Dunbar's Number: The Limit Is Attention, Not Memory
You can recognise thousands of faces and actively maintain far fewer relationships. The famous figure of 150 is contested — the underlying constraint is not.
Category
Society & Politics
Zero-Sum and Positive-Sum: Two Very Different Games
Two children share one cake and one child's gain is the other's loss. Two neighbours swap mangoes for apples and both end up better off, with no new fruit. Telling these apart changes what you should do.
The Overton Window: The Difference Between Wrong and Unsayable
Ideas that are ordinary today were once outside the range of what a respectable person said aloud. Mostly the facts didn't change — the boundary of the sayable did, and it moves by repetition.
The Tragedy of the Commons: When Restraint Is Punished
Every herder who adds a cow to the shared pasture captures the whole benefit and pays a twentieth of the cost. Nobody is greedy, everyone is correct, and the pasture dies anyway.
The Prisoner's Dilemma: When Two Rational People Both Lose
Betraying your partner is the correct choice no matter what they do. So both of you betray, and both of you serve five years instead of one. No error was made — and that is exactly the problem.
Nash Equilibrium: Why Everyone Stays Somewhere Nobody Likes
Two petrol stations cut prices until neither can move without losing. Nobody wanted the result, everyone behaved sensibly, and it held anyway — because stable and good are different properties.
The Thucydides Trap: When Rising and Established Powers Meet
A rising power wants influence matching its strength; an established one sees each concession as erosion. Both are sincere, neither needs to want conflict, and the pressure builds anyway.
The 15-Minute City Is an Old Idea Wearing a New Name
Most of human urban history was built around a 15-minute radius. The last century of car-centric planning was the actual anomaly.
Credentialing and Learning Have Quietly Become Two Different Products
The thing that gets you hired and the thing that actually teaches you are separating faster than most institutions have adapted to.
Remote Work Didn't Change Where People Work — It Changed Who They're Competing Against
The moment a job can be done from anywhere, the candidate pool for it stops being local and starts being global.