Whitestone Therapy

  Distance & Certainty... I sit with people for a living. An hour at a time, several times a day, listening to the inside of someone’s life. Selecting one day from last week, I had conversations about a marriage that is failing but might not be, another about a big decision that looks obvious from the outside but is not obvious at all once you are close enough to see what it would cost, and a parent who loves their child and is also, in ways they are only beginning to understand, making things worse for their child.  None of these situations have clean or simple answers. What they do have are trade-offs, and those trade-offs have serious costs, and sitting with that weight without rushing to resolve it is actually most of what I do. When finished, like millions of others, I'll probably plonk down in a chair and open my phone at some point. And there (on X) I invariably read someone explaining with complete confidence what people in these kinds of situations  should...

  Conviction Cascades...(1.5.26) 1 May 2026 | 2026 posts Why people adopt beliefs without evidence or persuasion    I recently came across a Substack piece called "Why Did Everyone Go Crazy All At Once?" It was asking the same kinds of questions I have spent the best part of two years trying to answer: how do ideas that most people privately find implausible come to dominate the professional classes, seemingly overnight, and with so little resistance? His answer involves a concept called preference falsification, an idea from the economist Timur Kuran that has had a moment lately, particularly since Marc Andreessen started tweeting about it after the 2024 US election. The basic claim is elegant: people hide their real views under social pressure, and when the pressure lifts, the truth comes flooding out. A preference cascade. I think that is partly right, but it is not complete. It misses important parts of the mechanism. Kuran's framework goes like this. People have priv...