Life of a solutiontwo days beforeLooking at the framework in the previous piece, I am noticing that…Change

Settled and “not settled yet” framings2021I was working on decision-making frameworks this week and had a pretty…So far, I carefully avoided the topic of change, presenting my problem-solving realm in a delightfully modernist manner. “See phenomenon? Make a model of it! Bam! Now we’re cooking with gas.”

Steady winds, doldrums, and hurricanes2023It just so happened that this year, many of my friends and…Alas, despite its wholesome appeal, this picture is incomplete. Change is ever-present. As the movie title says, everything, everywhere, all at once – is changing, always. Some things change incomprehensibly quickly and some change so slowly that we don’t even notice the change. At least, at first. And this ever-changing nature of the environment around us presents itself as its own kind of force.

Framing2022A Solution2022

Understanding2022Once the notion of a problem is sufficiently semantically disambiguated, we can…Limits2022This story builds on the one I wrote a while ago, and…Micro and macro jank2021If our team’s OODA loop runs just a tiny bit slower than…While the force of homeostasis is pushing us toward routine, the force of change is constantly trying to upend it. As a result of these forces dancing around each other, our problems tend to walk the awkward gait of punctuated equilibrium: an effective solution appears to have settled down, then after a while, a change unmoors it and the understanding process repeats. The punctuated equilibrium pattern appears practically everywhere, indicating that this might be another general pattern that falls out of the underlying processes of mental modeling.

Throughout this repeating sequence, the flux and effectiveness components wobble up and down, just like we expect them to. However, something interesting happens with the model diversity: it continues to grow in a stair-step pattern.

The Perspective Ladder2022I hope this illustration has been helpful. I have been using a…A Classroom for Humanity2019To gain more insights around these questions, I’ve been looking into the…How we engage with LLMs2023It seems popular to write about generative AI and large language models…If you’ve read my stories before, you may recognize the familiar stair-step shape from my ongoing fascination, the adult development theory (ADT). It seems to rhyme, doesn’t it? I wonder if the theory itself is a story that is imposed upon a larger, much more fractally manifesting process of mental modeling. The ADT stages might be a just slice of it, discerned by a couple of very wise folks and put into a captivating narrative.

Model compression and us2022Often, it almost seems like if we run the process of understanding…The Upper Limit Of Understanding2019Walking down the yellow-brick road of everything being storytelling, I stumbled into…Mental models2022I use the term “mental models” a lot, and so I figured…Every revolution of the process of understanding adds to our model, making us more capable of facing the next round of change. Sometimes this process is just refining the model. Sometimes it’s a transformational reorganization of it. This is how we learn.

Learning from the nadir2023Practices to break out of the cycle of not-learning2022Shadows and Curses2022

Decoherence2020There is no past or future. There are only stories of the…Archaeology of Self2019Every experience I have is a new lesson in life, a new…Moreover, this might be how we are. This story of learning is such a part of our being that it is deeply embedded into culture and even has a name: the hero’s journey. The call to the adventure, the reluctance, the tribulations, and facing the demons to finally reveal the boon and bring it back to my people is a deeply emotional description of the process of understanding. And often, it has the wishful “happily ever after” bookend — because this would be the last change ever, right? It’s another paradox. It seems that we know full well that change is ever-present, yet we yearn for stability.

Tension between Purpose and Safety2020Arthur Schopenhauer has a more dour take: “Life swings like a pendulum…Model compressionfive days after, links hereIt feels like a reasonable deal, yet there is a catch. As…Touching infinitylinks here, 2022As we explore the process of understanding, it may not be immediately…The problem understanding frameworklinks here, 2022For me, the attribute of ontological humility meant that the framework must…The law of tightening aperturelinks here, 2023Why does this happen? Strategy aperture appears to be subject to a…Diving into unpredictabilitylinks here, 2023In this metaphor, unpredictability is water. If we stay in it for…Machine Thinkinglinks here, 2025First, LLMs are “free energy” thinkers. The force of gravity that pushes…For me, this rhymes with the notion of Damasio’s homeostasis. Unlike the common belief that homeostasis is about equilibrium, in Strange order of Things, he talks how, from our perspective, homeostasis is indeed about reaching a stable state… and then leaning a bit forward to ensure flourishing. It’s like our embodied intuition accepts the notion of change and prepares us for it, despite our minds continuing to weave stories of eternal bliss.