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Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

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  AI progress is jagged: models are becoming superhuman at math and software engineering while remaining far weaker at intuition, creativity, and other forms of human reasoning.

  Their words

  AI has always been very jagged, and we are making models which are superhuman goal-seekers at math and software engineering, but they have massive limitations on intuitions, creativity, and other types of reasoning that humans are strong at.

  interconnects.ai

Professor of psychology at UCLA, where he studies human memory, attention and cognitive ageing, and author of Better with Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging.

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  Learning should be made harder rather than easier, and a teacher's instinct to smooth the path is the first thing that goes wrong.

  Their words

  How can you make learning kind of uncomfortable, but that you'll remember things better? And it goes against a lot of our intuitions. A lot of teachers will want to say, how can we make learning easier? And I think that's probably the first problem is you don't want it to be easy.

  youtube.com

Writes Useful Fictions on agency and how to get better at things; a former appellate lawyer and the top-ranked woman in professional poker in 2017.

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  If you are only asking for things you get, you are not asking for enough, and rejection should be courted deliberately.

  Their words

  Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate (of course, try not to be a jerk in the process). If you’re only asking for things you get, you’re not aiming high enough.

  How to be more agenticusefulfictions.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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  The Art Of Probability

  Their words

  Hamming was a practitioner, spending much of his career in Bell Labs, so unlike many books on probability, this stays grounded in the kind of intuitions that come up a lot in solving practical problems. It has countless helpful puzzles and problem-solving tricks which are organized in such a way as to give a sense of the deeper theory underlying probability and statistics.

  3blue1brown.com

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  Visual Complex Analysis

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  As the title suggests, this offers a highly pictorial introduction to complex analysis. I would not use this as the only text to learn about complex analysis, but Needham does a marvelous job of conveying the beauty of the subject, with numerous helpful intuitions for otherwise famously tricky ideas.

  3blue1brown.com

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  Ordinary Differential Equations

  Their words

  If you want to understand differential equations, but more from the pure math side of things, Arnold gives a wonderful picture of what the field is all about, with a mixture of high-level intuitions and low-level details, with a satisfying focus on visual and physical intuition along the way.

  3blue1brown.com

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  Visual Group Theory

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  Another text with a titular promise to focus on pictures, this one tackles a subject which is more commonly taught purely symbolically. One of the most important things for any student learning about groups to understand is just how many different ways there are to think about a group, and how different views might be helpful in different contexts. Again, I wouldn't use this as the only book to understand the topic, but it offers a refreshingly different perspective on the topic from most others out there to help arm your arsenal of intuitions.

  3blue1brown.com