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Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.

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  America's wealthy business-owning gentry class owes much of its fortune to deliberate tax-policy choices rather than pure market outcomes.

  America

  Their words

  The American gentry's fortunes, in other words, are in substantial part, a policy artifact.

  America’s Gentry Élite: TUESDAY TRENDS & TURMOILbraddelong.substack.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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  Even well-informed AI insiders frequently develop something like "AI psychosis" from engaging with these ideas.

  Their words

  Though be very, very careful when speaking with others, whether it be the less informed public or the more informed insiders who often come down with AI psychosis.

  Anthropomorphizing AI?marginalrevolution.com

Music critic and historian; author of The History of Jazz and Music: A Subversive History. Writes the newsletter The Honest Broker on music and culture.

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  Within living memory leisure was a media-free zone in which nobody expected your day off to earn money for anyone else.

  Their words

  As recently as a hundred years ago, leisure time existed in a media-free zone. Nobody expected you to make money for wealthy elites on your day off.

  How Our Leisure Time Got Monetizedhonest-broker.com

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

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  ADHD is a real condition and over-diagnosed at the same time; the two claims are not incompatible, because the line marking normality is a judgement call.

  Their words

  But I also think that this is not mutually incompatible with the view that there's also overdiagnosis. And I think we need very careful ways of making diagnosis because the conventional way is you take a history from a person about what the problem is.

  youtube.com

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

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  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

  Their words

  It’s one of those things that make perfect sense once you think about it. Great book, very important premise and a short and concise explanation. Can’t recommend enough.

  rakhim.org

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

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  The pace at which dangerous AI capabilities spread is set by the least cautious developer, not the most careful one.

  Their words

  The capability diffusion is determined by the lowest common denominator.

  interconnects.ai

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

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  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

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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  AI learns from patterns, so where the patterns are scarce, as in liver surgery, a human working with the machine beats the machine working alone.

  Their words

  So this speaks of a very important fact that um AI learns from patterns. When the patterns are not abundant, then we have to be careful. We have to know how to use AI or how not to use AI.

  youtube.com

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

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  AI companies' pattern of NDAs, big promises, and pushing environmental costs onto poorer communities resembles dark-money capture of local politics more than a runaway-AI threat.

  Their words

  Rather, the way that AI companies engage with communities-forcing NDAs, dangling billion-dollar promises, pushing environmental externalities far away from AI's wealthy user base-resembles a classic story about dark money in politics.

  🌻 no data centers in my backyardjasmi.news

Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025, Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads the company’s superintelligence lab.

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  Frontier models must be cheap enough for anyone to use, because a world in which they are rationed to the wealthiest developers is the wrong world.

  Their words

  we don't believe in a world where these models are so expensive that, you know, they get rationed only for the most wealthy of developers and and companies.

  youtube.com

Investing columnist for The Wall Street Journal and editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor.

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  The Psychology of Money

  Their words

  Housel, the author of The Psychology of Money, a book I wish I'd written, has written another book I wish I'd written.

  jasonzweig.com

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  The Art of Spending Money

  Their words

  Housel, the author of The Psychology of Money, a book I wish I'd written, has written another book I wish I'd written.

  jasonzweig.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.

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  Letting a coding agent live-edit the production server works fine in practice.

  Anthropic

  Their words

  But now with Claude Code on my VPS in the last year, it just live edits on my production server, which sounds like it should go wrong but it just doesn't, it's very careful and only twice in 12 months messed up which meant my site didn't load for 10 seconds which is OK

  levels.io

Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.

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  European countries are wealthy enough to afford widespread air conditioning, comparable to Japan.

  Europe

  Their words

  Europe is not actually poor. Japan is about as wealthy as Europe, and almost all Japanese homes are air-conditioned. Europeans could afford to air-condition their homes (and their hospitals!) just like the Japanese do.

  Europe Needs Air Conditioningjoshbarro.com

Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.

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  A person cannot expect to find lasting balance between conflicting parts of their psychology.

  Their words

  There's no reason to believe that you will find persistent balance between these conflicting elements of your psychology.

  Without hope of resolutionsashachapin.substack.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

Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.

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  Raise the number all you like, but never raise the lifestyle with it — you can make a lot of money and still be broke.

  Their words

  But the thing I was careful not to do was to change the lifestyle because I I watched people around me change the lifestyle so you can make a lot of money and still be broke.

  youtube.com

Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.

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  Most contemporary restaurants are over-optimized, investor-backed, and homogenized by branding rather than genuine culinary vision.

  Their words

  The average restaurant in NYC is, at this point, stupidly optimized, backed by wealthy investors, coated in impeccable branding.

  Utopia is a particular restaurant in Brooklynsashachapin.substack.com

Software engineer who writes about low-level and systems programming at nullprogram.com; author of the Elfeed feed reader, the Endlessh SSH tarpit and Enchive.

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  AI will make hand-written code a luxury only the wealthy can afford to produce.

  Their words

  AI makes programming so cheap that only the rich will write code by hand.

  nullprogram.com

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

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  Because an LLM can argue almost any direction competently, the right way to use one for forming an opinion is to make it argue every side.

  LLMs

  Their words

  The LLMs may elicit an opinion when asked but are extremely competent in arguing almost any direction. This is actually super useful as a tool for forming your own opinions, just make sure to ask different directions and be careful with the sycophancy.

  @karpathy on Xx.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.

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  AI will revolutionise mathematics by giving it an experimental side: large-scale data on which methods work, rather than the careful solving of individual problems.

  Their words

  So, I think AI-type tools we really will will actually revolutionize the ex- the experimental side of math where where um you don't care so much about uh individual problems and and the process of solving them, but you you want to gather just large-scale data about about what things work, what things don't.

  youtube.com

Machine learning engineer and independent AI consultant. He writes about LLM evaluation, tooling and applied ML at hamel.dev, and previously worked on machine learning at GitHub.

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  Careful step-by-step thinking is a property of the developer, not something a tool or framework can enforce

  Their words

  Notebooks don't force you to write clean code. AI tools don't force you to think carefully. Discipline comes from the developer, not the environment.

  Why I Stopped Using nbdevhamel.dev

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.

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  Thinking, Fast and Slow

  Their words

  When does our animal brain make decisions for us before our more analytical brain has a chance to think through the consequences? From Nobel laureate Kahneman, this is one of the most important psychology books ever written.

  bringthedonuts.com

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

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  The Wide Wide Sea

  Their words

  The causes and meaning of those events have been debated ever since, and Sides delivers a careful, sympathetic and engaging account of the entirety of Cook's final expedition.

  andrewbatson.com

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

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  An objective meant to serve people should be defined with psychology included, because changing the psychology is often cheaper than changing the technology.

  Their words

  do not define an objective which is designed to serve human beings without considering psychological factors because you might be able to solve your problem very very cheaply and efficiently by changing the psychology not by changing the technology

  youtube.com

Medieval historian at the LSE; writes Going Medieval and The Middle Ages: A Graphic History, and spends a lot of it correcting what people think the period was like.

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  We picture the past as populated entirely by the wealthy, because the wealthy are whose documents and buildings happened to survive.

  Their words

  Because of how source survival works, or indeed, how architectural survival works, we are often encouraged to think of the past as a place populated entirely by the wealthy elite.

  On contrarian historygoing-medieval.com

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

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  Industrial policy that grows a poor country’s economy does not automatically reduce its poverty.

  Their words

  But, peering past the hype around Morowali reminds us that we should be careful before assuming that industrial policy must be pro-poor.

  Indonesia Climbs the Chainglobal-developments.org

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

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  Oresteia

  Their words

  His thoughts on human psychology and the way he crafted his stories are why I liked this book. I have to admit, there is a lot in it that I need to absorb. I'll surely be re-reading this one sometime soon. It's one of those books that one ought to read multiple times in life because I'm certain that every time we read it, it will offer something new.

  thoughts.wyounas.com

Writes The Convivial Society, on technology and the moral life — what our tools do to attention, memory and how we treat each other.

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  Delegating care, skill, relationship, moral judgement or responsibility to a machine is different in kind from delegating a task.

  Their words

  We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world

  Life Cannot Be Delegatedtheconvivialsociety.substack.com

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators. Writes for The New Yorker.

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  Supercommunicators

  Their words

  A simple and tested method for communicating and connecting with anyone, Supercommunicators is an exploration of the psychology and neuroscience of communication — and how to use those skills at work, home and in life.

  charlesduhigg.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.

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  Expecting technology to keep accelerating is a bias of our particular moment; for most of human history the tools did not change at all.

  Their words

  So, we could be fooled into thinking like, "Oh, technology's going to go on forever, we're always going to find new advances." As opposed to sometimes things just flatten out for a long time. So, you have to be careful about that bias that we have living in this time of great acceleration.

  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.

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  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

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  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

Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.

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  Debanking became a public issue because it happened to well-connected wealthy people, who are not the typical victims.

  Their words

  We’re hearing about debanking because it sometimes affects socially established wealthy entrepreneurs and their companies.

  Debanking (and Debunking?)bitsaboutmoney.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.

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  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 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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  The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience

  Their words

  This is a great book for anyone interested in learning about neuroscience—and I’d recommend it as well for many of my more neuro-crazed psychology professor colleagues.

  smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

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.

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  Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions

  Their words

  Cultural psychology, studying emotions through the lens of culture. Your emotions are created by your culture. You should not be too sure that you share the emotional experiences of individuals from other cultures. Culture and emotion make each other up. Great insights!

  sive.rs

Machine-learning researcher; has written the Lil'Log survey posts on how a model technique works since 2017, and worked at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly leading its safety systems team.

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  High-quality data collection depends more on careful human execution than on machine learning techniques alone.

  Their words

  Lots of ML techniques in the post can help with data quality, but fundamentally human data collection involves attention to details and careful execution.

  Thinking about High-Quality Human Datalilianweng.github.io

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

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  Psych

  Their words

  Despite having read a few bookshelves worth of academic psychology texts, I enjoyed Yale professor Paul Bloom's survey of the field. Because understanding psychology cannot be divorced from understanding its history, I enjoyed Bloom's birds-eye view of the field from the past to the present day.

  scotthyoung.com

Political scientist at the University of Chicago and the leading exponent of offensive realism; wrote The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

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  A state's power rests on two material foundations only: the size of its population and its wealth.

  Their words

  The two key building blocks of power are population size and wealth. You want to have a lot of people and you want to be really wealthy.

  youtube.com

Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008; later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, where he now posts many times a day.

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  Be careful wishing for a world with no war at all, because what would be required to enforce it might be worse than a little war.

  Their words

  What I’m saying is that there is an argument that if you wish for no war, you should be careful what you wish for because what’s required in order for there to be no war might be worse than a little war.

  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.

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  How Minds Change

  Their words

  The psychology of how and why we believe. How we learn and change. The craft of doubt and persuasion. Insights into the social definition of truth. Epistemology. Certainty is a feeling not based on facts. Well-written with a nice balance of story-telling and deeper dives.

  sive.rs

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

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  We do not control neural networks well enough to guarantee an AI will not harm humans, so we should be careful about what capabilities we give them.

  Their words

  The biggest issue is probably that we don’t control neutral networks enough to be able to ensure AI doesn’t harm humans. We can’t even control AI to not reveal internal prompts.

  I Think AI Would Kill my Wifelucumr.pocoo.org

Economist; Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.

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  Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

  Their words

  Although his training is not in economics, Richard Reeves draws on economic research, as well as research from the fields of sociology, psychology, and political science, to tell an under-told story. The book explores the problems faced by boys and men, the roots of those problems, and possible policy solutions.

  fivebooks.com

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

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  Going back to re-check every old psychology study one by one makes no sense.

  Their words

  But the point that gets mixed in is “now we should go back and double-check every psychology study.” And that, my dear Kyle, makes no sense to me.

  experimental-history.com

Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.

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  Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

  Their words

  This is my list of the 10 best nonfiction books. These are the pillar books that have helped shape my thinking and approach to life. In my opinion, these are 10 nonfiction books everyone should read.

  jamesclear.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.

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  The Righteous Mind

  Their words

  This is the only one I’m not crazy about. My academic BS detector got tripped a few times while reading it, and it turns out that there are a number of better measurements emerging in moral psychology.

  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.

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  Where Good Ideas Come From

  Their words

  If you're looking for inspiration and understanding how inspiration comes to you. This is an interesting hybrid investigation of how to come up with ideas and the underlying psychology of doing so.

  jasonevanish.com