Signal / Noise

Chosen, not collected

My reading list

A short list, on purpose. Each of these earned its place by changing how I work — the caption is why it's worth your hours, not just what it's about.

Thinking about AI
The Alignment Problem — Brian Christian

The clearest account of why "the model works" and "the model is right" are different claims — the distinction every enterprise AI program is built on.

Prediction Machines — Agrawal, Gans, Goldfarb

Strips AI down to its economic primitive — cheap prediction — and suddenly every roadmap decision gets easier to price. Still underrated.

Co-Intelligence — Ethan Mollick

The most practical framing of working with models rather than around them. Hand it to the executive who wants one book, not ten.

AI Engineering — Chip Huyen

The best current field guide to building with foundation models in production — the backbone of the course.

Thinking about decisions
Thinking in Bets — Annie Duke

Decision quality under uncertainty, separated from outcome quality. Quietly, this is the whole job description of an AI product manager.

Superforecasting — Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner

How to hold beliefs with calibrated confidence and update them without drama — the temperament the field needs more of.

The Signal and the Noise — Nate Silver

Where this site's name comes from, in spirit: most of what looks like insight is noise, and telling the difference is a learnable skill.

Thinking about organizations
High Output Management — Andy Grove

Still the best writing on leverage. Most AI strategy documents are Grove with new nouns — better to read the original.

Principles — Ray Dalio

Less for the specific rules than for the habit: write down what you've learned, in a form someone else can test. This site follows that habit.

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