I’m back, baby. Well, maybe. If you’ve been here a while, you know I start and stop a lot. I also have periodic identity crises. I can’t reliably make any promises about where my writing may go, but I am going to commit to posting every day again, because I tend to be an all-or-nothing sort of guy. I’m not sure what’s next, but that’s part of the f…

A lot of introspection has brought me to what I think will be the third iteration of this blog. The rest of the answer is in the audio, which is really the point. With the Grain is supported by listeners like you. If you’d like to hear more from Potatowire and other Difficult Podcasts hosts, visit http://difficultpodcasts.fm/support and subscribe t…

There is something romantic about the notion of intuition. Who doesn’t love the idea of a respected art critic getting a fleeting view of a work of art and knowing immediately that it is a fake? How about a chess grand master walking past a game in the park boldly pronouncing, “white mate in three.” This leads us a nagging feeling that we can becom…

Throughout The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb bemoans the prevalence of Gaussian functions, perhaps known best graphed as characteristic bell curves. Much of the natural world sorts itself into a bell curve (see also the 80/20 “rule,”) but if we expect everything to fall within a Gaussian framework, we will be continually surprised by real life.…

I find Nassim Nicholas Taleb captivating. He possesses the amazing ability to reveal and clarify what should already be obvious, but isn’t. I also love the way he writes and how radical he is in his honesty. This also polarizes. In his book The Black Swan, Taleb analyzes the concepts of uncertainty and probability in light of the truly unpredictabl…

Occasionally, I get the idea that I am a hard worker. For times such as these, I keep stored up in my heart this passage from Robert Caro’s The Path to Power: Every week, every week all year long—every week without fail—there was washday. The wash was done outside. A huge vat of boiling water would be suspended over a larger, roaring fire and near …

Human beings are masters of overconfidence. Even when we’re wary of a rose-colored outlook, we find it tough to reliably determine whether a particular course of action is wise or not. This effect is not eliminated by combining fallible people together into groups, either. Daniel Kahneman describes this dynamic in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. …

Yesterday, Erik and I released the first episode of our new podcast Seasons of Obsession. He introduced it far better than I can, but I think of the show as a combination rough draft and director’s-cut version of our writing. As the name suggests, we will also sometimes veer off in pursuit of short-lived obsessions. Today on this site, I am launchi…