- if you're interested in becoming an expert -- if you're a student, starting a career, or just picking up a hobby or skill, you might try asking yourself "what are the zippers here." Everyone can use a zipper, but few people can fix broken ones and design unimagined new ones. If you want to become one of those people in an area, find the zippers and learn their mechanisms.
- Trying to encourage mechanism thinking can break through extremist belief patterns.
You might have heard "facts don't change minds, feelings do." Well, KIND OF. Facts, feelings and interpretations are actually all deeply intertwined in our processing of the world. It's tempting to think that our minds process and absorb the world like tape recorders. If I list a bunch of reasons why I support a policy, maybe that will convince someone. But dissecting their causal model might work much better.
Metacognition is something I highlight in my book. These are *learnable skills* and they are *very predictive* for real-world outcomes. People who cultivate habits of puncturing cognitive illusions form expertise, and make the people around them better thinkers too.
Amazing how much we can learn just from a little zipper!
Also just as a PS, it's neither possible nor very adaptive to ask yourself to have an overwhelmingly detailed explanation of mechanisms for everything you encounter, so that's not the goal. Groups of people need to fluently work at many different levels of abstraction.
The key is matching the level of understanding to the tasks and problems that we have! And often, coordinating different depths of expertise!
But we can benefit from having metacognitive skills!
@grimalkina As a result of this thread I went on a binge learning about the history of zipper design.
I am now using graphite pencils to properly lubricate all of my zippers, thank you very much.
@sidereal TIL!!
@grimalkina It's like, I knew graphite was a dry lubricant. But I don't think I would have ever thought to just use a pencil on a zipper. And now I know that I can apply dry lubricant to all kinds of assemblies by just jamming a pencil up in there. Thanks, metacognition!
@sidereal just casually doing learning transfer all over the place 😎 you're killing it
Aug 22, 2026, 6:05 PMi have a vague recollection of my mom using lead pencils to unstuck zippers, so thanks for undusting the cobwebs of that memory!
Aug 22, 2026, 6:11 PM@blogdiva @grimalkina @sidereal I am tasting what the #MTBOS used to provide to my Saturday mornings in the winter.
@sidereal @grimalkina Discovered this when attempting to beat the Fulcher Brothers at speed Rubik's Cube solving at school - cube times were significant social currency as a 13yo nerd 😂
@sidereal @grimalkina Yep, and you put graphite on a violin’s nut when changing strings, so they don’t catch.
@culturednyc @sidereal @grimalkina
Same for guitar nuts and bridges.
@sidereal @grimalkina Same here! As soon as I read your post it, it made perfect sense. I already knew everything I needed to know to understand it. But I NEVER would have come up with that idea on my own.
@sidereal @grimalkina I learned this from the luthier in my neighborhood: you can put some graphite in the little divots in the nut of a stringed instrument (the part that sticks up as the "zeroth" fret) and that makes tuning less "sticky" (strings much less likely to get stuck and then jump out of tune unexpectedly)
thanks for making me think about metacognition today!
@grimalkina "I think if I do this then this will happen, but I'm not sure why" is a thought that has kept me out of so much trouble."
Aug 22, 2026, 5:49 PM@grimalkina I have heard it said a few places that the key to truly understanding a complex thing is being able to explain its properties in a way that someone else can understand with no previous familiarity with it. Would you agree or disagree with this? I kind of feel like being able to break things down in that way is in and of itself a skill, so I'm not convinced the relationship is causal in that way (although I do think it is a good idea and a riggorous method to apply to yourself!)
@prism I think that's probably a very strong signal of understanding when you see it but not perfect in that it probably is conditional on some other things, like verbal and social skills! So not every case where you don't see it means understanding is lacking. So kind of a specificity vs sensitivity question there
@grimalkina @prism great question. Cat, you’re amazing. Thanks for your work. More wisdom of the elders being proven true.
I'll add that a great way to learn something deeply is to explain it to a newcomer, or prepare to do so, or rehearse doing so. When preparing to teach you often hit those "how does that work again" or "hmm, I know that part but never even considered that other part..."
Plus the whole "what has somebody else found out since I learned this" rathole to research down.
@grimalkina assuming this is about software I've always found "how do you fix a stuck zipper" more valuable knowledge than how a zipper works.
@deech one can be conditional on the other though!
@grimalkina
Can we also use this to build empathy with those who *are* experts in the zippers that we don't understand, so that we can trust their judgement?
@StompyRobot I would think absolutely!!
@grimalkina @StompyRobot And also for the zipper experts to understand that the rest of us don't need to know exactly how zippers work in order to use them - they just work well enough that we can use them. This is a comment on computing ...
@grimalkina I'm currently reading your book, stumbled upon this thread, didn't look at the author and was like »huh people are really interested in the psychology of how people work and learn these days, nice«
Aug 22, 2026, 6:37 PMin re zippers: been studying interwar sewing books, especially 1920s, exactly because they DO NOT deal with zippers. they weren't cheap until after WW2.
the zippered bomber jackets of WW1 were expensive to make at home. it’s why they became a status symbol among the moneyed classes.
on the other hand, after WW2 they were cheap army surplus. hence the 1950s poverty coda of the leather jacket, tshirt & jeans ―which, as cheap surplus clothes, didn't have zippers yet.
so zippers…
Aug 22, 2026, 6:47 PMso zippers are really interesting as something people take for granted in clothes but they weren't always there.
it’s why i wanted to study the logic of crafting pants in a zipperless world.
well, for starters, pants aren’t trousers because pants are held up by a belt whereas trousers are held up by a fly.
a zipperless world forces you to fit the pants with just enough ease to keep the pants up without a belt or with an open fly.
it’s technique over tech. /🧵
I think I was about 12 when I got my first pair with a zip. Buttons before that.
Mid 1960s England.
Neat. I just happened to run through a video about the history of zippers. I wish I could remember the link.
They were also seen as a status symbol and represented the future.
So interestingly, even when Germany (I think it was Germany) was rationing materials, they wouldn't ration materials to make zippers because they didn't want to admit they couldn't afford this modern connector!
Aug 23, 2026, 4:33 PM@jmcrookston @grimalkina fascinating! thank you.
Aug 22, 2026, 6:53 PM@grimalkina there was an article I read on this long ago that I can no longer find that talked about how your grandma's recipes are simple, but you can't make them because of the context she left out. She was an expert and wrote down the details she needed to remember the recipe, but not enough that a novice could make it. Then it compared the differences in what would need to be said for the levels of expertise. Really made it hit home for me. Wish I could find the article again.
Take 3 eggs and 1 pound of fujulicated flower.
Persertrate until you reach mildly furnacious consistency influkting raisins with vigour!
Place in an oven preheated to molfious temperature and bake until shanpy !
Enjoy!
@ted @grimalkina Old recipe books also use weird non-convertible units, like "take a ha'penny's worth of flour". A cookbook my mother had just said "eggs", not specifying yolks, white or both. It was presumably obvious to the author which you would use in any given recipe.
"I taught them everything they know, but I didn't teach them everything *I* know..."
Then there is a meta-problem with some recipes - actually being able to read them. I have an Austrian cookbook from the early 1900s (I think - can't find it to check) typeset in Germanic script, Fraktur. It is well-nigh unreadable without practice even though all the actual words are pretty much normal modern German words. I guess some old English-language cookbooks would have used old typefaces too (though not Fraktur, it was a German thing).
@grimalkina
Delightful thread, thank you!
I could explain all of the examples you gave, but for many years I was an apprentice and then an instrument technician, so got a ton of insight into how stuff works - BUT dig a little deeper and there are always more layers and interconnected systems that are familiar by mysterious
@grimalkina no, right, it's not possible to learn everything along with how to explain it, not all that useful to, shouldn't be the goal, shouldn't be a thing people have to do to solve social problems, and all that
nonetheless, it's fun and we've spent our whole life trying ><
Aug 22, 2026, 8:34 PM@grimalkina I fear this may be a worldview issue*, but as a (lapsed) physicist my natural bent is to apply methods and processes to develop a hierarchies of abstraction and detailed to describe and model the physical world.
For example, with zippers and crossbows, even with limited prior knowledge. Albeit this works better than politics or literature,
* or it could just be XKCD #793
Aug 22, 2026, 8:37 PM@grimalkina (as in "liberal arts majors may be annoying, but there is no nothing more obnoxious than a physicist encountering a new subject...")
@grimalkina
I just bought your book and I'm excited to read it!
Remembering how someone used a similar technique against the climate denialist claim that it is not humans but undersea volcanoes that cause the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 'Okay, but we know how much fossil fuels the countries of the world are burning, and how much CO2 is released in the process. Where does that all go?' Now we are talking numbers, and models, and there is just no consistent way to make it work where the human CO2 all goes 'somewhere else' (ocean? Vegetation? Rock weathering?) while only the volcanic CO2 collects in the atmosphere...
Aug 22, 2026, 10:19 PM
@grimalkina Very interesting thread, I've just ordered your book. Have you ever read "A Theory of System Justification" by John Jost? If not I feel it might be of interest.
@grimalkina reading the study, I have some questions. The definition of "extreme" used is is how far from neither supporting nor opposing a policy someone is, but this isn't how we typically use that descriptor in the world! Strongly opposing a genuinely extremist policy like a nationwide flat tax (one of the policies actually used in the study) isn't an extreme position, it's normal! Further, it's not clear how they got to some of the conclusions from their results. They say that asking for a mechanistic explanation "leads people to endorse more moderate positions," but I don't see where that happened in the experiments. Participants became less certain in their positions, but that's not the same as endorsing moderate ones. I think the conflation being made here between "moderation" and "uncertainty" is only useful for the purpose of the kind of technocratic attitudes which were popular in government when the study was published. They kind of lay their cards on the table early on with the two quotes denigrating having strong beliefs at all (and this was after Eastwood talked to a piece of furniture at the 2012 RNC!)
@jy4m I think you're misreading a bit, for instance the claim is that the position (on the same policy) becomes more moderate as an endorsement not that it switched to a different topic
@jy4m as a beliefs formation researcher myself, you're making some leaps here. We use these terms like "extreme" as a relative term to the distribution of positions
@jy4m the difference is primarily interesting *within belief*, not *between belief,* as in the up thread causal reasoning study I linked, it's interesting to see people modify their own beliefs and modify their own confidence in those beliefs *within position*
@grimalkina no I understood that part. The distinction I'm trying to draw here is between someone saying "I don't know" about a policy and someone saying "I do know that the truth is in the middle," which is what I would normally take endorsement to mean. Someone who has been convinced that they don't fully understand something so abandons belief is only endorsing another position insofar as they've been convinced to relinquish the right to hold a position on the issue, which I don't see as necessarily positive. And I of course can't object to the special usage of terms within a field, but once I translate that into the usual usage, it significantly alters the conclusion drawn (i.e. people asked to explain how their policy positions would work can be cowed into having less of a position, even if the question is whether a radical change should be implemented NOT that deeply held extreme viewpoints become deeply held moderate viewpoints when people confront their own ignorance).
@jy4m ok! You're allowed to decide you don't like or find this study convincing but please leave me alone about it
I wouldnt think “what are the zippers” first but “which zippers keep breaking”
Then you have zipper things to learn
How fix?
What kinds?
Expected failures?
Zipper alternatives?
Am trying to phrase the metacognition of “notice where you keep patching your beliefs”
Probably it’s in your book!
@clew I think we might call that interventionist thinking! A classically important way that we build causal models in our thinking!
Aug 22, 2026, 6:30 PM@grimalkina this works for processses, too! Bureaucracy is an invention, and as mad as it is, it had a function, or intended function, at some point, and that became frustrated because of observable things!