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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.

• Fear Strikes Out

  But the hatred remains

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Founder and chief executive of Replit. Previously an engineer at Facebook and Codecademy. Writes essays on programming, philosophy and entrepreneurship at amasad.me.

• The AI naming curse strikes again. “AI Safety” firm made AI unsafe. “Effective Altruists” are both ineffective and enabling criminal activity. “Irregular” is regularly incompetent.
  Quoting@brianchau57BREAKING: A single Israeli Effective Altruism firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta cyberattacks 🧵 with help from @lumpenspace

  AI alignmentRelated

Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

• i was going to write something, but Quentin beat me to it... Let me put it another way, so that Chairman Coquerel @ericcoquerel understands and corrects his statement. When a state issues nominal bonds (bonds that pay in euros), the real value of interest payments varies with inflation, creating risk for investors. So they require a higher interest rate to compensate for the risk. In issuing inflation protected bonds, the state eliminates the risk and thus is able to get a lower rate. This decreases the burden of the debt. This is good. Always happy to help the Chair of the Finance Committee…
  Quoting@QuentinVandewe2Est-ce que LFI organise un concours Lépine pour la théorie du complot la plus idiote sur la dette ? Après la Banque de France qui revendrait la dette en secret, Mélenchon découvre que l'État « vient de proposer de nouveau des titres indexés sur le capital et des intérêts compensant l'inflation ». U…

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Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.

• Top Links 1223 IMF caves to USA on chief economist. Miami boom. $LAPTOP crashes & the Canton-Hong Kong strikes.

  Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze

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Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.

• I hear roughly 3 reasons people keep working at AI labs despite believing in ~10% extinction risk: 1) Techno-determinism: Someone will build ASI no matter what, and I can do it better & more safely than China/OpenAI/etc 2) Consequentialism: ASI might kill us, but it also might produce utopia/immortality/superabundance, so it's a +EV bet 3) Self-interest: I am personally having fun & getting rich working on cool tech with friends. I don't think about the macro stuff. Notably, none of this is "I'm hyping up the risk for marketing reasons." People believe what they say, while being capable of a…
  Quoting@EvanHubJacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.

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Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.

• We’re collectively realizing that experts, analog or digital, make strange decisions from time to time. Non-determinism, we learn, is both awesome and dreadful. It’s more powerful, but like people, these tools need active management (and resist it just like our best devs).
  Quoting@heyJordanParkerAstra is such a weird model. 1. It makes better architectural decisions than Fable 2. It is more diligent & disciplined than Fable 3. It communicates better than Fable 4. Seems to compact better than every other model I've tested But also… 1. Is slow to answer 2. Is extremely slow & inefficient whe…

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China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.

• Excellent piece, very clear and accurate. Just what I've been saying! China's weak real effective exchange rate is a consequence of bad domestic macro policies, and appreciating the nominal rate without different macro policies won't get rid of deflationary pressures
  Quoting@GitaGopinathThe Chinese yuan is no doubt undervalued. But demanding that China revalue the yuan gets both the diagnosis and the cure wrong. Our piece, with @pogourinchas & @helene_rey in the @TheEconomist is out:

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

• The empire strikes back

  Objections to the market monetarist explanation of 2008-09

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Economist at the Hoover Institution; wrote The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level and blogs as The Grumpy Economist.

• Supply Shocks and Nominal Anchors

  Updating “Inflation,” I took “supply” and “demand” shocks more seriously, in a FTPL framework.

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