Questions, not departments
Things I’m still trying to understand.
Short observations and longer explorations about the systems shaping work, technology, culture, belief and everyday behaviour.
Why Can Neutral Words Sound Like an Attack?
The same sentence can sound caring on Tuesday and insulting on Thursday. What relationship history, defensive attention and memory do to ordinary words.
8 minWould We Make Better Decisions If Life Had Instant Feedback?
A cigarette warning can reach belief and still fail to change the next decision. What smoking, procrastination and bad metrics reveal about the timing of feedback.
8 minCan You Know How Humble You Are Before You Have Power?
A friend predicted that more money would make him more generous. Then the money arrived, along with an Xbox—and a harder question about forecasting our own character.
8 minDid We Eliminate Failure—or Just Move It Forward?
One missing idea made mathematics miserable for two years—until a physics teacher accidentally made the equations come alive. What should schools do sooner?
9 minIs First-Year University the Exam We Removed From High School?
A graduation full of honours, a missing calibration problem, and the possibility that first-year university has become a very expensive readiness test.
8 minWhen Every School Issues Its Own Currency, Universities Need an Exchange Rate
If a 95 from one school does not predict the same readiness as a 95 from another, should universities quietly convert the currencies—or show their work?
8 minIs Maturity Knowing When Not to Update?
A mature mind should not be carried by every new idea. But if nothing can move it, is that wisdom—or simply rigidity with better branding?
7 minWhen Does Inherited Faith Become a Question?
What changes when a teenager’s inherited worldview becomes one voice among friends, media, school and a rapidly widening world?
7 minWhy Does Faith Need Rehearsal?
If someone already believes, why pray, sing, gather and retell the same stories for a lifetime?
7 minWhy Is Everyone Nicer in the Church Parking Lot?
How a parking lot, a familiar building and invisible expectations can temporarily call forward a different version of us.
6 minAdd One Word, Change the Entire Argument
Labels such as “scientific,” “AI-generated” or a party name can act as viewing instructions, changing which evidence receives our attention.
6 minAI Can Write More Code. Who Gets to Slow Down?
AI coding feels like enchanted brooms: output multiplies, incentives reward speed, and nobody wants to admit they do not know the stop command.
7 minAre We Prediction Machines—or Reward Machines?
A side-mirror moment, transformer attention and children’s relentless curiosity raise a question: are humans mainly predicting what comes next, or learning what is worth doing?
6 minCan a Stereotype Create Its Own Evidence?
Expectations can alter treatment, behaviour and memory until a stereotype appears to prove itself. But the evidence is more conditional than it sounds.
7 minDoes Saying “I’m Bad at This” Make Me Worse?
David facing Goliath, one confident programming interview and one terrifying whiteboard raise a testable question: can our internal story change access to what we already know?
10 minIs Culture Behaviour That Forgot Why It Started?
A childhood jollof-rice emergency becomes a question about hospitality, inherited rules and what culture remembers after the explanation fades.
8 minIs Intelligence Mostly Knowing What to Ignore?
A dermatologist, a UX designer and a software engineer look at the same kind of crowded field and see different things. Is expertise partly an attention policy?
7 minIs Parenting an Optimization Problem?
A bedtime cookie, several conflicting objectives, and the trouble with treating a developing person like a solvable system.
10 minIs Social Media Training Us—or Are We Training It?
We train recommendation systems with attention; their selections reshape what receives attention next. Preference and exposure become hard to separate.
5 minWe Were Prompt Engineering Humans Before AI
Human communication has always shaped attention. Comparing human prompts with LLM prompts shows where the analogy helps—and where it becomes manipulation.
8 minWhat Was Religion Doing All This Time?
Religion bundles meaning, obligation, ritual and community. The machinery that creates belonging can also enable exclusion, shame and control.
6 minWhy Do Incentives Produce the Opposite Behaviour?
Rewards and fines do more than change behaviour: they can change what an action means, what people optimize and who still wants to participate.
6 minWhy Do Useless Meetings Keep Surviving?
A meeting may be poor at transferring information while being excellent at managing anxiety, status, interpretation and shared responsibility.
5 minWhy Does Some Evidence Change Us—and Some Just Bounce Off?
Surprise is not the same as learning. Evidence must pass through attention, trust, value and explanation before it can revise an existing model.
6 minWhy Every Metric Eventually Learns to Lie
A useful metric can slowly become the job itself. Goodhart’s law explains gaming; the deeper problem is how measurement redirects attention.
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