An Example About Peanuts That I Initially Misunderstood *Shortform Post* I want to write down a small example from a recent conversation, mostly because I noticed I misunderstood it the first time, and that misunderstanding seems worth keeping. A colleague was explaining something using a very simple setup. There are...
When Implicit Rules Fail: Subitizing, Scale, and “Lifting the Table” *Shortform Post* A useful way to distinguish intuition from explicit reasoning is to look at how they behave under scale. Consider a simple example. A three-year-old sees five peanuts on a table. When asked how many there are, he counts...
I propose a distinction between two cognitive states: Flow and what I term Awareness Bursts. By Flow, I mean a sustained, task-aligned state characterized by stable motivation and low variance in attention. While efficient for execution, I hypothesize that Flow operates at a lower representational resolution than brief, high-intensity Awareness...
5 or 6 years old. A one-yuan bill was washed to pieces in his pocket while doing laundry. At that moment, he thought: If money is just something someone gets—through work, gifts, or trading—it is just a trace. If every trace were recorded, everyone’s money would be fixed. We would...