Things I keep turning over.

I spent years studying this and I'm still not sure. My instinct is that judgment requires something more than reps — some capacity to sit with ambiguity without collapsing it too soon. But I've also watched people develop that through experience, which looks a lot like training. What I can't figure out is whether I'm describing two different things or the same thing from different angles.

I've seen people burn out doing work they loved, and I've seen people thrive under conditions that should have broken them. The conditions mattered, but so did something harder to name — whether the person felt like the work was theirs. I don't have a clean answer for what makes that sustainable. I just know the absence of it when I feel it.

My PhD was built around this question and I still don't have a good answer. The optimizing-for-it-ruins-it theory feels true when I look at certain people, and completely false when I look at others. What I've noticed is that the people who seem most alive aren't thinking about it at all — but I don't know if that's a cause or a symptom.

Pattern recognition is one of the most studied phenomena in cognitive psychology — and one of the most double-edged. Experts process faster and make better decisions on average, but they also develop systematic blind spots. The same schemas that let you see quickly are the ones that make you stop looking. This is part of why judgment is so hard to teach — good judgment often looks like pattern recognition, but the moments it breaks down are exactly the ones where the pattern doesn't fit. What I haven't figured out is whether you can actually train yourself to see what's missing, or whether you're always somewhat constrained by the patterns you've already built.