File 04 — Essays
Longer arguments, held loosely.
One idea each, written by someone who has been wrong before and fully expects to be again.
15 essays
- Your Brain Hates Base RatesYour gut reads one loud signal and skips the only number that matters — how common the thing was before today.Probability5 min →
- The Volume Knob and the Wrong DialYour alarm is tuned to scream at toast so it never misses a fire — which makes it terrible at telling you how likely the fire actually is.Panic4 min →
- One Bad Day Is Not a TrendTiny piles of data feel like prophecy. Mostly they are just weather.Judgment5 min →
- Keep Your Beliefs on a LeashConvictions are fine. Letting them run loose into traffic is the problem.Beliefs5 min →
- What Would Change Your Mind?The one question that turns a belief into something you can actually be wrong about — and how to ask it before your ego gets a vote.Judgment5 min →
- The Genius TrapSuccess is weak evidence of skill. Why winners overrate their own genius — and a calmer way to read your own track record.Judgment8 min →
- Loud Is Not CommonThe news is a feed of the rare and the dramatic — not a map of what's actually likely. And the harms that hurt the most people are often the quietest.Probability5 min →
- If They Could, They Wouldn't Sell ItThe coach promising 30% a year is making a claim you can check against the best investors who ever lived — and against the one number that gives them away: their own incentive.Judgment6 min →
- Defensible If It LosesHindsight tells us who won, then dresses it up as judgment. But the line between an honest bet and a crime was never win-versus-lose — it was whether the people carrying the downside were allowed to see the risk.Judgment7 min →
- Bacon Is Not PlutoniumBoth carry the same official rank — Group 1, carcinogenic to humans. One is breakfast. The label grades how sure scientists are that a thing can cause cancer, not how much it actually will.Probability6 min →
- You Only Live Once, StatisticallyA coin that pays on average and ruins you in person — and how Nassim Taleb used Monte Carlo simulation to see the difference. The gap between what happens to a crowd and what happens to you has a name, and it decides more than it should.Judgment8 min →
- Your Number Was Never a NumberA single growth rate in a deck feels like knowledge. It is almost always a cloud wearing the costume of a point — and the confident conclusions hanging off it survive in far fewer futures than they seem to.Judgment7 min →
- Cheaper Never Meant LessThe price of a token has been collapsing tenfold a year, and the bills keep growing anyway. A Victorian economist watched coal do exactly this in 1865 — the paradox was never in the pricing. It's in what your intuition thinks a price cut buys.Judgment7 min →
- Twenty Good YearsFor two decades, one line went up, and Volkswagen built a company on the assumption that it would keep going up. The forecast was never wrong about the past. That was the problem.Judgment10 min →
- The Fine Art of Baloney DetectionCarl Sagan packed a kit for detecting nonsense. Its dullest tool is the one that bites: a chain of argument is only as strong as its weakest link — and seven strong links, multiplied, make a coin flip.Judgment7 min →
What now?