About

Why this site exists

I spend my working life deciding what a number means and whether to trust it. This site is me taking that question seriously outside of work.

By trade I work in marketing and data — attribution models, measurement, the machinery that turns activity into a claim about what caused what. The recurring problem is never the arithmetic. It is that two honest people can look at the same figures and believe different things, and neither can say precisely why.

So I started reading epistemology: the study of knowledge itself. What justifies a belief. Why evidence underdetermines conclusions. How certainty and accuracy come apart. It turns out philosophers have been careful about this for two thousand years, and almost none of it reaches the people making decisions from dashboards.

The format

One essay a week, published Friday. I read Monday through Wednesday, draft Thursday, and publish whether or not it feels finished — a deadline is the only thing that reliably converts reading into thinking.

Each piece takes a single concept and tries to explain it plainly, without the vocabulary that makes philosophy sound like a members' club. Every one ends on a question, because I am working these out rather than reporting back from the far side of them. If you think I have something wrong, that is the most useful thing you could tell me.

Elsewhere

New essays go out by RSS. You can reach me at [email protected].