culture, change, and mental models
(the written-in-20-minutes version. feel free to ask questions in the comments below or on twitter if you would like me to unpack something or you try it and get stuck at some step!) (another ~20 minute onepager. read the other posts written in this style here. for a further description of how this skill can [ ]
For both my own sanity and as part of helping others navigate my writing and thinking, I found myself drawn to organizing my posts and unpublished drafts ideas into some kind of structure, not by bullets but relating them to each other in paragraph form. I’m going to put the topics in a loosely [ ]
my yearly review, in one breath standing on one foot, because my previous reviews had cleared 10k words and I want to spend precious writing time going deeper into other topics. okay fine, maybe two or three breaths.
Epistemic status: I’m definitely onto something but don’t take my word for it. There sometimes seems to be a tradeoff between confidence and humility. That apparent tradeoff comes from a subtle assumption, which is common yet false: that your experience and mine are supposed to be the same. Rudyard Kipling knew this: If you can [ ]
My friends Harmony, Sahil, and James created a practice for relating called Stemless. They ve written about it here. The core question of Stemless is what does it take to own your experience? Stemless is not prescriptive about how to do this, merely insistent that you keep attending to the question. Unlike practices like Circling, in [ ]
We re all going around making sense of everything. We have different kinds of models that we use without even realizing it. A non-exhaustive loose sketch: The first we mostly learn from direct experience. The second we mostly learn from studying and reasoning, plus confirming that it doesn t contradict our experience or our other related models. [ ]
The verb “trust” basically can’t be conjugated in the imperative case, in my view. When people attempt to trust, the means by which they achieve this tends to be something more like “pretending” or “ignoring” or even “compartmentalizing”. And that’s a move you can make! But in my view if you do such pretending without [ ]
There’s a classic thought experiment called Newcomb’s Problem. It goes as follows: Newcomb’s problem: You face two boxes: a transparent box, containing a thousand dollars, and an opaque box, which contains either a million dollars, or nothing. You can take (a) only the opaque box (one-boxing), or (b) both boxes (two-boxing). Yesterday, Omega — a [ ]
A few years ago I had an idea for a game to help people practice the stance of orienting towards win-wins, and the skill of creatively finding win-wins. I came up with a tiny playable proof-of-concept that didn’t need any materials, and played it a few times. Recently I discovered that somebody had made it [ ]
My friend Ivan is working on a project called the Applied Organic Alignment Lab and he asked me to write up my version of how I d approach such a project, in this era. It s written first as an invitation I imagined Ivan writing, followed by some of the preamble thoughts I had while iterating towards [ ]