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Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.

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  Large national investments in girls' athletic opportunities translate into better international sports results.

  America

  Their words

  America has made unusually large investments in athletic opportunities for girls and it pays off.

  Destroying women’s sports in order to save itslowboring.com

Director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Writes the A Wealth of Common Sense blog and co-hosts the Animal Spirits podcast with Michael Batnick.

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  Saving dominates returns early in a career and returns dominate saving later, because compounding is back-loaded.

  Their words

  How much you save has a far greater impact than your investments early on in your career. But as your portfolio grows, investment returns swamp your savings because of the wonders of compounding.

  How to Invest When Your Portfolio Gets Biggerawealthofcommonsense.com

Writes The Convivial Society, on technology and the moral life — what our tools do to attention, memory and how we treat each other.

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  AI as it is currently deployed bends towards demoralisation rather than towards flourishing.

  Their words

  My working thesis about the generalized impact of “AI” as it is currently deployed can be summed up in the observation that the arc of AI bends toward demoralization.

  Do Not Resign From Lifetheconvivialsociety.substack.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

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  Nvidia's suppliers make their investments for Nvidia and nobody else because only Nvidia's downstream demand can absorb what they build.

  Their words

  Now why are they willing to make the investments for me and not someone else and the reason for that is because they know that I have the capacity to buy it buy their supply and sell it through my downstream.

  Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?youtube.com

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

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  AI excels at breadth and human experts at depth, which makes them complementary and makes today's depth-focused way of doing science the wrong shape.

  Their words

  Yeah, so they excel at breadth and humans excel at depth. Um like human experts at least. Yeah, so um I think they're very complementary. Um but our current uh way of doing math and science is focused on depth because that that's where the human uh expertise cuz humans can't do breadth.

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American social psychologist at NYU Stern School of Business; author of The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind and The Anxious Generation.

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  Spirituality is a real part of human nature and central to flourishing, whether or not God exists.

  Their words

  I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence.

  The Devil's Plan to Ruin the Next Generationafterbabel.com

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

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  The harm done by low fertility is that people end up with fewer children than they wanted, not that a society runs short of workers.

  Their words

  I don’t see population collapse or lack of workers as the central policy problem: the central policy problem is human happiness, human flourishing, and the freedom to live life well.

  Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Costlymanstone.substack.com

Philosopher at Oxford; co-founded effective altruism and 80,000 Hours, wrote Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future, and now works on what a good future would actually contain.

From one piece Introducing Better Futures 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Whether anyone can actually do anything about how good the future is, rather than whether it matters, is the strongest objection to prioritising it.

  Their words

  I see this as the strongest argument against the better futures perspective, and the reason why I don’t feel confident that work on Flourishing is higher-priority than work on Surviving, rather than merely in the same ballpark.

  Introducing Better Futuresforethought.org

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  Improving how good the future turns out to be, given that humanity survives, is roughly as high a priority as preventing extinction.

  Their words

  This essay series will argue that work on Flourishing is in the same ballpark of priority as work on Surviving.

  Introducing Better Futuresforethought.org

Runs global health R&D at Open Philanthropy; writes about the science and medicine that could exist and does not.

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  Rapid AI progress does not automatically produce rapid medical progress; without complementary investment, people still get cancer and Alzheimer's.

  Their words

  Rapid AI progress does not automatically mean rapid medical progress. If the point of AI progress is human flourishing, we must make other complementary investments too.

  What does AI progress mean for medical progress?blog.jacobtrefethen.com

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  Going all in on AI is not the highest-return strategy for human flourishing, even if AI does produce rapid scientific advances.

  Their words

  Going all in on AI is not the highest return-on-investment strategy if you care about human flourishing, even if AI might lead to rapid scientific advances.

  AI will not suddenly lead to an Alzheimer's cureblog.jacobtrefethen.com

Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.

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  Leisure: The Basis of Culture

  Their words

  A short but powerful reflection from post-WWII Germany on 'true leisure' not mere relaxation or entertainment—is fundamental to human flourishing and the foundation of a meaningful life and culture.

  pathlesspath.com

Psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. Writes Psychiatry at the Margins on the philosophical and scientific arguments inside psychiatry and the psy-sciences.

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  Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

  Their words

  (publication date March 18, 2025, Viking) by Laura Delano is a compelling and troubling memoir of psychiatric patienthood, iatrogenic harm, and finding a meaningful and flourishing life outside of the mental healthcare system.

  psychiatrymargins.com

Machine learning engineer working on recommender systems, personalization and information retrieval. Previously worked on LLMs and LLM infrastructure at Mozilla.ai and on ML and recsys at Duo, Tumblr, Automattic and Comcast; wrote the 'What are embeddings?' text and ran the Normconf conference.

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  Life with Picasso

  Their words

  A second complementary book was Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot

  vickiboykis.com

Environmental researcher; writes on land use, agriculture and whether decoupling human welfare from nature is possible.

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  Believing that higher yields do not spare land would push investment away from the thing that actually protects wild habitat.

  Their words

  Claims to the contrary could lead to a misallocation of investments and, consequently, worse environmental (and social) outcomes.

  Raising Agricultural Yields Spares Landthebreakthrough.org

Founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, the activist investment firm he started in 2004.

From one piece Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech | Lex Fridman Podcast #413 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Investing well requires reversing the human instinct to grow excited as prices rise and fearful as they fall.

  Their words

  People tend to get excited about investments when stocks are going up and they get depressed when they're going down. And I think that's just inherently human. You have to reverse that. You have to get excited when things get cheaper and you got to get concerned when things get more expensive.

  youtube.com

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  Most investments are really speculations, because only a handful of businesses can be predicted with any confidence.

  Their words

  And very few businesses that you can have a really high degree of certainty about. And as a result, many investments are speculations because it's really very difficult to predict the future.

  youtube.com

Journalist and author writing on politics, liberalism and ideas; a contributor to Quillette and co-author of a book on Christopher Hitchens.

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  Spending on existential risk cannot be held accountable, because there is no measurement that would ever show it failing.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Unlike other interventions EA has sponsored, there are scant metrics for tracking the success or failure of investments in existential risk mitigation.

  How Effective Altruism Lost Its Wayquillette.com

Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku, author of The Twelve-Factor App, and a researcher at Ink & Switch.

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  The tech industry's economic and intellectual energy is directed away from human flourishing rather than toward it

  energy

  Their words

  The economic and intellectual horsepower in Silicon Valley and the wider tech world seems to be pointed away from these goals.

  making computers betteradamwiggins.com

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of The Cold Start Problem. Previously led rider growth teams at Uber; has blogged on growth, network effects and marketplaces since 2007.

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  Superforecasting

  Their words

  Lots of interesting learnings and relevant to those making startup investments also!

  andrewchen.com