Thoughtful Essayists
ℹ️ Also see Periodicals and Podcasts.
A list of people writing thoughtful pieces, often meta in their essence. A first way I am trying to segregate these people is by their professional background. I think that is highly correlated with the kind of perspectives they bring to the table, the kind of language they use, and the kind of essays they produce.
Scientists
Terence Tao - The math prodigy also has some career advice.
Sabine Hossenfelder - A physisist turned science writer with some appealing takes on the role of "beauty" in our scientific developments.
Allen Downey - A computer scientist who runs the blog Probably Overthinking It on Bayesian thinking.
Andrew Gelman - A statistician and political scientist, who is probably the biggest evangelist and criticizer of Bayesian statistics. While the blog has an ensemble cast of authors, it is predominantly written by Gelman.
Christian Robert - A statistician with an excellent blog. Also has themes beyond statistics.
Michael Betancourt - An applied statistician evangelizing the Bayesian philosophy with some excellent case studies.
Will Kurt - Another statistician who covers many topics Bayesian, more tiny practical posts that are easy to digest.
Nicholas J. Higham - An applied mathematician who runs a great "What is ...?" series on blog.
Francis Bach - The computer scientist from INRIA with plenty of algorithmic and theoretical contributions to the field of optimization. Often writes once a month.
Scott Aaronson - A theoretical computer scientist with loads of thoughtful essays ranging from quantum computation, to metaphysics.
Entrepreneurs / Builders
I am aiming for a broader meaning of what it means to be entrepreneurs. Builders seems more apt, but then every person on this page is a builder. A better term TBD.
Patrick Collison - Co-Founder of Stripe with some great writing.
Joel Spolsky - The Stack Overflow person!
Simon Hørup Eskildsen - A dropout at Shopify who writes a lot of book reviews.
Nikita Prokopov - Programmer and UI designer. Fun and detailed rants.
Investors
These people may very well be builders first too. I am just going with their dominating personas.
Paul Graham - Co-Founder of YC. Some great observational essays.
Fred Wilson - Writes some insightful content on a broad spectrum of topics.
Morgan Housel - A partner at the Collaborative Fund, oftens writes many of the posts on their blog.
Peter McCluskey - An investor with pretty wide variety of topics from invesing, technology, to quite a long list of book reviews.
Analysts / Journalists
Ben Thompson - In-depth articles by on analysis of the strategy and business side of technology and media, and the impact of technology on society.
Benedict Evans - Independent technology analyst with annual trend reports.
Tim Harford - An economist, who does a lot of data journalism, and writes some great books. Also runs the excellent podcast More or less: Behind the stats.
A persistent question:
Which category, whether old or new, can I contribute the most to?