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Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.

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  Religion barely explains how many children an American family has.

  America

  Their words

  Yes, religion does seem to have an impact on the decision about the number of kids a family will have, but it’s a very minor difference.

  Do Religious Families Actually Have More Kids?graphsaboutreligion.com

Lawyer and everyday-carry gear reviewer who publishes scored knife, flashlight and multitool reviews at Everyday Commentary.

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  Benchmade Mini Bugout in S90V

  Their words

  In the end, the MBO in S90V is probably the best EDC knife Benchmade has ever made and it is a jewel in my collection (the Valet and the Aphid were pretty good too; Benchmade can we get a re-issue of the Aphid with upgraded materials?). The exposed rear tang is an irksome but ultimately minor issue. The size, refinement, steel, and weight make this one of the very best knives on the market right now.

  everydaycommentary.com

Short-story writer and novelist; won the Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, and teaches craft weekly in Story Club.

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  The only style worth having is the one you cannot help; setting out to develop a personal style is the wrong goal.

  Their words

  And that there might come a moment, while reading a new, just-edited-for-the-thousandth-time draft, where that true self, or voice, pops out at you, suddenly revealed, as if someone else, not you, had done it.

  On the Perils of Self-Assessing...georgesaunders.substack.com

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

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  Good exposition is willing to say things that are a little bit wrong and fix them later, which is exactly what a crowd-sourced encyclopedia edits out.

  Their words

  And I think a good exposition you care a little bit less about like correctness on the way, but you can like deliberately craft things that are a little bit wrong that you correct along the way that gets like edited out in a crowd source environment.

  youtube.com

Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.

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  A small amount of friction is enough to reshape a behavior, because most wants are not strong enough to survive a minor inconvenience.

  Their words

  And so many behaviors are like that. It's like, well, did you want it or not? You know, like in the one sense, you wanted it so bad that you would check it every 3 minutes when it was next to you, but in another sense, you never wanted it bad enough that you would work for 30 seconds and walk down the hall to get it. And so, a little bit of friction can sometimes go a long way in shaping a behavior.

  The Silent Cost of Bad Habits | James Clearyoutube.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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  The Rattle Bag

  Their words

  The Rattle Bag edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes - In an age of LLM-generated poetry and machine learning curation (even coming from yours truly sometimes), it's refreshing to have real people who love poetry curate it and show you what you need to read to touch grass.

  vickiboykis.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  At the Midway

  Their words

  Mind candy, historical creature-feature thriller: in which the US military, in the form of the very worst ship in Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, comes up against beasts which are not oversized plesiosaurs. (Exactly what they are instead would be a minor spoiler.) I have no idea how I found this online, but it's perfectly enjoyable as a specimen of the genre.

  bactra.org

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

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  Effective altruism's scandals are minor next to its record, and its ratio of accomplishments to scandals is as good as that of any large institution.

  Their words

  I think EA’s track record of accomplishments vs. scandals is as good as any of them, maybe better.

  In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruismastralcodexten.com

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

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  The more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition.

  Their words

  The more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition. Despite having seen thousands of a/b test results for minor design details, I am still regularly surprised and humbled by my intuition being wrong.

  The Looking Glass: What AI Won't Changelg.substack.com

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

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  History has no predetermined path: its course turns on unpredictable contingencies rather than on deep currents that would have produced the same outcome anyway.

  Their words

  As much as we might want to imagine that the greater currents push historical events largely on a predetermined path with but minor variations from what must always have been, in practice events are tremendously contingent on unpredictable variables.

  Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?acoup.blog

Co-founded GiveWell and led Open Philanthropy; writes Cold Takes, on the most important century and how to think about it.

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  Any harm can in principle be outweighed by a small enough benefit delivered to a large enough number of people.

  Their words

  In theory, any harm can be outweighed by something that benefits a large enough number of persons, even if it benefits them in a minor way.

  Future-proof ethicscold-takes.com

Theoretical computer scientist, Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and director of its Quantum Information Center. Writes the blog Shtetl-Optimized.

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  Inadequate Equilibria

  Their words

  I do have two criticisms of the book, both relatively minor compared to what I loved about it.

  scottaaronson.blog

Web infrastructure engineer and standards editor; chaired the IETF HTTP working group and co-authored core HTTP and Atom specifications.

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  Aperture

  Their words

  Photos are edited and organised with Aperture.

  usesthis.com

Mac developer and writer at brettterpstra.com; makes the apps Marked and nvALT and writes extensively about Markdown and automation.

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  nvALT

  Their words

  For the latter I use nvALT almost exclusively, though my notes are all stored as individual text files (with OpenMeta tags) and can be added to, edited and searched from a plethora of apps and utilities.

  usesthis.com

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.

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  Academic credentials — grades, major, the prestige of the degree — barely matter to industry hiring.

  Their words

  Your major and minor don’t matter.  Most decisionmakers in industry couldn’t tell the difference between a major in Computer Science and a major in Mathematics if they tried.

  kalzumeus.com

Physicist and information theorist at Cambridge; wrote Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air and Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, and was the UK's chief scientific adviser on energy from 2009 to 2014. Died in 2016.

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  Nuclear waste is only a minor worry compared with the other forms of waste being left to future generations.

  Their words

  I feel nuclear waste is only a minor worry, compared with all the other forms of waste we are inflicting on future generations.

  Sustainable Energy — without the hot airinference.org.uk