Questions, not departments
Things I’m still trying to understand.
Some are compact observations. Others have become longer explorations. The labels describe their shape, not their importance.
When 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?
9 minWhy Does Faith Need Rehearsal?
If someone already believes, why pray, sing, gather and retell the same stories for a lifetime?
9 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.
7 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.
5 minWhat Happens When AI Writes Code Faster Than We Can Understand It?
AI can accelerate code generation faster than review, testing and operational understanding. What happens when the assurance gap keeps growing?
9 minAre We Prediction Machines—or Reward Machines?
Humans anticipate what happens next and learn from consequences. Predictive processing and reinforcement learning illuminate different parts of the loop.
5 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.
6 minDoes Saying “I’m Bad at This” Make Me Worse?
Saying “I’m bad at mathematics” may cue attention, anxiety or self-protection before a task. That is a testable hypothesis—not a settled fact.
5 minIs Culture Behaviour That Forgot Why It Started?
Culture can preserve old solutions long after their explanations disappear. How do groups tell accumulated wisdom from a workaround made sacred?
5 minIs Intelligence Mostly Knowing What to Ignore?
Experts can seem to notice more when they are discarding irrelevant information faster. The same filter that enables insight can also create blindness.
5 minIs Parenting an Optimization Problem?
A bedtime cookie, several conflicting objectives, and the trouble with treating a developing person like a solvable system.
15 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.
6 min