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Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Writing about the American Southwest without acknowledging drought, rising temperatures, and pollution is intellectually dishonest.

  America

  Their words

  Perhaps this is a bold claim, but I think anyone writing about or from the southwest who isn't also in some way clocking how drought and rising temperatures and pollution are affecting the region is being disingenuous.

  Processing: How Nicholas Russell Wrote Observercountercraft.substack.com

Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.

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  "Carbon intensity" metrics let oil companies claim climate progress even as their total emissions rise from increased production.

  Their words

  "Carbon intensity" is a greenwashing term: It measures pollution per barrel, allowing oil companies to claim climate progress even as rising production drives up total overall emissions.

  heated.world

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

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  Publicly embracing a taboo, extremist identity can function as a costly signal that builds political authenticity and loyalty.

  Their words

  People who act and speak in public as right-wing extremists and are labeled as such, establish a claim to authenticity.

  adamtooze.substack.com

Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.

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  Disputes about phones, homework and childhood are disputes about values, and more data will not settle them.

  Their words

  the claim here is that arguments about smartphones, bullying, and homework are arguments about values, often moral values

  Kids These Dayssmallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Enforcing equality against biology and markets requires censorship and violence, which makes the project immoral whatever its moral claim.

  Their words

  The left is on a project to enforce equality, despite biology and markets. The goal of equality gives claim to the moral high ground, but contradicting biology and markets requires censorship and violence, which makes the whole project immoral.

  @naval on Xx.com

Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A company that is a genuine climate champion should not need to be forced into climate action.

  Google

  Their words

  But if Microsoft, Amazon and Google are truly the climate champions they claim to be, they shouldn't need to be forced.

  heated.world

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

From one piece Neuroscience of Emotions & Tools for Improving Emotion Regulation | Dr. Ralph Adolphs 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Functionally defined emotions can be attributed to animals and, to some extent, to AI systems, without any claim about what either of them feels.

  Their words

  well but again these are functionally defined emotions and there's I think there's no problem assigning to AI to some extent and certainly to many animals uh those functional emotions

  youtube.com

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  You cannot reliably tell how someone feels from their facial expression, and Ekman's universality claim does not survive a reading of the whole literature.

  Their words

  We took stock of the whole literature and asked is this really true? Is Ecman's claim really true? Can you tell how someone feels from their facial expression? And the answer is well not nearly as well as you would think and in general not.

  youtube.com

Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.

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  Some historical raiders destroyed conquered cities for destruction's own sake, not to seize land, treasure, or slaves.

  Their words

  The Sea Peoples did not invade lands to claim them as their own, or extract treasure or slaves to bring back to their homeland. They seemingly torched the great capitals of the Bronze Age just to watch them burn.

  The Uses Of Terroradjacentpossible.substack.com

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

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  Silicon Valley's actual trajectory increasingly resembles Philip K. Dick's paranoid, hallucinatory fiction rather than the optimistic space-age visions of Asimov and Clarke.

  Their words

  Increasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown.

  programmablemutter.com

Writer and researcher, founder of New Science; writes essays on science funding, sleep research, productivity and ambition at guzey.com.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Most people sleep more than they need to, and are better off deliberately sleeping less.

  Their words, before

  I claim that if you sleep as much as you want, you’ll probably sleep too much and become more susceptible to depression.

  Their words now

  while I still believe that the quality of the existing sleep science is extremely low, I advise against trying to decrease the amount of sleep you’re getting based on this article

Psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. Writes Psychiatry at the Margins on the philosophical and scientific arguments inside psychiatry and the psy-sciences.

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  The Rumpelstiltskin effect claims only that the act of being diagnosed can itself help, not that a diagnosis is a net good for the patient.

  Their words

  The Rumpelstiltskin effect is not a claim that receiving a diagnosis is a net benefit or a net positive. It is a claim that the mere act of receiving a diagnosis can be beneficial.

  psychiatrymargins.com

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.

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  Establishment journalists claim to speak truth to power but never investigate themselves or each other.

  Their words

  The establishment journalist claims to speak truth to power, but somehow never gets around to investigating themselves or each other.

  The Network Statethenetworkstate.com

AI researcher at OpenAI; built the poker systems Libratus and Pluribus and the Diplomacy agent Cicero, and works on reasoning models.

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  A benchmark result should be reported under a stated budget, or as a curve against test-time compute — never as a single number.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  my claim is the proper way to evaluate the models now is you either have some kind of budget for the benchmark whether it's tokens or cost or time or whatever or you plot the performance as a function of the amount of test time compute that's going into the model

  youtube.com

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.

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  The claim that passive investing has made markets less efficient is overwrought.

  Their words

  Doomsday stories about how passive investing is making markets less efficient and less inclined to reflect fundamentals strike me as overwrought

  aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com

Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.

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  Most companies calling themselves mission-driven are only mission-hopeful; the real test is that you cannot profit except by achieving the mission.

  Their words

  Companies that claim to be missiondriven, most of them are just mission hopeful. Okay? It's it's It's just a candy coating on top of an extractive engine. Sorry, I don't buy it. If you're serious about being missiondriven, you have to show me that you cannot profit except by achieving the mission.

  youtube.com

Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.

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  Data centres mostly take farmland, of which America has too much, rather than housing land, of which it has too little.

  data centersAmerica

  Their words

  This post is about whether data centers waste the land they’re on relative to what they compete with, and my claim is that they mostly don’t compete with things we need more of (housing) and mostly compete with things we need less of (farmland).

  Data center land use issues are fakeblog.andymasley.com

Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.

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  Asking what the smallest experiment is that would settle a claim to your own satisfaction has become a thousand times more valuable in the last year.

  Their words

  Yeah, what what's the smallest experiment I can run to verify to my own satisfaction and everybody's level of satisfaction is going to be different whether or not this claim is true. That's That's the skill that is suddenly in the last year become a thousand times more valuable is that skill of saying, "What's the least I can do to validate for my to my own satisfaction whether this claim is true?

  youtube.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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The King and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti's Rise to Fame by his Manager, Friend, and Sometime Adversary

  Their words

  This one actually is fantastically fun.

  marginalrevolution.com

Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Economics journals have made large datasets and heavy statistics the price of making any causal claim at all, which has squeezed qualitative economic history out of the field.

  Their words

  Over the past few decades, journal editors and peer-reviewers have increasingly insisted that papers must present large datasets that have been treated using complex statistical methods in order to make even the mildest claims about what caused what.

  Age of Invention: Joel Mokyr's Nobelageofinvention.xyz

Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The claim that data centres poison the water around them is false.

  data centers

  Their words

  It’s very common that I’m told that data centers poison the water around them.

  The AI water issue is fakeblog.andymasley.com

German writer and historian; wrote Blitzed, on drug use in Nazi Germany, and Tripped.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Hitler did not mind that his early audiences were drunk, because drunk people are more susceptible to right-wing populism.

  Their words

  But it was used by right-wingers, and Hitler didn't mind because people who are drunk are more susceptible to right-wing populism, I would claim now here, and Hitler would agree. So he did not think it was bad that these people were a bit drunk, or maybe even very drunk, because if you're drunk you also get aggressive against others.

  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

  The claim that T. rex had primate-level intelligence does not survive the simplest check: its brain is a fraction of a chimpanzee's and it weighed seven tons.

  Their words

  But I'm being obviously overly facetious, but if ultimately part of your scaling is how big is the animal versus how big is its brain, that's most of a T-Rex brain. It's a fraction of the size of a chimp brain, and chimps don't weigh seven tons.

  youtube.com

Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.

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  Contemporary consumer products no longer claim purity or naturalness; they present themselves openly as artificial mixtures.

  Their words

  Any pretense of the pure or organic is undercut by a kind of willful alchemy; everything is an admixture.

  Labubus and the brainrot aesthetickylechayka.substack.com

Philosopher at Oxford; co-founded effective altruism and 80,000 Hours, wrote Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future, and now works on what a good future would actually contain.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Working on how good the long-run future is does not require accepting consequentialism or believing that you should always maximise the good.

  Their words

  But I don’t claim you should always maximize the good, no matter the self-sacrifice, and no matter what means are involved.

  Introducing Better Futuresforethought.org

Guardian columnist and environmental campaigner; wrote Feral and Regenesis, and argues for rewilding and against the food system as it is.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The claim that grazing cattle and sheep are good for the climate is the most effective form of climate denial now in circulation.

  Their words

  This story, wrapped in romantic cottagecore, is now the most active and seductive frontier of climate-science denial.

  Pasturisedmonbiot.com

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  OpenAI's claim that DeepSeek trained on its outputs is narrative management: other startups bootstrapped exactly that way and were never banned for it.

  OpenAIstartups

  Their words

  I think that they're trying to shift the narrative. They're trying to protect themselves. We saw this years ago when ByteDance was actually banned from some OpenAI APIs for training on outputs. There's other AI startups that most people, if you're in the AI culture, were like they just told us they trained on OpenAI outputs and they never got banned.

  youtube.com

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

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Born Standing Up

  Their words

  It's a nice, short, and moving memoir by the comedian and actor Steve Martin. The book details his early working days at shops and clubs, his relationships, and eventually his rise to fame. He shared his struggles, his failures, long hours of practice, his reflections to refine his craft, and his efforts to find his own unique voice as a comedian. Any memoir that only talks about successes and never discusses struggles, rejections, or weaknesses is suspect. This one is not. What I like about his writing is that it feels candid and, at times, funny.

  thoughts.wyounas.com

Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; works on the search for life elsewhere and wrote The Little Book of Aliens and Light of the Stars.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  No UFO or UAP data comes anywhere near the standard of evidence required to claim non-human technology.

  Their words

  I am all in favor of an open, agnostic, transparent, scientific investigation of UFOs and UAPs. But the idea that there's any data that we have that links UFOs and UAPs to non-human technology, I just think the standards, none of what is claimed to be the data lives up to the standards of evidence.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic; blogs at ma.tt.

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  Corporations dishonestly claiming the open source label for marketing is evidence that open source has won.

  open source

  Their words

  When corporations disingenuously claim to be “open source” for marketing purposes, it’s a clear sign that Open Source is winning.

  WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinkingma.tt

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.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  All About Eve

  Their words

  Excellent character-study/drama about the price of fame, the sincerest forms of flattery, and a little meta-fictionally, the psychology of the theatre and Broadway being usurped by Hollywood

  gwern.net

Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nobody has driven enough miles to show that robotaxis save lives, so the claim that they already do is not supported by the data.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  But their latest study is for only 7.1 million miles. They need something like 40 times more data prove they are actually saving lives with statistical confidence (likely even more).

  Waymo's Misleading Claim of Saving Livessafeautonomy.blogspot.com

Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Assuming you are a typical observer in the universe is not humility but a hilariously presumptuous claim that typical observers are like you.

  Their words

  But then you draw some conclusions from this, and what you end up realizing is you’ve been hilariously presumptuous because by saying, “I’m a typical observer in the universe,” you’re saying, “Typical observers in the universe are like me,” and that is completely unjustified by anything.

  youtube.com

Environmental researcher; writes on land use, agriculture and whether decoupling human welfare from nature is possible.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The claim that higher yields backfire and end up increasing farmland is much weaker than the literature assumes.

  Their words

  In sum, land sparing is common at the local level and the norm at the global scale, in contrast to recent appeals to Jevons' paradox.

  Raising Agricultural Yields Spares Landthebreakthrough.org

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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  Repeated vague platitudes without follow-up specifics signal weak first-principles thinking.

  Their words

  If they don't follow this up with a more specific, precise or nuanced claim, they may not be a strong first-principles thinker.

  How I build and run behavioral interviewsbenkuhn.net

Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A carmaker's claim to be the safest is mostly an artefact of comparing a new car against a fleet average twelve years old.

  Their words

  Any true safety improvement for Tesla is good to have, but is much more likely due to comparison against an "average" vehicle (12 years old in the US) which is much less safe than any recent high-end vehicle regardless of manufacturer, and probably not driven on roads as safe on average as where Teslas are more popular.

  safeautonomy.blogspot.com

First Amendment lawyer and former federal prosecutor; writes The Popehat Report and explains what the law actually says when people shout about free speech.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Refusing to advertise on a platform is protected expression, not an attack on the platform owner's free speech.

  Their words

  Elon Musk’s sullen yawp amounts to a claim that he has a right for companies to sponsor his speech, no matter what he says. That’s nonsense, both legally and philosophically.

  My Free Speech Means You Have To Shut Uppopehat.substack.com

Statistician at Columbia; writes Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and wrote Bayesian Data Analysis.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Samuelson's random-walk analogy for stock prices was mathematical showing-off dressed up as a claim about the real world.

  Their words, before

  Samuelson was the one claiming realism.

  Their words now

  I no longer think the main substance of my earlier post was correct.

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

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  The three-year bet about whether AI image models could handle compositionality was won in three months.

  Their words, before

  In fact, not only did they reach this level in three months, but probably they were at this level before the bet was even made

  Their words now

  I retract my claim to have won and will continue to see how AI progress advances over the next three years.

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.

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  Great work is usually done far younger than its fame suggests: people were grey-haired when they became famous, not when they did the work.

  Their words

  People who did great things often did so at very surprisingly young ages. (They were grayhaired when they became famous... not when they did the work.)

  Advicepatrickcollison.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  History teaches complexity rather than prediction: it can explain the mechanisms of change without licensing any claim about what comes next.

  Their words

  history is a lesson in complexity not predictability

  On Progress and Historical Changeexurbe.com