Which Information Sources I Listen to the Most

Day 18 of Inkhaven: 30 Days of Posts

A lot of the time, when I'm talking about or thinking about things, I lean on mental frameworks that I have built up over time. I think it's helpful to investigate and share the origins of these frameworks, and also encourage the spread of amazing ideas. These are some of the people who have had a huge impact on shaping my thinking recently.

Arnaud Bertrand

I get a huge amount of value from reading Arnaud Bertrand's work. His commentary primarily focuses on China, the US, and Europe and the interactions of the three, but from his perspective as a Frenchman who has lived in China for around 10 years.

His work represents a far more positive vision of China than is generally presented in the West, and while I think he is sometimes overzealous in his support (I disagree with his Mao apologism, for example) I still find his work overall extremely valuable.

Most importantly, he shares a huge number of facts in a way that I find other writers don't, which has helped me build a world model that rests on the primacy of China as potentially the most critical power in the world, directing the course of history in the 21st century while other major powers have quietly been dislodged from the seat of power and are simply flies within the carriage being driven by China.

Andrej Karpathy

Andrej is a wonderful thinker regarding AI, and every take that he has is grounded in his enormous experience building AI models from the ground up, his hands-on experience with specific tools or models, and his experience as a teacher and communicator within the space.

Whenever I am thinking about whether or not to take up a recent trend or recently released tool I heavily weigh my decision based on Andrej's take on the subject, and in general I've never regretted taking the time to absorb his views. What's more, I feel a huge amount more confidence in my own approach to the use of specific tools as a result, which has interesting effects on my usage patterns, affecting rate of adoption etc.

Most importantly, Andrej's amazing video tutorials exploring deep aspects of machine learning from the ground up are still the best educational resources that I have ever encountered on the topic, and made understanding the topics vastly easier than they otherwise would have been. I still recommend his tutorials as the first port of call for relatively technical people wanting to learn more about AI and machine learning.

Owain Evans

Owain's work has been some of the most impactful and instructive in the entire field of AI, but despite this he still seems somewhat underrated relative to how deep his intuitions around AI are.

While I don't have access to Owain's insight with the same regularity as some of the other people on this list, I do feel like he is the person whose mind I spend the most time trying to model and reverse engineer, due to his ability to generate surprising breakthrough insights.

Interestingly, Owain has a philosophy PhD, which I think feeds into his ability to think extremely deeply about the problems he grapples with. The kind of thinking that he does about AI somehow makes more sense to me from the perspective of philosophy than what I would expect from someone with a pure AI background. Given my own philosophy background, I feel inspired to approach research work in the same way.

Derek Sivers

Derek is someone who has always inspired me with his original thinking, and particularly his ability to defy convention and simply orient directly to what makes him happy and is good, despite what others might call inefficient from the outside.

Often when I am in some kind of deep funk, I revisit Derek's website and poke around until his way of thinking about the world infects me again and I feel inspired to take responsibility for my life.

This ability to coherently transfer the essence of his worldview through the online presence he has cultivated is I think one of the most remarkable achievements of Derek and is reflected in every aspect of his website and his work. It all coheres into a philosophy that emphasizes coherence, integrity, simplicity, robustness, and sovereignty. I find it incredibly inspiring to the extent that I shamelessly copied his website when building my own.