Substack and Other Blog Recommendations
Substack recommendations are remarkably important, and the actual best reason to write here instead of elsewhere.
As in, even though I have never made an active attempt to seek recommendations, approximately half of my subscribers come from recommendations from other blogs. And for every two subscribers I have, my recommendations have generated approximately one subscription elsewhere. I am very thankful to all those who have recommended this blog, either through substack or otherwise.
As the blog has grown, I’ve gotten a number of offers for reciprocal recommendations. So far I have turned all of these down, because I have yet to feel any are both sufficiently high quality and a good match for me and my readers.
Instead, I’m going to do the following:
This post will go through the 16 blogs I do currently recommend, and explain what I think is awesome about each of them.
I will also go over the top other non-substack blogs and sources I read regularly.
Then I will briefly review the 10 other substacks that sent me the most readers.
I will plan on doing something similar periodically in the future, each time looking at at least 10 previously uncovered substacks, and each time evaluating which blogs I should add or remove from the recommendation list. In the future I will skip any inactive substacks.
The comments section will be an opportunity to pitch your blog, or pitch someone else’s blog. Please aggressively like comments to vote for blogs.
Table of Contents
Note on Paywalls
I have a very high bar for being willing to go behind a paywall, the same way I have decided not to have one of my own. If something is behind a unique paywall, then almost all of my readers can’t read it, and the post is effectively outside of the broader conversation. So not only do I have to be excited enough about the content to initiate a subscription, I have to be excited enough despite it being unavailable to others.
I am of course happy to accept and respond to gift subscriptions for various content, including other blogs and newspapers, which substantially increase the chance I read, discuss or ultimately recommend the content in question.
The Substacks I Recommend (Not Centrally AI)
Going over this list, I notice that I highly value a unique focus and perspective, a way of thinking and a set of tools that I want to have available, that is compatible with the rationalist-style perspective of thinking with gears and figuring out what will actually work versus not work. I want to be offered a part of that elephant I would otherwise miss, a different reality-tunnel to incorporate into my own.
What I do not need to do is agree with the person about most things. I have profound and increasing important disagreements with most of the people on this list. When I recommend the substack, I am absolutely not endorsing the opinions or worldview contained therein.
I also reminded myself, doing this, that there is a lot of great content I simply don’t have the time to check out properly, especially recently with several things creating big temporary additional time commitments, that will continue for a few more weeks.
Astral Codex Ten (Scott Alexander)
Scott Alexander is one of the great ones. If you haven’t dived into the Slate Star Codex archives, you should do that sometime. In My Culture, many of those posts are foundational, and I link back to a number of them periodically.
There was a period of years during the SSC era when Scott Alexander had very obviously the best blog by a wide margin, and everyone I knew would drop what they were doing and read posts whenever they came out.
I do think that golden age has passed for now, and things have slipped somewhat. I can get frustrated, especially when he focuses on Effective Altruist content. I usually skip the guest posts unless something catches my eye.
That still leaves this as my top Substack or personal blog.
Overcoming Bias (Robin Hanson)
Robin Hanson is unique. I hope he never changes, and never stops Robin Hansoning.
Most of the time, when I read one of his posts, I disagree with it. But it is almost always interesting, and valuable to think about exactly what I disagree with and why. The questions are always big. I could happily write an expanded response to most of his posts, as I have done a number of times in the past. I would do this more if AI wasn’t taking up so much attention.
I find Hanson frustrating on AI in particular, especially on Twitter where he discusses this more often and more freely. We strongly disagree on all aspects of AI, including over its economic value and pace of progress, and whether we should welcome it causing human extinction. That part I actually like, that’s him Robin Hansoning.
What I do not like, but also find valuable in its own way, is that he often seems willing, especially on Twitter, to amplify essentially anything related to AI that makes one of his points, highlight pull quotes supporting those points, and otherwise act in a way that I see as compromising his otherwise very strong epistemic standards.
The reason I find this valuable is that this then acts as a forcing function to ensure I consider and am aware of opposing rhetoric and arguments, and retain balance.
Silver Bulletin (Nate Silver)
Before we first met up so he could interview me for his book On the Edge, I knew I had a lot in common with Nate Silver. I’ve been following him since Baseball Prospectus. Only when we talked more, and when I read the final book, did I realize quite how much we matched up in interests and ways of thinking. I hope to do a collaboration at some point if the time can be found.
His politics model will probably always be what we most remember him for, but Silver Bulletin is Nate Silver’s best non-modeling work, and it also comes with the modern version of the politics model that remains the best game in town when properly understood in context. He offers a unique form of grounding on political, sports and other issues, and a way of bridging my kinds of ideas into mainstream discourse. I almost never regret reading.
Rough Diamonds (Sarah Constantin)
Sarah is one of my closest friends, and at one point was one of my best employees.
In her blog she covers opportunities in science and technology, and also in society, and offers a mix of doing the research and explaining it in ways few others can, pointing our attention in places it would not otherwise go but that are often worth going to, and offering her unique perspectives on many questions.
If these topics are relevant to your interests, you should absolutely jump on this. If there’s one blog that deserves more of my attention than it gets, if only I had more time to actually dig deep, this would be it.
Construction Physics (Brian Potter)
No one drills down into the practical, detail level in an accessible way as well as Brian Potter. One needs grounding in these kinds of physical details. When AI was going less crazy, and I was spending a lot more time on diverse topics especially housing and energy, I was always excited to dive into one of this posts. They very much help distinguish what is and is not important, and where to put your focus, helping you build models made of gears.
I noticed compiling this list that I haven’t been reading these posts for a while due to lack of time, but the moment I went there I was excited to dive back in, and the most recent post is definitely going directly into the queue. My current plan is to do a full catching up before my next housing roundup.
In My Tribe (Arnold Kling)
There is something highly refreshing about the way Kling offers his own consistent old school economic libertarian perspective, takes his time responding to anything, and generally tries to understand everything including developments in AI from that perspective. He knows a few important things and it is good to get reminders of them. He often offers links, the curation of which is good enough that they are worth considering.
Dominic Cummings Substack (Dominic Cummings)
Perhaps never has a man more simultaneously given both all and none of the f***s.
Dominic writes with a combination of urgency, deep intellectual curiosity and desire to explain things across a huge variety of topics, and utter contempt for all those idiots trying to run our civilization and especially its governments, or for what anyone else thinks, or for the organizing principles of writing.
He screams into the void, warning that so many things are going wrong, that all of politics is incompetent to either achieve outcomes or even win elections, and for us to all wake up and stop acting like utter idiots. What he cares about is what actually works and would work, and what actually happened or will happen.
His posts are collections of snippets even more than mine, jumping from one thing to another, trying to weave them together over time to explain various important things about today and from history that people almost never notice.
I find a dose of these perspectives highly valuable. One needs to learn from people, even when you disagree with them on quite a lot of things, and to be clear I disagree with Dominic on many big things. I feel I understand the world substantially better than I would have without Dominic. One does not need to in any way approve of his politics or preferences, starting of course with Brexit, to benefit from these insights.
Bet On It (Bryan Caplan)
Similar to Dominic Cummings and Robin Hanson, I think most people who read this would benefit from a healthy dose, at least once, of Bryan Caplan and the way he views the world, offering us a different reality tunnel where things you don’t consider are emphasized and things you often emphasize are dismissed rather than considered.
Bryan expresses himself as if he is supremely confident he is right about everything, that everyone else is simply obviously wrong about them, and that the reasoning is very simple, if only you would listen. You want this voice as part of the chorus in your head.
I found The Case Against Education and Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids both extremely valuable.
However, I do notice that I feel like I already have enough of this voice on the issues he emphasizes most often, especially calls for free markets including open borders. So I notice that I am increasingly skipping more of his posts on these subjects.
Slow Boring (Matthew Yglesias)
This blog is of course primarily about politics, in particular how much better he thinks everything would be if normie Democrats were moderate, and supported policies that were both good and popular and did the things that win elections and improved outcomes, and how to go about doing that. He takes a very proto-rationalist, practical approach to this, that I very much appreciate, complete with yearly predictions. The writing is consistently enjoyable and clear.
It is important to think carefully about exactly how much politics one wants to engage with, and in which ways, and with what balance of incoming perspectives. Many of us should minimize such exposure most of the time.
Useful Fictions (Cate Hall)
Cate Hall is a super awesome person and her blog is all about taking that and then saying ‘and so can you.’ She shares various tricks and tactics she has used to be more agentic and happier and make her life better. They definitely won’t all work for you or be good ideas for you, but the rate of return on considering them, why they might work and what you might want to do with them is fantastic, and it’s a joy to read about it.
The Substacks I Recommend (Centrally AI)
I have to be extremely stingy recommending AI blogs, because the whole point of my AI blog is that you shouldn’t need to read either AI Twitter or the other AI blogs, because I hope to consistently flag such things.
There are still a few that made the list.
AI Futures Project (Group Blog, Including Scott Alexander)
This is the blog for AI Futures Project which includes AI 2027. A lot of the posts explain the thinking behind how they model the AI future, aimed at a broader audience. Others include advocacy, consistently for modest common sense proposals. All of it is written with a much lower barrier to entry than my work, and I find the writing consistently strong and interesting.
The Power Law (Peter Wildeford)
This is very much a case of someone largely doing a subset of what I am doing, finding, summarizing and responding to key news events with an emphasis on AI. So I would hope that if you read my AI posts, you don’t also need to directly read Peter. But he has a remarkably high hit rate of finding things I would have otherwise overlooked or offering useful new perspective. If you are looking for something shorter and sweeter, and easier to process, or to compare multiple sources, this is one of the best choices.
China Talk (Jordan Schneider)
China Talk focuses on China, as the name suggests, and also largely on Chinese AI and other Chinese tech. When this is good and on point, it is very, very good, and provides essential perspective I couldn’t have found elsewhere, especially when doing key interviews.
It is highly plausible that I should be focusing way more on these topics.
Musings On the Alignment Problem (Jan Leike)
He hasn’t posted since January, but I hope he gets back to it. We need more musings, especially musings I strongly disagree with so I can think about and explain why I disagree with them. I still would like to give better arguments in response to his thoughts.
Gwern Newsletter (Gwern)
Once a month you used to get a collection of notes and links, without my emphasis on the new hotness. The curation level was consistently excellent.
I save these, so that if I ever have need of more good content. But at this point it’s been four years.
Some Additional Substacks That Are Good And Aren’t Otherwise Covered But That I Am Not Ready to Recommend At This Time
Without loss of generality, all of these would be highly reasonable for me to include in my recommendation list, might well do so in the future after more consideration, and for which I would be happy to offer reciprocity:
The Pursuit of Happiness (Scott Sumner) about things Sumner, including economics, culture and movies.
Knowingness (Aella) about Aella things, often sexual.
Second Person (Jacob Falkovich) about dating.
Derek Thompson (Derek Thompson) about things in general.
Works In Progress (Various) about progress studies.
The Grumpy Economist (John Cochrane) about free markets and economics.
Dwarkesh Podcast (Dwarkesh Patel) mostly hosts the podcast. I highly recommend the podcast and watch him on YouTube.
Rising Tide (Helen Toner) about AI policy.
Understanding AI (Timothy Lee) about AI and tech.
One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick) about AI.
Import AI (Jack Clark) about AI.
The 10 Top Other Substack Subscription Blog Sources
My review process for each blog by default is to look at two to four posts, depending on how it is going, with a mix of best-of posts or what catches my eye, and at least one most recent post to avoid cherry-picking.
ControlAI advocates for, well, controlling AI, making the case for why we need to avoid extinction risks from AI, how we might go about doing that, and covering related news items. They are out there in the field making real efforts, so they often report back useful information about that. This is very much an advocacy blog rather than an explanation blog, if you want that then it is pretty good.
Applied Psychology = Communication appears to be a dead blog at this point, with the tagline ‘psychology that is immensely useful to your everyday life.’ These appear to be writeups of very simple points where You Should Know This Already, but there is a decent chance you don’t, and the benefits of finding one you didn’t know are plausibly high, so it is not crazy to quickly look, but I failed to learn anything new.
Get Down and Shruti by Shruti Rajagopalan is about Indian culture and politics and hasn’t been updated since January. I very much appreciate the recommendation, since our interests and worlds seem so disjointed. I found her posts interesting and full of facts I did not know. The issue is that this is mostly not relevant to my core interests, but if you have the interest or bandwidth, and don’t mind that it’s a bit dry, go for it, there’s lots of good stuff here.
Meaningness by David Chapman is a philosophy blog. I’ve extensively read Chapman previously via his previous online incarnation of his work, which is a book in slightly odd, hyperlinked form that you can jump around in, that is still in progress. That book is refreshingly accessible as such things go, if you don’t mind a tone of superiority and authority and claims of understanding it all that appear throughout, which passes through to the blog. I suspect what it takes to benefit from such things is the ability to look at such a system that is refreshingly made of gears, figure out which gears seem right for your situation and are doing the relevant work, which ones don’t work or are overreaching, and take the parts that you need. It is an excellent sign that the most recent post is one I could easily write quite a lot about in response, if I had more time. I’m glad I looked here.
The Roots of Progress by Jason Crawford is what you would expect from the name, if you are familiar with progress studies. The problem here is that Jason is writing an excellent book, but it is a book trying to present a case that most people reading this will already take for granted. Which is a good thing, but also means most of you don’t need to read the blog. The important progress questions are soon largely going to be about AI, where Jason is better at taking the differences seriously than most similar others, although there is still much work to do there, and again that is not the topic here. The question is, who both is going to sit for this length of progress message, and also needs it? For those people this should be a great fit.
Homo Economicus by Nicholas Decker. Decker is certainly not afraid to touch third rails, I will give him that, including his most popular post (way more popular than anything I’ve posted, life is like that) entitled ‘When Must We Kill Them?’ and subtitled ‘evil has come to America.’ He has a post asking, Should We Take Everything From The Old To Give To The Young? He seems at his best when making brief particular points in ways others wouldn’t dare, especially on Twitter where Icarus has some real bangers, whereas the longform writing, in my brief survey, needs work.
Marketing BS with Edward Nevraumont, dormant since 2023. Not my cup of tea, and the posts are very of-the-moment, with much less value now 18 months later.
Doom Debates by Liron Shapira, essentially a YouTube channel as a Substack. Debates about AI Doom, I tell you, doom! Recent debate partners for Liron are Richard Hanania, Emmett Shear and Scott Sumner. Would benefit from transcripts, these are strong guests but my barrier to consuming audio AI content is high and for debates it is even higher. I do love that he is doing this.
Donkeyspace by Frank Lantz. There’s an interesting core to these posts, a lot of the writing is fun, but there’s definitely ‘could have been a Tweet’ vibes to a lot of it. As in, there’s a core point that Lantz is making. It’s a good point, but we don’t need this much explanation to get to it. I don’t feel like I’m thinking along with him, so much as I wish he’d just share the one sentence already. Yes, I know who is typing this.
State of the Future by Lawrence Lundy-Bryan, examining questions about AI, mundane AI impacts and They Took Our Jobs. I noticed it failing to hold my interest, despite the topic being something I often focus on.
Other Blogs And News Sources In Heavy Rotation
It is remarkable how few blogs are left that are not Substack, that I still want to read.
Most of the remaining alpha in blogs is in Marginal Revolution and LessWrong. Without either of those this blog would be a lot worse.
LessWrong is a community blog, which obviously one would not want to read in full. That’s what the karma system, curation and other filters are for, including remembering which authors are worthwhile. Karma is very far from a perfect system, and it will sometimes miss very good posts, and the curated post selection is also very good. But I find it to be very good at positive selection. For recent posts, if you set a threshold of 200 and check out those plus the curated posts, and then filter by whether you are interested in the topic, you should do very well. For quick takes and comments, a threshold around 50-75 should be similar. There is also always tons of alpha in the archives, especially the sequences.
Note that my posts are cross-posted there, if you want to check out additional comments, or prefer the way they do formatting.
Reading the comments is often not a mistake on LessWrong.
Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok). A large percentage of interesting links and ideas I find come from Marginal Revolution, many of which I would have otherwise missed, by far the richest vein if you don’t count Twitter as a source. Alex often makes good points very cleanly. Tyler is constantly bringing unique and spicy takes. I have great fun sparring with Tyler Cowen on a variety of topics, and his support growing the blog via links and emergent ventures has been invaluable, he really makes an effort to assist thinkers and talent. Tyler in particular often plays his actual views very close to his chest, only gesturing at what one might think about or how to frame looking at something, or offering declarations without explaining. In many cases this is great, since it helps you think for yourself. You can tell that Tyler has a purpose behind every word he writes, and he should be read as such.
Alas, I have become increasingly frustrated with Tyler recently, especially in the AI realm, and not only because I don’t understand how he can hold the views he expresses given what he gets correct elsewhere. He seems to increasingly aggressively be placing his rhetorical thumb on the scale in ways I would not have expected him to previously. He also seems willing to amplify voices and points where I assume he must know better. It reads as if a strategic decision has been made. This also seems to be happening in other ways with respect to the current administration. So one must adjust, but MR is still a highly valuable and irreplaceable source of ideas and information.
Shtetl-Optimized (Scott Aaronson). It rarely ends up being relevant to my work but I find the perspective valuable, and it’s good to keep up with different forms of science like quantum computing and get Scott’s unique perspective on various other events as well.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Yes, this is an online comic, but it is full of actual ideas often enough I’m going to list it here anyway, also xkcd of course.
Meteuphoric (Katja Grace) is a series of simple points put bluntly and well, that I find worth considering.
Luke Muehlhauser is mostly tracking his media consumption. I do find this a worthwhile data point to periodically scan.
Stratechery (Ben Thompson). It is mostly paywalled. There was sufficient relevance that I paid up. Ben deals with AI and tech from a pure business perspective of profit maximization, and believes that this perspective is the important one and should carry the day, and is dismissive of downside concerns. Within that framework, he gets a lot of things right, and provides a lot of strong information and insight that I would otherwise miss. But this does cause me to strongly disagree with a lot of the points he emphasizes most often.
Bloomberg. This is my most expensive subscription, and it is money well spent. If I had to choose one mainstream news source to rely upon, this would be it. It is very much not perfect, but I find I can trust Bloomberg’s bounded distrust principles far more than I trust those of other mainstream sources, and also for them to focus on what matters more often and in more depth.
Wall Street Journal. This is my go to newspaper, and they often have articles that are important coverage of events in AI.
Washington Post. This also often has good unique coverage, and offers a counterweight to the Wall Street Journal. For conventional news stories I’ll often expand to a number of additional news websites.
Twitter
And of course, there is always there is Twitter.
I always check all posts from my followers and the Rationalist and AI lists.
In total that is on the order of 500 unique accounts.
This effectively is the majority of my consumption, if you include things I find via Twitter.
I write this guide back in March 2022 on how to best use Twitter to follow events in real time. Using Twitter to follow AI is somewhat different since it is less about real time developments and more about catching all the important stories, but most of the advice there still applies today.
If I had to make one change to the ‘beware’ list it would be that I did not emphasize enough the need to aggressively block people whose posts make your life worse, especially in the sense of making you emotionally worse off without compensation, or that draw you into topics you want to avoid, or that indicate general toxicity. A block is now even more than before only a small mistake, as they can still see your posts. If someone has not provided value before, a hair trigger is appropriate. This includes blocking people whose posts are shown to you via someone’s retweet.
The other note is that I take care to cultivate a mix of perspectives. I keep a number of accounts around so that I know what the other half is thinking, in various ways, especially legacy accounts that I was already following for another reason, many of which pivoted to AI in one way or another. I also count on them to ‘bubble up’ the key posts from the accounts that are truly obnoxious, too much so to put on the lists. One as to protect one’s own mental health. The rule is then that I can’t simply dismiss what those sources have to say out of hand, although of course sometimes what they say is not newsworthy.
Wrapping Up
I consume writing and write about it as a full time job. Most people of course cannot do this, plus you hopefully want to read this blog too, so you’ll have to be a lot more picky than this. If I was primarily working on something else, I’d be consuming vastly less content than I am now, and even now I don’t fully read a lot of these.
What am I potentially missing here, and should consider including? I encourage sharing in the comments, especially in the Substack comments. You are free to pitch your own work, but do say you are doing so.
I’ll take you up on the offer to pitch in the comments:
I started No Dumb Ideas to explore absurd sounding ideas with economic rigor. Each post takes something that initially sounds outrageous and follows it to its logical conclusion. Topics can cut across economics, business, and history.
Some of my favorites:
Charge $1 to apply for a job: https://nodumbideas.substack.com/p/the-big-idea-charge-1-to-apply-to
Make jobs sellable and tradable: https://nodumbideas.substack.com/p/the-big-idea-a-job-you-can-buy-and
A history of gambling on the papacy: https://nodumbideas.substack.com/p/betting-on-the-pope-was-the-original
Is Gwern's Substack newsletter active? The latest article in archive is from 2021. I signed up at around his Dwarkesh interview and I did not get anything since.