Posts
The Mimicry That Helps the Model
Batesian mimics degrade the model's signal. But what about systems where the mimics help the model by providing cover? Biology can describe this dynamic but hasn't bothered to name it. It shows up more places than you'd expect.
Why Productivity Tools Make You Busier
When a tool makes tasks cheaper, you don't do the same tasks faster. You find more tasks worth doing. The economics of why efficiency gains disappear, and what to do about it.
Polished vs Powerful
Every software product sits on a spectrum from opinionated-and-legible to flexible-and-powerful. The choice you make reveals what you actually value.
Decisions Are the Pinch Point
Every hypothesis for why some people have worse health outcomes — poverty, education, social determinants, whatever — passes through the same pinch point: decisions.
The Per-Minute Clinic
Fixed-fee appointments misalign doctor and patient incentives around duration. Per-minute billing dissolves the tension - and the second-order effects are more interesting than the first.
You Can't Search Your Way to Enlightenment
The practices most worth finding are invisible to discovery mechanisms - because the qualities that make them valuable are the same qualities that make them unsearchable.
Life Is At Least 50% Just Figuring Out Who to Copytrade
The smartest people copytrade the hardest. Not because they're lazy, but because identifying good judgment in others is itself the hard skill — and most people are bad at it.
It's a Filter, Not a Forge
Paths don't transform you into someone new. They reveal and select for who you already are. Getting the causal arrow right changes everything.
GLP-1s: A Seatbelt for the Digital Age
You're outgunned. Ten thousand PhDs have spent years optimising Skinner boxes against you. GLP-1s might be the first tool that actually levels the playing field.