🧠The Knowledge Project

Interviews about judgment, decision-making and how people in different fields think, hosted by the writer of a long-running blog on mental models. Since 2015.

Long interviews about how people decide things, by a host who used to work in intelligence and now collects mental models. I have a complicated relationship with the phrase mental models. The interviews are better than the phrase.

I logged it on 2025-02-12-Wednesday because of the tram ride in. I had an episode on about judging a decision by how it was made rather than how it turned out, and at 15:00 I was going to recommend slipping a launch in front of eleven people. I do not think the podcast gave me the nerve. It gave me a sentence for the memo.

• A decision and its outcome are two things. A good call can end badly and a bad one can be rescued by luck.
• So write down what you knew and what you expected at the time, before the result arrives and rewrites your memory for you.
• And say in advance what would change your mind.

That last one is the fourth box of 🧭 One-page decision memo, which is Leona's form and older than this show, but I filled it in properly for the first time that night.

Patchy since. A third of the guests are investors explaining discipline. I pick by guest and stop without guilt.

Decisions It Sat Behind

• 21 December. The sum that turned six months into four. Wrote what I expected first, then did the arithmetic. I was wrong by two months, and it is on paper that I was.
• 14 June. Keeping the newsletter on Quillstack. One page, four boxes, twenty minutes.
• 5 April. Reviewing the ninety-day decision about this vault against what I wrote on 5 January.
• 12 February. The slip memo: 📜 Slip the launch from 18 February to 11 March. Midnight. The what would change my mind box had two lines in it and one of them was a green load test.