Reading

Blogs

Blogs I keep coming back to.

Ideas & essays

  • Astral Codex Ten (Website) — Scott Alexander’s essays on AI, forecasting, medicine, and philosophy.
  • Overcoming Bias (Website) — Robin Hanson on hidden motives, cultural drift, and contrarian social science.
  • The Renaissance Mathematicus (Website) — a self-taught historian of science on the history of maths, astronomy, and navigation, cheerfully busting popular myths about al-Khwārizmī, Ibn al-Haytham, and Newton.
  • Wait But Why (Website) — Tim Urban’s enormous, stick-figure-illustrated deep dives on AI, space, procrastination, and the human timeline, taking one huge question and patiently walking all the way to the bottom of it.
  • Johnny’s Blog (Website) — a personal “some thoughts, some links” site of curated lists, film and book notes, recipes, travel guides, and opinions on everything from baseball to politics.
  • Ribbonfarm (Website) — Venkatesh Rao’s “refactored perceptions” blog, retired in 2024 and kept online as an archive of 17 years and 1,000+ posts on organizational theory, economics, technology, and ritual; start with The Gervais Principle, which reads The Office as an anatomy of how companies actually distribute power.
Gwern.net (Website) — Gwern Branwen on AI scaling, psychology, and statistics, plus darknet markets, spaced repetition, and blinded self-experiments. Every page carries a status and a confidence rating, and the site is built around sidenotes and link popups so you can follow a citation without leaving the paragraph.
  • The Scaling Hypothesis (Article) — the 2020 essay arguing that intelligence falls out of scale itself: keep making simple networks bigger and feeding them more, and the capabilities arrive without anyone designing them.
  • Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning (Article) — the spacing-effect literature set against the practice, including when a card is worth making at all and when reviewing it costs more than forgetting would.
  • Commoditize Your Complement (Article) — Joel Spolsky’s strategy pattern traced through case after case: make the thing next to yours cheap, and the profit pools in what you sell.
  • Banner Ads Considered Harmful (Article) — nine months of A/B testing ads on his own site across 380,140 pageviews, finding a ~10% traffic loss among readers without adblock. He removed AdSense.