Here are links to books, websites, blogs, PDFs, poems, etc. that I resonate with, and a few notes on them as well.
2026
- Go to the Limits of Your Longing, I was shown this poem by a friend and feel deeply inspired by the phrase "limits of longing" as well as "seriousness" and the choice of a deity (real or in the Weber sense of the phrase) as your value system.
- The International Development of China
- Tech Dollar, Has oil dollar dominance ceded to the Tech Dollar as the new might of American hegemony?
- How Financial Architectures Shaped (and Will Continue to Shape) Chinese Drug Development
- Curious Cases of Financial Engineering in Biotech, The intuition of viewing biotechs as a basket of risk, constantly updating your priors, is helpful to understand as the labs verticalize with respect to drug development. Will the labs need to adopt some of the mechanisms in this paper?
- Operating Well – What I Learned at Stripe
- Three Important Steps in My Maturation Process – Thomas Dullien
- The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
- A Secret Web, Using random search engines with LLMs generates better and more interesting results because of a greater amount of variance. Can you build tools to increase variance to find rare tokens?
- Recent Graduate Joins Group of Clinton-Gore Speechwriters | News
- Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail, The story of human civilization is the ascension up the abstraction tree.
- Warren Weaver and New Science Instruments, The creation of new tools for measurement led to entirely new fields because they create new ways of perceiving the world and new data modalities for scientists to collect data about what is right and wrong!, Power of sensors.
- Theory of the Firm, In the analysis of public markets, the "multiple" is used to price some intangible value of the business. I buy that the "theory of the firm" as a unit of complex emergent value is baked into the "multiple".
- Intelligence Killed Genius, Achieving flow state and constructing the world that you want is really not about insane levels of intelligence.
- Naïve Epistemology, Savvy Epistemology
- There Should Be ‘General Managers’ for More of the World’s Important Problems, How do you incentivize people to work on important problems?
- The High-Return Activity of Raising Others’ Aspirations, Raise ambitions.
- Good Conversations Have Emergent Properties
- Emergence Is Not Engineering
- Returning to Stanford, Harvard is a place of serendipity but also a place that requires a lot of intentionality.
- Self Reflections of a Striver, Striverism is a predominant religion of Gen Z and informs much of the culture. A good read to understand some of the mindsets.
- A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
- How I've Run Major Projects
2025
- The Pale King, "Boring" & large amounts of bureaucracy create power in the modern state. Boring concepts are the best antimeme.
- Working, Specificity is king
- The Elements of Style, How to write well, how to structure one's thoughts and think clearly. Paragraph structure, intellectual arguments, etc. Where should emphasis be?
- How Do You Find Your People, When Searching Is Itself an Antipattern?, Why greatness cannot be planned: the rat race vs. self-exploration.
- We Need a New Science of Progress
- Infinite Cornucopia (ft. Mills Baker), To what extent is abstraction helpful?
- The Venturification of Research & the Resulting Prisoner's Dilemma - Michael Dempsey: Blog
2024
- On the Genealogy of Morality
- The Fountainhead
- Hyperion Cantos, The idea of moving backward in time and our future being someone's past is super cool.
- Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Working backward linearly from your goal may not be the best path.
2023
- Gödel, Escher, Bach, Complex systems across domains.
- Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, The fundamentals of quality, ordering systems and evolution by ways of inorganic, biological, social, intellectual.
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Tacit knowledge (quality) as a fundamental part of being.