Index
Everything on the site — questions, ideas, writings and sources — in one list you can filter.
86 entries
- Source · Appearances · Skill · Seed idea'Improving ratings': audit in the British University systemThe paper on university audit that contains the sentence usually quoted as Goodhart's law.
- Claim · Appearances · Skill · Seed ideaA measure that becomes a target stops measuringThe sentence usually attributed to Goodhart, in the form Strathern actually wrote it.
- Concept · Tools · Seed ideaAbstractionA simplifying layer that hides detail in order to make something easier to use or reason about.
- Source · Knowing · Seed ideaApologyPlato's account of the speech Socrates gave at his trial in 399 BCE, including his explanation of what his reputation for wisdom actually consists of.
- Concept · Tools · Seed ideaAutomationA task or decision that has been shifted from human execution to a system that performs it without step-by-step human involvement.
- Claim · Knowing · Tools · Seed ideaCheap answers do not make questions cheapAn editorial claim of this site: when answers get cheap, the scarce thing becomes knowing which question was worth asking.
- Concept · Tools · Seed ideaConstraintA limit on what is possible in a given context — technical, procedural, or physical.
- Concept · Tools · Seed ideaCorrelated errorA failure mode in which multiple supposedly independent checks share the same underlying blind spot.
- Concept · Skill · Seed ideaDelegationHanding a task to another person or system to perform on one's behalf.
- Concept · Knowing · Seed ideaDistributed knowledgeKnowledge that exists across a group or system rather than in any single place.
- Claim · Tools · Appearances · Seed ideaEvery technology carries a biasPostman's claim that a technology is never additive: it redistributes what is easy, who is expert, and what counts as a problem.
- Concept · Knowing · Seed ideaEvidenceWhat is offered in support of a claim, and what makes it count.
- Concept · Skill · Seed ideaExpertiseReliable, practiced skill in a domain, built through sustained exposure to its problems.
- Claim · Knowing · Seed ideaFalsifiability demarcates sciencePopper's criterion: a theory is empirical only if some possible observation would contradict it.
- Concept · Knowing · Seed ideaFalsificationThe practice of stating, in advance, what evidence would count against a belief.
- Concept · Knowing · Seed ideaFeedback loopA cycle in which a system's output influences its own future input.
- Concept · Skill · Seed ideaFrictionThe effortful, sometimes slow resistance a task offers, as distinct from its outright difficulty.
- Concept · Tools · Seed ideaHarnessThe scaffolding of tools, checks, and constraints built around a capability to make it usable and trustworthy.
- Path · Knowing · Seed ideaHow a Field DecidesTwo accounts of what makes a claim scientific, one of which refutes the other, and what is left to do afterwards.
- Path · Knowing · Seed ideaHow Do We Know?A curated walk from evidence through verification, falsification, and representation to feedback and judgment.
- Concept · Appearances · Seed ideaInstitutionA durable social structure — organization, rule, or norm — that persists across the individuals who make it up.
- Concept · Tools · Seed ideaInstitutional memoryThe accumulated, often informal knowledge an organization retains about its own past.
- Question · Meaning · Seed ideaIs work meaningful for its product, or for what it forms in us?A question about whether the value of work lies in its output or in what doing it makes of the person who does it.
- Concept · Knowing · Seed ideaJudgmentThe capacity to make a sound call in a situation that has no fully specified rule for it.
- Claim · Knowing · Seed ideaKnowing that you do not knowSocrates' reputation for wisdom rests on a negative result, not a stock of answers.
- Claim · Skill · Knowing · Seed ideaKnowing-in-actionSchön's finding that expertise in hard cases is a conversation with a situation, not the application of a rule.
- Concept · Skill · Seed ideaKnowledge workWork whose primary output is information, analysis, or decisions rather than a physical product.
- Claim · Skill · Appearances · Seed ideaLabor, work and action are not one thingArendt's distinction between what is consumed, what endures, and what happens between people.
- Claim · Appearances · Knowing · Seed ideaLegibility costs local knowledgeScott's claim that a scheme can only administer what it has first simplified, and pays for the simplification.
- Claim · Knowing · Seed ideaMeaning is useA representation carries no sense apart from the practice of using it, and no rule fixes its own application.
- Concept · Appearances · Seed ideaMediationThe interposition of a technology, institution, or representation between a person and an experience.
- Claim · Knowing · Seed ideaNormal science does not test its frameKuhn's account of research as puzzle-solving inside a framework nobody is currently testing.
- Claim · Knowing · Skill · Seed ideaNot all lost friction was formativeAn editorial counter-claim: much of the labor a tool absorbs taught nobody anything, and mourning it romanticizes cost.
- Source · Knowing · Seed ideaPhilosophical InvestigationsThe posthumous work in which meaning is located in use within a practice, and in which no rule can guarantee its own application.
- Concept · Appearances · Seed ideaProxyA measurable stand-in adopted to track a goal that is itself hard to observe directly.
- Concept · Knowing · Seed ideaRepresentationA stand-in for a thing — a description, model, image, or summary — used in place of the thing itself.
- Source · Appearances · Knowing · Seed ideaSeeing Like a StateA study of what centralized schemes must simplify away in order to administer a place, and of the local knowledge that goes with it.
- Concept · Appearances · Seed ideaSpectacleGuy Debord's term for social life mediated by images and representations rather than direct relations.
- Concept · Skill · Seed ideaTacit knowledgeKnow-how that a person has but cannot fully put into words or explicit rules.
- Claim · Tools · Meaning · Seed ideaTechnology is a mode of revealingHeidegger's claim that technology is not a set of instruments but a way the world comes to show up.
- Source · Tools · Appearances · Seed ideaTechnopolyPostman's argument that every technology carries a bias toward some uses and away from others, and that a culture can lose the vocabulary to notice.
- Claim · Skill · Meaning · Seed ideaThe achievement subject exploits itselfHan's claim that a society organized around can rather than must produces exhaustion without any coercion.
- Source · Skill · Meaning · Seed ideaThe Burnout SocietyA short book arguing that the society of prohibition has become a society of achievement, whose subject exhausts itself voluntarily.
- Claim · Tools · Seed ideaThe danger is not any particular machineThe risk Heidegger names is that one way of disclosing the world becomes the only one available.
- Source · Skill · Appearances · Seed ideaThe Human ConditionArendt's distinction between labor, work and action, and her account of what a world of durable things is for.
- Source · Knowing · Seed ideaThe Logic of Scientific DiscoveryPopper's statement of falsifiability: a theory belongs to empirical science only if some observation could contradict it.
- Source · Tools · Meaning · Seed ideaThe Question Concerning TechnologyThe 1954 essay arguing that the essence of technology is nothing technological, but a way of revealing that sets everything up as a resource on call.
- Source · Skill · Knowing · Seed ideaThe Reflective PractitionerA study of how skilled professionals handle cases their training did not cover, by reflecting inside the action rather than before it.
- Source · Appearances · Seed ideaThe Society of the SpectacleGuy Debord's 1967 book arguing that modern social life is increasingly displaced by its own representation.
- Claim · Appearances · Tools · Seed ideaThe spectacle is a social relationDebord's insistence that the spectacle is not the images but the relationship between people that they mediate.
- Source · Knowing · Seed ideaThe Structure of Scientific RevolutionsThe book that described science as long periods of puzzle-solving inside an unquestioned framework, broken by crises in which the framework itself changes.
- Source · Knowing · Skill · Seed ideaThe Tacit DimensionThree lectures built on one sentence: we can know more than we can tell.
- Claim · Tools · Appearances · Seed ideaTools cross a second watershedIllich's two thresholds: the point where a tool starts to help, and the point where it takes the ability over.
- Source · Tools · Appearances · Seed ideaTools for ConvivialityIllich's account of the two watersheds a tool crosses: the point where it starts to help, and the point where it takes over the ability it was helping.
- Concept · Knowing · Seed ideaVerificationThe act of checking a claim or output against something independent of the process that produced it.
- Claim · Knowing · Skill · Seed ideaWe know more than we can tellPolanyi's claim that skilled recognition outruns the criteria anyone can state for it.
- Path · Knowing · Appearances · Seed ideaWhat a Map Cannot CarryEvery substitute drops something. This path follows what gets dropped, from a sentence to a spec to a state's survey of a village.
- Question · Knowing · Tools · Seed ideaWhat are we no longer forced to ask?The site's central question — about what questions stop getting asked once tools get good enough to make them unnecessary.
- Question · Meaning · Seed ideaWhat are we optimizing our lives for?A question about whether the targets we in fact optimize for are the ones we would endorse on reflection.
- Question · Knowing · Seed ideaWhat counts as evidence?A question about the standards a claim has to meet before it counts as support.
- Question · Tools · Seed ideaWhat did the abstraction remove?A question about what a simplifying layer takes away along with what it simplifies.
- Question · Knowing · Tools · Seed ideaWhat did the prompt leave out?A variant of "what did the representation leave out?", applied specifically to prompts and generated answers.
- Question · Knowing · Seed ideaWhat did the representation leave out?A question about what is lost whenever a thing is replaced by a stand-in for it.
- Question · Knowing · Seed ideaWhat do I actually know?A question about the gap between feeling confident and having grounds for confidence.
- Question · Skill · Seed ideaWhat does delegation remove?A question about what is lost, beyond time, when a task is handed to someone or something else.
- Question · Appearances · Seed ideaWhat does technological mediation hide?A question about what disappears from view once experience is routed through a technological layer.
- Question · Tools · Seed ideaWhat happens when answers become cheap?A question about what changes, for a person or a field, once getting an answer stops costing effort.
- Question · Appearances · Seed ideaWhat happens when proxies become goals?A question about what follows once a measure adopted to track a goal starts being optimized in its own right.
- Question · Meaning · Seed ideaWhat remains meaningful when competence is cheap?A question about what still feels worth doing once being good at something is no longer rare.
- Question · Tools · Seed ideaWhat should not be automated?A question about which tasks lose something essential when a person stops doing them directly.
- Path · Tools · Knowing · Seed ideaWhat the Tool TookThe site's central argument, walked end to end: from the questions a good tool lets you skip, through the objection that most of them were worth skipping.
- Question · Knowing · Seed ideaWhat would make me wrong?A question about whether a belief is stated in a form that could be falsified.
- Question · Skill · Seed ideaWhen does capability arrive before judgment?A question about the gap between being able to do something and knowing when it should be done.
- Question · Tools · Seed ideaWhen does optimization remove value?A question about the point at which making something more efficient starts making it worse.
- Question · Knowing · Seed ideaWhen does recognition become understanding?A question about the line between recognizing a pattern and understanding what produces it.
- Question · Appearances · Seed ideaWhen does representation become sufficient?A question about when a stand-in for reality is good enough to act on, and when it isn't.
- Writing · Knowing · Tools · Skill · Seed ideaWhen the Answer Becomes Cheaper Than the QuestionA walk along one path through the graph, from what a prompt leaves out to the site's central question about what we no longer have to ask.
- Question · Knowing · Seed ideaWhere does reality enter the loop?A question about the point at which a process actually touches the world it claims to model.
- Question · Skill · Seed ideaWhere will future expertise come from?A question about how expertise forms once the tasks that used to build it are delegated away.
- Question · Meaning · Seed ideaWhich abilities should remain ours?A question about which skills are worth keeping even when a tool could do them for us.
- Question · Tools · Seed ideaWhich constraints contain experience?A question about which limits, once removed, take accumulated know-how down with them.
- Question · Skill · Seed ideaWhich friction creates judgment?A question about which forms of difficulty in work are actually where judgment gets built.
- Question · Appearances · Seed ideaWhich institutions encode forgotten failures?A question about institutional rules whose original justification, a past failure, is no longer remembered.
- Path · Skill · Appearances · Seed ideaWho the Work Is ForFrom one day's output to the objective a whole life is quietly being run against.
- Question · Skill · Seed ideaWhy are we producing this?A question about whether the reason for a piece of work is still legible to the person doing it.
- Source · Skill · Tools · Seed ideaWhy Is Everyone in Tech So Sad?An article examining low morale among technology and knowledge workers, published in Noema Magazine.