systems

Apparent altruism is usually gene-level accounting — kin selection and reciprocity, not group benevolence.#altruism-is-arithmetic

Comparisons to past technologies establish the range of possible outcomes, not a probability over them.#analogies-are-rangefinders

Robust survives shocks; antifragile gains from them — so ask not whether a thing will break but which way volatility moves it.#antifragility-vs-robustness

Automation ROI follows a power law — automate the constraint, not whatever is easiest to automate.#automate-the-bottleneck

History is driven by a few unpredictable outliers that we explain confidently only after they happen.#black-swans-rule-history

Fix small visible decay immediately — tolerated rot signals that rot is tolerated, and the standard collapses fast after that.#broken-windows

Don't rely on in-the-moment willpower — build environments and rules that make the good decision the automatic one.#build-guardrails

Every path away from foundation models becoming commodity infrastructure requires something to change; commoditisation is the default.#commodity-or-monopoly

Every piece of knowledge should have one authoritative representation — duplication is where truth goes to diverge.#dry-principle

Output is effort times a multiplier — and effort is bounded by biology while the multiplier is not.#effort-times-multiplier

Notes that are never extracted die in the container that holds them, and the input loop feels like success the whole time.#extraction-or-it-dies

Selection acts on genes, not individuals or species — the organism is the vehicle the gene builds to copy itself.#gene-is-the-unit

Intervention carries costs that stay invisible when the harm is diffuse and the cure is credited.#iatrogenics

Never ask what someone thinks — ask what they are paid to think.#incentives-explain-behavior

Some domains are bounded and some are scalable — using bell-curve intuitions in the second is the central error of modern risk management.#mediocristan-vs-extremistan

A small intransigent minority with asymmetric preferences sets the standard for everyone else.#minority-rule

Keep components independent so a change in one does not force changes in others — coupling is what makes systems expensive to change.#orthogonality

Pain + Reflection = Progress: pain is information about the gap between reality and your model.#pain-plus-reflection

Write recurring decisions down as principles — a decision made once and codified stops costing willpower and starts compounding.#principles-as-code

The square root of contributors in a domain produces half its output.#square-root-of-output

Evolutionarily stable strategies explain behaviour with no planner — equilibria emerge from payoffs alone.#stable-strategies

Meaning is not enough if it is left unarranged — hierarchy gives spreading activation something to travel along.#structure-before-memory

Eliminate what makes you fragile before pursuing upside — debt and obligation prevent the risk-taking that opportunity requires.#subtract-fragility-first

Compounding rewards duration far more than rate — the dominant variable is how long you leave it alone.#time-is-the-lever

Build a thin end-to-end path first and aim from real feedback, rather than specifying the whole system in advance.#tracer-bullets

There are two 'yous' — the emotional actor and the rational designer; step out and design the machine the emotional you operates.#two-yous

An industry can be enormous, essential, and capital-destroying at once — mobile data grew orders of magnitude while the stocks went nowhere.#value-moves-up-the-stack

Improvement usually comes from removal — subtract the harmful before adding the helpful.#via-negativa