A Snapshot of My Inputs

Here is an incomplete list of writers and thinkers I read, admire, or find most interesting. [Last updated: June 2020]

Those I owe an eternal debt of gratitude

• Scott Alexander - Despite his site being the de facto headquarters of the rationality community, his blog is still wildly underrated. His top posts are a great place to start. Other pieces that matter to me:
  • Book Review: Secrets to our Success - my most recommended piece by Scott; a brilliant exposition of cultural evolution, the single most persuasive piece on the wisdom of precaution and conservatism
  • Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad - traditions are stupid, right? And my intuitions as I navigate the terrain only and always tend towards truth?
  • Book Review: Seeing like a State - what does it look like from inside a state?
  • Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers - how do we know how bad problems are?
• The Last Psychiatrist - a ranting, raving mad psychiatrist going on about narcissim and ignorance
  • This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach
  • Hipsters on Food Stamps
• Howard Baetjer - my college economics professor, the person who introduced me to the concepts of spontaneous orders, unintended consequences, and opportunity costs (I interviewed him recently!)

Those I find myself coming back to again and again

• Alexey Guzey explained why you—yes, you—should start a blog right now, and is the reason this site exists
  • Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now
  • Every productivity thought I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
  • My interview with him
• Tyler Cowen is an economist, head of the George Mason economics department, and along with Alex Tabarrok runs the best economics blog, period. He’s prodigious writer, having written some dozen or more books, hundreds of articles and papers, and has blogged daily for decades. He’s not one to court controversy or get engaged in the frontlines of the culture war, but he’s an ardent student of culture and its effects on human behavior
  • Stubborn Attachments
• Bryan Caplan has made twenty public bets with other academics and journalists since 2007 and has won every single one.
  • The Case Against Education
  • Make Your Own Bubble in 10 Easy Steps
• Scott Sumner is practically the market monetarist, and has been banging on about nominal GDP targeting for over a decade. We should listen to him.
  • My interview with him
  • The Promise of Nominal GDP Targeting
  • Money/Macro needs to go back to the basics
  • Never reason from a price change
• Patrick McKenzie knows business, especially small and medium-sized businesses, the software economy, and how to think about them. His twitter is a veritable goldmine
  • Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice
  • Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued
  • Identy Theft, Credit Reports, and You a primer on dealing with bureaucracy
• Jacob Jalkovich is honest and funny, putting numbers to things you wouldn’t think work with numbers
  • His February 27th coronavirus post was the most persuasive “coronapill” post pre-national lockdown
  • 100 Ways to Live Better
  • In Defense of Finance is one of the best primers on the miracle of financial intermediation
  • Shopping for Happiness
• Matt Levine writes Money Stuff the highest signal:noise ratio of any daily newsletter I’ve ever read, ever.
• Paul Graham is a creative who ventured into tech startups. That experience informed his grandest professional accomplishment: Y Combinator, the most famous startup incubator of all time, and his forum hacker news is where programmers drink their morning coffee. His essays in life, business, and everything in between, are the bedtime stories everyone in Silicon Valley grew up reading
  • What You Can’t Say
  • Do Things That Don’t Scale
  • How to Make Wealth

Individual essays

• “The Inner Ring” by C.S. Lewis
• “6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person” by “David Wong”
• “There’s no speed limit” by Derek Sivers
• “If you’re good, you need to talk more” by David Liang

Those who publish books

• Dave Foster Wallace
  • “Good Old Neon” a short story on being a fraud
  • “Tense Present” is Dave Wallace at his rollicking, crackling best.
  • Quack This Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing - Writers on writing
  • “Roger Federer as Religious Experience”
• Bill Bryson
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything
  • My post detailing the hilarity of In A Sunburned Country
• Nassim Taleb
  • Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
• Absolutely will come back to this list.

Those who Tweet

Twitter is the best social media by a mile. There is a community around any interest you could concieve of having an ongoing conversation on things you care about deeply, right now, all the time. Find an account in this scene with a few thousand followers, and live in the comments and reply section of their tweets: Talk to others, be nice, and meet any number of like-minded folks (I mean literally meet!).

Those more obscure sites I enjoy

• Stack Exchange questions and answers; later I’ll upload the best of newsletter which contains highly popular answers
  • English Language and Usage
  • The Workplace
    • sample: https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/61478/a-programming-task-is-scaring-off-candidates-should-we-ditch-it?newsletter=1&nlcode=456833%7c78ed
• Metafilter, specifically their most favorited AskMetaFilter site
• You can hardly go wrong finding the subreddit for a community and sorting by top of all time to see the wisdom of the crowd

Those who edutain on YouTube

• CGP Grey
  • 7 Ways to Maximize Misery
• 3blue1brown
  • Simulating an epidemic
  • Why do prime numbers make these spirals?
  • But what is the Fourier Transform?
• Veritasium
  • This equation will change how you see the world (the logistic map)
  • Where Do Trees Get Their Mass?
• Smarter Every Day
  • What I learned from President Obama although maybe watch that interview first
  • The backward brain bicycle

Podcasts

Favorites

I promise to return and provide individual favorite episodes

• Conversations with Tyler
• Making Sense with Sam Harris
• Unlocking Us with Brené Brown
• Joe Rogan Experience
• Radiolab
• The Daily
• 99% Invisible
• Bloggingheads.tv: The Glenn Show
• The Ezra Klein Show
• Invest Like The Best
• Dolly Parton’s America
• Hello Internet

Economics

• EconTalk with Russ Roberts
• The Not Unreasonable Podcast
• Macro Musings with David Beckworth
• Freakonomics Radio
• Planet Money
• The Weeds