7 posts
Inherited rules can preserve hard-won knowledge, reduce decision costs, and protect against biased exceptions. They can also survive through inertia and serve interests we no longer endorse. Age creates a reason to investigate—not a duty to obey.
Legibility asymmetry describes the bias where existing systems are unfairly judged against untested alternatives. This occurs because only established things have visible failures, while challengers remain unscrutinized by reality at scale.
Most of what people do carries far less deliberation than observers assume. Research shows intentional explanation is the automatic default — under time pressure people judge even accidental acts as deliberate — and that reading calculated motive into ordinary behaviour is the effortless option, not the accurate one.
Every argument that capitalism atomised us needs a premise: that community actually declined. The single most quoted piece of evidence for it — that Americans' circle of confidants shrank by a third — was argued in the same journal to be a measurement artifact, twice.
A billion is only three extra zeroes on the page and a thousand times larger in the world. Scale, compounding, and risk all become easier to judge when we change the representation.
A stammering expert loses arguments to a confident amateur more often than it should ever happen. The reason isn't laziness — it's a measurable perceptual glitch where the brain mistakes ease of processing for truth, and it shows up in your face before you've even judged the content.
The horoscope arrived in India from Hellenistic Greece — the founding text is called the Yavanajataka, 'of the Greeks.' But the more interesting number is modern: fewer than half of Indians say they believe in astrology, while 83% fix important dates by auspicious timing.
