Notes on the layer where abstractions stop being free. Published when ready.
I had a thousand bookmarks and zero ideas. This is the long story of how I tore the whole thing down, named the new system Mordor, and started writing notes that actually argue with me.
Interventions in complex systems often invert themselves. From colonial rat bounties to industrial quotas, the cobra effect demonstrates why incentives reorganize behavior in unexpected ways.
Complexity theory meets statistical physics. Analyzing the sharp phase transitions where Boolean satisfiability problems transform from trivial to exponential.
A deep dive into the lineage of crowd psychology—from Le Bon's warnings to Bernays' manuals—and the danger of the exempted vantage point.