Nerd Blog Power Rankings
token usage is NOT impact
Power Rankings are concerned with the way things actually are. You don’t get promoted up pecking orders for getting obvious predictions right, let alone making well-calibrated probabilistic predictions and saying I was wrong sometimes. Some bloggers happened to predict the Luka Doncic trade would be an all-time own goal, and/or happened to predict Iran would not placidly concede. Bully for them. That is simply not what counts on the Internet.
The reason this matters, as we’re all about to watch play out at globe-melting scale, is that being right is not enough. It really doesn’t matter to most people whether you accurately predicted or vehemently denied that a time would soon come when an artificial intelligence would grow so capable it could do dangerous things human brains could only dream of. Like, as of now, in a matter of months/minutes identify and exploit countless vulnerabilities in the software systems that are the foundation of modern civilization, high-severity vulnerabilities that some of the most intelligent humans have been hunting for fruitlessly for years.1
Some bloggers also happened to predict it would be handy if the keepers of such an AI had a worldview that held open the possibility of deeming such a powerful force unfit for release into the wild, rather than letting market forces or manifest destiny or Mark Zuckerberg undermine society’s safety, security, and sporting infrastructure.
“token usage is NOT impact” is one of the foundational beliefs of this Blog, and while there’s some debate about whether a staff memo with that title has been doing the rounds at Meta, what’s not debated is that they had a literal AI usage leaderboard where you could become a “Token Legend”.2 It’s reportedly been taken down, but nobody believes their so-called leadership has stopped trying their damndest to incentivize everyone on payroll to apply the skills honed bilking our crazy uncles out of billions of dollars to open sourcing the aforementioned superhuman capabilities. A fun little game where bad dice could cost us the future of all carbon-based life forms.
Meta has been beaten to the punch by Anthropic, who are the keepers of the superhacking model Claude Mythos. Thankfully, their leadership seems to be a whole lot less hypocritical, naive, or anti-democratic than their motivated critics would have you believe, despite no doubt being at least a little bit hypocritical, naive, and anti-democratic, what with being human. They have decided to use the technological breakthrough they’ve made to catalyze coordination on risk reduction rather than loosing Mythos into the arms race. Nevertheless, once - and even while - everyone else goes Hammertime to catch up and overtake, it would be preferable to have something more than a handful of individuals’ discretion and valour as the only things standing between us and a world in which anyone with a laptop can take down every grid, ground every plane, and crash every bank.3
I’ve been around a bit and got to know some of the people token usage leaderboards are for. Of the two kinds of people, these are not those who take seriously the impact of their words and actions, rather those who are just trying to stay on the glidepath to a retirement home in Monte Carlo. One of the most memorable lessons I learnt during nearly a decade in an F1 fantasy league office was that there are a frankly terrifying number of people in positions of no little power who fall in the second category.
You see this affliction plain as day in Fantasyland through the lens of team names. In three different seasons, three different grown men on the payroll of one of London’s blue chip strategic consultancies, a company which prides itself on recruiting the best and brightest minds exclusively from elite universities, joined a fantasy league run by a bloke in their chain of command and submitted their employer’s name as their name. I am not making this up.4
OC&C, you see, has two of the same letters as Esteban Ocon. Esteban Ocon, as you know from Drive to Survive, is an unremarkable journeyman. Pause for a moment and ask yourself honestly, if you were presented with this fact pattern and then handed a keyboard and asked to make a personal and enduring statement about yourself, would you be able to resist committing white collar crime by submitting your name as “Esteban OCCon”, “OCCon Racing”, or - and I am still not making this up - “OC(&C)on”?5
It gets better! Or rather worse. It would be one thing if these drones were just doing a corporate shill version of a thing lots of people on the retirement track do without being disqualified, making their team name a pun from the name of someone on their team. Esteban Ocon, though, was not on a single one of these teams.
These, I cannot emphasise enough, are reputedly our best and brightest grown-ups. And I don’t see any reason worth betting on why those in the employ of the AI companies currently holding the entire present and future in their grubby hands would be any better or any brighter.
In the league office I wanted to know whether we were presiding over a game of any skill at all. Despite “real life” F1 being predictably rigged in favour of the rich teams, outcomes in Fantasyland were scrambled into being axiomatically lucky by which lap Nepo Baby Stroll happened to crash on, who he happened to crash into, and both the Commissioner’s made-up scoring system and his man-made spreadsheet functioning as random number generators. I turned to studying whether team naming is skillful. The proof that it is comes by showing that it’s completely uncorrelated with luck: one’s position in the championship standings predicted nothing about one’s position in the Team Name Power Rankings.
Which brings us back around to nerd blogs and their names and the search for some light amid all the dumb luck, good and bad. For the logical reader it will follow clearly that while blogs themselves might be noise, their names are assuredly signal. It’s a wonder we’ve made it so far into what some call the Internet Era and what I call the endgame without anyone ranking them.
Within each tier there is room for reasonable minds to disagree about the order, but unbroken ties are moral equivalence so hairs must be split. The tiers themselves are non-negotiable.
What am I missing?
24. Money Stuff (Matt Levine)
We won’t dawdle here.
Whacking your name on it
23. Joe Carlsmith’s Substack (Joe Carlsmith)
22. Andy Masley (Andy Masley)
21. Derek Thompson (Derek Thompson)
There was some cheap point-scoring against the president when he was giving hours-long press conferences about ballrooms and convention centres during a hot war, but as a noted knower of World history being long and complex, isn’t it more likely any schoolboy mistakes he might have made in the Mideast came from being laser-focused on the foundation-shaking implications of Mythos?6
If you’re a young man flaunting your name after 1970, Derek > Andy for irony reasons.
Joe happens to be right about a lot of things, and wrong about whether to put Substack in the title of your Substack.
It’s still your own name though
20. Silver Bulletin (Nate Silver)
19. Bentham’s Newsletter (Bentham’s Bulldog)
18. Otherwise (Julia Wise)
17. From Matter (Matt Reardon)
Nate is a doyen of the nerd blogosphere, having built the bridge from Moneyball to the electoral college. He’s good at backronyms: witness 538.com’s RAPTOR (rip), the Robust Algorithm (using) Player Tracking (and) On/Off Ratings, released in 2019 and named after the reigning NBA champs. These days, though, he’s settled on a standard-issue pun on his own name.
Bentham’s Bulldog is a top-tier pseudonym for a utilitarian blogger standing on Jeremy’s shoulders. Bentham’s Newsletter, though, keeps the bark while losing the bite.
Full disclosure: I’m in a professional chain of command with Julia (in my day job, when I’m not on parental leave), one half of effective giving power couple Julia & Jeff, and maybe that’s why I’ve read so much of her blog and relatively little of his. Or maybe it’s that he just whacked his name on it.7
“From Matter to Life: Information and Causality” is a lovely encapsulation of Reardon’s project, but the move of reclaiming a literary reference will score more highly when it’s decoupled from the ego, because the blogosphere is about humility first and foremost.
The Valley of Meh
16. By the Numbers (Hannah Ritchie)
15. Data Points (John Burn-Murdoch)
14. Future Perfect (Vox)
13. Platformer (Casey Newton)
12. Import AI (Jack Clark)
In soccerball, The Valley of Meh refers to the gap in our understanding between most of the game being played in midfield, and almost all of the value-creating actions quantifiable using early analytical models happening near the goal. It stood to reason then that some of the efforts at progress and prevention in midfield mattered somehow, and even now with next gen models it’s not at all obvious how or how much.8
You can see a similar dynamic playing out here: things are happening and intentionally so - writing from an online platform about social media platforms; import is apparently a programming pun and AI is apparently important - but none of them quite reach escape velocity.
With a twist
11. Expecting Goals (Michael Caley)
10. Transformer (Shakeel Hashim)
9. Cold Takes (Holden Karnofsky)
Caley is proof that analytics are just some crap some people who were really smart made up just to get in the game because they had no talent.9 Despite being a tireless pioneer bringing expected goals into the public consciousness, he’s still stuck making ends meet as one half of the Double Pivot, the world’s most agreeable soccer analytics podcasting duo called Mike.10
Transformer is proof of another of the foundational beliefs of the Blog: everything is derivative. AI was transformed by the discovery of the transformer, the discovery of AI will transform the world, and Transformer is a better name than Platformer.
Twisting from hot to cold is easy; Cold Takes earns its place at the top of this tier with self-awareness about how spreadsheet-based approaches to solving the world’s most pressing problems are easily mistaken for a lack of compassion.
Alphabet soup
8. Astral Codex Ten (Scott Alexander)
Get it? Before he was a big name, Dr. Scott’s anagram was Slate Star Codex, a blog he chose to delete off the face of the Internet rather than be doxxed by a retirement-tracker from that little old blog called the New York Times. Codex does a double shift as scripture and medicine.
I see what you did there
7. Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen)
6. The Swiss Ramble (Kieron O’Connor)
5. That Vast Variety (Matt Beard)
Legend has it that KOC, who freely chose to out himself when he moved to Substack, originally discovered his blog while hiking in Switzerland listening to The Football Ramble. The money shot here is using Switzerland, the home of neutrality and international banking, to tie together his finance background and his discursive breakdowns of football club accounts. Are you watching Matt Levine?
The discovery of marginal utility theory in the 19th century was the birth of modern economics, and the way it’s used by Cowen makes in two words the claim that the Revolution enabled and is enacted by his incremental approach to progress.
Another Matt, another literary reference.11 This time it’s Hume, and his caution against overfitting the vagaries of “real life” to one’s preferred and predetermined principles, at the cost of ignoring “that vast variety, which nature has so much affected in all her operations”. So quaint, and so true.
Oscar bait
4. Defector (Deadspin defectors)
3. Good Bones (Ajeya Cotra)
You know what’s not quaint? Stick to sports mandates from private equity wise guys. The staff at Deadspin knew that deep in their bones and so when their editor was frogmarched for sticking to his non-sporting guns, under their own steam they walked out and started Defector, a website (remember those?) where ball and life are inseparable. Which is true.
A skeleton worth fleshing out is a metaphor for every unwritten blog and every unfulfilled life. Good Bones, the poem, has a mother realtor-selling her children on a half-terrible world that could be beautiful. In Ajeya’s hands, the Good carries the torch for doing good and doing it better, proudly promoting the potential of radical empathy and taking ideas seriously to make the world a dramatically better place, and acknowledging that putting our principles into practice is and forever will be a work in progress.
Photo finish
It’s Slow Boring vs Stealing Signals for all the marbles.
Slow Boring starts where Cold Takes leaves off and turns it up several notches. It layers on ironic self-deprecation: we know that neither Yglesias nor his style are slow or boring and we know he knows it. The pun on boring works subtly in the background of a tiger-tight literary reference to the blog’s thesis: politics as a strong and slow boring of hard boards. Max Weber, who wrote that line in his classic Politics as a Vocation, can only have been a golfer.
Stealing Signals is the exception to the rule under which these have all been nerd blogs I actually came up reading. It’s such a good name it was on my own longlist (n>200) of names for the Blog with No Name (working title). It fell at the Distinctiveness hurdle, dammit, when my editor discovered during the shortlisting process that it was already spoken for, right here in Fantasyland.12 Peeling the onion: signal, not noise, of course. Stealing, not playing it safe, as in stealing bases, and smuggling in the idea that good ideas cross domains. And best of all, sign-stealing, not playing by the rules, as in the scandalous scheme used by the Houston Astros on their way to the 2017 World Series. In Fantasyland, where no holds are barred, game recognises game.
One more foundation belief to get us across the line: when in doubt, the tiebreaker is comedy. Stealing Signals is a really funny name for a fantasy football blog if you know about the scandal, especially if you know that once stolen by a secret camera, the catcher-to-pitcher signal was communicated to the batter at the plate by a batter in the dugout banging on a bin. Slow Boring, though, is on its surface a really funny name for any blog about anything.
2. Stealing Signals (Ben Gretch)
1. Slow Boring (Matt Yglesias)
You can bid for the exclusive rights to name the Blog with No Name (working title).
If you win you’ll get your name on the building and you’ll be saving lives cost-effectively: all proceeds to GiveWell.
Training data
📖Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). The medium is the message. Twas ever thus.
🎵Four Out Of Five (2018). “Cute new places keep on popping up / Around Clavius, it’s all getting gentrified / I put a taqueria on the moon, The Information-Action Ratio / It got rave reviews, four stars out of five.”13
📝The Astros stole signs electronically in 2017 — part of a much broader issue for Major League Baseball (2019). Yes, they were found thoroughly guilty by the league’s investigation. And no, they were not stripped of their 2017 World Series title.
🎙️What everyone is missing about Anthropic vs The Pentagon. And: The Meta leaks are worse than you think (2026). From the excellent 80,000 Hours Podcast, who regrettably took the excellent name of their organization and just added Podcast to it.
📝Why Anthropic’s new model has cybersecurity experts rattled (2026). And me. I’m rattled.
My counterfactual fantasy
According to the lamestream media, Mo Salah was merely an Egyptian king. Over here in Fantasyland, where everyman can pick his own poison and make his own name, Mo is our MVP, the Most Valuable Prophet.
Too few of the most intelligent humans, of course, because a lot of them got waylaid ensuring every last drop was squeezed out of our ability to connect humanity with artificially sweetened water, but the point stands.
This deleted tweet from a NYT tech reporter once said: “funny — meta product growth director sent out an internal memo today with the title “token usage is NOT impact” after the twitter chatter the past 24 hours after @jyoti_mann1's story on “tokenmaxxing””
Anthropic did not set out to build a superhuman hacker. That property emerged from Mythos’s advanced coding capabilities, capabilities that everyone with a model are trying to advance.
Befitting his authoritarian temperament, my flatmate was League Commissioner, and is now a Partner at OC&C. To his credit, he tolerated dissent, allowing me to be his in-house critic on the condition I was also everyone else’s. His language of love for the game was doing the spreadsheets, mine was penning the weekly roundup. The league was a growth engine, averaging about 25% YoY, but we resisted the temptation to go full unicorn, which on reflection probably helped with never getting cancelled and living to write another day. (I fed my editor every edition and asked how many words I’d written over the course of hundreds of posts, and Ed. decided to stop counting at 100,000 for some reason. When I asked whether Team Name Power Rankings was a top notch recurring bit, Ed. said absolutely no doubt about it, and it didn’t feel like sycophancy to me.)
“OC(&C)on” is my personal choice for funniest self-own because not only is it patently absurd at first glance, if you do give it a second look, you realize that without the clunky-as-fuck parentheses it says “OCon”, which is nobody and means nothing.
You think I’m joking, but imagine he has put 2+2 together on the threat of his bank account being hacked, or those Epstein files.
“Julia and I [Jeff] believe that one of the best ways to make the world better is to donate to effective charities. Since we're advocating this, we want to be transparent about our own donations. We've pledged to donate 30% of our income, but we've been targeting 50%. As of 2026-03-30, we've donated a total of $2,503,259.”
I believe the original coinage was by StatsBomb’s Thom Lawrence in Some Things Aren't Shots: Comparative Approaches to Valuing Football.
This Barkley rant, to me, is Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Podcasts are not ranked, in part because the medium is the message and in part because 24’s already a long list. One effect of this is proportionally reducing sporting representation, because so much of that content has either pivoted to audio-video (like Thinking Basketball, Dunc’d On, and the Double Pivot) or been subsumed into the “real life” business of sport (like StatsBomb and Cleaning The Glass). The Double Pivot and Cleaning The Glass would have been competitive in the higher tiers.
Hello? Mr. Levine, can you hear? Is this thing on?
It being fantasy football of the American variety making it only marginally less surprising that not one of the indefatigable algorithms I’m exposed to had advertised it to me before.
“Advertise in imaginative ways / Start your free trial today.”
Chiming in late here to mention the incredibly named football substack, the Read Optional: https://www.readoptional.com
Ohhhh do me! I still need to change my name. Planning to write about clinical trial abundance and ME/CFS, long covid etc.
I was thinking Trials and Errors or maybe Trials and Tribulations. Siebe's Solutions.. well it's a little presumptuous isn't it?