Curious about
A public second brain. Things I keep returning to, not because they're useful, but because I can't stop thinking about them.
The structure of expertise
What separates a genuinely good engineer from a great one isn't usually the technical knowledge — it's some kind of pattern recognition that operates below conscious reasoning. They just *see* the problem differently. I want to understand what this is, whether it can be taught or transferred, and whether AI tools change the answer. I've been thinking about this since watching a senior engineer debug something in 20 minutes that would have taken me 3 hours, and being unable to explain the difference.
Why do some ideas spread and others die?
I keep returning to this because I've watched genuinely good ideas fail to spread while worse ideas become ubiquitous. There's something deeply non-obvious about information propagation that I don't think anyone fully understands. It's not quality, it's not truth value, it's not even usefulness. There's something about fit between idea and carrier — the person or institution transmitting it — that seems to matter enormously. I want to understand this mechanistically, not just observationally.