Algorithms exploit dopamine hits for engagement. AI slop is everywhere. Mainstream media is agenda-driven. You are busy as it is. What is the healthy information diet you can stick to? In the last two years, I found excellent options that work great for me. Discover them in this post.
Surround yourself with great people. Use quality information. Garbage in, garbage out. If 90% of what you read or watch is optimized for widespread appeal, lacking nuance, optimized for tribal appeal and memetic survival, etc, you rot your brain. You undermine your world model, your decision-making ability, and your effectiveness.
Recommendations
First place goes to Scott Alexander and his Astral Codex Ten blog (formerly Slate Star Codex). Scott’s essays are great for learning new concepts and levelling up your mental operating system, especially if you are new to the topics he covers. I started “reading” most posts once I discovered that there is a narrated audio version available on all the usual podcast platforms, including Spotify. My favourite post is from 2014, the famous Mediations on Moloch (audio).
Another favourite of mine is LessWrong. In particular, the Curated and Popular audio version. LessWrong is a community blog with high-quality posts on decision-making, epistemology, and AI safety/alignment. The Curated and Popular feed gives you a mix of evergreen concepts and reactions to recent events. Some random posts I linked and remember: Survival without dignity (hilarious), The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships, Humans are not automatically strategic, and The Memetics of AI Successionism. Also worth a mention are The Sequences, especially the first few posts or the highlights, and The Best of LessWrong.
For recent events specifically, Don’t Worry About the Vase is an excellent blog. Zvi, the prolific author of said blog, posts weekly AI roundups and provides early reactions to notable events within a day or so. It recently occurred to me that Don’t Worry About the Vase is the closest thing I consume to a classical news channel. I like how Zvi incorporates quotes and back-and-forths from various sources, often with his perspective or response included. While this blog focuses on AI, other topics range from education to dating, and from movies to policy. There is an excellent audio version.
List
My favourite and common information sources:
- Astral Codex Ten blog (audio)
- LessWrong forum (audio)
- Don’t Worry About the Vase blog (audio)
- Dwarkesh Podcast. My top podcast pick. Excellent guests.
Less frequent podcasts:
- No Priors — The hosts are VCs that interview builders and CEOs. Focus on AI and tech startups
- Moonshots — This is my feel-good entertainment podcast. Less signal. Extreme techno-optimism and dismantling the moon
- Mindscape — Sean Carroll (theoretical physicist) talks with guests about the nature of reality
- Naval — Timeless principles about high-agency and long-term focus. Minor focus on wealth. Infrequent content
- 80000 hours — Deep dives into topics surrounding saving the world and Effective Altruism. Warning: can be overly lengthy
- Y Combinator Startup Podcast — It’s in the name, though recently it also includes terrible AI safety takes by Garry Tan
- Win-Win — Exploration of game theory, cooperation, incentives. The host has read Meditations on Moloch too many times
What’s With All The Audio Links?
As I spend enough time looking at screens and reading, being able to consume blogs, articles, and podcasts via audio is great. One of my favourite activities is walking in the park with a good episode on, and doing laundry has never been this much fun.
I started out using Spotify, but switched to AntennaPod a few months ago. You can download this open-source podcast player for free. It’s shown in the screenshot, and I can recommend it.
Twitter, No Wait X
Here are 10 X accounts you can follow for high-signal:
- Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) — Mentioned above, Astral Codex Ten author
- Eliezer Yudkowsky (@ESYudkowsky) — The final boss of rationalism, author of The Sequences
- Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) — Ethereum founder, 500IQ, decentralization freedmons n stuffs
- Zvi Mowshowitz (@TheZvi) — Mentioned above, don’t Worry About the Vase author
- Aella (@Aella_Girl) — Prostitute statistician
- Rob Wiblin (@robertwiblin) — 80000 Hours podcast host
- Liv Boeree (@Liv_Boeree) — Win-Win podcast host
- Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) — Came up with Great Filter, Prediction Markets, Grabby Aliens, and more
- Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) — AI researcher
- Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) — AI researcher
Turns out a lot of the people I consider high-signal are only on X. Seems like they haven’t been knocked around much by the culture wars. Hence, this is a list of X accounts. In an effort to reduce the negative effects of The Algorithm and wasting time on noise, I created a list of X accounts, which I named Signal. This way can easily restrict my feed to only posts from these accounts. I keep this Signal list concise, at 10-15 accounts, many of which are listed above.
Including Robin Hanson here reminded me of Manifold Markets, which I am giving this honourable mention as a decent news source.
This Is Not a Software Design Post
It’s been over 3 years since my last post, Advice for junior developers. Who knows what the future holds, but I expect more blog posts again. I am removing the self-imposed constraint of only posting about software development. Most of my posts will likely remain related to my company, Professional Wiki, and thus not land on this blog. You can find those on the Professional Wiki blog and the ProWiki blog.
This post is a spiritual successor to my old Year In Books posts (2017, 2016, 2015). I’ve been thinking about posting another one of these for over 12 months. Since I “read” more via the sources mentioned in this post than classical books, and this seems like the more interesting topic for readers, you get this post instead.
Your Top Picks?
What are your favourite sources of high-quality content? Let me know in the comments!