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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.

  youtube.com

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

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  A model fitted only to trends in its own outcome cannot forecast anything, because it contains no variable anyone could change.

  Their words

  The demand for explanations of low fertility is entirely a demand for variables which will reduce these technical trends to near zero.

  We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com

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.

  youtube.com

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

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  Current AI techniques are four to six orders of magnitude away from optimal in data efficiency and test-time compute efficiency.

  Their words

  I believe current techniques are 4-6 orders of magnitude away from optimality in terms of data efficiency and test-time compute efficiency. But far future AI will be near-optimal.

  @fchollet on Xx.com

Climate scientist and energy systems analyst; writes The Climate Brink with Andrew Dessler and leads climate research at Stripe.

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  Strong agreement among forecast models does not by itself mean those models are skillful.

  Their words

  Model agreement this strong is unusual, though I'd note that agreement is not the same thing as skill as I discuss later on.

  The Strongest El Niño Evertheclimatebrink.com

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.

  youtube.com

Professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M; writes The Climate Brink with Zeke Hausfather.

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  Climate models are underestimating how intense heatwaves become at a given level of global warming.

  Their words

  the temperatures seen in France show that climate models continue to underpredict the magnitude of heatwaves for a particular level of global warming.

  theclimatebrink.com

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

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  If AI permanently drives down demand for labour, long-term income support for a significant fraction of the workforce will likely become necessary.

  Their words

  If AI-driven labor displacement ends up being large in magnitude and permanently drives down the demand for labor, it will likely be necessary to go beyond mere incentive programs to long-term income support for a significant fraction of the labor force.

  Policy on the AI Exponential (June 2026)darioamodei.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

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  You can bet your entire business on Nvidia shipping a better architecture every single year and your token cost falling by an order of magnitude — no ASIC team can promise that.

  Their words

  Pick your ASIC team where you can say I can bet the farm of I can bet my entire business that you will be here for me every single year. Your cost, your token cost will decrease by an order of magnitude every single year. I can count on it like I can count on the clock.

  Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?youtube.com

Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

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  Nothing in a fifty-year career has hit the industry with the magnitude of AI; it is a whole size difference from anything before it.

  Their words

  Well, nothing has hit with the magnitude of AI. That's I mean, this is a a whole size difference from anything that we've faced before.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

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  The cost of a token is falling by an order of magnitude every year, even as the price of the computers that make them goes up.

  Their words

  You know, our computer price is going up, but our token generation effectiveness is going up so much faster that token cost is coming down. It's just coming down an order of magnitude every year.

  youtube.com

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

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  What an accelerator needs from memory is bandwidth per unit of chip edge, and on that measure ordinary DRAM is an order of magnitude behind HBM.

  Their words

  and even if you take a generous interpretation of 128 * 8 gig transfers, you're at 128 gigabytes a second for the same shoreline versus 2 and a half terabytes a second. There's a there's an order of magnitude difference in bandwidth per edge area.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

From one piece Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential” 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  If a lab is off by a single year in its revenue forecast, no hedge on Earth stops the compute it already bought from bankrupting it.

  Their words

  And if my if my revenue is not a trillion dollars, if it's even 800 billion, there's no force on Earth. There's there's no hedge on Earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if I if I buy that much compute.

  youtube.com

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  There is a 90% chance of a country of geniuses in a datacentre within ten years, and no honest forecast can go much higher than that.

  data centers

  Their words

  on the basic hypothesis of you know, as you put it, within 10 years we'll get to, you know, you know, what I call kind of country of geniuses in a data center. I'm at like 90% on that. Um and it's hard to go much higher than 90% cuz the world is so unpredictable.

  youtube.com

Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.

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  Selling a saving caps what you can charge; selling more of what the buyer already values raises that cap by an order of magnitude.

  Their words

  It's just that it caps this price and this value that is they perceive that you do. Whereas if you deliver more of the value that they already value, it's I don't want to say uncapped completely, but like the cap is maybe an order of magnitude higher than saving.

  youtube.com

Partner at Collaborative Fund and author of The Psychology of Money, Same As Ever and The Art of Spending Money. Writes essays on investor behavior and posts frequently on X.

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  Cycles are hard to predict because forecasters extrapolate in straight lines and cannot see the forces undoing the present.

  Their words

  Cycles are so hard to predict, because it’s easier to forecast in straight lines.

  A Few Things I’m Pretty Sure Aboutcollabfund.com

Founder and CEO of SaaStr, the B2B software community and events business, and a SaaS investor who previously co-founded EchoSign and sold it to Adobe.

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  AI is raising what a single sales rep is expected to produce by an order of magnitude.

  Their words

  With AI, he's trying he's targeting 3 to five million in revenue per rep. 3 to 5 million. Honestly, if this was three or four years ago for a similar company, it would be 3 to 500K. That's an order of magnitude more efficiency.

  youtube.com

Founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and of Fortnite.

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  Unreal Engine's deepest limitation is that game simulation still runs on a single core, because single-threaded programming is orders of magnitude easier than multi-threaded.

  Their words

  The biggest limitation that's built up over time is the single-threaded nature of game simulation in Unreal Engine. We run a single-threaded simulation. If you have a 16 core CPU, we're using one core for game simulation and running with the complicated game logic because single-threaded programming is orders of magnitude easier than multi-threaded programming.

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Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.

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  A slower project aimed at the right goal beats a faster one aimed at the wrong goal.

  Their words

  "Direction is more important than magnitude"-it's usually better to have a lower-velocity project that works on the right things, than a higher-velocity one that's pointed at the wrong goal.

  How I've run major projectsbenkuhn.net

Energy and decarbonisation analyst; publishes an annual chart deck on the state of the transition, and was chief content officer at BloombergNEF.

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  Official forecasts consistently underestimate the pace of real-world change, with reality outperforming conservative predictions.

  Their words

  Until we develop better ways to bridge this gap - aligning what analysts understand with what is formally forecast - we'll continue to see the same pattern: reality consistently outperforming conservative predictions.

  AI data and Theories of Changenathanielbullard.com

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

Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.

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  Expecting AI or longer lives to arrive in time makes people skip having a plan for falling birth rates at all.

  Their words

  And they don’t see a need for a plan B, in case their forecast fails.

  Five Fertility Failsovercomingbias.com

Writes about the biotech industry, drug development and forecasting — “I write to learn, mostly about biotech.”

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  Pharmaceutical R&D productivity has fallen for decades: far more money spent per drug, with no matching improvement in the odds a candidate reaches the market.

  Their words

  The cost to discover and develop a drug today is orders of magnitude higher than in the 1950s. Despite this, the probability that a drug entering clinical trials will eventually reach the market has hardly improved in the intervening years.

  atelfo.github.io

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

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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  An acre of solar panels powering electric cars carries you orders of magnitude further than an acre of crops grown for fuel.

  solar

  Their words

  You can drive about 150 times as far from a solar-powered electric car compared to using corn bioethanol.

  hannahritchie.substack.com

Journalist; wrote We Are Eating the Earth on food and climate, and writes the newsletter Emissions.

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  An acre of solar panels powering electric cars carries you orders of magnitude further than an acre of crops grown for fuel.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  an acre of solar panels generates as much energy as 100 acres of corn grown for ethanol.

  A Climate Killer Disguised as a Climate Solutionmichaelgrunwald.substack.com

Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.

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  A self-driving car should be roughly ten times safer than a human driver before it is deployed, to leave engineering margin for what nobody can predict.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  Taken together, there is an argument to be made that AVs should be safer than human drivers by about a factor of 10 (being a nice round order of magnitude number) to leave engineering margin for the above considerations.

  safeautonomy.blogspot.com

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  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