What’s Between Us and Reality

June 30, 2026

We often talk as though we are in direct contact with reality - as though our eyes show us the world, and our minds read off the facts. But between whatever reality fundamentally is and the experience you're having right now, there are a surprising number of layers. At each layer, two types of error happen: information gets left out, and bias creeps in. By the time experience reaches you, there's the potential for a great deal of both to have accumulated. Put another way, rather than p...

The Mental Models You Don’t Know About

April 13, 2026

I was disheartened to discover how many people either never learned the basic mental models or learned garbled versions of them. As a public service, here’s a concise refresher. Which of these did you not already know? • Badhart’s Law: if a large organization doesn't measure anything, it's unlikely to achieve anything • The Zareto Principle: roughly 20% of effects come from just 0.001% of causes • The Dunning–Kruger-Kruger-Dunning Effect: people with little knowledge about the Dunning-...

Why Do Some People Have Better Intuition?

October 5, 2020

Here’s what I think: intuition is mainly a set of patterns, evaluations, anticipations and predictions that we learn from experience. Intuition differs in effectiveness across people and tasks because: Focus: We have experience in different domains. One person spends their time cooking, another training in martial arts. Wideness: Most have experience in more than one domain, and there can be cross-domain synergies as well. Perhaps the martial artist cook has an advantage. Time: ...

Five Powerful Learning Techniques Most People Have Never Tried

September 6, 2020

Obscure yet very powerful methods of learning that many people have never tried Here are five uncommon but highly effective learning techniques: 1. Intuition Flooding To understand something well on a gut level, spend hours looking closely at a huge number of examples, until your intuition forms a predictive model. I do this fairly often but don’t think I’ve heard it discussed! Example: Look carefully at 100 user interfaces. 2. Expert Observation Ask an expert if you can wa...