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20 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.
19 September
Clinical psychologist, EMDR consultant and yoga teacher in Boulder, Colorado. Author of The Complex PTSD Workbook and EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychology; writes on trauma, attachment and the nervous system.
📖 Norton Mental Health 📖 is pleased to offer 20% OFF & FREE SHIPPING* on two essential clinical resources from Dr. Arielle Schwartz: 1) APPLIED POLYVAGAL THEORY IN YOGA 2) EMDR THERAPY AND SOMATIC PSYCHOLOGY 🔗 https://t.co/m1eT6EUAnr *US customers only; offer ends 9/30/26 EMDR Psychotherapy Related
17 September
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.
14 September
Former L8 engineer at Meta, Microsoft and Atlassian, now writing and building solo on agentic engineering. Writes Kun's Field Notes and posts a lot about AI coding agents on X.
looks like exercise helps with mental health, and video games help with cognitive performance my mental health is fine. all i want is better cognitive performance lfg! Quoting @CalvinGrunewald Time to start playing my Switch while I ride the stationary bike! But seriously, it’s great to see studies like this. Video Games define many aspects of who I am today. I wish I had more time to play. Would be really interesting to see this broken down by type of game. Ie to mobile F2P have the sam… Related
Singaporean writer and author of FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD; blogs at visakanv.com about ambition, writing and thinking in public.
cultural illness: it’s like mental illness but at a societal level. the social body is twisted and knotted and fighting itself Quoting @oliveegger @justalexoki Why are people mad at you for needing HELP when all momtwt does is yell about how we don’t get any HELP Related
12 September
Economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education and Open Borders. Writes Bet On It.
"We may be dissatisfied with television for two quite different reasons: because the set does not work, or because we dislike the program we are receiving. Similarly, we may be dissatisfied with ourselves for two quite different reasons: because our body does not work (bodily illness), or because we dislike our conduct (mental illness)." - Thomas Szasz, *The Untamed Tongue* Related
7 September
Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.
A Monday morning question for you: What unfinished task is still hogging your mental real estate and needs to be let go? Related
Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.
6 September
Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.
As Carl Jung put it, "Man needs difficulties. They are necessary for health." Yet most people instinctually avoid pain. This is true whether we are talking about building the body (e.g., weight lifting) or the mind (e.g., frustration, mental struggle, embarrassment, shame)--and especially true when people confront the harsh reality of their own imperfections. #principleoftheday Related
24 August
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.
how do you think about how SSH public key authentication works (versus passwords) and what about your mental model makes you trust it? please only answer if you _don't_ understand the math of how RSA (or elliptic curves etc) works, I'm interested in exploring what it means to understand the interfaces around public key authentication without actually learning number theory (also obviously do not try to explain the math to me, also don't explain to folks in replies unless specifically asked) Related
17 August
Physician focused on longevity; wrote Outlive and hosts The Drive.
Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.
Their words
I think it's a uniquely at least as we have it it's uniquely human emotion and it's based on a broad sort of metacognitive ability we have which is to detach our conscious experience from the here and now and do like mental time travel.
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youtube.com
12 August
Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.
10 August
Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.
2 August
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.
Being prejudiced is a risk factor for mental illness. Longitudinal evidence: When people develop racist beliefs, they become more socially isolated—and end up more depressed, anxious, and distressed over the next 6 months. Belonging is an antidote to bigotry as well as misery. Related
28 July
Economist at Brown; writes ParentData and the books Expecting Better and Cribsheet, reading the evidence behind pregnancy and parenting advice.
24 July
Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.
22 July
Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.
On changing their mind
If you had asked me this question in the lead up to my 2019 book, Ultralearning, I would have said no. I was a strong advocate for doing hard problem solving and the associated mental effort it requires as a way to learn difficult skills.
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27 June
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.
Their words
Modern technology may be an amplifier, but it isn't the root cause.
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adamgrant.substack.com
8 June
Clinical psychologist and clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF. His 2010 meta-analysis established psychodynamic therapy as an evidence-based treatment; he has argued ever since that "evidence-based therapy" is used as a marketing term.
15 May
Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.
2 May
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.
1 May
Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.
15 April
Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.
22 March
Researcher on developer productivity; co-wrote Accelerate and the DORA research, and created the SPACE framework.
Their words
Well, now I'm getting feedback so quickly that I'm having to sometimes rebuild my mental model dozens of times in like a 30-minute period.
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youtube.com
3 March
Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.
7 January
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.
Their words
can lead to imposter phenomenon. In this book, a leading psychologist looks at the science behind our inner voice and new research into how to harness it and improve your physical and mental health.
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bringthedonuts.com
9 December 2025
Vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group, the advertising agency; author of Alchemy (2019) and the Wiki Man columnist at The Spectator.
Their words
We have a whole variety of different mental mechanisms at our disposal gifted to us by, you know, a few million years of evolution as a social species. And yet we've made rationality the gold standard.
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youtube.com
18 November 2025
Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.
30 October 2025
Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.
21 September 2025
Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.
Their words
we often also have this mental model of like oh our managers are a judge and they're going to judge me on whether or not I got it I did well I should get a promotion I should be fired so there's this sometimes fear that people have but I think in the very best relationships the manager is like a guide
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youtube.com
18 August 2025
Co-founder and chief executive of Sierra, chairman of the board of OpenAI, and formerly co-chief executive of Salesforce and chief technology officer of Facebook.
Their words
I just think about like really simple things like access to mental health care, access to education, access to medical advice, access to legal advice. We're essentially taking expertise and making it a commodity. And I think that will is generally democratizing.
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youtube.com
22 March 2025
Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.
Their words
It's the same reason why I recommend learning how to type and learning your editor so well you don't even have to think about the action because the people that have to... Even if you just look down, that's still mental processing power you have to spend looking at a keyboard in which you already know where the key is.
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youtube.com
16 March 2025
Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.
23 February 2025
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.
Their words
(publication date March 18, 2025, Viking) by Laura Delano is a compelling and troubling memoir of psychiatric patienthood, iatrogenic harm, and finding a meaningful and flourishing life outside of the mental healthcare system.
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psychiatrymargins.com
20 December 2024
Writes about the biotech industry, drug development and forecasting — “I write to learn, mostly about biotech.”
17 December 2024
Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.
10 August 2024
Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.
13 July 2024
Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.
2 June 2024
Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.
13 March 2024
Research psychologist, instrumental in founding the field of naturalistic decision making; developed the recognition-primed decision model, the PreMortem method and the ShadowBox training method, and wrote Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don't.
19 December 2023
Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.
Their words
I had read Johnson-Laird's original work, Mental Models, last year. It was nice to see an in-depth follow-up on how the theory has developed in the subsequent two decades.
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scotthyoung.com
16 November 2023
Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.
Their words
Obviousness comes from conforming to people’s existing mental models. Don’t waste time reinventing common UI patterns or paradigms unless they are at least 2x better, or you have some critical brand reason to do so.
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lg.substack.com
13 March 2023
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
8 February 2023
Physician and author on addiction, stress and childhood development. Wrote In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and The Myth of Normal, and developed the Compassionate Inquiry approach taught to therapists.
Their words
I spoke with @mariamenounos about the link between emotions and illness, and the importance of focusing on mental health, on her Heal Squad podcast. To listen to the full episode, please follow: https://t.co/XPIKAvi8tH
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x.com
13 October 2022
Gwern Recommends 13 Oct 2022
Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.
Their words
One of the classics in the field, Jensen sets out to explain almost everything, it seems, in psychometrics
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gwern.net
14 June 2022
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.
29 July 2021
Writer on time, productivity and limitation; wrote Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, and the newsletter The Imperfectionist.
Their words
you almost certainly can't consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day
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oliverburkeman.com
9 April 2019
Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.
Their words
Each language contains a different mental model, a different perspective for thinking about computation and how to write programs.
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thorstenball.com
20 December 2018
Physician and author on addiction, stress and childhood development. Wrote In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and The Myth of Normal, and developed the Compassionate Inquiry approach taught to therapists.
Their words
Compassionate Inquiry is an in depth teaching and distillation of the approach I have developed to working with human beings beset by personal issues, health problems that need gently guided exploration, mental health challenges, addictions, relationship difficulties and, above all, an unhealthy relationship to their own selves.
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drgabormate.com
24 October 2017
Philosopher and historian of existential risk; wrote Human Extinction, and coined "TESCREAL" with Timnit Gebru for the cluster of ideologies they argue underpins the AI industry.
AI alignment
Their words
One of the most commonly emphasized points in the AI safety literature is that one must never anthropomorphize AI—that is, don’t project human mental properties onto artificially intelligent systems.
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thebulletin.org
9 July 2015
Mathemusician and video maker known for the Doodling in Math Class series; directed the eleVR virtual reality research group at the Communications Design Group.
Their words
My mousepad is a MouseRug. It is essential to my mental health that my mouse live on this tiny Persian rug with fringe and everything.
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usesthis.com
29 June 2015
Game designer; wrote A Theory of Fun for Game Design and worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.
20 September 2013
Clinical psychologist and clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF. His 2010 meta-analysis established psychodynamic therapy as an evidence-based treatment; he has argued ever since that "evidence-based therapy" is used as a marketing term.
Their words
The illusion of mental health [pdf] Scientific evidence that we do not know our hearts and minds and must look past the surface—a classic in the field
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jonathanshedler.com
27 July 2005
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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