Open Hypotheses

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.

Human Behavior

• The Curiosity Plateau: People's willingness to learn new things peaks in their late twenties and then gradually declines, independent of cognitive ability
• Complexity Preference Inversion: As people become experts in a field, they increasingly prefer simple solutions, while novices are attracted to complex ones
• Social Proof Delay: The influence of social proof on behavior has a lag time that varies predictably based on the domain and individual traits

Technology & Society

• The Interface Sophistication Cycle: User interfaces alternate between periods of increasing complexity (adding features) and simplification (removing them) in roughly 7-year cycles
• Digital Tool Abandonment Pattern: People stop using digital tools not when they find better alternatives, but when the tools become "too helpful" and reduce their sense of agency
• Remote Work Equilibrium: Fully remote teams naturally settle into communication patterns that mirror the timezone distribution of their members

Learning & Creativity

• The Explanation Test: The best way to determine if you understand something is to try explaining it to someone who knows nothing about the topic
• Creative Constraint Optimization: There's an optimal level of constraint that maximizes creative output—too few constraints lead to paralysis, too many lead to mechanical execution
• Knowledge Half-Life Variation: Different types of knowledge decay at predictable rates based on how abstract they are

Economic Behavior

• The Overhead Paradox: Organizations naturally develop overhead that exactly consumes any efficiency gains from new tools or processes
• Value Perception Lag: People consistently undervalue things they get for free and overvalue things they pay for, even when controlling for actual utility
• Decision Fatigue Threshold: The quality of decisions degrades predictably after making approximately 35-40 decisions in a day

Personal Development

• Skill Transfer Asymmetry: Skills transfer from technical domains to creative domains more easily than the reverse
• Habit Formation Interference: Trying to establish more than 2-3 new habits simultaneously reduces the success rate of all of them
• Identity Lag Theory: People's self-concept updates about 6-18 months behind their actual behavior changes

Each hypothesis could become a research project. Some might be wrong, but wrong in interesting ways.