Me thinks Xerxes Wennerstierna nailed it.
__________
Xerxes Wennerstierna
I have a mental illness that makes me think that people will change their minds if I present the correct arguments with the appropriate facts and data.
I also suffer from:
The delusion that clearer charts produce clearer thinking.
The bias that more citations equal more conviction.
The fantasy that logic is a universal interface standard.
The hope that a good-faith question won’t trigger a tribal answer.
The belief that disagreeing is not the same as disrespecting.
The expectation that “I might be wrong” is contagious.
The habit of replying to emotions with spreadsheets.
The superstition that nuance will outperform outrage.
The reflex to bring signal where the market rewards noise.
The assumption that debaters seek truth, not status.
The dream that long-term evidence can beat short-term incentives.
The fantasy that a well-designed experiment beats a well-designed narrative.
The naivete that data changes minds; often minds change the data.
The compulsion to reconcile anecdotes with baselines and base rates.
The optimism that steelmanning earns reciprocity.
The conviction that definitions precede decisions.
The bias toward falsifiable claims in a world that prefers unfalsifiable vibes.
The belief that memory improves with mechanisms, not merely with quotes.
The instinct to replace “who’s to blame?” with “what’s the mechanism?”
The weakness for frameworks when the room is asking for slogans.
The itch to time-stamp predictions and score them later.
The idea that incentives are stronger than intentions.
The hope that we can separate identity from argument.
The urge to ask “compared to what?” before we vote, buy, or ban.
The belief that correlation is a conversation starter, not a verdict.
The practice of labeling assumptions so they can be revised.
The faith that small pilot studies beat large opinion wars.
The desire to replace heat with light—even when heat sells.
The audacity to think humility is a growth strategy.
The quiet suspicion that changing my own mind is the only proof of concept I control.
If any of this resonates, we’re probably in the same recovery group: analysts who still believe that better questions, better measurements, and better incentives can bend reality toward better outcomes. It’s not a cure—but it’s a practice.
