The Comfort of Simple Answers
Human beings love simple answers. Reality tends to prefer complicated ones.
human nature
The Tyranny of Low Expectations
Lowering expectations often feels compassionate in the moment. The long-term consequences are usually less kind.
The Expert Problem
Modern society often confuses expertise with infallibility. The two are very different things.
The Bureaucratic Immune System
Every institution develops defenses against disruption. The problem begins when the system starts treating solutions as threats.
The Sunk Cost Trap
The more people invest in a decision, the harder it becomes to abandon itāeven when the evidence says they should.
The Appearance of Competence
In many organizations, the appearance of competence is easier to measure than competence itself. That’s where the trouble begins.
The Cost of Good Intentions
Many bad outcomes begin with good intentions. The challenge is that reality responds to consequences, not motives.
The Incentive Problem
People tend to move toward rewards and away from consequences. Understanding incentives often explains behavior better than understanding intentions.
Why Every Organization Eventually Protects Itself
Most organizations begin with a purpose. As they grow, protecting the organization itself often becomes just as importantāand sometimes more importantāthan the original mission.
Why Some Writers Hate ChatGPT More Than Readers Do
I joined a self-publishing Facebook group looking for advice on selling books.
Instead, I stumbled into one of the internet’s newest culture wars.
My crime?
Mentioning that I used ChatGPT as part of my writing process.
Within minutes, complete strangers had reached a verdict. Some declared that AI-assisted books were automatically garbage. Others insisted that using ChatGPT meant I hadn’t really written anything at all. One even called AI users “scammers.”
The interesting part wasn’t the criticism.
It was that nobody asked a single question about the books themselves.
Nobody asked about the plot.
Nobody asked about the characters.
Nobody asked whether the story was entertaining.
The judgment arrived long before the evidence.
And that’s what made the experience so fascinatingānot as a lesson about publishing, but as a lesson about human nature.