Logic and imagination over accumulated references

I’d rather reason a problem out from first principles than reach for what’s already been said about it. That’s not a rejection of other people’s thinking — it’s a preference for arriving at a position I could rebuild from scratch, instead of one I’m just borrowing the authority of.

The distinction shows up most in how I read. Reading, for me, is for inhabiting a perspective — trying it on, seeing where it holds — not for extracting a lesson to repeat later in a meeting. A “lesson” collected that way is rarely load-bearing; it’s decoration that happens to sound smart until someone asks a follow-up question.

This is open to revision, same as everything else here. If the evidence changes, so does the position. What doesn’t change is the preference for having actually done the reasoning myself.