People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.
3,456 entries
Older adults consistently show a cognitive bias toward positive over negative information — they remember positive images better than negative ones, attend more to positive faces, and recall positive memories more readil…
A system can quietly take away someone's real say in their own life even though nothing broke and nobody objected.
A computational approach to understanding complex systems by simulating the behavior of individual agents following simple rules—and observing the emergent system-level patterns that arise from their interactions
Many small units, each following the same short list of local rules, with no rule anywhere describing the pattern you are hoping to see. You set the rules and the starting arrangement, run it forward, and the group behavior appears or does not. This is the sub-mode that can surprise its own author, which is also the warning attached to it: a pattern that emerges from rules you invented is a property of your rules.
Human or artificial agents carry work that needs expertise, labor, perspective, or judgment you lack.
Agnosticism concerns limits of warranted knowledge; Huxley's formulation emphasizes following reasons without claiming unsupported certainty
Ahimsa extends beyond pacifism to a strategic principle
The process runs fine but increasingly optimizes a proxy metric instead of the thing you actually want.
When warnings arrive so often that people stop reading them, the one warning that mattered gets ignored along with the rest.
Numbered steps, a decision at some of them, and an explicit stopping condition. No machine required, which means it can run in your head in the middle of a point or a meeting. The stop condition is the part people leave out, and it is the part that makes the steps a procedure rather than a list.
Write the information as an explicit step-by-step procedure or bit of code that anyone can re-run and get the same answer. Best when a judgment must repeat identically across cases; useless when the goal itself is fuzzy or the assumptions stay unspoken.
Algorithmic feed management deliberately curates your algorithmic inputs to shape what platforms show you
Step-by-step procedures for solving specific classes of problems or performing computations—the fundamental building blocks of computer science and, more broadly, of any SYSTEMATIC approach to problem-solving
Write out an explicit pair list: each piece of the familiar domain matched to the piece in the new one that does the same job. Match by function in the system, never by what things look like or are called.
Asks whether the thing you named is an end you actually care about, or just something easy to count. Trace it upward: if you hit it perfectly and still feel nothing changed, you named an activity, a borrowed metric, or a stand-in.
Pick one attribute every item has, then order and register all items on it so the same detail sits in the same spot for each. Comparing becomes reading straight down one column. It scales past two items to the whole set.
Allostatic load describes cumulative physiological burden associated with repeated or dysregulated adaptation to demands
Bruce McEwen's allostatic load theory describes the cumulative physiological cost of chronic stress adaptation
Puts a ceiling on how fast you may move, stated as a rate: how much more per week, how many sessions, how long between them. Order can be right and the tempo still wrong.
Alloying combines elements into a metallic material whose properties depend on composition and processing
The same ribbons, repeated across three or more time steps, with the stacking order free to change. Categories keep their identity while their thickness moves, so a stream that is quietly taking over crosses over the top of the one it replaced. The crossing is the signal.
The tendency to evaluate an option against a single alternative (usually the status quo) rather than against ALL available alternatives—producing decisions that are better than doing nothing but far worse than the best a…
A family of conflict resolution methods—mediation, arbitration, negotiation, collaborative law—that resolve disputes outside traditional litigation
Dispute resolution exists on a spectrum from fully consensual to fully adjudicative: negotiation (parties resolve directly), mediation (neutral facilitator helps parties find agreement), med-arb (mediation that converts…