links 8/25/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-25-2026

• • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheria the land of Phaeacia in the Odyssey probably was supposed to be the island of Corfu, off the west coast of Greece
  • https://michaelnotebook.com/cupcake/ Michael Nielsen thinks about when self-blame works and doesn't work
  • https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SNAKJuN8FdoEaWeFC/in-search-of-natural-features Dmitry Vaintrob looks at what feature directions (in the residual stream) are "denoised" by an LLM (aka amplified if above a threshold and damped if below a threshold). unlike SAEs, this measure is robust to different input distributions, even really artificial ones like bigrams only; it's not about the dataset you use for testing it, it's really saying something about the weights. the attractors/maxima seem to be about 4 very simple types of text: abstract nouns, names and text continuation, whitespace, and the word "the".
  • https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/re-re-re-pritchard-on-liberal-happiness Scott Alexander argues that yes, the happiness research does too show that money correlates with happiness both within and across countries, contra Cassie Pritchard, who thinks liberalism is "exhausted" because it only focuses on economic growth, which isn't what matters to people.
    • I am predisposed to be on the liberal pro-growth side rather than the socialist side, of course, but I was surprised to learn that money correlates this well with reported happiness; i still don't have strong opinions on the data (I have kind of an "ugh field" around social science, as it's so contentious and hard to be sure about.)
    • it is weird to see a socialist arguing that having more money does not matter to people, as opposed to "meaning, security, and satisfaction." I am confident, from hearing firsthand accounts, that poverty is bad and poor people do not like it. If your political program does not even claim to offer relief from poverty, what are you even doing. The traditional left-wing critique of fascism is that it gives poor people exciting vibes instead of material necessities. We are not all living in post-scarcity (and those of us who are should count our blessings!), and material necessities are still a big deal. I'm not sure Pritchard has really committed to "vibes over dollars" in her piece, but she at least feints in that direction a few times. She mentions a national jobs guarantee, for instance, and she talks about political participation -- one might infer that she thinks that making people feel like they matter is a bigger deal for happiness than making them richer.
      • the trouble is that most of the ways government can make people feel important are giving them opportunities to hate and hurt their enemies. in practice this is simply going to be old-fashioned bigotry. Prioritizing a "sense of meaning" over actual material conditions is dangerous.
      • I personally don't think the government should be in the business of providing people meaning, though there are some places I could compromise on that. (At a local level, for instance, I can support public events and public spaces that inspire, educate, and connect people.)
    • honestly I think people don't care about "economic growth", the phrase. they don't care about "GDP." Those things sound like some business guy's money, they are business-coded. but people care a lot about their cost of living, their salary, their employment prospects, and so on. i think polling and voting really bears this out. large populations are often wrong about what policies will make them materially better off, but that doesn't mean they're "post-economic" and don't care about money.
      • economic issues are not fun to pay attention to (in media and discourse), but people care about them -- these are not the same thing. what you spend the most time dwelling on or talking about is not necessarily what you prioritize highest when making decisions.
  • https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/why-parents-love-a-school-with-bogus AlphaSchool's "2x" learning claim is really overblown.
    • i think this is a very fair critique and I'm frustrated with the marketing puffery.
    • the fact remains that there aren't a lot of school options that offer challenging academics and ability tracking. it's bad out there. I'll accept a fair amount of nonsense if you actually do the school stuff seriously and well. (A genuine intellectual culture fostering "love of learning" would be amazing, but it is just hard to find.)
  • https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-western-water-crisis-has-a-simple I liked this Matt Yglesias explainer: water shortages in the American West are because water prices are set below market rates for farmers. we would probably have massive desalination efforts if not for that.
  • https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/ross-barkan-vs-the-machine opinion journalist Ross Barkan got fired for not citing his sources, and Naomi Kanakia defends him, apparently because the alternative is AI? this seems weak. "At least he's a human" -- well, so are lots of other people who would love to make a living as writers. I get that it's bad in journalism but yikes.