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Pluralistic: Process knowledge (08 Apr 2026) by Cory Doctorow
Wednesday April 8th, 2026 at 10:40 AM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Today's links


A woman washing dishes by hand in a rural, early 20th century shack. In the foreground is a jumble of tortured golgothan skeletons ganked from a Dore Old Testament engraving. Through the window in the back of the shack, we see a detail from another Dore Old Testament engraving: bodies escaping The Flood.

Process knowledge (permalink)

"Intellectual property" was once an obscure legal backwater. Today, it is the dominant area of political economy, the organizing regime for almost all of our tech regulation, and the most valuable – and most controversial – aspect of global trade policy:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/01/minilateralism/#own-goal

Despite (or perhaps because of) its centrality, "intellectual property" is one of those maddeningly vague terms that applies to many different legal doctrines, as well as a set of nebulous, abstract thought-objects that do not qualify for legal protection. "IP" doesn't just refer to copyright, trademark and patent – though these "core three" systems are so heterogeneous in basis, scope and enforcement that the act of lumping them together into a single category confuses more than it clarifies.

Beyond the "core three" of copyright, patent and trademark, "IP" also refers to a patchwork of "neighboring rights" that only exist to varying degrees around the world, like "anticircumvention rights," "database rights" and "personality rights." Then there are doctrines that have come to be thought of as IP, even though they were long considered separate: confidentiality, noncompete and nondisparagement.

Finally, there are those "nebulous, abstract thought-objects" that get labeled "IP," even if no one can really define what they are – for example, the "format" deals that TV shows like Love Island or The Traitors make around the world, which really amount to consulting deals to help other TV networks create a local version of a popular show, but which are treated as the sale of some (nonexistent) exclusive right.

It's hard to find a commonality amongst all these wildly different concepts, but a couple years ago, I hit on a working definition of "IP" that seems to cover all the bases: I say that "IP" means "any rule, law or policy that allows a company to exert control over its critics, competitors or customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Put that way, it's easy to see why "IP" would be such a central organizing principle in a modern, end-stage capitalist world. But even though "IP" is treated as a firm's most important asset, it's actually far less important than another intangible: process knowledge.

I first came across the concept of "process knowledge" in Dan Wang's Breakneck, a very good book about the rise and rise of Chinese manufacturing, industrialization and global dominance:

https://danwang.co/breakneck/

I picked up Breakneck after reading other writers whom I admire who singled out the book's treatment of process knowledge for praise and further discussion. The political scientist Henry Farrell called process knowledge the key to economic development:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/process-knowledge-is-crucial-to-economic

While Dan Davies – a superb writer about organizations and their management – used England's Brompton Bicycles to make the abstract concept of process knowledge very concrete indeed:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-brompton-ness-of-it-all

So what is process knowledge? It's all the knowledge that workers collectively carry around in their heads – hard-won lessons that span firms and divisions, that can never be adequately captured through documentation. Think of a worker at a chip fab who finds themself with a load of microprocessors that have failed QA because they become unreliable when they're run above a certain clockspeed. If that worker knows enough about the downstream customers' processes, they can contact one of those customers and offer the chips for use in a lower-end product, which can save the fab millions and make millions more for the customer.

This just happened to Apple, who seized upon a lot of "binned" microprocessors that were headed to the landfill and designed the Macbook Neo (a new, cheap, low-end laptop) around them, salvaging the defective chips by running them at lower speeds. The result? Apple's most successful laptop in years, which has now sold so well that Apple has exhausted the supply of defective chips and is scrambling to fill orders:

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/07/macbook-neo-massive-dilemma/

Process knowledge is squishy, contingent, and wildly important in a world filled with entropy-stricken, off-spec, and stubbornly physical things. Work with a particular machine long enough and you will develop a Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feeling) for the optimal rate to introduce a new load of feedstock to it after it runs dry. Even more importantly: if you work with that machine long enough, you'll have the mobile phone number of the retired person who knows how to un-jam it if you try to reload it too fast on your usual technician's day off. This kind of knowledge can mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy.

So why isn't process knowledge given the centrality in our conceptions of what makes a corporation valuable?

After reading Wang, Farrell and Davies, I formulated a theory: we ignore process knowledge for the same reason we exalt "IP," because process knowledge can't be bought or sold, can't be reflected on a balance-sheet, and can't be controlled, and because "IP" can. Process knowledge is far more important than "IP" (just try creating a vaccine from a set of instructions without the skilled technicians who have already spent years executing similar projects), but process knowledge is spread out amongst workers and can't be abstracted away by their bosses. Your boss can make you sign a contract assigning all your copyrights and patents to the business, but if you and your team quit your job, all that "IP" will plummet in value without the people who know how to mobilize it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance

"IP" isn't just a case of "you treasure what you measure" – it's also a case of "you measure what you treasure."

Recently, I hit on a positively delightful Tumblr post that illustrated the importance of process knowledge, and the way that bosses systematically undervalue it:

https://www.tumblr.com/explorerrowan/813098951730479104

This post is one of those glorious internet documents, a novel literary form for which we have no accepted term. It's composed of four major sections: a screenshotted impromptu Twitter thread made in reply to a throwaway post; a lengthy Tumblr reply to the screenshots; a second Tumblr reply to the first one; and then a chorus of more than 38,000 notes, replies, and hashtags added to it. I have no idea what to call this kind of document, in which some people are reacting to others without the others ever knowing about it, but also which is also written by so many authors, many of whom are explicitly interacting with one another. It's a "hypertext," sure, but what kind of hypertext?

Whatever you call it, it's amazing. As noted, it opens with a Twitter exchange. The first tweet comes from an online dating influencer, "TheEcho13":

I interviewed a gen z girlie 6 months ago and in the interview she told me that she does not like a challenge, has no interest in career progression, prefers to just do repetitive tasks and will never complain about being bored.

I hired her.

https://xcancel.com/TheEcho13/status/1948951885693813135#m

In response, Viveros (a content creator from Alberta and one of the 4m people who saw the original tweet), replied with a short thread about the value of people like this, who "keep the lights on and the business functioning at everything from restaurants to post offices but now nobody’s interested in hiring them":

https://xcancel.com/TheViveros/status/1949149720406110382#m

These are the "lifer[s] who can teach new people how everything works, who knows what’s up in the system, who knows what the obscure solutions are, and who can help calm down the asshole regulars because they know them more personally." In other words, the keepers of the process knowledge.

When this screenshotted exchange was posted to Tumblr, it prompted Blinkpatch, who describes themself as a "genderfluid," "ancient" "drifter" who pines for "solar-punk flavored revolution" to reply with a brilliant anecdote about their stint working as a dishwasher:

https://weaselle.tumblr.com/post/790895560390492160/whenever-i-think-about-the-value-of-something

At 16, Blinkpatch was hired as a restaurant dishwasher under the tutelage of Claudio, a 60-year old "career dish pit man." Claudio had washed dishes for his whole life, reveling in the fact that he could get work in any city, at any time.

When Claudio realized that Blinkpatch was taking the job seriously, the training began in earnest. Claudio asked Blinkpatch if they wanted to be able to clock off at midnight at the end of each shift, and when Blinkpatch said they did, Claudio laid a lot of process knowledge on them:

This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don’t have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it’s done every single time? You can’t do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you’ll do 160 loads.

These are the parameters, the kind of thing any Taylorist with a stopwatch could tell you. But Claudio went on to explain how that extra idle minute would translate to chaos in the kitchen, as the cooks ran out of pots and the servers ran out of plates, and how they would take out their frustrations on the dishwasher. To optimize that dishwasher, Blinkpatch would need to have a reserve of bulky, machine-filling items that could be run through the machine any time a load finished before there was a sufficient supply of smaller items. If they failed at this, Blinkpatch would be washing dishes until 2AM, rather than clocking out at midnight.

Blinkpatch's takeaway was that dishwashing was the bottleneck the whole restaurant ran through – and how that meant that Claudio, who was "unambitious" by conventional standards, had the best understanding of the restaurant's overall operations of anyone on site. He was the keeper of the process knowledge

This reply prompted another response, from "Marisol," a "haunted house actress and accidental IT person" who told the story of her time working at a medical office that specialized in mental health and addiction recovery:

https://www.tumblr.com/marisolinspades/790960414106304512/all-of-this-disaster-befalls-any-company-that

The company was in the midst of standing up its own purpose-built facility, and the CEO was working intensively with the architect to design this new building. When Marisol – the receptionist – happened to be consulted on the near-final design plan, "it took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out."

First: "The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout. It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall." This meant that she couldn't "keep track of the patients who are waiting."

The architect and CEO wanted to know why she couldn't use the sign-in sheet to manage this. She explained that not everyone signs in – people who are there for a check-in or group therapy need to be directed to the other side of the building, while "some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach."

The CEO and architect asked whether this happened often, and she replied "every day." They didn't believe her. Nor did they believe her when she said that the receptionists needed to have continuous access to the chart room throughout the day – they insisted that since charts for the day's patients were pulled in the morning, it would be OK to house them through two sets of locked doors, a five-minute walk away (that way, workers wouldn't be tempted to "goof off" in the room). They wanted to keep the chart room locked, with the key entrusted to the CEO, who would supervise every entry.

Marisol explained that charts were pulled continuously, any time there was a crisis or a patient had a question for a nurse, or when a patient came in due to a cancellation. All told, reception went into the chart room 20-30 times/day. The "goofing off" they thought workers got up to in the chart room was "when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time."

The CEO and architect were still disbelieving, so Marisol had them sit with her for an hour. They didn't last an hour – they left, taking the blueprints with them.

The punchline: Marisol bemoans the fact that she wasn't given more time with those blueprints, because then she might have spotted that they'd forgotten to include any closets, including closets for the janitors. As a result, all their cleaning supplies and holiday decorations were stolen from the cabinets in the bathrooms that they were forced to stash them in.

Marisol blames this on a "CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasn’t convinced closets were worth it."

This is doubtless true – but we can generalize this, to "a CEO who didn't appreciate process knowledge."

I've come to believe that process knowledge is the most undervalued part of our society. So undervalued that business geniuses like Elon Musk think you can fire skilled lifers from key government agencies and simply hire new ones if turns out you cut too deep. So undervalued that Trump thinks that you can simply stand up new factories in response to tariffs, and that "training" will somehow allow people to go to work making things that haven't been produced onshore in a generation.

And of course, the people who value process knowledge the least are the AI bros who think you can replace skilled workers with a chatbot trained on the things they say and write down, as though that somehow captured everything they know.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Chicken Little: what do you sell to an immortal, vat-bound quadrillionaire? https://web.archive.org/web/20110408210327/http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/04/chicken-little

#15yrsago Anya’s Ghost: sweet and scary ghost story about identity https://memex.craphound.com/2011/04/06/anyas-ghost-sweet-and-scary-ghost-story-about-identity/

#10yrsago The UK government’s voice-over-IP standard is designed to be backdoored https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1476827/

#5yrsago Ad-tech's algorithmic cruelty https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/06/digital-phrenology/#weaponized-nostalgia

#5yrsago The real cancel culture https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/06/digital-phrenology/#digital-phrenology

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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cjheinz
4 hours ago
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Process knowledge.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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Creating the 4D Resources library with Claude Code by Erica Heinz
Tuesday March 31st, 2026 at 11:38 PM

Think in 4D
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This weekend I used Claude to convert my Notion database of 350+ bookmarks into a resources page on my Framer site (with a Chrome extension to easily add and edit them). There are so many new tips and tools to keep up with, especially with AI changing EVERYTHING, so this is a feed/toolkit of new, favorite, or niche resources. Add it to your own bookmarks: 4Dthinking.studio/resources

(I’d been squirreling links away in Notion for years, but ’s great site and newsletter of design resources made me realize that a public Notion URL, while efficient, was a missed opportunity.)

It only took a day, and I thought some other people might want to do something similar so here’s the prompts and process I used.

Think in 4D is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

How to build a links database with Claude Code

First, think

I wanted a cool web page to display my links with custom sorting and filtering. I wanted a Chrome extension to add the items, since all the tools I still use regularly have extensions. I wanted tagging as part of the bookmarking, so I didn’t end up with another Inbox of saved links to process. And later in the process I realized I needed an easy way to edit the items or delete dead links.

Think: What are all the steps in your current workflow, and how could they be better?

Then, build

I started in Claude.ai — not a Project or anything, just the regular chat. With all the talk of “prompt engineering,” it’s easy to feel like you don’t have that skill, but YOU CAN JUST ASK CLAUDE. Look at how dumb my prompts are, and things turned out perfectly:

  1. how could i build a custom chrome extension that lets me grab a url, add tags, and save it in a public resources database like omglord.com

  2. ok, can you make the modal have fields for title, blurb, phase, link, date added, and then a checkbox for “fav”? i would like the web interface to be part of my Framer site if that’s possible

  3. how do i load the extension in chrome

  4. can you make Tags optional, and make Phase an autocomplete single select from the following attached options (in the same order):

  5. where do i get the firebase api key

  6. i don’t see Build → Realtime Database

  7. in framer, do i add an Embed component or a Code Block

  8. how do i get these existing resources into my db (csv attached)

Just those 8 prompts above and I had a working demo! A Chrome extension, a Firebase database, and a Framer embed (none of which I had ever created before).

The Chrome extension

Then, design

Once the prototype worked, I went into Figma to decide how I wanted it to look.

And then back to Claude for more fixes and questions

  1. for the framer component, could it look like this?

  2. [many rounds of detailed design feedback, e.g. please reduce the space between the phase tags to 1px, and put each row on its own line like in the bulleted list]

  3. oops i forgot to upload the mockup with the hover colors

  4. is 4d-minimal.tsx the new code to cut/paste

  5. what are all the other .tsx files in the /framer-variants folder for?

Finally, tons of UX revisions

  1. if i want to delete a resource later, what’s the easiest way to do that

  2. option 3 would be great, yes. also, for the filter tags below the phase tags, please use this design. Also, my site uses Millionaire for the serif and Acumin for the sans. See the CSS on https://ericaheinz.com/ and please set the framer extension up to use those fonts

  3. [more rounds of bug fixes]

  4. i updated resources.csv locally, how do i update firebase again?

Here I finally switched to Claude Code, which just edits the files in a folder directly, bc I got tired of downloading the file before copy/pasting into Framer

  1. i need to update the firebase database with new tags. what’s the easiest way to do that

  2. [many more rounds of bug fixes and design tweaks, trying not to get mad] e.g.

    1. the tags seem to be missing from the data now. i used the csv importer to firebase, are they being seen as part of the URLs in the csv?

    2. A/V is the phase, animation is the tag

    3. what do you mean run it once

    4. copy.tsx still not working. please compare to this version from yesterday that was working

    5. NO, don’t edit copy! that’s the one that was working! update 4d-minimal.tsx

    6. where is the firebase console browser

    7. nothing is pasting, is there any other way to do this?

    8. the fields look like they have the right name, but the type field is missing. can’t i just rename the column titles in the CSV and reimport? why is the type field not being imported

    9. yes change to category

    10. here is the new csv. can i go ahead and import it to firebase?

    11. why do i have to run these stupid scripts? i didn’t have to do that before

    12. i have the csv open in Numbers, i can also just do a find and replace to change values before importing, or reformat the dates. i’m not a developer i’m a designer

    13. you built this importer

    14. it was in a different chat with you

    15. ok it’s working now. whew!

One afternoon and one morning of work:

4Dthinking.studio/resources

Takeaways

  1. Build > Design > Iterate is the new process. Function first. Nuances next. Then endless iteration, and a much more polished product. When roles collapse (like Gary Chou talked about in my last podcast interview), you can get through dozens and dozens of iterations without saying a word.

  2. Be lazy! Ask Claude things you would normally go research or do, and it will often do work or suggest options you didn’t think about. (e.g. I asked if the list could animate in, and it asked what kind, and I normally would run off and do the research myself, but I said “where can i see examples of that” and it offered to build a demo of 3 options). Ask it “the easiest way” to do something, and it will often tell you about new tools (like Firebase for databases) or suggest feature ideas you hadn’t considered (like a View All page in the extension to edit/delete links)

  3. Be excited! I don’t know if these fast-food tools are rotting my teeth, but I definitely would not have gotten this project finished on my own. It’s cool to know I can now build Chrome extensions, and more

Any questions? Was this useful? LMK and I’ll do more.

Thanks for reading Think in 4D! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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cjheinz
7 days ago
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AI working under the close supervision of a genius human being - brilliant!
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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Nothing Works in Trump’s America — Except Racism .... by Jason Kottke
Tuesday March 31st, 2026 at 11:37 PM

kottke.org
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Nothing Works in Trump’s America — Except Racism. “Trump is objectively bad at running the government, but he’s objectively good at running a Klan rally, and his supporters value the latter so much that they forgive the former.”

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cjheinz
7 days ago
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Wow.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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Alien Politics by Karl Schroeder
Friday March 27th, 2026 at 9:58 AM

Unapocalyptic
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First, an apology. I’m behind in posting for a variety of life-related reasons. For example, this week I’m writing from rural Western Australia, where we are currently sitting in the path of Cyclone Narelle, a category 3 storm that has ravaged three states and now has its sights set on scouring the west coast. There’s that. Then there’s the foresight contract I’ve just wrapped up, which took up most of my free time, and of course, preparations for the release of my new short story collection (it really is happening this spring!).

I promise to tell you all about all of this, in due course, and will soon be back on my normal schedule, with some bonuses to come (such as a pre-order window opening soon for the collection, Laika’s Ghost.)

Our Next Political Move

As you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of politics, because if we’re going to bequeath a just and humanistic political system to our kids, we have to start building it now. There are a lot of moving parts to such a project, so I’ve been wondering how to boil them down to fundamentals. One thing that is clear is that the political frameworks of the 19th and 20th centuries are not up to the job. What is the most critical addition we need to make to our political systems right now?

Our future political freedom depends on us developing protocols that deliberately hold understanding at bay during deliberation.

If this sounds weird, it’s because we are in a weird situation, and that is the point. The kind of abeyance I’m talking about is not like working with statistical uncertainty; I am doing that right now as I’m watching the many possible paths Narelle could take, including some that pass directly over my head in the next 48 hours. That’s what you might call ‘normal’ uncertainty. What I’m talking about is more like Badiou’s Event, a concept I’ve written about before. But let’s try to avoid abstraction here.

Imagine a very near future (say, later this year) when people turn to AI systems such as Grok to help them decide how to vote. Hopefully, we all know by now that these systems are designed to be sycophantic, and therefore, reinforce our biases rather than expanding our worldview. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Deepseek are all bias amplifiers, just like social media. But they can be tweaked to nudge our thinking in particular directions. They are going to have a big impact on voting patterns if their owners (who are all oligarchs, except for the Chinese who are simply autocrats) have skewed their AIs’ models to reflect some partisan position.

This is just like the capture of journalism by the billionaires, so I won’t repeat arguments that others have made about that. It should be an obvious danger and therefore, politically, we need counterbalances in institutional or informal terms.

No, there’s a deeper issue here. It doesn’t have to do with AI’s sycophancy, but rather with its (and our) deep-seated drive to make things make sense.

The Bed of Procrustes

Large Language Model AIs aggregate humanit’s current understanding of the world. And, as Brian Boyd has pointed out, “if the human mind can understand something in narrative terms, it automatically will.” Whatever it is that is going on in the world today, we are frantically integrating it into a consensus-reality tale we’ve already written. The huge, under-examined problem is that if LLM AIs are bias amplifiers, they are also amplifiers of this integration process. They make things make sense to us, and they will try to do that even if the things in question do not make sense within any existing frame of thought.

We use them because they help us understand the world; and that is precisely why they are profoundly dangerous. See, there’s a lag between their training and what’s happening now; theorists and historians have not yet fully teased apart the phenomenon that is Trumpism, for instance, yet we’re living through it and have questions. LLMs are more than happy to answer those questions; but they will of necessity do so using the paradigms they were trained on.

This makes LLM AIs like Procrustes from the ancient Greek story, who would invite travelers to stay with him. If they were too short for his bed, he would stretch them to fit, and if they were too tall, he’d cut them down to size. This is what Large Language Models do with any situation we describe to them, because they represent the interconnections already present in language, and cannot reason or imagine new ones.

If something unprecedented happens, not only can they not recognize it, they will actively and cleverly confabulate an explanation that makes complete sense to us within the categories of thought that they’ve been trained on.

The AI apocalypse we should be worried about is not, therefore, them taking over the world and wiping us out. The AI apocalypse we should be worried about is one in which everything is explainable. AI is the Procrustean Bed for human knowledge.

Thanks for reading Unapocalyptic! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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The Department of Abeyance

Maybe aliens will help this make more sense. Say aliens land tomorrow, and we can kind-of communicate with them. There’ll be areas of overlap between our concepts and theirs. When they say something really strange, though, we have a couple of options. One is to take the weirdness seriously. Another is to treat what they’ve just said as nonsense and skip over it. Or, we can take what they’ve just said and shave off the uncomfortable parts until it fits the way we understand the world. We can Procustize them.

To take the weirdness seriously means to, firstly, admit it is there, and secondly to refrain from ‘fixing it’ the way Procrustes would. We’d have to learn to dwell with the incomprehensible. Based on the past of Colonial Europe in contact with the cultures of the New World, that ‘dwelling-with’ seems highly unlikely to happen on its own.

So is democracy, unless you have institutions that are designed to support it.

We’re rapidly institutionalizing Large Language Models and thus, their ability to explain the world to us. I propose that we create institutions designed to counterbalance the Procrustean problem by deliberately holding off—keeping in abeyance—understanding when we sense that, in some way we can’t yet describe, there is more to the story.

What would such a Department of Abeyance look like?

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cjheinz
12 days ago
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Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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A comparison of different sorting algorithms (bubble,... by Jason Kottke
Thursday March 26th, 2026 at 2:28 PM

kottke.org
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A comparison of different sorting algorithms (bubble, merge, heap, timsort). You can run them one at a time or race all seven.

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cjheinz
13 days ago
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Sorting algorithms are cool to watch.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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Admitting when we’re wrong by Mark Heinz
Tuesday March 24th, 2026 at 4:56 PM

Forward Kentucky
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Admitting when we’re wrong

There are several iconic lines in the 1975 blockbuster movie, Jaws. For example, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” has been repeated or paraphrased in numerous films.

My personal favorite is when Quint, the crusty old fisherman played by Robert Shaw, tells Matt Hooper, the know-it-all young scientist played by Richard Dreyfuss, “Well, it proves one thing Mr. Hooper. It proves that you wealthy college boys don’t have the education enough to admit when you’re wrong.”

I’ll admit that, as the only one of seven siblings without a college degree, I used to favor common sense and traditional wisdom over academic intellectualism. Now that I am older – READ: old – I try to look at things from as many different perspectives as I can. However, I generally prefer scientific method over traditional wisdom or gut feelings.

It seems universally true that most people, including me, don’t want to admit when they are wrong. In “Why Some People Will Never Admit That They’re Wrong” published in Psychology Today, Guy Winch writes,

No one enjoys being wrong. It’s an unpleasant emotional experience for all of us. The question is how do we respond when it turns out we were wrong. (...)

Some of us admit we were wrong and say, ‘Oops, you were right. (...)

Some of us kind of imply we were wrong, but we don’t do so explicitly or in a way that is satisfying to the other person. ... We accept responsibility fully or partially (sometimes, very, very partially), but we don’t push back against the actual facts.

But what about when a person does push back against the facts, when they simply cannot admit they were wrong in any circumstance? What is it in their psychological makeup that makes it impossible for them to admit they were wrong, even when it is obvious they were? And why does this happen so repetitively – why do they never admit they were wrong?

The answer is related to their ego; their very sense of self.

I am a lifelong Democrat. Sometimes I’ve defended a Democrat, or Democrats, because of party loyalty, even when I pretty much knew they were wrong. For example, in 1998 President Bill Clinton was impeached primarily for lying under oath and obstructing justice while trying to conceal his extramarital affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. I mostly excused Bill Clinton on the flimsy grounds that, although it was wrong for him to lie, it was understandable and excusable and even honorable for him to want to spare his wife and daughter and even the nation from the shame and tawdriness implicit in the sexual affair.

Nowadays, however, I have zero respect for Bill Clinton. I admit that I was wrong to excuse his lies and bad behavior. I will further admit that many years passed before I was able to make that admission. As a journalist, I have to be thick-skinned. But maybe my ego was more fragile than I thought.

Winch continues,

Some people have such a fragile ego, such brittle self-esteem, such a weak ‘psychological constitution,’ that admitting they made a mistake or that they were wrong is fundamentally too threatening for their egos to tolerate. Accepting they were wrong, absorbing that reality, would be so psychologically shattering that their defense mechanisms do something remarkable to avoid doing so – they literally distort their perception of reality to make it (reality) less threatening. Their defense mechanisms protect their fragile ego by changing the very facts in their mind, so they are no longer wrong or culpable.

Indeed, rather than admit that Bill Clinton was a sleazy lying adulterer, I shifted the blame to America’s puritanical history and resultant prudishness, arguing that progressive European nations like France or Italy wouldn’t have a problem with their president lying about an extramarital affair. In a modern civilized culture, that’s what one does in such a situation, right? Er ... no, that’s not right.

Not everyone who voted for Donald Trump identifies with the MAGA movement. Some are lifelong Republicans who always vote for Republicans, just as I’m a lifelong Democrat who always votes for Democrats.

In Gallup News, Jeffrey Jones writes that a “new high of 45% in U.S. identify as political independents; more independents lean Democratic than Republican, giving Democrats edge in party affiliation for first time since 2021.”

He continues, “The recent increase in independent identification is partly attributable to younger generations of Americans (millennials and Generation X) continuing to identify as independents at relatively high rates as they have gotten older. In contrast, older generations of Americans have been less likely to identify as independents over time. Generation Z, like previous generations before them when they were young, identify disproportionately as political independents.”

I have mixed feelings about Independents. On one hand, I believe there are clear and distinct differences between the two major parties that make it easy for me to choose to be a Democrat. I focus mainly on what the Democratic party represents and not on individual candidates. On the other hand, I can understand and empathize with voters — especially younger voters — who are fed up with, and even exhausted by, the rancor and vitriol between the two major parties.

Moreover, identifying as an Independent allows voters the freedom to micromanage their political beliefs and decisions – as opposed to accepting the “party line” adopted and promoted by either of the two major parties. In short, party loyalty comes with a price – that Independents presumably don’t have to pay.

Independent voters in critical swing states such as Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania were key to Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election. (Those same Independent voters also helped several Democrats win their Senate races.) Considering President Trump’s abysmally low approval ratings — on tariffs and the economy, healthcare, gas and energy prices, the federal budget, immigration, Iran, Ukraine — I can’t help but wonder if some of them now regret voting for Trump.

One anonymous man who voted for Trump in 2024 admitted that things were “not going well. I was looking yesterday and, you know, Americans have lost over $1 trillion in their wealth in the last year, while the top 1% has gained over $10 trillion. And it’s like, that’s not exactly what was supposed to be happening.”

Or is it? I would argue strongly that this is exactly what Trump wants – the rich are getting richer, while the rest of us are not.

Regardless of his motives, Trump has seriously soured the American economy, and his tariffs and policies have hurt the economies of numerous friendly countries such as Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia, Germany and other European allies. Yet Trump’s MAGA base continues to confuse their stubborn loyalty and blindness to the truth with inner strength and moral conviction.

It’s commonly known that we all make mistakes. Although it’s painful, we need to admit our mistakes, learn what we can from them, and resolve to make amends for them if possible.

And that includes MAGA Trump voters.

--30--

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cjheinz
14 days ago
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Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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