Catalog
Your path from zero knowledge to complete expert — every course, in order.
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- 🔬Beginner
First-Principles Thinking
BeginnerReason up from what you know is true instead of by analogy. Learn to boil a problem down to its irreducible facts and rebuild from scratch — the engine behind every real breakthrough.
0/6 lessons
- 🔃Beginner
Inversion: Think Backwards
Beginner“Invert, always invert.” Instead of asking how to succeed, ask how you'd guarantee failure — then refuse to do those things. A simple flip that quietly solves problems forward thinking gets stuck on.
0/7 lessons
- 🧬Beginner
Natural Selection
BeginnerVariation, selection, heredity — repeat. Any system where traits vary, some copies survive better, and survivors pass their traits on will design itself over time, with no designer in charge. The most powerful algorithm in nature, and it runs far beyond biology.
0/6 lessons
- ⚖️Intermediate
Opportunity Cost & Trade-offs
IntermediateThe real cost of anything is the best thing you gave up to get it. The single idea that turns every choice into a comparison — and quietly explains money, time, careers, and attention.
0/7 lessons
- 🍽️Beginner
The No Free Lunch Theorem
BeginnerThere is no method, model, or rule that beats every other on every problem. Any approach that does better on one kind of task pays for it by doing worse on another — so "best for which problem?" is the only sensible question.
0/7 lessons
- 🗺️Beginner
The Map Is Not the Territory
BeginnerEvery model is a simplification of reality, not reality itself. Learn why useful maps leave things out on purpose, where your map quietly stops matching the ground, and how to keep from mistaking the model for the world.
0/6 lessons
- 🥕Beginner
Incentives: Follow the Reward
Beginner“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” People and systems drift toward whatever is rewarded — so to predict behavior, find the reward, not the stated intention. The single most reliable lever for explaining why people do what they do.
0/7 lessons
- 🎲Intermediate
Thinking in Probabilities: How Likely, Not Whether
IntermediateSwap true/false for odds. Base rates, expected value, and the habit of asking “how likely?” instead of “is it possible?” — the upgrade from a yes/no mind to a calibrated one.
0/7 lessons
- 📈Beginner
Compounding
BeginnerGrowth that feeds on its own output curves upward — slowly, then suddenly. A small edge, repeated and left alone, ends up dwarfing a big one-off effort. The engine behind fortunes, skills, reputations, and the debts that bury people.
0/6 lessons
- 🪒Beginner
Occam’s & Hanlon’s Razors
BeginnerTwo cutting tools for trimming explanations. Prefer the one needing the fewest assumptions, and don’t blame malice for what plain incompetence already explains. Learn what each razor does, why it works, and exactly where it lies to you.
0/6 lessons
- 💡Beginner
Lateral Thinking: Walk Around the Problem
BeginnerWhen banging harder on the front door never works, walk around the building. Lateral thinking is the deliberate art of sidestepping the obvious, “logical” line of attack — reframing the problem, challenging the assumptions everyone forgot they were making, and generating ideas on purpose instead of waiting for a flash of genius.
0/7 lessons
- 🌊Intermediate
Second-Order Thinking: And Then What?
IntermediateFirst-order answers are fast, obvious, and usually wrong. Second-order thinking traces the consequences of the consequences — the ripple effects that decide whether a clever move actually pays off.
0/7 lessons
- 🏃Advanced
The Red Queen Effect
Advanced“It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.” When everyone around you adapts, standing still means falling behind — and even sprinting flat out only holds your position. The model of coevolution, arms races, and the treadmills you can’t opt out of.
0/6 lessons
- ⚖️Beginner
Supply & Demand
BeginnerPrices are a conversation between how much exists and how much people want. Where the two curves cross sets the price — and shifting either one moves it in a predictable direction. The engine under every market, from coffee to housing to your own salary.
0/7 lessons
- 🐜Intermediate
Emergence
IntermediateThe whole does things no part can. Simple agents following simple rules produce flocks, traffic jams, markets, and minds — patterns that exist only at the level above the pieces, with nobody in charge. Learn to stop hunting for a controller that isn't there and intervene at the level of the rules instead.
0/6 lessons
- ⭕Beginner
Circle of Competence
BeginnerKnow the edge of what you actually understand. The size of the circle matters less than knowing where its boundary is — and staying honest about which side you're on.
0/7 lessons
- ⚖️Advanced
Loss Aversion & Prospect Theory
AdvancedLosses hurt about twice as much as equivalent gains feel good — so the very same choice flips depending on whether it's framed as winning or losing. The asymmetry that quietly bends nearly every decision you make.
0/7 lessons
- 🐘Advanced
Fat Tails & Black Swans: When the Rare Runs the Show
AdvancedSome worlds are mild and some are wild. In fat-tailed domains the rare extreme dominates the average, the bell curve lies, and one outlier rewrites the whole record — so plan for the tail, not the typical.
0/7 lessons
- 🔎Intermediate
Confirmation Bias: The Mind's Lawyer
IntermediateWe hunt for evidence that we're right and look past what says we're wrong. The mind defends its beliefs like a lawyer, not a scientist — unless you make it look for the disconfirming case. Learn to spot it, and how to argue against yourself on purpose.
0/6 lessons
- 🧠Intermediate
The Availability Heuristic: What Comes to Mind
IntermediateYou judge how likely something is by how easily an example springs to mind — so vivid, recent, scary stories feel common even when they're rare. This course teaches you to tell what's memorable from what's frequent, and to stop letting headlines set your odds.
0/6 lessons
- ⚓Intermediate
Anchoring & Adjustment
IntermediateThe first number you see quietly hijacks the estimate that follows — even when it's random, irrelevant, or absurd. You adjust away from it, but never far enough. Learn to spot the anchor, question it, and set your own.
0/6 lessons
- 🔁Advanced
Bayesian Updating: Change Your Mind by Degrees
AdvancedDon't flip your beliefs all at once. Start from a base rate, weigh how well the new evidence fits, and land on a calibrated new belief instead of overreacting to the latest headline — the engine that turns priors plus evidence into a sharper estimate.
0/7 lessons
- 🐄Intermediate
Tragedy of the Commons
IntermediateWhen a shared resource is free to take but costly to everyone, individually rational use adds up to collective ruin. Each gain is private; each cost is split — so the pasture gets stripped bare, the fishery collapses, and the air fills with smoke, with no villain anywhere in sight.
0/6 lessons
- 🔁Intermediate
Comparative Advantage
IntermediateEven if you're better at everything, you can't do everything. Specialize where your edge is largest, trade for the rest, and the whole pie grows — the most counter-intuitive result in economics.
0/7 lessons
- 🏔️Advanced
Fitness Landscapes
AdvancedPicture every possible design as a point on a terrain, with height = how well it works. Evolution — and any trial-and-error search — climbs uphill, which means it can get marooned on a low peak with a taller summit hidden across an unclimbable valley. The map of why “good enough” gets stuck.
0/7 lessons
- ♟️Advanced
Game Theory: Thinking in Moves
AdvancedWhen your best move depends on theirs and theirs on yours, you need more than preference — you need strategy. Equilibria, dominant moves, and why rational players can still both lose.
0/8 lessons
- 🎰Advanced
The Lollapalooza Effect: When Biases Multiply
AdvancedBiases rarely strike one at a time. When several psychological tendencies all point the same way at once, they don't add — they multiply, tipping ordinary, sensible people into bidding wars, bubbles, cults and manias. Charlie Munger's name for the moment many models combine into one overwhelming, nonlinear force — and the bias checklist that is the only real defence.
0/7 lessons
- 🌳Advanced
Ecosystems & Niches
AdvancedNo species wins everywhere. Each survives by fitting a niche the others can't exploit — and two things that make their living the exact same way can't share a world for long. The model behind competitive exclusion, specialization, food webs, and why crowded markets push every player to differentiate or die.
0/7 lessons
- 🔄Advanced
Feedback Loops & Systems Thinking
AdvancedWhy systems run away, settle down, or oscillate. Reinforcing loops amplify, balancing loops resist, and delays make both misbehave — the engine room beneath second-order effects.
0/7 lessons
- 🐜Expert
Spontaneous Order & the Knowledge Problem
ExpertNo one designs a language, a city's food supply, or the price of copper — and yet each works, coordinating millions of strangers who never meet. Order can emerge from the bottom up, without a planner, precisely because the knowledge needed to run the whole is scattered in fragments no single mind can gather. Why the market, the anthill, and the footpath across the lawn all solve a problem no committee could.
0/7 lessons
- 🎯Advanced
Regression to the Mean: Why Extremes Don't Last
AdvancedAfter a record-shattering result — a stellar quarter, a career-best game, a disastrous exam — the next one tends to drift back toward average, for no reason but chance. The model that quietly explains why punishment 'works', praise 'backfires', wonder cures wear off, and star performers fade.
0/7 lessons
- 🎯Advanced
Influence & Persuasion: The Levers That Move a Yes
AdvancedThe handful of psychological levers that reliably move a 'yes' — reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity and unity. How compliance is engineered from ordinary biases and incentives, why these shortcuts usually serve us well, and how to spot when they are being turned against you. Robert Cialdini's principles of influence, taught as mental models of how a mind is moved to comply.
0/7 lessons
- 🛟Intermediate
Margin of Safety: Build for More Than You Expect
IntermediateYour estimates are wrong in ways you can't see yet. Margin of safety is the engineer's habit of leaving a deliberate buffer between what you expect and what you can survive — so being wrong doesn't mean being ruined.
0/7 lessons
- ✈️Intermediate
Survivorship Bias: The Evidence That Never Shows Up
IntermediateYou judge the world by what survived to be seen — the winners, the returning planes, the buildings still standing — and never by the silent majority that didn't. The model that quietly rigs your evidence, inflates success rates, and makes you armour the wrong part of the plane.
0/7 lessons
- 🎯Expert
Calibration: Knowing What You Know
ExpertA calibrated thinker's 70% guesses come true about 70% of the time. Measure your overconfidence, widen your honest error bars, score your beliefs with a Brier score, and turn vague hunches into probabilities you can actually be graded on.
0/7 lessons
- 🛁Advanced
Stocks & Flows
AdvancedA bathtub fills when the tap outruns the drain — and most reasoning errors about debt, climate, hiring, and inventory come from confusing the level in the tub with the rate of the tap.
0/7 lessons
- ⛓️Intermediate
Bottlenecks & the Theory of Constraints
IntermediateA chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a system only as fast as its slowest step. Find the one constraint that governs the whole — and stop polishing the parts that don't matter.
0/7 lessons
- 🏰Advanced
Moats & Durable Advantage
AdvancedAny business earning fat profits invites attackers — a moat is whatever keeps them from crossing. Network effects, switching costs, scale, brand, and efficient scale: why a handful of advantages compound for decades while most evaporate in a quarter, and how to tell a real moat from a mirage.
0/7 lessons
- 🔥Expert
Entropy & the Second Law
ExpertLeft alone, everything runs down: heat spreads, order dissolves, batteries drain, and the tidy room turns messy — never the reverse. This course teaches entropy and the second law of thermodynamics from the ground up, as one of the most transferable models in the whole latticework: why disorder wins as a matter of pure counting, why time has an arrow, why energy has quality and not just quantity, why local order always costs global disorder, and why every machine, house, body, company, and codebase needs constant energy just to stay ordered.
0/10 lessons
- ♟️Advanced
Nash Equilibrium
AdvancedA situation where no player can do better by changing strategy alone — so everyone stays put, even when everyone would be better off somewhere else. The still point of a strategic game, why stable outcomes are so often the bad ones, and how to change the game instead of scolding the players.
0/8 lessons
- 🕸️Expert
Combining Models: The Latticework
ExpertThe capstone skill of the whole site: holding several mental models at once and letting them check, complete, and correct one another into a single judgment. When independent models stack the same way you get a lollapalooza; when they disagree, the disagreement is the signal. How a latticework actually thinks — and how to run one over a real decision without fooling yourself.
0/7 lessons
- ⚛️Advanced
Critical Mass & Tipping Points
AdvancedSome things do nothing, nothing, nothing — then everything, all at once. Below a threshold a self-amplifying process fizzles; one step past it, it runs away. The physics model behind tipping points, viral spread, network effects, and why change so often arrives suddenly after a long, quiet build-up.
0/8 lessons
- 🏭Advanced
Externalities
AdvancedWhen the person who decides isn't the person who pays, the price lies — and the market quietly over-produces pollution and under-produces vaccines. The gap between private and social cost, why it bends every market off-target, and the toolkit for closing it.
0/6 lessons
- 📈Expert
Cumulative Advantage & Power Laws
ExpertWhy a few winners take almost everything while a long tail gets scraps: when success breeds success — the rich get richer, the cited get cited — small early leads compound into staggeringly unequal, 'scale-free' outcomes. The generative engine behind power laws, the 80/20 rule, and winner-take-all markets, and where the pattern misleads.
0/8 lessons
- 🎢Advanced
Asymmetry & Optionality: Lopsided Bets and the Right to Win Big
AdvancedSome bets lose you a little and win you a lot; others do the reverse. When the downside is capped and the upside is open, you can be wrong most of the time and still come out far ahead — the model behind options, experiments, and antifragile decisions.
0/7 lessons
- 🪞Expert
Debiasing & the Bias Blind Spot
ExpertYou can ace every lesson on cognitive bias and stay just as biased — because you see everyone's distortions but your own. The meta-skill of catching your own thinking in the act: why knowing barely helps, and the handful of things that actually do — the outside view, pre-mortems, red teams, checklists, and pre-commitment.
0/8 lessons
- 🤝Advanced
The Evolution of Cooperation
AdvancedIf nature is red in tooth and claw and every player is out for itself, why is the world so full of cooperation? How self-interested agents evolve to help each other — repeated games, tit-for-tat, reciprocity, reputation and kinship — and the exact conditions that make being nice the winning strategy.
0/8 lessons
- 🛤️Expert
Path Dependence & Lock-In
ExpertWhy history refuses to be optimised away: small, half-random early choices get amplified by positive feedback until they harden into standards nobody can escape — QWERTY, VHS, the metric-vs-imperial split, the institutions we're stuck with. How increasing returns lock a system onto one path, why the 'best' option so often loses, and when a locked-in system can still be broken open.
0/8 lessons
- 🌪️Expert
Creative Destruction
ExpertGrowth does not pile onto the old order — it dismantles it. This course teaches Schumpeter's creative destruction — why every genuinely new product, method, or business model must destroy the incumbent it replaces, why incumbents lose despite every advantage, the long-wave rhythm of boom and clearing, and why the healthiest economies are the ones most willing to let their winners die.
0/7 lessons
- 🔁Expert
Reflexivity & Self-Fulfilling Dynamics
ExpertSometimes believing a thing makes it true. A solvent bank fails the moment enough depositors fear it will; a stock is 'worth' whatever the crowd will pay for the story; a currency breaks because traders bet it must. When beliefs bend the very reality they're about, the usual one-way arrow from facts to opinions runs both ways — and feedback, not fundamentals, takes the wheel. How to spot a genuine self-fulfilling loop, tell it from ordinary feedback, and know where the model lies.
0/8 lessons
- 🎯Advanced
Leverage Points: Where to Push a System
AdvancedIn any system, some places to push are almost useless and a few are astonishingly powerful — and human intuition reliably grabs the weak ones. Donella Meadows' ladder of where to intervene, from tweaking a number to changing the goal and the paradigm of the whole system, and why the strongest levers feel the most counterintuitive.
0/7 lessons
- 🌱Expert
Antifragility & Via Negativa
ExpertSome things break under stress, some just endure it — and a rare few actually get stronger from it. Muscles, immune systems, and good businesses feed on a little disorder; the fragile ones are quietly wrecked by it. This course is the anatomy of the triad — fragile, robust, antifragile — the convexity that defines it, and why the surest way to improve most things is to remove, not add.
0/8 lessons
- 🛠️Advanced
Mechanism Design
AdvancedGame theory in reverse. Instead of predicting how players will move inside a fixed game, you design the rules so that self-interest — everyone chasing their own advantage — produces the outcome you actually wanted. The engineering discipline behind honest auctions, fair splits, pollution taxes, and matching markets, and the impossibility results that say where even the best rules must give something up.
0/8 lessons
- 👁️Expert
Common Knowledge & Coordination
ExpertThere is a world of difference between everyone knowing a thing and everyone knowing that everyone knows it. That second, recursive kind of knowledge — common knowledge — is what lets a crowd move as one. Why the public signal that makes knowledge common, not the private truth, is what actually moves people.
0/7 lessons
- 🌫️Expert
Deciding Under Deep Uncertainty: Choosing Well When You Can't Know the Odds
ExpertExpected value assumes you know the probabilities. Deep uncertainty is when you don't — and can't. The expert model for choosing under a fog: stop optimising for the world you guessed and start seeking robustness, margin of safety, and decisions that survive being wrong.
0/7 lessons
- 🔍Expert
The Value of Information
ExpertInformation is only worth something if it might change what you do. This course teaches the value-of-information model from decision analysis — the "would it change my action?" test, the perfect-information ceiling (EVPI), the value of a real noisy test (EVSI), and why looking is often just expensive procrastination.
0/7 lessons
- ⏳Expert
Ergodicity & the Time Average
ExpertA game with a positive average can still ruin every single player who keeps playing it. The catch is that the average across many parallel bettors (the ensemble) and the average of one bettor across time need not agree — and when they diverge, expected value quietly lies. Meet non-ergodicity: why the path you actually live, not the crowd you average over, is what survives; the flagship coin that promises +5% and delivers ruin; the Kelly fix that bets to survive; and exactly where the model does and doesn't apply.
0/8 lessons
- 🔒Expert
Credible Commitment & Deterrence
ExpertThe strategic paradox that less freedom can mean more power: by visibly burning your own options — a binding contract, a burned bridge, a doomsday device — you change what rivals expect and bend the game your way. The logic of credible threats, promises, and deterrence, and where each one lies to you.
0/8 lessons
- 🎭Expert
The Principal–Agent Problem
ExpertYou hire someone to act for you — an employee, a fund manager, a contractor, a politician — but they have their own interests and know things you don't. Why 'getting someone to do what you want' is one of the deepest problems in economics: hidden action, hidden information, and the incentives that (imperfectly) realign them.
0/8 lessons
- 🦂Expert
Evolutionarily Stable Strategies
ExpertWhy does a population settle on the exact mix of behaviours it shows — so much fighting, so much bluffing, so much sharing — and hold there? An evolutionarily stable strategy is the one that, once common, no rival can invade: the equilibrium biology finds by breeding, not by reasoning. Where game theory and natural selection fuse into a single lens.
0/7 lessons
- 🌋Expert
Punctuated Equilibrium
ExpertChange is not a steady drip — it is long stretches of almost nothing, snapped by sudden bursts of everything. This course teaches Eldredge & Gould's punctuated equilibrium — why species, technologies, companies, and habits mostly sit still and then lurch, why the fossil record's "gaps" are data rather than missing pages, how to read stasis as stored pressure, and why the same stability-then-jump rhythm runs through every locked-in system.
0/7 lessons
- 🐑Expert
Information Cascades & Herding
ExpertSometimes it is perfectly rational to ignore what you know and copy the crowd — and that is exactly how the crowd goes wrong together. Once a few early choices line up, each newcomer sensibly follows the herd instead of their own private signal, so no new information enters and a fragile consensus locks in on a whim. How rational individuals produce irrational, reversible mobs.
0/7 lessons
- 💊Expert
Hormesis & the Dose-Response Curve
ExpertA small dose of a stressor strengthens; a large dose of the same thing harms or kills. Exercise, fasting, vaccines, sunlight, even certain poisons trace a curve where the dose makes the poison — and the response is a curved function of the dose, not a straight line. This course teaches hormesis and the dose-response curve from the ground up: the three curve shapes and how to read an optimum, the biology of adaptive overcompensation, worked cases across exercise and medicine and forests, why frequency and recovery are part of the dose, and where the model lies — because a little of a good thing is not a licence to self-poison.
0/7 lessons
- 🎲Expert
The Kelly Criterion
ExpertGiven a genuine edge, how much of your bankroll should you stake? Bet too little and you leave growth on the table; bet too much and you go broke even while winning on average. The Kelly criterion names the one bet size that maximises long-run growth — and shows why survival, not expected value, is the real game.
0/7 lessons
- 🏆Expert
The Winner's Curse
ExpertIn a competitive auction for something of uncertain value, winning is bad news. You won precisely because you were the most optimistic bidder in the room — so the very act of winning is evidence you overpaid. This course teaches the winner's curse from the ground up: why it bites on common value but not private value, how conditioning on winning quietly shifts the odds against you, the exact way to shade your bid to defuse it, and where it shows up in the wild — corporate takeovers, IPOs, spectrum auctions, free-agent contracts, competitive hiring, and housing bidding wars.
0/7 lessons
- ⏱️Expert
Optimal Stopping & the Secretary Problem
ExpertSome decisions have a brutal shape: options arrive one at a time, you must accept or reject each on the spot, and once you pass one it's gone. How long should you keep looking before you commit? This course teaches optimal stopping from the ground up — the classic 37% rule and why the number e shows up, explore-then-commit as the general pattern, how the threshold changes when you want the best expected value rather than the single best, the variations that matter in real life (recall, known distributions and reservation values, search costs, uncertain N), and where the model lies. By the end you can spot a look-then-leap decision and know when to stop searching and choose.
0/7 lessons
- 🎯Expert
Goodhart's Law
ExpertWhen a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Point an incentive at a proxy — test scores, clicks, arrests, hospital wait-times — and people optimise the proxy while the real goal it stood for quietly rots. Why every metric you reward eventually lies to you, and what to do about it.
0/7 lessons
- 🦚Expert
Signalling & Costly Signals
ExpertA peacock's absurd tail, a diploma, a firm's deep warranty, a nation's show of force — all the same move: when you know something others can't verify, you prove it by doing something that would be too expensive to fake. Why only costly signals are believed, how they separate the good type from the bad, and where the cost is pure waste.
0/8 lessons
- 🎭Expert
Preference Falsification
ExpertWhen speaking your mind is costly, people voice the opinion they think is safe, not the one they actually hold — so a public consensus can be a mirror almost nobody privately believes, propped up only because each person underestimates how many others secretly agree. This course teaches Timur Kuran's model of preference falsification — why fear of the social cost of dissent hides the true distribution of opinion, how that hidden gap freezes unloved norms and regimes in place for years, and why a tiny shock can let the whole facade unravel overnight.
0/7 lessons
- 🧩Expert
Bounded Rationality & Satisficing
ExpertReal minds don't optimise — they can't. With limited time, information and computing power, we don't find the best option; we search until something is GOOD ENOUGH, then stop. Herbert Simon's bounded rationality reframes 'irrational' behaviour as a smart adaptation to a hard world. This course builds the model from the ground up — why optimisation is often impossible or not worth it, what satisficing actually is (an aspiration level plus a stopping rule), the psychology of maximisers versus satisficers and the paradox of choice, fast-and-frugal heuristics and ecological rationality, and how to set the right aspiration level and know which decisions to satisfice and which to optimise. By the end you can tell 'good enough, fast' from lazy — and choose the right mode for the decision in front of you.
0/7 lessons