Indy Neogy

There is, unfortunately no good word for “skill at solving poorly defined problems.” Insight, creativity, agency, self-knowledge—they’re all part of it, but not all of it. Wisdom comes the closest, but it suggests a certain fustiness and grandeur, and poorly defined problems aren’t just dramatic questions like “how do you live a good life”; they're... See more

thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.

Dragonfly Thinking

Our best chance of understanding complex issues lies in seeing them through “dragonfly eyes,” as political scientist and psychologist Philip Tetlock shows in his work on forecasting. Dragonflies have compound eyes made up of thousands of lenses and they integrate the views from these lenses to give them a range of vision of... See more

Information work increasingly asks employees to handle more complexity—but we should not have to self-manage our own productivity in imperfect systems laid atop programmer thinking to simply do our work.

Though he knows it’s not fairly common, Colin’s left needing more:

What if there was a way to overlay somehow that I drank half a bottle of BodyArmor when I started the run? And at mile 6, I briefly stopped to drink some water and eat an energy gel.

And then how can I compare how that nutrition impacted my metrics compared to two weeks earlier when I... See more

Just like those lines, I think all of our various tests of intelligence aren’t as different as they seem. They’re all full of problems that have a few important things in common:

• There are stable relationships between the variables.


• There’s no disagreement about whether the problems are problems, or whether they’ve been solved.


• There have clear

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