Last updated: April 11th 2026.
Currently Reading
- Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021)
- Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters (Richard Rumelt, 2011)
2026
- Red Heart (Max Harms, 2026)
- If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All (Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, 2026)
- A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens, 1843)
2025
- BlueDot Biosecurity Course (BlueDot Impact, 2025)
- Why I Write: Essay Collection (George Orwell, 1946)
- The Time Machine (H. G. Wells, 1895)
- Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932)
- The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change The Way You Lead Forever (Michael Bungay Stanier, 2016)
- Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)
- The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka, 1915)
- The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943)
- 1984 (George Orwell, 1949)
- How to Actually Change Your Mind (Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2009)
- Inadequate Equilibria: How and Why Civilizations Get Stuck (Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2017)
- Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2009)
- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (Cal Newport, 2019)
- The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley (Michael S Malone, 1985)
- Quran 30 for 30: Thematic Tasfir (Omar Suleiman & Ismail Kamdar, 2025)
- From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Fred Turner, 2008)
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion, 1968)
- To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (Edmund Wilson, 1940)
- Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery (Adam Hochschild, 2005)
- How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth (Mark Koyama & Jared Rubin, 2022)
- The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (Deborah Harkness, 2007)
- The Final Pagan Generation (Edward J. Watts, 2015)
- The Rise of Christianity (Rodney Stark, 1996)
- The Kingdom (Emmanuel Carrère, 2014)
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn, 1962)
2024
- Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (Peter Thiel & Blake Masters, 2014) [my summary here]
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2015)
2022
- Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom, 2014)
- Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Decisions (Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths, 2016)
- The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't (Julia Galef, 2021)
- Superforecasting: The Art of Science and Prediction (Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner, 2015)
- Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control (Stuart Russell, 2019)
- Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and How You Can Make a Difference (William MacAskill, 2015)
2021
- The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (Toby Ord, 2020)
- Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams (Matthew Walker, 2017)
- How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie, 1936)
April 2026
- How can an ordinary person prepare for AGI? (benjamintodd.substack.com)
- Anthropic's Pause is the Most Expensive Alarm in Corporate History [Fiction] — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Have we already lost? Part 2: Reasons for Doom — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Betteridge's law of headlines - Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
- I quit drinking for a year - DYNOMIGHT INTERNET NEWSLETTER (dynomight.substack.com)
- The effects of caffeine consumption do not decay with a ~5 hour half-life — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- The hard part isn't noticing when papers are bad, it's deciding what to do afterwards — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- My picture of the present in AI (blog.redwoodresearch.org)
- 10 pieces of advice for children - Nina Panickssery (blog.ninapanickssery.com)
- On the Road - by Erica Hu - trekking (erica-hu.com)
- Some things I noticed while LARPing as a grantmaker — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- USB-Clawd and a Mini Fax Machine (benbyfax.substack.com)
- Daniel-isms: 50 Ideas for Life I Repeatedly Share – Daniel Frank (danfrank.ca)
- What it's like to be an AI safety grantmaker (and why we need more of them) — EA Forum (forum.effectivealtruism.org)
- how to tell if men will attack you on the street (aella.substack.com)
March 2026
- 🟡 Iranian steel and nuclear plants bombed, Houthi attacks begin, AI solves open problem in mathematics || Global Risks Weekly Roundup #13/2026 (blog.sentinel-team.org)
- Know your insomnia treatments (nablatheta.substack.com)
- Don't Overdose Locally Beneficial Changes — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- What I Got From 1.5 Years In Slightly-Competitive Debate — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- My journey to the microwave alternate timeline — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- They don't make 'em like they used to — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Testosterone gave me my life back (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- The missing mood about EA guilt - by Ajeya Cotra (substack.com)
- 🟡 Oil and gas facilities attacked in the Middle East, another US Marine unit deploying to the Middle East, desalination plants threatened || Global Risks Weekly Roundup #12/2026 (blog.sentinel-team.org)
- Lack of Social Grace is a Lack of Skill — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- What the humans like is responsiveness (sashachapin.substack.com)
- Kicking an addiction to self-loathing (mhollyelmoreblog.wordpress.com)
- The missing mood about EA guilt - by Ajeya Cotra (acotra.substack.com)
- Please remember how strange this all is. — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Christian homeschoolers in the year 3000 — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Depression – Lorien Psychiatry (lorienpsych.com)
- Sustainable motivation | Helen Toner | EA Global: San Francisco 2019 (youtube.com)
- Daniel-isms: 50 Ideas for Life I Repeatedly Share (part 2) (notnottalmud.substack.com)
- On infinite ethics - Joe Carlsmith (joecarlsmith.com)
- The persona selection model — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Desperation hamster wheels — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Things That Sometimes Help If You Have Depression (slatestarcodex.com)
- Resources On Mental Health And Finding A Therapist — EA Forum (forum.effectivealtruism.org)
- LLMs predict my coffee - DYNOMIGHT INTERNET NEWSLETTER (dynomight.substack.com)
- The modern formatting addiction in writing (dynomight.substack.com)
- Towards Alignment Auditing as a Numbers-Go-Up Science — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- The case for AI safety capacity-building work — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Half-assing it with everything you've got (mindingourway.com)
- AI for AI safety (joecarlsmith.substack.com)
- Paths and waystations in AI safety (joecarlsmith.substack.com)
- When should we worry about AI power-seeking? (joecarlsmith.substack.com)
- I underestimated AI capabilities (again) - by Ajeya Cotra (planned-obsolescence.org)
- Replacing guilt (mindingourway.com)
- You're not burning out because you're tired — EA Forum (forum.effectivealtruism.org)
- A personal take on why (and why not) to work on AI safety at Open Philanthropy (catherinebrewer.substack.com)
- 🟡 US and Israel strike Iran, Iran retaliates against US allies, Anthropic designated a supply chain risk || Global Risks Weekly Roundup #9/2026 (blog.sentinel-team.org)
February 2026
- Here's to the Polypropylene Makers — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- What is it to solve the alignment problem? - Joe Carlsmith (joecarlsmith.com)
- How do we solve the alignment problem? - Joe Carlsmith (joecarlsmith.com)
- Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War \ Anthropic (anthropic.com)
- We hosted a dessert invention contest - by Ben James (benbyfax.substack.com)
- The Persona Selection Model: Why AI Assistants might Behave like Humans (alignment.anthropic.com)
- The ML ontology and the alignment ontology — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- 🟩 US buildup in Middle East continues, Russian vessel en route to Cuba, AI time horizons lengthen | Global Risks Weekly Roundup #8/2026 (blog.sentinel-team.org)
- We're in Triage Mode for AI Policy - by Miles Brundage (milesbrundage.substack.com)
- The stakes of AI moral status - Joe Carlsmith (joecarlsmith.com)
- Three positive updates I made about technical grantmaking at Coefficient Giving (fka Open Phil) — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Changing the world for the worse — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Animal welfare in 1800 — EA Forum (forum.effectivealtruism.org)
- The Unilateralist’s Curse and the Case for a Principle of Conformity (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
- [REPOST] Epistemic Learned Helplessness (slatestarcodex.com)
- Against neutrality about creating happy lives - Joe Carlsmith (joecarlsmith.com)
- Actually possible: thoughts on Utopia - Joe Carlsmith (joecarlsmith.com)
- Request for Proposals: Improving Capability Evaluations (coefficientgiving.org)
- [Closed] Request for Proposals: Studying and Forecasting the Real-World Impacts of Systems Built from LLMs (coefficientgiving.org)
- [Closed] Request for Proposals: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real-World Tasks (coefficientgiving.org)
- Research directions Open Phil wants to fund in technical AI safety — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Open Philanthropy Technical AI Safety RFP - $40M Available Across 21 Research Areas — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- New roles on my team: come build Open Phil's technical AI safety program with me! — EA Forum (forum.effectivealtruism.org)
- Comments on OpenPhil's Interpretability RFP — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- On future people, looking back at 21st century longtermism - Joe Carlsmith (joecarlsmith.com)
- Killing the ants - Joe Carlsmith (joecarlsmith.com)
- Thoughts on being mortal - Joe Carlsmith (joecarlsmith.com)
- On clinging - Joe Carlsmith's Substack (joecarlsmith.substack.com)
- The costs of caution (planned-obsolescence.org)
- Leaving Open Philanthropy, going to Anthropic - Joe Carlsmith (joecarlsmith.com)
- By 2050 we could get "10,000 years of technological progress" (youtube.com)
- Functional Representations of Emotion in a Large Language Model (transformer-circuits.pub)
- Why we should expect ruthless sociopath ASI — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- The attempted kidnapping at my house - by Aella (aella.substack.com)
- A multi-level postmortem of how our whole house got badly poisoned — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Church Planting: When Venture Capital Finds Jesus — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- 🟩 US sends second aircraft carrier to Middle East, European nuclear deterrent discussed, pandemic preparedness deprioritized at NIAID | Global Risks Weekly Roundup #7/2026 (blog.sentinel-team.org)
- You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership (astralcodexten.com)
- Aligning to Virtues — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Do Less. - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- The Missing Genre: Heroic Parenthood - You can have kids and still punch the sun — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time (joannabregan.substack.com)
- Ending Parking Space Saving — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- after my dad died, we found the love letters (jenn.site)
- my dad could still be alive, but he's not. (jenn.site)
- Making every researcher seek grants is a broken model — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- 🟩 Anthropic and OpenAI release new models, US-Iran talks continue, illegal biolab in the US, nuclear arms treaty expires | Global Risks Weekly Roundup #6/2026 (blog.sentinel-team.org)
- Angels-on-the-Shoulder: 5 AI Tools for Better Decisions (forethought.org)
- I miss thinking hard. (jernesto.com)
- AlgZoo: uninterpreted models with fewer than 1,500 parameters (alignment.org)
- Eli's shortform feed — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Jeremy Bentham - Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
- Different senses in which two AIs can be “the same” — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- the case for CoT unfaithfulness is overstated — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Extending control evaluations to non-scheming threats (blog.redwoodresearch.org)
- It Is Reasonable To Research How To Use Model Internals In Training — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- 50 things I know (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Berkson's paradox - Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
- Burnout is breaking a sacred pact (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- bye, mom (aella.substack.com)
- The seam through the center of things (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- The lies I used to tell myself (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- In praise of quitting (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Aliveness and where to find it - by Ben James - Ben by Fax (substack.com)
- Are you stuck in movie logic? (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Rightness is a prison (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- How to increase your surface area for luck (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Tying yourself to the mast (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Everyone’s the hero of their own story (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- How to instantly be better at things (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Fuck willpower (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Learn to love the Moat of Low Status (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Are you a jerk, or a liar? (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Everyone here is in a cult (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Crossing the cringe minefield (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Barnum effect - Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
- 37 things people love about Sasha Chapin (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- I used to be a high-performing robot (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- There are nine wolves inside of you (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Maybe you’re not Actually Trying (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Paper Highlights of January 2026 (aisafetyfrontier.substack.com)
- How Nature Became a 'Prestige' Journal (asimov.press)
- Opinionated Takes on Meetups Organizing — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Why read novels? (dynomight.net)
- On neural scaling and the quanta hypothesis (ericjmichaud.com)
- “Features” aren’t always the true computational primitives of a model, but that might be fine anyways — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- The Hidden Cost of Our Lies to AI — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- A playbook for field strategy (blog.bluedot.org)
- Aliveness and where to find it (benbyfax.substack.com)
- Fake thinking and real thinking (joecarlsmith.substack.com)
January 2026
- Mini Blog Post 3: Become a person who Actually Does Things — Neel Nanda (neelnanda.io)
- How to be more agentic (usefulfictions.substack.com)
- Book Review: Seeing Like A State (slatestarcodex.com)
- Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard - YouTube (youtube.com)
- AI-engineered diseases are coming. Here's the plan to stop them. | Andrew Snyder-Beattie - YouTube (youtube.com)
- From Warp Speed to 100 Days—Asterisk (asteriskmag.com)
- The UK Recovery Trial for Covid-19 treatments helped save a million l… (archive.ph)
- Oversight Assistants: Turning Compute into Understanding — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Unsupervised decoding of encoded reasoning using language model... (arxiv.org)
- Recent LLMs can do 2-hop and 3-hop latent (no-CoT) reasoning on natural facts — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Recent LLMs can use filler tokens or problem repeats to improve (no-CoT) math performance — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Why Not Just Train For Interpretability? — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models (transformer-circuits.pub)
- Can we safely automate alignment research? — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Turning 20 in the probable pre-apocalypse — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- The Redwood Research podcast - YouTube (youtube.com)
- Paper Highlights of December 2025 - by Johannes Gasteiger (aisafetyfrontier.substack.com)
- The Most Important Graph in AI Right Now | Beth Barnes, CEO of METR - YouTube (youtube.com)
- Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research - YouTube (youtube.com)
- So you’ve taken over the world - by Owen Cotton-Barratt (strangecities.substack.com)
- The behavioral selection model for predicting AI motivations — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- TPU Deep Dive (henryhmko.github.io)
- my guide for visiting NYC (notnottalmud.substack.com)
- How AI Is Learning to Think in Secret — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Reflections on 2025 (samuelalbanie.substack.com)
- The Assistant Axis: Situating and Stabilizing the Default Persona... (arxiv.org)
- We Let an AI Talk To Another AI. Things Got Really Weird. | Kyle Fish, Anthropic - YouTube (youtube.com)
- Alignment remains a hard, unsolved problem — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- On Agency (sebastianfarquhar.com)
- Why Every Scientist That Wanted Mirror Bacteria Changed Their Mind - YouTube (youtube.com)
- Film Study for Research (jsteinhardt.stat.berkeley.edu)
- 🟩 US attacks Venezuela and captures Maduro, threatens Iran, Mexico, Colombia and Denmark || Global Risks Weekly Roundup #1/2026 (blog.sentinel-team.org)