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20 September
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.
Most of who is willing to debate whom is judgments of relative status. We'll debate someone much higher, but not much lower. Quoting @GaryMarcus @JeffLadish @sapinker either scott should debate someone like me or admit he can’t defend his positions. Related
19 September
Technologist and entrepreneur; former CTO of Threadless and chief technology officer of the 2012 Obama re-election campaign.
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.
Their words
We won't even get into the fact that in the most ancient religions of Canaan and Israel, the bull is primarily a symbol of God Most High, not of the subordinate Ba'al Haddad
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braddelong.substack.com
18 September
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.
17 September
Programmer, writer and musician; author of the Learn Code the Hard Way books and of Mongrel, the Ruby web server.
I'm currently streaming my attempt to polish this OpenGL turd until it's got specular highlights and shadows: twitch.tv
Related
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.
"basic assumption is that modernity facilitates impersonal, technical-scientific reasoning, and the dominance of instrumental action, which gradually displaces mystical orientations and erodes the social role of religion" Except belief in ghosts, precognition, ESP, psychic healing, etc. isn't down much at all, even if max internet nations. Quoting @ryanburge Well, we finally have a really rigorous answer to the question: Did the Internet kill religion? Yeah, it did. When Internet penetration rose, religiosity declined in a dataset of 81 countries. Related
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.
ZCash is having a governance debate thanks to @maxdesalle, @zooko, @matthuang and others. It's a perennial debate because everything DeSalle says about the weakness of governance institutions is correct and yet when it comes to public goods, externalities and increasing returns--all of which are critical for ZCash-there is very little choice but a governance institution. N.B. All DeSalle says also applies to firms! Firms are islands of central planning. Central planning is inefficient. So shouldn't people who appreciate markets want to get rid of firms?! No. The boundary between firms and the… Quoting @matthuang A few thoughts on ZCash (disclosure: Paradigm is an investor in ZEC and ZODL): - All blockchain ecosystems struggle with long-term funding, especially of public goods, and an inflation-funded developer fund is an elegant mechanism to do so. How this fund is allocated is a fair debate, and we should… Related
Former options market maker who writes Moontower, a newsletter on trading, volatility, decision-making and how to think about risk outside markets too.
Co-sign Dave & Jon are media personalities with pointed views because that travels even though plenty of room for reasonable debate in between. For most of us debate is a waste of time. We have bills to pay not crusades to fight. Pick whatever view makes your life better. Related
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.
I asked this question as someone I might debate claimed that God existing is an example of an unverifiable fact, for which one needn't have probabilities. Quoting @robinhanson Do you think it is possible, if God exists, that he (or she or whatever) could clearly prove to you that he exists? So that you'd then assign >99.9% chance to his existing? Related
Co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic; blogs at ma.tt.
16 September
Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.
Envy and competition is often disguised as a debate about politics and progress: robkhenderson.com
Quoting @TwinOfTiger The Sydney Sweeney thing is hilarious cos this generation (generation as in current norms not age) uses politics to mask jealousy. Society needs to go back to open hating. Own it and stop tryna trick somebody 😂😂 Related
Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.
15 September
Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.
A few highlights from week 1! Quoting @alpha_founders We are in week 2 of Founders School. But so much happened in week 1! Recap time 🔄 Related
Former option trader and risk analyst, now a distinguished professor at NYU. Author of the Incerto essay series, including The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.
Zalloua @PZalloua while visiting The Republic of Amioun nervously preparing for the debate. Quoting @nntaleb Preparing for a discussion on the "Evolution of Lebanese Identities" Sept 17, at the Corm Palazzo, with @AlbertKostanian and @PZalloua. @Grok cher ami, please provide a bibliography for the below. Related
13 September
Web designer and writer; founded A List Apart and Happy Cog, co-founded the An Event Apart conference, and wrote Designing With Web Standards.
The 25 Photos That Changed Fashion Forever Two photographers, a fashion designer, a stylist, a creative director, an editor and a supermodel debate the images that have had an indelible impact on how we dress. nytimes.com
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Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.
Their words
Strong liability enforcement could be helpful in the AI debate. If your agent swarm goes rogue, you’re liable. If your weakly protected model gets jailbroken, you’re liable. If you serve a weakly protected OSS model, you’re liable.
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@naval on X x.com
12 September
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.
11 September
Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
A propos nothing (or maybe not). First, an oped arguing the earth is flat. Journalists, who smell a good fight, set up a debate. They invite the flat earth guy and find a round earth one willing to come and debate. The flat earth guy explains that, if the earth was round, people on the other side would be walking upward down or would fall. This is just common sense. The round earth guy explains that there is something called gravity, and so this is not what happens. The flat earth guy says that this is all high brow academic stuff, and common sense should rule the day. Anyway, he says, there… Related
Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.
Mathematicians are unhappy about OpenAI. The gist of their argument is that they form a community that trains young people. When AI started producing breakthroughs on hard mathematical problems, I asked what a very smart 17-year-old would feel. Do you still choose a math major and train yourself to prove difficult results by hand? This crisis has been coming for a long time. When I was a kid, the four-colour theorem was proved by a computer, in 1976. An intense debate followed. Does it count as a proof? I wrote my PhD thesis using symbolic algebra software. To my knowledge, nobody then would… Quoting @TheEconomist 24 Fields Medal winners have written a letter of objection OpenAI Related
Interviewer; the Dwarkesh Podcast runs long, heavily researched conversations with AI researchers, historians and economists.
Front-end web developer at Paravel and co-host of the ShopTalk Show podcast; blogs at daverupert.com.
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
10 September
Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.
American open-source program lead working on WordPress; a WordPress core contributor and release lead who writes at jeffpaul.com.
9 September
Founder of Farnam Street (fs.blog) and host of The Knowledge Project podcast. Writes and curates on decision-making, mental models and rational thinking.
The Bill Gates-Steve Jobs rivalry. "These two guys, they would, they would take a crap on each other at any chance they could." They were polar opposites. The core of the debate was open vs closed systems. "If you were sitting around in 1995 ... You would have thought that the open system makes more sense. Bill Gates and Microsoft are the future. But if you're sitting around in 2026 and looking at all this, it looks more like the closed ecosystem, the Apple ecosystem, is actually the success." Quoting @shaneparrish Steve Jobs almost disappeared from history. After being ousted from Apple, he spent 12 years struggling. He: • Alienated the people closest to him • Blew up deals that could have saved his company • Refused to compromise • Drove away his co-founders and investors • Burned through hundreds of millio… Related
8 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Wrote up my thoughts on the whole OpenAI Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem story, and how it highlights the still confusing question of what using my data "to improve model performance" actually means OpenAI Related
Australian moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics emeritus at Princeton University; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.
Do we need God in order to have objective reasons for acting morally? I discussed this question with Christian thinker Andy Bannister in a wide-ranging debate about ethics, religion and what gives human life value. Watch the full debate, “Do we need God to be good?”: youtube.com
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Writer of the personal-finance blog Of Dollars And Data and author of Just Keep Buying and The Wealth Ladder. Chief Operating Officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management.
4 September
Writes and podcasts Volts, on the technology, politics and policy of decarbonisation; covered energy and climate at Vox and Grist before that.
30 August
Investor and writer. Previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a product leader at Twitter, Facebook, Snap and Microsoft. Writes essays and memos at sriramk.com.
everyone should go read @dwarkesh_sp’s post - it does a great job of laying out the timeline and what we know ( and don’t know) I do have two issues with it A) the use of anthropomorphic language. These are not civilizations nor do they have desires just like a CPU thread or a bunch of programs don’t. this doesn’t mean we downplay the importance of this moment for cyber - but using human parallels for what I believe is code is dangerous territory. B) IMO it gets the impact of open source models wrong and is unreasonably dismissive for reasons that are not clear. As @ClementDelangue highlights… open source Related
29 August
Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.
Great piece that highlights the open oppty for someone to reinvent social! Quoting @bizbookpr Why is social networking still an unsolved problem? Fascinating Fast Company feature by @harrymccracken on the USA Today bestselling book Life at the Speed of Play by Zynga founder @markpinc from @HarperBusiness Related
27 August
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
Bluesky I agree with this take by @billgates.bsky.social, who also highlights several of the growing risks of AI systems, including cyber, bio and loss of control. We need to be far better prepared to address the risks of frontier models being developed by leading AI companies. English, from French Je suis d'accord avec ce point de vue de @billgates.bsky.social, qui souligne également plusieurs des risques croissants des systèmes d'IA, notamment cyber, bio et perte de contrôle. Nous devons être bien mieux préparés à faire face aux risques des modèles de pointe développés par les principales entreprises d'IA.
Related
x.com I agree with this take by @BillGates, who also highlights several of the growing risks of AI systems, including cyber, bio and loss of control. We need to be far better prepared to address the risks of frontier models being developed by leading AI companies. gatesnotes.com
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Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.
20 August
Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.
It has been less than four years, since ChatGPT made its public debut, but talk of AI has taken over business, investing and even personal conversations. The AI debate, though, has gone off the tracks as people talk past each other and distractions about. My attempt to make sense of it all: bit.ly
OpenAI Related
18 August
Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.
16 August
Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.
Their words
Good, concise and straight-forward exploration of spirituality. Loved it.
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rakhim.org
14 August
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.
I thoroughly enjoyed going deep with @nxthompson on AI and the future of writing and creativity for The Most Interesting Thing in AI podcast. A few highlights: • How Nick and I have used @Gemini_Notebook to write our books • Why AI can lead to more serendipitous discovery in the research process (at least using Notebook’s citation-based approach) • The brilliance of the “explain” button in Notebook’s quiz feature • AI as the anti-social-media, with its gravitational pull towards mainstream consensus (citing @danwilliamsphil) • Why our attachment to the human voice of the writer is not going a… Quoting @nxthompson Few people have put more time into figuring out how creativity works than @stevenbjohnson. How do we link ideas in our mind, and how can we use tools to make that linking easier? He's not only written some of my favorite books of the past few decades; he's also written some of my favorite essays ab… Google Related
11 August
Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?
Abortion is an eternal debate but can we at least agree that the really extreme positions (“a 15-year-old girl who gets pregnant cannot have an abortion 2 days later” / “a healthy 38-week fetus can be induced and killed instead of given up for adoption”) are just mad? Quoting @LifeNewsHQ Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signs the bill for abortions up to birth as Democrats celebrate. Related
10 August
Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin. Writes at arslan.io about Go, tooling, industrial design and books.
Their words
Nobody writes the code anymore. Instead you're basically planning, debating, implementing and reviewing with Agents.
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Joining Cursor arslan.io
2 August
Writes and podcasts Volts, on the technology, politics and policy of decarbonisation; covered energy and climate at Vox and Grist before that.
29 July
Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025, Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads the company’s superintelligence lab.
AI alignment
Their words
so much of that debate is like I think um in some ways uh a little bit of a waste of time because, you know, I think it's inevitable that we're going to have very powerful models
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youtube.com
27 July
Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.
17 July
Journalist and author of The Art of Noticing; writes the newsletter The Art of Noticing (TAoN) on attention, creativity and the everyday.
Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.
19 June
Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.
As the debate about the pricing of SPaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic heats up, there is a parallel debate about whether S&P should be including these companies in the S&P 500 index, with many arguing against inclusion. My thoughts on the topic: bit.ly
Anthropic OpenAI Related
13 June
Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.
this statement is true, but it all comes down to: "What does quality mean, in this particular circumstance?" talking about "fast" and "slow" is toddler-level reasoning, and it irks me when the AI debate gets so wrapped around that axle. Quoting @awscloud @honeycombio Quality first, quantity second. Hear how @mipsytipsy built it on the AWS for Software Companies podcast. Related
9 June
Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.
Their words
All told, this is a read-in-one-sitting thriller that does as much to illuminate the workings and dynamics of patriarchy and religion as any gender studies class. It's peak Kritzer (so far), and that's saying something.
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pluralistic.net
6 June
Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.
30 April
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
Fireside chat at Sequoia Ascent 2026 from a ~week ago. Some highlights: The first theme I tried to push on is that LLMs are about a lot more than just speeding up what existed before (e.g. coding). Three examples of new horizons: 1. menugen: an app that can be fully engulfed by LLMs, with no classical code needed: input an image, output an image and an LLM can natively do the thing. 2. install .md skills instead of install .sh scripts. Why create a complex Software 1.0 bash script for e.g. installing a piece of software if you can write the installation out in words and say "just show this to… Quoting @stephzhan @karpathy and I are back! At @sequoia AI Ascent 2026. And a lot has changed. Last year, he coined “vibe coding”. This year, he’s never felt more behind as a programmer. The big shift: vibe coding raised the floor. Agentic engineering raises the ceiling. We talk about what it means to build seriousl… LLMs Related
24 April
American open-source program lead working on WordPress; a WordPress core contributor and release lead who writes at jeffpaul.com.
The WordPress AI plugin 0.8.0 is now available! Highlights in this release: • New Refine from Notes experiment to automatically apply editorial feedback • New AI dashboard widgets • Integration with Gutenberg Guidelines • Image Generation promoted to a stable Feature make.wordpress.org
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15 April
Bootstrapper and investor. Founder of TinySeed and MicroConf, host of the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, and author of several books on self-funded software startups.
What an amazing couple days at #MicroConf 2026. Here’s a video recapping some of the highlights 👇 Quoting @MicroConf That's a wrap on #MicroConf US 2026 in Portland! Couldn't make it? Here's everything you missed: Related
9 April
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.
Here's my conversation with historian Lars Brownworth all about the Vikings, from the start of the Vikings Age to the conquest of Europe and beyond. This was an epic & mind-blowing conversation. It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Episode highlight 1:17 - Introduction 2:37 - The start of the Viking Age 12:30 - Viking military strategy, tactics & technology 26:13 - Ragnar Lothbrok 35:40 - The Great Heathen Army 40:23 - Rollo and Normandy 50:34 - Viking religion and Valhalla 1:01:06 - Viking explorers 1:06:13 - Vikings in North America 1:19:35 - Vi… Europe America Related
1 April
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.
12 March
Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.
Just published my Laracon EU 2026 recap. Lots of great talks this year — highlights for me were Dan Harrin on abstractions, Peter Suhm on unblocking users with AI, and Shane Rosenthal showing NativePHP rendering actual native iOS and Android elements. Also a good reminder to finally look more seriously at PostgreSQL. https://stefanzweifel.dev/posts/2026/03/12/laracon-eu-2026-recap/ #LaraconEU Related
London-based front-end architect, web developer evangelist and cloud consultant; Microsoft MVP. Writes at praveen.science and answers on Stack Overflow.
🚀 Live from #SREDays #London at Everyman Canary Wharf! 🛳️ Checked in and ready for a day packed with SRE, observability, and production reliability stories. I’ll be sharing highlights throughout the day. #SREDaysLondon #SRE #DevOps #CloudNative Related
1 March
Researcher of social media, privacy and youth culture; founder of Data & Society and author of It’s Complicated.
Current household debate: Who bullshits more - GenAI or politicians? Related
21 February
Software engineer who worked on Chrome and Polymer at Google, and writes about the web, emoji and Elm at meowni.ca.
Hi! I made a Chrome extension that highlights creeps from the Epstein emails. Depending on how much news you read on your computer, enabling it might be really depressing. Related
18 February
Maths educator; writes Mathworlds on how mathematics is taught and why so much of the technology sold to schools does not help.
14 January
American novelist and critic, author of Real Life, The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures; writes the newsletter sweater weather on literature and culture.
8 January
Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.
6 January
Web developer; former head of engineering at Flickr, author of Building Scalable Web Sites, and co-founder and CTO of Slack.
I've updated my 2025 reading list with the 121 books I read in the year. Highlights were The Thursday Murder Club by @richardosman, Piranesi by @susannaclarke_, The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball and Little Eyes by @sschweblin. iamcal.com
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1 January
Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.
Their words
Though written accessibly, Segerstrale’s narrative rewards repeat reading, because it is so dense with historical detail that remains relevant today.
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razibkhan.com
22 December 2025
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.
Their words
A very useful background read for understanding later Indian history and religions, as well as the more general spread of religion throughout the southern regions of Asia.
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marginalrevolution.com
12 December 2025
Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum; reads cuneiform, and wrote The Ark Before Noah and The First Ghosts.
From one piece
Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations, Noah’s Ark, and Flood Myths | Lex Fridman Podcast #487
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
I think the big mistake for mankind was the creation of monotheistic religions, because they brought evil into the world. Because if you believe in a monotheistic religion, that means I’m right and you’re wrong if you don’t.
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youtube.com
Their words
Because not having religion does not mean not having law or morality or sensitivity or consideration or love or any of those things. None of those things depends on religion, and those are the things which are important.
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youtube.com
26 November 2025
Australian moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics emeritus at Princeton University; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
9 September 2025
Machine learning engineer working on recommender systems, personalization and information retrieval. Previously worked on LLMs and LLM infrastructure at Mozilla.ai and on ML and recsys at Duo, Tumblr, Automattic and Comcast; wrote the 'What are embeddings?' text and ran the Normconf conference.
3 September 2025
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.
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.
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sive.rs
11 August 2025
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
31 July 2025
Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.
Their words
It allowed that, but he said, every person has the right to choose their religion. No one can stop them. No one can force them. The idea that it was individual choice, no one in history had ever thought of that, that it belonged to the person.
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youtube.com
9 June 2025
Irish independent game developer, maker of VVVVVV, Super Hexagon and Dicey Dungeons.
Just released a v1.1 patch for my Other Games. Things are feeling pretty stable, so this might be the last one? Highlights are: it shows a pop-up on itch for achievements now, it has improved accessibility options, and I added Japanese and LATAM Spanish localisations: terrycavanagh.itch.io
Related
17 April 2025
Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.
Had a session with very senior folks on how they build with AI and can’t help thinking there’s no better time to learn, clarify, brainstorm, write, debate, plan, design, code, debug, review, analyze, delegate, play, and in general do more more while doing less with AI—so psyched! Related
21 January 2025
Development economist; writes Global Developments, on growth, history and the numbers behind them.
Their words
Precisely how much the ancient continuity of East Asian states matters for development is still a little murky, and the delineation with colonial legacies is still an area of active debate—but the balance of evidence suggests that the legacies of these pre-colonial states stretched through the colonial period, extending even into the post-independence era.
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global-developments.org
19 January 2025
Historian at Stanford and the Hoover Institution; wrote Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market, on Ayn Rand.
Their words
Milton Friedman, he also does tend to have friends who agree with him, yet he's always willing to debate his opponents, and he's willing to do so with a smile on his face. He's a happy warrior, and he actually will win a lot of debates simply by his emotional affect and his cheerfulness and his confidence, where Rand will lose debates because she gets so angry in the face of disagreement.
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youtube.com
10 January 2025
Founder of what became Bloomberg New Energy Finance; writes and speaks on clean energy, hydrogen and the economics of the transition, and hosts the Cleaning Up podcast.
6 January 2025
Web developer; former head of engineering at Flickr, author of Building Scalable Web Sites, and co-founder and CTO of Slack.
I've updated my 2024 reading list with the 88 books I read in the year. Highlights were Oryx and Crake by @MargaretAtwood, The Husbands by @hollygramazio and Dungeon Crawler Carl by @mattdinniman iamcal.com
Related
30 September 2024
Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.
From one piece
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
America
Their words
I think religion in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there, very old. Actually, the earliest pottery in all of the Americas, all these places that we have civilizations that grew up, you know where the oldest pottery is? The middle of the Amazon.
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youtube.com
America
Their words
In fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas.
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youtube.com
Their words
But he is the one creator deity, in my opinion, through all of these cultures. And the people in the Amazon still talk about him there. His name is Viho Masse in some groups, but they say that his emissaries on earth are the jaguars and that he is the creator deity.
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youtube.com
21 March 2024
Writer and engineer behind the blog Melting Asphalt, and co-author with Robin Hanson of The Elephant in the Brain.
feeling weirdly wistful about the obliteration of Carthage a Roman Republic-sized civilization’s worth of unique literature, law, religion, politics, culture — poof, gone, `rm -rf`ed from history Related
4 March 2024
Historian of Ukraine at Harvard; wrote The Gates of Europe, Chernobyl and The Russo-Ukrainian War.
Russia
Their words
The elites would be integrated, and the empire was based on the state loyalty and the state integration. But once you bring in the factor of nation and nationalism and language, then, once in a sudden, the whole model of the integration of the elites, irrespective of their language, religion, and culture, starts falling apart.
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youtube.com
16 January 2024
Web developer; former head of engineering at Flickr, author of Building Scalable Web Sites, and co-founder and CTO of Slack.
I've updated my 2023 reading list with the 105 books I read in the year. Highlights were The Future, by @NaomiAllthenews, Station Eternity by @mightymur and Titanium Noir by @Harkaway iamcal.com
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10 October 2023
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.
Their words
So abstract. Maybe the most abstract book you’ll ever read. Compares “finite” games with rules and winners, versus “infinite” games without winners where we can play with the game itself. Is it about a job versus a calling? Religion versus spirituality? A story versus story-telling? Who knows. Thought-provoking if you can apply the metaphor to whatever concerns you.
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sive.rs
20 July 2023
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.
Their words
Great anthropology! So many insights into religions, tribes, friendships, organizations, the evolution of minds, superstition, and more. Got me thinking most about friendships.
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sive.rs
28 May 2023
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.
Their words
Brilliant insights into human nature. Moral reasoning, inventing victims, emotional reactions, the elephant (emotions) and its rider (explanations). Intuition reacts then logic confabulates a reason. Survival of the fittest applied to groups. Understanding religion and tradition. Great from start to finish.
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sive.rs
9 May 2023
Designer, product manager, YouTuber and developer who has written about technology at Birchtree since 2010. He makes the Quick Reviews and Quick Notes apps and the A Better Computer YouTube channel.
Their words
is my favorite way to save things to read later, to actually read them, and to sync my highlights wherever I want.
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thesweetsetup.com
31 March 2023
Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.
Their words
It's mostly readable, though there are quite a few places where the translator calls for more research and this reprint, naturally, doesn't say whether it's been followed up *. In any event, I found this fascinating.
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bactra.org
17 February 2023
Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?
24 January 2023
Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.
9 January 2023
Web developer; former head of engineering at Flickr, author of Building Scalable Web Sites, and co-founder and CTO of Slack.
I've updated my 2022 reading list with all the 112 books I read in the year. Highlights were Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by @gabriellezevin and A Memory Called Empire by @ArkadyMartine. iamcal.com
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1 June 2022
Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
30 September 2020
Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?
7 February 2020
Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.
Their words
Fantastic, many similar ideas to Stoicism and Virtue Ethics, though with more mystical elements thrown in. Would highly recommend it as a “first taste” of eastern religion.
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nateliason.com
27 July 2017
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
1 January 2017
Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.
Their words
Another biology-related book. Explores the role of parasites (and bacteria, disease, disgust) in human behavior, attraction, even politics, morality, religion. Some of this is is cutting-edge, speculative, or not fully proven — but very interesting stuff indeed.
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radex.io
1 October 2016
Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
Their words
Covers a few theory of computation highlights. The explanations are delightful and I've watched some of the videos more than once just to watch Bernhardt explain things.
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danluu.com
1 January 2015
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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A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
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About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
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