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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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  By early childhood, girls already perceive boys as academically inferior to themselves, while teachers rate girls as academically superior even when test scores show the opposite.

  Their words

  By four years of age, girls tend to think that boys are academically inferior to them. Teachers often see their female students as academically superior, even when aptitude tests show the opposite pattern for their classes.

  Dark Forest, Young Men, Blood Boyrobkhenderson.com

Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Local optimizations of easily measured code metrics do not produce global optimums, and matter less the fewer people look at the output.

  Their words

  All those things you can easily measure in isolation, and you can also optimize for them quite locally. But these local optimizations do not produce global optimums, and the fewer of us are looking at the output, the less it matters.

  Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?lucumr.pocoo.org

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Venture capitalists are judged on the price they entered and exited at, not on the quality of the business they built.

  Their words

  VC success is measured based on price at entry and price at exit on an investment, rather than the quality of the business built

  aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A school should be judged on how fast its students are learning, not on how much they already know when measured.

  Their words

  And you should measure a school based on the rate of learning and the slope of the line, the growth rate, not its achievement.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Health optimisation has overshot: minimising a measured risk is not worth it if the cost is not having lived.

  Their words

  And this is the myopia of modernity, that we reduce things down to like, well, one glass on this long run study meant that you had a 0.1% greater risk of some heart defect. Yes, but if you didn't live at all, what's the point?

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Each emotion probably does have a specific bodily signature; the studies that found none measured far too little of the body to have seen it.

  Their words

  What you would want to do is have a detailed highdimensional readout of okay your your gallbladder and your liver and your kidney and your heart and changes all over your body and look at that and ask is there is there some kind of association between specific emotion states and changes some kind of complex change in your body and I would bet that there is but we just don't have those data yet

  youtube.com

Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A correction never travels as far as the scare it corrects: the press said a fifth of the project's skills were malicious, and the measured figure was 0.3 percent.

  Their words

  We did the the numbers and the numbers are more like 0.3%. We scanned all 67,000. We shipped the we shipped the paper. But you know a correction never travels as far as a scare.

  Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com

Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  In the physical world a model's mistake is measured in human lives rather than tokens, and there is no retry button.

  Their words

  In the physical world, the cost of a mistake can be measured in human lives, not tokens. There's simply not an undo and a retry button.

  youtube.com

Founder of HumanLayer; wrote 12-Factor Agents, on how to build AI agents that hold up in production.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Models will not learn to write maintainable code from today’s benchmarks, because the cost of bad architecture cannot be measured by running the unit tests — it arrives three to six months later.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  the problem with training models on maintainability is like the cost function of bad architecture and bad program design can't be evaluated by running the unit test because it hits you 3 to 6 months later

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Ambition should be measured in the eyes of your customer rather than your peers, which means being willing to take the best ideas wherever you find them.

  ambition

  Their words

  if you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. If you and if you define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer, not your peers, you're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers.

  youtube.com

Historian of maritime strategy at the US Naval War College; wrote The Wars for Asia and works on why continental and maritime powers fight differently.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Land powers lose people by the million and maritime powers by the hundred thousand, and the reason is simply that the fighting happens at home.

  Their words

  So, the deaths for the the land powers are measured in uh millions, whereas the maritime powers, it's a hundreds of thousands, still not a great number.

  youtube.com

Economist at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute; works on what advanced AI would do to growth, saving and the long-run economy.

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  There is no single interest rate in a world of rapidly cheapening robots: measured in robots it might be ten thousand per cent.

  interest rates

  Their words

  It might be that every robot now can turn into, you know, 100 robots next year, right? So, in units of robots the interest rate is 10,000%.

  youtube.com

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Opening school to everybody necessarily made average measured performance look worse, because the students who used to be excluded are now in the data.

  Their words

  But if you know anything about my obsession with selection bias, you can predict the outcome: when you expand access from a population that excludes more students to one that excludes fewer, you’re very likely to see declining performance.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  How long a trial takes decides which diseases get drugs at all, because capital flows to the indications whose endpoints can be measured quickly.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  Lastly, the duration of a clinical trial does not merely determine how fast an individual therapy reaches patients. It also shapes which diseases attract serious investment and which do not.

  writingruxandrabio.com

Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Brand marketing and growth experimentation are not rivals — a product personality carried into social media becomes fuel for the measured growth work.

  Their words

  Yeah, I mean I used to think it was versus, but now I realize that they combine really well. It could be rocket fuel for for your growth.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

Economist specialising in China's economy, international macroeconomics and global trade, and author of The New China Playbook.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Chinese industrial policy worked, and the evidence is that the cities which pushed hardest on a sector ended up best at both production and patents.

  China

  Their words

  Industrial policy was heavily criticized and again, if I talk to my Harvard professors, they’ll be very, very, very skeptical about the role of the state, especially in such a major way. But if you look at the Chinese experience, the evidence for success is all there. The cities that have pushed the most on supporting that particular sector ultimately did the best in terms of production, but also in terms of innovation, measured by patents. It’s all in the data.

  youtube.com

Writes Where's Your Ed At and hosts Better Offline; runs a tech PR firm, and argues at length that the AI business does not add up.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The chief executive is no longer a leadership role but a figurehead measured only on growing the company’s market capitalisation.

  Their words

  The Chief Executive — who makes over 300 times more than their average worker — is no longer a leadership position, but a kind of figurehead measured on their ability to continually grow the market capitalization of their company.

  The Era Of The Business Idiotwheresyoured.at

Founder and chief executive of Superhuman, the email client; previously founder of Rapportive, which he sold to LinkedIn; a professional game designer before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Product-market fit can be measured, optimised and numerically increased, and an algorithm can write the roadmap that increases it.

  Their words

  which is number one, you can measure product market fit. Number two, you can optimize product market fit. Number three, you can systematically even numerically increase product market fit. And number four, you can even have an algorithm write your road map for you.

  youtube.com

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A growth team should spend a fifth to a quarter of its year, measured annually rather than by sprint, introducing a new growth loop.

  Their words

  I try to focus 20% 20 to 25% of growth team's time annually, not every given sprint, not every given quarter, but annually, to introduce a new growth loop.

  youtube.com

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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

  Their words

  Best books I read in 2024: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Just as Deadly: The Psychology of Female Serial Killers by Marissa A. Harrison Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon

  robkhenderson.com

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Just as Deadly: The Psychology of Female Serial Killers

  Their words

  Best books I read in 2024: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Just as Deadly: The Psychology of Female Serial Killers by Marissa A. Harrison

  robkhenderson.com

Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.

From one piece Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The fall in childbearing in rich countries is concentrated among the less educated, not among female graduates.

  Their words

  Slurs of ‘childless cat ladies’ usually target female graduates, but in the US, Sweden and Finland the real decline is happening among people with less education.

  Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally?ggd.world

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rising female autonomy cannot be the cause of falling birth rates, because births have collapsed just as fast in countries where women's freedom is heavily restricted.

  Their words

  Nicolas Eberstadt speculates that it’s all about rising autonomy. But that can’t explain why fertility has also plummeted in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and India, where women are often heavily restricted.

  Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally?ggd.world

Game designer and director of the NYU Game Center; made Universal Paperclips and writes Donkeyspace.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Games should not be measured against any outside yardstick — not purpose, not pleasure, not politics.

  Their words

  In my approach, I resist using any external value framework as an ultimate set of criteria against which to measure games’ worth - not purpose, not pleasure, not politics.

  Are Games Good?franklantz.substack.com

Monetary economist known for NGDP-level targeting. Wrote TheMoneyIllusion until it closed in 2024 and now writes The Pursuit of Happiness.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint

  Their words

  Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (Germany, 2019, CC) 3.6 When thinking about the most overlooked female artist, Artemesia Gentileschi often comes to mind. This documentary makes a persuasive case for Hilma af Klint. To my eyes, her most appealing works are not the large scale abstractions, rather it’s the small Klee-like gems that stand out. Don’t assume that if you have seen a half dozen of her most famous works that you have any conception of her overall career.

  themoneyillusion.com

Investigative journalist; wrote Area 51, The Pentagon's Brain and Nuclear War: A Scenario, reconstructing what secret programmes actually did from interviews and declassified records.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Judgment and cognition are the two capacities the nuclear launch decision actually turns on, which is the standard a presidential candidate should be measured against.

  Their words

  Because why on earth there would be two candidates, one of whom has cognitive problems and the other of whom has judgment problems? These are the two biggest issues with the nuclear launch, judgment and cognition. And so where’s the young-ish, thoughtful, forward looking, wise, dedicated civil servant running for president? I know that sounds fantastical, but I wish it weren’t.

  youtube.com

Writes about the biotech industry, drug development and forecasting — “I write to learn, mostly about biotech.”

• Our readingkorrents.com

  How long a trial takes decides which diseases get drugs at all, because capital flows to the indications whose endpoints can be measured quickly.

  Their words

  Because patents have fixed term lengths, with small extensions to compensate for the year or so when the drug is under regulatory review, drug developers are incentivized to go after conditions where clinical trials can be completed quickly, all else being equal.

  atelfo.github.io

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A dependency you would need engineer-months to replace or fork is a critical one, and retaining its maintainer is straightforward business sense.

  Their words

  This is how I frame it: if the effort required to replace or fork a dependency should it go unmaintained is measured in engineer-months, that’s a critical dependency and retaining its maintainers probably makes good business sense.

  words.filippo.io

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A dominant platform is more fragile than it looks, because pushing users far enough makes even the locked-in ones leave.

  Their words

  An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed.

  Tiktok's enshittificationpluralistic.net