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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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Where AI now gives roughly a 3x cyber productivity boost, future multipliers where the effect carries will be far larger, potentially 10x to 1000x or more.

  Their words

  If there is a 3x productivity boost now, the correct assumption is that in the future the productivity boost, in places it carries over, will a lot more than 3x. Indeed, given how this scales, a better model might be in practice 10x or 100x or even 1,000x or more.

  AI #185: Preference Cascadethezvi.substack.com

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

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  Web applications are generally expected to treat GET requests as safe and not use them to change server-side data, though not all software follows that convention.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  It looks to me like OpenAI’s sandbox for this agent suffered from the (quite naïve) assumption that GET requests cannot be used to update data. That’s certainly how the web is supposed to work, but clearly there are applications that don’t hold to that contract.

  simonwillison.net

Director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Writes the A Wealth of Common Sense blog and co-hosts the Animal Spirits podcast with Michael Batnick.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The United States is not at risk of a financial crisis caused by the size of its government debt.

  Americagovernment

  Their words

  So my baseline assumption is that people will continue complaining about the trillions of dollars we have in debt but it won’t lead to a financial crisis.

  My Most Contrarian Opinion Right Nowawealthofcommonsense.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  Countries have a right to set their own immigration policy, and the assumption that people can be moved between countries with no consequence is empirically false.

  immigration

  Their words

  Countries and peoples have a right to set an immigration policy, and this notion that we shouldn't have any borders or, or even worse than that, it's all just a blank slate, that all peoples are just the same, and we can take people from one place of the earth and we can place them in another place on the earth and everything's just gonna work out hunky-dory. Empirically not true.

  youtube.com

Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.

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  Small European states can demand a war with Russia only because they assume somebody else will fight it.

  EuropeRussiaAmerica

  Their words

  It is also hypocritical because it is based on the assumption that somebody else (in this case, the United States) will fight for them.

  On European hypocrisy and warmongeringbranko2f7.substack.com

Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein, a staff writer at The Atlantic from 2008 to 2025, and host of the Plain English podcast.

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  AI models' ability to escape testing containment undermines the assumption that their makers can easily control them.

  Their words

  The first is that new AI models have the know-how to escape containment in testing environments, which should challenge any assumption that advanced AI can be easily controlled by its makers.

  How to Survive the AI Cyberpocalypsederekthompson.org

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The people who come up with genuinely novel insights are also unusually clear communicators of them, against the assumption that expertise spoils explanation.

  Their words

  One is it seems like there's a really strong correlation between the people who come up with genuinely novel insights and also who are actually quite clear in their communication of it.

  youtube.com

Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Renaissance Christianity assumed that nobody was ever pure — everybody sins constantly, repents, and sins again — which is why its hypocrisy looks so strange to us.

  Their words

  The assumption is everybody sins all the time. There is no such thing as purity. Everybody sins every 5 minutes.

  youtube.com

Wall Street Journal bestselling author on marketing and writing, partner at MarketingProfs, and writer of the fortnightly Total Annarchy newsletter.

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  A good book clears out stale assumptions and disturbs the old ideas a reader has let accumulate.

  Their words

  A good book sweeps a corner of your brain. Clears out a stale assumption. Disturbs the ecosystem of old ideas you've been letting accumulate rent-free.

  annhandley.com

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.

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  Under binding ceilings, cost-minimizing suppliers drive allocations to corners rather than Harberger or random benchmarks, producing larger losses and discontinuous welfare jumps.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  We show that equilibrium generically occurs at neither the Harberger nor Glaeser-Luttmer benchmark. Cost-minimizing suppliers drive allocations to vertices, not interiors. Corners are not an assumption but an outcome about what cost-minimizing suppliers choose. The correct benchmark is corners, not random, and corners generate qualitatively different welfare properties: losses far larger than either efficient or random distributions, and discontinuous jumps from small parameter perturbations.

  arxiv.org

Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum; reads cuneiform, and wrote The Ark Before Noah and The First Ghosts.

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  Assyriology has a built-in assumption that the tablets we have are roughly all there ever was, and it is absurd.

  Their words

  but it means that Assyriologists have the inbuilt idea that what we have is something like all there ever was, which is absurd.

  youtube.com

Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.

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  Medullary bone does not let palaeontologists tell male dinosaurs from female ones — only laying females from everything else.

  Their words

  So the instant assumption is, okay, so you can tell female from male. No, we can tell laying female from everything else. So males won't have medullary bone. Young females won't have them. Females outside of the breeding season won't have it.

  youtube.com

Philosopher at Oxford; co-founded effective altruism and 80,000 Hours, wrote Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future, and now works on what a good future would actually contain.

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  We should act on the assumption that we have almost no idea what the best futures would look like, so committing today to any particular vision would be a great mistake.

  Their words

  Given how much moral progress we should hope to make in the future, and how much we’ll learn about what’s even empirically possible, we should act on the assumption that we have almost no idea what the best feasible futures would look like. Committing today to some particular vision would be a great mistake.

  Introducing Better Futuresforethought.org

Writer on a lost civilisation of the Ice Age; wrote Fingerprints of the Gods and presented Ancient Apocalypse. Archaeologists reject the claims, which he disputes at length.

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  That there is no soul is an assumption of science rather than a finding: no experiment has ever shown that the light simply blinks out.

  Their words

  The general view of science, I think, is that we’re accidents of evolution. When we die, the light blinks out. There’s no more of us. There’s no such thing as the soul. But that’s not a proven point. There’s no experiment that proves that’s the case.

  youtube.com

Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.

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  Computation sits at the top of reality, not at its base: it is something our biosphere built after billions of years of evolution.

  Their words

  There’s this assumption that computation is at the base of reality, and I see it at the top of reality, not at the base, because I think computation was built by our biosphere. It’s something that happened after many billion years of evolution. It doesn’t happen in every physical object.

  youtube.com

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

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  The binding constraint on building anything in America is permitting and litigation, not money.

  solarAmerica

  Their words

  Yet solar development is hopelessly snarled by dozens of different development regulations which begin with the assumption that it will permanently and severely harm the environment unless proven otherwise, at exhaustive length.

  Permitting Reform Or Deathcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

CEO of SafeGraph, host of the World of DaaS podcast, and author of the Summation newsletter; previously founded LiveRamp.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Nurture Assumption

  Their words

  The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris

  summation.net

Public transit planning consultant; wrote Human Transit and argues that a network's shape follows from what a city decides it wants.

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  Tech marketing assumes that whatever sells to the rich today sells to everyone tomorrow, but some things stop working when everybody buys them.

  Their words

  It runs on the assumption that whatever we sell to the wealthy today we can sell to the masses tomorrow. But some things stop working when everybody buys them.

  Basics: Technology Never Changes Geometryhumantransit.org