https://example.pages.dev/ Essays about how people think: from one cup on a table, up through categories, rules, systems and loops, and back down to the particular thing. Notes on thinking and looking. en Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 https://example.pages.dev/essays/tangible/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/tangible/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Tangible thinking is not a primitive stage. It is high-resolution attention to one particular thing, and every other level of thinking is built from it. https://example.pages.dev/essays/abstract/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/abstract/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Every category is a decision about what to ignore. Ten cups become one word, and the word is useful right up until you forget that it was made. https://example.pages.dev/essays/principle/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/principle/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A principle is an abstraction given authority over action. It tells you what to do in a case you have never met, which saves time and can fail badly. https://example.pages.dev/essays/system/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/system/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Behavior comes from structure. The same people in a different arrangement wait a different length of time, and blaming the people hides the thing worth fixing. https://example.pages.dev/essays/loop/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/loop/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Many puzzling patterns turn out to be one loop with a delay in it. Once you can draw the loop, a strange wobble stops being strange and becomes predictable. https://example.pages.dev/essays/frames/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/frames/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The skill at the top of the ladder is choosing the lens a situation needs, and noticing when the lens you are holding has stopped working. https://example.pages.dev/essays/purpose/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/purpose/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Systems and loops do not care what you want. Purpose decides what counts as working, and a well run system aimed at the wrong thing fails efficiently. https://example.pages.dev/essays/learning-levels/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/learning-levels/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 There are levels of learning, and the top one is not learning more. It is changing the habits that decide which frame you look through. https://example.pages.dev/essays/return/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/return/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Abstraction is worth the trouble when you come back to the particular thing and find more in it than you saw before you left. https://example.pages.dev/essays/stuck/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/stuck/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Every level of thinking has a strength and a trap, and the strength and the trap are hard to tell apart from inside. Being stuck is not being at a low level. https://example.pages.dev/essays/test/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/test/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A way of thinking that only ever looks is worth keeping for its own sake. A way of thinking you use to decide things has to change something. https://example.pages.dev/essays/field-guide/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/field-guide/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A practical guide to working out which level of thinking a problem needs, with one question per level, symptoms, and three routines for switching. https://example.pages.dev/essays/clock/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/clock/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A clock looks like a thing that measures time. It is a thing that carries an agreement, and everything else in the day is built on top of that agreement. https://example.pages.dev/essays/door/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/door/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Every door is a decision about who may pass, made long before anyone walks through it. The hardware, the position, and the swing all carry that decision. https://example.pages.dev/essays/path/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/path/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A path across grass is not a path anybody planned. It is a loop that has worn itself in, and the shape of it is a record of the choices that were made. https://example.pages.dev/essays/money/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/money/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A banknote is paper. It works because of a shared belief, held by people you have never met, about a unit nobody can eat. https://example.pages.dev/essays/stairs/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/stairs/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A staircase is a rule that somebody made out of wood, usually after somebody fell, and the rule it embodies is about rhythm rather than about height. https://example.pages.dev/essays/exam/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/exam/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A mark is a compression of a piece of learning, and like every compression it drops something. Knowing what it drops is what keeps a test honest. https://example.pages.dev/essays/kitchen/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/kitchen/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Cooking for six with one stove is a problem about order, not about recipes. The stove is the constraint, and the sequence is the thing worth designing. https://example.pages.dev/essays/phone/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/phone/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Your attention is the thing being traded, and the machine that trades it is shaped to get as much as it can. Reading the shape is the first step to changing it. https://example.pages.dev/essays/defamiliarize/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/defamiliarize/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The ordinary disappears from view the moment you know its name. There are five reliable ways to make it come back, and all of them are a kind of patience. https://example.pages.dev/essays/map-territory/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/map-territory/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A model is a distortion made on purpose. Knowing what a map leaves out is what lets you use it without being used by it. https://example.pages.dev/essays/zoom/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/zoom/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Changing scale does not change the thing. It changes which questions the thing can answer, and that is a different thing from changing the level you think at. https://example.pages.dev/essays/drawing/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/drawing/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A drawing is a record of looking, and most bad drawings are a record of naming. Three techniques change what you look at, and all get in the way of the word. https://example.pages.dev/essays/noun/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/noun/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A noun is a compression that leaves out the change. Some compressions are useful and some quietly rearrange the world, and the difference is worth seeing. https://example.pages.dev/essays/emergence/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/emergence/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Some behaviour belongs to the arrangement and not to any of the parts. Finding it means asking what the whole is doing, not what each piece is. https://example.pages.dev/essays/second-order/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/second-order/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Almost every consequence has a consequence, and the second one is usually where the cost and the cause are hiding. The habit is to ask the question twice. https://example.pages.dev/essays/constraint/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/constraint/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A constraint is not a limit on the work, it is the thing that decides what the work is. Freedom inside a form is easier to find than freedom without one. https://example.pages.dev/essays/fast-slow/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/fast-slow/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Most systems have a fast part that moves a lot and decides little, and a slow part that moves almost not at all and decides nearly everything. https://example.pages.dev/essays/metaphor/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/metaphor/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A metaphor borrows a map and brings its distortions with it. The skill is not using metaphors but knowing where each one stops working. https://example.pages.dev/essays/ma/ https://example.pages.dev/essays/ma/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 In a drawing, in a piece of music, in a conversation, the empty part is not the leftover. It is doing the work, and it is the part that is hardest to notice.