James Parris

Ideas

These are working claims, not settled findings — each one earned in practice, stated as sharply as I can, with what would change my mind. That's also how I keep them honest.

  1. Experts teach the description

    The expert teaches a vague self-description of their skill, students fail, and the expert concludes the students are the problem.

  2. The double translation problem

    Extracting a pattern from a master is only half the job; the other half is encoding it so a learner can recognise their own correct execution.

  3. Elicit, don't just ingest

    Second brains fail because nobody interviews the owner; the most valuable knowledge was never in a document.

  4. Courses fail without extraction

    The sell-a-course industry skips the one step that determines whether a course works, and the market is running on the failure of its own products.

  5. Choking is a system jam, not a character flaw

    Pressure makes performers consciously unpick a process that only worked because nobody was managing it.