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Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

From one piece God Help Us, Let’s Try To Learn About Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques 2 beliefs · astralcodexten.com

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  Neural networks do not have a one-to-one mapping between individual neurons and concepts.

  Their words

  researchers started by seeking a 1:1 mapping between neurons and concepts, like a neuron that always fired when the AI was thinking about cats, but quickly learned that nothing like that existed.

  astralcodexten.com

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  Removing a concept from a mind can damage unrelated systems or push the mind toward incompetence or insanity.

  Their words

  empirically concepts can get their tentacles into weird places, and removing one can topple seemingly unrelated systems or push a mind nonspecifically in the direction of incompetence or insanity.

  astralcodexten.com

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

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  True AI alignment is impossible because obedience and benevolence are fundamentally incompatible goals.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  AI alignment will forever be balancing the tradeoff between paperclip-maximizing and disempowerment, because these two rival concepts of alignment are fundamentally incompatible.

  Roundup #87: Technology BAD!!noahpinion.blog

Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.

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  Concepts are represented with strikingly similar geometry inside large AI models and inside brains.

  Their words

  And so when you look inside these big AI models, the mathematical objects that you see look a lot like the things that you see in neuroscience. So if you look at how do how do these AI models represent um just like represent concepts and you look at the parts of the brain that represent concepts, you see these you see very similar geometry.

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

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  The famous body maps of emotion record where people believe they would feel things, not where anything in the body actually changes.

  Their words

  it's ultimately about people's concepts of how emotions correspond to changes in the body, not the real actual changes in the body.

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Professor at Stanford working on robot learning and meta-learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence.

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  Combining an avocado and a chair into one image is evidence a model conceptually understands both, not that it memorised pictures of them.

  Their words

  when you can basically bridge the concept of an avocado and a chair and show that you kind of can combine those two, it means that the model has at least some kind of conceptual understanding of what an avocado is and what a chair is to the point that it can combine them into something that exhibits both concepts at the same time.

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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.

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  To reward the instinct that a new idea is worth having, training would have to score the smallness of the concepts a solution needs, not just whether it solved the problem.

  Their words

  Uh but I don't think it's easy but I do think it's something you would have to do in order to uh reward the gawwa like instinct rather than just rewarding have you solved a problem.

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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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  Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces that Shape Your Life

  Their words

  Alex Mayyasi, Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces that Shape Your Life is a useful introduction to economic concepts.

  marginalrevolution.com

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

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  The stable one-profession career is becoming a thing of the past; what will still be needed alongside AI is reasoning with abstractions and problem-solving when things go wrong.

  Their words

  It's becoming much more a thing of the past. So I think you just have to be adaptable and flexible. I think people will have to get skills that are transferable, like learning one specific programing language or one specific subject of mathematics or something. That itself is not a super transferable skill, but sort of knowing how to reason with abstract concepts or how to problem solve when things go wrong.

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Software engineer and essayist who writes about programming, formal methods, philosophy and literature at thoughts.wyounas.com.

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  Principles of the SPIN Model Checker

  Their words

  This book gave me both insight and a deeper curiosity about the subject. This book introduces the SPIN model checker and exposes the reader to the nuances of verifying programs using SPIN. A nice feature of the book is how it explains concepts using thoughtfully developed, freely available tools (such as jSpin) that the author created for pedagogical purposes. It's a demanding book, but the content was interesting. The book presents details about concurrency, temporal logic, non-determinism, advanced SPIN topics, and even case studies. I've already written a few blog posts about the topics I explored while reading this book, and I plan to write more. Overall, it's a good book. I'm sure I'll revisit the latter half again.

  thoughts.wyounas.com

Venture capitalist and founder of Theory Ventures, previously a partner at Redpoint. Writes a near-daily blog on startups, SaaS metrics, data and AI.

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  Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

  Their words

  Rovelli describes quantum concepts in an approachable way.

  tomtunguz.com

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

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  A Philosophy of Software Design

  Their words

  There are few books like this, that discuss software design in a simple and approachable way, while leaving the reader novel and practical concepts to use.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Design engineer and illustrator; makes visual essays on programming, anthropology and what language models do to the way people write.

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  Writing that is specific, local and grounded in a real life is the cheapest available proof that a person wrote it, because models default to generics.

  Their words

  Referencing obscure concepts, friends who are real but not famous, niche interests, and recent events all make you plausibly more human.

  The Dark Forest and Generative AImaggieappleton.com

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.

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  Stories of Your Life and Others

  Their words

  He is the closest thing to a modern Jorge Luis Borges in melding high concepts with literature to create something better than either

  gwern.net

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.

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  Brainstorming together produces no more ideas and no better ones than having people generate ideas privately before sharing them.

  Their words

  the research on like brainstorming where all brainstorming together the research shows that brainstorming does not produce more ideas or more innovative ideas. And I think teams would be and groups would be better having individuals generate their own concepts and then after they've done it independently and privately sharing it with the others.

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Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

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  Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

  Their words

  In today's world of massive consumer choice, it's easy to end up locked in competitive battles where no one stands out. Harvard professor Youngme Moon makes a great series of cases for how you can still stand out. What I particularly liked about this book was it's not like your average marketing book; instead it's like an extended conversation with Moon exploring key concepts on differentiation without the heavy-handedness of specific rules.

  jasonevanish.com

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  Economics in One Lesson

  Their words

  This economics thought experiment is a classic book originally written in 1946. Like most books that follow Nassim Taleb's "all books worth reading are at least 20 years old" rule, it has timeless lessons throughout. It tackles all kinds of ongoing political/economic concepts like rent control, minimum wage, tariffs, "saving industries", and more.

  jasonevanish.com

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  Enchantment

  Their words

  It's a decent coverage of the concepts of planning how to delight your customers from your product's design to how you support and serve them. However, it felt a bit like a poor man's Thank You Economy, with less novel ideas and some filler.

  jasonevanish.com

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  What Customers Want

  Their words

  This book was written before the Lean Startup movement, but espouses many of the same concepts. If you feel like you're starting at zero in understanding what to do to become customer driven, this is a good place to start.

  jasonevanish.com

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  The Lean Startup

  Their words

  If you actually want to learn how to actually BE a lean startup or how to actually do it, this book will not help you. If you want to learn the high level concepts only then this is a great book. The other books I have above I encourage you to read before this one if you want to truly learn and implement lean practices. 7. On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (3.13.18)

  jasonevanish.com

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  An Introduction to Thermal Physics

  Their words

  Despite my aim to keep this list purely about math books, I cannot help but include this one in the list. Simply put, it's one of the most enjoyable textbooks I've ever read, giving a very satisfying first-principles understanding of what thermodynamic concepts like temperature and entropy really are, and how we can to understand them.

  3blue1brown.com

Statistician and Chief Scientist at Posit (RStudio). Author of the ggplot2, dplyr and tidyverse R packages and of books on R programming and data science.

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  Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming

  Their words

  Another similar and also interesting book is Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, which explains all the models of computer languages and how they fit together.

  fivebooks.com

Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.

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  The Culture Code

  Their words

  Ideas about developing teams that work together better. Underwhelming — took just a few base concepts and then stretched them very thin by applying to them a dozen different (not always compelling) stories.

  radex.io

Software engineer working on distributed systems and databases; creator of rqlite, the distributed database built on SQLite.

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  The Unix Programming Environment

  Their words

  The Unix Programming Environment is a book you can't read too soon. It's something I wish I'd come across years before I actually did. An authoritative and comprehensive manual for using Unix as a programmer, it clearly explains concepts such as inodes, hard and soft links, system calls, and the power of joining programs together via stdin and stdout. By the time I came across this book I already knew these concepts, but had never studied them before in one place, and in such a coherent manner.

  philipotoole.com

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.

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  Operating System Concepts

  Their words

  It covers concepts at a high level and hits the major points, but it's lacking in technical depth, details on how things work, advanced topics, and clear exposition.

  danluu.com