Profile 9 min read

Lessons from Roy Baumeister

Roy Baumeister is a social psychologist who studies self-control, relationships, and meaning. His work frames willpower as finite and shows why bad events outweigh good ones, connecting motivation, self-esteem, and social economics to everyday behavior.
Profile 9 min read

Lessons from Kelly McGonigal

Kelly McGonigal is a health psychologist and Stanford lecturer who translates neuroscience into tools. She reframes stress as a catalyst for resilience and willpower as a biological function, connecting movement, self-compassion, and the mind-body relationship.
Profile 9 min read

Lessons from Tony Schwartz

Tony Schwartz is a journalist who founded The Energy Project to argue that companies should manage energy, not time. His work connects physical rest, attention, emotional intelligence, and organizational design to a more sustainable model of performance.
Profile 8 min read

Lessons from Steven Kotler

Steven Kotler is a journalist and author who studies the neurobiology of peak performance. His work maps flow, the state of extreme focus in which people perform at their best, alongside the psychology of risk, aging, and writing.
Profile 10 min read

Lessons from Max Mullen

Max Mullen co-founded Instacart, pairing complex retail logistics with simple design. His “dirty white sneaker” theory and culture framework offer grounded approaches to product curation, hiring, early investing, and the unglamorous work of building a marketplace.
Research Explainers 6 min read

AI Fiction Has a Plot Fingerprint

StoryScope suggests that AI fiction can be detected from narrative decisions, not only surface style, including tidy plots, explicit themes, and reduced structural variety. The findings suggest provenance detection should examine story structure alongside lexical fingerprints.
Research Explainers 6 min read

Synthetic Societies Need Belief Models, Not Personas

A NeurIPS position paper argues that LLM social simulations need traceable belief models, not merely fluent personas and plausible survey answers. Explicit belief state, update rules, and validation make simulated populations more scientifically useful.
Research Explainers 8 min read

Agent Skills Are the New Supply Chain

A systematization paper argues that reusable agent skills are becoming the procedural layer of agent systems, with meaningful performance gains and supply-chain risk. The survey maps benefits alongside provenance, permissions, poisoning, and dependency management.

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