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4 stars
Your Review: Alpha School | Astral Codex Ten
45-minute read
In January 2025, the charter school application of “Unbound Academy”, a subsidiary of “2 Hour Learning, Inc”, lit up the education press: two hours of “AI‑powered” academics, 2.6x learning velocity, and zero teachers. Sympathetic reporters repeated the slogans; union leaders reached for pitchforks; Reddit muttered “another rich‑kid scam.” More sophisticated critics dismissed the pitch as “selective data from expensive private schools”.
But there is nowhere on the internet that provides a detailed, non-partisan, description of what the “2 hour learning” program actually is, let alone an objective third party analysis to back up its claims.
[...]
If all of this makes your inner Bayesian flinch, you’re in good company. After twenty‑odd years of watching shiny education fixes wobble and crash—KIPP, AltSchool, Summit Learning, One-laptop-per-child, No child left behind, MOOCs, Khan‑for‑Everything—you should be skeptical.
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For me, the real value that comes from Alpha is not the performance uplift. The most important feature of Alpha is that they have found a way to learn more efficiently. It allows students to condense all the “required” state-mandated material into half a day for ~6 years instead of a full day for ~13 years. Is that the right stuff to learn? Are they learning all they need from that platform? That almost doesn’t matter. The point is that the alternative is to spend more than twice the amount of time to get to the same (or worse) output.
Once you have freed up half a day for 6-years and a full day for the other seven, you open up a limitless number of possibilities.
3 stars
The Unending Disappearance of Jason Landry | Texas Monthly
35-minute read
The day before he would take off his clothes and vanish into the rural countryside on a frigid night—defying logic, devastating those who loved him, and baffling some of the best criminal investigators in Texas—Jason Landry was thinking about socks. Not just any socks, but a colorful pair that featured an image of a monkey in a suit and tie holding a briefcase in one hand and a banana in the other, with the words “monkey business” stitched across each ankle. Socks were the highlight of an extensive, bullet-pointed Christmas list that Jason texted to his mother, Lisa, on Saturday, December 12, 2020. He preferred “wacky and cool socks,” he noted, not basic ones with “tacos or dogs on them.”
[...]
The messenger, who went by the pseudonym Courtlan Smith on Facebook, said they wanted to work with her to solve Jason’s disappearance. There were, however, stipulations. As long as Jason was missing, Lay would never know Smith’s real name, hear their voice, or see their face. Smith, whose gender was also ambiguous, insisted that the relationship be kept confidential.
One reason for the secrecy, Lay said Smith explained, was that if Jason had been killed, the murderer could be a member of one of the Facebook groups. Smith also demanded complete honesty. It was the only way to exchange information, Smith argued, increasing their chances of identifying evidence that could break the case wide open.
Original link | Archive.is link
At Jackie Robinson's high school, Altadena rebuilds after fire | ESPN
11-minute read
Jasmine's family has lived in Altadena for generations. They lost everything in the Eaton Fire. Their homes. Old photographs. Their favorite places. On the way to the ceremony today, Brenda hugged nearly everyone who crossed her path. She knows this town and its people. They know her. Her father graduated from Muir, as did her two oldest daughters. She was classmates with so many parents and faculty gathered here today. Jasmine included many of them in the collage on her graduation cap: Dr. Gray, head water polo coach Micol Issa, athletic director Alfredo Resendiz.
They all came back to their hometown because they believe Altadena is special, a place where families put down roots and stayed. In the weeks and months after the fire, they tracked every student's whereabouts, feeling keenly the loss of each family that left. For the students who made it here to graduation, and especially for the 70 or so who stand, today is a celebration. As they move their tassels from right to left and toss their caps into the air, they cry and hug and take in this moment of reprieve from living in hotel rooms, waiting in line at donation centers and sitting in unending uncertainty.
2 stars
Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | Astral Codex Ten
23-minute read
The mid-20th century was the golden age of nurture. Psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the spirit of the ‘60s convinced most experts that parents, peers, and propaganda were the most important causes of adult personality.
Starting in the 1970s, the pendulum swung the other way. Twin studies shocked the world by demonstrating that most behavioral traits - including socially relevant traits like IQ - were substantially genetic. Typical estimates for adult IQ found it was about 60% genetic, 40% unpredictable, and barely related at all to parenting or family environment.
By the early 2000s, genetic science reached a point where scientists could start pinpointing the particular genes behind any given trait. Early candidate gene studies, which hoped to find single genes with substantial contributions to IQ, depression, or crime, mostly failed. They were replaced with genome wide association studies, which accepted that most interesting traits were polygenic - controlled by hundreds or thousands of genes - and trawled the whole genome searching for variants that might explain 0.1% or even 0.01% of the pie. The goal shifted toward polygenic scores - algorithms that accepted thousands of genes as input and spit out predictions of IQ, heart disease risk, or some other outcome of interest.
The Unseen Fury Of Solar Storms | Noema Magazine
16-minute read
It is only since humanity constructed a planet-scale network of electromagnetic technologies, and subsequently grew to depend on that network for just about everything, that the sun’s activity became a potential hazard. In basic terms, the primary danger of space weather is its capacity to produce an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Upon making contact with the upper reaches of the atmosphere (the ionosphere), charged particles thrown out by the sun can instigate a “geomagnetic storm”, inducing currents in the Earth’s crust that overwhelm electrical equipment and its infrastructure, resulting in cascading malfunctions, power surges and blackouts. Anything that relies on electricity is vulnerable. Satellites, power grids, aviation, railways, communications, farming, heavy industry, military installations, global trade, financial transactions — the categories of vital systems that could be impacted by a sun-borne EMP are endless and interconnected, affecting every facet of our networked society.
Evolution and Guinea Pig Toes | Nautilus
9-minute read
As an evolutionary biologist, I can’t go far in my work without tripping over an insight from Wright. But his work’s importance crystalized on the world health stage when strange new mutations of the COVID-19 virus began emerging. When, in 2022, the Omicron variant rapidly replaced the original variant due to its higher infectivity, researchers discovered that this superpower had actually resulted from a series of about nine mutations that initially reduced its infectiousness. How did a virus that was initially less infectious persist long enough to obtain the next mutations to become even more infectious than the original variant?
How I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old | The Intrinsic Perspective
10-minute read
Put it all together, and early reading for pleasure stands out in the scientific literature, in that it has (a) very broad cognitive benefits, (b) good empirical support for this class of thing, (c) has a large environmental component, and (d) actively replaces and competes with screen time, which is usually neutral or negative in the literature (in the ABCD cohort, screen time had an inverse correlation with reading for pleasure).
New Sphere-Packing Record Stems From an Unexpected Source | Quanta Magazine
5-minute read
Over the years, they’ve come up with better packings. But these improvements have been small and relatively rare.
Now, in a short manuscript posted online in April, the mathematician Boaz Klartag has bested these previous records by a significant margin. Some researchers even believe his result might be close to optimal.
A newcomer to this area of study, Klartag achieved his packing method — which works in all arbitrarily high dimensions — by resuscitating an old technique that experts had abandoned decades earlier. The work taps into several long-running debates about the nature of optimal packings in high dimensions. Should they be ordered or disordered? And how snug can they possibly get?
“This is really an amazing breakthrough,” said Gil Kalai, a mathematician at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It’s something that’s excited mathematicians for nearly 100 years.”
A Possible Connection Between Mental Illness and Diet | Undark Magazine
9-minute read
Palmer, a Harvard psychiatrist who works at McLean Hospital near Boston, had just published “Brain Energy,” a book arguing that much mental illness is rooted in metabolic dysfunction rather than neurotransmitter imbalance, the prevailing model. For nearly 10 years, Palmer has been a leading advocate of using the high-fat, moderate-protein, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet — or “ketogenic metabolic therapy” as some clinicians call the rigorous and restrictive regimen to distinguish it from the popular weight-loss diet — to help people suffering from mental illness regain control of their health by directly addressing their metabolic dysfunction.
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Shebani Sethi, a Stanford psychiatrist and obesity specialist, published a study in Research Psychiatry last year in which she tracked 21 adults diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. All had some metabolic condition such as insulin resistance or obesity, and all were also taking antipsychotics. Participants were put on a high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet and closely monitored for four months. At the end of the study, three-fourths of participants showed significant reductions of their psychiatric symptoms.
#81. A Brief History of Education | Play Makes Us Human
9-minute read
Schools as we know them began centuries ago as Church-run institutions designed explicitly for obedience training and indoctrination. The curriculum and stated goals of schooling have changed over time, but the methodology has not. We still have today a system well designed for obedience training and indoctrination and poorly designed for anything else.
Think about it. The only way students can pass in school is to do what they are told to do, no matter how stupid and irrelevant it seems; and almost the only way they can fail is to not do what they are told to do. Teachers go into the profession for all sorts of idealized reasons and, generally, obedience training is not one of them. But once in the profession, they are, by necessity, obedience trainers. They reward for obedience and punish for disobedience. We don’t like to think of the school lessons today as doctrine, but when you require students to feed back, unquestioningly, whatever it is you “teach,” then what you are teaching is doctrine. Some great teachers can overcome it, but it takes much effort and cannot be fully overcome as the school structure doesn’t allow that.
The dawn of the posthuman age | Noahpinion
11-minute read
When I was a child, sometimes I felt bored; now I never do. Sometimes I felt lonely; now, if I ever do, it’s not for lack of company. Social media has wiped away those experiences, by putting me in constant contact with the whole vast sea of humanity. I can watch people on YouTube or TikTok, talk to my friends in chat groups or video calls, and argue with strangers on X and Substack. I am constantly swimming in a sea of digitized human presences. We all are.
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Thus, dimly and through the fog, we can begin to perceive the shape of the future that the posthuman age will take. As humanity becomes more tightly bound into a single digital collective, we find that we desire offline families less and less. As we gradually abandon reproduction, there are fewer and fewer of us, forcing us to cling even more tightly to the online collective — to spend more of our time online, to take solace in the ever-denser core of the final global village. The god-mind of that collective delivers us riches undreamt of by our ancestors, but we enjoy that bounty in solitude as we wirehead into the hive mind for a bit of company.
1 star
Contra Skolnick On Schizophrenia Microbes | Astral Codex Ten
4-minute read
Stephen Skolnick is a gut microbiome expert blogging at Eat Shit And Prosper. His most recent post argues that contra the psychiatric consensus, schizophrenia isn’t genetic at all - it’s caused by a gut microbe.
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I disagree with all of this.
Did the Thunder get too good, too fast? | Silver Bulletin
8-minute read
Three seasons ago, the Oklahoma City Thunder, rebuilding from a Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook-led era that peaked with a quick exit in the NBA Finals in 2012, went 24-58. None of their top eight players was more than 23 years old. They drew the right lottery balls for the 2nd pick in the NBA Draft, snagging Chet Holmgren, along with Jalen Williams later in the first round.
Two years ago, the Thunder were 40-42 — but actually a little pluckier than that, finishing with a positive point differential even as Holmgren was hurt in the preseason and took a gap year. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was suddenly a star, averaging 31.4 points per game. Still, nobody was prepared to anoint the Thunder a contender: they entered the 2023-24 season with +10000 odds (100:1 against) of winning the NBA Finals. Instead, with Holmgren making his debut and Williams blossoming, they finished with the #1 seed in the Western Conference at 57-25 before losing to Dallas in the Western Conference Semifinals.
And then this year, the Thunder were one of the best teams in NBA history, with a 68-14 record, the best point differential ever, an MVP Award for SGA, and then on Monday night, the first title in Thunder history.
Why Are Homes in Western States So Expensive? | Construction Physics
6-minute read
The most obvious pattern here is the huge sea of red counties in the western half of the US. In the rest of the country expensive housing is mostly concentrated around major metro areas, outside a few hotspots like South Florida and the Blue Ridge Mountains. But in the West it seems to be everywhere.
If we dive into this pattern, the explanation appears to be a simple case of high demand. While there’s high demand and high home prices in major metro areas around the country, western states are unusual for having high demand in rural areas as well.
Now I Really Won That AI Bet | Astral Codex Ten
6-minute read
In June 2022, I bet a commenter $100 that AI would master image compositionality by June 2025.
Stealing a ‘superpower’ | Harvard Gazette
3-minute read
In the new paper, the team reports how the sea slug Elysia crispata, a species native to the tropical waters of the western Atlantic and Caribbean, eat algae but do not fully digest the chloroplasts. Instead, the slugs divert these organelles into intestinal sacs and encase them inside a special membrane that the scientists termed a “kleptosome.” Within this unique slug structure, the stolen organelles are kept alive to continue photosynthesis.
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Chemical analysis revealed that the stolen chloroplasts contained slug proteins. This suggests the hosts were keeping the stolen organelles alive. Meanwhile, the organelles continued to produce their own algae proteins, proving they were still functioning inside the slugs.
UC Irvine-led team uncovers cell structures that squids use to change their appearance | UC Irvine News
3-minute read
The group of scientists, which included collaborators from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, found that in vibrantly colored squid mantle tissues, light-manipulating cells called iridophores or iridocytes contain stacked and winding columns of platelets from a protein called reflectin, with the columns functioning as Bragg reflectors that selectively transmit and reflect light at specific wavelengths.
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In a paper published today in Science, the researchers discussed how they took inspiration from the cells and their internal columnar structures to develop a multispectral composite material with adjustable visible and infrared properties.
A simple monthly injection allows mice to live 25% longer and free from diseases | El Pais
3-minute read
It seems too good to be true, but biochemist Jesús Gil speaks enthusiastically from his laboratory in London. “There is no reason to think that what we have seen in mice will not work in people,” he says. What they have observed in rodents is verging on the miraculous: a team of scientists has given monthly injections of a simple antibody to mice that are almost 18 months old, an age equivalent to 55 human years. These animals have lived up to 25% longer than their peers and in good health, with lower incidence of cancer, less cholesterol, and greater muscle strength. It is as if human life expectancy had skyrocketed to 104 years, instead of the current 83 in Spain, for example.
Archaeologists discover 3,500-year-old city in Peru | BBC News
1-minute read
Archaeologists have announced the discovery of an ancient city in Peru's northern Barranca province.
The 3,500-year-old city, named Peñico, is believed to have served as a key trading hub connecting early Pacific coast communities with those living in the Andes mountains and Amazon basin.
Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide | One Useful Thing
7-minute read
Every few months I put together a guide on which AI system to use. Since I last wrote my guide, however, there has been a subtle but important shift in how the major AI products work. Increasingly, it isn't about the best model, it is about the best overall system for most people. The good news is that picking an AI is easier than ever and you have three excellent choices. The challenge is that these systems are getting really complex to understand. I am going to try and help a bit with both.