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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The right starting point for studying AI is treating it as genuinely powerful while its consequences unfold unpredictably through multiple complex social processes.

  Their words

  a recognition that AI is powerful (and will reshape power relations among humans) but that the consequences will flow messily through multiple complex processes that we really need to start mapping and understanding

  How should social science think about AI?programmablemutter.com

Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.

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  Policymakers should avoid being boastful or belligerent so they can save credibility for when it is really needed.

  Their words

  Policymakers should avoid being boastful or belligerent, not simply as a matter of good manners, but to save their credibility for moments when it’s really needed.

  Bessent and the Bondspaulkrugman.substack.com

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

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  Growth impresses investors more than any credential does.

  Their words

  No credential will get you more credibility with investors than growth.

  @paulg on Xx.com

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

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  Equating an emotion with the conscious feeling of it turns emotion research into consciousness research, which is why the two must be kept apart.

  Their words

  And the other question is if you tie emotion to the the conscious experience of emotion, that is you equate you conflate emotions with feelings. Well, then you're not studying emotions, you're studying consciousness.

  youtube.com

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

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Clean Code

  Their words

  Clean Code is another standard recommendation, but that one wasn't for me. There are useful design principles in there worth studying, but the book as a whole is too narrow and a bit too dogmatic for my taste. Your mileage might vary.

  adamtornhill.substack.com

Co-founder of Superlogical, started in 2026 to build server-side terminal infrastructure; creator of Ghostty. Co-founded HashiCorp and created Vagrant and Terraform before that.

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  Superlogical

  Their words

  Superlogical will begin by shipping a terminal multiplexer. I'm pouring my years of experience building a terminal and studying the potential and limitations of other multiplexers into something new, powerful, and, of course, fast.

  mitchellh.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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  Decisions: Studying and Supporting People Facing Hard Choices

  Their words

  His narrative of the development of decision-making research over the past half-century is rich with personal anecdotes, gentle humor, continuous learning, and profound humility about how prone we all are to misjudge and misunderstand risks.

  jasonzweig.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Meta Platforms, the company he started as Facebook in 2004.

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  The right unit of study is a system like inflammation rather than a named disease — understand the system and others can build the therapies.

  Their words

  rather than studying the specific diseases we think that by trying to understand inflammation more broadly that will make it so that other companies that can then use these tools can work on specific therapies.

  youtube.com

General partner at Benchmark Capital for over two decades; was the lead analyst on Amazon's IPO before moving into venture capital. Writes Above the Crowd on tech and marketplace economics.

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  Venture capital bends toward the young, because the work is a hustle and later-life obligations cap how many hours anyone can give it.

  startups

  Their words

  I think the the whole industry bends towards youth for that reason and because it's a hustle business like there there's there's always a rock you haven't looked under and you know age brings children and homes and and and other requirements you get tied to and responsibilities and you're just not able to go spend 80 hours a week studying YouTube like you just can't.

  youtube.com

Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.

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  Lasting satisfaction comes from studying how others play, then defining and fully playing one's own game rather than someone else's.

  Their words

  The only lasting path to satisfaction, happiness, skin in the game, maximizing learning, is to really study everybody's game, define your own, and then play it to the best of your ability.

  What you can do in a decadeswyx.io

Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.

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  This is the golden age of humanity and the end of its beginning; in a thousand years these decades will be studied the way we study the end of the Roman Republic.

  Their words

  I I think this is golden age of humanity right now. It's the I think it's the end of the beginning. And and so I think we will um I think people in 1,000 years will um study these times uh the way we are studying um Cicero's times of the end of the Roman Republic

  youtube.com

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

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  Changing societal outcomes requires changing minds, and the credibility many diverse co-authors lend to a conclusion is hard to replicate with AI.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I think that changing societal outcome requires changing minds, and the "heft" that comes from many authors with different backgrounds endorsing a certain set of conclusions is hard to replicate with a link to a shared ChatGPT chat.

  Megapapers and How to Write Themmilesbrundage.substack.com

Runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind; worked on interpretability at Anthropic under Chris Olah before that, and teaches the field to newcomers.

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  Complete reverse-engineering of neural networks is a less promising research direction than studying model biology and applying interpretability usefully

  Their words

  I'm now fairly pessimistic about ambitious interpretability (i.e. complete reverse-engineering), and I'm excited about model biology (studying qualitative high-level properties of models) and applied interpretability (rigorously doing useful things with interp).

  MATS Applications Open (Due Aug 29)neelnanda.io

Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.

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  Genghis Khan reached his laws through the practical experience of being hurt, never through ideology or the study of moral right.

  Their words

  I don't say that he did this because of some ideological reason. Just like he didn't outlaw the kidnapping of women for ideological reasons. He didn't come to it through studying ideas of moral right. He came to it through practical experience of life.

  youtube.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.

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  Playfulness and humor in leadership build authenticity and credibility rather than undermine it.

  Their words

  Playfulness and humor won't erode your credibility. They amplify your presence. They make you real. And people follow real.

  Why Great Leaders Embrace Humor and Playfulnessbringthedonuts.com

Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.

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  The frontier of new physics is not high-energy particle physics or quantum gravity, but the problems of life and intelligence.

  energyTrauma

  Their words

  I think for me, the frontier in modern physics, where the new physics lies is not in high energy particle physics, it’s not in quantum gravity, it’s not in any of these sort of traditionally sold, “This is going to be the newest deepest insight we have into the nature of reality.” It is going to be in studying the problems of life and intelligence and the things that are sort of also our current existential crises as a civilization or a culture that’s going through an existential trauma of inventing technologies that we don’t understand right now.

  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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  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

Founder of Pinboard; writes Idle Words — talks and essays on the web, aviation, politics and travel.

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  Planetary protection rules will keep astronauts on Mars away from everything on Mars worth studying.

  Their words

  The phenomena of greatest scientific interest on Mars (gullies, recurrent slope lineae, intermittent methane sources, and underground water) will all be off-limits to astronauts.

  Why Not Marsidlewords.com

Research psychologist, instrumental in founding the field of naturalistic decision making; developed the recognition-primed decision model, the PreMortem method and the ShadowBox training method, and wrote Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don't.

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  Decision-bias research is itself biased, studying only how heuristics fail and never the strength they supply.

  Their words

  Um but nobody has done research on the positive side of these heuristics. And so, I think that's a bias on the part of the decision bias researchers that they're only looking at the down arrow. How do these heuristics get us in trouble? And they're not looking at the strength of these heuristics.

  youtube.com

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

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  A writer should keep a public list of the things they got significantly wrong, so that readers can judge their credibility.

  Their words

  But if I get something significantly wrong, I'll try to put it here as an acknowledgement and an aid for anyone trying to assess my credibility later.

  Mistakesastralcodexten.com

British historian, Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford; author of The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed.

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  De Administrando Imperio

  Their words

  It's the introductory text for anybody studying the Byzantine Empire and yet no one has ever heard of it.

  fivebooks.com

Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.

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  Good to Great

  Their words

  A research-based look at what causes companies to move from mediocre or good to great performance. Not super engaging to read, but the methodology behind the book gives its ideas more credibility.

  radex.io

Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.

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  A single risk-adjusted summary of a surgeon's results risks giving spurious credibility to analyses that ignore non-patient influences.

  Their words

  The use of a single risk adjusted number to summarise a surgeon's results runs the risk of lending a level of spurious credibility to an analysis that does not take into account the impact of influences that are not patient related.

  doi.org