Top 15 essays

My all time top 15 essays:

• Paths of Glory by Ian Parker
• Will old age temper the burning fire of Rory Stewart’s youthful ambition?
• Flat out brilliant. My favourite profile, ever
• The Parable of the Talents by Scott Alexander
• IQ, moral worth, and the concept of innate ability
• Tech Entrepreneurship and The Disruption of Ambition by Matt Clifford
• The most personally impactful essay on this list
• Scale your impact and you might dent the universe
• The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project by Scott Alexander
• “The Hungarian Phenomenon”, the atom bomb, and the role of genetics
• The Scaling Hypothesis by Gwern
• Neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder, manifesting new abilities even at trivial-by-global-standards-scale. The deep learning revolution has begun as foretold
• Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind by David Samuels
• Why did Allan Bloom’s critique of American culture spark a cultural war?
• Two Paths to the Future by Alvaro de Menard
• AI or Human Enhancement – what leads us to the future?
• Compounding Crazy by Packy McCormick
• Compound interest doesn’t just apply to money. The world is about to get weird
• Your Life in Weeks by Tim Urban
• An OG internet blogger doing what he’s best at: visualising the human experience with fun charts
• When the Worst Man in the World Writes a Masterpiece by Alvaro de Menard
• How did the worst man in the world manage to write the best biography?
• Federer as Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace
• Roger Federer, the nature of beauty, genius and the sublime
• A Reductionist History of Humankind by John Sexton
• How did the idea of human nature shape the history of civilisation?
• On The Referendum #21: Branching histories of the 2016 referendum and ‘the frogs before the storm’ by Dominic Cummings
• The real story behind the EU referendum from the main player
• The Mystery of the Miracle Year by Dwarkesh Patel
• An interesting pattern recurs across the careers of great scientists: an miracle year in which they make multiple, seemingly independent breakthroughs in the span of a single year or two. What explains this phenomenon?
• Why we stopped making Einsteins by Erik Hoel
• Is the downfall of aristocratic tutoring to blame for modern societies lack of geniuses?
• “I saw the Emperor – this soul of the world – go out from the city to survey his reign”
• Even if you beat me by Sally Rooney
• Writing as an art form
• “It may not mean anything to anyone else, but it doesn’t have to – that’s the point. I was number one. Like Fast Eddie, I’m the best there is. And even if you beat me, I’m still the best.”