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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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  Government borrowing through the financial crisis and the pandemic was a good trade, because it repaired household balance sheets.

  government

  Their words

  I think the fact that the government took on debt during two crises to help households was a good trade-off.

  My Most Contrarian Opinion Right Nowawealthofcommonsense.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  The current tech layoffs are pandemic over-hiring correcting itself, with AI as the convenient excuse.

  Their words

  And I think what we're seeing right now with some of the layoffs is a testament to that, not AI. It's just that during the pandemic, a bunch of overhiring went on, and now AI is a convenient excuse to slim down. But I do also think AI is going to expose some roles as just not being productive ways for humans to spend their time, and therefore we must come up with new ways of spending their time.

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Chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety and AI control.

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  AI risk is probably a totally manageable problem that will be brutally mismanaged, the way pandemic response was.

  China

  Their words

  it's just so easy for me to imagine the situation being like totally manageable but brutally mismanaged in practice in the same way as like maybe CO could have been avoided in the first place if the like Chinese response to CO was less of like a cover up and more of a like pandemic response and similarly like I could imagine a world where like the US response to CO was like way more functional but just like sometimes the the the response to societal problems is extremely dysfunctional.

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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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  Older adults came through the pandemic more psychologically resilient than younger adults, which is the opposite of what was expected of them.

  Their words

  But what we found, at least at the psychological level, we did some of this research, older adults were much more resilient than younger adults.

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Long-time Debian developer and free-software maintainer (remctl, INN, pam-krb5) who has published book reviews on his personal site since the 1990s.

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  Iris Kelly Doesn't Date

  Their words

  My favorite books I read this year were Ashley Herring Blake's Bright Falls sapphic romance trilogy: Delilah Green Doesn't Care, Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail, and Iris Kelly Doesn't Date. These are not perfect books, but they made me laugh, made me cry, and were impossible to put down.

  eyrie.org

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  Delilah Green Doesn't Care

  Their words

  My favorite books I read this year were Ashley Herring Blake's Bright Falls sapphic romance trilogy: Delilah Green Doesn't Care, Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail, and Iris Kelly Doesn't Date. These are not perfect books, but they made me laugh, made me cry, and were impossible to put down.

  eyrie.org

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  Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail

  Their words

  My favorite books I read this year were Ashley Herring Blake's Bright Falls sapphic romance trilogy: Delilah Green Doesn't Care, Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail, and Iris Kelly Doesn't Date. These are not perfect books, but they made me laugh, made me cry, and were impossible to put down.

  eyrie.org

Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.

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  Extensive preparation before having kids is unnecessary since parents have months to adjust as needs arise.

  Their words

  This is part of why I think "getting ready" to have kids is, frankly, ridiculous.

  nateliason.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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  The Blighted Stars

  Their words

  Mind candy: a very angsty romance wrapped in a shell of space opera. Both aspects of the story are left in media res, and I look forward to reading the sequels.

  bactra.org

Biologist at the MIT Media Lab; invented CRISPR gene drives and then spent years arguing for safeguards against their misuse and against engineered pandemics.

From one piece It shouldn't be easy to buy synthetic DNA fragments to recreate the 1918 flu virus 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Ordering the synthetic DNA needed to rebuild the 1918 influenza virus is surprisingly easy, even from companies that screen customers' orders.

  Their words

  It should be hard — exceedingly hard — to obtain the synthetic DNA needed to recreate the virus that caused the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic without authorization. But my lab found that it’s surprisingly easy, even when ordering gene fragments from companies that check customers’ orders to detect hazardous sequences.

  media.mit.edu

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  The genome sequences of pandemic viruses and the protocols for building them from synthetic DNA are already freely available online.

  Their words

  Both the genome sequences of pandemic viruses and step-by-step protocols to make infectious samples from synthetic DNA are now freely available online.

  media.mit.edu

Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.

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  Reading and listening are only preparation; learning happens by doing, and it consists of failing on the way to mastery.

  Their words

  The only way to learn is by doing things. That we can read about how to swim and we can read about how to make uh uh uh a vegetarian maki roll, but you will not learn how to do it until you do it. And the reading, the listening is important preparation, but learning is the act of failing on our way to mastery.

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

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  The people who can be moved by deaths from neglected tropical diseases are the same people who can be moved by pandemics and by AI risk, because both come from reasoning about importance rather than from the news.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  And I notice that the tiny handful of people capable of caring about 200,000 people dying of neglected tropical diseases are the same tiny handful of people capable of caring about the next pandemic, or superintelligence, or human extinction.

  In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruismastralcodexten.com

Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

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  AI must be reoriented toward safety rather than capabilities alone, as preparation is already behind schedule and the costs of unpreparedness outweigh premature action.

  Their words

  For AI to be a boon, we must reorient; pushing AI capabilities alone is not enough. We are already behind schedule for this reorientation. The scale of the risks means that we need to be proactive, as the costs of being unprepared far outweigh those of premature preparation.

  arxiv.org

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

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  Pandemic relief checks function mainly as retroactive social insurance rather than stimulus, because people receiving them during a pandemic save or pay down debt instead of spending.

  Their words, before

  If you get a check during a pandemic, you’re not going to go out and spend it at restaurants and bars, because…well, there’s a pandemic. Instead, you’re more likely to stick it in the bank, pay down debt, or pay the back rent that you owe.

  Their words now

  I had some theory and some evidence on my side for this prediction, and yet I ended up being very wrong about what would happen to consumption.

Biologist at the MIT Media Lab; invented CRISPR gene drives and then spent years arguing for safeguards against their misuse and against engineered pandemics.

From one piece Opinion: Manipulating viruses and risking pandemics is too dangerous. It's time to stop. 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Research programmes that identify or create pandemic-capable viruses teach the world how to make them, and should stop.

  Their words

  But perhaps the biggest question of all isn’t being asked insistently enough: Why is anyone trying to teach the world how to make viruses that could kill millions of people?

  media.mit.edu

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  The spread of pandemic-capable biology should be treated as a matter of international security, in the way nuclear physics is.

  Their words

  Like nuclear physics, with its potential for global catastrophe when put to destructive ends, the proliferation of pandemic biology ought to be considered a matter of international security.

  media.mit.edu

Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.

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  A mass death does not by itself produce a boom afterwards: expecting a pandemic to renew an economy on its own misreads what followed the Black Death.

  Their words

  Using history to understand our present is a great impulse, but it means some of the false myths we tell about the Black Death and Renaissance are doing new damage, one of the most problematic in my view being the idea that sitting back and letting COVID kill will somehow by itself naturally make the economy turn around and enter a period of growth and rising wages.

  exurbe.com