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Robin Hanson
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I asked this question as someone I might debate claimed that God existing is an example of an unverifiable fact, for which one needn't have probabilities.
probabilities claimed debate
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least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone —
nothing here is a summary of this one.
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20 September
Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.
Most of who is willing to debate whom is judgments of relative status. We'll debate someone much higher, but not much lower. Quoting @GaryMarcus @JeffLadish @sapinker either scott should debate someone like me or admit he can’t defend his positions. Related
18 September
Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.
17 September
Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.
The current moment of AI doomerism reminds me so much of the millenarian, apocalyptic thinking of evangelical Christianity it’s uncanny I think it’s safe to say that the Singularity was modeled directly after the Apocalypse/Tribulation/Rapture/End Times, whether consciously or unconsciously This isn’t widely known, but the bestselling nonfiction book of the entire 1970s was Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. It claimed to predict the imminent end times by mapping biblical prophecy to current events, like Israel’s founding as a state, the Soviet Union, and nuclear weapons He predicted… Related
Professor of economics at George Mason University and Bartley J. Madden Chair at the Mercatus Center. Co-writes the blog Marginal Revolution and co-authors the textbook Modern Principles of Economics with Tyler Cowen.
ZCash is having a governance debate thanks to @maxdesalle, @zooko, @matthuang and others. It's a perennial debate because everything DeSalle says about the weakness of governance institutions is correct and yet when it comes to public goods, externalities and increasing returns--all of which are critical for ZCash-there is very little choice but a governance institution. N.B. All DeSalle says also applies to firms! Firms are islands of central planning. Central planning is inefficient. So shouldn't people who appreciate markets want to get rid of firms?! No. The boundary between firms and the… Quoting @matthuang A few thoughts on ZCash (disclosure: Paradigm is an investor in ZEC and ZODL): - All blockchain ecosystems struggle with long-term funding, especially of public goods, and an inflation-funded developer fund is an elegant mechanism to do so. How this fund is allocated is a fair debate, and we should… Related
Former options market maker who writes Moontower, a newsletter on trading, volatility, decision-making and how to think about risk outside markets too.
Co-sign Dave & Jon are media personalities with pointed views because that travels even though plenty of room for reasonable debate in between. For most of us debate is a waste of time. We have bills to pay not crusades to fight. Pick whatever view makes your life better. Related
16 September
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.
Envy and competition is often disguised as a debate about politics and progress: robkhenderson.com
Quoting @TwinOfTiger The Sydney Sweeney thing is hilarious cos this generation (generation as in current norms not age) uses politics to mask jealousy. Society needs to go back to open hating. Own it and stop tryna trick somebody 😂😂 Related
Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.
15 September
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.
If you had no college degree, were backed mostly by voters without degrees, yet claimed to be the voice of the formally educated, people would laugh. But a college grad backed by other college grads can claim to be the voice of the working class and people just accept it. Weird. Related
Former option trader and risk analyst, now a distinguished professor at NYU. Author of the Incerto essay series, including The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.
Zalloua @PZalloua while visiting The Republic of Amioun nervously preparing for the debate. Quoting @nntaleb Preparing for a discussion on the "Evolution of Lebanese Identities" Sept 17, at the Corm Palazzo, with @AlbertKostanian and @PZalloua. @Grok cher ami, please provide a bibliography for the below. Related
13 September
Web designer and writer; founded A List Apart and Happy Cog, co-founded the An Event Apart conference, and wrote Designing With Web Standards.
The 25 Photos That Changed Fashion Forever Two photographers, a fashion designer, a stylist, a creative director, an editor and a supermodel debate the images that have had an indelible impact on how we dress. nytimes.com
Related
Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.
Their words
Strong liability enforcement could be helpful in the AI debate. If your agent swarm goes rogue, you’re liable. If your weakly protected model gets jailbroken, you’re liable. If you serve a weakly protected OSS model, you’re liable.
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@naval on X x.com
12 September
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.
11 September
Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
A propos nothing (or maybe not). First, an oped arguing the earth is flat. Journalists, who smell a good fight, set up a debate. They invite the flat earth guy and find a round earth one willing to come and debate. The flat earth guy explains that, if the earth was round, people on the other side would be walking upward down or would fall. This is just common sense. The round earth guy explains that there is something called gravity, and so this is not what happens. The flat earth guy says that this is all high brow academic stuff, and common sense should rule the day. Anyway, he says, there… Related
Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.
Mathematicians are unhappy about OpenAI. The gist of their argument is that they form a community that trains young people. When AI started producing breakthroughs on hard mathematical problems, I asked what a very smart 17-year-old would feel. Do you still choose a math major and train yourself to prove difficult results by hand? This crisis has been coming for a long time. When I was a kid, the four-colour theorem was proved by a computer, in 1976. An intense debate followed. Does it count as a proof? I wrote my PhD thesis using symbolic algebra software. To my knowledge, nobody then would… Quoting @TheEconomist 24 Fields Medal winners have written a letter of objection OpenAI Related
Interviewer; the Dwarkesh Podcast runs long, heavily researched conversations with AI researchers, historians and economists.
Free software developer and longtime Debian developer; author of git-annex, etckeeper, ikiwiki and debhelper. Lives and works off-grid.
Receptionist claimed that if I self paid for a doctors visit it would he insurance fraud. Sigh, now I have to write a letter to their board suggesting they not mislead their patients. (I assume it would violate an agreement they have with the insurer, which is no excuse for that behavior) Related
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
Their words
most surveys find that the median AI researcher forecasts about a 5% chance of extinction or similar "doom" from AI, while the mean probability is much higher -- around 15-20% -- due to a smallish group who give very high probabilities of doom.
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@Noahpinion on X x.com
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
10 September
Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.
"Symbolic learning" is simply "machine learning" (automatically learn function x -> y given examples of (x, y) pairs), but where the substrate is symbolic, i.e. the functions you learn are code-like, not curve-like. The term is in opposition to "parametric learning" or "curve-fitting". Symbolic learning does not mean that the system avoids numbers or probabilities. It means its learned representation are discrete, explicit, parsimonious, code-like. Related
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
Their words
I put the probability of complete extinction as being so low it isn't worth discussing, but the probabilities of AI caused disasters - e.g. cyber attacks on critical infrastructure or bio-risks - as being worth debating.
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interconnects.ai
9 September
Founder of Farnam Street (fs.blog) and host of The Knowledge Project podcast. Writes and curates on decision-making, mental models and rational thinking.
The Bill Gates-Steve Jobs rivalry. "These two guys, they would, they would take a crap on each other at any chance they could." They were polar opposites. The core of the debate was open vs closed systems. "If you were sitting around in 1995 ... You would have thought that the open system makes more sense. Bill Gates and Microsoft are the future. But if you're sitting around in 2026 and looking at all this, it looks more like the closed ecosystem, the Apple ecosystem, is actually the success." Quoting @shaneparrish Steve Jobs almost disappeared from history. After being ousted from Apple, he spent 12 years struggling. He: • Alienated the people closest to him • Blew up deals that could have saved his company • Refused to compromise • Drove away his co-founders and investors • Burned through hundreds of millio… Related
8 September
Australian moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics emeritus at Princeton University; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.
Do we need God in order to have objective reasons for acting morally? I discussed this question with Christian thinker Andy Bannister in a wide-ranging debate about ethics, religion and what gives human life value. Watch the full debate, “Do we need God to be good?”: youtube.com
Related
Writer of the personal-finance blog Of Dollars And Data and author of Just Keep Buying and The Wealth Ladder. Chief Operating Officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management.
1 September
Librarian, technology instructor and writer in rural Vermont; longtime community manager at MetaFilter and author of a book on the digital divide.
Visited a library today which was named after a rich guy from Harvard (class of 1834). Discovered, through very minor research, that the money given to the library (claimed to have been left in his will) was, in fact, given by his sister, the sole beneficiary of his $$ after he left no will at all. After correcting the Wikipedia record on this point, I have now gotten lost reading about The Harvard College Rebellion of 1834 which is about as ridiculous as it sounds. scholarship.law.wm.edu
Related
29 August
Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.
27 August
Criminal defence lawyer in New York; writes Simple Justice, mostly about how criminal law works in practice rather than in theory.
25 August
Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.
20 August
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.
It has been less than four years, since ChatGPT made its public debut, but talk of AI has taken over business, investing and even personal conversations. The AI debate, though, has gone off the tracks as people talk past each other and distractions about. My attempt to make sense of it all: bit.ly
OpenAI Related
18 August
Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.
11 August
Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?
Abortion is an eternal debate but can we at least agree that the really extreme positions (“a 15-year-old girl who gets pregnant cannot have an abortion 2 days later” / “a healthy 38-week fetus can be induced and killed instead of given up for adoption”) are just mad? Quoting @LifeNewsHQ Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signs the bill for abortions up to birth as Democrats celebrate. Related
10 August
Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin. Writes at arslan.io about Go, tooling, industrial design and books.
Their words
Nobody writes the code anymore. Instead you're basically planning, debating, implementing and reviewing with Agents.
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Joining Cursor arslan.io
8 August
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
Their words
All of these grand visions hide truths that are messier, more sordid and more contingent.
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programmablemutter.com
29 July
Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025, Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads the company’s superintelligence lab.
AI alignment
Their words
so much of that debate is like I think um in some ways uh a little bit of a waste of time because, you know, I think it's inevitable that we're going to have very powerful models
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youtube.com
17 July
Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.
30 June
Social scientist turned small-scale farmer; wrote A Small Farm Future and argues against the case for feeding the world from factories.
energy
Their words
Another is that it isn’t ‘food from thin air’ as is often claimed – as well as the high energy use, it’s food from a lot of tap water, minerals, ammonia and industrial infrastructure.
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chrissmaje.com
19 June
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.
As the debate about the pricing of SPaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic heats up, there is a parallel debate about whether S&P should be including these companies in the S&P 500 index, with many arguing against inclusion. My thoughts on the topic: bit.ly
Anthropic OpenAI Related
13 June
Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.
this statement is true, but it all comes down to: "What does quality mean, in this particular circumstance?" talking about "fast" and "slow" is toddler-level reasoning, and it irks me when the AI debate gets so wrapped around that axle. Quoting @awscloud @honeycombio Quality first, quantity second. Hear how @mipsytipsy built it on the AWS for Software Companies podcast. Related
6 June
Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.
1 March
Researcher of social media, privacy and youth culture; founder of Data & Society and author of It’s Complicated.
Current household debate: Who bullshits more - GenAI or politicians? Related
24 February
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.
18 February
Maths educator; writes Mathworlds on how mathematics is taught and why so much of the technology sold to schools does not help.
25 January
Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.
Their words
But the truth is we don't know what the probability is. We don't know what the probability curves look like. We actually can't use expected value.
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youtube.com
8 January
Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.
1 January
Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.
Their words
Though written accessibly, Segerstrale’s narrative rewards repeat reading, because it is so dense with historical detail that remains relevant today.
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razibkhan.com
26 November 2025
Australian moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics emeritus at Princeton University; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
9 September 2025
Machine learning engineer working on recommender systems, personalization and information retrieval. Previously worked on LLMs and LLM infrastructure at Mozilla.ai and on ML and recsys at Duo, Tumblr, Automattic and Comcast; wrote the 'What are embeddings?' text and ran the Normconf conference.
4 September 2025
Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.
Their words
So Spinosaurus is a super weird and exaggerated version of what was already a kind of super weird group of theropods. So Spinosaurus is properly strange. And then, as you kind of hinted at, super controversial as well, because various papers have claimed it's a diver or a really good swimmer, and I think the evidence for that is very weak at best.
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youtube.com
11 August 2025
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
9 June 2025
Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.
17 April 2025
Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.
Had a session with very senior folks on how they build with AI and can’t help thinking there’s no better time to learn, clarify, brainstorm, write, debate, plan, design, code, debug, review, analyze, delegate, play, and in general do more more while doing less with AI—so psyched! Related
21 March 2025
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
21 January 2025
Development economist; writes Global Developments, on growth, history and the numbers behind them.
Their words
Precisely how much the ancient continuity of East Asian states matters for development is still a little murky, and the delineation with colonial legacies is still an area of active debate—but the balance of evidence suggests that the legacies of these pre-colonial states stretched through the colonial period, extending even into the post-independence era.
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global-developments.org
19 January 2025
Historian at Stanford and the Hoover Institution; wrote Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market, on Ayn Rand.
Their words
Milton Friedman, he also does tend to have friends who agree with him, yet he's always willing to debate his opponents, and he's willing to do so with a smile on his face. He's a happy warrior, and he actually will win a lot of debates simply by his emotional affect and his cheerfulness and his confidence, where Rand will lose debates because she gets so angry in the face of disagreement.
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youtube.com
22 December 2024
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.
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.
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youtube.com
1 October 2023
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.
Their words
Not only did Mill consider the topic of women, but virtually everything he claimed turned out to be true, and insightful, even though it was highly controversial at the time. It is one of the best and most important and most original books of the nineteenth century.
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tylercowen.com
29 August 2023
Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.
Their words
But I’ve become increasingly worried that science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis.
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ageofinvention.xyz
17 February 2023
Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?
1 June 2022
Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.
The wave function as a true ensemble In quantum mechanics, the wave function predicts probabilities of possible measurement outcomes, but not which individual outcome is realized in each run of an experiment. This suggests that it describes an ensemble of…
Related
20 February 2022
Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.
My favorite part of the vibe shift discourse is that the people who hated it—claimed it meant nothing—seemed to accidentally out themselves as believing it meant something. My newsletter this morning is about the irony of trying to stay relevant haleynahman.substack.com
Related
30 September 2020
Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?
27 July 2017
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
Nothing matches. Show everything
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Got it
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
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