Related posts

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Gray hair is at least partly due to oxidative stress from diets mostly of processed food, lack of heavy exercise, and obesity.

  Their words

  I'm increasingly convinced gray hair is at least partly due to oxidative stress from the average diet now that's mostly processed food, as well as lack of heavy exercise and obesity

  @levelsio on Xx.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Playing video games is great for cognitive development, reflex training, and strategic thinking.

  Their words

  Of course playing video games are great for cognitive development, reflex training, and strategic thinking.

  @dhh on Xx.com

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  English people are becoming smarter due to the cognitive demands of navigating Heathrow Airport.

  Their words

  English people are becoming smarter because of the cognitive workouts they're forced to complete by navigating Heathrow Airport

  @Noahpinion on Xx.com

Co-founder of Ximian and Xamarin; CEO of GitHub from 2018 to 2021; now an independent investor and funder of open technical projects, including the Vesuvius Challenge to read the Herculaneum Papyri.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful

  Their words

  The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful Great individuals should be fully empowered to exercise their judgment

  Nat Friedmannat.org

Neurologist at Oxford; studies apathy, motivation and attention after brain injury, and edits the journal Brain.

From one piece How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Personality is not fixed: the self is the product of a society of cognitive modules, and take one module away and the self changes.

  Their words

  So, I think the key point here is the self is not immutable. It's something that can change. People might think my personality is this way. It can never change. Well, your personality is the product of your society of mind.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Keeping a social network, staying curious and having a sense of purpose protect against dementia about as much as blood pressure and exercise do.

  Their words

  Those include that having that sense of purpose, making sure that you have a network of people, that you're socially connected as your age, and also remaining curious, open to new ideas. Those factors turn out to be almost as important as some of the physical things we do.

  youtube.com

Engineering leader on Google Chrome; writes about web performance and, lately, about working with AI coding tools.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Heavy AI use erodes understanding first and judgement second: cognitive debt turns into cognitive surrender, where the model's answer simply becomes your answer.

  Their words

  the first is cognitive debt. So the more that you use AI, it's it's sort of the erosion of your ability to have good memory and have good understanding of the problems that you're working on. And the natural follow-up to that is cognitive surrender, which is where you, you know, you blindly give in to whatever the AI says as your answer.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Awe is a uniquely human emotion, resting on the metacognitive ability to detach conscious experience from the here and now.

  Their words

  I think it's a uniquely at least as we have it it's uniquely human emotion and it's based on a broad sort of metacognitive ability we have which is to detach our conscious experience from the here and now and do like mental time travel.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Social competence has to run automatically, because doing it deliberately imposes a cognitive load that becomes an impediment in itself.

  Their words

  you need to somehow internalize it and it has to be relatively effortless and automatic. It has to become automatic at some level and then you can move through life fairly smoothly in a socially very complex way.

  youtube.com

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

• Readrcmnd.app

  You Are Not So Smart

  Their words

  More like a series of blog posts than a cohesive narration, but still a fantastic book about most common cognitive gotchas.

  rakhim.org

Chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety and AI control.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is essentially no cognitive task humans do where AI improvement is failing to transfer at all.

  Their words

  it's really hard for me to think of examples of cognitive tasks humans do where we're not seeing some transfer from AI improving.

  youtube.com

Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Nature of Code

  Their words

  This book is a beautiful introduction to simulations of natural systems. We get concise prose, clear illustrations, and carefully chosen systems with a guided tour through the math. All done in the Processing language, which is fun and easy to pick up. The reason I like this book so much is probably due to timing. In 2013, I was on the verge of abandoning software development. I was fed up. (That's a story for another time.) Instead, I planned to go into cognitive psychology full-time as a researcher. This book brought back the joy in programming for me. Sometimes, a good book is the book that motivated you.

  adamtornhill.substack.com

Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Approving purchases one at a time is the wrong place to control burn; spending review belongs earlier, in a budget people can make their own trade-offs inside.

  Their words

  And so what you realize is not only is this very hard to keep burn under control, but also it's just this is the inappropriate place to exercise spending review. Spending review has to come earlier. You have to have some concept of budgeting.

  Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.com

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.

From one piece Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Renouncing your own cognitive ability because the models are good is premature, because companies still pay an enormous premium for it.

  Their words

  there still seems to be an enormous premium on cognitive ability. And so, I wouldn't I I I I think, um, renouncing that before there's evidence that we've saturated, uh, those benefits would be premature.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Knowing something yourself will stay faster than asking a model for it, because a lookup in your own head beats a round trip to an agent.

  Their words

  That's a hell of a lot slower than knowing it in cognitive L1 cache. And you can have way more round trips in your brain than you can, you know, muttering through, you know, super whisper or typing it out or whatever.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A reader's own mental image of a character is as valid as the author's depiction of them.

  Their words

  Some readers like this, others don't, and if the Samantha in your head looks nothing like the one on the page, yours is the correct one.

  Zero Knowledge: Twenty Chapters Infeld.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.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Struggling with a hard problem before being shown the answer is not always the best way to learn; a hint or a worked example can beat floundering.

  On changing their mind

  If you had asked me this question in the lead up to my 2019 book, Ultralearning, I would have said no. I was a strong advocate for doing hard problem solving and the associated mental effort it requires as a way to learn difficult skills.

Physician and neuroscientist at the University of Washington; researches brain health, metabolism and athletic performance.

From one piece Accelerate Learning & Increase Cognitive Capacity | Dr. Tommy Wood 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Cardio and weights build different brains: aerobic exercise benefits the gray matter and the hippocampus, resistance training the white matter.

  Their words

  Whereas aerobic exercise on that kind of intensity spectrum we just talked about seems to particularly benefit the gray matter which includes the hippocampus. Resistance training seems to particularly benefit the white matter.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We lose cognitive function with age largely because adults refuse to be bad at things, and so stop giving the brain the novel input that maintains it.

  Their words

  potentially one of the reasons why we lose lose cognitive function as we get older is because we stop giving our brain novel inputs or complex inputs that help maintain function, drive neuroplasticity. And I think one of the reasons that that happens is because adults hate being bad at things, right?

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  High-intensity exercise improves hippocampal structure and function precisely because it releases a lot of cortisol, which is the opposite of the case made against hard training.

  Their words

  This study directly shows that working really hard, releasing a lot of cortisol in high-intensity interval training actually improves hippocample structure and function um over over time.

  youtube.com

+ 2 more

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Cognitive decline is a staircase rather than a slope: the big drops happen after episodes of serious illness.

  Their words

  cognitive function doesn't just decline sort of linearly or steadily with age. It goes down, you know, a little bit on average, but the biggest decreases sort of happen stepwise after periods of significant illness.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nobody can do genuinely hard cognitive work for eight hours a day; the sustainable unit is one or two sessions of sixty to ninety minutes.

  Their words

  We kind of expect that we can go to work and we can work really hard for eight hours straight during the day, but like the brain doesn't really work like that.

  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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The external tools people use to reason, remember and calculate — including chatting with an LLM — are genuine extensions of the human mind, not just aids to it.

  LLMs

  Their words

  the external tools that we use to help us reason, remember, associate, calculate-from counting on our fingers to chatting with an advanced LLM-should be properly understood as extensions of our own cognitive process.

  Notebooks And The Extended Mindadjacentpossible.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Reading should be treated as cognitive fitness: scheduled daily, with distracting digital media avoided the way we avoid junk food.

  Their words

  We should treat highly distracting digital garbage like junk food – something we largely avoid – and purposefully schedule a non-trivial amount of time each day to read, write, and self-reflect, just as we now dedicate time to walking, jogging, and weight lifting.

  Why Reading Matterscalnewport.com

Professor of psychology at UCLA, where he studies human memory, attention and cognitive ageing, and author of Better with Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging.

From one piece How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Walking three or four times a week grew older adults' hippocampus by one percent and left their memory better a year later, which no pill has managed.

  Their words

  But in the walking group the group that was randomly assigned to walk three four times a week for 40 minutes compared to a stretching group who's still engaging in exercise but not cardiovascular exercise. The walking group their you know hippocamp is actually increased in volume by 1%. So you're changing the the brain, but you're also changing the behavior. Their memory was much better a year later.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Alzheimer's pathology in the brain does not settle whether a person has dementia: the nuns' brains were full of plaques and tangles while they went on functioning normally.

  Their words

  and you found that these nuns, how they aged, some of them certainly when they passed away, their brains had these kind of hallmark signs of dementia, plaques and tangles, but behaviorally they were still high functioning. So, it's really interesting that the hardware shows what we see as dementia and specifically Alzheimer's disease, but their behavior uh was that of a fairly healthy cognitive person.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Exercise is the most powerful broad-based longevity intervention available today, and a drug that blunts its adaptations is not worth taking for longevity.

  Their words

  we now have multiple trials confirming that metformin interferes with your ability to reap the adaptive benefits of exercise, which is the most powerful broad-based longevity intervention available to us today

  Metformin and cancer: active surveillance neededpeterattiamd.com

Writer on happiness, habits and human nature. Author of The Happiness Project, Better Than Before and The Four Tendencies, and host of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Adults, like children, focus and learn better when they get regular breaks for exercise, sunlight, and unstructured play.

  Their words

  Research shows that children are far better able to sit still, focus, and learn when they've had the exercise, sunlight, freedom, and fun of recess. The same is true for adults.

  gretchenrubin.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Smartphones and social media amplify the youth mental health crisis but are not its root cause.

  Their words

  Modern technology may be an amplifier, but it isn't the root cause.

  adamgrant.substack.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Current fears about AI causing harmful cognitive offloading are largely based on outdated impressions of early chatbots rather than today's AI tools.

  Their words

  To a certain extent, the concerns about cognitive offloading are an example of technological lag, where the mainstream discussion of AI and its impact is still framed in terms of the first-generation chatbots.

  Cognitive Uploadingadjacentpossible.substack.com

Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.

From one piece David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farming 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There was no genetic switch for behavioural modernity: no selective sweep is shared by everyone alive today in the period the cognitive revolution supposedly happened.

  Their words

  This is like a crazy result because uh it looks like there's no key selective sweeps that have occurred in this period that is ancestral to everyone living today.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Selection on the genetic predictors of cognitive performance peaked in the Bronze Age and has left no trace at all in the last 2,000 years.

  Their words

  And what you see when you look at intelligence is you see that this maxes out in the Bronze Age between 5,000, 4,000, 3,000, 2,000 years ago. And the impact in the last 2,000 years is almost nothing. There's no evidence of natural selection at all.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every cognitive ingredient for farming and for states was already in place tens of thousands of years before either appeared, so what humanity was waiting on was not biology.

  Their words

  So, the cognitive resources for doing this must have all been in place, but it's a very long fuse.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nvidia's business is the transformation of electrons into tokens, and its job is to do as much as necessary and as little as possible in between.

  Their words

  my mental model of our company the input is electron the output is tokens that is in the middle Nvidia and our job is to to do as much as necessary as little as possible to enable that transformation to be done at incredible capabilities

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

Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Directing a swarm of coding agents is a different, multi-threaded way of thinking that costs more cognitive load, and the engineers who make the switch have doubled their output.

  coding agents

  Their words

  it required a different way of thinking and the cognitive load might be a little higher but the output is dramatic and we have seen our best engineer double their output.

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The online ecosystem has become so degraded that it has impaired people's ability to exercise taste.

  Their words

  Another conclusion might be that the online ecosystem has become so polluted-so fragmented, deceptive, overstimulating, ersatz-that it has warped our ability to exercise taste at all.

  Why tech bros are obsessed with "taste"kylechayka.substack.com

Researcher on developer productivity; co-wrote Accelerate and the DORA research, and created the SPACE framework.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Fast feedback is no longer straightforwardly good: agent-speed loops make you rebuild your mental model dozens of times in half an hour.

  Their words

  Well, now I'm getting feedback so quickly that I'm having to sometimes rebuild my mental model dozens of times in like a 30-minute period.

  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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We are living through a cognitive Copernican revolution: human intelligence is not the centre, and which tasks we count as requiring intelligence has to be re-evaluated.

  Their words

  you know, right now we're going through uh an in um an cognitive version of the Copernican revolution where we used to think that human intelligence is the center of the universe. And now we're actually seeing that there's there's very different types of intelligence um that that that are out there uh with very different strengths and weaknesses.

  youtube.com

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A passing test suite is not evidence that the software works, so an agent must also be made to start the thing and exercise it the way a person would.

  Their words

  just cuz the test suite passes doesn't mean that the web server will boot. You know, there's there's always a chance that when you actually try in the real world, something's not going to work.

  youtube.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Solving a problem yourself, without searching or prompting, is a form of exercise -- the help makes you weaker.

  Their words

  My brain feels stronger because I work through the problem instead of prompting it away.

  Offline 23 hours a daysive.rs

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Regulation must precede reflection: cognitive insight fails while a nervous system is in defensive dominance.

  Polyvagal theory

  Their words

  Polyvagal theory provided me with a coherent framework for understanding why cognitive insight alone often fails when a nervous system is in defensive dominance. In such states, higher-order cortical processes are functionally constrained.

  drarielleschwartz.com

From one piece Bryan's Protocol 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Sleep is the highest-return health behaviour there is, and everything else — exercise, diet, self-control — rests on it.

  Their words

  Sleep – high quality sleep is the world’s #1 longevity drug.

  Bryan's Protocolprotocol.bryanjohnson.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Six hours of exercise a week, split between strength, cardio, flexibility and balance, is the right dose for a healthy adult.

  Their words

  Exercise – 6 hours a week is ideal.

  Bryan's Protocolprotocol.bryanjohnson.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Other Side of Change

  Their words

  The Other Side of Change by cognitive scientist Maya Shankar (January)

  adamgrant.substack.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It

  Their words

  can lead to imposter phenomenon. In this book, a leading psychologist looks at the science behind our inner voice and new research into how to harness it and improve your physical and mental health.

  bringthedonuts.com

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Because AI matches the general cognitive profile of humans, it will also be good at the new jobs that would ordinarily replace the ones it automates.

  Their words

  By contrast, AI is increasingly matching the general cognitive profile of humans, which means it will also be good at the new jobs that would ordinarily be created in response to the old ones being automated.

  The Adolescence of Technology (January 2026)darioamodei.com

Vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group, the advertising agency; author of Alchemy (2019) and the Wiki Man columnist at The Spectator.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Reason is only one of several evolved mental faculties, and treating it as the gold standard misdescribes how people decide.

  Their words

  We have a whole variety of different mental mechanisms at our disposal gifted to us by, you know, a few million years of evolution as a social species. And yet we've made rationality the gold standard.

  youtube.com

From one piece Will AI Make Us Stupid? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Solving a problem yourself, without searching or prompting, is a form of exercise -- the help makes you weaker.

  Their words

  Learning requires an investment of effort, and AI will make us stupider if that effort is avoided.

  Will AI Make Us Stupid?scotthyoung.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You cannot learn to code by having a model write it: the mental models only come from writing programs by hand.

  Their words

  The answer, I believe, is not too different from before: if you want to learn to code, you need to start by creating programs by hand.

  Will AI Make Us Stupid?scotthyoung.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Models are enormous only because the internet is bad: most of that capacity does memory work, and a better dataset would need far less of it.

  Their words

  Um so I almost feel like because the internet is so terrible, we actually have to sort of like build really big models to compress all that. Uh most of that compression is memory work instead of like cognitive work. But what we really want is the cognitive part actually delete the memory

  youtube.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Figma, the collaborative design platform he started in 2012 and took public in 2025.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A company can treat AI as a way to grow and do more or as a cost-cutting exercise, and the growth reading is the better one.

  Their words

  you can either see AI as an opportunity for your company to grow and do more or you can look at it as like cost cutting efficiency but I think the growth part is way more exciting.

  youtube.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The one muscle worth training is self-discipline; once that is trained, everything else follows by itself.

  Their words

  I think the main muscle you can exercise is this muscle, the muscle of self-discipline. Not your biceps or your pecs or anything else. Because if you get to train that one, everything else just comes by itself.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  In the best working relationships the manager is a guide, not a judge deciding whether you deserve a promotion or a firing.

  Their words

  we often also have this mental model of like oh our managers are a judge and they're going to judge me on whether or not I got it I did well I should get a promotion I should be fired so there's this sometimes fear that people have but I think in the very best relationships the manager is like a guide

  youtube.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

Development economist; writes Global Developments, on growth, history and the numbers behind them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Who gains from a poor country’s growth is a question of political economy and geopolitics, never a purely technical one.

  Their words

  Poverty reduction is never a purely technocratic exercise, and questions about industrial policy can never be entirely divorced from those of political economy—including those of global geopolitics.

  Indonesia Climbs the Chainglobal-developments.org

Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI agents can now do real cognitive work, and writing software is permanently changed as a result.

  Their words

  2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same.

  The Gentle Singularityblog.samaltman.com

Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Learning to touch-type and to know your editor without thinking is worth it, because every glance at the keyboard spends attention the problem needs.

  Their words

  It's the same reason why I recommend learning how to type and learning your editor so well you don't even have to think about the action because the people that have to... Even if you just look down, that's still mental processing power you have to spend looking at a keyboard in which you already know where the key is.

  youtube.com

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.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

  Their words

  (publication date March 18, 2025, Viking) by Laura Delano is a compelling and troubling memoir of psychiatric patienthood, iatrogenic harm, and finding a meaningful and flourishing life outside of the mental healthcare system.

  psychiatrymargins.com

Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI that exceeds human performance in nearly every cognitive domain is almost certain to be built within the next few years.

  Their words

  AI that exceeds human performance in nearly every cognitive domain is almost certain to be built and deployed in the next few years.

  Time's Up for AI Policymilesbrundage.substack.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The West has not yet internalised that China is a source of genuinely new drugs, not just a maker of ingredients and copies.

  China

  Their words

  I don’t think many in the West have yet fully internalized a mental model of China as a source of genuine innovation.

  Will all our drugs come from China?atelfo.github.io

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is no such thing as the best people; you are trying to hire the right people for this team at this stage.

  Their words

  Here’s one small mental hack that makes a world of difference: remember that you are trying to hire the right people to join your team/org/company. Not the “best” people. The right people.

  “Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmakingcharity.wtf

Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Design of Everyday Things

  Their words

  Design as cognitive science.

  worrydream.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Trust between colleagues comes from shared mental models built through mutual investment.

  Their words

  Trust comes from common knowledge of shared mental models, and that takes investment from both sides to build.

  Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quicklybenkuhn.net

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

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Cognitive Behavior Therapy

  Their words

  I recently reviewed Beck's book, which is written as a practical guide for therapists implementing CBT.

  scotthyoung.com

• Likedrcmnd.app

  How We Reason

  Their words

  I had read Johnson-Laird's original work, Mental Models, last year. It was nice to see an in-depth follow-up on how the theory has developed in the subsequent two decades.

  scotthyoung.com

Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.

• Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality

  Their words

  That is what cognitive philosopher Andy Clark explores in The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality

  themarginalian.org

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Obviousness comes from conforming to people's existing mental models: do not reinvent a common UI pattern unless the new one is at least twice as good.

  Their words

  Obviousness comes from conforming to people’s existing mental models. Don’t waste time reinventing common UI patterns or paradigms unless they are at least 2x better, or you have some critical brand reason to do so.

  lg.substack.com

Physician and author on addiction, stress and childhood development. Wrote In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and The Myth of Normal, and developed the Compassionate Inquiry approach taught to therapists.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Heal Squad

  Their words

  I spoke with @mariamenounos about the link between emotions and illness, and the importance of focusing on mental health, on her Heal Squad podcast. To listen to the full episode, please follow: https://t.co/XPIKAvi8tH

  x.com

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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Bias in Mental Testing

  Their words

  One of the classics in the field, Jensen sets out to explain almost everything, it seems, in psychometrics

  gwern.net

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Trust Exercise

  Their words

  But what really makes it brilliant is a kind of meta-fictional twist that happens in the middle of the book

  adjacentpossible.substack.com

Writer on time, productivity and limitation; wrote Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, and the newsletter The Imperfectionist.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The only thing a productivity system can do for you is help you choose slightly better what to do right now.

  Their words

  In the end, the only point of any personal productivity system, goal-setting technique or "life planning" exercise is to help you make a slightly better decision about what to do, right now

  List one task, do it, cross it outoliverburkeman.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nobody can consistently do more than about three or four hours a day of work that demands serious mental focus.

  Their words

  you almost certainly can't consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day

  oliverburkeman.com

American author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked. Writes essays and book reviews at markmanson.net.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Thinking, Fast and Slow

  Their words

  Still the definitive book on cognitive biases and behavioral economics.

  markmanson.net

Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  The Thank You Economy

  Their words

  Is there a financially justifiable reason to send a customer an exorbitant gift like a football jersey? Gary makes a very compelling case for such a move and others like it. It's a great exercise in thinking about unconventional marketing opportunities.

  jasonevanish.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The cognitive costs of air pollution are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasised -- most EPA materials do not mention them at all.

  Their words

  Air pollution is a very big deal. Its adverse effects on numerous health outcomes and general mortality are widely documented. However, our understanding of its cognitive costs is more recent and those costs are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasized. For example, cognitive effects are not mentioned in most EPA materials.

  Pollutionpatrickcollison.com

Journalist and author of Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Writes the newsletter Culture Study, which runs a recurring links-and-recommendations issue.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Zero Odor

  Their words

  The Detergent That Actually Makes Your Exercise Clothes Not Reek And Trust Me I’ve Tried A Lot: Zero Odor

  annehelen.substack.com

Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Each programming language embodies a distinct mental model for thinking about computation and writing programs.

  Their words

  Each language contains a different mental model, a different perspective for thinking about computation and how to write programs.

  thorstenball.com

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  Compassionate Inquiry Online Training

  Their words

  Compassionate Inquiry is an in depth teaching and distillation of the approach I have developed to working with human beings beset by personal issues, health problems that need gently guided exploration, mental health challenges, addictions, relationship difficulties and, above all, an unhealthy relationship to their own selves.

  drgabormate.com

Game developer and moral philosopher; made QWOP, GIRP and Getting Over It, and teaches at the NYU Game Center.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Making a chess variant, a dice variant and a Pong variant is a worthwhile exercise for any game designer.

  Their words

  It's been my view for a while that it's a worthwhile exercise for any game designer to make a chess variant, a dice variant and a Pong variant.

  FLOPfoddy.net

Philosopher and historian of existential risk; wrote Human Extinction, and coined "TESCREAL" with Timnit Gebru for the cluster of ideologies they argue underpins the AI industry.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Never project human mental properties onto an artificial intelligence; the difference between the two architectures is the reason to worry, not a reason not to.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  One of the most commonly emphasized points in the AI safety literature is that one must never anthropomorphize AI—that is, don’t project human mental properties onto artificially intelligent systems.

  thebulletin.org

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

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  How to Exercise Primally

  Their words

  And I love these two articles from Mark Sisson, a former triathlete and marathon runner: How to Exercise Primally The 10 Rules of Successful Exercise

  lynalden.com

Mathemusician and video maker known for the Doodling in Math Class series; directed the eleVR virtual reality research group at the Communications Design Group.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  MouseRug

  Their words

  My mousepad is a MouseRug. It is essential to my mental health that my mouse live on this tiny Persian rug with fringe and everything.

  usesthis.com

Game designer; wrote A Theory of Fun for Game Design and worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An interface should give the user a useful mental model even if it is false, while a game should give the player an accurate model of its own machinery.

  Their words

  Where UX tries to provide a likely false but useful mental model of the interior workings to the user, game design tries to guide the player towards a fairly accurate mental model.

  Game design vs UX designraphkoster.com

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  The illusion of mental health

  Their words

  The illusion of mental health [pdf] Scientific evidence that we do not know our hearts and minds and must look past the surface—a classic in the field

  jonathanshedler.com

Computer scientist and professor; author of The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. and of a long-running blog on programming languages, research and academia.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Marcy Recumbent Mag Cycle

  Their words

  I can't afford time off work to exercise, so I attached a Table Mate II couch desk to a Marcy Recumbent Mag Cycle, and moved it next to the desk in my home office. Honestly, I'm more productive on the bike than off.

  usesthis.com