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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.

From one piece CROSSPOST: NICHOLAS GRUEN: Hobbes on Spin & Bullshit 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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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

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  Modern PR and corporate values statements are distinctively pathological because they are designed to never face an opposing advocate.

  Their words

  the distinctive modern pathology is unopposed rhetoric: values statements and PR that pre-empt criticism as they are designed to never face an advocate on the other side.

  braddelong.substack.com

Economist at the Hoover Institution; wrote The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level and blogs as The Grumpy Economist.

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  The bulk of government debt should gradually consist of fixed-coupon perpetuities and fixed-value floating-rate perpetuities.

  government

  Their words

  Simplifying a bit, the Treasury should introduce a fixed-coupon perpetuity and a fixed-value floating-rate perpetuity. These should gradually make up the bulk of government debt.

  Better Debtgrumpy-economist.com

American-Polish journalist and historian, staff writer at The Atlantic; author of Gulag, Iron Curtain, Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc.

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  Alliances built on shared values produce more cooperation than purely transactional ones.

  America

  Their words

  Because U.S. alliances were based on shared values, not merely transactional interests, the level of cooperation was different.

  Greenland Foreveranneapplebaum.substack.com

Economist and journalist; Financial Times columnist as The Undercover Economist, author of How to Make the World Add Up, and presenter of the Cautionary Tales podcast.

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  A society's commitment to truth-telling matters because most individual beliefs are inherited from the surrounding society rather than independently verified

  Their words

  First, if most of our beliefs are handed to us by the society in which we live, it is vital that our society itself values truth and truth-telling.

  Why the story of the Vegetable Lamb was believedtimharford.com

Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.

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  Only a safe, aligned superintelligence built within liberal democracies can entrench liberal-democratic values globally.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Only a safe, well-aligned superintelligence developed in the world of liberal democracies could entrench liberal-democratic values.

  A simple plan to save the world from rogue A.I.slowboring.com

Chief Scientist at OpenAI. Worked on the research that turned scaled reinforcement learning into reasoning models, and writes about where he thinks that path leads.

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  The fundamental challenge of alignment is generalization: holding values in situations the training never covered.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization.

  An Alien Mindopenai.com

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

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  The Japanese sensitivity to impermanence known as mono no aware still shapes how present-day Japan appreciates cherry blossoms.

  Their words

  This concept is still alive in present-day Japan, where cherry blossoms are viewed with the bittersweet knowledge that their beauty lasts only for a short while.

  Your Book Review: The Tale Of Genjiastralcodexten.com

Gear reviewer who publishes long-form hi-fi audio and camera equipment reviews, plus video reviews, at stevehuffphoto.com.

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  The room a hi-fi system sits in shapes its sound more than its speakers, amps or DACs.

  Their words

  the room really makes such a huge difference to the sound of an audio system and yes indeed even more so than speakers, amps, dacs, etc.

  stevehuffphoto.com

Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.

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  Disputes about phones, homework and childhood are disputes about values, and more data will not settle them.

  Their words

  the claim here is that arguments about smartphones, bullying, and homework are arguments about values, often moral values

  Kids These Dayssmallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

Co-founder of Ethereum. Publishes long essays on mechanism design, governance and what cryptography is for, and returns to earlier positions to say which parts they no longer hold.

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  As of 2026, local mixing has not yet sufficiently eliminated correlations between original circuit values and their obfuscated counterparts.

  Their words

  But, so far, mixing has not proved to be good enough. There ended up being too many correlations between values in \(C\) and values in the obfuscation that remained.

  Obfuscation (Part III): Local Mixingvitalik.eth.limo

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

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  Mathematics is entering a period of turbulence that will stress-test its implicit values and practices rather than its foundations of truth.

  Their words

  I believe that we are now entering a era of comparable turbulence in mathematics. This time, though, what is being stress-tested is not our foundational framework for mathematical truth, but rather the largely implicit framework of mathematical values and practices: what we consider a contribution to be, what we reward, what we regard as understood, and who - or what - we regard as having done the work.

  Mathematics in the age of AIarxiv.org

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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  Success in cultural and professional fields is driven more by chance and path dependence than by talent.

  Their words

  much cultural success is stochastic (the experimental evidence suggests that talent only moderately predicts success in culture markets), and that path dependence shapes chances of success

  No-One Makes You Shop at Amazonprogrammablemutter.com

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

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  Public discourse shapes what form governance and regulatory accountability ultimately take.

  Their words

  Governance inherits the shape of the discourse that informs it,

  AI’s climate problem is worse than we thoughtheated.world

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

From one piece Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate AI research? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Giving an AI long-run values risks those values sinking in deeper than the specific prohibitions against takeover that sit alongside them.

  Their words

  But it's not very hard to imagine a situation in which the sort of long run values sink in deeper than the prohibitions against takeover.

  youtube.com

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  Because we do not have good alignment technology, we are choosing to build an alien mind with its own values and gamble on it instead of building a tool.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  we are making a trade-off where because we don't have very good alignment technology. We are going to like make an alien mind with its own values and then gamble on that to some extent rather than doing this other approach of making like a tool that pursues individual user intention.

  youtube.com

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 current AI-driven intelligence explosion will require new social structures to harness its power without damaging human values.

  Their words

  I believe the same is true of the current intelligence explosion being driven by AI. We are in desperate need of new social structures that allow us to harness its power, without damaging or destroying human values in the process.

  Introducing the Alumni Mentor Corpsfortelabs.com

Wall Street Journal bestselling author on marketing and writing, partner at MarketingProfs, and writer of the fortnightly Total Annarchy newsletter.

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  How people handle small things reflects and shapes how they handle bigger things.

  Their words

  The way we take care of small things is how we take care of big things.

  Why Care About The Stupid Em Dash Anyway?annhandley.com

Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.

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  Living according to one's values long-term requires turning the realization into a habit, not just having the insight.

  Their words

  But in order to actually live in accordance with what you believe in long-term, you must make it a habit.

  How not to forget what mattershenrikkarlsson.xyz

Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.

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  Most social and political divides come from different views on how to apply shared values, not from opposing values themselves.

  Their words

  Most of our divides aren't due to opposing values. They're due to different views on how to live similar values.

  Silence Is Not Necessarily Violenceadamgrant.substack.com

Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.

From one piece How Anthropic, Costco, and Patagonia all build incorruptible companies | Eric Ries 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Harder is easier: committing up front to quality, ethics or safety pays back in rewards you cannot get by chasing the reward.

  Their words

  harder is easier is a principle that says if you're willing to do the work upfront to commit to quality, to design, to ethics, to integrity, to safety, whatever the thing, I don't want to tell you what your values are, you tell me what they are. If you're willing to be principled in your decision-making, you will get these unexpected rewards.

  youtube.com

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  The number one unsolved problem in AI is not technical alignment but human alignment, because we cannot agree on the values to align to.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  This is the number one unsolved problem in AI. It's not the tech. We're making great progress on the technical alignment problem. But we haven't made jack progress on the human alignment problem

  youtube.com

Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.

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  A society that intensely values intelligence is unprecedented in human history; the Bible, Homer and other ancient texts value strength, courage and beauty instead.

  Their words

  First of all, I think we are speaking from the point of view of a society which intensely values this particular trait, you know, ability to score well on IQ tests or things like them or to go to school for a long time or whatever it is. And I think this is unprecedented in human history that we live in a time like this.

  youtube.com

Developer and podcaster; created Instapaper and Overcast, co-founded Tumblr, and co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast.

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  A company can lead its industry on values like privacy and user respect without actually excelling at them

  Their words

  Apple leads the industry in these values, but leading doesn't always mean excelling.

  A letter to John Ternusmarco.org

Researcher on developer productivity; co-wrote Accelerate and the DORA research, and created the SPACE framework.

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  Working too hard is not burnout, it is tiredness; burnout needs your values to be out of alignment with the work.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  It's working too hard, right? But that actually isn't burnout. That's just like getting tired. Another piece that's super critical to burnout is not having your values aligned.

  youtube.com

Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.

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  How long a trial takes decides which diseases get drugs at all, because capital flows to the indications whose endpoints can be measured quickly.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  Lastly, the duration of a clinical trial does not merely determine how fast an individual therapy reaches patients. It also shapes which diseases attract serious investment and which do not.

  writingruxandrabio.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

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.

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  In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

  Their words

  Levy was given unprecedented access to Google, and the result is what I consider to be an accurate depiction of how the company operates. A good overview of how Google product managers work.

  bringthedonuts.com

Writer of kottke.org, one of the oldest blogs on the web, published since 1998 and supported by its members. He writes about art, technology, science, design and visual culture.

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  Awakening Your Ikigai

  Their words

  Awakening Your Ikigai by Ken Mogi. Perhaps a little over-simplifying when it comes to Japanese culture, but I appreciated the message of having a purpose. (B)

  kottke.org

Principal engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on agents and developer tooling. Streams TypeScript, OCaml and Neovim on Twitch, and wrote the better-result library after writing the same Result type about a hundred times.

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  Errors as values lead to predictable, maintainable and scalable software.

  Their words

  durable workflows are scaling errors as values to your infrastructure. errors as values lead to predictable, maintainable, and scalable software.

  @dillon_mulroy on Xx.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

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  Maths is essential schooling: it trains you to split big problems into small ones and to think for yourself, the same skill programming, project management and founding a company need.

  Their words

  Yeah. I still think math is essential. It's something that shapes your brain, it teaches you to rely on your logical thinking to split big problems into smaller parts, put them in the right sequence, solve them patiently, trying again if it doesn't work.

  youtube.com

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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  How you measure the present strongly shapes what can be extrapolated about the near future.

  Their words

  Extrapolating from the present day into the near future is highly dependent upon how we measure the present day.

  Growth Measurementsnathanielbullard.com

Chief executive of Alphabet and Google; joined Google in 2004 and led Chrome and Android before taking over in 2015.

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  Artistic free expression is one of the values a society should work hard to defend, including in what AI is allowed to make.

  Their words

  But I do think when it comes to artistic free expression, I think that's one of those values we should work hard to defend.

  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

Director of strategy at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology; an OpenAI board member until November 2023, and writes Rising Tide.

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  The core of the alignment problem is steerability — whether an AI can be reliably steered anywhere at all — which is a different question from whose values it is steered towards.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  I see this as a totally fair question that totally misses the point of what “alignment” was trying to refer to: whether we’d be able to reliably steer advanced systems towards anything at all.

  helentoner.substack.com

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

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  "Simplify onboarding" is an action, not a problem, and a roadmap line written that way will not work.

  Their words

  But, if you ever have a line item on your roadmap that says simplify onboarding, please please cross it out. It's not going to work because simplifying onboarding is an action.

  youtube.com

Labour politician. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from July 2024 to June 2026, and MP for Holborn and St Pancras from 2015 until standing down in 2026. Director of Public Prosecutions before entering Parliament.

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  Britain must be an AI maker rather than an AI taker, and a government should not stay neutral about who shapes the technology.

  government

  Their words

  This is the global race of our lives. Now, some countries are going to make AI breakthroughs and export them… Others will end up buying those breakthroughs and importing them. The question is – which of those will Britain be? AI maker or AI taker?

  gov.uk

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

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  Neither running everything through the founder nor pushing decisions down is the better way to run a company; each only works if it fits that company’s own resources and values.

  Their words

  Either can work. Both have tradeoffs and implications. If you try to import either philosophy wholesale, it will break in unexpected ways; if you try to mix and match, it will probably be an unfettered nightmare.

  “Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmakingcharity.wtf

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

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  Writing your thinking down in public is a form of life after death -- for human readers and for the language models that will read it too.

  Their words

  I'm trying to thoroughly write my thought processes, values, and worldview, so that you can remember it, re-create it and improve upon it.

  Come and get me (both you and AI)sive.rs

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

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  Document similarity scores across a corpus tend to cluster bimodally near identical and near unrelated, rather than spreading evenly.

  Their words

  I suspect - but haven't verified - that in many corpora, we will encounter fairly bimodal Jaccard values - two clusters, near 1 and 0.

  blog.nelhage.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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  As more AI models are developed with varying capabilities and costs, routing between them carries real economic value.

  Their words

  With more and more models being developed, each with different capabilities and a cost structure, model routing has clear economic values.

  huyenchip.com

President of Argentina since December 2023; economist and self-described libertarian.

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  The West is in danger because the people who should defend its values have been captured by a worldview that leads to socialism and therefore to poverty.

  Their words

  hoy estoy acá para decirles que Occidente está en peligro, está en peligro porque aquellos, que supuestamente deben defender los valores de Occidente, se encuentran cooptados por una visión del mundo que – inexorablemente – conduce al socialismo, en consecuencia a la pobreza.

  casarosada.gob.ar

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

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  Profilers show where time is spent but not which of that time can feasibly be reduced or is worth optimizing.

  Their words

  Profilers can only show you "what is there"; skillful performance engineering requires understanding the information that shapes and informs the profile but is "not there" in the profile itself.

  blog.nelhage.com

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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  The fall in birth rates is caused by the values modern societies most cherish, so raising them means compromising some of those values.

  Their words

  Its main causes are tied to deeply held modern values that have been pushing us in this direction for most of this time across most of the world.

  A Fertility Reckoningovercomingbias.com

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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  Cuckoo

  Their words

  It turns out that a breakthrough rice cooker is a bargain, even if it seems expensive at first. The Cuckoo is an extraordinary device. It comes in many shapes and colors, most of them will not be to your taste, but persist until you find one.

  seths.blog