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Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Food safety regulation is an essential government role that cannot be left to the private sector or to individuals doing their own research.

  government

  Their words

  And this is not something that you can leave up to the private sector. It’s not something where you can do your own research. It’s a very complicated world out there. And the informational burden of trying to figure out whether the people responsible for your package of hamburger are actually following safe procedures, that’s beyond everybody.

  Where’s the Beef (Coming From)?paulkrugman.substack.com

US science and technology adviser to the president, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; previously US chief technology officer and chief operating officer of Scale AI.

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  AI regulation only avoids handing incumbents a moat if it is one national framework that is equally clear and easy for companies of every size.

  startups

  Their words

  I think it's all about having regulatory clarity and ease for all sizes of of companies. Um and if we can work with Congress to do something like that, I think that would be that would be the biggest boon for for for startups.

  youtube.com

Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".

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  Ignorance is a permanent feature of complex, specialized societies rather than a problem that will eventually be solved.

  Their words

  Ignorance is not a temporary defect that we will eventually eliminate. It's the permanent burden of increasing specialisation and living in a complex world.

  Nobody Knows Anythingstrangeloopcanon.com

Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.

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  Being an excellent programmer is a burden rather than an advantage when learning to work with coding agents.

  coding agents

  Their words

  It’s actually how good they are at programming is almost a burden in their ability to empathize with the system that’s starting from scratch. It’s a totally new paradigm of, like, how to program. You really, really have to empathize.

  youtube.com

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

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  Temperature is a rare conceptual lever that lets you use physics to reason usefully about a biological problem.

  Their words

  Basically what that gives you is like you can apply a lot of theoretical sort of um a lot of theoretical toolkit used in physics to model parts of this question in ways that are actually useful. And it is just not true that you can use like equations from physics to think usefully about almost any other problem in biology.

  youtube.com

Mathematical biologist; Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath and author of The Maths of Life and Death and How to Expect the Unexpected.

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  Higher male global TB burden may be in large part due to population-scale factors such as employment, social contacts and health-seeking behaviours.

  Their words

  The main reasons for males suffering from a higher burden of global TB cases, compared to females, may be in large part due to population-scale factors, such as employment type, the quantity and type of social contacts they make, and their health-seeking behaviours (e.g. differences in diagnostic and treatment delays between genders).

  arxiv.org

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

Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.

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  Retention is what makes a consumer subscription business possible: without it the whole burden falls on getting a stranger to pay on day one.

  Their words

  Yeah, I mean user retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on like day one. That's super hard, right?

  youtube.com

Product designer and entrepreneur; author of Mobile First and Web Form Design; formerly a product director at Google; now building AI products.

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  Web forms make people adapt to databases; AI flips this so people can provide information in any form they like, and no form is the best kind of web form design.

  Their words

  With Web forms, the burden is on people to adapt to databases. Today's AI models, however, can flip this requirement. That is, they allow people to provide information in whatever form they like and use AI do the work necessary to put that information into the right structure for a database.

  lukew.com

Development economist; writes Global Developments, on growth, history and the numbers behind them.

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  Pollution is a price worth paying for escaping poverty only if the people breathing it are the ones who escape.

  Their words

  It’s one thing if residents of Sulawesi like Mr. Jamal and his family have had to risk exposure to toxic pollutants in a successful escape from poverty. It’s another thing entirely if those bearing most of the burden see few of the benefits.

  Indonesia Climbs the Chainglobal-developments.org

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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  Payroll taxes fall mostly on workers rather than employers because labor supply is inelastic.

  Their words

  Employer-side payroll taxes superficially raise hiring costs, yet the low elasticity of labor means most of the burden really falls on workers.

  Oren Cass’s Labor Theory of Valuesecondbest.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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  Arguing that human-level AI is very unlikely within twenty years is now the minority position, and the burden of proof has moved onto it.

  Their words

  If you want to argue that human-level AI is extremely unlikely in the next 20 years, you certainly can, but you should treat that as a minority position where the burden of proof is on you.

  helentoner.substack.com

Development economist; writes Global Developments, on growth, history and the numbers behind them.

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  Africa before colonisation was not stagnant for lacking states: states formed where they paid, and other arrangements suited other places.

  Their words

  African states formed where it was rational to do so, in places like the Ethiopian highlands where population density was high and the disease burden was relatively low.

  global-developments.org

Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; works on the search for life elsewhere and wrote The Little Book of Aliens and Light of the Stars.

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  The burden of proof about alien civilisations has shifted: it is now on the pessimists.

  Their words

  But I felt like what this paper showed was that the burden of proof is now on the pessimists. So, that's why we called it the pessimism line. Throughout history, there's been alien pessimists and alien optimists, and they've been yelling at each other, that's all they had to go with.

  youtube.com

Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

From one piece Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress (with 24 co-authors) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Frontier AI systems cannot be presumed safe unless proven unsafe; developers must bear the burden of proof that risks stay within acceptable limits.

  Their words

  Despite evaluations, we cannot consider coming powerful frontier AI systems "safe unless proven unsafe". With current testing methodologies, issues can easily be missed. Additionally, it is unclear if governments can quickly build the immense expertise needed for reliable technical evaluations of AI capabilities and societal-scale risks. Given this, developers of frontier AI should carry the burden of proof to demonstrate that their plans keep risks within acceptable limits.

  arxiv.org

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  AI must be reoriented toward safety rather than capabilities alone, as preparation is already behind schedule and the costs of unpreparedness outweigh premature action.

  Their words

  For AI to be a boon, we must reorient; pushing AI capabilities alone is not enough. We are already behind schedule for this reorientation. The scale of the risks means that we need to be proactive, as the costs of being unprepared far outweigh those of premature preparation.

  arxiv.org