The Curriculum

Feedback and its tragedies

One mechanism before any vocabulary: a loop whose gain decides whether differences die out or compound.

1. Feedback loops

   Loop gain, measured: below one a disturbance fades, above one it feeds itself.

2. Vicious circles

   The same gain above one, filed as sociology — a tragedy none of its participants chose.

3. Scanning for latent change

   The move that watches a loop for the drift its participants have stopped reporting.

Signals and their costs

Price a message before trusting it.

1. Costly signaling

   A signal is credible when faking it costs more than it pays.

2. Signaling games

   When fakes get cheap the equilibrium moves, and the signal's meaning moves with it.

3. Tribal signal

   The slogan priced: cheap to say, expensive to say to the wrong room.

4. Counter-signal

   Understatement — the move high types make once imitation is cheap.

What talk does

Sort talk by the commitment it stakes, then watch what floods a market where commitment is cheap.

1. Assertion

   The baseline act: staking your standing on a claim being true.

2. Lie

   Full commitment, known falsehood — a forgery that spends assertion's credit.

3. Palter

   True words arranged to mislead: the commitment kept, the cooperation broken.

4. Adverse selection

   Talk is a market with unverifiable quality: the cheap-to-say crowds out the costly-to-mean.

Frames and situations

See the frame before weighing anything inside it.

1. Frame set

   Which facts count as evidence is decided here, before any weighing starts.

2. Definition of the situation

   A frame everyone acts under stops being a frame and becomes the situation.

3. Fixed points

   A self-confirming definition is a fixed point: the belief manufactures its own supporting data.

4. Self-distancing

   The move that steps back far enough to see your frame as one of several.

Opening what closed too early

Conclusions arrive before their evidence does; these moves reopen them deliberately.

1. Premortem

   Assume the failure already happened; its causes become nameable.

2. Multiple working hypotheses

   Carry several explanations at once so no single one owns your attention.

3. Degrees of belief

   Replace believe-or-doubt with a number that can move by small amounts.

4. Bayesian updating

   The arithmetic those moving numbers obey, and how far one observation may push them.

Coupled systems

What two systems do to each other while each keeps its own rules — and the warning that comes before the snap.

1. Structural coupling

   Two systems perturb each other's states while each runs on its own logic.

2. Coupled oscillators

   The mathematics of that perturbation: weak coupling, then sudden synchrony.

3. Regime shifts

   A coupled system holds its state past the point of warrant, then flips all at once.

4. Critical slowing down

   The measurable warning before the flip: recovery from small shocks stretches.

The observer returns

Turn the instruments on the hand that holds them.

1. Second-order observation

   Watching how an observer observes: what their distinctions show and what those distinctions cost.

2. Making the system an object

   Treat your repertoire of moves as itself an object of study — the explainer is unbuilt, so the catalogue holds its place.

3. The Examples

   Specimens of talk doing work, reread as a field manual: each one an act you can now name on sight.

laboratory

Laboratory assignments

Last, the bench. The Reactor sites a nuclear plant under the purposes you toggle and weight by hand; each task below is one discovery about constraint.