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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
The the words it uses that this site has seen
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
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
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
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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.
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
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
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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.
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
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
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
17 July
Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.
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
18 February
Maths educator; writes Mathworlds on how mathematics is taught and why so much of the technology sold to schools does not help.
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.
11 August 2025
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
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 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.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
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.
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.
Got it