iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21h

Of course, I think it's good to strive for a society in which the most people who want to have kids can have them and maintain a high quality of life! But that road there is a complicated policy mix beset by uncertainties and lined with failed experimentation.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21h

But I think people reach for affordability as an explanation because what they mean is "affordability at a personal consumption level consistent with my pre-child lifestyle" (i.e., the opportunity cost).

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21h

Being wealthier unlocks a quality of life in the world that makes the opportunity cost of child rearing substantial. I suspect "hired live-in help" levels of money is the level at which that cost is sufficiently defrayed to break the negative correlation.

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Reposted by Steve B. Holt

Sean Corcoran @seanpcorcoran.org · 05/10/2026

For those who follow elite high school admissions in #nyc @mdarisse.bsky.social (on the job market!) has written the most rigorous analysis to date of the Discovery Program which sets aside seats for low-income students who missed the test cutoff for admission: edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1607

edworkingpapers.com

The Impact of Exam Schools on Disadvantaged Students: Evidence from NYC’s Discovery Program

This paper studies the New York City Department of Education's Discovery Program, an affirmative action policy implemented to increase access to some of New York City’s most elite public high schools....

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The expense alone! A version of "some people have way too much money" that I hadn't previously encountered.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

And here I thought Republicans really cared about women's sports.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I mean, the entire Iberian peninsula remained under fascist dictatorships for 30 years after the war, so, yeah, seems uncontroversial.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Onyx Boox readers are incredible. Highly recommend. The Go 10.3" Gen I or II is lightweight and super flexible. You can use Libby, Kobo, or Bookshop for reading e-books across the three. You can sync with a cloud and put e-books in there and read that way. It's great.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

As a Florida alum of the Tebow era it pains me deeply to agree. But that's really just because I maintain a deep suspicion of prosperity gospel evangelicals writ large. Always feels like a ticking clock before they use the moral authority of faith to exploit desperate Christians for self-enrichment.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"We have a mandate from the American people to do evil things and take lifelines away from the American people and people around the world. You can tell people love and support this by how much money we cut from aid and reallocate to keeping ourselves safe from the American people, who love us."

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"Woke 1 was crazy" has become a meme in certain corners, but during about the same period, the right built an entire social media ecosystem dedicated to convincing women being in a fundamentally abusive marriage was natural and desirable to mainstream implied opposition to the 19th Amendment.

nytimes.com

Bernadine Bluntly’s Brand Was Tradwife. Then She Got Divorced. (Gift Article)

What happens when a trad influencer leaves her husband, questions her beliefs, stops selling anti-feminism T-shirts — and still needs to make a living online?

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Having worked a lot of very crappy jobs up to and through my undergraduate degree, the intellectual and creative freedom of university life was more real and authentic than any aspect of the things you do in jobs you need to survive to cope with the inherent imbalance of power that entails.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I agree with all of this and would only add that, in my experience, the people who discount university life in preference for industry job training are people who entered college without meaningful exposure to jobs and went straight into an office job from college.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The incentive structure of TV drives this. Most creators come up with one good season because that's what they can guarantee will get picked up. Audience response will create network demand for more but there's little incentive for the creators to have more pre-planned with the same depth of thought

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Perfectly timed response to WB merger likely going through, lol. Anyway, get your libraries to sign up for Kanopy. And set up Plex servers. And get a DVD player and rent DVDs from the library. Just a reminder of the alternatives to streaming.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

With friends like this, it's easy to feel like you only have enemies.

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Reposted by Steve B. Holt

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

One more example of how a personalist regime they cannot conceive of a bipartisan institution to the point they would prefer to destroy it if they cannot repurpose it to their ends. See, also, much of the rest of the federal government, our military, science, higher education etc.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

But then I talk to Gen Z and not only is most of the Boomer stuff lost to them, but so are most Millennial cultural influences. Movies and major bands from like 1995-2014 don't seem to have made it to them at all. Such a strong demarcation of when personalized algorithmic online culture took over.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I was literally having this conversation tonight! Like, I have so much random knowledge of even minor Boomer cultural outputs because of daytime network TV (Matlock, In The Heat of the Night, Nightrider, Magnum PI, Murder She Wrote, countless movies) and radio.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Very fair point. I type with a sad chuckle.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Anyway, I have a hard time believing this will be sustainable in the long-run and wanted to flag an aspect I don't see discussed all that often.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Since early classes in the sequence are often more general, the professors in those classes might be more likely to have laxer approaches to AI use, for a variety of reasons. But now, this wild west approach creates obvious issues because pre-requisites no longer indicate reliable baseline knowledge

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Students now likely arrive in more advanced classes with less learning and retention of the foundational material than expected, particularly if the advanced class is taught by an instructor with a strict no AI use policy. Now the class grinds into more review time than expected.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Sequenced classes mean that instructors design classes later in the sequence around knowledge expected to be acquired in pre-requisites. If professors early in the sequence adopt more lax AI policies or, more bafflingly, encourage the use of AI in the course, the pre-requisites' function is broken.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Some universities, like mine, have adopted an "it's up to the instructor to set AI policy for their class" approach to AI. I think folks have underappreciated the extent to which that's basically a race-to-the-bottom in AI permissiveness. Consider sequenced classes.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

"They don't even respect us enough to want to take us over!"

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Absolutely. I 100% agree with your thread. I just wanted to add that the insult to injury is that the humanities got targeted for defunding over decades while STEM has been more targeted for capture and repurposing. It's kind of an echo of the internal cultural resentments across the houses.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I agree with all of this, but worth noting that the fierceness of the war on NIH and NSF are because 1) their broad-based prestige made them juicy targets for institutional capture and 2) the federal humanities supports were too small to provide meaningful leverage in that larger goal of capture.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I can't wait for the effective altruist take's final form: "it should be okay for me to get a tax write off for donating to a nonprofit fund that just pays me the money back because in the long-run, my impact on humanity will be so great that it's altruistic for me to keep all the money."

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This is my... Aspiration 😏 I'll even pretend to plant trees with some of the money!

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

We should have a fund, called the Steve Holt fund, and any time the White House is looking for a costly blunder, you know, just to feel something again, they just give the monetary equivalent to the Steve Holt fund for me to do a no show job and keep it all. The world improves. I'm happier. Win-win.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Okay, yeah, but also Silent Hill 2 holodeck makes me hope not all games get a holodeck edition.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Ah. Yeah, I always underrate the boards.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

(I mostly raise because you've likely had your finger on the pulse of something like changes in university president job markets more firmly than me, so curious your thoughts).

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

How much do you think this is a function of changes in university president job markets? I might be wrong, but I have the sense that they have shorter tenures and often job hop more than previously. If true, easy to measure outcomes like enrollment make for better job talk points and get more focus.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

That feels like a paradox. Seeing this kind of bookshelf would make many people see the owner as someone who does not read.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

For most hacking, the limiting factor was time and compute. AI agents trivialize that limit. Hell, I'd be really nervous if I engaged with crypto at all. Seems like the kind of thing that would be an obvious target.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I've been saying this in various group chats for awhile, but the moment recursive learning was introduced to enable autonomous agents to operate a computer directly, the very thing that justifies the AI resource dump, also contained the most dangerous implications of the technology.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I'm not kidding that the next admin should make Elon a pauper and prosecute him for accessing sensitive government data illegally. But the political groundwork for that needs to start now.

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Boycott X? Brother, this guy's companies & wealth are basically entirely dependent on government contracts. The next Democratic administration should be DOGE-ing those contracts into the sun on day one and nationalizing the national security-related enterprises (SpaceX & Tesla batteries, basically)

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The thing about hard mode is you are mostly right on age and race heuristics but then the curve balls are Jews, atheists, and college degree holders. Who did I vote for? I earned 15,527 points over 20 voters on hard mode (avg 776). Model 871, base rate 776. profmusgrave.github.io/votergame2024/

profmusgrave.github.io

Who did I vote for?

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Oh, you moved just outside the city limits for the schools, you say?

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Steve B. Holt @stevebholt.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

One can't realize how bad ideological consistency among voters would be for most policymaking until they talk to "In this house" sign types about new public transit or a new apartment building proposed a few blocks from their house.

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