The Engineer's Journal
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Follow learning paths and reusable mental models for thinking through complex systems.
Steelmanning and Strawmanning: Building Arguments That Hold
Why defeating a weak version of someone's view proves nothing, and how restating the strongest version first makes your own arguments sharper and fairer.
Goodhart's Law: When the Measure Becomes the Target
Why any measure, once it becomes the goal people are judged by, stops accurately measuring the thing it was built to track.
Falsifiability: The Test for Real Information
A claim only carries weight if you can say what evidence would prove it wrong. Learn to tell testable claims from statements that can never lose.
Thinking With AI: Setting Up Your Workspace
A practical guide to organizing AI sources, instructions, personal understanding, and verification into a workspace that supports better thinking.
Thinking With AI: Students
A worked example of how a student can use AI to extend learning while keeping the actual thinking, explanation, and judgment her own.
Building the Extended Mind Thesis and First Principles of Thinking With AI
A practical mental model for using AI as an extension of thinking through clear prompts, organized data, and a disciplined loop of questioning and revision.
The Extended Mind Thesis: Where Does Thinking Actually Happen?
A mental model that treats cognition as extending beyond the brain into the body, tools, and environment rather than stopping at the skull.
The Latticework: Why One Mental Model Is Never Enough
A way to combine mental models from different disciplines so problems are tested through several lenses instead of one narrow frame.
The Confirmation Bias
A cognitive bias where people favor information that confirms their preexisting beliefs.
First Principles Thinking
A mental model for reasoning from fundamental truths by separating what is actually known from what is merely assumed.
Who Is an Engineer?
A working definition of engineering as a practice, not a credential, and a map of what this Journal is for.
The Architecture of Belief: From Bayesian First Principles to Silicon Systems
A mental model for updating engineering beliefs as new evidence changes what is plausible.
Feedback Loops
A model for seeing how systems observe state, react, and sometimes amplify the conditions they are trying to correct.
Redundancy
A reusable way of thinking about reliability by adding backup capacity, alternate paths, or duplicate capability.
Second-Order Effects
A discipline for asking what a decision will cause after the immediate effect has already happened.
Trade-offs
A way to reason about engineering choices where improving one property changes cost, complexity, risk, or behavior elsewhere.
Foundations of Systems Thinking
A route through concepts, mental models, and articles for reasoning about complex software and infrastructure systems.