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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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  Building institutions that can incorporate diverse perspectives, adapt flexibly to change, and keep public legitimacy is the central challenge of state capacity today.

  Their words

  Creating institutional forms that can incorporate diversity and respond flexibly to a changing environment while maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of citizens is the fundamental project of state capacity that faces us.

  programmablemutter.com

Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.

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  Teaching that reflects political commitments is a legitimate part of intellectual diversity, not a violation of academic norms

  Their words

  There is nothing wrong with promoting perspectives that have political commitments; in fact, intellectual diversity requires this, because some viewpoints include political commitments.

  danieldrezner.substack.com

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

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  How much a person looks at faces is a stable personality trait, and looking less at them tracks autistic traits across the whole population.

  Their words

  If I just take the general population on average it's the case that those people who would have a diagnosis of autism or who score higher on autistic traits even if they don't have a diagnosis look less at faces.

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Writer on happiness, habits and human nature. Author of The Happiness Project, Better Than Before and The Four Tendencies, and host of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast.

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  A team made up of people with similar personality traits ends up lacking the strengths that more varied traits would provide.

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  But this concentration weakens a team, because you end up with too much of certain qualities, and not enough of others.

  gretchenrubin.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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  What look like the priorities of old age are the priorities of a short time horizon: tell a young person they have five years and they choose the same way.

  Their words

  But her work has shown that when you give people different time perspectives, they make different choices. So if you unfortunately tell someone who's younger that they only have 5 to 10 years left to live, they're going to make choices very much like older adults too.

  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.

From one piece David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farming 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Europeans have been under selection against body fat for 10,000 years because farming made the food supply steadier, not less stable.

  Europe

  Their words

  And so, maybe what you're seeing is that this group of people in Europe and the Middle East over the last 10,000 years has moved into a a period of relatively more stable food, where building up stores of fat are not as advantageous, and there's been selection against this combination of traits.

  youtube.com

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  Complex human traits have not been pushed steadily in one direction because both ends of the spectrum carry advantages in different times and places.

  Their words

  my sense is that these complex traits have not pushed in one direction because there's advantage there's spectrums where there's advantages to both ends of the spectrum

  youtube.com

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  The weak selection signal on behavioural traits is a shortage of statistical power, not evidence that behaviour was unselected.

  Their words

  It may still be the case, and I guess it is, that immune traits are the most selected category, but is not at all the case, and in fact, we can prove it's not the case that behavioral traits are not selected.

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  There is more room at the top for every human trait: push selection harder in any direction and the mean would move, at some cost elsewhere.

  Their words

  But I think it's highly likely that if natural selection was pushed pushed any of these traits in more in one direction than it is, the mean would move.

  youtube.com

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  For any trait built out of many mutations, all the variation needed to move a population to a new adaptive set point already exists inside it.

  Their words

  So for complex traits, ones underpinned by many mutations, all the variation already exists to move the population to a different adaptive set point that's optimal in the environment which it's in.

  youtube.com

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  Waste Books

  Their words

  Tweets from 1765-1799 by a 4’9” hunchback physicist, friends with Goethe and Kant, admired by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc. Such wonderful random thoughts, beautiful perspectives on thinking for yourself, observing nature, language, freedom, philosophy, religion, and more. Hundreds of initial insights, especially inspiring because they’re undeveloped.

  sive.rs

Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

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  Dominic Cummings Substack

  Their words

  I find a dose of these perspectives highly valuable.

  thezvi.substack.com

Game designer and director of the NYU Game Center; made Universal Paperclips and writes Donkeyspace.

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  The video game audience has come to embrace the medium’s worst traits as emblems of the hobby rather than treat them as flaws.

  Their words

  So many of the worst things about video games are not just reluctantly tolerated but enthusiastically embraced because, through association, they have become emblems of our beloved hobby/artform/lifestyle.

  Are Games Bad?franklantz.substack.com

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

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  How to Know a Person

  Their words

  It's a must-read for anyone looking to deepen their relationships and broaden their perspectives—and I believe it has the power to make us better friends, colleagues, and citizens.

  gatesnotes.com

Writes Useful Fictions on agency and how to get better at things; a former appellate lawyer and the top-ranked woman in professional poker in 2017.

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  Most traits people treat as fixed — agency, confidence, charisma, warmth — are learnable if you believe they are and work at them.

  Their words

  Most subject matter is learnable, even stuff that seems really hard. But beyond that, many (most?) traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite malleable if you (1) believe they are and (2) put the same kind of work into learning them as you would anything else.

  How to be more agenticusefulfictions.substack.com

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  The Vagabond’s Way

  Their words

  Best travel book I’ve ever read! Shook my soul many times. Tiny “daily meditation” format, with lots of quotes from others, but wow what wonderful insights. They make me yearn to travel again. Love love love these ideas and perspectives so much.

  sive.rs

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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  Keynes's bisexuality and strong interest in gay sex were a significant cause of his ability to grasp different and outside perspectives.

  Their words

  I view Keynes’s bisexuality and his strong interest in gay sex as a significant cause of what made him interesting and which gave him so strong an ability to grasp different and outside perspectives.

  tylercowen.com

Family therapist and founder of Relational Life Therapy. Author of I Don't Want to Talk About It, How Can I Get Through to You? and Us; argues that Western individualism is what makes couples' work hard.

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  Character is not fixed: therapy works because habitual neural pathways can re-form, sometimes within minutes.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  In my practice, I have seen that opening neural pathways can lead to profound change, to brand-new traits and behavior, sometimes in a matter of minutes.

  The Myth of the Individualterryreal.com

Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.

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  Finding a good spouse depends more on one's orientation toward building relationships and spotting non-trivial compatible traits than on matching a status checklist

  Their words

  Whether one does find a good spouse or not depends more on one's orientation towards actually building relationships, and whether they can identify non-trivial traits in a partner that would contribute to that.

  Whose dream bf is it anywayputanumonit.com

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  Happy

  Their words

  Brilliant and profound yet totally entertaining philosophy book by one of my favorite people. Gives an approachable overview of past philosophies and shows how they apply to your life today better than the harmful pop-self-help-positivity stuff. Amazing perspectives on desires, death, relationships, anger, and how being present doesn’t matter as much as the story you tell yourself afterwards. H…

  sive.rs