Every idea, framework, and brainstorm I've put into writing — ordered by when I first thought it. 12302 items total. Click any title for the thesis card; the card links to the full essay if you want it.
The standard critique of incentives — that they 'distort rational judgment' — assumes rationality was ever the operating system.
Presenting data to shift behavior is mostly futile because the audience has already emotionally concluded and is now gathering facts to confirm it.
Humans are emotional actors who construct post-hoc rational justifications, not rational actors who add emotion as garnish.
Skilled liars know that a too-clean story triggers suspicion, so they salt their fabrication with something odd, rare, or never-quite-ordinary.
When someone is trying to con you, first play along with interest and intrigue to lower their guard. At the right moment, drop an uncomfortable question that signals you're on to them.
When a young MP touring Parliament began calling opposing MPs 'the enemy,' Churchill corrected him: that's the opposition, dear boy — the enemy's behind you.
Larry Ellison's view of Bill Gates, captured by David Senra, frames Gates' superpower as a refusal to let ego distort truth-seeking.
Security at the data-entry layer stacks: double entry catches typos, confirmation gates the destructive action, and explicit feedback (success/error) closes the loop so the user knows the system actually heard them.
Treating 'Reduce user input' as a security method — favoring user selection from predefined options over free-text entry — turns an accessibility convenience into an attack-surface reduction.
Kahneman's observation implies a two-tier system of belief formation: a small fraction of beliefs are evidence-based, while the vast majority are trust-based — adopted because someone we love or respect holds them.
Kahneman identifies a foundational paradox of human cognition: we hold our most important beliefs with enormous confidence, yet those beliefs are typically inherited from people we trust rather than grounded in evidence.
Higher dairy protein and calcium intake are 'highly significantly' associated not only with elevated IGF-1, but also with lower concentrations of IGFBP-2—the binding protein that normally limits IGF-1 bioavailability.
Higher dairy protein intake doesn't just correlate with elevated IGF-1—it appears to actively drive it through two distinct pathways.
Cystic fibrosis doesn't cause malnutrition through a single mechanism — it hits the body twice. First, thick mucus blocks the pancreas from releasing digestive enzymes into the intestines.
Instead of inventing from scratch, deliberately borrow, adapt, and implement proven ideas that others have already validated. The upside: you skip the trial-and-error phase and inherit what already works.
Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, famously 'invented practically nothing' — yet he copied every smart idea he encountered. This deliberate strategy of imitation and iteration built one of the most dominant retail empires in history.
Compound lifts recruit the largest muscle groups and produce the greatest systemic hormonal response, making them superior to isolation work for boosting testosterone.
Encode a document's lifecycle stage directly in its name: versioned suffixes for evolving brainstorms, ISO-style dates for frozen artifacts like meeting notes, and bare topic names for stable canon.
Separate genuinely shared content (both people need to see and edit) from per-person folders inside the shared brain (private takes on shared projects) from personal-only content (lives entirely in your private brain).
) rather than renaming the existing one. This preserves the historical lineage and lets anyone trace how thinking evolved over time.
This card exists as a redirect placeholder preserving wikilink integrity while the canonical content has moved to a clustered location.
A simple two-step operating rule derived from cumulative culture theory: when a problem appears, the first move is never to think — it's to look. Only after exhausting inherited solutions should you generate new ones.
Robin Dunbar's core argument is that human progress isn't built on individual genius — it's built on inheritance. Each generation skips the trial-and-error phase entirely by standing on the solutions of the last.
Stewart-Williams demolishes the lone-genius myth: no single man or civilization fathered the steam engine. Edison didn't invent the lightbulb; he compiled 600 prior attempts and synthesized them at the right moment.
Stewart-Williams argues humans aren't distinguished by raw intelligence but by cumulative culture — the ability to stockpile knowledge across generations.
Stewart-Williams grounds the entire study of human culture in a single guiding assumption: humans are animals who evolved to pass on genes.
Humans evolved first to pass on their genes, but once the capacity for culture appeared, culture became its own evolving system — competing, replicating, and mutating independently of genetic selection.
Western cultural history traces a recognizable arc: Enlightenment reason gives way to Romantic emotion, which hardens into Realism, which rebels into Modernism, which deconstructs into Postmodernism.
Cultural identity is not a single trait but a stack of derived attributes: nationality, ethnicity, religion or ideology, social class, and generational cohort.
Steve Stewart-Williams reframes culture as software: just as apps expand a phone's capabilities, every cultural tool you acquire—language, math, norms, skills—functions as installed code that multiplies what your cognitive hardware can