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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Adam Kay's This Is Going To Hurt is a textbook case study of moral injury and post-traumatic stress in a competent doctor, narrated by the patient himself.

  Trauma

  Their words

  This Is Going To Hurt is, read with a clinical eye, a textbook case study of moral injury and post-traumatic stress in a competent doctor, narrated by the patient himself, with the diagnosis hidden in plain sight.

  Your Book Review: This Is Going To Hurtastralcodexten.com

Professor of economics at George Mason University and Bartley J. Madden Chair at the Mercatus Center. Co-writes the blog Marginal Revolution and co-authors the textbook Modern Principles of Economics with Tyler Cowen.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  Modern Principles of Economics

  Their words

  Modern Principles of Economics is best principles of economics textbook; great videos, clear writing and excellent applications and examples!

  marginalrevolution.com

Neurologist at Oxford; studies apathy, motivation and attention after brain injury, and edits the journal Brain.

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  Motivated and apathetic people are indistinguishable when the reward is large; the whole difference between them shows up over small rewards.

  Their words

  We find that everyone is willing to work for high rewards. But the difference between motivated people and apathetic people is at the level of the low rewards. Apathetic people are more inclined to say, "Nah, I don't think this is worth the effort, so I won't do that option."

  youtube.com

Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.

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  Losing your emotions does not leave you a cooler decision-maker; it leaves you unable to organise a life at all.

  Their words

  if you have massive frontal lobe lesions that make it the case that you're no longer emotionally responding to stimuli the consequences are devastating which is that you cannot make decisions complex decisions in your life you can't organize your life you're not motivated to take the right path through life because you don't feel one one way or the other about the different options that are available.

  youtube.com

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

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  Modern Operating Systems

  Their words

  I really enjoyed reading this textbook even after finishing the corresponding course.

  rakhim.org

Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Nature of Code

  Their words

  This book is a beautiful introduction to simulations of natural systems. We get concise prose, clear illustrations, and carefully chosen systems with a guided tour through the math. All done in the Processing language, which is fun and easy to pick up. The reason I like this book so much is probably due to timing. In 2013, I was on the verge of abandoning software development. I was fed up. (That's a story for another time.) Instead, I planned to go into cognitive psychology full-time as a researcher. This book brought back the joy in programming for me. Sometimes, a good book is the book that motivated you.

  adamtornhill.substack.com

Founder of HumanLayer; wrote 12-Factor Agents, on how to build AI agents that hold up in production.

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  The engineering intuition that matters cannot be taught from a textbook — you know bad patterns in software because you have debugged them at three in the morning.

  Their words

  there's a different kind of intuition that you that you develop over years as a software engineer and uh there's many categories of it but the one I'll I'll call attention to that is like a thing that you cannot teach you cannot do you cannot learn in a textbook. The only way to learn it is like I know bad patterns in software because I have debugged them at three in the morning.

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.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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  Even if AI curates better, people will still want a human curator they have a relationship with, because wanting to learn something is a social phenomenon.

  Their words

  I think we would always still prefer like a human that we had a relationship with because the way that we get motivated to be interesting interested in things is a social phenomenon.

  youtube.com

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

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  The problems worth a small builder's time are the ones too small for a big AI company to be motivated to solve.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  Like if it's a big problem, like everyone can see, then all these big companies will get into it. But whereas it's like there are a lot of problems that's like smaller, then maybe OpenAI won't be motivated to solve it, but maybe I can like all a lot of people can.

  youtube.com

American game designer and director, for nineteen years at Blizzard as a World of Warcraft quest designer and then game director of Overwatch; now runs the independent studio Kintsugiyama.

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  Game design has no textbook, so a designer has to keep their own list of the elements of fun the way a writer keeps the elements of fiction.

  Their words

  And there’s no, like, textbook that exists for game design, at least none that has been introduced to me yet. But I think about, like, elements of fun.

  youtube.com

Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku, author of The Twelve-Factor App, and a researcher at Ink & Switch.

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  People who lack intrinsic motivation to invest time upfront in a new tool often won't, even if it would save them time later

  Their words

  The "homework problem" described above might be much worse in practice for end users who aren't motivated to invest in their email triage systems, even if it will save them time in the medium term.

  Firehose authentic useadamwiggins.com

Co-founder and CEO of Until, a reversible-cryopreservation company, and previously the founder of the Longevity Fund.

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  Biology is taught as flat triangles and arrows in a textbook, a depiction of the molecular world that makes no conceptual sense.

  Their words

  and I think most people experience it as like flat triangles and squares in a biology textbook where it's like you know there's an arrow between like this triangle and this triangle is just like doesn't make any conceptual sense and is like confusing and annoying

  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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  Raising prices usually leaves signups unchanged or increases them, which is not what the textbook demand curve predicts.

  Their words

  So what usually h what often happens is you raise prices and signups don't change. When I say signups, I mean the like signups per month, you know, the rate at sign or signups go up. This happens all the time.

  youtube.com

Roboticist; co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, directed the MIT AI Lab, and publishes a scorecard grading his own dated predictions about AI, robots and self-driving.

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  A robotaxi that still needs remote human help loses the cost advantage that motivated it, which pushes out when it can scale.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  Systems which do require remote operations assistance to get full reliability cut into that economic advantage and have a higher burden on their ROI calculations to make a business case for their adoption and therefore their time horizon to scaling across geographies.

  Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01rodneybrooks.com

Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.

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  Chinese factory workers are more motivated than American ones because what they want has been getting cheaper against their wages while American housing has not.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  Between 2015 and 2025 US manufacturing wages rose 40%, while the cost of purchasing a home rose 93%.

  molsonhart.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Inca stones were not fitted by patient pecking with hammer stones; they were fused with acid.

  Their words

  The common archeological wisdom that you’d find out of a textbook is that they just kept pecking away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which has to be bullshit, that there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody’s got a hammerstone. I personally think it’s acids.

  youtube.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

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  Whether a country builds ships well comes down to whether it actually wants to compete internationally, and America never has.

  America

  Their words

  The U.S., on the other hand, never appears to have been strongly motivated to make its shipbuilding industry an international success.

  Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships?construction-physics.com

Technology journalist; writes Understanding AI, after reporting at Ars Technica, Vox and the Washington Post.

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  A robotaxi that still needs remote human help loses the cost advantage that motivated it, which pushes out when it can scale.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  If Waymo vehicles were constantly asking for remote guidance, Waymo might need to hire so many remote operators that it negates the cost savings that come from not needing a driver.

  understandingai.org

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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  Employees and customers do not want what founders want, and equity stakes become a demotivator in almost every organisation.

  startups

  Their words

  Employees don't want what you want. Customers don't want what you want. Uh you know, that that one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They are not. Not even close.

  youtube.com

Journalist and author writing on politics, liberalism and ideas; a contributor to Quillette and co-author of a book on Christopher Hitchens.

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  A movement that has decided its job is to save humanity is uniquely prone to hubris, dogma and motivated reasoning.

  Their words

  This is a worldview that’s uniquely susceptible to hubris, dogma, and motivated reasoning.

  How Effective Altruism Lost Its Wayquillette.com

Co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the writer who started the modern argument that a sufficiently capable AI would by default kill everyone. Has argued the case since the early 2000s, latterly with the conclusion that it is being lost.

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  Aligning an AI is not impossible in principle; the problem is that it has to be done without the textbook that would make it look easy.

  Their words

  None of this is about anything being impossible in principle.

  AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalitiesintelligence.org

Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  The Startup Owner's Manual

  Their words

  This is Steve Blank's textbook to starting a company. It's the Four Steps to the Epiphany, expanded and much more readable. If you want to deep dive into the Lean methodology, this is the book to read.

  jasonevanish.com

Security technologist and author of books including Applied Cryptography and Data and Goliath; writes the Schneier on Security blog and the monthly Crypto-Gram newsletter.

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  Against a sufficiently skilled and determined attacker computer security fails, and most people are safe only because nobody bothered with them.

  Their words

  If a sufficiently skilled, funded, and motivated attacker wants in to your computer, they’re in.

  Security vs. Surveillanceschneier.com

Interpretability researcher at Anthropic, which he co-founded; before that at OpenAI and Google Brain, where he wrote the explanations of neural networks most people learned them from.

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  The connection between representations and types may be fundamentally significant, akin to links among geometry, logic, topology and functional programming.

  Their words

  The known connection between geometry, logic, topology, and functional programming suggests that the connections between representations and types may be of fundamental significance.

  colah.github.io