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... ↓
how to evolve a system
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 it still marches, just not for you.
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novelty
all innovation arrives inside novelty. a system improves by raising the volume of mutations or the ratio of good ones: toyota harvests ideas from every factory floor because discarding a bad one costs nothing, while genentech aims each new treatment at a known biomarker. volume or quality, the mutation supply sets the ceiling.
tests
the tests imposed on a system decide the ideals it evolves towards. one survival test made peppered moths light before the industrial revolution and dark after it, and the nba quietly selects giants from a population where almost nobody stands that tall. be exact about the test and the system does the rest.
spread
a winning trait dies with its entity unless it spreads. the fosbury flop remade the high jump because every jumper who saw it could copy it; fashion only cycles, because status is zero-sum and cannot raise the whole system. spread converts one entity’s luck into the system’s standard.
speed
evolution accelerates at its bottleneck. once the loop exists, speed comes from one mechanism at a time: produce more or better novelty, test it faster and at volume, or cut the friction slowing the winners’ spread. growth, above all else.