Media

Everything here I have at least found interesting. Some favorites are marked with a **.

Articles

• Bitcoin is Time
• Bus Factor 1
• Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard

Blogs / Substacks

• Alexey Guzey: personal site
• Bartosz Ciechanowski: visual, interactive, intuitive explanations of various topics
  • ** Cameras and Lenses: a ground-up interactive explanation of how cameras and lenses work.
• Dan Luu: programming and computer science
• Gwern: essays, personal experiments
  • The Melancholy of Subculture Society
  • Terrorism Is Not About Terror
  • Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement
• Mr. Money Mustache: personal finance, frugality, financial independence
  • The True Cost of Commuting
  • Or start from the beginning
• Paul Graham: startups, advice, life
  • How To Do Philosophy
  • Keep Your Identity Small
  • The Age of the Essay
  • The Refragmentation
  • The Top Idea in Your Mind
• Razib Khan: Substack Unsupervised Learning; blog Gene Expression
  • Made in China
  • Our Three-Body Problem
• Astral Codex Ten / Slate Star Codex: essays on a wide variety of topics
  • Shilling For Big Mitochondria

  • Your Book Review: Addiction By Design (note: written by a reader)

  • ** Book Review: Albion’s Seed
  • ** Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty
  • Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
  • Different Worlds
  • I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup
  • ** Meditations on Moloch
  • Staying Classy
  • The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories
• Tanner Greer (The Scholar’s Stage): mostly history, with an emphasis on Asia
  • History Is Written By The Losers
  • ** Tradition Is Smarter Than You Are
  • Radical Islamic Terrorism In Context, Part 1 and Part 2

Books

• ** Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China: on modern China, largely through experiences and stories of individuals
• ** Very Short Introductions: a series of over 700 short (~150 page) books covering the basics of a wide variety of topics
  • e.g. Communism: A Very Short Introduction

Podcasts

• Lex Fridman Podcast: AI, philosophy, life, expert interviews
  • ** #167 Saagar Enjeti: Politics, History, and Power
  • #166 Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media
  • #117 Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning
  • #63 Stephen Kotkin: Stalin, Putin, and the Nature of Power
  • #20 Oriol Vinyals: DeepMind AlphaStar, StarCraft, Language, and Sequences
• Conversations with Tyler: interviews with experts from a wide range of domains
  • Fuchsia Dunlop on Chinese Food, Culture, and Travel
  • Masha Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia
  • Sam Altman on Loving Community, Hating Coworking, and the Hunt for Talent

Websites

• LessWrong: rationality, essays on interesting topics
  • ** Anti-social Punishment
  • Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points
  • Conservation of Expected Evidence
  • Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
  • Hindsight Devalues Science
  • Correspondence Bias