Via Negativa: in theology and philosophy, the focus on what something is not, an indirect definition, deemed less prone to fallacies than via positiva. In action, it is a recipe for what to avoid, what not to do—subtraction, not addition, works better in domains with multiplicative and unpredictable side effects. In medicine, stopping someone from

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Instead of embarking on an endless search, I’ve taken a different approach: working backward. Instead of thinking about what I want to do and how I want to live, I start instead with what I don’t want to be doing and what failure looks like. By looking at what might go wrong with our lives, we can avoid obvious traps, creating more space for things

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