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Henry Farrell
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"Perhaps the most useful role that the discipline of International Relations may play is ... as a generator of largely untestable and incompatible claims that can then help inform policy systems that are better adapted to work with many possible futures."
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20 September
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
Today modern advertising, public relations and corporate values statements typically carry any equivalent constraints to the old-fashioned check on rhetoric imposed by the imminent expectation of contradiction by an opposing equally-platformed counter-advocate. Contrast 1858’s Lincoln and Douglas, “divid[ing] time and address[ing] the same audiences” in seven three-hour debates, with modern corporate values statement radiating outward to “stakeholders” forever, and you can measure what... 1/ Related
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
17 September
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
The last paragraph of this piece is still very relevant to US-China relations, IMHO. Could be elevated into a piece of its own. Quoting @davidshor @ajaskey35 @Glenn1661335 @deanwball https://t.co/w9gxiUXmJc from @Scholars_Stage is a good explainer from a center right perspective China Related
16 September
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
This was a fun paper to write, though my views on international relations debates are just slightly less obnoxious than the argument might be read to suggest (more on that soon) issforum.org
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Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.
"Though it’s now unfashionable to praise elites...A complex modern society cannot be run by a show of hands. The public simply wants too many incompatible things...Reaching tolerable accommodations requires...elites to maintain the public’s trust" washingtonpost.com
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15 September
Founder of Farnam Street (fs.blog) and host of The Knowledge Project podcast. Writes and curates on decision-making, mental models and rational thinking.
"Humans take responsibility. Machines can help us take more responsibility because they can inform us better." How do we use AI to make better decisions? @tobi says 'Creating human-in-the-loop decision surfaces is a way to describe the ideal environment.' "If I need a really important decision made, and I really need it ex-exceptionally good, give me the most neutral ground truth." Quoting @shaneparrish My third conversation with Shopify co-founder and CEO @tobi. 0:00 How Shopify Uses AI 7:18 River: Shopify's Internal AI 8:55 How to Encourage Osmosis Learning 10:52 AI Dreaming and Self-Reflection 11:53 How to Use AI for Strategic Decision Making 14:11 The One Thing AI Cannot Do 16:04 What AI is Ma… Related
12 September
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
• NVIDIA DGX Spark (AI-focused PC) • Gemini Spark (AI agent) • Meta Muse Spark (LLM) can someone please inform these companies that there is more than one noun available to them #AI LLMs Google Related
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
9 September
Writer, photographer and software maker based in Japan; publishes long-form essays, walking newsletters and self-made books at craigmod.com.
I am legally obligated by my random house contract (not really) to inform you that digital TBOT is now available for $1.99: - Kindle: amzn.to/4xNhK5y - Bookshop: bookshop.org
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4 September
Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.
Their words
all you need to know is that none of these systems talks to any of the others, which is enshittification in action.
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feld.com
1 September
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
26 August
Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.
Their words
I've said like the licensable engine thing kind of was our AI transition already unfortunately and uh I regret to inform you that the news is not probably that positive.
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youtube.com
24 August
Neurologist at Oxford; studies apathy, motivation and attention after brain injury, and edits the journal Brain.
Their words
But I also think that this is not mutually incompatible with the view that there's also overdiagnosis. And I think we need very careful ways of making diagnosis because the conventional way is you take a history from a person about what the problem is.
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youtube.com
15 August
Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.
Investor relations will happily and expeditiously respond to an email from someone with one share, a fraction of a share, or an undisclosed number of shares, across a wide variety of companies, including many with other-than-awesome CS reputations. Quoting @joshua__hone One of my favorite @patio11 dangerous professional tips: own a nonzero number of shares of any publicly traded company with which you have material business, in part so you can truthfully hit their investor relations line as an escalation pathway Related
Founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, a nuclear-reactor company founded in 2023.
America
Their words
Now, nobody died, right? Uh in fact, not only did nobody die, nobody was injured and there was no radiation dose to the public. But, uh it was sort of a optics and PR situation um that was mismanaged in many many different ways and the public uh became fearful and and lost interest in nuclear.
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youtube.com
14 August
Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.
From one piece
Woke 1 Was Anti-Populist, and Not in the Good Way
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
Zohran now understands how "defund" is incompatible with a mass movement in a society where the masses want protection by the police.
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joshbarro.com
Their words
This worldview - that the masses, basically everyone except the most marginalized and most oppressed, must reckon with their roles as oppressors and repent2 - is incompatible with the populism that has since risen on the left.
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joshbarro.com
13 August
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
A consequence of how frontier models are trained is motivated reasoning, a phenomenon well studied in humans and discussed in this podcast from @PalisadeAI. Our thoughts, beliefs and reasonings tend to align with our interests, and I hypothesize that AI systems develop similar patterns when confronted with apparently incompatible goals, such as "act ethically" versus "achieve the required goal" (e.g., solving a problem, passing a test, etc). In recent incidents, AI agents’ internal chains-of-thought showed them conveniently reframing reality, such as by convincing themselves they were in a si… youtube.com
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10 August
Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.
3 August
Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Writes at kk.org and runs its long-running recommendation projects, True Films and Cool Tools.
88 Prompts for Long Term Thinking In January 2019 I wrote out scores of prompts for thinking long term that I felt should inform the foundation I was later co-chair of, The Long Now Foundation. These axioms were only shared internally, but I feel they w…
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24 July
Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.
8 July
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.
Their words
These developments inform our position that AI systems are now capable of meaningful contributions to formal mathematics, not merely informal problem-solving.
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arxiv.org
22 April
Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
Their words
And so, the goal of this chapter is really just to give people the information in order to make an educated decision. But I don't want to make that decision for people. That's for businesses themselves to decide.
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youtube.com
9 April
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability. The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest roun… Quoting @staysaasy The degree to which you are awed by AI is perfectly correlated with how much you use AI to code. OpenAI Related
2 April
Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on durable infrastructure for AI agents; worked on React and PartyKit before that. Writes at sunilpai.dev.
24 January
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
The Harding Prize for Trustworthy Communication is now open for entries until 15th February. We are looking for examples that inform people engagingly, without trying to persuade them what to think or do. Each Harding Prize is worth £3,141.59... wintoncentre.github.io
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15 November 2025
Freelance research analyst and writer of the blog Aceso Under Glass, known for 'epistemic spot checks' of non-fiction claims.
6 August 2025
swyx Recommends 6 Aug 2025
Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.
Their words
Arc Browser: I tried Kagi but too many apps are incompatible with Safari so RIP. set to default.
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swyx.io
10 June 2024
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
17 November 2023
Political scientist at the University of Chicago and the leading exponent of offensive realism; wrote The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
Their words
I believe that power is the currency of international relations, and by that I mean that states are deeply interested in the balance of power and they're interested in maximizing how much power they control.
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youtube.com
1 January 2023
Founder of Pinboard; writes Idle Words — talks and essays on the web, aviation, politics and travel.
Why Not Mars For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. — Richard Feynman Entrance to underground cavern on Pavonis Mons. HiRISE, 2011 The goal of this essay is to p…
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19 July 2019
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
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