iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Is this meaningfully different from labor unions e.g.?

jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Oh you mean like privileging the (silly, counterproductive) stated desires of people in the room over the wishes of the much more numerous people who they’ve excluded and then saying “this is what the people want”?

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Which is not to say we shouldn’t do it—but regulation can solve future problems and not just past problems.

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Jensen Huang agrees with you! The problem is that, just like regular criminals, executives vastly underestimate the odds that their cunning plans will fail. And by the time they find out, you can throw them in jail but you can’t undo the damage.

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It’s always been a weakness of philosophy of mind that many theorists are uninterested in engaging seriously with neuroscience. Now they have another field to not engage seriously with.

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

In fairness, it gets to be less major as Republicans cause other, more pressing problems

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I know that engaged parents choose schools based on their administrations! And yes I think that the DOE would get some calls if PS 321 say got a dud principal! Definitely going back a while but I know public school parents who had dinner with Joel Klein regularly

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I have been in the past and I will be again next year. I’ve met great educators serving disadvantaged students! I’ve also met…not that

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

But the district pouring in money doesn’t help empower the parents is the thing. You can’t get the terrible principal reassigned by adding a music class or buying art supplies. Calling the commissioner can do it though!

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

And this formula is unfair to students in underperforming schools?

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

That report you posted suggests that *all* state support of schools goes through the district not to individual schools! I’m not denying that PTA fundraising is a thing but I agree with Stephen that it can’t explain the dysfunction from the article. Parents’ political power can though!

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Foundation aid is given to NYC as a single grant though? So it doesn’t point to the intra-district disparities that the article is talking about.

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I’m not saying that these things would change the relative position of these schools (paging Freddie deBoer!) but they would specifically help smart motivated kids in bad schools! Like Najya!

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I think the Bloomberg administration actually had this right, in NYC specifically the key is finding good administrators and teachers and getting rid of the bad (or, charitably, the misplaced) ones. Disadvantaged kids get stuck with these by default because empowered parents don’t put up with them.

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

But the Urban Assembly story was really about trendy interventions that give a school a veneer of “goodness”. Like giving kids As in advanced math classes without teaching anything. Or doing restorative justice on behaviorally problematic students

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I agree that the curriculum is improving (and her experience at PS 307 was now a few years ago) but the issue here is that she was at a school whose staff had no interest in teaching, not that they were teaching the wrong thing

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

It really is a great piece. She’s *so* close to getting it (how teachers convinced left-wing policymakers to try anything to help disadvantaged kids except pedagogy)

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Fun fact, Canada has weaker consumer protections for commercial aviation than either the US or the EU. Regulatory harmonization here would be a huge upgrade

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It’s worth saying that a lot of political advocates have policy demands that wouldn’t achieve their goals even if they succeeded, or a plan of action that has no way to advance their policy demands, or both. Even if advocacy doesn’t scale linearly you can still run the numbers.

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

So the problem with fast fashion is that the clothes are made of plastic and end up in landfills right? Isn’t…isn’t that just carbon sequestration?

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The police in NYC haven’t been under meaningful civilian control since…I mean probably before the Lindsay administration? I don’t think sidewalk parking is gonna be what changes that

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

worried you might be an over-RL’ed LLM

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I thought the way that rain gardens work is by getting stormwater into the water table rather than by impounding it in the topsoil?

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I don’t think anyone has made a normative point yet — if we think the racial disparities on the SHSAT are bad and we want to fix them it’s important to be accurate about what they are.

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

There were ~400 selective high school offers to Black and Hispanic students in 2026, so plausibly that could be, idk, 20% higher counterfactually?

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

It’s a free leadership program that guarantees admission and financial aid to selective NYC private schools for underrepresented minorities. Few hundred kids a year, selected based on competitive admissions in 7th grade (before SHSAT!)

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Ohhhh wait I just remembered there’s an obvious artifact for SHSAT specifically because of Prep for Prep

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

SHSAT passes are quite high percentile so it might not take much…but also you get all kinds of Simpson‘s Paradox nonsense to sort out so good evidence is probably hard to come by

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Very much not my place to draw conclusions but I bet the mechanisms are different, for Hispanics I’d wonder about interactions effects between SES and ethnic ID

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The best research about this IMO is on Nigerian immigrants to the US and UK. My understanding is that in the US, first generation Nigerian immigrants tend to perform comparably to other immigrant groups but this performance erodes gradually over 2nd and 3rd gens.

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The real mess is that section 9 public housing residents often face crazy high marginal tax rates due to income based rent, pushing them towards the informal sector. So much of the “unemployment” in public housing is actually this!

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Mathematics paper withdrawn after counterexample found to lemma asserted to be “trivial” without proof

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Just tried to do this at CDG so my kid could go for a swim on a long layover but CDG is so big and hard to navigate that it didn’t work out

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Reposted by @jacobbaskin.bsky.social

Sam @samd.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

ngl I’m starting to get a “covid in february 2020” vibe when it comes to the latest AI models anyone on here with the view that “it’s just a fancy autocomplete” needs to update their priors fast because the range of outcomes could be much much worse than that

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

It’s so tempting to jump on the bandwagon if the thing you really want is to slow down AI but it’s a poisoned chalice for this and other reasons (other countries exist, for instance)

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

People have counterproductive responses to AI anthropomorphism. They’re not people but pretending that they are (albeit weird ones) gives you better intuitions about what they do than just saying they’re not over and over again.

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

We (in theory!!) have politics to limit the downside of any one human’s bad judgment but we don’t have any ideas for aligning a misaligned AI that’s smarter than humans

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Citation very much needed on that one!

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

You can say they’re not a “real” adversary but it’s more predictive to model AIs as one than as a token predictor in this situation!

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

This is what Dwarkesh was trying to get across IMO — that were not trying to fix an airplane, our challenge is fundamentally adversarial and gets harder as our adversary gets more resources and skills.

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I think that if incentives were perfectly aligned they’d have to admit that they have no idea how to solve the technical challenges of AI alignment. I’m a bit surprised that someone with a P(doom) that’s neither zero nor one also thinks that these challenges are prosaic software engineering?

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

But doesn’t (b) make you more scared not less?

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Agreed but there comes a point where that stops being a useful way to think about what AI is doing because it doesn’t explain or predict much at all.

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I think we disagree here about: - What a perfect sandbox means and how hard it is to achieve in practice - How impressive the work was that the agent swarm accomplished relative to what highly motivated humans could do in an analogous situation

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

So, since no sandbox has ever been perfect, maybe we should agree that AI development is exceptionally risky and go slower until we develop better software practices?

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jacobbaskin.bsky.social @jacobbaskin.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The AI skeptics, mostly, the stochastic parrot crowd. Say that AIs don’t think all you want but it’s hard to productively model this behavior as “predicting the next token”.

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