Philosophy: The Questions Every Other Field Has to Assume
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.
Concept
The Map Is Not the Territory
History: The Past and the Account of It Are Different Things
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.
Relativity: One Stubborn Fact and Everything That Follows
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.
Simpson's Paradox: True in Every Group, False Overall
A treatment beats its rival for small stones, beats it for large stones, and loses when you combine the patients. Nothing was miscalculated — which is what makes it worth understanding.
Neuroscience: The Brain Rearranges Itself Around What You Do
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.
The Observer Effect: Measuring Something Touches It
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.
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.
Occam's Razor: Why Assumptions Are Expensive
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.
First Principles Thinking: Separating Physics From Habit
A pallet's dimensions are not a fact about pallets. Most of what looks like a constraint is an inherited decision — and telling the two apart is where the method earns its cost.
The Map Is Not the Territory: Every Model Earns Its Keep by Lying
A map showing everything would be the size of the city and useless. Models work by discarding detail — the error is forgetting which detail, and when you left the range where it didn't matter.