Gallery

Pseudonym in Reminiscences: "Ursa Major" the Great Bear Active: 1860s–1890s, New York The greatest bear operator of the 19th century. Cammack made his fortune r

Active: 1850s–1864, New York Known as: "Napoleon of the Open Board" Died: 1864, heart attack Peak wealth: $3 million Related: Leonard W. Jerome partner, William

Alameda Research was a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm founded by Sam BankmanFried SBF in 2017. It operated as the sister company to FTX exchange — a r

British computer scientist and professor, known for foundational work in HumanComputer Interaction HCI. Coauthor of HumanComputer Interaction with Finlay, Abowd

Albert Bandura 1925–2021 was a CanadianAmerican psychologist at Stanford University, widely considered one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th cen

Amos Tversky 1937–1996 was an Israeli cognitive psychologist and Kahneman's closest collaborator. Together they produced the heuristicsandbiases program that re

Andrej Karpathy is an AI researcher and engineer whose public comments on LLM coding behavior are used in these sources as the seed for a practical agentinstruc

Angela Duckworth is a psychologist best known for the concept of grit: passion and perseverance sustained over very longterm goals. In this wiki, she matters be

Apple is the technology company that turned the App Store into one of the central distribution layers of the smartphone era. In this wiki it matters less as a h

Apple Developer Academy Indonesia is a cohortbased educational program run in partnership with Apple and Indonesian universities. It trains participants — calle

Engineering professor, author, and learning science communicator. Known for cocreating "Learning How to Learn," the world's most popular online course on Course

American educational psychologist 1913–1999, best known for Bloom's Taxonomy and his landmark research on talent development. His work is foundational to both s

Born: August 19, 1870, Camden, South Carolina Died: June 20, 1965, New York City American financier, statesman, and speculator. Known on Wall Street in the earl

Brené Brown is a researcher and storyteller whose work on vulnerability, shame, and empathy has shaped how many fields think about human connection. Her RSA Ani

Carol Dweck is a psychologist best known for the distinction between fixed and growth mindsets: the belief that ability is either a stable trait or something th

Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway 1978–2023. Warren Buffett's partner for over five decades. Lawyer turned investor turned polymath thinker. Died November 28,

Charles Van Doren 19262019 was an American writer, editor, and educator who collaborated with Mortimer J. Adler on the revised and expanded edition of How to Re

Born: 1843, Gelnhausen, Germany Died: May 11, 1886, New York pneumonia, age 43 Role: Bear operator, NYSE member; Woerishoffer & Co. One of the most famous bear

Claude Elwood Shannon 1916–2001 founded information theory — the mathematical science of communication that underlies computers, the internet, and digital media

cobie pseudonym, real name Jordan Fish is one of the most followed accounts in crypto Twitter, known for sharp market commentary, dark humor, and a long track r

Dale Carnegie 1888–1955 was an American writer, lecturer, and adult education teacher whose 1936 book How to Win Friends and Influence People invented the selfi

Writer, creator, and entrepreneur. Known for the newsletter The Modern Mastery thedankoe.com/letters and courses on oneperson business, writing, and selfdevelop

Born: 1797, Carmel, New York Died: 1879, New York City Known as: "The Old Man of the Street" Peak net worth: ~$30 million One of the fiercest stock operators of

Daniel Kahneman 1934–2024 was an IsraeliAmerican psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics with Vernon Smith for work on judgment and decision maki

Systems thinker and philosopher focused on civilizational risk — what he calls the "Metacrisis." Known for calm, nuanced, nonpolarizing analysis. Rarely posts;

David Epstein is a science journalist and author. His first book, The Sports Gene 2014, explored genetics and athletic performance. Range: Why Generalists Trium

David Kelley b. 1951 is the founder of IDEO, the design and innovation consultancy, and cofounder of the Stanford d.school the Hasso Plattner Institute of Desig

Do Kwon born 1991, Seoul is the cofounder of Terraform Labs and the creator of the Terra/LUNA ecosystem, which included the LUNA token and UST — an algorithmic

Cognitive scientist, design theorist, and UX pioneer. Director of The Design Lab at UC San Diego. Former VP of Advanced Technology at Apple. Coined the term "us

Dorothy Kenyon was a lawyer, judge, and activist targeted during McCarthyism. In the wiki she is the case anchor for how accusation without evidence and reversa

Eduardo Briceno is a speaker and educator best known here for extending growth mindset from classroom psychology into a broader theory of success, learning, and

Edward Oakley Thorp b. 1932 is a mathematician who proved casino games and markets could be beaten with math — and who popularized the Kelly criterion in both d

Edward Snowden is the whistleblower whose disclosures about mass surveillance pushed privacy, state monitoring, and digital freedom into global public debate. I

Born: January 23, 1871, Colón, Panama Died: February 22, 1943, Dorset, Vermont American journalist, author, and diplomat who ghostwrote sources/reminiscencesofa

Eli Pariser is a writer and public critic of algorithmic personalization whose work turns the language of web convenience into a question about democracy, publi

Elizabeth Cox is a writer and educator whose fallacy lessons work by attaching abstract reasoning errors to concrete historical cases. In this wiki, her pieces

Erick Wilberding is the author of an educational essay on the Socratic method as a practical tool for improving reasoning across philosophy, medicine, science,

Farnam Street is a mentalmodels publication known for translating ideas from psychology, decision theory, investing, and systems thinking into compact explanato

GCR pseudonym @GiganticRebirth, personal account @GCRClassic as "GCR, Ezekiel X," FTX leaderboard name "GiganticCassockedRebirth" is an anonymous crypto trader

George Soros born 1930, Budapest is a macro investor and founder of Soros Fund Management, best known for the 1992 trade that broke the Bank of England by short

Glenn Greenwald is a journalist and privacy advocate whose work in this wiki centers on the political and human meaning of surveillance after the Snowden revela

Google matters in this wiki as both a searchandranking company and a platform operator. In the appeconomy cluster, it is the company behind Android Market and l

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1646–1716 is arguably the most centrifugal concepts/polymath in Western history — the figure who made genuine, lasting contributions a

Pseudonymous crypto researcher, investor, and writer. Cohost of the Uncommon Core podcast alongside Su Zhu. Known for writing on Bitcoin trustminimization prope

Born: ~1818, poor household Died: 1869, leaving his family $4.5 million Known as: "William the Silent" Notable for: Defeating Addison G. Jerome in the Old South

Cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management 1995, one of the world's largest alternative investment firms specializing in credit and distressed debt. Author of The

Ignaz Semmelweis was a nineteenthcentury physician whose handdisinfection policy dramatically reduced deaths from childbed fever. In the wiki he appears as a ke

Ionica Smeets is a Dutch mathematician and science communicator whose work, in this wiki, matters as an example of teaching statistical and logical caution thro

Isaiah Berlin 1909–1997 was a British philosopher and historian of ideas, born in Riga, Latvia, best known for his work on political philosophy and the history

Born: April 17, 1837, Hartford, Connecticut Died: March 31, 1913, Rome, Italy Role: Banker, railroad consolidator, financial system stabilizer; patriarch of J.P

Born: 1794, Newburyport, Massachusetts Died: 1865, New York City Known as: First "Great Bear of Wall Street" Peak wealth: Multiple fortunes made and lost The fi

Writer and speaker on habits, decisionmaking, and continuous improvement. Author of Atomic Habits 2018, one of the bestselling nonfiction books of the decade. R

James Flynn 1934–2020 was a New Zealand political studies professor who documented the Flynn effect — generational IQ gains driven by abstract reasoning, not sc

Active: 1870s–1910s, New York Known for: One of the great Wall Street operators of the Gilded Age; pool operator; executor of market distributions for J.P. Morg

Jan Amos Comenius 1592–1670 was a Moravian philosopher, theologian, and educator who gave the concepts/pansophia movement its name and clearest programmatic sta

Born: July 26, 1877, Shrewsbury, Massachusetts Died: November 28, 1940, New York City suicide Fictional name in Reminiscences: Larry Livingston The greatest spe

John Kounios is a professor of psychology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, specializing in the neuroscience of creativity and creative insight. His 2004 pa

John Larry Kelly Jr. 1923–1965 was a Bell Labs scientist who wrote the 1956 paper that became the Kelly criterion — originally an informationtheory result, not

Jonathan Juravich is an elementary art educator and 2018 Ohio State Teacher of the Year who develops practical methods for teaching empathy as awareness and act

Josh Waitzkin is a chess master and martial artist used in this wiki as an example of crossdomain skill transfer. In sources/thepowerofbeliefmindsetandsuccess,

Math educator, writer, and selfdescribed "upskilling maximalist." Founder of Math Academy, an adaptive math learning platform. In this wiki he matters not only

Sir Ken Robinson 1950–2020 was a British education authority, speaker, and author, knighted in 2003 for services to education. His 2006 TED talk, "Do Schools Ki

UX designer, product strategist, and author of Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups. Known for practical, nononsense takes on how design and engineeri

Leonardo da Vinci 1452–1519 is the archetype of the Western concepts/polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, anatomist, botanist, musician, and writer

Former OpenAI researcher who worked on the Superalignment team under Ilya Sutskever. Published Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead in June 2024, a ~165page

Anonymous crypto prop trader, known on Crypto Twitter as @lightcrypto. One of the largest and most successful prop traders in crypto as of 2020, notable for bei

Louis Pasteur supplied the microbial explanation that helped confirm why antiseptic practices worked against childbed fever. In this wiki he functions as the bi

Trading psychologist and coach 1948–2015. Started trading in 1978 while running an insurance agency in Detroit; moved to Chicago as a Merrill Lynch broker at th

Mike Caulfield is a digitalliteracy educator best known here for developing the SIFT method and for helping popularize webnative verification practices such as

Mortimer J. Adler 19022001 was an American philosopher, educator, and public advocate of liberal education best known for the Great Books movement, the Syntopic

A veteran speculator who appears in sources/reminiscencesofastockoperator as the embodiment of concepts/sittingtight. His nickname "Old Turkey" comes from his h

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a trader, risk thinker, and author of the Incerto series. In sources/fooledbyrandomness, his role in this wiki is as the strongest sour

Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and public thinker — cofounder of AngelList and a prolific earlystage investor in Twitter, Uber, and others.

OpenAI Codex is treated in this wiki as an AI coding agent/product used for software development workflows. The current source emphasizes Codex as a longrunning

Born: Memphis, Tennessee Role: Chairman and CEO, Tudor Investment Corporation Education: University of Virginia 1976; journalism courses at Memphis State Fullbl

Real identity: Theodore Hazeltine Price, the "Cotton King" Pseudonym in Reminiscences: Percy Thomas One of the most powerful cotton speculators of the early 20t

Peter Burke born 1937 is a British cultural and intellectual historian, emeritus professor at Cambridge, known for bringing social science methods into historic

RebirthDAO was a "decentralized hedge fund" formed by entities/GCR in late 2021, combining top crypto traders into a coordinated research and trading operation.

Born: 1835, Watertown, New York sixth of nine children Died: May 12, 1899 heart disease; died wealthy and at the height of his bull market leadership Role: Gove

Japanese industrialist, inventor, and founder of what became the Toyota empire. Known as the "King of Japanese Inventors." Created the 5 Whys rootcause techniqu

Samantha Agoos is the author of a practical criticalthinking guide centered on everyday decisionmaking, evidence evaluation, implications, and perspectivetaking

Socrates is the philosophical model for disciplined inquiry through questioning. In this wiki he matters less as a doctrinebuilder than as the origin point for

Cofounder and CEO of Three Arrows Capital 3AC, one of the most prominent crypto hedge funds until its collapse in 2022. Cohost of the Uncommon Core podcast alon

Susan Sontag 1933–2004 was an American writer, filmmaker, and critic who represents Burke's endpoint of the Western concepts/polymath tradition — the final name

Theresa Wiseman is a nursing scholar whose research into professions where empathy is essential produced the fourqualities framework that underpins much modern

Tim BernersLee is the computer scientist most closely associated with the creation of the World Wide Web. In this wiki he matters as the figure who brought toge

Japanese automaker founded in 1937. Originated the Toyota Production System TPS — the operational philosophy that became the global "lean manufacturing" templat

William Poundstone is a science writer whose Fortune's Formula 2005 popularized the Kelly criterion's history — from Bell Labs through blackjack, Princeton Newp

Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist, writer, and former finance minister best known for treating economics as a struggle over power rather than as a neutral t