sarahconstantin's Shortform

sarahconstantin

links 8/17/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-17-2026

- https://imbue.com/minds/inspirations/ list of AI tools that might actually be useful for someone (none I especially want though)
- https://mostlydeadlanguages.tumblr.com/post/656166624810991616/ea-na%E1%B9%A3ir-reassures-two-men-uet-v-72 "Ea-Nasir reassures two men."
- https://commoncog.com/be-good-to-your-mentors/ advice on being mentored
- https://danmeyer.substack.com/p/does-alpha-school-work-for-regular critique of a version of "AlphaSchool" that is just the online tech stack, done with a nonselective student population, at home with no teacher supervision, and underperforms public school on test scores.
  - Even assuming this is true, it's not convincing that parents shouldn't send their kids to a "normal" Alpha School, which is selective and does have teachers and a campus. (My kids are starting Alpha School in the fall).
  - also note that 'it's just selection effects' can mean two things -- "better test scores are literally just a statistical artifact due to taking the average scores of a smarter tranche of kids" (no causal effect), or "a school that only admits smart kids actually allows the kids to progress more than they would if mixed in with genpop" (a causal effect). i suspect both are factors for why average test scores are higher in selective schools.
  - it makes sense that education researchers care about the whole student population! and a teaching method that only helps smart or rich kids is a "failure" from that perspective. and I think Alpha's public messaging tends towards making extraordinary claims pretty casually, in a way that's entirely fair to critique. but if you are a parent deciding what to do for your kids, and you are rich and/or have smart kids, your priorities are necessarily different.
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-escape-artist interesting book review of the memoir of a guy who escaped Auschwitz.
  - (though the review author probably shouldn't be so shocked that the book author blames the Jewish community for not doing more to prevent/mitigate the Holocaust. That was not at all unusual! in fact, my sense is that Holocaust survivors writing memoirs pretty much never took the simple "everyone but the Nazis was innocent" line. there is a ton of bitterness, and guilt, about how the dead were screwed over by "fellow victims" who were more ruthless in trying to survive, or who engaged in small acts of cowardice or denial. and how conditions in the camps sometimes utterly destroyed human empathy, such that survivors would not really want to be friends afterwards with people they knew in there. simply being a victim of an atrocity does not make you into a "good guy"; it's more often the opposite. this is why it's exceptionally impressive when people are brave or kind despite extreme adversity. people these days forget that!)

"a school that only admits smart kids actually allows the kids to progress more than they would if mixed in with genpop"

This seems like a taboo or a blind spot in usual debates about education.

Ironically, because many people mention it as an argument against elite education -- we should not take the bright kids out of average schools, because their presence is motivating for the average students who then learn more.

When I hear that, I obviously ask: "So maybe if we take the bright kids out of average schools and put them in the same school, then by the sam... (read more)