OK tensility for the win! Sounds akin to antifragility?
Also checking out Isha Dhruva for her claim that meaningfulness and economic livelihood are co-constitutive. YES they are (though I'm also verifying my understanding of co-constitutive - you PhDs, you!
Tensility sounds like that, yes! I'll admit I haven't yet had a chance to dive deep into the that literature, but Perplexity points me toward this definition: “A relationship’s capacity level for bending and withstanding strain, accommodating changing conditions and the capacity for bouncing back from difficulties," which is from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7177380/
So it may be that antifragility is a form or close relative of tensility (or vice versa?)...
Tensility seems specific to relationships, which is interesting. And that description doesn’t capture Taleb’s idea that difficulties actually strengthen anti-fragile things, which is my favorite part about the concept 💪
I agree with you that thought leaders would develop better ideas if they had to put unfinished versions in front of people capable of challenging them. Outside academia, they’re usually rewarded for making ideas look finished: a clean model, a confident conclusion, a memorable phrase. That makes an idea easier to sell, but it can also make its creator more committed to defending it than improving it.
I just recorded a podcast with Geoffrey Moore that will come out at the end of the month, and we touched on this in a sense. His frameworks give people a shared language: the chasm, the tornado, gorillas, the bowling alley. That can communicate a fairly complex idea with only a word or two. But we also talked about the tradeoff. When we overapply a framework or understand its terms differently, that shared language can create the impression that we’re aligned when we may actually be misunderstanding one another. Public challenge can be helpful because it forces the hidden assumptions inside the language into the open.
I always find it helpful that you focus so much on clarity. I struggle with that myself, while also frustrating some people when I keep asking questions because I want to make sure I understand what they’re saying.
Yes! I think people need "packages," for ideas—simple shortcut ways to hold on to bigger and more complex ideas—and Geoffrey has so many good ones! One of the ways I've found to counter the tradeoff of possible misunderstanding with those kinds of shortcuts is to always include a brief explanation immediately afterwards (to wit, like I just did with "packages"). It doesn't solve everything, but it at least leaves less to inference!
OK tensility for the win! Sounds akin to antifragility?
Also checking out Isha Dhruva for her claim that meaningfulness and economic livelihood are co-constitutive. YES they are (though I'm also verifying my understanding of co-constitutive - you PhDs, you!
Tensility sounds like that, yes! I'll admit I haven't yet had a chance to dive deep into the that literature, but Perplexity points me toward this definition: “A relationship’s capacity level for bending and withstanding strain, accommodating changing conditions and the capacity for bouncing back from difficulties," which is from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7177380/
So it may be that antifragility is a form or close relative of tensility (or vice versa?)...
Tensility seems specific to relationships, which is interesting. And that description doesn’t capture Taleb’s idea that difficulties actually strengthen anti-fragile things, which is my favorite part about the concept 💪
I agree with you that thought leaders would develop better ideas if they had to put unfinished versions in front of people capable of challenging them. Outside academia, they’re usually rewarded for making ideas look finished: a clean model, a confident conclusion, a memorable phrase. That makes an idea easier to sell, but it can also make its creator more committed to defending it than improving it.
I just recorded a podcast with Geoffrey Moore that will come out at the end of the month, and we touched on this in a sense. His frameworks give people a shared language: the chasm, the tornado, gorillas, the bowling alley. That can communicate a fairly complex idea with only a word or two. But we also talked about the tradeoff. When we overapply a framework or understand its terms differently, that shared language can create the impression that we’re aligned when we may actually be misunderstanding one another. Public challenge can be helpful because it forces the hidden assumptions inside the language into the open.
I always find it helpful that you focus so much on clarity. I struggle with that myself, while also frustrating some people when I keep asking questions because I want to make sure I understand what they’re saying.
Yes! I think people need "packages," for ideas—simple shortcut ways to hold on to bigger and more complex ideas—and Geoffrey has so many good ones! One of the ways I've found to counter the tradeoff of possible misunderstanding with those kinds of shortcuts is to always include a brief explanation immediately afterwards (to wit, like I just did with "packages"). It doesn't solve everything, but it at least leaves less to inference!
Your doctoral student chops