Longer writing around books and ideas.
Articles are the connective tissue between books: putting several of them side by side to answer a larger question.
The intellectual starting point of modern capitalism was not the invisible hand, but an earlier redefinition: the pursuit of gain, recast from a vice into a counterweight to destructiveness
A Design That Has Been Forgotten There is a popular account of how modern capitalism was thought into existence: Adam Smith discovered the invisible …
From central-bank targets to quarterly earnings — the same mechanism keeps recurring: once a number is used to steer action, it stops being a good description of reality
A Concrete Problem: Why More Measurement Can Mean Less Clarity Modern institutions translate almost everything into numbers. Schools track progressio…
From "the medium is the message" to the attention economy — a structural problem that keeps being treated as a personal one
A concrete question: why has abundance not made us wiser? Over the past three decades, information has undergone an extraordinary deflation. A resear…
From the Bronze Age collapse to modern infrastructure — when the returns on growth turn into fragility
A Concrete Puzzle: Why Solutions Grow Into Problems Every modern institution was built to solve a specific problem. Regulation exists to prevent the …
From the corridors of Bell Labs to the fab floor, the hardest knowledge to copy is the knowledge nobody wrote down
A Concrete Puzzle There is a recurring phenomenon in the semiconductor industry. A mature production line can be "copied" wholesale to another city: …
Consensus is not the product of judgment; it is its substitute
An Unusual Failure In September 1998, Long-Term Capital Management lost roughly 4.6 billion dollars in under four weeks, and was ultimately recapital…
The value of history is a reusable structure for judgment
English version coming soon.
Ask the right questions before choosing a method
English version coming soon.
Good thinking tools should last a lifetime
What a Mental Model Is A mental model is not knowledge. It is a way of handling knowledge. Knowledge tells you what something is; a mental model tell…
Not a list, but a ladder of understanding
Why an AI Reading List at All Arguments about AI are rarely technical at bottom. When people disagree over how many jobs AI will replace, when AGI wi…
Reading the chip as a system with many layers
Why Start with Semiconductors If you want to understand the technological landscape of this era, the semiconductor is the unavoidable entry point. It…
The classics are not answers but questions that keep surviving
A Common Misunderstanding Many people assume that reading the classics means accepting the right opinions. The opposite is closer to the truth. The f…