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Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A competent, empowered civil service that performs crucial government functions with in-house expertise is good.

  government

  Their words

  One unpopular position I’ve stuck to over the years is that a strong bureaucracy is good. I don’t mean “bureaucracy” as in red tape and regulation; I mean a competent, empowered civil service that can perform crucial government functions efficiently and well using in-house expertise. This is also called state capacity.

  Roundup #88: Is it time to panic yet?noahpinion.blog

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.

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  The Trump administration is defined by hostility to expertise and has silenced or purged people who know things across agencies.

  Their words

  At a fundamental level, they’re just hostile to the idea of expertise in any domain, in pretty much every agency where there’s something to know, where there’s technical stuff that you need to know to make good decisions. The people who actually know things, or the people who are willing to speak up about what they know, have been silenced, purged.

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

Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.

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  Handing all code production to AI leaves junior developers with no path to becoming senior ones.

  Their words

  In addition to reliability issues, it often engenders a mind-numbing workflow and an environment where junior developers will never acquire the expertise to become senior developers capable of designing complex systems.

  On AI Coding and Its Discontentscalnewport.com

Chief Product and Technology Officer at Netflix, previously VP of Science at Lyft and an economist at Analysis Group.

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  Deep design expertise does not get squeezed out just because code and analysis got faster.

  Their words

  But I think it would be a mistake to say design and deep design expertise and thinking gets squeezed out just because we can write code faster. We can do data analysis faster.

  youtube.com

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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  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

Canadian bootstrapper and writer on small software businesses. Co-founder of the podcast hosting company Transistor.fm and author of the book Marketing for Developers.

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  The most valuable problem to pursue is the hardest one someone is genuinely positioned to solve.

  Their words

  Doing "the hard thing" means pursuing the highest-value problem you can find that still sits inside your zone of expertise; the hardest problem you're personally in a position to win.

  Do the hardest thingjustinjackson.ca

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

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  Expertise is an enormous accumulated library of small facts and skills, which is why no method can shortcut the sheer volume of learning it takes.

  Their words

  The boring truth is that expertise in most subjects is largely a matter of having an enormous library of knowledge and skill.

  scotthyoung.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

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  Nvidia's engineers can routinely get another 2x out of an AI lab's stack, and doubling the tokens a fleet produces doubles that lab's revenue.

  Their words

  And so our expertise um helps our our our um uh our AI labs partners get another 2x out of their stack easily. Often times it's not unusual that we you know by the time that we're done optimizing their stack or optimizing a particular kernel their model sped up by 3x 2x 50%.

  Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?youtube.com

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

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  Poincare missed special relativity because he knew too much: the leading physicists of the day were prisoners of their own expertise.

  Their words

  his expertise seems to be getting in the way. He knows so much, he understands so much, um and then he's not able to let go of these these things.

  youtube.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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  AI excels at breadth and human experts at depth, which makes them complementary and makes today's depth-focused way of doing science the wrong shape.

  Their words

  Yeah, so they excel at breadth and humans excel at depth. Um like human experts at least. Yeah, so um I think they're very complementary. Um but our current uh way of doing math and science is focused on depth because that that's where the human uh expertise cuz humans can't do breadth.

  youtube.com

Long-time Debian developer and free-software maintainer (remctl, INN, pam-krb5) who has published book reviews on his personal site since the 1990s.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Politics on the Edge

  Their words

  The stand-out non-fiction book of the year was Rory Stewart's Politics on the Edge. I have a lot of disagreements with Stewart's political positions (the more I listen to him, the more disagreements I find), but he is an excellent memoirist who skewers the banality, superficiality, and contempt for competence that has become so prevailing in centrist and right-wing politics. It's hard not to read this book and despair of electoralism and the current structures of governments, but it's bracing to know that even some people I disagree with believe in the value of expertise.

  eyrie.org

Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.

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  Relying on AI to replace performance engineers reduces an organization's overall technical expertise over time.

  Their words

  If a company spends less on performance engineers as it's considered AI'd, it will reduce the company's effective "performance IQ."

  On "AI Brendans" or "Virtual Brendans"brendangregg.com

Co-founder of Superlogical, started in 2026 to build server-side terminal infrastructure; creator of Ghostty. Co-founded HashiCorp and created Vagrant and Terraform before that.

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  Effective use of AI coding tools requires domain expertise: the tool should be used as an assistant, not as a replacement for the engineer.

  Their words

  This is intentional and I believe good AI drivers are experts in their domains and utilize AI as an assistant, not a replacement.

  Vibing a Non-Trivial Ghostty Featuremitchellh.com

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.

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  Turning expertise into a commodity is democratising, because access to medical, legal and mental-health advice has always tracked wealth.

  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.

  youtube.com

Engineering leader and writer; wrote The Manager's Path and Platform Engineering, and blogs at Elided Branches.

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  Defining what expertise looks like in a job family is not HR’s work, and a career ladder left to them will be wrong.

  Their words

  Don’t let (or make!) HR do all of the work. It’s really not their job to define expertise in your functions.

  10 Years of Engineering Ladderselidedbranches.com

Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.

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  A people manager needs enough technical depth to follow discussions and judge debates without relying on trust, but not the deepest technical expertise on the team.

  Their words

  The bar I typically suggest is that the people manager doesn't need to have the most technical depth on the team, but they need enough depth that they can follow most discussions without slowing them down, understand who's correct in most debates without needing to rely on trust, and generally stay oriented easily.

  Categories of leadership on technical teamsbenkuhn.net

Cryptography engineer; maintains Go's cryptography libraries as a full-time open-source maintainer, funded directly by companies that use them.

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  The thing open source can actually sell is not the code but access to its maintainers’ attention and expertise.

  open source

  Their words

  Clients still pay a fixed monthly retainer to ensure the professional maintenance of the whole portfolio, and to get access to the expertise of all of Geomys’ maintainers.

  words.filippo.io

Principal engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on agents and developer tooling. Streams TypeScript, OCaml and Neovim on Twitch, and wrote the better-result library after writing the same Result type about a hundred times.

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  JavaScript has the lowest bar of entry to being productive, but one of the highest bars of any stack to building high-quality, stable, reliable software.

  JavaScript

  Their words

  My hot take is that JS has the lowest bar of entry to building and being productive (a good thing) but one of the highest bars of any language and stack to building high quality, stable, and reliable software. Very few devs have the expertise to pull off the latter

  @dillon_mulroy on Xx.com

Neuroscientist at UC Davis; studies memory and wrote Why We Remember.

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  Expertise is not passively absorbing patterns — it is learning what to look for, which makes becoming an expert a training of attention.

  Their words

  This fits with some of the studies of chess experts and so forth that it’s not so much that you learn the patterns passively. You learn what to look for. You learn what’s important and what’s not.

  youtube.com

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Creativity in Science

  Their words

  This book surveys theories of creativity, contrasting four competing explanations: expertise, genius, society, and chance, in offering a model for how creativity works. Simonton's work provides a nice hybrid between the purely anecdotal work of biographers and the data-driven work of experimental scientists.

  scotthyoung.com

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

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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

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

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  Countries that build cheaply defer to engineers, even the ones with far more political patronage than the United States has.

  America

  Their words

  Importantly, low-cost countries with more clientelism and politicization of the state tend to be more deferential to the expertise of engineers.

  High Costs are not About Precaritypedestrianobservations.com

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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  A run of correct forecasts is not evidence of expertise, because among many forecasters some are right by chance.

  Their words

  I may have I may be an investor. I have a track record of calling the market right in the last five times. People say, "Wow, he really knows what he's talking about." But there are lots of people who are trying to predict which way the market is going to go. And some of them are going to get it right by chance. And people assume it's because they know what they're what they're doing, and in fact they're just the lucky ones.

  youtube.com

Author of Shape Up; formerly head of strategy at Basecamp, where he worked on product design for seventeen years; now runs Felt Presence.

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  Work that is too fine too early commits everyone to the wrong details; shaped work is rough on purpose so designers and programmers can apply their own judgement.

  Their words

  Work that’s too fine, too early commits everyone to the wrong details. Designers and programmers need room to apply their own judgement and expertise when they roll up their sleeves and discover all the real trade-offs that emerge.

  Shape Up, chapter 2: Principles of Shapingbasecamp.com