Reusable models, techniques, and frameworks currently being shaped.
A tool for answering a question on the spot — a job interview's "tell us about yourself," a Q&A prompt, any moment that demands speech without preparation time.
A rootcause technique: ask "why?" iteratively — typically five times — to drill from a visible symptom down to the systemic cause that actually triggered it. Or
Rebecca Okamoto's distinction between introductions that describe you and introductions that describe what you can do for them. Most people answer "Tell me abou
The word sounds like it means vague or unclear — in ordinary speech it often does. In computing and problemsolving it means the opposite: a precise simplificati
Most traders assume they accept risk because they place stops. Mark Douglas argues the opposite: knowing the risk and accepting the risk are different acts. A s
Structures rules, departments, "policy," technical limitations turned into process that allow organizations to produce bad outcomes while ensuring that no indiv
Activation energy is the minimum energy input required to start a chemical reaction — the height of the energy barrier between reactants and products. Most ther
To be a good conversationalist, be a good listener. To be interesting, be interested. Carnegie's chapter on listening is titled "An Easy Way to Become a Good Co
Howard Marks frames active management as the search for mistakes. A market mistake is a mispricing: an asset priced too low or too high relative to value and ri
Active reading is the idea that good reading is not passive reception but visible mental work. The reader asks questions, marks the book, tests claims, follows
"Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes — and most fools do — but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exaltation to adm
Agent operating instructions are durable files that teach coding agents how to behave inside a project: what context matters, what must not be touched, how to h
Agentic coding workflows use AI systems as semiautonomous execution agents rather than passive autocomplete tools. The human's role shifts from writing every li
The argument that AGI and superintelligence are fundamentally national security challenges rather than consumer technology products. Whoever leads in superintel
AI assistants are conversational systems that generate text, explanations, summaries, and other outputs by predicting language patterns from training data, some
AI bias is the reproduction or amplification of unfair patterns, stereotypes, or unequal treatment in model outputs. It does not usually enter at one single ste
AI hallucinations are fabricated or unsupported outputs generated by an AI system and presented in the style of confident knowledge. The important point is that
An algorithm is a plan — a set of stepbystep instructions with a clear starting point, a clear finishing point, and a set of unambiguous instructions in between
Matching internal needs nonnegotiables + strengths to external opportunities through deliberate information gathering before and during the job search. Ashley R
Alternative histories are the plausible paths that could have happened but did not. Taleb uses the idea to attack outcome worship. A decision is not validated s
Analogical thinking maps structure from one domain onto another. Surface similarity "this clogged drain is like that clogged drain" is easy. Deep analogical thi
Analytical reading is the third level of reading: the fullscale attempt to understand a book as thoroughly as time and effort permit. It is the level at which t
The anchoring effect occurs when people consider a number before estimating an unknown quantity — and stay near that number even when the anchor is obviously ir
The announcementofannouncement is a tradeable market structure pattern: an asset pumps when its team signals that a significant announcement is coming, before t
The speculator's art is not prediction — it is anticipation: positioning before the crowd reaches a conclusion that you have already reached. By the time the co
Apolitical money is the fantasy that money can be treated as a neutral technical tool instead of as a social institution loaded with rules, power, and conflict.
The app economy is the economic system built around app creation, distribution, monetization, and the much larger layer of commerce that apps facilitate. It ope
J. Pierpont Morgan observed, in one of his analytical interludes, that a person usually has two reasons for doing a thing: one that sounds good and a real one.
The argument from ignorance treats a claim as true because it has not been disproven, or false because it has not been proven. It exploits a gap in evidence as
There is only one reliable way to get another person to do anything: make them want to do it. Carnegie frames this as almost axiomatic — you can threaten someon
Artificial neural networks are machine learning models designed to mimic the relationship between neurons in the brain. Instead of following explicitly programm
No one likes to take orders. Resentment caused by a brash order may last a long time — even when the order was given to correct an obviously bad situation. Begi
The atomic hypothesis is the claim that everything in the universe is made of tiny particles — atoms — that are in perpetual motion, attract each other at moder
Automation is not just the replacement of labor by machines. In capitalism it becomes a structural tension because the system rewards laborsaving technology whi
People judge frequency or probability by how easily instances come to mind. If examples are retrievable, the class feels numerous — a useful clue that becomes b
Energy is conserved — the total never changes. But not all energy can do useful work. The fraction of energy that can actually drive a process, run a machine, o
"There is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument — and that is to avoid it." Carnegie's opening chapter in Part 3 doesn't argue for compr
Backpropagation is the procedure that lets a neural network figure out how each weight contributed to the final error so that gradient descent can update those
Backtracking is a search method that builds a candidate solution step by step and abandons a partial path as soon as it becomes clear that the path cannot possi
Banking in a capitalist economy is not mainly a storage service. It is a system for creating money, extending claims on the future, and keeping payment circulat
Base rate neglect is ignoring prior probabilities when casespecific information arrives — even when the case information is worthless. It is the flagship error
A productive form of impatience is the habit of frequently asking “how could this thing take less calendar time?” This mindset correlates with effectiveness acr
"If a man's heart is rankling with discord and ill feeling toward you, you can't win him to your way of thinking with all the logic in Christendom." Logic doesn
A barber lathers a man before he shaves him. It is always easier to listen to unpleasant things after we have heard some praise of our good points. Beginning wi
The biasvariance tradeoff is the tension between models that are too rigid to capture the underlying pattern and models that are so flexible they start fitting
The dominant traitpsychology model Brian Little summarizes as OCEAN — five normally distributed dimensions describing universal human differences: Letter Trait
A framework by Benjamin Bloom describing the three stages through which worldclass performers develop, based on studying 120 elite performers across music, athl
Booms are not anomalies — they are the predictable product of human hope applied to rising prices. Every speculative mania follows the same psychological arc be
A research mode where you start with what seems interesting or tractable — a technique, a surprising model behavior, a quick experiment — and figure out the pro
Brownian motion is the ceaseless random jitter of microscopic particles suspended in a fluid — visible under a microscope as a pollen grain or smoke particle zi
Bubble detection is the practice of judging market behavior around a theme, not merely deciding whether the theme itself is real. Howard Marks' central warning
Knowing what you're genuinely good at — the foundation for asking for what you need in nonnegotiables and redirecting interviews toward value you actually deliv
Four distinct responsibility categories in technical team leadership. Useful for role design, staffing, and understanding what "leading a team" actually involve
Chunking is the process of binding separate pieces of information together through meaning into a single retrievable unit — a "chunk." It is the fundamental mec
A circle of competence is the zone where your understanding is real enough to support judgment. Munger and Buffett treat the idea as a boundary discipline, not
Circular reasoning happens when an argument assumes the truth of the conclusion it is supposed to establish. Instead of moving from evidence to claim, it loops
Circular reporting is a misinformation pattern in which a false or weakly sourced claim circulates through multiple publications until repetition is mistaken fo
Classifying books is Adler's first rule of analytical reading: know what kind of book you are reading, and know it as early as possible. This is not library sci
Click restraint is the habit of pausing on a search results page long enough to evaluate the available options before clicking. Instead of reflexively choosing
Cognitive entrenchment is Erik Dane's term for when deep experience in a narrow domain makes experts less able to adapt when rules or contexts change. They have
Coming to terms with an author means identifying the key words in a book and determining what the author means by them in that specific work. For Adler, terms a
A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. It locks in good behavior — or locks out bad behavior — before
Communication metadata is the information about a communication other than its content: who contacted whom, when, for how long, from where, using what service,
We give not only to help but to signal virtue, generosity, and social status. Altruism is partly a competitive display — demonstrating to others and to ourselve
Computational thinking CT is a problemsolving framework that breaks complex problems into manageable parts, looks for patterns, filters out irrelevant detail, a
The confidence cycle is Howard Marks' idea that belief, optimism, and certainty move in selfreinforcing waves. Confidence affects both the economy and markets:
Energy is conserved: in any isolated system, the total amount of energy stays constant. It can change form — kinetic to potential, heat to mechanical work, mass
Medicine and charity are partly about health and helping — and partly about publicly demonstrating that you care. The demonstration has value independent of the
Thorstein Veblen 1899: we buy things not solely for their functional value but to signal wealth and social status to others. The term is now often applied narro
Context clues are signals in the same sentence or nearby sentences that let a reader infer the meaning of an unfamiliar word without leaving the text. They matt
Game theory divides interactions into two fundamental types based on whether players share goals and can make binding agreements. Players on the same side: shar
Two things moving together is not the same as one making the other happen. Correlation only tells you that variables are associated. Causality says that changin
A signal is reliable only if it's costly to fake. Cheap talk can be produced by anyone regardless of quality; a costly signal can only be produced sustainably b
Creative confidence is the belief that you are capable of creative action — grounded not in talent but in accumulated experience of small creative successes. Th
Creativity is, at minimum, the capacity to produce something both novel and useful — though almost every researcher working on the topic is dissatisfied with th
The credit cycle is Howard Marks' framework for how the availability of capital expands and contracts. He treats it as one of the most marketmoving cycles becau
Credit investing is mostly the art of avoiding losers rather than finding uncapped winners. Marks calls it a negative art because the upside is contractually li
Economic crisis is not an outside shock interrupting an otherwise balanced machine. In Varoufakis's framing, it is what happens when the inner promises of capit
Critical thinking is the disciplined habit of questioning claims, examining evidence, clarifying goals, and testing whether conclusions actually follow from rea
Almost no one believes they deserve criticism. Al Capone thought he was a public benefactor. "Two Gun" Crowley wrote, while bleeding from police bullets, that h
Criticizing a book fairly means withholding disagreement until you can first show that you understand what the author is saying. For Adler, this is not politene
Vinh Giang's name for a specific failure loop: getting triggered to learn a skill, searching for it, being overwhelmed by the volume of results, quitting withou
Debt and profit are not separate topics in capitalism. They are paired mechanisms: borrowing brings future expectations into the present, and profit is the hope
Debugging is the process of identifying and fixing errors bugs in an algorithm or program. It is distinct from evaluation: evaluation checks whether an algorith
A good decision can produce a bad outcome, and a bad decision can produce a good outcome. Howard Marks returns to this idea through Nassim Taleb's "alternative
Decision trees are models that make predictions by splitting a problem into a sequence of branching questions. Each internal node asks for a distinction in the
Each day contains a handful of moments that disproportionately shape everything that follows. These are decisive moments — the forks in the road where one small
Familiar tasks get decomposed automatically — you don't consciously plan each step of brushing your teeth. The problem is that when something is new or complex,
Deductive reasoning moves from a general rule to a specific conclusion. If the premises are true and the logic is valid, the conclusion must follow. It does not
Defense in depth is the principle that important protection should not depend on a single safeguard. Instead, multiple layers cover different failure modes so t
Deliberate practice is the highestleverage mode of skill training. It involves: 1. Working on tasks just beyond your current ability level 2. Getting immediate
Delta vs. level is the distinction between progress from your starting point and your absolute current position in the real field. Delta asks: how far have you
A structured, humancentered approach to problemsolving and innovation. Popularized by IDEO and the Stanford d.school in the 2000s. Offers a repeatable process f
Assign one fixed location for each easilylost essential — keys on a hook by the door, passport in a particular drawer, reading glasses on a particular table — a
Robert Bjork coined desirable difficulties: obstacles that make learning slower, harder, and more frustrating in the short term, but stronger and more flexible
John Dewey called it "the desire to be important" — the deepest urge in human nature. William James put it more directly: "The deepest principle in human nature
It is usually better to have a lowervelocity project working on the right things than a highervelocity project pointed at the wrong goal. This is why investing
The DRI is the single person accountable for a project's outcome — not just for doing work, but for ensuring the project is going well and that everyone involve
A way to classify the form of disagreement, from weakest to strongest. Higher levels require more work and are rarer, forming a kind of pyramid. DH0 Namecalling
Divergent thinking is the cognitive mode of generating many possible solutions, ideas, or responses before narrowing toward one. It is the "opening up" half of
DNA deoxyribonucleic acid is the molecule that carries hereditary information in living cells. Its structure — the double helix discovered by Watson, Crick, Fra
DNS, short for Domain Name System, is the web's naming layer. It translates humanreadable domain names into machineusable IP addresses so browsers know which se
Startups don't take off by themselves. Founders have to make them take off with an early, laborious, unscalable push — the crank before the engine runs on its o
A dominant strategy is a choice that produces the best available outcome for a player regardless of what the other player does. You don't need to know or predic
The doubleslit experiment is the central demonstration of quantum weirdness. Feynman called it the phenomenon that "contains the only mystery" — the one that "c
This is a time of dramatization. Merely stating a truth isn't enough. The truth has to be made vivid, interesting, dramatic. You have to use showmanship. The mo
A fourstop map of how confidence and knowledge diverge and reconverge while learning a new skill. The underlying psychological finding — that people with low co
Dynamic equilibrium is the state in which two opposing processes are happening simultaneously at the same rate, so that the net result appears static. Nothing i
Mass is a form of energy. A body at rest contains energy equal to its mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light: $$E = mc^2$$ Since c ≈ 3×10⁸ m/s, c²
A sharp, narrativedriven rally that occurs inside a bear market, after the real bottom has already formed but before a genuine new bull cycle is underway. GCR u
Economic power is the capacity to shape the terms on which others live: who owns, who borrows, who works, who waits, and who absorbs losses. Power in economic l
Economic reality is the constraint layer: scarcity, tradeoffs, incentives, productivity, secondorder consequences, and the fact that one cannot get all desirabl
A framework named by entities/GCR Apr 4, 2022 as a complement to the efficient market hypothesis, applied specifically to yield opportunities: "In most instance
German for "installation" — a cognitive phenomenon where an idea you already hold in mind blocks you from seeing a better idea or solution. Your existing mental
All electromagnetic radiation — from radio waves to visible light to Xrays to gamma rays — is the same physical phenomenon: oscillating electric and magnetic fi
Elementary reading is the first level of reading: the level at which a person learns what the words on the page literally say. It includes decoding, vocabulary,
Attractive things work better. Not aesthetically better — functionally better. Don Norman's threelevel model of emotional design explains why: products operate
Empathy is the choice to feel with another person. It requires taking their perspective as their truth, staying out of judgment, recognising the emotion they ar
Endtoend encryption means the content of a communication is readable only by the communicating endpoints, not by the service carrying the message in between. It
The principle that sustainable high performance depends on managing energy, not just time. Highleverage activities are often draining. If you only optimize for
People with the "best selfcontrol" are usually people who structure their environment so they rarely need selfcontrol. Discipline is not a personality trait — i
A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself being consumed. An enzyme is a biological catalyst — a protein molecule
The shared public information environment — the "water supply" for minds. Just as clean water enables physical health, a clean epistemic commons enables coheren
Epistemic humility is the discipline of matching confidence to evidence. In The Complete Collection Howard Marks, it becomes especially visible during the COVID
The equivalence principle states that gravitational mass and inertial mass are identical. These sound like different things: Inertial mass measures resistance t
Ergodicity is the question of whether the average across many possible outcomes matches what one participant is likely to experience over time. In nonergodic si
Essayer — French "to try." Montaigne's 1580 essays established the form: an essay is an attempt, not a statement. You don't know what you're figuring out yet; y
Evaluation is the checking stage between designing an algorithm and programming it. Once you have built a solution using decomposition, pattern recognition, abs
Eventbased time is the principle that the meaningful unit for measuring time is not the clock second but the discrete event. Whether in highfrequency trading, a
Exchange vs reciprocity is the distinction between relationships organized by price and relationships organized by mutual obligation, gift, trust, or shared lif
Frankl's term for the widespread feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness that characterizes modern life. Not a neurosis in itself — it is the potential pathoge
Expectancy is the average profit or loss per trade across a large sample. It is the single number that tells you whether a trading system makes money — not how
Kahneman distinguishes two selves: the experiencing self that lives moment to moment, and the remembering self that keeps score and makes future choices. They w
The core methodological commitment of physics — and, Feynman insists, of science — is that experiment is the only authority that can confirm or refute a theory.
Extrinsic aids to reading are helps that lie outside the book itself: relevant experience, other books, commentaries, abstracts, dictionaries, encyclopedias, an
Taste is not natural. Every designer whose work looks effortless built that effortlessness through years of deliberate looking — noticing not just that somethin
A false analogy treats one shared feature as if it were enough to make two cases explanatory twins. The trap is not comparison itself. Comparison is useful. The
The false cause fallacy turns a pattern into an explanation before the causal work has been done. Two things occur together, or one follows the other, and the m
Far transfer is when knowledge or skill learned in one context applies effectively in a new domain or a problem you have never seen before. It is the holy grail
Febezzlement is Munger's term for the functional equivalent of embezzlement. The original idea comes from Galbraith's "bezzle": wealth that has already been sto
Fertility decline is the trend of falling birth rates in wealthy, hightechnology societies, typically dropping below the 2.1 childrenperwoman replacement rate n
Figurative language is language that does not mean only what it literally says. It asks the reader to interpret comparison, exaggeration, symbolism, or irony in
A filter bubble is a personalized information environment shaped by algorithms that learn from a user's past behavior and then increasingly feed them what seems
A financial panic is a selfreinforcing collapse in confidence where the fear of loss causes behavior that produces the loss. It is a reflexive event: the expect
The disproportionate weight of opening moments in how someone is evaluated, heard, and remembered. Rebecca Okamoto treats the selfintroduction as a firstimpress
First principles thinking means breaking a problem down to foundational truths and rebuilding from there, rather than copying existing templates or reasoning by
Default human reasoning that stops at the immediate, obvious result of a decision or observation. Fast and automatic Surfacelevel analysis Everyone tends to rea
Fixed mindset is the belief that intelligence or ability is mostly a stable trait rather than something that can be developed much through effort, strategy, and
The Flynn effect is the sustained rise in IQ test scores across generations in the twentieth century — about three points per decade in dozens of countries. Jam
The brain operates in two fundamentally different modes, and effective learning and creative work both require toggling between them. Barbara Oakley frames this
Two modes of strategic reasoning about what to work on: Backchaining: Start from a desired end state and reason backward through the causal steps needed. Highle
From YC experience, the qualities that predict founder success above a minimum intelligence threshold. Determination: most important. Ability to keep going when
entities/HowardStevenson and Laura Nash's research with ~150 high achievers identified four distinct types of success people report. The crucial finding: the fo
All interactions between matter — every push, pull, chemical bond, nuclear reaction, and gravitational orbit — arise from just four forces. Physics has no deepe
James Clear's actionable framework built on the habit loop cue → craving → response → reward. Each law targets one phase of the loop. Each has an inversion for
Adler reduces the reader's basic obligations to four questions: 1. What is the book about as a whole? 2. What is being said in detail, and how? 3. Is it true, i
Luck is not one thing. Naval Ravikant via Marc Andreessen's blog post on a James Austin book identifies four distinct types. The first is genuinely random; the
Logically equivalent descriptions of the same state of the world produce different choices because System 1 reacts to words, not just outcomes. Kahneman and Tve
Moments when you transcend your trait profile to enact a script that advances a core personal project. Brian Little's key idea: we are not just a bundle of trai
Fulldisk encryption protects the data stored on a device by encrypting the drive itself rather than only locking the screen or encrypting a few files. Its purpo
Two broad approaches to markets — plus a third Douglas adds. Fundamental analysis estimates intrinsic value from economics, financial statements, and metrics P/
Inertia is the property of matter that resists changes in motion. An object in motion continues moving at constant speed in a straight line unless a force acts
The gambler's fallacy is the belief that independent random events become more likely after a run of opposite outcomes. After four coin flips of heads, tails is
Game theory is an analytical framework for understanding situations where outcomes depend on the choices of multiple actors. The core claim: if you understand t
Gaming of systems is what happens when people optimize for the measurement or payout rule instead of the system's real purpose. Munger treats this as a permanen
Newton's law of gravity works beautifully in most situations, but it has a critical flaw: it implies gravity propagates instantaneously. If you moved the Sun su
Most people spend their energy trying to get others interested in them. Carnegie reverses the direction entirely: you make more friends in two months by becomin
Don't begin a conversation with the things on which you differ. Begin by emphasizing — and keep emphasizing — the things on which you agree. Get the other perso
There is an old saying: "Give a dog a bad name and you may as well shoot him." It means that we respond to what others believe about us. If a young person is la
People will go for six days without food before complaining seriously. Carnegie points out they'll go six weeks — sometimes sixty years — without receiving the
Golden cross and death cross are movingaverage crossover signals using the 50day and 200day MAs daily charts. When the 50 crosses above the 200, technicians cal
Peak motivation occurs when working on tasks of "just manageable difficulty" — approximately 4% beyond your current ability. Too easy and you get bored. Too har
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." — Charles Goodhart, economist Once you optimize for a metric, behavior shifts toward gaming t
Google Scholar is a scholarly discovery tool that searches academic literature such as journal articles, books, theses, dissertations, and some forms of grey li
Gradient descent is an iterative method for minimizing a function by repeatedly moving a guess in the direction that most reduces error. Instead of solving an o
Granny's Rule is the simple sequencing principle that the unpleasant but necessary task comes before the reward. The child's version is carrots before dessert.
Graph traversal is the process of systematically visiting the nodes of a graph according to some rule so that the structure can be explored, searched, or analyz
The gravitational constant G is the proportionality factor in Newton's law of gravity: $$F = G\frac{m1 m2}{r^2}$$ Its measured value is G ≈ 6.674 × 10⁻¹¹ N·m²/k
Newton gave us the law of gravity — the exact formula, the inversesquare dependence, the constant G — and immediately refused to speculate about what gravity is
Grit is sustained passion and perseverance for longterm goals. In Angela Duckworth's framing, it is the ability to keep working toward a future that matters to
Stocks within an industry sector tend to move together. In a bull market, all members of a group should advance. When one member of a group conspicuously fails
Growth mindset is the belief that ability is not a fixed verdict but a developable capacity. In Carol Dweck's framing, talent matters less than what a person th
Habit stacking links a new behavior to an existing one using the formula: "After CURRENT HABIT, I will NEW HABIT." It is a special form of implementation intent
Habit tracking is the practice of measuring whether you performed a habit. The simplest form: mark an X on a calendar each day you complete the routine. "Don't
Four foundations Julian Treasure says powerful speech should stand on. The acronym spells HAIL — to greet or acclaim enthusiastically — which is how Treasure th
The halo effect is the tendency for one positive trait to spread across the entire judgment of a person or company. System 1 seeks coherence; liking one feature
Happiness as skill is Naval Ravikant's view that happiness can be trained like fitness, nutrition, or wealth creation. It is not merely inherited, found, or ear
Heartbreak is a complex psychological injury that follows the end of a romantic relationship. It shares hallmarks with traditional grief — insomnia, intrusive t
Temperature is not a substance — it is the kinetic energy of atoms. A hot object is one whose atoms are moving fast; a cold object is one whose atoms are moving
The Hello Zone is Mollie Kaye's term for the area at or above the collarbone — the zone of appearance most visible during facetoface interaction. A noticeable i
The thesis of The Elephant in the Brain: humans are designed to act on hidden, largely selfserving motives while presenting prosocial explanations — to others a
Hindsight bias: after an outcome is known, it seems inevitable — "I knew it all along." The remembering self rewrites history into a coherent story concepts/wys
A brain structure that evolved over tens of thousands of years to track the locations of important things — wells, fish, fruit trees, friendly and enemy tribes.
Agency "manifest determination to make things happen" is a learnable skill, not an innate trait. It involves finding real edges — actions others avoid because t
HTTP, short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is the basic requestresponse protocol browsers and servers use to exchange web resources. In the simplest version o
Most of the time, even smart and numerate people who claim goals do not automatically take the narrow set of actions that would effectively pursue them. Ineffec
Hypnagogia is the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep — the brief window when the mind is still partially conscious but no longer fully directed. P
Idealization is the cognitive distortion of remembering only the best of a person or relationship while minimizing or forgetting the bad. It is an automatic res
Identitybased habits flip the direction of behavior change. Instead of starting with outcomes "I want to run a marathon" or processes "I need to run every morni
A Japanese concept roughly meaning "reason for being." In the context of skill development and career, it refers to the intersection of: 1. What you love — intr
The gap between feeling like you know something and actually knowing it. This is arguably the single most important concept for any learner to understand, becau
Among people who have already passed a high technical bar, the remaining differentiator is leverage — impactperhour. The bottleneck is no longer raw ability; it
An implementation intention is a predecision about when, where, and how you will act. The formula: "I will BEHAVIOR at TIME in LOCATION." The cues that trigger
Incentive superpower is Munger's claim that incentives do not merely influence behavior. They often dominate it. People change what they notice, what they excus
There are tactful ways to say what you want, but there is one threeletter word that destroys that intention: the word "but." It delivers criticism in the guise
Inductive reasoning moves from examples to a broader claim. It starts with what has been observed, notices a pattern, and turns that pattern into a probable con
Inequality is not just uneven outcomes. In this book it is the visible expression of a deeper structure deciding who owns, who works, who borrows, and who comma
Inferencing is the act of drawing a conclusion from evidence, background knowledge, and reasoning when the text or situation does not state the conclusion direc
entities/HowardStevenson borrows the term from mathematics: an inflection point is where there is no tangent — no clear direction, no obvious path forward. In a
Information overload — the condition of having more information available than any individual can process or meaningfully absorb — is not a product of the inter
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky distinguished two ways to forecast projects and decisions. Kahneman coined the labels in Thinking, Fast and Slow; Epstein and F
Two distinct routes lead to creative solutions. Insight — the aha moment — is when a solution bursts into awareness without conscious deliberation. Analytical t
Inspectional reading is the second level of reading: a fast but disciplined pass whose purpose is to determine what a book is about, how it is built, and whethe
The idea that once AI systems can automate AI research itself, progress becomes recursive and explosive: smarter systems produce even smarter systems in a tight
Interdisciplinarity is the deliberate crossing of disciplinary boundaries in research, teaching, or practice — working across two or more established fields to
The nonnegotiable conditions you need — inside and outside work — to be happy in a role. Ashley Rizzotto's first strategy for mastering interviews: know these b
Using narrative from your experience rolodex to answer interview questions — the strategy Dino Martinez teaches once employers already like you on paper. Mockin
The Big Five E dimension — but Brian Little treats it as consequential enough to unpack separately, especially because behavior can diverge from trait via free
"Invert, always invert." — Carl Jacobi mathematician, adopted by entities/charlesmunger. Inversion means solving problems backward: instead of asking "How do I
Investment styles move in and out of favor like clothing hemlines. Howard Marks uses this image to show that popularity itself changes future returns. The quest
The Iron Prescription is Munger's discipline of hunting for disconfirming evidence, especially when you love your current conclusion. He takes the habit from Da
An iterated game is a repeated interaction between the same players — the same game played over many rounds, with each round's outcome carrying forward into the
Ship something imperfect. Learn from real users. Improve it. Repeat. Iterative development treats every release as a hypothesis and every user interaction as da
Knearest neighbors is a prediction method that classifies a new case by looking at the most similar known cases nearby and letting those neighbors vote. Its log
Japanese for "change for the better." A philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement as a daily practice — done by everyone in the system, not just leaders
When people's sense of self is attached to a position, they stop evaluating that position on its merits. They start defending themselves instead of thinking. Th
The Kelly criterion is a sizing rule for repeated bets: given a genuine edge, what fraction of capital maximizes longrun geometric growth — wealth compounded mu
Johannes Kepler derived three laws of planetary motion between 1609 and 1619 from Tycho Brahe's precise astronomical measurements. They are empirical — Kepler f
A KIM chart is a simple threecolumn vocabulary tool built around Key Word, Information, and Memory Cue. It helps by putting definition and recall trigger beside
Psychologist Robin Hogarth divided learning environments into two types. The labels sound cute; the distinction explains when experience makes you better and wh
Labor markets are not ordinary markets for an ordinary commodity. They are the institutions through which people sell their capacity to work because they need w
Frankl's phrase for the one freedom that cannot be stripped by any external force: the freedom to choose one's attitude toward any given circumstance. "Everythi
Lateral reading is the practice of leaving a webpage to investigate its source, claim, or organization through other tabs and other sources rather than reading
Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo's chief engineer through the Game Boy era, preached lateral thinking with withered technology: take cheap, mature, wellunderstood compone
Kahneman and Tversky's ironic label: people act as if the law of large numbers applies to small samples too. Small samples yield extreme results more often; we
Every physical law is an approximation. It holds within some regime of scale, speed, energy, or precision — and breaks down when you push outside that regime. T
Every business has two fundamental domains: building — creating the product, delivering the service, making the thing work — and selling — communicating it, dis
A method for turning investigation into retained, opinionated understanding by organizing learning around writing rather than reading. Reading and discussion al
Learning from failure sounds automatic, but it is not. A mistake only teaches when the learner can both emotionally tolerate the setback and accurately diagnose
The claim that all learning is fundamentally memorybuilding. "Understanding" is not a categorically different thing from "memorization" — it is deeper, richer,
Most people trying to win others to their way of thinking do too much talking. Let the other person talk themselves out. They know more about their business and
Don't you have much more faith in ideas that you discover for yourself than in ideas handed to you on a silver platter? If so, isn't it bad judgment to ram your
Letting one save face. How important, how vitally important that is! And how few of us ever stop to think of it! We ride roughshod over the feelings of others,
The levels of reading are Adler and Van Doren's claim that reading skill is hierarchical. There is not one generic act called "reading." There are at least four
The Lindy effect is the observation that for nonperishable things — technologies, ideas, institutions, books — longevity predicts future durability. Each additi
Prices move in whatever direction requires the least force. When buying pressure exceeds selling pressure, prices rise — not because fundamentals have changed b
Liquidity risk is the risk that an investor cannot sell an asset quickly at a fair price when they need to. Marks treats liquidity as transient and paradoxical:
entities/HowardStevenson's rule: you can learn from the past, but you can't change it. The failure mode is living life backward — spending present time and ener
A local maximum is the highest point reachable from your current position by always moving uphill — but not the highest point overall. You are at the top of you
User asked for practical FGD prep help: no speaking practice, rarely speaks Indonesian/English aloud, freezes up gugup in practice sessions Diagnosed as two sep
Meaningcentered psychotherapy developed by Viktor Frankl. The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy — after Freud's psychoanalysis pleasure principle and Adler
When multiple psychological tendencies act in confluence toward the same outcome, the result is extreme — often far beyond what any single tendency would produc
Loneliness is the subjective experience of insufficient social connection — distinct from the objective fact of being alone. You can be surrounded by people and
Howard Marks' selling framework argues that investors often sell for psychologically satisfying reasons rather than analytically valid ones. They sell because a
Losses and gains of equal percentage are not equal in their effect on a portfolio. A 10% loss requires an 11% gain just to return to the starting point. The asy
Loss aversion: losses hurt more than equivalent gains please. Kahneman and Tversky built it into prospect theory as the steepest part of the value function at t
Romantic love activates the same neural reward pathways as substances like cocaine and opioids. When a relationship ends, the brain goes through withdrawal — no
Low unit bias is the retail psychological tendency to perceive an asset as "cheap" because its nominal price per unit is low, independent of market capitalizati
A lowrate world is an environment where the riskfree rate is so low that prospective returns fall across nearly all assets. Marks treats this as the dominant po
Carnegie calls this "one allimportant law of human conduct." Obey it and you'll almost never get into trouble. Break it and you'll get into endless trouble. The
Tell your child, your spouse, or your employee that he or she is bad at a certain thing, has no gift for it, and is doing it all wrong, and you have destroyed a
Always make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest. This is one of the important rules of human relations. It is only a matter of finding a wa
A distinction between two operating modes for project ownership: Mode 1: "My goal is to ship by end of month, so I'm going to get people started ASAP." Mode 2:
Manwithahammer syndrome is the tendency to force every problem into the shape of the one tool you already know. Munger uses it as a standing warning against sin
Market maker distribution describes the full cycle by which a token's insiders — project teams, early investors, and coordinated market makers — accumulate supp
Market manipulation is any deliberate action to create an artificial price, volume, or narrative signal in a security or commodity. In the early 20th century, b
Market society is not simply a society with markets in it. It is a society in which access to life's basics depends on market participation, above all on sellin
Market specialization is the discipline of trading one market or segment deeply instead of spreading across every asset class. CFI's commodity chapter states a
Vinh Giang's threestage loop — try and apply, reflect and review, plan and improve — for developing a skill through repeated cycles rather than through accumula
Match quality is economist Ofer Malamud's term for how well work fits a person — their abilities, interests, and evolving self. It is the hidden variable behind
The third and highest of logotherapy's three avenues to meaning: even unavoidable suffering carries within it the possibility of meaning, if the person chooses
Meanstesting is a policy mechanism that restricts benefits to people who fall below a defined income threshold. It is the standard design for welfare programs:
Memorizing a talk is a reliable path to powerful delivery — but it contains a trap in the middle that stops most people short. Stage 1 — Early. The speaker does
Mental accounting Richard Thaler, via Kahneman is how Humans — not Econs — organize money and outcomes into separate accounts: spending cash, savings, golf perh
Mark Douglas names a third road beside fundamental and technical analysis: mental analysis — studying how your beliefs, attitudes, and perception filters transl
Munger's central framework: acquire the big ideas from every major discipline — math, physics, biology, psychology, economics, engineering, history — and organi
The middle ground fallacy assumes that a position becomes true, fair, or wise simply because it sits between two opposing views. It mistakes balance for judgmen
Minimax is a gamesearch strategy for adversarial settings where you assume the opponent will also play intelligently. It chooses the move whose worst plausible
The moat of low status is the period you must cross when learning a new skill where you are visibly bad at it — asking obvious questions, making embarrassing mi
Money creation is the process by which new purchasing power enters the economy, and in modern capitalism most of it is created through bank lending rather than
Naive Bayes is a classification method that chooses the most likely class for a case by combining prior class probabilities with the probability of seeing that
A Nash Equilibrium is the stable state of a game where no player can improve their outcome by unilaterally changing their strategy, given what everyone else is
Net neutrality is the principle that internet traffic should be treated without unfair preference by network operators. At its simplest, it means providers shou
A network effect occurs when each additional user of a product makes the product more valuable for every existing user. Value scales with connections, not with
Neuroevolution is the use of evolutionary search to improve neural networks instead of, or alongside, direct gradientbased training. Rather than computing exact
The chapter's subject is not lying or omitting facts. It's recognizing that how you deliver a correction determines whether it lands or backfires. Telling someo
NNT — the number of people who must take a drug, undergo surgery, or receive a medical procedure before one person is helped. Daniel Levitin argues this is the
In the doubleslit experiment, electrons fired at a barrier with two open slits produce an interference pattern — the probability distribution of arrivals shows
Oedipal markets are markets whose attempts to cure themselves can undermine the very recovery they are supposed to produce, because participants interpret the a
Threefourths of the people you will ever meet are hungering and thirsting for sympathy. Give it to them, and they will love you. The magic phrase: "I don't blam
OODA Observe, Orient, Decide, Act applied to largescale project coordination. The key insight: most large projects are bottlenecked on information processing, n
A framework for measuring AI progress in "orders of magnitude" OOMs of effective compute rather than benchmark scores or subjective impressions. Introduced in s
Outsidein thinking solves hard problems by importing ideas and methods from domains far from the problem's home field. Alph Bingham built Eli Lilly's InnoCentiv
Packet switching is the architectural principle underlying how data moves across the internet. Instead of reserving a dedicated continuous channel between sende
Packets are the small chunks into which data is split when it travels across the internet. They are the unit of transport in packet switching — the architectura
Pansophia from Greek: pan = all, sophia = wisdom is the 17thcentury project of organizing all human knowledge into a single unified system — one that any educat
A fourbeat structure — Point, Action, Result, Ask — for entering a live conversation with a distilled contribution instead of a scattered one. Vinh Giang built
A therapeutic technique developed by Frankl as part of logotherapy: the patient is instructed to intend — and even wish for — the very thing they fear. This bre
By the midtwentieth century, highenergy particle accelerators were revealing a proliferating catalog of subatomic particles — electrons, protons, neutrons, pion
A password manager is a tool that stores and generates unique credentials so that one account breach does not automatically become many account breaches. Its re
Pattern recognition is what lets you solve a new problem by noticing it is structurally the same as one you've already solved. Without it, every problem is enco
The ability to extract key features from complex environments while filtering out irrelevant noise. Experts don't just think differently from novices — they lit
Permissionless leverage is leverage that does not require someone else to give you capital or agree to work for you. The three types of leverage aren't equal in
Ancient Persians killed messengers who brought bad news. The modern version: careers are damaged by carrying unwelcome information to powerful people, even when
entities/HowardStevenson's replacement for the singlementor model. The premise: no one person covers all of life well enough to be your one advisor. Instead, as
The "doings" in your life — the pursuits that make you individually you beyond trait labels. Brian Little's idiogenic layer: you may share extroversion or neuro
Feynman's metaphor for how physics is done: imagine being dropped into a chess game with no rulebook. You can observe the pieces moving. By watching enough game
A plan for victory is a concrete, stepbystep list of actions that ends with a goal achieved. Its primary purpose is not forward projection — it is an earlywarni
Planck vs chauffeur knowledge is Munger's distinction between real understanding and convincing performance. The story is simple: Max Planck, after giving the s
The planning fallacy: plans and forecasts that are unrealistically close to bestcase scenarios, improvable by consulting statistics of similar cases. Coined by
The frustrating part of behavior change is that effort arrives on schedule while evidence arrives late. James Clear calls that hidden stretch the Plateau of Lat
Platform governance is the set of rules, rankings, review systems, economic terms, and interface controls through which a digital platform shapes what users can
Markets are not neutral natural spaces. They are politically constituted systems whose rules determine ownership, bargaining power, money creation, and risk all
A polymath is someone who has made significant contributions in three or more distinct, unrelated fields — not just someone who reads widely. The threshold is a
A time management method: set a timer for 25 minutes, work with full focus phone off, internet off, then reward yourself when the timer rings. Named after the t
Position sizing is the rule for how much capital to put at risk in a trade or investment. It is the bridge between having an idea and surviving the consequences
A poverty trap is any selfreinforcing economic or environmental condition that perpetuates deprivation across generations. The defining feature: the circumstanc
Why don't we use the same common sense when trying to change people that we use when trying to change dogs? Animal trainers have used this technique for centuri
Also called prospective hindsight — psychologist Gary Klein's procedure, endorsed by Daniel Kahneman and extended to personal life by Daniel Levitin. Postmortem
The principle that advanced skills should only be attempted after foundational prerequisites are genuinely mastered — not just "covered." Skycak's summary: "Pre
A 2–3 minute structure for answering "tell me about yourself" in interviews: present who you are professionally now → past relevant experience → future why this
The prisoner's dilemma is a game structure where two players would both be better off cooperating, but each player has an individual incentive to defect — and i
Privacy is the protected space in which a person can think, communicate, explore, and dissent without constant observation or forced exposure. It is often misun
Mark Douglas's core doctrine in sources/tradinginthezone: trade like a casino, not like a gambler trying to call the next card. You need an edge odds in your fa
In quantum mechanics, the probability that a particle arrives at a given location is not computed directly. Instead, you compute a probability amplitude — a com
Probability blindness is the human inability to naturally feel probability, base rates, randomness, and rare events correctly. In sources/fooledbyrandomness, Ta
Problem framing is the disciplined act of exploring and defining what problem you are actually facing before rushing into solutions. Many teams are fast at solu
The problem of induction is the limit of learning future certainty from past observations. In sources/fooledbyrandomness, Taleb uses the classic swan problem to
Profit is not just leftover money after costs. In capitalism it is the driving surplus around which production, investment, and competitive pressure are organiz
The singsong, metalanguage layer of speech — rhythm, stress, and intonation — that imparts meaning beyond the words themselves. Julian Treasure calls prosody "r
Prospect theory Kahneman & Tversky, 1979 is a descriptive model of risky choice — not how people should decide, but how they do. It replaced expected utility's
Pseudocode is an informal, humanreadable description of an algorithm that uses structured language conventions without being tied to any specific programming la
Munger's magnum opus: a taxonomy of 25 standard causes of human misjudgment, developed over decades of selftaught psychology and revised in 2005 at age 81. The
Pyramiding is the practice of adding to a position incrementally as the market confirms the original thesis. Each addition happens at a higher price for longs o
Quantum mechanics does not predict what will happen in a specific experiment — it predicts probabilities. When an electron passes through a double slit and hits
Random walk theory holds that security prices move without a predictable pattern — each step is independent of the last — so forecasting via fundamental or tech
The rational actor model is the standard economic assumption that individuals consistently act to maximize their own selfinterest, given their preferences and t
Adler and Van Doren separate two very different outcomes that ordinary language collapses into one word: information and understanding. Reading for information
Reading history means reading narrative accounts of the past while remembering that historical facts reach you already selected, arranged, and interpreted. Adle
Reading imaginative literature requires a different posture from reading expository works. Fiction and poetry do not mainly proceed by terms, propositions, and
Reading philosophy begins in good questions. Adler opens the chapter by arguing that children ask better philosophical questions than many adults because they s
Reading practical books means reading works that tell you what should be done or how to do it. They are not mainly trying to describe what is true of the world,
Reading science and mathematics well means respecting the special role of demonstration, observation, and formal structure. Scientific books are often easier in
Reading social science is difficult partly because its concepts and language spill into journalism, politics, criticism, and everyday argument. The reader often
Reasonable expectations are a form of risk control. If the expected return is too high, too smooth, or too dependable relative to the risk being taken, investor
Recycling is Varoufakis's name for the circulation that keeps an economy alive: wages becoming spending, revenues becoming salaries and investment, and credit s
Habits automate behavior and free cognitive resources — but without reflection, they also automate your current level of performance. You reinforce what you alr
Reflexivity describes situations where the beliefs of participants change the reality those beliefs are about, which then changes the beliefs again. The feedbac
Regression to the mean: extreme measurements on one trial tend to be less extreme on the next, because the first trial included luck as well as skill. Galton do
Reinforcement learning is a machinelearning approach in which a system improves by receiving feedback about the consequences of its actions over time. Instead o
The distilled quality of a good startup founder: not merely relentless, but resourceful in the face of novel obstacles. The best analogy is a running back: not
A person's name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language. It sets them apart — makes them unique among all others. Forget it or
Remote associations are connections between concepts that are semantically distant — not obvious neighbors in meaning, but linked through indirect, weak, or met
Risk of ruin is the probability that a losing streak destroys enough capital to end a trading career before an edge has time to express. It measures survival, n
Risk/reward ratio compares what you stand to lose if wrong against what you stand to gain if right. CFI's mastertrader checklist: only take trades where being r
The process of finding how your particular skillset can provide leverage in an organization, rather than trying to fit a predefined role archetype. Relevant esp
A sampling period is the early phase of development where a learner tries many activities with light or unstructured practice before narrowing focus and ramping
Scale effects are the ways size changes economics. Munger treats scale as neither automatically good nor automatically bad. It creates powerful advantages, but
Howard Marks' seachange thesis says the investment world from roughly 1980 to 2021 was shaped by a fourdecade decline in interest rates, and the inflationandrat
A seamless web of trust is Munger's name for the kind of organization where highly reliable people can depend on one another without thick layers of defensive p
A search engine is a retrieval system that discovers, indexes, and ranks web content so users can find relevant pages through queries. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo,
Search operators are syntax cues and constraint tools that make a query more precise than plain keyword searching. They let the searcher express structure direc
The practice of thinking past the immediate result of a decision to consider downstream consequences and the consequences of those consequences. FirstOrder Seco
Remember that other people may be totally wrong. But they don't think so. Don't condemn them. Any fool can do that. Try to understand them. Only wise, tolerant,
Selfefficacy is Albert Bandura's term for the belief that you can produce a specific outcome through your own action. It is not general optimism, not selfesteem
Frankl's principle that genuine meaning is always found outside the self — in a cause to serve, a person to love, a work to complete, or a truth to pursue. Self
One of entities/HowardStevenson's three biggest surprises from 150 highachiever interviews: the most satisfied people had a reasoned sense of enough across each
Julian Treasure's label for seven common habits that make speech hard to listen to. Not a complete taxonomy of bad communication — but large habits most people
Mark Douglas's operational definition of "I am a consistent winner" in sources/tradinginthezone — seven subbeliefs that must function without internal argument.
A shelling point is the option people converge on in a coordination problem even when no central authority tells them to choose it. It becomes the obvious meeti
The shortestpath problem asks for the least costly route from one node in a graph to another. In an unweighted graph, "shortest" usually means fewest edges cros
Levels of effort: Tsuyoku naritai: I want to become stronger — keep improving on previous failures. Isshokenmei: Make a desperate effort — allout, as if life at
SIFT is a fourstep routine for evaluating online information before accepting or sharing it: Stop, Investigate the Source, Find Better Coverage, and Trace claim
The value of a university degree comes primarily from what it signals to employers, not from the skills or knowledge it imparts. The signal has three components
Sitonyourass investing is Munger's case for extreme selectivity followed by patience. The idea is not laziness. It is disciplined inactivity. If real opportunit
The hardest skill in speculation is not finding the right position — it is holding it. "Sitting tight" means staying in a correct trade through all the normal f
Skewness and asymmetry describe payoff shapes where gains and losses are distributed unevenly. Taleb treats payoff shape as more important than the comforting s
Every major wave of technology pushes human skill up one level of abstraction. The execution layer gets automated; humans move to the layer above — judgment, di
A slippery slope fallacy argues that one first step will inevitably trigger a sequence ending in an extreme outcome. The key mistake is not warning about conseq
A smile is a signal before any words land. Charles Schwab told Carnegie his smile had been worth a million dollars — and Carnegie thought he was understating it
Also called the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis. Human intelligence evolved primarily to navigate social competition — not to solve ecological challenges
The Socratic method is a structured form of questioning associated with Socrates that tests claims by pushing on definitions, assumptions, examples, exceptions,
Julian Treasure's coinage for imposing your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately — broadcasting at full volume without regard for whether o
Spaced repetition is a practice technique that exploits the "forgetting curve" to maximize longterm memory retention. The core insight: the act of successfully
Specialization is the historical process by which the production of knowledge became organized into distinct, bounded fields — each with its own methods, journa
Specialized terminology is the domainspecific vocabulary a field develops so that its members can talk with more precision than everyday language allows. Learni
Specific knowledge is knowledge that cannot be easily trained into someone else. It is usually discovered through genuine curiosity, unusual background, obsessi
The distinction between speculation and gambling is not about uncertainty — both involve uncertainty. It is about whether the decision is grounded in reasoned a
entities/HowardStevenson's model for how successful people actually cultivate the concepts/fourdimensionsofsuccess — not sequentially, but in a growing spiral w
Spoken language and written language are different registers. Writing a script in prose and then reading or reciting it aloud tends to sound unnatural — because
Stag hunt coordination is the problem of achieving a better collective outcome when each individual will pursue it only if they expect enough others to do the s
A structure for answering behavioral interview questions by telling a complete story: Situation — what happened, context Task — what you had to do Action — what
Solid, liquid, and gas are not different kinds of stuff — they are the same atoms in different arrangements, held at different energies. The distinction between
Status is the actual incentive many people optimize for, even when they believe — or claim — they are optimizing for something else. In modern mating, economics
Stellar nucleosynthesis is the process by which stars forge elements heavier than hydrogen. The Big Bang produced primarily hydrogen and helium; nearly everythi
Stoic resilience is the discipline of meeting trouble without collapse into selfpity, resentment, or denial. In Munger's use of the idea, adversity is not somet
Stories and myths are not side ornaments around economics. They are part of how economic orders justify themselves and part of how people can learn to question
Robert Trivers' principle: "We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others." Selfdeception is not accidental. It's adaptive. If others are scanning you for s
You're not at your best when you're stressed — and the dangerous part is you often can't tell. Daniel Levitin's framing: the brain releases cortisol in threaten
When System 1 cannot answer a hard question, it answers an easier one instead — and does not announce the swap. Kahneman calls this substitution: the heuristic
entities/HowardStevenson's replacement for the word "balance." Balance implies a static state — he imagines a seal holding a ball on its nose, spinning. Jugglin
Confusing sufficient and necessary conditions is one of the most common logical errors — and one of the easiest to commit, because the two can sound interchange
The technical challenge of reliably controlling and aligning AI systems that are much smarter than humans. Distinct from current alignment which works via RLHF
Superstructure refers to the macrolevel conditions that determine which game is currently being played. Before analyzing why individuals behave a certain way, y
Supervised learning is a machinelearning approach in which a model learns from examples that already include the desired answer or label. The basic pattern is s
Supply chain resilience is the tradeoff between cheapest sourcing and dependable sourcing. Howard Marks' 2022 memo "The Pendulum in International Affairs" frame
Support and resistance are price levels where buying or selling has repeatedly turned the market. Support is where fresh buying previously stopped a decline; re
Surprise is the target of good essays and a useful guide in intellectual work generally. Surprises = things you didn't know + things that contradict what you th
Survivorship bias is the error of studying only the visible winners while ignoring everyone who tried the same thing and disappeared from the sample. In sources
Every conservation law in physics corresponds to a symmetry of the laws of nature. This connection — one of the deepest in all of physics — was proven by Emmy N
Sympathy is feeling for someone from a safe distance. It is the response that stays at the edge of the hole and offers comfort without entering the other person
Syntopical reading is Adler's fourth and highest level of reading: reading multiple books around one question and turning them into a structured conversation. T
The mind runs two modes of processing, a pedagogical fiction Kahneman uses throughout Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 is not a brain region; "System 1 does X"
A Tshaped developer has two axes of competency. The horizontal bar of the T is broad familiarity across the domains that a digital product requires: user resear
It isn't nearly so difficult to listen to a recital of your faults if the person criticizing begins by humbly admitting that he or she, too, is far from impecca
Framing a talk as a journey changes how you prepare and how the audience experiences it. A journey has a starting point, a destination, and a sequence of steps.
"The royal road to a person's heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most." Whenever Theodore Roosevelt expected a visitor, he sat up late the ni
Tape reading and order flow is the practice of learning from how orders actually hit the market rather than only from higherlevel stories, indicators, or endofd
Taste is the quality of your predictive models and search heuristics: if I design the experiment this way, what will I find? If I write the doc this way, how mu
TCP/IP, short for Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, is the basic transport and addressing framework that moves data across the internet. In b
Temptation bundling pairs a behavior you need to do with a behavior you want to do. The formula: "After HABIT I NEED, I will HABIT I WANT." Or combined with hab
Testandlearn is Herminia Ibarra's alternative to planandimplement career design: act, sample, reflect, adjust — instead of introspecting until you have a twenty
Obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of additional consumption. Named after French philosopher Denis Diderot. In 1765, Diderot was nearly broke — h
Named after the Meander Menderes river in Turkey, which winds dramatically but not from frivolity — it follows the most economical route to the sea. Algorithm:
Thesis drift is what happens when a trade's original reason for existing silently changes without the trader explicitly deciding to change it. The position stay
Thinking out loud is the practice of narrating your reasoning process while working through a problem — showing the steps, the uncertainty, the angles you're co
Threat modeling is the practice of deciding what you are trying to protect, from whom, how likely the threat is, what failure would cost, and how much inconveni
Brian Little's frame for what makes a person: 1. Biogenic nature — neurophysiology; how you're wired 2. Sociogenic nature second nature — culture and social sha
A throughline is the single clear idea that connects every part of a talk, essay, or narrative. Every section, story, and example either serves it or doesn't be
Charles Schwab: "The way to get things done is to stimulate competition. I do not mean in a sordid, moneygetting way, but in the desire to excel." The desire to
A practical framework for highvolume, rapiditeration empirical work in LLM alignment research scalable oversight, adversarial robustness, CoT faithfulness, proc
Titfortat is a decisionmaking strategy that wins in iterated competitive environments by being simple, cooperative, and proportionally retaliatory. It was the c
Trading edge is a concrete reason a trade should have positive expected value after costs, slippage, sizing error, and psychological failure. It is the answer t
The chief enemies of a speculator are not the market, other traders, or bad luck. They are internal: hope, fear, and greed operating in the wrong direction at t
Technical indicators are math applied to price and volume — overlays or subcharts that compress market behavior into lines, histograms, or candlestick patterns.
Frankl's term for optimism in spite of the tragic triad — pain, guilt, and death. Not optimism that denies these realities, but optimism that coexists with them
Trust minimization is the attempt to build systems where cooperation depends less on faith in particular people or institutions and more on rules that are legib
A listeneroriented selfintroduction capped at roughly 20 words — designed as a sound bite that earns "Tell me more," not a compressed résumé. Rebecca Okamoto bu
Twofactor authentication adds a second proof of identity on top of a password, usually something you have or temporarily generate rather than something you know
When starting a new habit, scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less. "When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do."
The uncertainty principle, formulated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, states that certain pairs of physical properties cannot both be known precisely at the same
Unemployment is not just the absence of work. In this book it is evidence that labor markets do not automatically clear the way textbook models suggest. People
Universal basic income UBI is a fixed, unconditional cash payment to every member of society regardless of employment status or wealth. It is the only known pol
Newton's law of universal gravitation states that every mass in the universe attracts every other mass with a force proportional to the product of their masses
Giving an unscripted talk is not the same as winging it. The words are found in the moment — the structure, the steps, and the destination are prepared just as
Unsupervised learning is a machinelearning approach in which a system looks for patterns, clusters, or structure in data without being given labeled answers in
A URL, short for Uniform Resource Locator, is the address of a resource on the web. It tells a browser what protocol to use, what domain to contact, and what pa
Useitorloseit is the principle that skills and mental models decay when they are not retrieved and used. Munger includes the idea because possessing a concept i
Value is the fault line between what markets can price and what human beings actually care about. Market price is one form of value, but it is not the only one.
Value versus growth investing is often framed as a fight between cheap stocks and expensive stocks. Howard Marks argues that this framing is confused. Growth is
Variable rewards are rewards delivered at unpredictable intervals. They produce a stronger and more durable dopamine spike than fixed rewards — and they are the
Variance is the natural spread of outcomes around the expected value. In trading it means that two traders running the exact same system with the same rules and
The visibility paradox is the tension Mollie Kaye names precisely: "We are terrified to be noticed, but we are dying to be seen." The fear of standing out — of
Vocabulary flashcards are a lowfriction retrieval tool: put the target word on one side, the definition on the other, and ideally add part of speech plus an exa
Julian Treasure's frame for the voice as an instrument with adjustable controls. Most people have never opened the toolbox — they speak from habit, not choice.
Six exercises Julian Treasure runs before every talk — and recommends before any important speech stage presentation, marriage proposal, raise request, wedding
A breakup doesn't end a relationship — it ends several things simultaneously. The void inventory is the practice of identifying every distinct loss, not just th
Quantum objects — electrons, photons, protons, atoms — behave neither like classical particles nor like classical waves. They arrive in discrete lumps like part
Weak ties are lowintensity social connections — brief interactions with acquaintances, neighbors, shop workers, baristas, and strangers — as opposed to strong t
A web browser is the clientside software layer that requests, receives, interprets, and displays web resources for a human user. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Ed
A web page is a single document that a browser can display, usually an HTML document plus the resources it depends on. It is smaller in scope than a website, wh
A web server is the computer or serverside system that hosts web resources and sends them to clients when requested. In the beginner picture, it is the place wh
A web service is a serverside system that responds to requests over the internet to perform a function or provide data. Unlike a plain informational page, a web
A website is a collection of related web pages and associated files grouped under a shared domain or identity. The pages usually link to one another, often thro
A welfare trap is a structural condition where taking a job leaves a benefit recipient financially worse off than remaining unemployed. It is created by meanste
Frankl's name for the primary human motivational force: the drive to find meaning in one's life. The competing claims — Freud's pleasure principle, Adler's will
entities/HowardStevenson's term for the involuntary emotional sting of seeing someone else succeed where you chose not to compete. His example: he was the "ST"
A word web is a vocabulary tool that treats a word as the center of a small network rather than as a oneline definition. It helps the learner build depth around
Wordpart clues are meaning hints that come from the internal structure of a word itself. Instead of asking what the surrounding sentence implies, the reader ask
The central insight of learning science, as presented in Advice on Upskilling, is the distinction between working memory WM and longterm memory LTM and how expe
Vinh Giang's claim that career progression tracks how much someone contributes out loud in meetings, not just how good their work is. In his framing, visibility
The World Wide Web is a distributed hypertext system built on top of the internet, made of interlinked documents identified by URLs, retrieved through browsers
WYSIATI — what you see is all there is — is Kahneman's label for a core System 1 property: the mind builds the best story it can from available information and
Xraying a book is Adler's metaphor for seeing the hidden structure beneath the surface prose. A worthwhile book has a skeleton: a unity, major parts, and an ord
A zerosum game is one where the total available reward is fixed. One player's gain is exactly another's loss. A nonzerosum game is one where the total can grow