Archives

Repeating words, or injecting irrelevant facts to decision models can lure them.

Everyone dies, so I'd rather spend the time avoiding whatever I don't want to do. A post about boot camp, poker, and why the thing I was actually thirsty for was freedom.

Naval Ravikant splits luck into four kinds. Only the first one is truly random, and the other three can be trained like a skill.

Hasok Chang's Is Water H2O? shows chemistry moving forward by combining right hypotheses with wrong ones. That habit has a name, pluralism, and it's the same idea behind mental models and Charlie Munger's latticework thinking.

Peter Thiel's talk on why competition is for losers, and why choosing the right game matters more than being good at winning the one everybody else picked.

A Harvard study pinged 5,000 people at random moments and found they were unhappier lying around than working. What made them happy wasn't a pleasant thought, but no thought at all.

My unread pile grows faster than I can read it, and after three passes through one book I stopped treating a shelf of finished books as knowledge I own.

A bee that can't describe what it found dances nonsense anyway, and so do people who answer every question with confidence. Here's how to say only what you actually know.

An explanation is judged by whether the other person understood it, and buying that understanding usually costs you some precision.

A paper on how founders think splits reasoning into two kinds, and the second one builds the future instead of forecasting it.

Aswath Damodaran sorts ideas into possible, plausible, and probable. Only the last one comes with a number, and that's the test most ideas fail.

Parroting someone's last words kills the conversation. Complex reflection, a careful guess at what sits behind what they said, is what makes people feel understood.

Working memory holds about three new things for about thirty seconds. Writing is how you get past that limit, and how you keep readers from hitting theirs.

We drop long games because the payoff sits too far away. Cutting them into short games with small rewards is what keeps you in them.

Chase Hughes says everyone wants one of six things, and naming the right one is what makes people feel understood.

Gary Klein's Critical Decision Method turns a vague gut feel into two questions anyone can ask.

My pen name loses on Google to a manga character and a decade-old scandal, so I'm giving it up.

Gary Klein's Recognition-Primed Decision model explains how experts read a messy situation in seconds, and how you can train the same habit.

Philip Tetlock's three patterns of closed thinking, the politician, the preacher and the prosecutor, and the fourth job that gets you out of them.

Richard Feynman's four-step study method, why it works on memory, and how writing catches the knowledge you only think you have.

The bombers that never came back hold the answer. How survivorship bias works, and what to ask before you judge from the data in front of you.

Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns and Bezos's 70% rule. Some decisions are worth slowing down for, and the rest lose their value while you wait.

Wason's rule-finding experiment shows why stacking up supporting evidence never proves you right, while a single counterexample can prove you wrong.

You can't judge advice on a subject you don't know, so judge the adviser instead: does he want you to do well, does he know the field, and does he know you?

Certain words and certain people trip a breaker in your head that shuts your thinking off, and you can learn to catch it and switch it back on.

Retrieval and deep encoding are what make anything stick, and writing happens to be the easiest way to do both.

Charlie Munger's story about Max Planck's chauffeur, and why depth of knowledge is what carries you through the questions you never rehearsed.

Qiao Liang's Unrestricted Warfare, Gramsci's war of position, and what Charlie Munger's latticework says about a small company taking on a large one.

Try sketching a doorknob from memory and you'll see how thin your model of the world is, and why forecasts keep missing.

Post 51. Why I walked out of a developer job to study thinking and persuasion, and what a year of writing every Sunday did and didn't give me.

Fatigue and skepticism stop most stories before they start, and this last post in the series covers the three emotions and four narratives that get past both.

Your worldview decides how you act, and a story you fall into rewrites that worldview, which is how Edward Bernays turned cigarettes into torches of freedom.

Every story runs on one pattern, someone did something and it turned out well or badly, and this post takes that structure apart to show why it works.

A made-up story about worm patties dented McDonald's sales for forty years, and this first post in the story series explains why stories get to us at all.

The last three of the seven relationships that explain the world: oscillation, trend, and independence, and what each one is good for.

The first four of seven quantitative relationships that run through everyday life, and the lesson each one hands you.

Dalio tells you to be a hyperrealist and moves on, so here are the two things that stop you: your desires and your guesses.

The second half of The Righteous Mind, on the two feelings that bind people into a group and why costly, pointless-looking rituals keep it alive.

The last three moral foundations from The Righteous Mind, updated with research through 2024: authority, liberty, and purity.

Six of the nine moral foundations from The Righteous Mind, updated with research through 2024: ownership, care, equality, proportionality, loyalty, and honor.

A review of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, updated with research through 2024, starting with why moral judgment is a feeling before it is an argument.

Motivational interviewing has a formula for the two hard parts of a conversation: open questions that pull an honest answer, and complex reflection that shows the person you understood them.

What Millie's Library asks of a Book Master, what the weekly job involves, and the perks that come with the badge.

Questions that trade feelings and vulnerability, plus responses that empathize and support, are what turn a stranger into a friend. A Blackpink lyric happens to say the same thing.

Thirty questions turned strangers into friends in an hour. The book Supercommunicators explains why, and this first part is about hearing what the other person actually wants from a conversation.

A three step method for building decision rules that hold when your own judgment wobbles: settle the plan before you act, state its intent, and name the assumptions that would break it.

A behavioral economics paper on why we set a rule and then break it. We judge by one standard when we plan and a different one when we act.

Three standard speed reading tricks that the research kills, three that survive it, and how to build the reading muscle underneath them.

The four-step method in full: record, summarize, connect, repeat, and why counting the books you finished is the wrong scoreboard.

Anne Jones read the last Harry Potter in 47 minutes, but the speed worth training is how fast you can put a book to use.

Five techniques from Mentalist DaiGo, folded into a three-stage process you can run on whatever you are writing today.

Desire, relationship, and difference: three strategies from Mentalist DaiGo for writing that moves a reader instead of just informing one.

The first of three posts on Mentalist DaiGo's book on persuasive writing: we write to make people act, and the thing that does the moving is imagination.

The three emotion systems in Brain View, stability, stimulation, and dominance, and how the one a person runs on decides what they buy.

Why memory keeps the experiences you felt something during, how those get filed as patterns that run you without asking, and what changes when you reinterpret one.

Brain View argues that emotion drives learning and decisions, and this first post covers why emotion exists at all and how it turns into the motives behind what you do.

The rest of the four-step revision method: read like a reader, name what feels off, write alternatives and pick one, and know when to stop.

Why revising is what makes writing easy, and why the first thing you revise is not a sentence but the thinking behind it.

Momentum, part 3: readers run out of attention halfway, so space the interesting bits closely and become the good kind of attention seeker.

Momentum, part 2: give the reader a reason to care and shake up an emotion, the two ways to start something people actually finish.

Momentum, part 1: a reader is a car going uphill, and a piece that stops pressing the pedal loses them.

Decision-making series 3: the Martingale strategy looks unbeatable and bankrupts you anyway. The three mistakes to avoid when you can't know the odds.

Decision-making series 2: the Kelly criterion says your return can never beat the accuracy of your information, so bet in proportion to what you actually know.

Decision-making series 1: more information didn't make expert racing analysts any more accurate. It only made them more sure they were right.

Fear is what drags you back into a fixed mindset. One question pulls you out of it, and it works on the way out of a bad day too.

Three ways to work your circle of competence: map it honestly, build it deeper instead of wider, and pay someone else for everything outside it.

Three everyday uses for nonviolent communication: leading a negotiation with empathy, thanking someone so they feel it, and turning work you resent into work you chose.

Nonviolent communication splits a position into four parts, observation, feeling, need and request, and that structure is what turns a fight into something you can settle.

Every piece of writing exists to change its reader in one specific way, and writing that change down as a single sentence gives you the purpose statement.

The second half of Blair Warren's course cuts persuasion down to two words, validate and fascinate, and explains why correcting someone always backfires.

Blair Warren's entire persuasion course fits into a single sentence with five parts, and The Secret sold 35 million copies by using every one of them.

The three filters I put a book through before I trust it: whether the author is writing inside their own expertise, whether the claims have evidence, and whether the writing is clear.

Your gut is fast, and it stops at the first result. Second-order thinking asks 'and then what?' so you can see the second and third-order results coming.

Charlie Munger said knowing what you don't know beats being smart. Your circle of competence is the ground where you hold the advantage, and every side job outside it is a game stacked against you.

A line by line read of the apology Lee Jae-yong gave during the MERS outbreak, showing how its order does the work: emotion first, reason second, sympathy for the doctors last.

Reading a lot doesn't make you write better, because you read for content. The fix is to read for structure: underline the lines that do something to you, then work out why.

John F. Kennedy's September 12, 1962 speech, and the line about choosing a goal because it's hard rather than because it's easy.

The three moves behind titles that pull a million views: take a subject the reader already cares about, get specific, and never hand over the answer.

Short sentences for speed, long ones for weight, and a turn that breaks what the reader expects. How to write a piece that reads like a rollercoaster.

Two structures cover everything you will ever write: PREP when you are explaining something, and ki-seung-jeon-gyeol when you want the reader to feel it.