Essays
A curated reading list, roughly themed around progress studies: how do we build a better future? Started November 2020.
Top Essays
- Paths of Glory Will old age temper the burning fire of Rory Stewart's youthful ambition? Flat out brilliant. My favourite profile, ever
- The Parable of the Talents IQ, moral worth, and the concept of innate ability
- Tech Entrepreneurship and The Disruption of Ambition The most personally impactful essay on this list. Scale your impact and you might dent the universe
- The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project "The Hungarian Phenomenon", the atom bomb, and the role of genetics
- The Scaling Hypothesis Neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder
- Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind Why did Allan Bloom's critique of American culture spark a cultural war?
- Two Paths to the Future AI or Human Enhancement – what leads us to the future?
- Your Life in Weeks An OG internet blogger doing what he's best at: visualising the human experience with fun charts
- When the Worst Man in the World Writes a Masterpiece How did the worst man in the world manage to write the best biography?
- Federer as Religious Experience Roger Federer, the nature of beauty, genius and the sublime
- A Reductionist History of Humankind How did the idea of human nature shape the history of civilisation?
- On The Referendum #21 The real story behind the EU referendum from the main player
- The Mystery of the Miracle Year Why do great scientists have miracle years of multiple breakthroughs?
- Why we stopped making Einsteins Is the downfall of aristocratic tutoring to blame for modern society's lack of geniuses?
- Even if you beat me Writing as an art form
Noteworthy
AI & Machine Learning
- The Scaling Hypothesis
- Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
- Can AI Solve Science?
- What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work?
- The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1
- The Doomsday Invention
- Can We Stop Runaway A.I.?
- Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?
- The Inside Story of Microsoft's Partnership with OpenAI
- Ego, Fear and Money: How the A.I. Fuse Was Lit
- 'The Godfather of A.I.' Leaves Google
- What will GPT-2030 look like?
- Simulators
- Draft report on AI timelines
- AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities
- The alignment problem from a deep learning perspective
- Bing Chat is blatantly, aggressively misaligned
- Mysteries of mode collapse
- Cyborgism
- A History of the Future, 2025-2040
- Third-wave AI safety needs sociopolitical thinking
- What failure looks like
- AI Could Defeat All Of Us Combined
- Nobody's on the ball on AGI alignment
- My current summary of the state of AI risk
- My AI Safety Lecture for UT Effective Altruism
- Janus' GPT Wrangling
- Janus' Simulators
- Thread: Circuits
- Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits
- Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications
- Attention is All You Need
- RLHF: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
- Illustrating Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
- The AI Power Paradox
- AI and the automation of work
- On giving AI eyes and ears
- How to make Britain's AI dreams reality
- What would humans do in a world of super-AI?
- Large, creative AI models will transform lives
- An early warning system for novel AI risks
- Governance of superintelligence
- What every CEO should know about generative AI
- Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"
- The Complete Beginners Guide To Autonomous Agents
- Why Nvidia's AI Supremacy is Only Temporary
- The Rise of Vertical AI
- Five years of progress in GPTs
- From Bing to Sydney
- Generative AI exists because of the transformer
- An introduction to deep learning
- Historical analogies for large language models
- Text Is the Universal Interface
- Introduction to Diffusion Models
- AI And The Limits Of Language
- Report: OpenAI Business Breakdown
- Why didn't DeepMind build GPT3?
- Building machine learning products: lessons from Papercup's product team
- An Opinionated Guide to ML Research
- On the ordering of miracles
- A Framework: Turning Services into AI
- AI's $600B Question
- The Game Theory of AI CapEx
- The big stack game of LLM poker
- Open-endedness is all we'll need
Startups & Venture Capital
- Tech Entrepreneurship and The Disruption of Ambition
- Intercom on Product: Product strategy in the age of AI
- AI in 2023: When six months feels like six years
- Creating Product Strategy with Multiple Strategic Tracks
- Defensibility & Competition
- Mind the Moat, a 7 Powers Review
- A Total Addressable Market Masterclass
- Strategy Letter V
- Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement
- The Power of Product Thinking
- Startup Decoupling & Reckoning
- Y Combinator: Progress Machine
- Y Combinator: The Institute of Innovation
- Tiger Global: How to Win
- The Collison Brothers Built Stripe Into A $95 Billion Unicorn
- Index Companies
- World Building
- The Company of the Future is Default Global
- Challenging Life Experience as Entrepreneur Characteristic
- On Respect: The Anna Karenina Principle of Founding Relationships
- The Ideation Flywheel
- Company, team, self.
- AI 50 2023
- AI in 2023: The Application Layer Has Arrived
- How to validate your B2B startup idea
- The 4 Levels of PMF
- What is -1 to 0? A Philosophy of Ideation.
- The Physics of Startups
- How I've run major projects
Progress Studies & Science
- Shifting the impossible to the inevitable: A Private ARPA user manual
- Why does DARPA work?
- The bosses of Britain's new research agency explain its innovations
- Notes on Progress: The world that has never been
- What ails the social sciences
- The great reinforcer
- This is what peak culture looks like
- Securing posterity
- The housing theory of everything
- The Problem Of Excess Genius
- How I Made $10k Predicting Which Studies Will Replicate
- How should mathematics be taught to non-mathematicians?
- How to start an advance market commitment
- Doom scrolling
- Confirmed! We Live in a Simulation
- How to make better use of antidepressants
- Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible
- How to Make Superbabies
- Ancient DNA Revolution
- The Mystery of the Miracle Year
- Why we stopped making Einsteins
- Two Paths to the Future
Profiles & People
- Paths of Glory
- Modern Meditations: Claire Hughes Johnson
- Becoming a Magician
- Agnes Callard's Marriage of the Minds
- The Observer Effect – Daniel Ek
- The Cormac McCarthy I Know
- Reid Hoffman Is on a Mission
- Interview: Patrick Collison
- Omens of exceptional talent
- Palmer Luckey, American Vulcan
- Nabeel Qureshi: Reflections on Palantir
- The Scholar's Stage: a Primer
- DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis Urges Caution on AI
- Was Jack Welch the Greatest C.E.O. of His Day—or the Worst?
- Childhoods of exceptional people
- Your flaws matter less than you think
Politics & Society
- On The Referendum #21
- On Crimes and Punishments and Beccaria
- Power Lies Trembling
- Zero-Based Regulation
- Accelerating to Where?
- The Defense Reformation
- Democracy is the solution to vetocracy
- Our position on China
- Securing Liberal Democratic Control of AGI through UK Leadership
- The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning
- The Prophet of the Revolt
- American Strong Gods
- UCL Talk – Government, science, and creative destruction
- The making of a techno-nationalist elite
- Federer as Religious Experience
Culture & Ideas
- The Parable of the Talents
- The Most Precious Resource is Agency
- Solitude and Leadership
- Think real hard
- Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born
- Secrets about People: René Girard
- Peter Thiel's Religion
- Back to the Future
- The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time
- Culture Is Not About Esthetics
- Iron and the Soul
- Too much efficiency makes everything worse
- Whose advice should you take?
- Your Real Biological Clock Is You're Going to Die
- Welcome to the new age of magical thinking
- A blog post is a very long and complex search query
- Thoughts after Lambeth
- Christopher Hitchens on Isaiah Berlin
- The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust
- Nobody Cares
- Social behavior curves, equilibria, and radicalism
- The Silicon Valley Canon
- To build a meritocracy
- The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism
- The Case for Longtermism
- All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild
- Great Founder Theory
- Coordination Headwind – How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds
- Even if you beat me
- Compounding Crazy
- Your Life in Weeks
History
- A Reductionist History of Humankind
- The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius
- How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
- Winston Churchill's Black Dog
- The Anti-Reactionary FAQ
- Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro
- The Murder of Wilbur Wright
- How I taught the Iliad to Chinese teenagers
- #1 On Bismarck: practical education in high performance politics
- People, ideas, machines IX: Britain's 'Organization of Victory'
- People, ideas, machines VI: the War Diaries of Alanbrooke
- From Caveman to Chinaman
- The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians
- Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind
- The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project
- When the Worst Man in the World Writes a Masterpiece