Archive
131 essays, grouped by category.
Epistemology & Logic
Confusing a simplified model of reality for reality itself is one of the most common — and most avoidable — reasoning failures.
The meeting you weren't invited to has two explanations that fit equally well. Preferring the boring one isn't generosity — it's what happens when you count how much each explanation assumes.
The colleague who ignored your email is probably not conspiring against you. The principle behind that judgement is arithmetic, not optimism — and it is misquoted more than almost any other rule of thought.
Most decisions copy what worked before. The decisions that change an industry usually start by refusing to.
Instead of asking how to succeed, ask what would definitely ruin the outcome — then spend your effort avoiding exactly that.
Health & Biology
CRISPR can already cure diseases in trials. The bottleneck holding back wide access is closer to a manufacturing and pricing problem than a scientific one.
Chronological age tells you almost nothing useful. A handful of measurable fitness markers tell you a great deal more.
The gut doesn't just digest food. It runs a constant, largely unconscious conversation with the brain that shapes mood more than most people realize.
Humanities & Arts
Every account is assembled from what survived, by someone who already knows the ending. That single fact makes events look more inevitable than they were — and explains why careful history sounds less certain.
Every generation of media technology bundles content for convenience, gets unbundled by a competitor promising choice, and then quietly re-bundles once the unbundled market gets crowded.
Physicists assume observation reveals reality; doctors assume suffering is bad. None of those assumptions can be tested by the field relying on them — and someone has to examine them.
Stoic philosophy survives not because it's inspiring, but because it's a functional set of defaults for handling things you can't control.
The Bronze Age Collapse wasn't caused by one disaster. It was caused by an interconnected system with no slack left to absorb several small ones.
Everyone has caught a news article getting their own area of expertise embarrassingly wrong. Almost no one applies that skepticism to the very next article.
India
Digital public infrastructure, data localization, and platform rules in India increasingly follow a distinct playbook from the US or EU.
The signals that predict a market shift in the US often lag or don't apply at all when read against India's market structure.
A playbook built for high-willingness-to-pay markets often breaks the moment it meets India's scale-first, price-sensitive reality.
Life Sciences
A population grows until the resource runs short — then often keeps going past the limit. What makes overshoot serious is that it can damage the resource base and leave the ceiling permanently lower.
Species with identical needs cannot coexist — a small consistent advantage compounds until one is gone. Which means anything living side by side must differ, and finding how is informative.
Your eye has a blind spot no engineer would design. That flaw reveals the process that built it — a process that governs markets and ideas as strictly as it governs retinas.
The fossil record shows long stretches where species barely change, then rapid shifts. The interesting question is not why change happens in bursts — it is what holds things still for so long.
In a competitive system, staying exactly as good as you were last year is a losing strategy, because everyone else isn't standing still either.
Lifestyle & Skills
Almost every flavor people describe as 'savory' or 'roasted' traces back to one chemical reaction that has nothing to do with caramelization.
Most note-taking systems are optimized for capturing information. Almost none are optimized for finding it again later, which is the entire point.
Media & Culture
A one-person channel with a loyal audience now competes directly with institutions that employ hundreds.
The feed isn't showing you content — it's making a continuous bet about what will keep you from leaving.
Unbundling gave viewers exactly what they asked for — and quietly removed the economics that funded the content in the first place.
Writing's real consequence was not that people could record things — it was that law could outlive its author. Every medium does work that no individual message controls.
Medicine & Health
If each case produces more than one further case, an outbreak grows; below one, it fades. That threshold is simple — and almost everything else about the subject is context-dependent.
The interventions with the largest effects have been known for decades and are unglamorous. Attention flows almost inversely to effect size, for a simple reason — the big ones cannot be sold.
The computer analogy breaks down at the most important point — the hardware physically changes with use. That single property explains most of what is practically known about learning.
Nearly everything that strengthens a system — a muscle, an immune system, an organization — does so by first damaging it slightly.
Physics & Reality
Paper on a table will not burn, though burning releases energy. Something has to supply the initial push — and most stalled intentions are barriers, not disagreements about value.
An afternoon coffee still has an eighth of its caffeine in you the next morning. Anything that loses a constant proportion per period behaves this way — including skills and knowledge.
Left alone, every system trends toward disorder. Staying organized isn't natural — it's a constant, energy-consuming fight against physics.
Light measures the same speed however fast you are moving. Take that seriously and distance and time have to bend — which is why your phone's position fix depends on the theory working.
Checking a tyre's pressure lets out a little air, so the reading is never quite what was there before. With objects that hardly matters. With people it can be larger than what you were trying to measure.
Policy & Power
The classic test for monopoly power breaks down the moment the product in question doesn't charge users anything at all.
First post on the new blog.
Almost nobody actually wants zero data collection — they want a trade they'd make consciously instead of one made invisibly on their behalf.