Best of blundercheck.timberschroff.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
12 stories from blundercheck.timberschroff.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 7 June 2025, with 28 upvotes and 1 comment in total. The latest was shared on 17 October 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Deep Marketing
Grabowski argues that projects should spend at least as much on marketing as on engineering, keeping a Marketing / Engineering Investment Ratio above 1. The article defines marketing as market research done before or during product engineering, distinct from sales, promotion, and advertising that come after the product is ready. Its reasons are that upfront marketing clarifies market size, user personas, and willingness to pay, and that path dependence makes product design costly to change later. The author also extends the idea to field building for emerging technologies, citing the U.S. government's mandate of TCP/IP for ARPANET users as an example.
- Decision-Based Evidence-Making
The author argues that decision-based evidence-making, where organizations choose an action first and then gather data to justify it, is common and often unavoidable, but only acceptable if the loop is closed afterward. Karl Weick's view that teams converge on a shared "how" before deciding what to do and why is presented as a counterpoint to Simon Sinek's Start With Why framework, and the author says they lean toward Weick about 80% of the time. The text notes that evidence made this way is often discarded once it has served its purpose, and that stakeholder pressure and org-hacking are common reasons for it. It also says that regular process hacks suggest the process needs an audit.
- How the World Forgot to End
The author argues that modern life feels like living under a midnight sun, where constant alerts and crises keep rising in intensity without ever reaching resolution, much like the Shepard tone illusion. The essay says news framing, feed-based media and manufactured scapegoats such as "aspartame martyrs" sustain this feeling, and it offers focusing on the meso level of communities and institutions as a way to see past it. It also suggests focusing on "boulders," meaning daily habits like working hard and taking care of yourself, rather than minor pursuits.
- The ETTO Principle
- The Three Types of Space
The author's central point is that operations improve when people follow "returner protocols," such as putting things back where they were found or leaving a space better than it was found, and that understanding the three types of space (structures, storages, and stages) helps make this work. Stages, where activity happens, should be kept clear and reset frequently, while structures can be designed to serve multiple purposes. The article illustrates the classification with a 2016 Outback owned by the author and his partner, and it ends with a caveat that overly strict tidiness is not always appropriate.
- Racing Against Procedure
The author's central point is that tempo, the procedural initiative in chess, is a useful model for work and project management. The article says the key check is whether a move accomplishes more than one thing, since advancing along several critical paths at once speeds up development. It describes tempo as lost through inefficient moves, unnecessary moves, or deliberate concessions for positional gain. It also argues that chess concepts at an intermediate level train players in tools such as GANTT, GTD, and CPM, and it announces a biweekly online study group on related ideas.
- The Voyage of Theseus
The author argues that safety is a property of ongoing activity rather than of the objects that perform it, using the image of a plane swapped mid-voyage to show that a voyage can persist across different vessels. Drawing on Erik Hollnagel's distinction between Safety-I and Safety-II, the piece contends that treating all risks the same way gives an incomplete picture. It extends the idea to cities, which it presents as conduits within a broader network, and to a "lowercase versus uppercase" distinction, holding that movements and practices avoid the fragility of centralized brands and reputations.
- Systems Thinking is Brain Rot for Analysts
The author argues that systems thinking books mislead young analysts into overestimating their agency, and that the job depends more on qualitative analysis and a broad range of analogies than on grand causal models. The essay says Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems and Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline can inflate hubris, because a simplified model of a system is often wrong and awareness of a leverage point does not give the ability to act on it. It adds that systems thinking narrows analogical range, ignores tail risks and absences like safety and security, and that at the macro level there are strings to pull rather than levers to push.
- Safety at the End of History
The author, a safety researcher, argues that modern safety culture has both pathological and useful sides, and that the useful parts include capability-based approaches and psychological safety. The piece opens with a grizzly bear encounter and draws on Francis Fukuyama's "last man," who avoids risking his life for a cause, to frame safety as a new moral high ground. It credits social media with improving visibility of hazards worldwide, and it calls consumer wearables largely unrealized, needing better hardware standards. It says psychological safety is useful for reducing stress from long working hours, managing performance expectations, and treating near-misses as lessons.
- Disposable Engines
Venkatesh Rao's essay (as written here, a personal post) argues that disposable engines, such as rules of thumb, hacks, prototypes and experimental protocols, are underrated and useful for building new fields and ventures. He contrasts them with reusable engines and cameras, which are persistent frameworks or lenses, and argues that mixing up these categories causes problems, citing behavioral economics' replicability crisis as an example. He also suggests that businesses drawing on live information flows rather than stored artifacts, such as LLM tools, are a sign of how knowledge work may change.
- Cardio Before Chemicals
The essay argues that cardiovascular fitness and stress management matter far more to longevity than trace exposures such as pesticides, artificial food dyes, and seed oils, and that people should address fitness and stress first. It cites the WHO's identification of insufficient physical activity as the 4th leading cause of early death globally and a CDC estimate that about 8.3% of U.S. adult deaths aged 25+ are attributable to not getting enough exercise. It also says that a large study found men at "elite" cardiorespiratory fitness had around an 80% lower long-term risk of dying than those with low fitness, and that a 2022 analysis found no significant mortality increase for people eating high-pesticide produce.
- Anabolic Note-Taking
Note-taking and productivity systems such as index cards, Roam, and Getting Things Done tend to fail because they demand heavy maintenance and offer no plan for repair, the author argues. The author says these systems are overly catabolic, focusing on breaking information down rather than using it, and that failures go uncorrected because they are embarrassing and bad for marketing. Proposed remedy: "Anabolic Note-Taking," which emphasizes building ideas into articles and frameworks, and starting by summarizing old notes instead of abandoning them.