The Basics Guide

Recently Added

  • Not All Kindness Is Nice

    True kindness prioritizes care and moral clarity, even when uncomfortable. Niceness prioritizes social ease and appearance. When kindness is mistaken for aggression and niceness for virtue, moral depth is lost. Real care often includes discomfort, confrontation, and truth—not just softness and harmony.

  • Adversarial Emergence – How Optimization Systems Turn Against Us

    A/B testing seems harmless. You compare two options, pick the one that performs better, repeat. But when “better” means more clicks, more time spent, or higher conversion, performance becomes a proxy for reaction. The system stops asking what works for people and starts asking what gets to them.

  • Cassandra’s Dress – Unfashionable Clarity

    Clarity that arrives before the group is ready is rarely welcomed. It breaks rhythm. It lacks the timing that makes ideas acceptable. In many social environments, especially those governed by trend, timing isn’t just important—it’s everything.

  • The Socratic Problem and the Nature of Transmission

    Socrates is one of the foundational figures of Western philosophy, yet nearly everything about him is uncertain. He left behind no writings. What survives comes secondhand—from Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, and a handful of others. Their accounts don’t align.

  • Attention is Agency

    Many systems—biological, social, cognitive, technological—don’t eliminate internal tensions; they govern them. At their core lies a structure: two enduring opposites and a mediating force. The opposites remain; the mediator governs their expression. This isn’t merely synthesis or compromise. This leads to agency.

  • The Mediator Triad

    At the base of many dynamic systems lies a familiar structure: two enduring opposites and a third element that governs their interaction. These are not static binaries—they are living polarities in active, mediated opposition: traits, values, forces, or strategies that remain in tension over time. Together, all three form a triad.

  • Fitness Through Gravity

    Justice, in its oldest and most durable sense, is not about fairness in the emotional or social sense. It is about fit—proportion, balance, scale. The Latin root ius speaks to structure: what is due, what aligns, what belongs in place. Justice in this mode is not reactive but architectural.

  • Exact Justice

    Exact Justice

    The word “just” comes from Latin iustus, rooted in ius—law, right, what is due. Its earliest sense is structural: justice as proportion, balance, proper allocation. To call something just is to say it fits within a system of order.

  • Radical Thinking

    Radical Thinking

    Radical is a word that contains more structure than it first shows. It appears in politics, science, mathematics, chemistry, and culture, carrying meanings that seem disconnected—until you notice the pattern. At the center of all its uses is a single idea: the root.

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