Thinking & Personal Effectiveness
Portable structures for thinking about unfamiliar problems.
13 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis
Albert A. Bartlett · 1978
Uses nothing but the arithmetic of steady percentage growth to show that any fixed growth rate has a fixed doubling time, and argues that…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
How to Make Our Ideas Clear
Charles Sanders Peirce · 1878
Proposes that the entire meaning of a concept lies in the practical, testable effects we conceive it to have, and offers this 'pragmatic maxim' as a…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Science and Sanity
Alfred Korzybski · 1933
Argues that most human conflict and confusion stems from confusing a description of reality with reality itself, and proposes 'the map is not the…
+5 more at this level
12 of 13 works
Albert A. Bartlett
Uses nothing but the arithmetic of steady percentage growth to show that any fixed growth rate has a fixed doubling time, and argues that policymakers and the public routinely misjudge how little time compounding leaves before consumption meets a finite limit.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles Sanders Peirce
Proposes that the entire meaning of a concept lies in the practical, testable effects we conceive it to have, and offers this 'pragmatic maxim' as a portable method for stripping any idea down to what actually matters about it before reasoning further.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George Polya
Sets out a four-stage heuristic — understand, plan, carry out, look back — and argues that the questions a solver asks themselves are teachable even where the subject matter is not.
Julie K. Norem & Nancy Cantor
Finds that people who deliberately set low expectations and mentally rehearse everything that could go wrong before a stressful task use the resulting anxiety productively and perform as well as optimists, rather than being undermined by pessimism as expected.
Donella H. Meadows
Ranks twelve places to intervene in a system from least to most effective, arguing that people habitually push on parameters — the easiest lever to find and the weakest one to pull — while the rules, goals and paradigms that generate a system's behaviour are both harder to change and far more powerful.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Pedro Domingos
Reviews the theoretical and empirical arguments for preferring simpler models and finds most of them wanting, concluding that Occam's razor is frequently invoked in machine learning as a justification it does not actually provide.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Uri Gneezy & Aldo Rustichini
A field experiment at daycare centres finds that introducing a modest fine for picking children up late increased the rate of late pickups rather than reducing it, arguing that a price reframes a social obligation as a market transaction and removes the guilt that previously did the deterring.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alfred Korzybski
Argues that most human conflict and confusion stems from confusing a description of reality with reality itself, and proposes 'the map is not the territory' as a discipline for remembering that any word, model or theory is always an abstraction from what it represents.
W. Ross Ashby
Formalises regulation and control as the general problem of restricting a system's variety in the face of disturbance, and derives feedback as the mechanism by which a system can be made to counteract deviation regardless of what field it operates in.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robyn M. Dawes
Shows that crude linear models built from a handful of variables and even arbitrary weights routinely out-predict trained human judges, and argues experts lose to simple models not from lack of knowledge but because they inconsistently apply it — adding noise a fixed formula cannot.
M. E. J. Newman
Surveys the handful of simple mechanisms — preferential attachment, multiplicative growth, combinations of exponentials — that generate power-law and Pareto-shaped distributions across systems as different as city sizes and word frequencies, and argues the same shape recurring everywhere is not itself evidence of one common cause.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Martin Wortman, Ernest Kee & Pranav Kannan
Argues a safety margin is really an economic hedge against uncertain future costs, and builds a framework linking how large a margin a regulator should demand to whether the regulation is prescriptive or performance-based.
link checked 17 Sept 2026