Compared to what
"Everything is relative" gets used to end arguments about measuring people. The largest attempt ever made to weigh suffering says it points the wrong way: the relative judgment is the part that works.
Read it 9 min
Average by definition
Playing it safe is not the absence of a bet. It is a bet on the mean, placed on the one outcome that greatness is defined against.
Made by other hands
A man checks a shirt button before leaving the house, and counts what strangers have done to keep him whole. Written sixteen years to the day after Steve Jobs sent himself nine lines about the same thing.
The second industrialization
Intellectual work was industrialized in the 1790s, and the machine to replace it was planned in 1832. The belief that reasoning and creativity were exempt is the pattern's oldest product.
The Kolmogorov School
A century of genius schools failed in five different ways. This is the design that survives all five, assembled from the evidence.
This blog will change its mind
Darwin rewrote the Origin five times, in public. Posts here work the same way: every revision of the thinking stays readable, diffs and all.
The correction nobody read
Dunning-Kruger has been seriously challenged for a decade. The challenges are cited about ninety times less than the finding.
The law Goodhart did not write
The line everyone quotes about measures and targets is not the one Charles Goodhart wrote. And the difference matters.
Compliance ate the password rule
An expert got the password rules wrong in 2003. That is not the interesting part. The interesting part is the fourteen years.
Shai-Hulud: when a supply chain attack starts replicating
A self-replicating worm in the npm ecosystem, explained simply, and what it changes about how we think about dependencies.
Nothing in that category yet.