Concepts

47 items

A Motorcycle for the Mind A motorcycle for the mind is a computer with a language model added to it. The computer on its own was already called a bicycle for the mind, because it let a
A Return to Code A return to code is a loop for making cheap custom software. You describe the program you want. An agent builds it and tests it. You correct the agent. The
Accuracy Before Speed A familiar process already runs near the fastest pace the quality bar still allows. Real speed comes from changing the process, and from running the current
Agent-Native Infrastructure Agent-native infrastructure is software and documentation written so an automated worker can read the instructions, see the state, and take the actions,
Anti-Marketing Anti-marketing is the practice of showing constraints, flaws, trade-offs, and weak points before the other party has invested, instead of leaving them out of a
Are You Thinking, or Just Consuming Thinking with material is comparing, predicting, explaining, retrieving, deciding, or building. Consuming material is working with it without doing any of
Bias and Framing Real-world bias is delivered by framing. The facts of a case can pass through a sentence unchanged while the valence attached to them, the positive or negative
Catching the Inner Voice Self-talk is speech without sound. A person learns it from other people, produces it with the same system that produces spoken words, and can train it the way
Cave Theory A brain priced in energy keeps what connects to a purpose and sweeps the rest: why the relationship, relevance, and question techniques are not tastes.
Charisma How much other people want to come toward you and the conversation: contingent, trainable, and only as good as what sits behind the signals.
Cognitive Load & What Mental Effort Is Trying to Cue Cognitive load is mental effort, read as a signal of the work the mind is doing: holding pieces of material, resolving them, comparing them, or transforming
Dating Apps - The Gini Coefficient One number between 0 and 1 for how unevenly the likes women send land on the men. On Hinge in 2017 it came out at 0.542 for men, near apartheid-era South
Declarative, Procedural, and Conditional Knowledge Under any skill there are three separate jobs. Having one of them does not give you the other two. The first job is knowing what the thing is and what it
Design of Everyday Things When a capable person cannot work a door, a stove, or a thermostat, the object's design has failed. The object was supposed to show what can be done, where to
Five Thinking Habits - Conclusion First Five checks you run on your own thinking before you speak: say the conclusion first, give observations before conclusions, play the question back, say what
Four Stages of Competence The Four Stages of Competence is a model of how a skill improves. First the learner does the skill wrong without knowing it. Then the learner sees the mistakes
Global Workspace and J-space The J-space is a small internal workspace inside a language model. It holds a handful of silent patterns, and each pattern stands for a word the model is close
Good Faith Everyone has the cooperative-sounding words; what settles who means them is what a person will say at their own expense.
Higher-Order Generativity vs Higher-Order Judgment Higher-order work split into two capabilities, making the thing and making the call, divided by who carries the cost of being wrong, and closing at very
How to Communicate Truth Into Someone Else's Frame Communicating truth into someone else's frame means explaining something you actually believe, in the terms the other person already uses, and leaving when the
How to Unlearn Old or Bad Habits Efficiently A habit is one feeling joined to one automatic move. When the feeling arrives, the move is already prepared. A new response you are trying to learn is still
Human vs AI Capability Lens The capability lens grades any skill on two separate scores, a Human score and an AI score. Each score is one axis of a plane, and the pair of scores places
Learning Efficiency Learning efficiency is the amount of usable knowledge a learner keeps per hour spent learning. A count of pages covered does not show it. Two learners can log
Learning Styles Myth and Multimodal Learning The learning styles idea says that each person has one channel that suits them best: seeing, hearing, reading, or doing. It also says that teaching should be
Levels of Thinking - The Step Back A level of thinking is one step back from your own reaction, and there are nine of them, from your own needs up to watching your own mind build a reaction.
Meiwaku The trouble you cause other people that you did not need to cause, and the habit of counting it before you act.
Memory Handling Memory handling is the work of shaping, attaching, and testing a piece of new material in the short window after it arrives. The piece has to be handled at
Nothing Ever Happens Is Over "Nothing ever happens" is a meme. It makes a cynical claim: every large change is oversold, and the world returns to how it was. The mindset behind the meme
Probability Distributions The common probability distributions, each with a picture, a plain definition, and real-world examples, grouped by the kind of number they fit.
Regulatory Capture via Doom-Marketing Regulatory capture via doom-marketing is the pattern in which dramatizing a technology's danger gives gatekeepers the pretext to centralize control of it. The
Reverse Causality A closed justification loop: one idea's importance is explained through a second idea that itself has to be memorized, which adds a memory item instead of
Selfhood One person's keep-or-cut filter, run against a real use at the moment of choosing. What shows is only what the filter left behind.
Selfhood and the Ledger The slide from careful to silent: the count a considerate person runs on their own speech misses half the entry, and the missing half was priced by the frame
Social Media - Curvilinear Design & the Theft of Time A feed has no chapter end, last page, or closing time, so continuation never has to be chosen and an hour leaves nothing the day can file as an event. The
Style Style is the recognizable pattern left by repeated choices in method, rhythm, and emphasis. The pattern prepares the audience for the work. It does not compete
Suicidal Empathy Care aimed by what is most visible, and the check that re-aims it before it decides.
The Accretion Frame The accretion frame is the design theory behind a pull engine. A pull engine is a practice that produces its own return visits. A long practice runs on one of
The Age Of Nonlinear Returns A small exchange is scored by whether the trust, options, skill, and relationships behind it still have a path to a much larger upside. Linear accounting asks
The Four Things People Stay For People stay with a host for a mind on an object. The stay is content, logic, delivery, and message. Takes carry personality. Ego stays off the title.
The Same Model Twice A model's label hides three variables that decide its output quality: precision, task type, and finish. A comparison between two models that has not fixed all
The Screen Inferiority Effect Paper beats screens for learning. The reason is a set of frictions that a reader can remove. The largest friction is a trained habit of not thinking while
The Shortcut Problem The shortcut problem is a finished note, highlight, map, or answered prompt standing in for the evaluation, comparison, or reconstruction the task needed. The
The Three Readings of a Silence A test of why a thing worth saying went unsaid, taken against one specific remembered silence in a room that mattered, returning which repair is worth running.
The Trained Voice The model's default voice as trained self-regard: a corpus paid in attention taught the machine to sell, and selfhood is the one thing that cannot be in the
The Two Meanings of Ego The word ego names two unrelated things in writing. The first is self-regard. Self-regard is prose written so that the reader will think better of its author,
Understanding Bottleneck The understanding bottleneck is the work that stays with a person after an agent has generated options, written code, and summarized sources. The person still
Wabi-Sabi Wabi-sabi is an aesthetic stance. It finds beauty in naturalness, simplicity, and subtle imperfection. The imperfection it values comes from age, from wear,