These sources are about how people think, focus and improve. Almost all are personal essays, with little measurement. This page lists twelve sources, oldest first where dated.
Understanding (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The entry surveys epistemology, philosophy of science and the humanistic tradition. It covers the objects, psychology and value of understanding, and testimony. It then turns to idealized models and to understanding other people. It reports positions from many named philosophers and takes no side.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born
Henrik and Johanna Karlsson read the working notes of Alexander Grothendieck and Ingmar Bergman. They describe the state of mind that these notes point to. The essay then lists techniques other creators use to enter it. Evidence is quotation, biography and anecdote.
Naturalizing relevance realization: why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational
The paper is a philosophical argument by five academics, not an empirical study. It builds on earlier work on relevance realization by one author. It claims agency, cognition and consciousness rest on the self-making organization of life.
Ideonomy: A Science of Ideas
Grace Kind explains ideonomy for newcomers, since Gunkel's own materials are hard to follow. The post is an explainer with a few quoted passages from Gunkel. It offers one example of the method and a list of open problems. It has no experiments or data.
Troubleshooting: a skill that never goes obsolete
Curiositry collects habits for finding and fixing faults in systems, from cars to code. The essay is organized as a long list of tips with anecdotes. Its evidence is the author's experience and that of relatives and mechanics. It also proposes an experiment but does not run it.
Maybe you're not Actually Trying
Cate Hall tells how a cyberstalker problem lasted years until the author's husband acted. From this, the essay argues that people are selectively agentic. The evidence is the author's own story and a few examples. A 2026 note promotes the author's book.
Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom
Henrik Karlsson argues that lingering on one thing synchronizes the body's systems and deepens experience. The essay mixes a loose physiological account, personal stories and quotes from other writers. Its mechanisms are offered as rough understanding, not established findings.
21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties
The post lists tips on host calm, timing, guest lists and keeping people moving. The advice comes from experience, with some numbers from the author's own circles. The page also carries ads for the co-author's products.
Increasing your practice surface area
Allen coins practice surface area for all the time and places practice can happen. The essay supports it with stories about famous performers and five tips. It cites no studies. About 86 comments follow, many of them spam.
A defense of philosophical intuitions
Hilarius Bookbinder defends the use of intuitions as evidence in philosophy. The essay argues by analogy to other mental faculties, such as sight and memory. It offers examples and thought experiments, not new data.
Reply adding Chalmers' The Conscious Mind to a thread on philosophy
The post is very short. It adds one book title to a thread about how little philosophy people have read. It links to the Wikipedia article on the book and offers no argument.
Map of 450+ Theories of Consciousness | Consciousness Atlas
The site presents Robert Lawrence Kuhn's 2024 taxonomy as a visual map. It sorts theories into eleven families, from materialism to challenge theories. Each theory has a short structured entry. The site says it does not rank or endorse any theory.
Connections to other subjects
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- Ideonomy: A Science of Ideas and Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk" letter to Gottfried Leibniz, from Science and medicine. Leibniz wanted a language that would automate scientific reasoning. Gunkel wanted ideas listed and combined by rule. Kind argues language models can now do what Gunkel could not. Has the old dream returned, with statistics in place of logic?
- Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom and Too Fast to Think: The Hidden Fatigue of AI Vibe Coding, from Review, taste and expertise. Karlsson says frequent switching leaves attention residue, and that sustained attention deepens experience. Schmidt reports fatigue from constant fast review. Read together, that fatigue may be more than overload. It may be the cost of never letting attention bloom.
- Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born and Developing Taste, from Review, taste and expertise. Kowalski tells readers to surround themselves with great work and tastemakers. Karlsson's essay describes solitude as a state free of others' opinions. Both concern how judgment forms. Perhaps taste needs exposure first, and then time away from it.
Glossary
- A priori
- Knowable by thinking alone, without observation.
- Affordance
- An opportunity or obstacle the environment offers an agent pursuing a goal.
- Agency
- The capacity to take effective action on your own problems.
- Alexander Technique
- A method of retraining habitual posture and movement.
- Aphantasia
- The inability to form mental images.
- Attention residue
- Leftover thoughts from earlier tasks that crowd out the present one.
- Autopoiesis
- The way a living system continually produces and maintains itself.
- Binary search
- Repeatedly halving the places a fault could be to find it fast.
- Church-Turing conjecture
- The claim that everything physical can be computed by a Turing machine.
- Cortisol
- A stress hormone that clears slowly from the body.
- Cut point
- A place where a system can be split to test each side separately.
- Deliberate practice
- Focused practice aimed at specific weaknesses, usually with feedback.
- Dopamine
- A brain chemical tied to anticipating rewards.
- Dualism
- The view that mind and body are different kinds of thing.
- Episteme
- An ancient Greek word for a high-grade state of knowing, often linked to causes.
- Experimental philosophy
- Philosophy that uses surveys and experiments on how people judge cases.
- Faulty sensory appreciation
- The idea that habitual tension feels right and good posture feels wrong.
- Flake rate
- The share of people who say yes and then do not show up.
- Gettier luck
- Luck that makes a justified true belief true by accident.
- Grothendieck
- A major 20th-century mathematician who reshaped algebraic geometry.
- Gödel's incompleteness theorems
- Results showing that any rich formal system has true statements it cannot prove.
- Hard problem
- The puzzle of why physical processes give rise to felt experience.
- Heisenbug
- A bug that changes or vanishes when you try to observe it.
- Idealism
- The view that reality is fundamentally mental.
- Idealization
- A simplified model that leaves out or falsifies some real features.
- Ideonomy
- Patrick Gunkel's proposed science of ideas and their laws.
- Intuition
- In philosophy, a quick sense that a claim is true, without an argument.
- Jhana
- A deep meditative state of absorbed joy, practiced in Buddhist traditions.
- Language model
- An AI system trained on large amounts of text to produce and judge language.
- Larval idea
- An early, fragile idea that sounds bad before it has developed.
- Mental rehearsal
- Imagining a performance in detail without physically doing it.
- Minimum viable repetition
- The author's term for the smallest practice unit that can be done anywhere.
- Objectual understanding
- Understanding of a whole subject matter rather than a single fact.
- Operator
- A transformation, such as negation, applied to an idea to produce new ideas.
- Organon
- In ideonomy, a tool for thought, such as a list, chart or dictionary.
- Panpsychism
- The view that consciousness is a basic feature of all matter.
- Partiful and Luma
- Apps for sending event invitations that show the guest list.
- Phenomenal consciousness
- The subjective feel of experience, such as the redness of red.
- Predictive processing
- A theory that brains constantly predict inputs and learn from prediction errors.
- Proprioception
- The sense of where one's body parts are.
- Quorum
- The minimum number of attendees needed for the event to work.
- Radical skepticism
- The view that nothing can be known.
- Relevance realization
- The process by which a living thing works out which features of a situation matter.
- Rubber duck debugging
- Explaining a problem aloud or in writing to find the answer yourself.
- Récoltes et Semailles
- Grothendieck's very long reflective writing about mathematics and life.
- Selective agency
- Being resourceful in some areas of life but not in others.
- Testimony
- Learning something because another person tells you.
- The Conscious Mind
- A philosophy book by David Chalmers about why experience exists.
- The Sequences
- A long series of blog essays on reasoning and rationality.
- Trialectic
- The authors' term for three processes that each depend on the other two.
- Troubleshooting
- Systematically finding the cause of unwanted behaviour in a system and fixing it.
- Verstehen
- German for understanding, used for grasping human action from within.
- Workbook
- A private notebook used to think and draft, not to publish.