Thought experiments are powerful thinking tools. To clarify the perhaps most important characteristic of them, I like to think of them as existing at the intersection of thoughts and experiments. Here is an obvious Venn diagram to show that relationship. It has some clear implications. Experiments are specifically about testing hypotheses or ideas. You get […]

I once again read David Foster Wallace‘s This is Water on the first day of the year. Here is some of the thinking that came up for me. The obvious can be valuable, at times perhaps even profoundly important. In the everyday busyness of life however, the obvious can fade into the background of your […]

There is value in reasoning by first principles and there are different approaches you can take to discover the first principles at play in a given situation. I will leave that for future posts. Here, I want to briefly cover a foundational truth about this. What does it mean when you determine those first principles? […]