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Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.

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  The current capabilities of existing AI models are barely being used and are often not even well understood.

  Their words

  My point is that, while there is a lot of debate over what future models will do, the current capabilities of existing models are barely being used, and are often not even well understood.

  The Overhangoneusefulthing.org

Founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU Project, original author of GNU Emacs and the GNU General Public License, and long-time president of the Free Software Foundation.

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  Ancient rock art may convey a valuable but imprecise message that could someday be understood

  Their words

  Nonetheless, ancient rock art is precious, because it may convey a not-so-detailed message that would nonetheless be amazing to understand, if someday we can.

  Urgent: Raise the Wage Actstallman.org

Technology writer of Spyglass, a newsletter about technology and media. Previously a reporter at TechCrunch and an investor at GV.

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  For streaming services, a large back catalog matters more for reducing subscriber churn than for boosting sign-up numbers.

  Their words

  I'm not sure they fully understood that it wasn't really about juicing their numbers, but about churn prevention.

  Apple TV Dethrones HBOspyglass.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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  AI is best understood as another shock in the long series of disruptions from the industrial revolution, not a wholly novel phenomenon.

  Their words

  the best way to think about AI is as another social, political, cultural and economic shock in the series of shocks that have been underway over the long industrial revolution.

  How should social science think about AI?programmablemutter.com

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

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  AI systems should be understood as something between airplanes and humans, since it can no longer be assumed they lack humanlike motivations.

  Their words

  Rather than treat AI as similar to airplanes, we should treat it as something between airplanes and humans. We don’t know exactly where on this spectrum they will land, but we can no longer be certain that AI will lack any given humanlike motivation.

  Nicholas Decker In Hellastralcodexten.com

Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

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  There is no trade-off between well-architected code and fast code: in practice, the code that is architected properly is also the code that runs quickly.

  Their words

  I have never really understood the sort of mentality of there's a difference between code that is like well architected by some principles and code that runs quickly because in my experience usually the code that is architected properly is also the code that runs quickly.

  youtube.com

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

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

From one piece Neuroscience of Emotions & Tools for Improving Emotion Regulation | Dr. Ralph Adolphs 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Emotions are functional states, to be understood by what they do rather than by how any particular brain or machine happens to implement them.

  Their words

  The basic answer is that I think of emotions as functional states of a particular type. They should be understood by what they do, their function rather than how they happen to be constituted in the human brain or differently in an octopus nervous system or in an AI which we should talk about.

  youtube.com

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  Death is better understood as you losing the world than as the world losing you, because the world you experience is a construction in your brain.

  Their words

  So rather than thinking of death as we normally do as the world loses you, the neuroscience perspective is the inverse which is you lose the world.

  youtube.com

Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.

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  The external tools people use to reason, remember and calculate — including chatting with an LLM — are genuine extensions of the human mind, not just aids to it.

  LLMs

  Their words

  the external tools that we use to help us reason, remember, associate, calculate-from counting on our fingers to chatting with an advanced LLM-should be properly understood as extensions of our own cognitive process.

  Notebooks And The Extended Mindadjacentpossible.substack.com

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

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  The hardest thing for a future historian to recover will be how little the world outside understood, because whatever happened looks inevitable in retrospect.

  Their words

  One is at every moment of this exponential, the extent to which the world outside it didn't understand it. This is This is a bias that's often present in history where anything that actually happened looks inevitable in retrospect.

  youtube.com

Programmer, teacher and speaker; long-time Microsoft developer-community figure, host of the Hanselminutes podcast and author of the hanselman.com blog.

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  As AI takes over more of the coding process, clearly specifying goals and exercising good judgment will matter more than ever.

  Their words

  As high-level programming cedes way to the prose compiler, making your goals and specs well understood to the ambiguity loop and showing good judgment is going to matter more than ever.

  The danger of glamourizing one shotsfeeds.hanselman.com

Writer and artist, author of Steal Like an Artist; publishes a weekly newsletter and an annual list of the books he read.

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  Train Dreams

  Their words

  It's as sad and beautiful as I remembered, but also funnier.

  austinkleon.com

Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.

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  A habit is best understood as a recurring solution to a recurring problem in a person's environment.

  Their words

  The one one that I like is that a habit is a recurring solution to a recurring problem in your environment. So something comes up again and again and your brain is trying to solve it. Another way to describe it is that it's like an automatic or a mindless behavior.

  The Silent Cost of Bad Habits | James Clearyoutube.com

Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.

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  There Is No Antimemetics Division

  Their words

  There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm is a mind-bending psychological thriller about a secret agency tasked with fighting dangerous "antimemes"—ideas that refuse to be remembered. Plenty of stories start with a clever high-concept premise and just let it play out. This one pushes its premise to extremes I never imagined possible, ratcheting up an astonishing amount of tension along the way.

  eliotpeper.substack.com

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

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  LLM intelligence should not be understood through an animal analogy; it is a different kind of entity altogether

  LLMs

  Their words

  2025 is where I (and I think the rest of the industry also) first started to internalize the "shape" of LLM intelligence in a more intuitive sense. We're not "evolving/growing animals", we are "summoning ghosts".

  2025 LLM Year in Reviewkarpathy.bearblog.dev

Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.

From one piece Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  We are leaving the age of replication for an age of design, in which minds are built to a plan rather than copied without being understood.

  Their words

  then we're entering the age of design where because our AIs are designed our our our all of our physical objects are designed our buildings are designed our technology is designed and we're we're designing now uh AIs things that can be intelligent themselves and that are themselves capable of design

  youtube.com

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  If we understood a squirrel we would be almost all the way to understanding human intelligence; language is a small veneer on the surface.

  Their words

  if we understood a squirrel I think we'd have a we'd be almost all the way there to understanding human intelligence. The the language part is just a a small veneer on the surface.

  youtube.com

German writer and historian; wrote Blitzed, on drug use in Nazi Germany, and Tripped.

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  The idea of driving the whole German army through the Ardennes, not the methamphetamine, is what won the campaign in the West.

  Their words

  That was the victorious idea. So it's not the drugs. Actually, that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountains, if you think monocausal, you would say that's the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I.

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Psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. Writes Psychiatry at the Margins on the philosophical and scientific arguments inside psychiatry and the psy-sciences.

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  Self-diagnosis is an attempt to secure the therapeutic effect of a medical intervention patients cannot officially access.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  Likewise, self-diagnosis should be understood as an attempt to secure the therapeutic effect of a medical intervention to which patients do not have official access.

  doi.org

Historian of the Second World War; wrote Normandy '44 and Brothers in Arms, and co-hosts the We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast.

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  D-Day is remembered as a predominantly American show, but all three service commanders were British and two-thirds of the aircraft and of the men landed were British and Dominion.

  America

  Their words

  And while it is still seen as a predominantly American show, all three service commanders are British. Two-thirds of the aircraft are British. Two-thirds of the men landed are British and Dominion.

  youtube.com

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

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  C# in Depth

  Their words

  C# is the language I probably understood down to the nitty-gritty details. Just when I thought myself of being an expert - knowing all that is to know on memory allocation, garbage collection, LINQ - I read this book. It made me realize how many things I did not know.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.

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  Coordinated debanking is overstated; what is poorly understood is how independent banks end up making correlated decisions.

  Their words

  We will explore some coordination mechanisms, which are overstated, and some correlation mechanisms, which are poorly understood.

  Debanking (and Debunking?)bitsaboutmoney.com

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

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  Maya hieroglyphs must have been readable across several spoken languages, the way Chinese characters or Latin were.

  EuropeChina

  Their words

  There must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin. You know how there was a period in Europe where most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin? Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya world.

  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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  Debt is best understood as narrowing the range of outcomes you can survive, not as a cost of capital.

  Their words

  I think this is the most practical way to think about debt: As debt increases, you narrow the range of outcomes you can endure in life.

  How I Think About Debtcollabfund.com

Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.

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  The story that Einstein could not keep up with quantum mechanics is almost exactly backwards: his philosophical objections were correct and should have been taken far more seriously.

  Their words

  I think that that story about the latter part is completely wrong, almost 180 degrees wrong. I think that Einstein understood quantum mechanics as well as anyone, at least up through the 1930s. I think that his philosophical objections to it are correct. He should actually have been taken much more seriously about that.

  youtube.com

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

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  John Maynard Keynes is best understood as a British aesthete rationalist who did economics in his spare time, not primarily as an economist.

  economists

  Their words

  I don’t view Keynes primarily as an economist, rather I see him as a British aesthete rationalist who did economics in his spare time, and fortunately he had lots of spare time.

  tylercowen.com

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

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  Even when advice is understood and believed, people discount it by assuming their own case is the exception.

  Their words

  Even when we understand the words, and even when we trust them, we still have another eject button: we assume they don’t apply to us.

  You can't reach the brain through the earsexperimental-history.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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  A contribution is a cost to the maintainer, not a gift: it is taking part, not merely using the code, that consumes a project’s scarcest resource.

  Their words

  I often read advice along the lines of “if you want to help a project send PRs” and I never understood it. Reviewing and iterating or pushing back on PRs is work! Often more than writing the code itself.

  How to pay professional maintainerswords.filippo.io

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

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  National discourse on contentious issues and resulting policies would be very different if people better understood how attitudes have and have not changed.

  Their words

  Our findings suggest that the national discourse around contentious social issues, policies resulting from that discourse, and perhaps the opinions that drive discourse in the first place would be very different if people better understood how attitudes have and have not changed.

  doi.org

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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  The Listening Book

  Their words

  Everyone should read this book of little essays about listening. It teaches your ears to pay more attention. It calls your attention to sounds you hadn’t noticed. It’s beautifully written, and makes your life better. I read it twice, 24 years ago, and reading it again this week, it was even better than I remembered.

  sive.rs

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

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  Pre-modern subsistence farmers were minimising the risk of starvation rather than maximising output, and their apparently backward practices are rational once that is understood.

  Their words

  These small subsistence farmers generally seek to minimize risk, rather than maximize profits. After all, improving yields by 5% doesn’t mean much if everyone starves to death in the third year because of a tail-risk that wasn’t mitigated.

  acoup.blog