Nth Order

GPT-5.2 has gotten a lot better… this is a much better retelling than my previous post of The Refusal of Reciprocity by GK Chesterton I’m still not good at LLM-assisted revisions … so I wasn’t able to successfully weave in the nomenclature for this temperament as “The Children of Tuesday”. For that you’ll have to read my prior post. THE REFUSAL OF RECIPROCITY (A MODERN RENDITION) In an earlier argument I suggested that barbarism, as it actually appears in the modern world, is not chiefly a matter of ignorance, nor even of cruelty....

The scales had always stood in the square, older than memory. They tilted in strange ways. Weighing not the physical, but what lay neath the surface. What is the measure of a man? The scale’s measure had rang true for a millenia. One fine autumn afternoon, when the air sang with crispness and well after the trees had dropped their clothing, a traveler arrived into the village. He bore no signets or banners, just a simple cloak and a well-worn briefcase....

10 voices echoed in unison. “No witnesses.” The phrase reverberated through the parlor, filling the space, only to be swallowed by the weathered tapestries that lined the walls. Sunlight peeked through frayed curtains, illuminating the gathering with an eerie, almost sacred glow. Many faces were new. They had been but greenhorns, fresh blood just entering the family business, the last time the decaclave convened. The elder council members bore more wrinkles, more scars — silent witnesses to decades of careful work....

A modern GPT-assisted retelling of The Refusal of Reciprocity by GK Chesterton The Children of Tuesday There are many ways of being lawless, and most at least have the virtue of consistency. A pirate plunders, but he does not expect the Navy to plunder for him. A thief sneers at property, but he does not howl robbery when his own purse is cut. Even the hypocrite, that most despised of villains, still pays morality the backhanded compliment of pretending it exists....

It really is amazing how they figured out “One axis that nobody competes on in banking is treating the user as if they know what a wire is.” Has been differentiating since they launched and gotten more so over time as they get better and banks have gotten worse (or closed). https://t.co/NzJ1gOVpPl — Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) July 9, 2025 For whatever reason, this tweet got me thinking about an exercise I periodically like to do related to developing your own product-sense....

There was a psychologist who lived in the early half of the 20th century by the name of Egon Brunswick. Egon spent a good chunk of his career studying the field of perception and some of these findings are still relevant today. If I was a more skilled writer, I would devote a good chunk of my next 6 months to Gladwell-izing Egon Brunswik and his ideas. There is enough good ideas in what I’ve read so far of his research, that it could probably make for a very compelling book....

Magnus Carlsen claims that one or two signals per match from a chess AI indicating when he should think hardest would make him “almost invincible”. IMO you could boost researchers similarly with just one or two signals a year saying “think hard about the paper you just read”. — Richard Ngo (@RichardMCNgo) June 1, 2025 I wonder how generalizable this concept is to other fields. “Think extra hard now” Most things have 80-20 (Pareto) returns....

When I led PM teams, I often had to help PMs frustrated by a lack of alignment with PMs in other orgs. Sometimes, I’d suggest a simple fix: send an engineer or a designer to talk to the other team instead. Worked like magic. PM-to-PM ego is a problem that no one talks about, but it is common in top companies. In fact, product managers are often most difficult with each other....

Word dimensionality expansion: trust There is a suprising amount of variation present in the statement: “I trust them”. I particularly notice this tension in regards to certain politicians. I frequently hear people utter the refrain: “they are someone we can trust”. And on one hand, I can actually empathize with that statement. There’s a certain resonant quality to it that is hard to deny (which is why it’s sticky). In some sense you can trust them....

There is this scene from The Office that I’m thinking about a lot lately. It’s from the later seasons. The CEO, Robert California, is searching for game-breaking ideas to turn the business around. Kevin Malone, the office simpleton, makes an observation about the layout of cookies in the break-room vending machine. [paraphrasing] - “The best spot in the machine is being taken up by cookies 🍪 that nobody likes.” Robert hears (without really hearing) what Kevin said....