Notes | kaguc — Writing to understand systems.

The failure of good decisions

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A pattern I keep seeing but haven’t pinned: people make good decisions, each individually defensible, and the sum is bad. Worse than that — the sum is what you would have specifically tried to avoid if you’d described it up front.

Possible names: “local optimization,” “constraint blindness.” Neither fits. Local optimization has a global frame implied; this is a thing that happens because nobody is keeping the global frame.

Coming back to this.

Systems thinking, edge case

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The thing nobody mentions about “systems thinking” is that it can become the lens — i.e. the next universal hammer.

I caught myself this week treating a deeply specific problem (a particular failure of a particular team) as if it were an instance of a feedback loop. It wasn’t. It was just three people who hadn’t slept enough.

The discipline isn’t to use systems thinking. It’s to know when not to.

On rereading Buffett's 1989 letter

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The thing that hits me on the third pass is how much of it is the shape of an argument I already half-knew, presented in a way I would have flinched from at twenty-five.

The famous lines aren’t the best lines. The best lines are the operational ones: “the most important quality… is willingness to wait.”

Note to self: stop saving the famous quotes. Save the operational ones.