Nth Order

10 voices echoed in unison. “No witnesses.” The phrase reverberated through the parlor, filling the space, only to be swallowed by the weathered tapestries that lined the walls. Sunlight peeked through frayed curtains, illuminating the gathering with an eerie, almost sacred glow. Many faces were new. They had been but greenhorns, fresh blood just entering the family business, the last time the decaclave convened. The elder council members bore more wrinkles, more scars — silent witnesses to decades of careful work....

A modern GPT-retelling of The Refusal of Reciprocity by GK Chesterton For the Prussian begins all his culture by that act which is the destruction of all creative thought and constructive action. He breaks that mirror in the mind, in which a man can see the face of his friend or foe. The Children of Tuesday There are many ways of being lawless, and most of them at least make sense....

It really is amazing how they figured out “One axis that nobody competes on in banking is treating the user as if they know what a wire is.” Has been differentiating since they launched and gotten more so over time as they get better and banks have gotten worse (or closed). https://t.co/NzJ1gOVpPl — Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) July 9, 2025 For whatever reason, this tweet got me thinking about an exercise I periodically like to do related to developing your own product-sense....

There was a psychologist who lived in the early half of the 20th century by the name of Egon Brunswick. Egon spent a good chunk of his career studying the field of perception and some of these findings are still relevant today. If I was a more skilled writer, I would devote a good chunk of my next 6 months to Gladwell-izing Egon Brunswik and his ideas. There is enough good ideas in what I’ve read so far of his research, that it could probably make for a very compelling book....

Magnus Carlsen claims that one or two signals per match from a chess AI indicating when he should think hardest would make him “almost invincible”. IMO you could boost researchers similarly with just one or two signals a year saying “think hard about the paper you just read”. — Richard Ngo (@RichardMCNgo) June 1, 2025 I wonder how generalizable this concept is to other fields. “Think extra hard now” Most things have 80-20 (Pareto) returns....

When I led PM teams, I often had to help PMs frustrated by a lack of alignment with PMs in other orgs. Sometimes, I’d suggest a simple fix: send an engineer or a designer to talk to the other team instead. Worked like magic. PM-to-PM ego is a problem that no one talks about, but it is common in top companies. In fact, product managers are often most difficult with each other....

Word dimensionality expansion: trust There is a suprising amount of variation present in the statement: “I trust them”. I particularly notice this tension in regards to certain politicians. I frequently hear people utter the refrain: “they are someone we can trust”. And on one hand, I can actually empathize with that statement. There’s a certain resonant quality to it that is hard to deny (which is why it’s sticky). In some sense you can trust them....

There is this scene from The Office that I’m thinking about a lot lately. It’s from the later seasons. The CEO, Robert California, is searching for game-breaking ideas to turn the business around. Kevin Malone, the office simpleton, makes an observation about the layout of cookies in the break-room vending machine. [paraphrasing] - “The best spot in the machine is being taken up by cookies 🍪 that nobody likes.” Robert hears (without really hearing) what Kevin said....

“Is your red the same as my red?” A question that middle-schoolers and high-schoolers ponder in jest actually has some profound applications to perception. “Is your red the same as my red?” Perception is this in-betweeny thing that exists between reality, in this case the color red, and your interpretation of reality, what you perceive as red. Now, we can make all sorts of measurements and claims to try to circle around a definition for reality-red....

Lee looked at him and the brown eyes under their rounded upper lids seemed to open and deepen until they weren’t foreign any more, but man’s eyes, warm with understanding. Lee chuckled. “It’s more than a convenience,” he said. “It’s even more than self-protection. Mostly we have to use it to be understood at all.” Samuel showed no sign of having observed any change. “I can understand the first two,” he said thoughtfully, “but the third escapes me....