Curation

Internet content I find insightful, useful, or thought-provoking.

My curations

Nassim Taleb’s probability theory library
A semester of probability with Persi Diaconis (suggested reading and accumulated wisdom)

Links I like

Four Masted Barque rounding Cape Horn, 1928. YouTube.
Andy Matuschak’s notes
- Novel, inspirational ways to organize knowledge
David Samuels, “The Happiest Place On Earth: A visit to Switzerland reveals the coming age of techno-Calvinism, created by the merger of iPhones and the new Puritan America
Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives – But Why by Tanner Greer
- “There are practical implications for all this. If you are an intellectual, the sort of person whose work consists of generating and implementing ideas, then understand you are working against time. Figure out the most important intellectual problem you think you can help solve and make sure you spend your thirties doing that. Your fifties and sixties are for teaching, judging, managing, leading, and dispensing with wisdom. Your teens and twenties are for gaining skills and locating the problems that matter to you. Your thirties are for solving them.”
Talking To the Diamond Hands – Party at the Moontower
- On risk and different ways of thinking of it.
Businesses I Love from The Sweaty Startup
Interview with Anthony Braxton
Rediscovering E. Digby Baltzell’s Sociology of Elites — Aaron Renn
- A great summary of the work of sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, who popularized the term WASP and argued for the importance of a generationally-meritocratic upper class in America.
Beware of tight feedback loops by Brian Lui
- Feedback loops in the presence of noise. World construction -> noisy feedback -> world elimination -> action.
- Process improvement: create many parallel processes and discard those that are unfit, not iterative improvements to a single process
Performance Matters, CppCon 2020 – Emery Berger
Familiarity and Belonging by Simon Sarris, as well as Work on these (other) things
David Perell’s links page
- One of the inspirations for this page.
Alexey Guzey’s old links page (new)
- Another one of the inspirations for this page. His homepage is also good.
The Online Books Page
- A site founded by John Mark Ockerbloom in 1993. It is a huge and excellent catalog of links to books available freely online, and great for finding old books.
John Cook’s blog, for succint posts from an applied mathematician working as a consultant.
Welcome to the Everything Game and Twilight of the AI Nerds by Jon Stokes
- Quantification is the digestive fluid of software eating the world. What is quantified is easily gamified. Everything that is gamified, sucks.
- “accusations of ‘bad faith,’ ‘virtue signaling,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘fake news’ are signature moves in the Everything Game — because the game itself actively frustrates our human intuitions about authenticity by nakedly and explicitly reducing everything to a set of software-mediated experiences that consist of signals, rules, scores, and incentives.”
- ML got discovered by capital and the cool kids rolled in.
Ted Gioia’s piece on Hermeto Pascoal, the most musical man in the world
- The videos on this page are fantastic. In one, Hermeto plays jazz with a coffee cup.
Niccolo Soldo’s interviews with Marc Andreessen and James Poulos
McLuhanomics: The Medium versus the Market by James Poulos.
Tyler Cowen’s advice on visiting Paris
The Higher Education Bubble by Erik Torenberg
- “College isn’t insurance—It’s a nightclub. If colleges were normal businesses, with the entire world clamoring to get in, they’d increase enrollment. If they’re offering a great product, more people should benefit from it. But not universities. Because it’s not about learning, it’s about status.”
- “Education has become increasingly a status driven credential, where you simply get it in order to get other things. Everything is about extending optionality. And thus higher ed becomes a way to avoid thinking about the future.”
On Deck Series A Memo.
- “On Deck is where top talent comes to accelerate their ideas and careers, surrounded by a world-class community.”
Article about Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures and talent curation by Tony Kulesa
Homeskoolin’ with Tom Bukovac
Cast Iron Chaos
Life advice: become a billionaire by Applied Divinity Studies.
- Advice: How to be a good billionaire by Rohit.
Career advice compiled by MoontowerMeta
- and all Moontower blog posts
Alastair Roberts’s full audio commentary on the Bible. I believe the cost of knowing the Bible well has been substantially lowered by the free release of this commentary.

Backlog

Warning: unevaluated!