Let me read you something

Moontower Munchies #112

Jun 04, 2025

Friends,

You might be aware that there’s a reading crisis going around. I’m not totally surprised since every year that passes I’m convinced Neil Postman was Nostradamus.

If you want to catch up on that particular crisis you can check out:

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

”To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.” The Atlantic covered this story late last year (I found you an unpaywalled copy).
The Average College Student Is Illiterate (Persuasion)

”Students are not what they used to be. The crisis is worse than you think.”

More recently Erik Hoel published How I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old (14 min read)

It has a more uplifting slant (and it was a wildly popular post, another hopeful development) — how he was able to “triple reading level” by tutoring his son. But even within this post he mentions “a study wherein researchers had college students read the first few paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, only 5% of English majors could passably describe what was going on.”

Just to play the “n of 1” anecdote game…I went to CBA in Lincroft, NJ. A LaSalle all-boys high school (this section in my chat with Matt) because I knew it was academically strong and that was my best chance to go to a good college yadda yadda. CBA required “summer reading”. For the summer entering freshman year I had to read 7 books which I would be tested on early in the semester. I only remember a few of the titles (Old Man and The Sea, Guns of Navarone, some Catholic indoctrination including discussion of masturbation in Becoming A Man). I recalled this recently with my family as my kids and niece and nephew next door compiled their summer goals*.

My niece is going into sophomore year. She’s at a public HS that is top 1% in the country based on US News. There’s zero “summer reading”.

Even in my resistance to lazy “old guy thinks old ways were better” reflexes, I think not emphasizing reading is an abdication of responsibility to our youth. So much so that you could imagine a super-villain doing exactly that in a generations long-game of domination. And here we are doing it to ourselves.

I mean, the latest out of SF education reads could be the Onion:

Grading for Equity coming to San Francisco high schools this fall

Key quotes:

Without seeking approval of the San Francisco Board of Education, Superintendent of Schools Maria Su plans to unveil a new Grading for Equity plan on Tuesday that will go into effect this fall at 14 high schools and cover over 10,000 students. The school district is already negotiating with an outside consultant to train teachers in August in a system that awards a passing C grade to as low as a score of 41 on a 100-point exam.
Grading for Equity eliminates homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that matters is how the student scores on a final examination, which can be taken multiple times. Students can be late turning in an assignment or showing up to class or not showing up at all without it affecting their academic grade. Currently, a student needs a 90 for an A and at least 61 for a D. Under the San Leandro Unified School District’s grading for equity system touted by the San Francisco Unified School District and its consultant, a student with a score as low as 80 can attain an A and as low as 21 can pass with a D.
Grading for Equity de-emphasizes the importance of timely performance, completion of assignments, and consistent attendance.

*We are doing far less camps this year as I’d like for them to have plenty of unstructured time to ride around the neighborhood on bikes until CPS knocks on our door…but yea some goals are in order as well to combat brain rot.

Ok that’s enough moaning.

I want to give you something better. This is an old post by Visakan (one of the best follows on the internet imho) that I come back to when I need a spine alignment.

In my view it’s about risk, reward, and staying intact.

it’s just math (7 min read)

In my version of reading it to you, I will emphasize what lands for me:

my general instinct that’s been sharpening over the years is: if you’re moderately intelligent, perceptive, courageous, etc, you can very likely figure out a way to make more money doing what you love than you might believe. almost everyone’s intuitions are miscalibrated on this.

people don’t really do the math. 0.1% of people is a lot of people. most aren’t willing to take 1000 shots for the 0.1% payoff. they’ll write it off as risky lottery chasing. but you just need to be able to afford those 1000 shots. then it’s just math, and victory is inevitable. (If you wanna get technical about it, 1000 tries at 0.1% chance has a 63.3% probability of success. But in the social domain, tries aren’t ‘independent’. Each person you talk with can help you with your search in finding the person you’re looking for. And there are other domains where you can learn from your failures as you go.)

it was inevitable that I would have an internet audience large enough that would pay my bills. because I was willing to work on it, for fun, for free, every day, for 10+ years, and I would’ve gone 10, 20, 30 more years if I had to. talking to a dozen new people every day, with earnestness and dynamism, can’t lose.

“oh but not everyone is charismatic, not everyone knows how to adapt and evolve, how to identify mistakes in their own thinking, ask for feedback-” yea if you wanna argue for your limitations you get to keep them. you could either learn to address each of those things. otherwise stick to the existing paths. this is for the wildhearts.

the bulk of the payoff/reward isn’t really not for your intelligence but for your courage, your willingness to stomach uncertainty and deal with social illegibility and status regulation and so on. if you endure past that the rewards are disproportionate. but going offroad hurts

once you go far enough off the beaten path, past the arid zone where most casual experimenters give up (and there’s no shame in that btw), things start to become clear. you start to see who the other serious players are and you develop a kinship with them. it’s quite beautiful

but actually even that’s not the cool thing. the cool thing is realizing that you can trust yourself to figure shit out, and take care of yourself, whatever the circumstances. that you are resourceful and adaptable. when you feel this in your bones, your entire vibe shifts

I can kind of tell when someone has this, I’d say to ~80-90% degree confidence, almost entirely based on the way they carry themselves, from their body language and their tone of voice, the muscular tension. I crossed this threshold at ~28yo

sometimes people ask about the “do 100 thing” riff/mantra like, “what if I do 100 thing but I don’t get any better?” that means you’re not learning from your experience. you’re not present. you’re running a mindless script as an absentee person. then u can’t grow/win, yea!

(Q: How do we ensure that we’re learning from experience? Some sort of journalling?

A: journalling can help make it clearer, but the critical thing is really that you’re asking questions, examining how things go, and trying differently. all practice should be deliberate. if you’re asking earnestly what’s working and not working and why, and trying different things accordingly, by definition you are going somewhere with every practice session)

Visa updates the post occasionally.

will update this post in the future the next time i get a burst of energy from wishing it existed

These are some of the updates:

🌟it’s just math, it’s just math… conventional wisdom is so narrowly constrained.

reality can be so much weirder, wilder than most people tend to think. “truth is stranger than fiction” because fiction has to ‘make sense’, ie correspond to our existing assumptions about how things work. But what if our assumptions are wrong? They’re almost always wrong. and so we live in such tiny boxes without realizing, constrained by our imaginations. We don’t have to live like this! Do the math and figure out what is actually possible!

🌟Making bets on myself. There are several things about my behaviour that feel super glaringly obvious to me that I’ve come to realize aren’t obvious to other people.

One is that I make big bets on myself because I believe in me. I’m not some kind of self-sacrificial altruist type. I expect to succeed. For eg I spent ~5 years writing two books, when I could have say, worked a job instead. part of it is passion, yes, but I also expect to make more money from those books over the rest of my lifetime, than I would’ve made in any job(s) I might’ve had.

that said, I’m not optimizing for money. FAN and Introspect are books about how to be kind, how to be useful, how to be encouraging, how to be a good person. If I wanted to make maximum $ I’d have used language like “winners and losers”, defined an outgroup/enemy, etc.

people- especially driveby critics on Twitter – tend to evaluate what they see, based on their preexisting assumptions, without stopping to consider the map of possible choices

If you think I’m Bad, sure, but I’d like you to consider how easily I could be Worse.

those people also tend to scoff at what appears trivial in the moment. when I had 50 followers and I talked like I’d have 50,000 someday, people laughed and said I was delusional. 50,000 to 50,000,000 is a different game, but also not? Anyway I’m not optimizing for follow count.

I would say I am “just a twitter poster” the way Walt Disney was “just a cartoonist”. I don’t know what my Disney World is going to be precisely yet, but I can promise you (me) I won’t stop or quit until I manifest it.

a big source of confusion is that many people tend to think of the internet, and of twitter, as a place of procrastination, a dark place, a wasteful place, etc. if you truly think that, you shouldn’t be here. if you think that and you’re here anyway, your internal conflict will manifest in ugliness in your interactions with others, and you will in fact become part of the problem that you imagined in the first place. in my case, I have always thought of the internet as a a place of possibility, a magical global intertwingling of some of the greatest living minds. Twitter is a particularly high-collision coffeehouse in this paradise. And almost every moment I spend on here is a compounding delight for me. I am having such a great time even writing this long tweet that will annoy some people. And I will have a great time sharing it with others in the future. And it will make me friends with wonderful people I haven’t even met yet.

Someone was oddly troubled by my use of the phrasing of “making big bets on myself”. I stand by it. I contextualized it above with “spend 5 years working on something with no guarantee of reward”. that’s a big chunk of time, with a lot of opportunity cost. it’s a big bet. And I intend to spend the rest of my life doing this. the first few years are the hardest. Consider how different the world would look if the vast majority of people saved up for 10 years to then do whatever made their heart sing for 5 years. For starters I want to assemble a cluster of ~100 people who do this for themselves, on their own terms, for their own reasons The payoff for this is basically impossible to calculate in advance; it has to be done on faith. It’s a big bet!

🌟(2024dec24) This section was a standalone 2020dec19 post titled /risk/, but I think it makes more sense for me to put it here.

let me see how quickly I can speedrun this: people have different concepts and assessments of risk, and different ideas about how much risk they think are willing to tolerate. people also vary in terms of how effective they are at protecting themselves from negative consequences.
major variables: the birth lottery (1), your skill as a player (2), and circumstances beyond your control (3) – some of which can be anticipated to some degree, some of which cannot. Of the latter, some can be prepared for and others cannot… it gets very layered and recursive
what I think is interesting is how much time & energy people spend on trying to convince each other of the relative “rightness” of the positions they hold. I believe it’s possible to drop most of that behavior and come out net positive for it in terms of outcomes
I have a pretty calibrated sense of how right I am about most things. I’m not trying to win arguments, I’m trying to learn. Sometimes I forget this because I accidentally end up surrounded by argument-win-seekers, and unconsciously start mimicking the game they’re playing

🌟 2024oct19— the question I have for myself here is, how does this usually come up? How do people misunderstand risk? Sometimes it’s when I’m talking about stuff I’ve done, and people say things like, that’s lucky, that’s risky— and my sense is, sure, in a sense, but to what degree? And that’s the part that always seems underexamined. You have to know the actual upsides and downsides to things. For example, if the cost of talking to a person is negligible, and the potential upside is something like a 0.1% chance of finding a wonderful spouse, and/or your best friend for life, then I believe you should keep taking that bet until it pays off.

I leave you by repeating one quote in particular:

“oh but not everyone is charismatic, not everyone knows how to adapt and evolve, how to identify mistakes in their own thinking, ask for feedback-” yea if you wanna argue for your limitations you get to keep them. you could either learn to address each of those things. otherwise stick to the existing paths. this is for the wildhearts.

Bart Simpson that on a chalkboard:

if you wanna argue for your limitations you get to keep them

Stay groovy

☮️

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