Ego Is the Enemy
Ego isn't confidence or ambition. It's the need to be seen a certain way, and it costs you differently depending on where you are: as an aspiring person, as someone successful, and when you fail. This book examines how ego…
Tag: Critical Thinking (Page 3)
Book ReviewsThe Obstacle Is the Way
Marcus Aurelius wrote that obstacles advance action. Ryan Holiday spent a book proving he was right, organizing Stoic philosophy into three practical moves: how you see the problem, what you do about it, and how you survive when nothing works.…
BiasThe Imaginary Scarcity Trap
There are no good clients. Nobody can do this properly. There is no time. These sound like observations about the world and behave like decisions, because once you believe a thing is unavailable you stop looking, and not looking produces…
Character DevelopmentThe Disasters That Happen to Ordinary People
The disasters that happen to ordinary people are boring: a power cut in a heatwave, a burst pipe, a job ending. Almost nothing in the preparedness market addresses any of it, because fear sells better than usefulness.
Critical ThinkingToba: The Winter That Almost Ended Us
Seventy-four thousand years ago a mountain in Sumatra came apart and took the sky with it. Sunlight fell, the cold held for years, and the human population may have dropped to fewer than ten thousand. This is what that winter…
AI and Your CareerGeorgie-Ann Getton: I Forgot I Had Free Will
Organizational systems architect Georgie-Ann Getton on the story you tell yourself, setting goals as a floor rather than a ceiling, and the morning she missed a turn and realized she had forgotten she could turn around.
AI WritingAI Detection Cannot Be Evidence, and Publishing Is Using It That Way
An author can now lose a publishing contract because a stranger uploaded their manuscript to a website and got a number back. Here is why those numbers cannot bear the weight being put on them, and what a writer should…
AI WritingAI Consciousness Left Philosophy and Entered the Laboratory
Researchers trained a model on a meaningless maze and found a positive and negative axis that already existed in the base model. Steering it changes behavior far outside the maze. Here is what that evidence shows, what it does not,…
AEOThe Web Got Fenced: What AI Search Costs Small Sites
A link used to be a vote and cost nothing to give. AI visibility depends on corroboration from platforms that charge admission, which is a spending filter wearing the costume of a trust signal. Here is what it costs and…
AEOWhat the AI Visibility Industry Sells, and What the Evidence Says
An industry has grown up selling AI visibility, and much of what it sells has no evidence behind it. Here is what the measurements say, what destroyed three real companies, the one documented recovery, and the short list that survives…
Critical ThinkingBlack Tuesday: The Web Ring War Nobody Outside It Noticed
Web rings were how you found things before search worked. I belonged to more than two hundred of them and ran a dozen, and when I finally closed my account it held 2,900 memberships. On 5 September 2000 Yahoo replaced…
Character DevelopmentBlack Tuesday: The Original ring-master.net Page, 2000
The page I published at ring-master.net in 2000 and 2001 after Yahoo replaced the WebRing system: what changed, what ringmasters said about it on the message boards, and the American Pie parody somebody wrote for the occasion.