Posts
All the articles I've posted.
What matters more than the survivors
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.
Unknown unknowns and last week's lottery numbers
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.
The 2-4-6 rule that 96% of people get wrong
Wason's rule-finding experiment shows why stacking up supporting evidence never proves you right, while a single counterexample can prove you wrong.
How to dodge bad advice, from a Wharton professor
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?
What if your brain stops and you never notice?
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.
Why the teacher remembers and the students forget
Retrieval and deep encoding are what make anything stick, and writing happens to be the easiest way to do both.
Are you Planck, or his driver?
Charlie Munger's story about Max Planck's chauffeur, and why depth of knowledge is what carries you through the questions you never rehearsed.
Unrestricted Warfare: how a startup beats a giant
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.
You can't draw a doorknob
Try sketching a doorknob from memory and you'll see how thin your model of the world is, and why forecasts keep missing.
I quit my job and blogged for a year
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.