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What Are People Still Doing in 2026 That Makes No Sense?

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What Are People Still Doing in 2026 That Makes No Sense? Many outdated practices survive despite better alternatives because replacing them requires coordination, redistributes costs and benefits, or demands more immediate effort than simply continuing the old system. What looks irrational from one perspective may still make sense to the person benefiting from the status quo. Technological progress can happen quickly. Institutional change usually does not. New software can be released overnight, but changing the procedures, incentives, relationships, and habits surrounding a system can take years. This helps explain why obviously dated practices remain part of ordinary life in 2026. Hospitals Still Use Fax Machines Modern healthcare contains extraordinary technology. Hospitals use advanced imaging systems, electronic health records, robotic surgery, digital laboratories, and increasingly capable AI tools. Yet many healthcare organizations still send records by mail or fax. Federal heal...
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What’s the Point of a Post-Mortem?

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What’s the Point of a Post-Mortem? The purpose of a post-mortem is not simply to explain what went wrong. It is to reconstruct what people expected, determine why reality differed, identify the conditions that shaped the outcome, and make specific changes that improve future decisions. Organizations often conduct reviews after failures, outages, missed deadlines, and unsuccessful launches. The resulting documents can contain detailed timelines and accurate descriptions without producing much learning. The problem is that explanation and improvement are different outcomes. A post-mortem becomes useful when it changes how people understand the system and what they do afterward. The Obvious Cause May Not Be the Useful Cause On February 28, 2017, Amazon Web Services experienced a major disruption to its S3 service in Northern Virginia. An authorized employee investigating a billing-system problem entered an incorrect input into an operational command. The command removed far more server ca...
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What Elongates Time?

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What Elongates Time? Clock time moves at a steady rate, but the time we experience and the time we remember can expand or contract dramatically. Attention, emotion, uncertainty, novelty, and memory all influence how long a period seems to last. Most people have experienced the contradiction. Five minutes spent waiting can feel longer than an hour spent doing something enjoyable. Yet months later, the engaging experience may occupy far more space in memory than the wait that once seemed endless. Understanding that contradiction requires separating objective time from psychological time. Clock Time Is Only One Kind of Time Clocks measure duration consistently. Sixty seconds make a minute regardless of what someone is doing during that interval. Human experience does not operate with the same consistency. An hour can feel short or long depending on where attention is directed, what emotion accompanies the experience, and whether the person is actively monitoring time. Memory introduces an...
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What Should You Think About When Defining Your Style?

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What Should You Think About When Defining Your Style? Personal style is the recognizable pattern created by how we express our identity, values, aspirations, and preferences. Defining it requires understanding not only what we choose, but why those choices feel natural and which influences we still want to carry forward. Style is most commonly associated with clothing, but appearance is only one form of expression. The way someone writes, speaks, decorates a room, presents an idea, or interacts professionally can all display a recognizable style. This makes personal style broader than an aesthetic category. It is partly a pattern of repeated decisions. Understanding that pattern can reveal something about identity. Style Communicates Before We Explain It Imagine two people walking into the same business meeting. One wears a tailored suit, speaks carefully, and uses a structured slide presentation. The other dresses casually, speaks conversationally, and prefers an open discussion. Both...
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How Much Should You Be Willing to Spend to Get a New Customer?

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How Much Should You Be Willing to Spend to Get a New Customer? The maximum rational customer acquisition cost depends on more than what a customer will generate over their lifetime. A business also has to consider gross margin, retention, payback time, available cash, and the cost of acquiring the next customer rather than relying only on historical averages. Customer acquisition is one of the central economic problems in a growing business. A company can have a product customers like, healthy revenue growth, and attractive lifetime customer economics while still damaging itself by paying too much or waiting too long to recover acquisition spending. The useful question is therefore not simply how much it costs to acquire customers. It is how much a particular customer relationship can economically support. Start With Customer Acquisition Cost Customer acquisition cost, usually shortened to CAC, estimates how much a business spends to acquire each new paying customer. The basic formula ...
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What Makes Intelligent People Believe Things That Aren’t True?

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What Makes Intelligent People Believe Things That Aren’t True? Intelligent people can believe false things because analytical ability is only one part of belief formation. Motivation, repetition, trust, social influence, and prior commitment all affect what evidence people examine and how willing they are to revise a conclusion. Intelligence usually provides an advantage. People who reason carefully are often better at distinguishing strong evidence from weak evidence and true information from false information. The mistake is assuming that reasoning ability automatically guarantees good judgment. The same mind that can dismantle a weak argument can also construct a sophisticated defense of a preferred conclusion. Intelligence is a tool, and the result depends partly on what the tool is being used to accomplish. Theranos and the Evidence Around the Claim Elizabeth Holmes built Theranos around an extraordinary promise. The company claimed that extensive blood testing could be performed ...
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What Happens When Intelligence Changes Faster Than Our Ability to Understand Ourselves?

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What Happens When Intelligence Changes Faster Than Our Ability to Understand Ourselves? Artificial intelligence can improve the quality and speed of human work without necessarily producing an equivalent improvement in the knowledge, judgment, or independent capability of the person using it. As AI becomes more capable, distinguishing assisted performance from human understanding becomes increasingly important. The benefits of generative AI are easy to observe. Work can be completed faster, drafts can improve quickly, difficult calculations can be automated, and people can produce results that previously demanded much more time or expertise. The less visible question concerns what happens to the human capability behind those results. Improved output does not automatically tell us whether the person gained understanding, developed skill, or would recognize when the system produced a convincing error. AI Can Improve Professional Performance Research has already documented meaningful prod...
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