Thinking
The standing layer. Posts argue one thing on one day; these pages hold the position, and they get revised rather than replaced.
Each page carries the date its claim was last checked and whether I regard it as stable or still provisional. They are pulled from the notebook I keep, so they are terser than an essay and they assume you are reading for the argument rather than for the story.
Ideas
- Calibrated Belief Under Uncertainty
Rational beliefs are probabilistic priors, updated in proportion to the strength of evidence, never reaching certainty but continuously approaching better approximations of truth
- Experimental Adaptation to Complexity
The right response to genuine complexity is designed, survivable experiments with tight feedback loops, preceded by understanding what kind of complexity you face, and qualified by not removing structures you don't yet understand
- Agency Stratification of Strategy
The strategy and product lenses people accumulate as a toolbox are better organised by the kind of agency each one concerns than by their subject matter: some describe conditions you can only observe and adapt to (forces - given), some describe choices you make in response (positions - chosen), and some describe con...
Principles
- No Single Frame Is Sufficient
View the situation through more than one frame before committing - every frame is selective, so any single one carries characteristic, predictable blind spots.
- Match the move to the situation, not to a universal best practice
Select the intervention by first typing the situation; there is no context-free best practice, and a move that works in one context reliably fails when transplanted to another without re-selection.
- Frame the problem before committing to a solution
Converge on what the problem actually is - and who owns that definition - before committing resources to a solution.
Domains
- Competitive & Evolutionary Strategy
Competitive position is not a fixed property but a moving one - every capability, practice and mental model evolves along a one-way arc from novel to industrialised, and strategy is the discipline of seeing where things sit on that arc and playing the movement rather than the snapshot.
- Negotiation & Partnerships
Reaching agreement with a counterparty is its own discipline, distinct from competing against them. Its two halves are bargaining - where leverage comes from your alternatives and from getting beneath stated positions to underlying interests - and contracting - where the terms you write are not neutral descriptions...
- Communication & Persuasion
Effective communication structures information around the audience's question, not the author's knowledge. Lead with the conclusion so the reader grasps the argument before deciding how deeply to inspect.
- Entrepreneurship & Business
Product-market fit is a binary threshold event, not a gradient - strategy should be built around crossing it, not on optimising before it. Before PMF, the primary job is discovery and survival; the secondary job is everything else.
- Epistemology & Reason
Rational beliefs are probabilistic priors, updated in proportion to the strength of evidence. Certainty is structurally unavailable - blocked by entropy, quantum indeterminacy, the Markov blanket's incompleteness, and the prior-dependency of all inference.
- Learning & Cognition
Durable learning requires effortful retrieval in varied conditions - not passive re-exposure. But before the mechanics of learning can work at all, the learner must be in a disposition to update: intellectual humility, acknowledged ignorance, and physiological regulation are the preconditions that open the loop.
- Organisation & Leadership
Organisational quality is engineered into the system's structure, not achieved through individual performance. Motivation, retention, and leadership effectiveness are properties of designed environments - structural outputs - not character outputs.
- Personal Development
Durable personal change works through identity and character, not willpower. The right lever is the accumulated evidence of repeated action that progressively rewrites self-concept - not the effort to override the existing self-concept by force.
- Product & Design
The right unit of product work is a validated learning loop, not an output. Discovery must precede formulation: the question "what should we build?" is only answerable after the question "what do we need to learn?" has been answered and the evidence gathered.
- Strategy & Decision-Making
Good strategy requires diagnosis first - a clear-sighted account of what kind of problem you face and specifically what must be overcome - before selecting a response mode. The most common and costly error is acting without diagnosis: applying a tool that fits a different problem type.
- Systems & Complexity
Complex systems fail through feedback suppression and tight coupling - the same structural conditions that make them efficient (standardised responses, optimised interdependencies) also make them brittle when novelty arrives.