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<title>Open Hypotheses | Kris Yotam</title>
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<h1>Open Hypotheses</h1>
<div class="keepws">
(<span class="bold">notes</span>
(date 2025-05-30)
(category <a href="../../notes.html">culture</a>)
(status <span class="status-evergreen">evergreen</span>)
(confidence certain)
(importance 6)
(tags epistemology hypotheses ideas))
</div>
<p class="preview">Mental models, frameworks, etc. I am tampering with.</p>
<div class="prose">
<h2>Open Hypotheses</h2>
<p>Testable ideas about how the world works that I find plausible but haven't seen rigorously tested. Some are personal theories, others are hunches that could benefit from systematic investigation.</p>
<h3>Human Behavior</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>The Curiosity Plateau</strong>: People's willingness to learn new things peaks in their late twenties and then gradually declines, independent of cognitive ability</li>
<li><strong>Complexity Preference Inversion</strong>: As people become experts in a field, they increasingly prefer simple solutions, while novices are attracted to complex ones</li>
<li><strong>Social Proof Delay</strong>: The influence of social proof on behavior has a lag time that varies predictably based on the domain and individual traits</li>
</ul>
<h3>Technology & Society</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>The Interface Sophistication Cycle</strong>: User interfaces alternate between periods of increasing complexity (adding features) and simplification (removing them) in roughly 7-year cycles</li>
<li><strong>Digital Tool Abandonment Pattern</strong>: People stop using digital tools not when they find better alternatives, but when the tools become "too helpful" and reduce their sense of agency</li>
<li><strong>Remote Work Equilibrium</strong>: Fully remote teams naturally settle into communication patterns that mirror the timezone distribution of their members</li>
</ul>
<h3>Learning & Creativity</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>The Explanation Test</strong>: The best way to determine if you understand something is to try explaining it to someone who knows nothing about the topic</li>
<li><strong>Creative Constraint Optimization</strong>: There's an optimal level of constraint that maximizes creative output—too few constraints lead to paralysis, too many lead to mechanical execution</li>
<li><strong>Knowledge Half-Life Variation</strong>: Different types of knowledge decay at predictable rates based on how abstract they are</li>
</ul>
<h3>Economic Behavior</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>The Overhead Paradox</strong>: Organizations naturally develop overhead that exactly consumes any efficiency gains from new tools or processes</li>
<li><strong>Value Perception Lag</strong>: People consistently undervalue things they get for free and overvalue things they pay for, even when controlling for actual utility</li>
<li><strong>Decision Fatigue Threshold</strong>: The quality of decisions degrades predictably after making approximately 35-40 decisions in a day</li>
</ul>
<h3>Personal Development</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>Skill Transfer Asymmetry</strong>: Skills transfer from technical domains to creative domains more easily than the reverse</li>
<li><strong>Habit Formation Interference</strong>: Trying to establish more than 2-3 new habits simultaneously reduces the success rate of all of them</li>
<li><strong>Identity Lag Theory</strong>: People's self-concept updates about 6-18 months behind their actual behavior changes</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Each hypothesis could become a research project. Some might be wrong, but wrong in interesting ways.</em></p>
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