This page contains a collection of some of my favorite links (mostly blog posts), roughly categorized by author. My hope is that others similar to myself can waste enjoy countless hours of reading from recursively following some of the links here. I haven’t yet finished this post but have published it regardless.

Scott Alexander (Twitter): As the author behind SlateStarCodex (now AstralCodexTen) and many great LessWrong posts, in my opinion Scott is among one of the best written content creators of the last decade. He focuses primarily on psychiatry, rationality, meta-science, critical thinking, and logical reasoning. Favorite posts:

• todo (this will take me around 20-50 hours if I work well, hence not having finished it yet, maybe some day!)

Gwern Branwen (Twitter – currently private): Well-known for having quality deep dives in diverse areas such as statistics, technology, machine learning, genetics, psychology, and many others. Also often recognized as an amazingly aesthetic, verbose, and highly-usable website. Favorite posts:

• About Gwern: About Gwern; who he is, what he has done, and links to other mediums
• It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World: An eloquently-written and humorous short story about AI alignment and paperclipping, featuring our good friend Clippy alongside a multitude of entertaining references, both to Internet history and many arxiv machine learning papers
• Generating Anime Faces: An overview of GANs in machine learning, with focus on Stylegan2 and anime art generation including ThisWaifuDoesNotExist and its follow-up ThisAnimeDoesNotExist, both trained from a large Danbooru dataset
• Death Note Anonymity: Using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in Death Note (absolutely worth watching, even if you’re not into anime), offering insightful analysis and constructive criticism
• The Scaling Hypothesis: Discussion of the scaling hypothesis in machine learning (essentially how much better models get with significantly more data+compute), with obligatory emphasis on GPT-2 and GPT-3
• Melatonin: Detailed information on melatonin, a simple endogenous hormone that notably improves sleep in many individuals when supplemented just before bedtime
• Nicotine: An analysis on the benefits of nicotine as a nootropic, with attention given to the fact that it is often incorrectly assumed to be a dangerous and addictive drug due to its inclusion in cigarettes and consequently significantly-confounded research claims
• Modafinil: Discussion of modafinil, a prescription stimulant drug that appears to have a relatively favorable cost/benefit profile for productivity and alertness
• Embryo Selection for Intelligence: A cost-benefit analysis of the marginal cost of IVF-based embryo selection for intelligence and other traits
• Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation: A meta-scientific discourse and analysis on the age-old adage that correlation does not imply causation
• The Melancholy of Subculture Society: A brief analysis on the cultural effects of the Internet allowing niche subcultures to easily form
• Newsletters: Links to Gwern’s past ~monthly newsletters
• My Anime List: Gwern’s top-rated anime

Andrej Karpathy: (Twitter) A bright AI researcher who has spent time both at OpenAI and as the chief AI officer at Telsa. He has a popular Youtube channel with machiune learning content as well.

• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks: Back in 2015 Andrej trained a 10M-parameter RNN on some interesting text datasets like the source code for the Linux kernel and Shakespeare. Performance was surprisingly good!
• Biohacking Lite: It’s always fun to read content from people from fields like computer science when they later deep dive into biology, often for their own personal health. This post has some high-SNR content on the basics of metabolism and energy in humans as well as some quantified-self demonstrations and simple dietary advice.

Scott Aaronson: A theoretical computer scientist with a focus on quantum computing and complexity theory. Although his posts on quantum computational complexity theory research go over my head, I’ve enjoyed some great content from him in other categories. Favorites:

• My Vaccine Crackpottery: A Confession: A critical post lamenting the slow pace and poor execution of the vaccine rollout during covid
• Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ!: An FAQ about quantum supremacy
• Ask Me Anything: Apocalypse Edition: An AMA with diverse and interesting questions (see also: more AMAs)

Matt Levine (Twitter): An ex-Goldman Bloomberg opinion columnist with some wonderfully insightful and hilarious posts (offered as a free newsletter, generally ~4x a week) on the happenings in our modern yet often-insane financial world. Posts are generally centered around current events and are best read as they come out. Some examples:

• The SEC Is Baffled By GameStop Too: On the SEC’s Gamestop fiasco report, green company projects, as well as an obligatory section on Elon Musk’s tweets (which appear to be a common theme)
• Looking for Tether’s Money: On the potential insolvency of Tether, along with a section on interesting loans and NFT occurrences
• Elon Musk Sold Some Stock: Musings on the never-ending fun of Elon Musk’s doings, his tweets, and potential legal implications thereof, as well as notes on GE banking fees and Trump’s SPAC PIPE
• Doing Fraud on Securities Fraud: On the common theme of everything being potential securities fraud, as well as some takes on the rise of meme stocks and markets
• Archegos Was Too Busy for Margin Calls: On the blowup of Archegos capital, as well as some takes on Robinhood and Nikola happenings

Nintil (Twitter): A wonderful blog by Jose Luis Ricón with a focus on longevity, economics, and meta-science. Favorite posts:

• The Longevity FAQ: An overview of many fundamental topics in aging and longevity
• Peer Rejection in Science: Case examples of major scientific discoveries that were initially looked down upon by scientific peers, including mRNA vaccines, airplanes, DNA, and many others
• Immunosenescence: A Review: A detailed post reviewing the changes that occur in the immune system with age
• Epigenetic Clocks: A Review: A review over the functionality and workings behind epigenetic clocks
• Gender and STEM: Follow-up comments on gender distributions in various STEM fields
• Fund people, not projects III: The Newton hypothesis; Is science done by a small elite?: The middle post in a series of five posts that approaches meta-scientific inquiries involving the advantages and disadvantages of funding specific people over general projects
• No Great Technological Stagnation: Some counter-examples to the common claim that the modern era exhibits a notable decline in the speed of technological improvements, at least in some specific areas

Patrick Collison (Twitter): The CEO and co-founder of Stripe, often with focuses involving meta-science, individual and societal productivity, and economics

• Fast: Examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together
• Questions: A short list of interesting questions
• Advice: Advice, particularly for young and ambitious individuals
• Book Recommendations: A well-sized list of suggested reading

Sam Altman (Twitter): The CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator, his posts often focus on startups, artificial intelligence, productivity, and science. Favorites:

• How to be Successful: Thirteen thoughts on how to achieve long-term successful outcomes: learn a lot, compound yourself, work hard, and be ambitious
• Productivity: Various productivity tips, such as ‘Picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity and usually almost ignored. So think about it more!’
• Advice for Ambitious 19 Year Olds: Advice for young and ambitious individuals, such as ‘The best people always seem to be building stuff and hanging around smart people’
• How to Invest In Startups: Advice about being a good startup investor
• Super successful companies: Notes some salient commonalities between many very successful companies
• The Strength of Being Misunderstood: You should trade being short-term low-status for being long-term high-status

Paul Graham (Twitter): The founder of Y Combinator, with many posts focusing on startups, ideas and frameworks for everyday life, as well as advice and reflections for people that fit the founder/builder/nerd stereotype. Some favorites:

• Do Things That Don’t Scale: An amazing tip on gaining initial traction and leverage by doing high-impact activities that won’t scale, but that will work effectively for the time being
• What You Can’t Say: Reflections on that which exists outside of the Overton window
• How to Make Wealth: An essay on effectively building wealth over time
• Keep Your Identity Small: On why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions due to excessive involvement with personal identity
• Having Kids: Personal experiences and thoughts on having kids
• It’s Charisma, Stupid: A 2004 essay arguing that charisma is the most important trait for elected politicians, using the US presidency as an example
• What I worked on: A personal and emotional memoir on pg’s professional and personal history

Alexey Guzey (Twitter): Currently working on New Science, Alexey has some great blog posts with a focus on properly using the Internet for social leverage (reach out to people more, cold email people more, initiate conversations more, and create content more!), meta-science, productivity, biology, and more. Some favorites:

• Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now: Encouragement to start your own blog. I strongly recommend this to people, as well as starting/doing many other things that involve content creation. Also attempts to argue against some common excuses made for why someone shouldn’t start a blog, which I mostly agree with
• How to make friends over the Internet: ‘90% of meeting people is reaching out, so, unless you’re already very well-known, most of your network building will consist of actively initiating conversations’
• Cold emails and Twitter: Sending cold emails and using Twitter can both be extremely high-impact activities when done well, see also from a separate author: A Guide to Twitter
• It is Your Responsibility to Follow Up: It is your responsibility to take the lead in following-up with contacts
• Why (and How) You Should Join Twitter Right Now: A post encouraging Twitter usage. If you pick your follows wisely, you can have a wonderful time on Twitter, one that is full of smart and amazing people and with minimal political outrage. This is worth reconsidering if it is something you instantly dismissed as ‘not for you’ due to Twitter’s mainstream political reputation. Last time I traveled I met up with many people I had found on Twitter and had a great time with literally everyone single one (and also only had a few hundred followers myself).
• Every productivity thought I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible: Admittedly this post does not appear to be effective for myself, but some others may find it very useful so I’ve included it
• Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors: A post criticizing a popular science book about sleep alongside its author, with some insights in meta-science and related social dynamics and forces, epistemology, and charlatanism. See also: How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation
• Best of Twitter Newsletter: A short newsletter highlighting some insightful and interesting Tweets

Melting Asphalt (Twitter): Written by Kevin Simler (along with Robin Hanson (Twitter), co-author of The Elephant in the Brain), Melting Asphalt has a wonderful collection of posts on evolutionary psychology, game theory, and novel and introspective takes on what makes us human. Favorites:

• Neurons Gone Wild: A beautifully speculative post that suggests a recursively selfish model of biological neurons which enables selfish sub-agents and networks to co-exist in an evolutionary semi-competitive environment within our own minds. Probably my favorite post on this blog for several reasons. Also see Hallucinated Gods
• Music in Human Evolution: A great book review of Why Do People Sing?: Music in Human Evolution by Joseph Jordania, involving predatory defense mechanisms, disposition of the dead, battle trances, and the audio-visual intimidation display
• Crony Beliefs: On beliefs that stick around when they shouldn’t
• Personality: The Body in Society:
  What is personality? ‘Nature and nurture work together to create a prototype, which then negotiates with the external world. The result is a strategy for getting along and getting ahead — a strategy we call “personality”, in other words, ‘Personality is a strategy for making the most of one’s particular lot in life.’ See also: part two and part three
• Ads Don’t Work That Way: On ‘cultural imprinting’ and signaling in advertising
• Doesn’t Matter, Warm Fuzzies: Discusses many interesting aspects of human ecology and society, with a focus on rituals, culture, confabulation, mimicry, and more
• Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole: On social status in humans, including an analysis of two proposed separate status systems: dominance/submission and prestige/admiration. See also: Social Status II: Cults and Loyalty
• Border Stories: Borders are a necessary precondition for agency within a hostile ecosystem

Qualia Computing: With a subtitle of ‘revealing the computational properties of consciousness’, Qualia Computing is a great blog for anyone interested in the neurology, phenomenology, and interesting attempts at quantifications and explanations behind our own conscious experiences (qualia)

• Top 10 Qualia Computing Articles: Ten selected articles from Qualia Computing
• Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering: On the logarithmic nature of our pains and pleasures
• The Pseudo-Time Arrow: Explaining Phenomenal Time With Implicit Causal Structures In Networks Of Local Binding: On the experience of time
• Algorithmic Reduction of Psychedelic States: On interesting property of altered states of consciousness

Patrick Mckenzie (Twitter): An entrepreneur and writer that lives in Japan and currently works at Stripe with a focus on startups and outreach, Patrick has many invaluable posts about finance, startups, marketing and professional communication, and highly-regarded SaaS and entrepreneurial advice. Favorite posts:

• Greatest Hits: Self-selected popular posts
• Salary Negotiation: ‘Instrumentally probably the most useful thing I have ever written’; If you work in tech, this is required reading
• Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice: ‘Realities of Your Industry 101’ for engineers; ‘README.txt for your career as a young engineer’
• Doing Business In Japan: A great read on the interesting cultural differences of business and life in Japan
• Running A Software Business On 5 Hours A Week: Professional and personal musings on running a software business / side project on your own
• Don’t End The Week With Nothing: Prefer to work on things you can show others and that accumulate over time
• Hacker News Profile: I’ve included this link as patio11 is one of Hacker News’ all-time favorite content contributors, judged both by objective karma and subjective user preferences
• Bits About Money: A new ~weekly free newsletter about modern financial infrastructure. See also his Twitter, which has many great finance takes

Fantastic Anachronism (Twitter): todo, see Recommended Reading

Applied Divinity Studies: todo

Peter Attia (Twitter): todo

Vitalik Buterin (Twitter): todo, see The bulldozer vs vetocracy political axis

Nick Cammarata (Twitter): todo

Lesswrong: todo

Austin Allred: How to skip the resume pile and get a ton of interviews (even without a degree): The ridiculously detailed guide

Overcoming Bias: todo, ‘This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don’t all die’, from Robin Hanson.

Aella (Twitter): Popular Posts, Becoming A Whorelord: The Overly Analytical Guide To Escorting, Handling Accusations In Communities, The Polyamory Post

Tim Ferris: 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous

Dynomight (Twitter): todo, see Better air is the easiest way not to die by The impact of air pollution on health is often significantly underrepresented, and working on improving the quality of air in your dwelling can result in a very high ROI for your health

Marginal Revolution: todo

Zvi: todo

(about 15 other todos currently excluded)