ybooks

Readers

Samuel Hammond

Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.

1 book on the record · 11 Aug 2026 – 11 Aug 2026 · @hamandcheese

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 7d is days, 4yr is years.

recommends it

Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint by Joseph Heath

For those curious to learn more, I recommend Joseph Heath’s Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint – a book ostensibly about the evolution of language, rule-following, and human normativity that, in retrospect, is actually about the inadequacy of consequentialist decision theory for solving AI alignment.

on secondbest.ca · 11 Aug 2026

Everything Samuel Hammond recommends — not just books — on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.