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Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

From one piece International relations has a problem with the future 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Standard social-science approaches that seek long-term regularities become less useful during periods of systemic transition, until the system stabilizes again.

  Their words

  the value of standard social science approaches, which attempt to discover long term regularities, is likely to depreciate in relative terms until the system settles down again.

  programmablemutter.com

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  Building institutions that can incorporate diverse perspectives, adapt flexibly to change, and keep public legitimacy is the central challenge of state capacity today.

  Their words

  Creating institutional forms that can incorporate diversity and respond flexibly to a changing environment while maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of citizens is the fundamental project of state capacity that faces us.

  programmablemutter.com

Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.

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  AfD support reflects a coherent anti-systemic worldview rather than incoherent or narrowly self-interested preferences.

  Their words

  Rather than thinking of this set of preferences as incoherent, or merely the expression of a sectional petty bourgeois interest, it makes more sense, surely, to view it as a coherent set of anti-systemic views.

  adamtooze.substack.com

Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.

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  How much worse the climate crisis becomes depends on how many people publicly demand systemic change now.

  Their words

  However worse the climate crisis gets now depends on how quickly society transforms. How quickly society transforms depends on how many people demand it.

  “What can I do?” The answer is still anything.heated.world

Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.

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  Britain has a systemic problem building large infrastructure projects, including reservoirs

  energy

  Their words

  I think Britain has a real problem with building almost anything, from train lines to houses, and reservoirs to energy infrastructure.

  The UK needs to build more reservoirshannahritchie.substack.com

Professor at Stanford working on robot learning and meta-learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence.

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  It is the diversity of a robot data set, not its size, that produces generalization: dropping the most diverse slice hurts far more than dropping a random fifth.

  Their words

  we find that the performance on held out tasks decreases dramatically. Whereas if we um just take out a random 20% of the data that's less diverse than the most diverse subset, the performance um only decreases a little bit. And so this suggests that actually having really diverse data plays an important role in enabling it to generalize to new tasks.

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Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

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  Solving a systemic problem by doubling down on the same approach risks creating uncontrollable feedback loops.

  Their words

  As a general matter, trying to solve a systemic problem by doubling down risks creating out-of-control feedback loops.

  The downside of robot solutionismprogrammablemutter.com

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

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  Bus grids cannot function as a city's primary transit backbone at the scale of a very large, low-density city like Los Angeles, no matter how much priority the buses get.

  Their words

  But in fact, the scale of buses is rather short, and in a Los Angeles-size city they are hopeless, no matter how much priority they have.

  pedestrianobservations.com

Investor and writer. Previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a product leader at Twitter, Facebook, Snap and Microsoft. Writes essays and memos at sriramk.com.

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  The future is multi-model.

  Their words

  it is clear we are going to have a diverse ecosystem of models at least on coding and agentic use.

  Open source models are having a momentsriramk.com

Investing columnist for The Wall Street Journal and editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor.

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  Behavioral economics is not a cure-all, but it is a useful tool for individuals and for systemic change alike.

  Their words

  My view: Behavioral economics is no panacea, but it can be an extremely useful tool for individuals and for systems as well.

  Some Summer Readingjasonzweig.com

Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.

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  The finance industry is built on false mathematical precision and prone to systemic collapse.

  Their words

  Finance only to find that it is a house of cards built on false precision, as the world collapsed around us

  What America has meant to meswyx.io

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

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  Model intelligence should speciate like the animal kingdom rather than converge on one oracle that knows everything.

  Their words

  I do think we should expect more speciation in the intelligences. Um like, you know, the animal kingdom is extremely diverse in the brains that exist and there's lots of different niches of of nature and some animals have overdeveloped visual cortex or other part kind of parts and I think we we should be able to see more speciation and um you don't need like this oracle that knows everything.

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Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz

  Their words

  Jazz is messy, and musicians seem to court disaster night after night. What can product leaders learn from how these artists approach their art? Barrett’s entertaining book formed the backbone for

  bringthedonuts.com

Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.

From one piece Megapapers and How to Write Them 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Changing societal outcomes requires changing minds, and the credibility many diverse co-authors lend to a conclusion is hard to replicate with AI.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I think that changing societal outcome requires changing minds, and the "heft" that comes from many authors with different backgrounds endorsing a certain set of conclusions is hard to replicate with a link to a shared ChatGPT chat.

  Megapapers and How to Write Themmilesbrundage.substack.com

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  AI systems are not yet a substitute for real, diverse human experts.

  Their words

  But they can't do everything that megapapers do, such as conveying intellectual heft and legitimacy, and they are not yet a replacement for real, diverse experts.

  Megapapers and How to Write Themmilesbrundage.substack.com

Cryptography engineer; maintains Go's cryptography libraries as a full-time open-source maintainer, funded directly by companies that use them.

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  Open source maintenance can be a mature profession organised into small specialist firms, the way law and medicine already are.

  open source

  Their words

  From the onset, I envisioned small firms of professional maintainers with thematic portfolios, accommodating diverse maintainers and project sizes, just like the specialized firms of other professionals.

  words.filippo.io

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Britain has a systemic problem building large infrastructure projects, including reservoirs

  Their words

  It’s turned entire countries, like the United Kingdom, incapable of building more than about one line per generation.

  pedestrianobservations.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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  A good life rests on things that demand skill and effort from you, not on goods that arrive requiring none.

  Their words

  A good life is supported by a diverse array of focal things and practices, which tend to reward us with deeper, more meaningful experiences; a gratifying measure of bodily skill and competence; and possibly even a stronger fabric of relationships.

  The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Lifetheconvivialsociety.substack.com

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

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  Universities would be better run by business leaders than by academics the faculty approves of.

  Their words

  I would argue having a business leader run these institutions and then having a board that has, itself, diverse viewpoints, and by the way, permanently structured to have diverse viewpoints is a much better way to run a university than picking an academic that the faculty supports.

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