R.Dal (@ryandal) header
R.Dal (@ryandal) profile picture

International school leadership. On holiday. Probably wrong.

South East Asia
Joined February 2009
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What is the planning fallacy and why is it a potential problem for school leaders? open.substack.com/pub/pendid…
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Academics have to invest tremendous effort into a single paper, so we often work on papers that we suspect will yield interesting & significant results. But that also pushes us to predictable work. AI has no such constraints, forcing us to rethink a lot of how science is done.
New working paper: Can AI forecast treatment effects in economics from pre-registration documents? Answer: Yes. 1/
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"I pay attention to NOTHING" 🤣 Dundee boss Steven Pressley's view on social media... #BBCFootball
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Absolutely stunning essay by @DouglasKMurray about the crisis in France. It includes this quote. thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-f…
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R.Dal retweeted
Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham examines the viral reaction to Nikole Hannah-Jones's NYT essay on her child's schooling. He argues Hannah-Jones, the Times, and critics all acted rationally—she shared a personal story implying causal links between parent influence and school quality, the Times published it as opinion journalism, and commentators responded because it became the topic of the moment. Yet Willingham is frustrated: despite all this effort, almost no one's thinking actually changed. Commentators mostly repeated existing views on school choice, funding, or segregation rather than engaging with new evidence. He challenges writers to use viral moments to genuinely refine arguments—clarifying terms, resolving puzzles, or spotting new angles—rather than just restating old positions. dtwuva.substack.com/p/when-e…
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Incentives shape behaviour
I attended a borough CEO roundtable where it emerged that schools receive £4,000 for every pupil identified with SEND who does not have an EHCP. Unsurprisingly, the number of pupils identified with SEND across the borough has rocketed. Strangely, nobody could quite work out why. In fact, the prevailing view was that there were still more pupils with SEND waiting to be identified. One might reasonably ask whether the financial incentives are influencing identification rates. But that possibility didn't seem to feature in the discussion.
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I’m almost 70, and people believe it all too easily. Here are my secrets for ageing like a used tea bag: 1. Skin: find a good pub and visit regularly. Sun, wind, cigar smoke, the occasional fist, whatever it takes. Just give them your credit card. 2. Body: eat more, work out never, get fat. Even with that, use PEDs: port, eggs and digestives. 3. Hair: let it go wherever it likes. Off the top, into the ears, out of the nose. 4. Stress: seek it out, especially financial stress. And - of course - never ever brush your teeth.
i’m almost 40, but people don’t seem to believe me. besides my asian genes, here are my secrets to stay looking young: 1. skin: find a good dermatologist and visit regularly. thermage, ultherapy, lasers, whatever it takes. just give them your credit card. 2. body: eat less, work out more, don’t get fat. even with that, use PEDs. ozempic exists for a reason. 3. hair: keep it thick and full. PRP if your hair starts thinning, and take turkish hairline if it’s too late. balding is optional. 4. stress: avoid it, especially financial stress. so make more money. btw, money is also the key ingredient for item 1, 2 and 3. hope this helps. 😉
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Andrew Scott delivers this speech too slowly; I know some viewers will hate the way he breaks up the verse. AND YET even in spite of that I think this is the best delivery of this soliloquy I’ve ever seen. He makes it sound like it’s not a portentous speech everyone already knows but a morally serious real-time deliberation, by a highly intelligent person in extreme pain, considering what it would mean to end his own life.
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Reads like gatekeeping
This document is going to be an assigned reading in college classes that cover this moment in time, there's a lot happening in a few paragraphs... ahmath.org/statements
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After a brief but institution-eroding slop science era, it increasingly looks like we are going to have two revolutions from AI: 1) Everything ever published will be re-read and re-judged in ways that human scientists never anticipated 2) Novel discoveries will start to come fast
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"Nobel Committee praised Mr. Halzen's 'vision and scientific leadership' for the project" None of the media on this tries to convince readers that he had special intellectual insight. Even Nobels are often awarded to elites instead of experts. nytimes.com/2026/10/06/scien…
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Never believe anything until it is officially denied....
BREAKING NEWS France is not Greece
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Wait, the replication crisis is worse in economics than psychology?
Massive replication study: Only 55% of 274 social-science findings successfully replicated. Education was in first place, economics last, and psychology somewhere in between. stevestewartwilliams.com/p/s…
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Rob Kurzban's response to common criticisms of evolutionary psychology. From my "Top 18 Quotes about Evolutionary Psychology" stevestewartwilliams.com/p/t…
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“We find that on medium-length, well-defined accounting tasks, frontier AI models are now faster and more accurate than junior accountants, even the best one in our study.” Eighteen months ago they scored well below human accountants Good discussion here: mercor.com/blog/human-baseli…
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Totally floored by this. The world's greatest naval historian, NAM Rodger, has reviewed A Dangerous Game in the new TLS. He comes to a judgment on Cochrane's guilt in the Great Stock Exchange Fraud of 1814 and then concludes with this.
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Banger
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R.Dal retweeted
David Sacks compares banning AI to the Chinese emperor who banned shipbuilding “If you go back to the medieval time period, Chinese civilization was much more advanced than European civilization. And somewhere along the line, it basically switched and the West basically took the lead. And some historians have pinpointed this to the decision of a single Chinese emperor to ban shipbuilding." “What that allowed is the Europeans then basically colonized the whole world and all the riches that flowed from that flowed back to Europe. And that's how Europe took the lead. And I think that if we were to do the Bernie Sanders thing, which is basically ban AI, it's like banning shipbuilding." “Chinese civilization will rocket past us, they will be the ones that make all the discoveries and discover this new world and accrue all the wealth. But that's what we're talking about doing. I mean, crazy things like this have happened in history, where you'll engage in self sabotage."
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Leaving aside the arguments over the reasons why this has happened, it is shocking that Europe does not have a single frontier AI lab, nor even a near-frontier lab nor even an effort that could likely lead to building up a frontier lab in the future.
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Regardless of whether he was out or not did he actually intend to do a bounce pass?
He can do it all! 🤩 #NRL #NRLFinals
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"Within the A.I. industry in China, there are some folks who worry about technological loss of control, as they call it. But, generally speaking, it is a very, very marginal issue." newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/w…
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