Views that disagree with the received one, and why they might be right.
Ask how a business escapes competition before asking how large its market is.
Venture and growth interviews, any moat discussion, and any pitch that leads with market size.
From Zero to One · Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Judge a design by how much a reader must understand to change it safely, and prefer deep modules behind small interfaces.
Code review, design discussions, and software engineering interviews that ask what good code is.
From A Philosophy of Software Design · John Ousterhout
Cost discipline has a limit, and the cost of crossing it arrives years after the reward for approaching it.
Any capital allocation discussion where the case for cuts and buybacks seems unanswerable, and any post-mortem on an engineering or safety failure.
From Downfall: The Case Against Boeing · 2022
Ask how many people ran the same method and are not in the sample before treating a record as evidence of skill.
Reading any success memoir, evaluating a manager's record, or presenting your own.
From How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market · Nicolas Darvas
Measure risk as the chance of ending the holding period with less buying power, which makes volatile productive assets safer than stable unproductive ones.
Any debate about what risk means, portfolio construction over long horizons, and questions about gold or cash as safe assets.
From Berkshire Hathaway's 2011 letter to shareholders · Warren Buffett