triumph of the wilderness

published 06-05-2025

the pasture is only as weak as the habit that tends it. the tragedy of the commons says take where taking is easy, before your neighbour does. but when the children of the farmers see the sorry remains, some squabble over the shrinking dirt, and... ↓

role sculpting

published 21-12-2024

to sculpt is to multiply through subtraction. if you quit tomorrow, your role would be filled by someone just like you. spend a little time each day shaping the role into something your less-experienced self would have been excited about, and... ↓

false positive

published 05-07-2024

negativity finds contradictions; positivity resolves them. naive optimism censors the scary parts, and pessimism just points at them. redefine both as conflict management tools, and... ↓

loop break

published 25-05-2024

you get about 700k hours, and the reaper takes the rest. sleep costs 230k, work 170k, eating 28k. what survives must be protected from the little degenerate in all of us, so... ↓

mr market

published 11-02-2024

a sonnet for the market. wants are whispered into its patient ear, and a price is given to those who speak; so long as hands can build and eyes can see,... ↓

how to evolve a system

published 26-01-2024

whatever a system tests is what it becomes. every system evolves through three mechanisms: continual randomised novelty, tests that favour some of it, and spread of the winners. set the tests deliberately and the system marches toward your goal; leave them to chaos and... ↓

black coffee, whisky & cigars

published 28-12-2023

acquired tastes are proof of persistence. bitterness once signalled poison, so learning to love black coffee, whisky and the occasional cigar demonstrates a willingness to endure discomfort on the way to a reward. so... ↓

to be open minded.

published 12-10-2023

an open mind is a system, not a disposition. plans come from ideas, ideas come from explanations, and explanations stay good only inside a habitat that takes in new ones continually, filters them for signal and source, carries their context, refutes the bad and integrates the rest. build the habitat and... ↓

the importance of experience

published 26-04-2023

the picture is just one third of the art. another third is trained perception, the language of the medium. the final third is you: without lived experience, art is reduced to brushstrokes on canvas, so... ↓

levels of differentiation

published 18-02-2023

mastery is reacting to ever greater nuance. protect the king, until the exception; the exception becomes a rule, and the rule spawns new exceptions. feedback is more general than what you need in the moment, so... ↓

clear the fog

published 22-01-2023

everything you say is a foggy generalisation. we meet the world through maps of meaning, and most maps are fog: confident opinion built from headlines, hearsay and one small life. accept the fog, stop lecturing those who have cleared it, and... ↓

clear the fog

everything you say is a foggy generalisation. we meet the world through maps of meaning, and most maps are fog: confident opinion built from headlines, hearsay and one small life. accept the fog, stop lecturing those who have cleared it, and clear a patch of your own.

maps of meaning

you interact with reality through maps, not reality itself. you think you know how a helicopter flies until someone asks you to build one. the distance between the world and your picture of it is fog, and most maps carry far more of it than their owners suspect.

the fog spreads

an unexamined opinion is fog handed to someone else. money advice without a first million, politics from a database of headlines, certainty downloaded into children as a favour. to someone who has done the work, a foggy opinion sounds like an exaggerated story about an event they attended; they will not correct you, but they will stop trusting you.

small samples

hold every opinion at the size of your sample. one life of experience is a tiny dataset against the entirety of human knowledge, so strongly held opinions are silly by construction. accept that everything you say is a generalisation, and make allowances for it.

clear a patch

learn to get really good at one thing. not because beethoven on piano is useful, but because the march to mastery builds the discernment to find imperfections, the creativity to form solutions, and the discipline to repeat both forever. all experts are people who cleared a heap of fog in a single field; if you know the way broadly, you will see it in everything.