People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.
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The firing condition at the front of the option sentence: an observable event that starts the action without you deciding again. Unlike a date or an ordering, it hands the start signal to something outside your willpower, so noticing the event is the whole decision.
A rule or event starts a bounded action automatically, always with limits and exceptions.
A protocol for increasing the space between a stimulus and your reaction — what Viktor Frankl described as the seat of human freedom
Decide now, in writing, exactly what you will do the moment the signal shows up or the clock runs out. Without it, waiting has no exit: the signal arrives and you just reopen the same debate.
A strategy of disguising your true objective inside something the target willingly accepts—gaining access through apparent gift or cooperation rather than through direct confrontation
The trolley problem and its variants explore whether there's a moral difference between acting to cause harm (pushing someone off a bridge to stop a trolley) and allowing harm to occur through inaction (not diverting a t…
Trophic cascades are indirect ecological effects transmitted across feeding relationships, such as predators influencing plants through herbivores
Name the real underlying quality your metrics are supposed to represent, the thing that would still matter if no score existed.
Draw one mark per item, all of them, with no abbreviation. The count stops being a claim and becomes something the eye can verify by scanning. It also shows shape for free: which marks are filled, where they cluster, and how much of the field is empty. Above roughly 200 items this stops working and becomes texture.
Tobi Lütke's (Shopify CEO) metaphor for tracking the state of professional relationships: every interaction either CHARGES or DRAINS the trust battery between two people
The gradual destruction of trust not through dramatic betrayal but through an accumulation of small violations: broken small promises, shared confidences, subtle lies, forgotten commitments, and inconsistencies between w…
A principle of keeping decision-relevant beliefs responsive to evidence and separate from wishes
Groups structured to prioritize accuracy over consensus, social harmony, or status signaling
Set the size of the next round using what the last one showed. If the evidence was good, raise the dose or drop a support. If it was rough, shrink it or add help. You adjust one variable, not several.
Taleb's parable illustrating the danger of inferring safety from a track record of safety
Shrink a big uncertain commitment to about 10%, keep the exit open, and name the evidence needed before going all in.
Charlie Munger's term for the human tendency to spend time on trivial, unimportant matters while avoiding difficult, important ones—gravitating toward easy conversation, easy problems, and easy decisions while the hard o…
An informal label for activity whose contribution to its intended purpose is too small to justify the time or attention it consumes.
Dennett's connected boxes use different internal representations but coordinate responses through overlapping represented content
Two forces inside one decision drawn as two figures facing each other, each with a name and one want, and the current settlement marked between them. Neither figure wins outright, which is the point. The mark shows where the deal sits today, so a mood you cannot argue with becomes a position that can move, and you can say which way you want it to move.
Dennett's two counter-images challenge a privileged central location for consciousness by emphasizing distributed processes and the wider influence that some contents acquire.
Get separate assessments before reviewers see each other's conclusions, with real independence in data or method.
Two Lotteries compares selecting a winner before tickets are distributed with selecting one afterward