About

Essential Concepts is a curated vocabulary of 158 named patterns — feedback loops, antifragility, Goodhart's law, opportunity cost — written as refined long-form articles and cross-linked by a hand-curated concept graph.

The organizing idea: you cannot recognize a pattern you cannot name. Most of these patterns were discovered independently by several fields, each under its own vocabulary — what a physiologist calls homeostasis, an engineer calls control theory and an investor calls reflexivity. This site treats those names as aliases of one concept, so you can arrive with your field's word and leave with the pattern itself.

It is one component of a broader effort, Reignite the Enlightenment — a better UI/UX for thinking, for the LLM age. Where this site restores the vocabulary (you cannot recognize a pattern you cannot name), its sibling projects restore the other lost tools: the Enlightenment Toolkit holds the moves, and Battle of Ideas is the arena — where contested claims meet their strongest steelmanned arguments on each side. The concepts defined here (see Steelmanning and Red Team / Blue Team) are the named moves that arena runs on.

Each article aims to be worth re-reading: a concrete opening case, the mechanism, examples across scales, where the concept breaks down, and its connections. Articles are educational, not consultative — they teach how to think, never what to decide.

Use it with your LLM. Every concept is also served as clean markdown (add .md to any concept URL, or start at llms.txt). Paste an article into a conversation and ask the model to apply the pattern to your situation.

Written and curated by Nicolai Johannesen. Site v0.1.0.