Flashcards

Core concepts for building with large language models: context, retrieval, agents, and evaluation. A starter deck that also shows the file format.

Attention as the budget everything else is spent through: why feeds and notifications win, what switching and a nearby phone cost, news and noise versus signal, deep reading on screens, the social media evidence taught as a debate, and the practices (curation, batching, fasts, audits) that take the hours back.

How to make the handful of choices you cannot practise and cannot easily undo: reversibility first, forecasting a future self who will differ from you, choosing a partner, a place, a career pivot, children, and care, then living with the choice once made.

How rare and valuable skills are built, chosen, and traded for autonomy and mission: deliberate practice, plateaus and when to quit, range versus specialisation, important problems, leverage, reputation, mentors, and the long game.

The systematic errors in human thinking, how each one misleads you, and a concrete counter-move for every one, plus the logical fallacies that wreck arguments.

Saying what you mean and hearing what was meant: leading with the conclusion, real listening, difficult conversations, feedback, disagreeing well, negotiation, and the clear thinking that has to come first.

Meditation and its relatives, taught plainly and with the evidence at its real strength: how to sit, what the trials do and do not show, adverse effects, metta, RAIN, the Stoic exercises, the examen, gratitude, breath techniques, silence, and how to choose a teacher.

How to solve problems you have not seen before and produce original work on purpose: Polya's phases and heuristics, reframing, divergent versus convergent thinking, quantity before quality, constraints, incubation, fixation and how to break it, what replaces brainstorming, cheap prototypes, critique that does not crush, and finishing.

The economic way of thinking as a tool for everyday judgment: opportunity cost and the margin, prices as information, incentives and the ways they go wrong, hidden information and hidden action, commons and trade, the second-order effects of rules, and how to read an economic claim without being fooled.

How habits actually form and break, how to design an environment that does the work for you, and the systems that turn effort into compounding results.

The recurring shapes in human history that help you read the present: the farming trap, the Malthusian ceiling and the escape from it, why the West industrialised first, energy, disease, debt, empires, revolutions, and how to use a historical analogy without being captured by it.

How people and groups actually behave: status, signalling, tribalism, conformity, reputation, cooperation, power, and moral intuition, so you can read a room clearly and act well in it.

The dimension an optimization-heavy life skips: actually enjoying it. Savoring, gratitude, flow, play, awe, nature, and real rest, grounded in positive psychology.

How the brain actually learns, and the methods that work with it: retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, deliberate practice, sleep, and the neuroscience underneath.

Why you get up, what makes effort feel worth it, and how to live well against the fact that life is finite. The ideas behind meaning, purpose, and a life that holds together.

How emotions work and what to do with them: anxiety and worry mechanics, the core moves of CBT and ACT, stress and recovery, depression and its first steps, self-compassion, and what actually predicts resilience. General education, not clinical advice.

Reusable thinking tools from many disciplines: first principles, inversion, expected value, incentives, compounding, and the trade-offs that make them work.

How your own mind works, and how to monitor it: confidence calibration, System 1 and 2, self-deception, and practical moves that correct your thinking in real time.

How the brain works at the level of cells, chemistry, and circuits, and which popular stories about it are wrong: dopamine as wanting, prediction error, the prefrontal cortex under stress, pain and placebo as brain outputs, realistic neuroplasticity, and the neuromyths and scan-reading errors to stop falling for.

The durable mechanics of building wealth: compounding, saving rate, debt, index investing, risk, and the mindset habits that outlast any market. General education, not individual advice.

The capstone: how to turn the rest of this collection into a way of running a life. Horizons from values to today, the weekly review as the keystone ritual, the daily shutdown, the calendar as the truth, one inbox, personal policies and checklists, journals and dashboards, slack and non-negotiables, the restart protocol, and running experiments on yourself without the system becoming the point.

The ethical frameworks and philosophical tools a thoughtful person uses to decide and to argue: consequences, duties, and character with their standard failure cases, justice, moral luck, the is-ought gap, death, free will, the Stoics and existentialists, lying and promises, and how to act when you are not sure which view is right.

High-leverage, evidence-based rules for sleep, exercise, nutrition, and metabolic health, aimed at a long and capable life rather than at any fad. General principles, not individual medical advice.

The unglamorous competence that keeps a life running and that nobody teaches: insurance and contracts, dealing with institutions, the pay slip and the one-page budget, digital security and backups, the home and the car, cooking and food safety, first aid and the warning signs you never wait out, and the paperwork that protects the people you leave behind.

Bayes' rule as a habit rather than a formula: priors, strength of evidence, conservation of expected evidence, beliefs that pay rent, reference class forecasting, when expected value breaks, the value of finding out, and how to disagree so that someone changes their mind.

The craft of close relationships, which shape wellbeing and health more than income or status: attachment, listening, trust, conflict repair, friendship, and love as a practice.

How science produces knowledge and how to read a scientific claim as a non-specialist: falsifiability, trials and confounding, p-values and effect sizes, screening tests and risk, reading a paper fast, Fermi estimates, and a handful of the big mechanisms that explain the world.

What technology does to work, markets, attention, and power, and how to read a technology claim: diffusion lags, S-curves, Jevons, tasks versus jobs, network effects, scaling laws and their limits, the jagged frontier, the Collingridge dilemma, and staying literate without chasing the feed.