavior clashes with fragile interiors and public‑space rules, parents must constantly correct, scold, and supervise. This 'vigilance burden' is a hidden labor and relationship cost of modern design, especially for rambunctious young boys.
— It shifts debates on parenting, youth mental health, and urban policy by showing how design choices create continuous policing work for families rather than mere 'parental failure.'
Sources: Little Humans, Big Rules
2M ago
1 sources
Using a university rule that delayed and gated fraternity/sorority entry, researchers find joining cuts grades by up to 0.3 standard deviations and yields no later earnings boost. The supposed networking payoff does not show up in income data.
— It challenges the belief that Greek affiliations are a good human-capital investment, informing university policy and student choices.
Sources: Round-up: A trait that is barely heritable?
2M ago
1 sources
In confidential interviews, 77% of students said they disagree that gender identity should override biological sex in sports, healthcare, or public data—yet would not say so publicly. This points to a spiral of silence on concrete policy questions, not just vague 'politics.'
— If campus norms suppress majority views on sex-based policy, institutional signals and surveys may misrepresent preferences, distorting rules, research, and trust.
Sources: Faking Wokeness to Fit In
2M ago
1 sources
The assumption that local power is naturally more accountable can fail when small‑scale officials are thin‑skinned, conspiratorial, and surround themselves with security to avoid constituents. Examples include a county executive demanding a multi‑person security detail for travel and school boards treating parents as threats. Decentralization without healthy norms and constraints can devolve into proximate autocracy.
— This reframes federalism debates by arguing accountability depends on culture and incentives, not just proximity, pushing reform toward guardrails for local governance.
Sources: I Have a New Hole In My Priors
2M ago
3 sources
World Athletics will require a one-time SRY gene test to enter the female category, shifting eligibility from hormone levels or identity to a genetic marker tied to male development. The article argues this is the clearest proxy for sex and rebuts the gene’s discoverer who opposes its use. It spotlights edge cases and prioritizes competitive fairness over more subjective standards.
— This sets a precedent for biology-first eligibility rules that could influence other sports and institutions navigating sex-based categories.
Sources: Why World Athletics Is Right to Use the SRY Gene Test, Keep Men Out of Women’s Sports—And Women Out of Men’s, What Americans think about Sydney Sweeney, 'good genes,' and nature vs. nurture
2M ago
1 sources
The essay argues aggression is a natural, socially necessary drive—'stepping toward' conflict to defend others and advance justice—and that schools’ zero‑tolerance rules misfire by suppressing all forms of it. It proposes reframing aggression as a virtue to be trained and channeled rather than punished outright, drawing on theological language and examples.
— If aggression is reframed as a civic virtue when trained, education and youth policy could shift from blanket suppression to structured cultivation, changing how we approach discipline, safety, and male development.
Sources: Aggression sets boys free
2M ago
4 sources
Internal emails at Cornell allegedly instructed a closed, invite-only process to preselect a 'diversity hire,' with no public posting or open competition. This suggests a replicable blueprint: avoid listings, interview one candidate at a time, and minimize discoverability to skirt Title VII risk.
— If common, this exposes universities to broad legal challenges and reframes DEI hiring as a governance and compliance problem, not just a culture-war dispute.
Sources: Cornell Quietly Violated My Civil Rights. Now I'm Taking Legal Action., Oh Man — Imagine If Universities Were Politically Biased In Their Hiring, From Heterodox to Helpless (+1 more)
2M ago
1 sources
The author argues that academics’ brittle prestige and moral self‑image create strong psychological and career incentives to deny problems and resist change agents they see as 'inferior.' This, combined with ideological monoculture, makes self‑reform irrational for insiders and tilts the field toward external audit and enforcement.
— It reframes higher‑ed reform as a prestige‑incentive trap, clarifying why only outside pressure is likely to reset norms and governance.
Sources: From Heterodox to Helpless
2M ago
3 sources
Eric Kaufmann launched a Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham, hosted a 'Post-Progressivism' conference, and issued a manifesto with articles slated for Theory and Society. This marks a coordinated, named movement to reorient social science away from DEI-era orthodoxies toward 'glasnost' and consilience with the natural sciences.
— If heterodox reform consolidates into institutions and journals, it could reshape research agendas, editorial standards, and speech norms across universities.
Sources: The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science, Post-Progressive Social Science: A Manifesto, Post-Progressivism
2M ago
2 sources
The piece claims social feeds compress subjective time in two ways: users underestimate time in the moment and later remember little of what they saw. Rapid novelty and context switching blunt awareness and memory encoding, so whole sessions feel brief in retrospect despite lasting hours.
— This reframes online harms from mere distraction to 'time theft' by design, suggesting policy should target features that degrade chronoception and memory.
Sources: How Social Media Shortens Your Life, The Cantos of Criticism
2M ago
1 sources
Recent survey data show parents read to two‑year‑olds more often than to children aged five to eight. Reading exposure rises early, then drops precisely during the years when independent reading could replace screen time.
— This inversion highlights a preventable gap in habit formation and supports policy shifts toward earlier literacy instruction to counter screen capture.
Sources: Literacy lag: We start reading too late
2M ago
1 sources
Rufo claims some university leaders privately favor depoliticizing reforms but cannot overcome resistant faculties. Federal mandates give them cover to implement changes while attributing them to Washington, realigning campus power without open civil war.
— It shows how external enforcement can rewire internal coalition incentives in universities, enabling reforms that fail under normal campus governance.
Sources: Trump Has Conquered Columbia—Are More Universities Next?
2M ago
1 sources
The piece aggregates studies where faculty evaluate identical male and female dossiers and finds the weight of evidence shows bias against men. Because these audits hold qualifications constant, they identify bias more cleanly than observational gap studies that can’t establish causation.
— Basing DEI and hiring reforms on audit experiments rather than correlational claims would sharpen policy and reduce ideology-driven misdiagnosis.
Sources: More Evidence of Biases Against Men than Against Women in Faculty Hiring
2M ago
1 sources
The essay contends modern Western monarchs are not mere figureheads: like Alfred the Great, they can commission translations, sponsor curricula, shape legal symbolism, and revive shared rituals to rebuild national identity. Soft power exercised through patronage and narrative-setting can buttress social cohesion alongside formal government.
— This reframes constitutional monarchy as a live governance tool for cultural cohesion, suggesting heads of state can actively influence national identity without formal policymaking.
Sources: If I were king
2M ago
1 sources
Some Chinese liberal intellectuals and diaspora commentators, who idealize U.S. liberal democracy ('Beaconism'), now defend Trump’s intervention at Harvard as stopping 'bullying' rather than censorship. This reframes U.S. higher‑ed enforcement actions as restoring liberal order, not undermining it.
— It shows how external and immigrant perspectives can legitimize or recast U.S. culture‑war policy, shaping coalitions and the global narrative around academic freedom and governance.
Sources: Killing Freedom in the Name of Freedom: Debating Trump's Attack on Harvard
3M ago
1 sources
Kaufmann lays out a deliberate strategy—conference, manifesto, journal special issue, funding, then an edited volume—to build 'post‑progressive social science' as a field. He explicitly cites CRT’s 1980s–2000s trajectory as the model for creating legitimacy and scale.
— If successful, this strategy could rebalance agenda‑setting power in academia and reshape which topics and methods are considered credible.
Sources: Post-Progressive Social Science: A Manifesto
3M ago
1 sources
The Buckingham manifesto is co‑signed by figures who disagree on methods—Steven Pinker favoring institutional autonomy and Chris Rufo favoring government intervention—but unite on the goal of rebalancing social‑science inquiry. This creates a rare cross‑ideological pact around both opening 'forbidden' topics and formalizing the study of 'woke' ideology.
— An unusual coalition signals a workable reform lane that could reshape university governance and research norms beyond standard left–right lines.
Sources: Post-Progressive Social Science: A Manifesto
3M ago
1 sources
FIRE’s 60,000-student surveys show Jewish Ivy Leaguers’ self-censorship tripled (13%→35%) and 'very liberal' identification plunged (40%→13%) after spring 2024 encampments, while conservative students’ self-censorship fell (55%→31%). Students are roughly split on who started the Oct. 7 war, with liberal non‑Jews far from liberal Jews on blame. Religious Jews report the highest pressure to self‑censor.
— This signals a coalition shift among future elites, with Jewish students peeling away from the far left and campus speech pressures refocusing.
Sources: Jewish Elite Students' Sudden Alienation from the Left
3M ago
1 sources
In 2024, conservative Ivy League students reported much less self‑censorship (55%→31%) while Jewish students reported much more (13%→35%). The enforcement heat of progressive activism appears to have shifted targets post‑encampments.
— It reveals changing speech‑policing dynamics that could reshape campus norms and political identities.
Sources: Jewish Elite Students' Sudden Alienation from the Left
3M ago
1 sources
A back-of-the-envelope simulation using 2017 university ACT percentiles and enrollment suggests only about 13.8–15.6% of Americans with IQs above 125 attended a top-25 'elite' undergraduate school. Even at very high ability (≈145 IQ), the model estimates only around 50/50 odds of elite-college graduation. The upshot is that elite degrees miss most of the high-ability pool.
— This challenges credentialism and argues hiring, research funding, and leadership pipelines should seek talent beyond elite-college pedigrees.
Sources: Most smart people don't attend elite universities
3M ago
1 sources
The Office for Students is portrayed as using extensive powers to push diversity, equity, and inclusion into university selection and curricula. Combined with fee reliance on international students, this shifts universities toward compliance and branding over scholarship, resembling 'quangocracies' (state‑adjacent NGOs).
— It reframes higher‑ed decline as a governance design problem—regulatory incentives and political mandates—rather than isolated campus culture.
Sources: Diversity is the Inverse of University
3M ago
1 sources
Looser licensing, zoning, and per‑pupil vouchers could unlock a mesh of home‑based services run by mothers: school pods, subscription nursing, home kitchens, and salons. This model aligns with school schedules, rebuilds neighborhood trust, reduces commuting, and creates flexible income without big firms. The tradeoff is shifting oversight from centralized credentials to outcome tracking and basic safety standards.
— It reframes economic development, education, and health policy around enabling household‑scale production rather than ever‑larger institutions.
Sources: We Need More Woman Entrepreneurs
3M ago
1 sources
The essay argues that while perspectives shape which facts we notice, suffering or moral aims (like 'universal emancipation') don’t by themselves yield truer descriptions of society. Reliable knowledge still comes from generalizable methods—data, transparent reasoning, and replicable inference—accessible to all, regardless of social position. Treating the oppressed as having special access to truth risks bad policy and weakens institutions’ ability to adjudicate claims.
— This challenges a popular academic-media frame and urges institutions to center evidence standards over identity-based epistemic trump cards.
Sources: The Standpoint of the Oppressed Doesn't Lead to Truth
3M ago
1 sources
The article contends that southern backcountry militias—largely Scots‑Irish settlers with a hard‑edged frontier culture—were pivotal in turning the war at King’s Mountain and Cowpens. It connects their origins as British‑managed borderers (and later Ulster planters) to their American squatter ethos and willingness to fight, challenging the New England‑centric narrative of independence.
— This reassigns credit for U.S. nation‑founding and helps explain enduring regional political cultures by rooting them in settler‑group history and southern campaign outcomes.
Sources: Independence, Redneck Style
3M ago
1 sources
If cancer is best understood as an evolutionary reversion to ancient cellular programs, oncology needs core training in evolutionary biology and developmental constraints. This would shift clinicians toward targeting conserved vulnerabilities and interpreting tumors as failed multicellularity rather than purely mutation stacks.
— Recasting medical education around evolutionary theory would influence guideline design, drug targets, and how institutions evaluate competing cancer models.
Sources: The Evolutionary Theory of Cancer (podcast)
4M ago
2 sources
CDC’s ADDM Network estimates that 3.2% of U.S. 8‑year‑olds (1 in 31) had ASD in 2022, up from 1 in 36 in 2020. The report also reiterates a >3× male‑to‑female ratio and shows prevalence across all racial and ethnic groups.
— An official prevalence baseline informs debates over causes, diagnosis policy, school and health‑system capacity, and how to interpret the long‑run rise in autism identification.
Sources: Data and Statistics on Autism Spectrum Disorder | Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) | CDC, Prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder in Preterm Infants: A Meta-analysis - PubMed
4M ago
1 sources
Harvard’s governing board stripped Business School professor Francesca Gino of tenure and terminated her employment after an internal probe concluded she manipulated data in multiple studies. This appears to be the first such tenure revocation by the Harvard Corporation in decades and follows court rulings that dismissed her defamation claims.
— This sets a high‑profile precedent for how elite institutions may sanction research misconduct, reshaping norms around tenure’s protections, due process, and scientific credibility.
Sources: In extremely rare move, Harvard revokes tenure and cuts ties with star business professor | GBH
6M ago
1 sources
The author suggests that widespread modern illiteracy isn’t merely decay but an evolved social response to an environment flooded with hazardous, manipulative information. In this view, stepping back from books and deep reading can function as a protective filter when institutions fail to curate trustworthy knowledge. Literacy revival, therefore, must start with meaning, mentorship, and cultivation rather than technocratic fixes.
— This reframes literacy and media policy as selection problems under information risk, challenging standard prescriptions for education and cultural renewal.
Sources: The Cantos of Criticism
6M ago
1 sources
The author argues you can’t coerce a captured elite university into 'merit' because, inside it, ideology is what counts as merit. Instead of punitive audits or forced hiring rules, real power should make Harvard irrelevant—cut it out of decision flows while building more attractive rival institutions and only use coercion sparingly with decisive, permanent effects.
— This reframes campus reform from coercive makeover to competitive displacement, guiding how governments and donors should deploy leverage against entrenched institutions.
Sources: Harvard to the Finland Station
7M ago
1 sources
Revive the older sense of craft (cræft) as a fusion of practical skill, strength, and virtue, not merely handmade aesthetics. If moral excellence is partly forged through skilled bodily action, then restoring craft education and apprenticeships is a character policy, not nostalgia.
— This reframes schooling, work, and AI displacement debates by tying human flourishing to embodied mastery rather than purely cognitive or procedural metrics.
Sources: REVIEW: Cræft, by Alexander Langlands
7M ago
2 sources
The author argues the contemporary 'settler‑colonialism' framework—used to stigmatize European‑descent Jews in Israel—was largely built by Australian academics, not simply inherited from 1960s Francophone or Arab writers. She also critiques the Australian habit of folding 40,000 years of Aboriginal prehistory into the nation’s story to support analogies that don’t fit cases like Algeria.
— If true, it shifts blame lines and strategy in Israel‑Palestine discourse by tracing influential rhetoric to a specific academic export rather than to long‑standing anti‑colonial theory.
Sources: Reports, recriminations, and realism, Australia Sneezes, America Catches Flu…
8M ago
1 sources
If institutions truly stop using race (no DEI, no disparate‑impact rules), selection effects will likely enlarge measured group gaps in admissions, testing, hiring, and discipline. Without a publicly accepted hereditarian account, those gaps will spur demands to re‑impose equity policies, recreating the conditions for 'woke' norms. The argument says durable reform needs a plan for explaining persistent disparities, not only new rules.
— It forces policymakers and anti‑DEI reformers to confront how their frameworks will handle persistent outcome gaps without relapsing into equity mandates.
Sources: Was I Wrong about Woke?
2Y ago
1 sources
By following rare surnames through elite rosters (universities, professions, legislatures) over centuries, Clark argues social mobility is much slower and more consistent across countries than standard parent‑child measures show. He also contends endogamy increases persistence and that racism and simple wealth inheritance cannot account for the patterns.
— This reframes equality‑of‑opportunity debates by suggesting deep, persistent family‑level advantages (e.g., inherited 'social competence' and assortative mating) drive outcomes more than near‑term policies alone.
Sources: The Son Also Rises (book) - Wikipedia