Learn Logic

"What we’re facing isn’t a lack of evidence. It’s a classic knowing-doing gap." f-st.co/SyX3aMj

People don't hate math; they hate the feeling of being lost. They hate the compounded debt of unlearned prerequisites.

a second grader who reads at grade level can listen and comprehend at a fourth or fifth grade level. Sticht and James (1984) documented a consistent two grade level gap between reading ability and listening comprehension throughout elementary school. this means audio content lets

I’ve been wanting to get to this one for a while. This line from @Doug_Lemov foreword summarizes with remarkable precision why I read books like this: “In many ways the greatest form of equity lies in whether students get access to teaching that applies the science of learning as well as it can be by teachers who understand it well enough to make decisions to adapt and adjust their lessons for maximum benefit.”

Nobody is rooting for you to fail. Maybe you’ll succeed. Maybe you’ll fail. For the most part, nobody cares one way or the other. This is a good thing! The world is big and you are small, and that means you can chase your dreams with little worry for what people think.

How much does family background shape economic outcomes? New @OECD research shows strong intergenerational persistence in earnings, education & women’s labour participation. Education matters but parental background influences outcomes in many countries. brnw.ch/21x0PMz

A Little-Known Fact about Stories In every story, there's a tension between three things: (1) what the author knows, (2) what the reader knows, and (3) what the character knows. It's a three-sided knowledge structure. "For example, with unreliable narrator stories, your character has a whole lot of stuff that they know that they're not saying, and then you'll get to a bit where the reader realizes that they've not been given the full story. The other way that triangle of information can go is that when the author and the reader are sharing knowledge that the characters don't have. The main character explores the world. He doesn't particularly understand a lot of the things he finds, but the reader can pick up the clues and stay a step ahead of what the character understands. In my book, Dogs of War, the main character, Rex, is a bioengineered dog who's being used as a military asset. It becomes apparent to the readers that what Rex is doing is war crimes, but Rex has no understanding of that because he doesn't have the context. As he goes out into the world, he understands more and starts making his own value judgments about what is right and wrong. That isn't just 'my master has told me to do this thing,' but in those early sections, you as the reader have a lot of perspective and knowledge, even based on Rex's own account, that Rex doesn't have."

It’s easy to think that youth and creativity go hand in hand. But Keith Sawyer argues that creative productivity often peaks mid-career, not at the beginning of life. His advice: Pursue multiple ideas, stay open to reinvention, and keep making work. thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/is-creativity-…

In 1796, a woman who described herself only as "an American Orphan" published the first cookbook ever written by an American. Nobody truly knows her full story. No biographical records survive. The only thing history kept is the book itself and 47 pages of recipes that quietly changed how an entire country cooked. Her name was Amelia Simmons, and her book was called American Cookery. Before it was published, every cookbook used in the thirteen colonies had been imported from Britain, full of ingredients Americans had trouble sourcing, techniques that assumed kitchens that didn't exist here, and measurements calibrated for a country they had just broken from. Simmons sat down and wrote the first one that actually reflected the country people were living in. She was the first person to put cranberry sauce with turkey in print. The word "cookie" appears in published form for the first time in her book, borrowed from Dutch settlers in New York. So does the word "slaw." Two words that now define American food culture made their first appearance on the page because one orphaned domestic worker decided to write down what she actually cooked. What makes Simmons remarkable is not just what she wrote but who she was writing for. She addresses the book directly to American women, and particularly to women like herself, those without parents or brothers or wealth, who had to work in other people's households and make do with what was available. The book sold for over thirty years and then disappeared entirely, replaced by newer editions and imported British volumes that had caught up with American tastes. Simmons herself vanished from the record the moment the last edition went out of print. But the words cookie and slaw are still in every American kitchen, and there is still a turkey on every Thanksgiving table with something made from cranberries beside it. She put those things in the American culinary vocabulary, and nobody remembers her name. © Eats History #drthehistories

The skills we outsource to technology we lose in ourselves. Skills like thinking, questioning, making friends, diagnosing patients and being able to communicate with honest heffernanm.substack.com/p/use-it-or-lo…

Every "AI strategy" meeting in 2026: [Cartoon by Tom Fishburne]

Proposal vs Submission

Most people overcommunicate. They ramble. The dive into the weeds. They lose their audience. And in doing so, lose their credibility. Change how you think and you'll change what you say. And how you say it. Headlines. Punchlines. Here's my 5-step formula to find your voice:

FASCINATING post about working memory... at first I thought 'I don't think of WM as a store', but then I realised I did, and now I have a much more useful idea about what is going on. The pyramid model is so effective. Brilliant - thanks @EfratFurst . open.substack.com/pub/efratfurst…

Leaders tell us they want to “build trust.” But what they often notice first is hesitation in meetings, commitments slipping, or decisions landing without clarity. 🔍️ What’s one small action you could take today to strengthen trust? hargraves.in/working-collab… #trust #friction

What are the effects of large human-capital shocks on innovation? In a new paper, we study how WWI military deaths across British communities affected local invention over the next decades. We find that places that lost more young men became persistently less innovative. (🧵1/11)

Take the risk.

Something I noticed about genuinely happy people: They're doing less than you. They have fewer goals. Fewer appointments. Fewer obligations. They've learned that addition by subtraction is real. While you're optimizing every minute, they're sitting on their porch drinking coffee. They're not lazy. They just figured out that most of what we chase doesn't matter. Busy is a choice. Peace is too. One looks successful. The other actually is.

I love how Icelanders make new words for modern concepts instead of taking words from other languages. For example, they call a galaxy a stjörnuþoka or ‘star fog’, and a computer a tölva or ‘number prophetess’.

You are not your grand plans. You are your daily patterns.