My all time top 15 essays:
- Paths of Glory by Ian Parker
- Will old age temper the burning fire of Rory Stewartâs 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
- âThe Hungarian Phenomenonâ, 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 Bloomâs critique of American culture spark a cultural war?
- Two Paths to the Future by Alvaro de Menard
- AI or Human Enhancement â what leads us to the future?
- Compounding Crazy by Packy McCormick
- Compound interest doesnât just apply to money. The world is about to get weird
- Your Life in Weeks by Tim Urban
- An OG internet blogger doing what heâs 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 âthe frogs before the stormâ 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?
- âI saw the Emperor â this soul of the world â go out from the city to survey his reignâ
- Even if you beat me by Sally Rooney
- Writing as an art form
- âIt may not mean anything to anyone else, but it doesnât have to â thatâs the point. I was number one. Like Fast Eddie, Iâm the best there is. And even if you beat me, Iâm still the best.â