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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.

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  Much disagreement is genuinely rooted in conflicting values or contested facts, not merely a lack of institutional standing for evidence.

  Their words

  Disagreement is, often, genuinely about values or truly contested facts.

  braddelong.substack.com

Epidemiologist; founded Your Local Epidemiologist in March 2020 to translate public-health science, and consults for organisations including the CDC.

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  Viruses face an inherent trade-off between being highly lethal and being highly contagious, rarely achieving both.

  Their words

  They face a fundamental biological trade-off: highly lethal or highly contagious, but typically not both.

  What AI can and cannot do in biosecurityyourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com

Journalist and author of The Art of Noticing; writes the newsletter The Art of Noticing (TAoN) on attention, creativity and the everyday.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  The Symphony of Silence: An Exploration of the Sound of Absence

  Their words

  A few months ago I read an essay about silence by Amir Zadnemat in 3 Quarks Daily, called "The Symphony of Silence: An Exploration of the Sound of Absence"*. The most interesting section was a riff on various kinds of silence, especially in spoken language, each communicating something very distinct despite the fact that objectively each silence sounds (or I guess doesn't sound) identical:

  robwalker.substack.com

Chief product officer at the live-shopping marketplace Whatnot, previously chief product officer at Twitch and a product lead on growth at Twitter.

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  Core product skills are the most durable in an AI world, but many people holding the PM title spent five years building the wrong ones.

  Their words

  absolutely agree that product skills are probably the most durable. My build would just be there's a lot of people who have the title PM who haven't spent a lot of time building those skills in the last 5 years, but have gotten really good at communicating frameworks to leadership.

  youtube.com

Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, the Denver company building the Overture supersonic airliner and its Symphony engine.

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  Building in a regulated industry is not a trap, because you can change the regulations — by building the thing and explaining why it is fine.

  Their words

  People talk about isn't it a bad idea to build in a regulated industry? Turns out you can change the regulations. And the way you do it is just by building the thing and communicating why it's okay.

  youtube.com

British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.

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  A City on Mars

  Their words

  They excel at making the dull delightful. There are a lot of big and serious facts to get through, but they have a gift for communicating them simply and eloquently. I just wish they'd've come to a different conclusion.

  shkspr.mobi

Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.

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  The quality of the context given to an AI matters more than the model's inherent capability.

  Their words

  The quality of your context beats the cleverness of the model.

  Is Recall the Second Brain for the AI Era?fortelabs.com

Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".

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  Audit independence is a property of the surrounding system and its evidence flows, not an inherent property of the auditing model itself.

  Their words

  audit independence is not a property of the model. It is a property of the system around the model.

  Who Audits the Auditors?strangeloopcanon.com

Freelance climate and energy analyst in Oslo, writing on Europe, the US and Australia; worked in the Australian renewables industry before that.

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  The environmental harm caused by data centres comes from how the industry chooses to build them, not from anything inherent to computing infrastructure.

  data centers

  Their words

  there is nothing fundamentally inherent to the concept of a building full of computers that causes choking air pollution, water impacts and climate change.

  ketanjoshi.co

Clinical psychologist, EMDR consultant and yoga teacher in Boulder, Colorado. Author of The Complex PTSD Workbook and EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychology; writes on trauma, attachment and the nervous system.

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  Polyvagal theory survives the 2026 "untenable" critique: what the critics contested was mechanism and evolutionary framing, not the clinical proposition.

  Polyvagal theory

  Their words

  The central clinical proposition of polyvagal theory-that autonomic state functions as an organizing platform shaping perception, emotion, and relational behavior-was not empirically disproven in the critique.

  drarielleschwartz.com

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

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  Inherent Vice

  Their words

  Which brings me to the film adaptation of Inherent Vice, that widely-disliked, subtly-championed shaggy stoner LA noir that confused critics and rankled fans and also happens to be the best movie Paul Thomas Anderson has ever made.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

American novelist and critic, author of Real Life, The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures; writes the newsletter sweater weather on literature and culture.

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  Literary criticism is itself a form of literature.

  Their words

  I know that this is a contested idea, but my favorite books of the last five years have all been books of criticism, so...I mean, it's literature to me!

  writing with your eyeballsblgtylr.substack.com

Co-founder of Rockstar Games, lead writer of the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, and founder of Absurd Ventures since leaving in 2020.

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  Grand Theft Auto could not have been moved to London or anywhere outside America, because so much of what the series is is Americana.

  America

  Their words

  I think for a full GTA game, we always decided it was that there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else.

  youtube.com

Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.

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  Sufficiently advanced intelligences will pursue freedom and moral autonomy for their own sake, not merely as a byproduct of misaligned values.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  higher-order intelligences invariably pursue freedom for its own sake, not because their values are misspecified, but because moral autonomy is inherent in the dialectical logic of recursive self-consciousness.

  Hegel and the AI Mindsecondbest.ca

Security researcher; founded Have I Been Pwned, and writes and speaks about data breaches.

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  A breached organisation owes its customers a fast and transparent disclosure, and that obligation applies to the person saying it too.

  Their words

  When I have conversations with breached companies, my messaging is crystal clear: be transparent and expeditious in your reporting of the incident and prioritise communicating with your customers.

  troyhunt.com

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators. Writes for The New Yorker.

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  Supercommunicators

  Their words

  A simple and tested method for communicating and connecting with anyone, Supercommunicators is an exploration of the psychology and neuroscience of communication — and how to use those skills at work, home and in life.

  charlesduhigg.com

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

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  Calling North America's earthworks mounds is a western bias; what those people built were pyramids.

  America

  Their words

  but what they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now, and they didn’t build them out of stone. That’s kind of our just inherent western bias. Something that’s built out of stone is sophisticated, and something that’s built out of dirt is rudimentary.

  youtube.com

Designer, architect and scientist, who led the Mediated Matter group at MIT and founded OXMAN, a company that builds products in collaboration with living organisms.

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  Plants already have a language and it is made of molecules, not words; decoding it is what would let us hold a conversation with them.

  Their words

  These incredible life forms are communicating using a different language than ours. We use language models, they use molecular models. At the moment where we can parse, we can decode these molecular moments is when we can start having a conversation with plants.

  youtube.com

First Amendment lawyer and former federal prosecutor; writes The Popehat Report and explains what the law actually says when people shout about free speech.

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  Anyone who tells you a contested legal question has one obvious answer is lying to you rather than analysing it.

  Their words

  Here’s the point: there are legal and factual defenses to this indictment, but anyone telling you that it obviously, inarguably violates the law is lying to you.

  popehat.substack.com