Cedric Chin

@cedricchin
306 Followers
90 Following
602 Posts
Writes http://commoncog.com. Talks books, career moats & the art of business, from the perspective of an operator. Yes cats.
Writinghttps://commoncog.com
LocationSingapore/Saigon

Commoncog by @cedricchin is probably the most influential resource I’ve discovered on the Internet in the last couple of years. I elaborate and share links to some great articles in a latest post on my blog:

https://mirekdlugosz.com/blog/2025/found-on-web-commoncog/

#testing #thinking #mentalmodels #blog #software

Found on web: Commoncog

Commoncog by Cedric Chin is probably the most influential resource I’ve discovered on the Internet in the last couple of years. It’s deep. It’s grounded. It’s deliberate. It’s insightful. It’s judicious. It’s nuanced. It’s well written. It’s practical. If I were …

Mirek Długosz personal website

if you want to still be sneaky, hide your critical passwords (and backup MFA codes!) behind a photo frame or in a random book or whatever, but *tell* whomever you trust most where that place is, or at least write it down in the place they're most likely to look if you pass unexpectedly.

ask the same of your loved ones, too.

no one deserves the pain of navigating customer support trees and the other kafkaesque hells of accessing accounts when they're already submerged in grief. loving is leet.

I broke character as someone who mostly writes about feelings and wrote some programming advice, about when and how to introduce abstractions in your code: https://notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2024-01-13-08:28.html

In my defence the programming advice is also about feelings.

Writing good programming abstractions

One implication of https://commoncog.com/seeing-expertise-milestone-worth-aiming-for/ is that when someone reveals to you that they don’t have expertise by being unable to recognise it in front of you, you should take that very seriously as a signal.
Ability to See Expertise is a Milestone Worth Aiming For

Good news: we have a neat, universal milestone on the journey to mastery. What that looks like, and how to use it.

Commoncog
Something I wrote on the Commoncog member forums yesterday:

The core idea, in 3 sentences:

Starting a company is a crapshoot.

You don’t get to choose which business turns out to work for you.

But you still can build a billion-dollar outcome; you don’t have to shoot for the moon with a single startup.

This is how.

This week’s Commoncog essay is a re-release of a previously members-only post, now made free because I (ahem) survived my wedding!

It also happens to be the bombshell piece of the entire Capital Expertise series. https://commoncog.com/capital-allocation-antidote-to-business-luck/

Capital Allocation as an Antidote to Business Luck

The unspoken secret about new company formation is that you need to get lucky. Roll the dice, get a business outcome. Capital allocation matters because it gives you a path to winning even when you lose the initial roll.

Commoncog
If you want my full series, that’s available — newly free to the public — here: https://commoncog.com/learning-ill-structured-domains-series/
Learning In Ill-Structured Domains Series

How do you accelerate learning in ill-structured domains? A series on Cognitive Flexibility Theory, and how to use it.

Commoncog

I’m not sure why it is that having a mechanistic explanation of expert cognition helps, when the exercises are so well known.

But there’s something about “oh, so that’s how the greats think when doing it” that makes the exercises hit different. 🤷‍♂️

Rohan says he will double down on collecting cases, so that he will be more likely to say (as per Munger and Buffett) “this reminds me of when …” but without simplifying to non-generalisable principles.

And he’ll be more likely to revisit old events and cases.