Beauty of second degree probes 3 minutes read — 09 Aug 2025

I've been noticing this pattern again and again—just about enough to make this pattern a heuristic for my own understanding. "No lie can overcome a second degree probe" If you probe a lie, just about enough, it reveals itself in due course. At work, I see this all the time. When a statement is just made, in a matter-of-fact way in which it assumes everyone already knows it, and when you ask "why...

One way door decisions 3 minutes read — 28 May 2025

There are moments in life when you hit slow-burn-max mode, when you know a big decision is coming, and you can feel the weight of it. You stop everything else and think deeply about the problem you're about to face. Jeff Bezos calls these “one-way doors.” Most decisions are two-way doors, you can go through, try it out, and walk back if it doesn’t work. But some aren’t like that. They’re...

We have been scammed by the Gaussian distribution club 4 minutes read — 08 Apr 2025

Taleb insists that we've been scammed by the Gaussian distribution club. The gaussian distribution has become so ubiquitous in our daily jargons, oru day-to-day decisions even. >"We have been duped by the bell curve. Mandelbrot was the first to rigorously prove that markets are not Gaussian." – Taleb As most real-world phenomena: especially complex, human-involved systems are not well-behaved in...