inputs

• how a mind actually changes The research on attitude change: the moment a person moves from one position to another. Unglamorous literature, and the only one that treats persuasion as a mechanism rather than a talent.
• synthetic populations Personas detailed enough to stand in for real human variety, so you can watch a belief spread through them in miniature before you spend a rupee finding out in the world.
• markets as instruments A price is a crowd’s belief made legible, updating continuously, punished when wrong. Better instrument than any survey ever built. Most of Priced Belief comes from here.
• systems that rewrite themselves Anything that holds its own output up to the light, finds what is wrong, and revises, until something better than its designer intended falls out. Which is, if you squint, also what a mind does.
• what happens to attention under abundance When the cost of producing anything goes to zero, the scarce thing moves. Working out where it moves to is most of The Judgment Premium.

Not a recommended-reading list. These are the specific books the theses on this site are arguing with or standing on.

• Seeing Like a State · James C. Scott The clearest account of how a system, trying to make people legible, quietly reshapes what they are. The book behind half of what I believe about infrastructure.
• The Elephant in the Brain · Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson Motives are mostly hidden from the person holding them. Uncomfortable, and hard to un-see once you have read it.
• Superforecasting · Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner Calibration as a practice rather than a personality. The discipline that makes a prediction worth publishing.
• Thinking, Fast and Slow · Daniel Kahneman The standard text, and worth rereading specifically for the parts that have since been contested. The replication fights taught me more than the findings did.
• Imagined Communities · Benedict Anderson Belief formation at the scale of a nation, and a demonstration that the machinery is usually printing technology and a shared clock.
• Influence · Robert Cialdini The book everyone in advertising has half-read. Read the whole thing, then read it again as a description of what is being done to you.
• Understanding Media · Marshall McLuhan Infuriating, unfalsifiable, and right often enough that I keep coming back to it when a new interface shows up.
• The Black Swan · Nassim Nicholas Taleb Mostly here for the distinction between risk you can size and uncertainty you cannot, which became Chosen Uncertainty.

If you have read something that argues with any of the above, I would genuinely like it. send it over.