The Cure Was the Disease
In 1847 Vienna, the doctors’ maternity ward killed far more mothers than the midwives’. Ignaz Semmelweis found the cause, and it was the one thing the profession could not afford to believe: their own hands.
All essays
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Gravity Was Never a Force
Newton knew action at a distance was absurd, then used it anyway. Einstein's revolution was refusing to keep the assumption in brackets, gravity is not a force but the shape of spacetime.
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Einstein and the Assumption of Absolute Time
There is no universal now. Einstein didn't merely solve a physics problem, he refused the assumption that everyone, everywhere, shares the same moment.
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The Truth Was a Setting
xAI wants to build a truth-seeking AI. But a language model is a coherence engine, and "truth" is a word that hides which kind you mean. What would have to hold for the output to be true?
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Where the Bullet Holes Aren't
The military asked exactly the right question about where to armour their bombers, and still nearly reinforced the wrong parts of the plane. A question carries assumptions; so does the method you use to answer it.
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An Essay on Metaphysics
R. G. Collingwood's 1940 essay on presuppositions, how absolute assumptions define the boundaries of what can be asked and thought
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Debugging with AI: Two Strategies for Finding the Truth
When erotetics.com stopped redirecting, two AI models took radically different approaches to find the problem. One ran commands. The other tried to think.
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Assumptology Case Study: The Palme Murder, Part 3: Witnesses
What human sensors can reliably output, and how narrative, memory, and closure pressure manufacture identity
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Assumptology Case Study: The Palme Murder, Part 2
What We Know, and What We Assume
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Assumptology Case Study: The Palme Murder, Part 1
What We Know, and What We Assume
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Assumptology: The Titanic - When 'Unsinkable' Met Reality
How a single unquestioned assumption turned the world's most advanced ship into history's most famous disaster
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When the wrong assumption cost an empire
Why assumptology?
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Assumptology: Making the Implicit Explicit
Assumptology: Making the Implicit Explicit
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The Hidden Hospital Part 2: A Story About Assumptions
The Hidden Hospital: A Story About Assumptions
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The Black Swan and the Fragility of Assumptions
The Black Swan and the Fragility of Assumptions
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The Big Mac Illusion: How a Slice of Cheese Exposed My Hidden Assumption
The Big Mac Illusion: How a Slice of Cheese Exposed My Hidden Assumption
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Which Big Mac has no cheese?
Which Big Mac has no cheese?
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Assumptology Foundations
Assumptology Foundations
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Assumptology Principles
Assumptology Principles
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The Hidden Hospital: A Story About Assumptions
The Hidden Hospital: A Story About Assumptions
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Why assumptology?
Why assumptology?