Essays

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem Joan Didion
• A Journey into the Mind of Watts Thomas Pynchon
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again David Foster Wallace
• The Total Library Jorge Luis Borges
• Other Inquisitions Jorge Luis Borges
• Cybernetics and Ghosts Italo Calvino
• Six Memos for the Next Millennium Italo Calvino
• The Imagination of Disaster Susan Sontag
• A Lecture on Ethics Ludwig Wittgenstein
• What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Thomas Nagel
• An Unfortunate Dualist Raymond Smullyan
• If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious Eric Schwitzgebel
• Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind Julian Jaynes
• Analogy as the Core of Cognition Douglas Hofstadter
• On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth Werner Herzog
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences Eugene Wigner
• Who Can Name the Bigger Number? Scott Aaronson
• Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity Scott Aaronson
• Cargo Cult Science Richard Feynman
• You and Your Research Richard Hamming
• A Mathematical Theory of Communication Claude Shannon
• The Bandwagon Claude Shannon
• Computing Machinery and Intelligence Alan Turing
• Intelligent Machinery Alan Turing
• Reflections on Trusting Trust Ken Thompson
• Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction Bret Victor
• The Bitter Lesson Rich Sutton
• The Scaling Hypothesis Gwern
• Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology Chris Olah
• Simulators janus
• Meditations on Moloch Scott Alexander
• Interview with 36Kr Liang Wenfeng
• The Art of Bouldering John Gill
• Games Climbers Play Lito Tejada-Flores

Forecasting

For the past year my life has mostly revolved around forecasting, and getting AI to beat humans at it. Writing on it I’ve enjoyed:

• Vox Populi Francis Galton, 1907
• Truth and Probability Frank Ramsey, 1926
• Foresight: Its Logical Laws, Its Subjective Sources Bruno de Finetti, 1937
• The Use of Knowledge in Society Friedrich Hayek, 1945
• Verification of Forecasts Expressed in Terms of Probability Glenn Brier, 1950
• Rational Decisions I. J. Good, 1952
• The Hedgehog and the Fox Isaiah Berlin, 1953
• Clinical versus Statistical Prediction Paul Meehl, 1954
• Words of Estimative Probability Sherman Kent, 1964
• Belief in the Law of Small Numbers Tversky & Kahneman, 1971
• On the Psychology of Prediction Kahneman & Tversky, 1973
• Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases Tversky & Kahneman, 1974
• Hindsight ≠ Foresight Baruch Fischhoff, 1975
• The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making Robyn Dawes, 1979
• The Well-Calibrated Bayesian A. P. Dawid, 1982
• What Is a Good Forecast? Allan Murphy, 1993
• Could Gambling Save Science? Robin Hanson, 1995
• Psychology of Intelligence Analysis Richards Heuer, 1999
• Probability Theory: The Logic of Science E. T. Jaynes, 2003
• Expert Political Judgment Philip Tetlock, 2005
• Making Beliefs Pay Rent Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2007
• Strictly Proper Scoring Rules, Prediction, and Estimation Gneiting & Raftery, 2007
• The Promise of Prediction Markets Arrow et al., 2008
• Psychological Strategies for Winning a Geopolitical Forecasting Tournament Mellers et al., 2014
• AI Forecasting: One Year In Jacob Steinhardt, 2022
• Prediction Market FAQ Scott Alexander, 2022
• From Prediction Markets to Info Finance Vitalik Buterin, 2024

Language models

Newer work on what language models know, how sure they are, and whether they can forecast.

• On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks Guo et al., 2017
• AI Safety via Debate Irving, Christiano & Amodei, 2018
• Truthful AI Evans et al., 2021
• Eliciting Latent Knowledge Christiano, Cotra & Xu, 2021
• Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know Kadavath et al., 2022
• Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words Lin, Hilton & Evans, 2022
• Forecasting Future World Events with Neural Networks Zou et al., 2022
• Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision Burns et al., 2022
• Language Models Don’t Always Say What They Think Turpin et al., 2023
• Just Ask for Calibration Tian et al., 2023
• The Geometry of Truth Marks & Tegmark, 2023
• Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models Sharma et al., 2023
• Approaching Human-Level Forecasting with Language Models Halawi et al., 2024
• Wisdom of the Silicon Crowd Schoenegger et al., 2024
• ForecastBench Karger et al., 2024
• Consistency Checks for Language Model Forecasters Paleka et al., 2024
• Reasoning Models Don’t Always Say What They Think Chen et al., 2025
• Pitfalls in Evaluating Language Model Forecasters Paleka et al., 2025
• Why Language Models Hallucinate Kalai et al., 2025