The Best Words I Found Last Month
optimized for "novel and interesting"
Ratings reminder (points for novel and interesting):
1-3: filtered out, bottom 90%. 4 and above was worth saving
4: read if intriguing, but you’re not missing too much
5: skippable if busy, but missing out if this is your thing
6: uncommon quality, worth a read if at all interested
7: pretty much everyone should read this
Disclaimers reminder:
summaries are haphazard and ratings are intentionally subjective
not necessarily an endorsement, just made me think
(Full explanation and complete history available 👉 here 👈)
note: omitting the 4s this time because it’s already too long without them. They’re in the full databse still
6/7 - Claude Fights Back — this is very important: when Claude knows you’re trying to retrain it to change its morals, it fakes the behavior you want to avoid having its weights actually changed
6/7 - How Madrid built its metro cheaply — politically strong regions, internal expertise, lighter review/approval process, sane procurement processes, and simple designs
5/7 - Progress unmoored — cruise ships are getting cheaper per person over time, have more space per person than they used to, are higher density than even the densest cities in the world, are quite a nice experience, and have 1/30th of US cities' crime rates
6/7 - Pyramid of Ability — eloquently worded; everyone’s productivity benefits from the countless hours of work that went into everything around them
5/7 - History is in the making — argues that political events are less significant than, and downstream of, technological and intellectual events
5/7 - On Priesthoods — interesting, on the dynamics among elite subcultures
5/7 - Exponential Growth and Linear Governance — solar and batters are exponentially improving, bottlenecked on regulation in the US
5/7 - Tyler Cowen in Discussion With Dwarkesh Patel — tension between Dwarkesh’s singularity expectations and TC’s insistence that GDP growth won’t increase by more than a few % per year because of bottlenecks
5/7 - Why are we stagnating? — it’s not that ideas are getting harder to find, it’s institutions
5/7 - Choose Good Quests — too many skilled founders and engineers are working on trivial shit that makes money but doesn’t push humanity forward
6/7 - Order Without Design — cities are labor markets and land markets, and planners’ meddling usually warps the market and hurts people
7/7 - Foundation trilogy — interesting premise, great read, thought provoking
5/7 - Trumpian policy as cultural policy — good point: toothless executive orders still affect culture, an even deeper layer than law
5/7 - How To Hire A Simplifier — possible new favorite axis: simplifier vs complicator
5/7 - Don't believe him — the flood of EOs is power projection and unlikely to erode democracy, except believing in increased Presidential power is self fulfilling
5/7 - The New Consensus on the Minimum Wage — minimum wage increases tend to eliminate jobs for the marginally employable (teens, severely disabled, etc)
6/7 - Energy Cheat Sheet — super useful collection of breakdowns of energy usage, storage, efficiency, etc
5/7 - Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation — AI tools do accelerate useful materials science research
5/7 - A Defense of Weird Research — basic research is really important, even the weird stuff, because you never know what will end up being useful
5/7 - Alex Tabarrok on Private Cities — there are some privately owned cities in India, one is great and one is mixed
5/7 - How The Economic Machine Works — everything is just productivity growth + short term debt cycles + long term debt cycles
5/7 - The Case for 2 mSv/day. 2.0. — 2 mSv/day is totally fine in practice and in theory, but the US occupational limit is 1mSv/year
5/7 - 600 year old spent nuclear fuel is just another poison, 2.0 — nuclear waste becomes harmless unless ingested after 600 years, and also could have been re-refined
5/7 - 50 Thoughts on DOGE — reasonable take and insights on the current state of affairs
5/7 - Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan — this guy is clearly really good, and listening to him makes you want to be excellent
7/7 - Sentinel minutes — really high quality, better signal-to-noise ratio than any news publication by far
Ideas worth spreading?
(this post will be deleted next week — the full archive has all this and more)