Information Alchemy

Your capacity to learn, unlearn, and relearn faster than the environment changes.

Malcolm Knowles's principles of adult learning: self-direction, experience as resource, readiness, problem-centered orientation, intrinsic motivation.

Amishi Jha's research: attention is a finite, depletable, but trainable cognitive resource — short daily mindfulness measurably improves it.

Approach a situation as if you knew nothing.

Unusual or bizarre material is more memorable than common material.

Hierarchy of cognitive learning: Remember → Understand → Apply → Analyze → Evaluate → Create. Benjamin Bloom, 1956 (revised 2001).

High-velocity quotas for enumerators turn data collection into fiction-writing.

Believing previously learned misinformation even after it has been corrected.

Dread weighs roughly double in our calculus what the equivalent gain does.

As more facts are learned about a topic, retrieving any one fact slows.

In quantum mechanics, certain pairs of properties cannot both be precisely known.

We climb from raw data to action through selection, meaning-making, and assumption — usually invisibly.

Value grows with the number of users.

The NLP claim that the unconscious mind runs the body, stores memory, organizes patterns, and seeks to follow the directives it's given.

Funding rules force districts to add sugary sides to hit caloric minimums.

Generated training data that mimics real data.

Rebuild your calendar from scratch every quarter rather than inheriting it from the last one.

Using an authority's opinion as evidence, regardless of its merits.