iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 5h

Yes, I mean the peer pressure, not the activity. Not-getting-buffaloed into something is the province of the middle-aged, be it: -one more beer -that risky dive into the pool -joining the office softball team -buying your kid whatever brand of shoes -"just trying out" some broish podcast etc

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 5h

Being "too old for this shit" is amongst the (scarce) Very Good things about getting old!

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 6h

tfw the subtweet is so ready but conditions on the ground simply can't sustain it

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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 8h

This is the type of unaccountable behavior from armed government forces that helped spark the American Revolution. It's what the founding generation wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights to oppose. 🇺🇲

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 11h

Which I share mostly b/c I want a record to prove that I am not a knee-jerk AI skeptic or anti-tech or whatever strawman. I'm someone who wants to get useful work done and is open to AI as a tool—but has persistently found it disappointing for almost anything that I'd need it to do.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 11h

"Whoops, you're right, that school *doesn't* have that program. The confusion is because it's in the same enrollment feeder pattern as a school that *does* have that program."

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 11h

Tried to get AI to help me with a research project the other day—searching out a bunch of schools of a particular type and subsequently filtering them in various ways. It was...discouraging. Lots of quick data, lots of confident answers, lots of errors.

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Maureen Kelleher @maureenkelleher.bsky.social · 22h

It's not the focus of the piece, but this aside is gold: "My longstanding observation is that the thing we scale fastest and best is failure. When we race to grow before we understand what growing requires, we take good ideas and kill them by multiplying them before we know enough to do it well."

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 23h

"There’s only one thing the critics have generated more of than TFA, and that’s solution-free criticism." citizen.substack.com/p/one-day-in...

citizen.substack.com

One Day, Indeed

I will always support people who believe we will find a way to educate every child.

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Olivia Waite @oliviawaite.com · 05/10/2026

There is a bleak sort of pleasure in telling people who bring up AI in casual conversation, “Actually, I’m one of the authors AI stole from. Not an exaggeration. The judge ordered them to send me a check.” It hits them different when it’s a real person saying it.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The frantic nature of the whole AI enterprise is maybe the defining characteristic—like, no, no, we can't answer questions about why we did things this way, it just must be this way, what do you mean you don't like it, if we don't hurry someone else will do it this way, plz plz you don't understand

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

extrapolating from a sample size of 1 (game)

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Fall still the greatest season, no question, no debate, no serious pushback

picture of gorgeous leaves in DC that are green from the stem about 2/3 of the way out towards the tips with a subsequent band of bright scarlet and then a band of golden yellow at the edges.

Different picture of gorgeous leaves in DC that are green from the stem about 2/3 of the way out towards the tips with a subsequent band of bright scarlet and then a band of golden yellow at the edges.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Just successfully defended my title at the Fun Run for my kid's HS athletics fundraiser. 2x champ—take that, anxious, insecure Conor from 1998(ish).

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Citizen Jane @rivergoat.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

LOVE ❤️

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Now, as for at least the past 10 (20? 30?) years, it is *critical* that we keep receipts to stop folks from imagining daylight between "respectable" conservative institutions and guys like Rufo.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

So: if we're gonna put this movement away for real, we need to make sure that folks like Salam and Goldberg and various others who enable the Rufos of the right...don't get to rejoin our politics as Very Serious, Very Reasonable Men once (if) we get past the immediate crisis.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

For whatever reason, these guys never disavow their fringe until it's way too late (if they ever get around to it). So it kept building and growing and Bob Dole went from radical conservative to moderate as the GOP fell off the right wing of reality.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

You want to know where MAGA came from, really? It came from the mainline conservatives who thought they could ride on the noxiousness of the Tea Party movement and Young Guns and the direct-mail Michigan Militia stuff in the 1990s and the Birchers before that. Etc.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Basically: If Salam and the Manhattan Institute host Rufo's nonsense, they don't get to rehabilitate later as a redoubt of responsible, non-MAGA conservatism. No points for only facilitating authoritarians just a little bit.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

In 2008, Jonah Goldberg wrote a trash heap of a book called Liberal Fascism. It had a smiley face w/a Hitler mustache on the cover. Republicans built anti-Obama rhetoric around its (crummy historical) claims for years! Now Goldberg's a Never Trump hero. GTFOH. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal...

en.wikipedia.org

Liberal Fascism - Wikipedia

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Otherwise, you end up letting people like Jonah Goldberg unjustly rehabilitate their reputations once the public sours on the worst of Republican governance.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Now, as for at least the past 10 (20? 30?) years, it is *critical* that we keep receipts to stop folks from imagining daylight between "respectable" conservative institutions and guys like Rufo.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This happened to me in the supermarket parking lot last week and I responded, "I definitely DO NOT" in a flat, monotone voice...except then I had to spend the next 10 minutes explaining the situation to my 2nd grader.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

To put it another way...the value of an elite institution here might be that it buys a kid a few more years to figure out their path. If you're 18 and good at school but not clear on a career, a place w/that prestige keeps lots of doors open while you figure it out.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Me too! I hadn't realized just how much I appreciate public/civic investments in culture—by the people, for the people—until they came under sustained assault.

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Anjali Dayal @anjalikdayal.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

these are our pianos, not theirs! I know this stuff can feel secondary with all of the immediate pain this admin causes, but in the face of such personalism, it also feels important to assert the democratic principle that these cultural inheritances don't belong to the president, they belong to us

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This is a useful piece from @citizenstewart.bsky.social. It gets at why I'm much more skeptical of (publicly funded) private school choice programs and more open to (curated) public school choice programs. citizen.substack.com/p/the-myth-o...

citizen.substack.com

The myth of middle-class school choice supremacy

One unexpected result of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ popular essay is how it revealed a high number of perfect parents.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Yeah, I think that that's right also—the extra-elite places buy more unconditional options *and* the social status/social networks to network yourself (w/o much work) into other additional options.

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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

When I do the morning school drop off I frequently think about how visibly and obviously different the kids walking a couple blocks west to the neighborhood elementary school look from the kids walking a couple blocks east to the charter school.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Yes! There's some discussion of this in the article linked in the OP—we have data showing that privileged folks cluster around their perceived social peers

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

That curation matters! And we more or less know how to do it. There's been ample research on which oversight/accountability systems for charters produce better overall results for kids—especially for historically marginalized kids.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Basically: if you're a parent using a public choice system, you're doing your best to choose something that works for your kid...but you're also operating with a greater safety net in the (likely?) event that you don't make a perfect/lucky choice.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

1) Those additional layers of accountability vary a lot by place (blue states/cities tend to curate their public options more aggressively), & 2) they're never 100% perfect or failsafe, but they *do* improve the likelihood that a family's choosing from a stock of reasonably effective schools.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

If they're public charter schools, they were opened under a contract with a charter school authorizer—and that contract specifies the student outcomes necessary for the school to stay open.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

...but they also almost always have a bunch of quality controls operating in the background. They have publicly-visible student achievement data, accountability systems for pressuring schools to improve, and the like.

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

And that brings us to public choice programs, which have a genuinely *different* accountability approach. They offer families options, sure, and they sometimes talk about making sure families can pick the "perfect" fit for their kid...

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

But it's also b/c it's just super tough to parent around these things. Maybe you suspect your kid would do better in a different school...but can you manage the social upheaval and friction and logistical complexity of that move?

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

That may be because they don't have good info about how their kids are doing—cf. the Nikole Hannah-Jones article and ensuing discourse. bsky.app/profile/cono...

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hammancheez but spooky @hammancheez.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

its like buying a house you don't know if you've made a horrible mistake until 4 years in

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

And then there's the data! Most private choice programs are supposed to work on the market principle—families choose schools that work for their kids and leave schools that don't. Efficient. (Ideally) Transparent. Accountable. But most studies show that families don't really match that model!

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

That's why I'm usually skeptical of parents who claim to know that their kid would "thrive" in a certain kind of school—Montessori or STEAM or diverse or homogeneous or whatever. Kids are malleable and complicated and always unfolding into someone new—how could you possibly know?

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I've known this forever! I'm a former teacher, an education researcher, a former full-time dad, and our kids' primary caregiver for all but two years of our parenting lives... I've kinda run point on choosing schools for our kids. I feel exquisitely uncertain about every choice I've made!

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Basically: much of school choice advocacy gets its rhetorical oxygen from the seemingly intuitive principle that "families know best, and will choose a school that best fits their child." But boyo, that really isn't true. Or, rather, it's not true in anything like a policy-actionable sense.

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