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Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.

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  Most people who hold a widely-held political view are ignorant or intellectually sloppy about it

  Their words

  The fact is that for basically any widely held political view, a huge share of the people who hold the view are going to be ignorant, intellectually sloppy, or otherwise badly flawed in their reasoning.

  slowboring.com

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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  RCTs have the disadvantage of requiring too many things to be held constant and can miss longer-term adjustment benefits.

  Their words

  RCTs somehow have the odd disadvantage of requiring too many things to be held constant, and so they can miss the benefits of longer-term adjustments.

  Does AI assistance enhance or erode expertise?marginalrevolution.com

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

From one piece The smartest people I know have strong opinions weakly held 2 beliefs · levels.io

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  Smarter people hold their opinions firmly but revise them quickly when new information appears, while clinging to consistency for its own sake is a mark of lower intelligence.

  Their words

  The smartest people I know have strong opinions weakly held and change them when new information arises The dumbest people I know keep their opinions the same just so they can remain consistent Time changes too fast try remain consistent, better to sail the waves to wherever they are taking you!

  levels.io

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  Changing your mind in light of new facts should be celebrated rather than held against you.

  Their words

  The smartest people I know have strong opinions weakly held and change them when new information arises The dumbest people I know keep their opinions the same just so they can remain consistent Time changes too fast try remain consistent, better to sail the waves to wherever they are taking you!

  levels.io

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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  Changing your mind in light of new facts should be celebrated rather than held against you.

  Their words

  IDK why anyone has a problem with having strong opinions, weakly held.

  @GergelyOrosz on Xx.com

Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and co-founder and CEO of World Labs.

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  The scaling law for world models was a conviction held in advance, not a discovery; the devils were always in the architecture choices and the data mixture.

  Their words

  I think three of us have total conviction about the scaling law. That that I think we do. I do think the exact architecture choices and data mixtures is where the the devils are in the details.

  youtube.com

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

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  Changing your mind in light of new facts should be celebrated rather than held against you.

  Their words

  I'd rather celebrate people updating their priors than dunking on them for being late. Make it cool to change your mind when you realize the facts have changed!

  @dhh on Xx.com

Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.

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  Monitors that read an agent's chain of thought must be kept out of the reward signal, or you are simply training the agent to obfuscate its thinking.

  Their words

  But keep those methods you use to investigate things and monitor things very separate from the methods you use to generate reward which is something that AI companies including open AAI have held up as a principle especially in the case of avoiding putting training pressure on the chain of thought. So you might have monitors that read the agents chain of thought in order to alert you if something is going wrong somewhere but you don't train the agents with the outputs of that monitor.

  youtube.com

Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.

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  Platform design choices are not shielded by the First Amendment or Section 230, so companies can be held liable for harmful features.

  Their words

  judges and juries have begun to accept the argument that platform design is not covered by either of those, and companies can be punished for harmful features.

  platformer.news

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

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  Large language models could still plateau, and that possibility should be held open even though no evidence of it has appeared.

  LLMs

  Their words

  So we should also have the humility. As amazing as the LLMs are now, it could be that they eventually plateau. We haven't seen any evidence of it yet, and I think this is also why we're seeing this absolute gobsmacking levels of investment, because so far the scaling laws are true, and the more billions are poured in, the more intelligence comes out.

  youtube.com

Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

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  Performance cannot win a market on its own: against an incumbent held up by network effects, being far more responsive is a nice plus and nothing more.

  Their words

  maybe performance could be part of a package where you try to take on one of those players. like, hey, look at how much more responsive our thing is than theirs. Might be a nice plus, but that's not going to be sufficient.

  youtube.com

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

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  It is the diversity of a robot data set, not its size, that produces generalization: dropping the most diverse slice hurts far more than dropping a random fifth.

  Their words

  we find that the performance on held out tasks decreases dramatically. Whereas if we um just take out a random 20% of the data that's less diverse than the most diverse subset, the performance um only decreases a little bit. And so this suggests that actually having really diverse data plays an important role in enabling it to generalize to new tasks.

  youtube.com

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

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  Netflix’s cultural rules were never ends in themselves: agency, accountability and pushing decisions deep into the organisation are the mechanism by which you get excellence.

  Their words

  It was instead a very strongly held opinion that that you get to excellence by giving people a lot of agency and accountability. By pushing decisions as deep in the organization as possible, hiring great people who can be trusted to have good judgment and make good decisions.

  youtube.com

Investment researcher and engineer who runs Lyn Alden Investment Strategy, writing on macroeconomics, currency systems and equity analysis.

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  A large generation of small business owners is aging and looking for liquidity or diversification as they plan succession.

  America

  Their words

  Privately held businesses in the United States are collectively worth trillions of dollars, and demographically speaking, they have an aging set of owners who are seeking liquidity or diversification as they explore how to pass on what they've built.

  lynalden.com

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

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  Machiavelli held that every institution is gradually corrupted and must be reformed back to its foundations or collapse under the weight of that corruption.

  Their words

  All institutions are gradually corrupted and need to be reformed and returned to their foundations, or they will collapse under the weight of their corruption.

  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 far less trade-off than people assume between a safer AI race and widely shared gains: a big lead can be held by a widely owned public company.

  Their words

  some people think either uh frontier AI gets commoditized and we all enjoy the benefits, but there might be some risk because like it's the market's really competitive and cutthroat, or um things are safer because there's a big gap between the leader and the laggard, but that means that the leaders get fantastically wealthy. No, like you could just have a relatively big gap, but it's a public company ownership and it's widely distributed.

  youtube.com

Investor and writer. Previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a product leader at Twitter, Facebook, Snap and Microsoft. Writes essays and memos at sriramk.com.

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  In most technology-driven industries, capability advantages are held for longer and are harder to fast-follow than is the case with AI models.

  Their words

  This is not the case with many other technology driven industries where capability or advancements often tend to be longer held and a fast-follow model is harder.

  Model capabilities and four minute milesriramk.com

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

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  Hundreds of billions of dollars of AI value rest on about a billion dollars of lithography tooling that cannot be scaled quickly.

  data centers

  Their words

  oh 50 gigawatts of economic you know sort of capex in in the data center and what gets built on top of that in terms of tokens is even larger right it might be hundred billion dollars worth of AI value into the supply chain is held up by this $1.2 two billion dollars worth of tooling that simply just cannot expand its supply chain quickly.

  youtube.com

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

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Red Harvest

  Their words

  I re-read all of Hammett's novels this year, and this, his first, held up the best.

  andrewbatson.com

Astrophysicist and coffee researcher; author of The Physics of Filter Coffee and The Physics of Espresso, and writer of the Coffee ad Astra blog on brewing science and equipment.

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  Dripper diameter, with other brew variables held fixed, does not change extraction or taste — only batch size.

  Their words

  changing the dripper diameter, keeping all other important variables fixed, has no impact on the brew mechanics and the resulting cup, in an "idealized" scenario

  The Importance of Bed Depthcoffeeadastra.com

Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.

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  I am a classicist rather than a contrarian: I am in step with what thinkers about the mind have always held, and content to be out of step with my own field for decades.

  Their words

  I I really view myself as a classicist rather than as a contrarian. I go to what what the larger community of of thinkers about the mind have always thought.

  youtube.com

Chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, which he has led since 2005 after turning around Bank One.

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  Held-to-maturity accounting hides interest-rate risk, which is how a bank's tangible book value could be halved by marking a single line to market.

  interest rates

  Their words

  And the interest rate exposure was hidden by accounting. It was called held to maturity, where you don't have to mark even treasuries to market.

  youtube.com

Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.

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  Vibe coding lets users design and build their own software, upending the user-centred design paradigm that has held since 1947.

  Their words

  The new trend toward vibe coding and vibe design may be upending the user-centered design paradigm that has remained based on the same ideology since the first UX design projects at Bell Labs, starting in 1947.

  jakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Historian at Stanford and the Hoover Institution; wrote Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market, on Ayn Rand.

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  The circle around Ayn Rand became totally conformist because its members held that rationality was the only way to decide anything and that being rational meant agreeing with her.

  Their words

  Over time, they all come to share Ayn Rand's views and opinions on everything, from music to art, to clothes. She gets a dining room table and a bunch of them get the same dining room table, and it becomes incredibly conformist, because they've all believed they're acting rationally. And they believe that to act rationally is to agree with Ayn Rand and they believe there's no other way to make decisions than rationality. To disagree with her is to be irrational.

  youtube.com

Journalist and author writing on politics, liberalism and ideas; a contributor to Quillette and co-author of a book on Christopher Hitchens.

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  Spending on existential risk cannot be held accountable, because there is no measurement that would ever show it failing.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Unlike other interventions EA has sponsored, there are scant metrics for tracking the success or failure of investments in existential risk mitigation.

  How Effective Altruism Lost Its Wayquillette.com

Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.

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  The fall in birth rates is caused by the values modern societies most cherish, so raising them means compromising some of those values.

  Their words

  Its main causes are tied to deeply held modern values that have been pushing us in this direction for most of this time across most of the world.

  A Fertility Reckoningovercomingbias.com

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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  Neither monetarist money-supply-focused models nor Keynesian macro models have outperformed simple random-walk models at forecasting the macroeconomy.

  Their words

  Friedman’s focus on the money supply has not held up, as Samuelson suggested, but the alternative Keynesian macro models recommended by Samuelson in the same interview have not done better and they were not outperforming simple random walk models of predicting the macroeconomic future.

  tylercowen.com