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An economic moat is a structural barrier that allows a business to resist the natural forces of competition. In a standard market, high profits act as a signal for other companies to enter, replicate products, and drive prices down—a process that eventually erodes a company's ability to generate wealth. A moat interrupts this cycle by making it difficult or expensive for competitors to take market share, enabling the business to perpetuate its earnings and survive far into the future.Because these barriers exist, the company does not have to constantly reinvent its core model to survive. Instead, it can rely on its established position to maintain a steady output of value. This structural durability makes the business's long-term trajectory more stable and less prone to the sudden decay that typical firms face when a new rival appears.

One of the most enduring forms of a moat is Brand Power, where a name creates such high consumer trust or habit that people are unwilling to switch to a cheaper alternative. Coca-Cola provides a classic example of this; it has spent over a century building a brand that occupies a unique "real estate" in the consumer's mind, allowing it to sell what is essentially a commodity with much higher margins than generic competitors. Similarly, Scale and Cost Advantages occur when a company grows so large that it can deliver services at a cost that smaller rivals simply cannot match. Amazon utilises its massive logistics network and volume to offer prices and delivery speeds that would be financially ruinous for a smaller retailer to attempt.

Other businesses perpetuate themselves through Network Effects, where a service becomes more valuable as more people use it. Instagram is a prime example of this dynamic; the platform's primary value to a user is the presence of their friends and family, which means a new competitor cannot simply offer a better interface to win—they would need to move the entire social circle simultaneously. This is often paired with High Switching Costs, which make it too painful for a customer to move to a competitor. Apple provides a masterclass in this with its "walled garden," an ecosystem where its hardware, software, and services (like iMessage, iCloud, and the App Store) are designed to work harmoniously together but intentionally difficult to use with outside devices. Once a user has invested in the apps, storage, and accessories within this garden, the cost of leaving—not just in money, but in time and frustration—creates a barrier that preserves the company's customer base. Each of these moats serves to insulate the business from the "mean reversion" that typically forces profits toward zero, making the long-term outcome of the business more a matter of its internal nature than of market dynamics.

#3964·Benjamin DaviesOP, 10 days ago

I don't like shorting.

When you buy a stock, the most you can lose is 100% of your investment, but your potential gain is infinite. When you short a stock, your maximum profit is capped at 100% (if the company goes bankrupt), but your potential loss is mathematically infinite because there is no limit to how high a stock price can climb. This creates a "bad bet" where you risk everything for a relatively small reward.

Shorting is also a battle against time. To succeed, you must be right about a company’s failure and the exact timing of the market's reaction, all while paying interest on the shares you borrowed. Instead of fighting the natural upward trend of human progress and productivity, it is far more rational to invest in "compounding machines"—high-quality businesses that grow in value over the long term. This allows time to work in your favor rather than against you.

#3963·Benjamin DaviesOP, 10 days ago

Markets are made up of fallible people and are often wrong, sometimes wildly wrong about what an asset is worth. A good investment often involves reading the situation better than other market participants and going against the tide.

#3962·Benjamin DaviesOP, 10 days ago

The market often makes silly mistakes:

In 2021, Elon Musk tweeted "Use Signal" (referring to the private messaging app). Investors rushed into Signal Advance, an obscure medical device company, causing its stock to surge from around $0.60 to over $70 in days. The messaging app isn't even a public company.

#3961·Benjamin DaviesOP, 10 days ago

Focus is usually defined in coercive terms—working without distraction or despite it. This framing sneaks discipline in through the side door.

• Deep Work: Focus is the ability to concentrate on cognitively demanding tasks without distraction.
• Indistractable: Focus is doing what you intend to do despite internal and external distractions.
• Hyperfocus: Focus is intentionally directing attention while deliberately ignoring everything else.

What all of these share is the assumption that focus is valuable because it resists distraction. Distraction is treated as interference to be pushed aside.

I think this coercive component should be removed. At the same time, empirical experience makes it clear that people do differ in their ability to stay engaged—and that this ability can be trained. So something real is being gestured at, but mischaracterized.

Here is my Deutsch-compatible explanation of it:

Focus is the stickiness of engagement with a chosen problem.
It is not about heroic self-control—suppressing distractions or forcefully pushing competing thoughts away—but about how reliably engagement sustains itself without requiring repeated creative intervention. Creativity enables intentional action; focus determines how often that intentionality needs to be actively renewed.
When focus is weak, engagement is fragile. Minor distractions, impulses, or shifts in attention repeatedly pull us away, forcing creativity to be spent again and again just to re-establish intentional direction.
When focus is strong, engagement is stickier. The threshold for a distraction to take hold is higher. Distractions still occur, but they are rarer. And when they do arise, they are less disruptive, because our sticky focus allows us to handle them using sound judgment rather than succumbing to poor judgment.
Focus is a capacity we can train like any other skill. Periods of sustained engagement stretch that capacity, and—when followed by adequate recovery—our ability to stay engaged grows stronger

This reframing preserves what the popular literature gets right—that sustained attention exists and matters—while rejecting its coercive foundation. It replaces self-war with problem-solving, and willpower myths with creativity and judgment.

I would love to hear criticisms of this theory of focus. It is a core part of my book and, I believe, a necessary incorporation into a Deutschian / TCS view of the mind—one that fully addresses and refutes the popular focus literature referenced above.

#3868·Edwin de WitOP revised 19 days ago

There’s still an issue on ideas#show. When an idea has nothing but a code block, there’s too much of a margin at the bottom, between the block and the border of the highlight.

#3953·Dennis HackethalOP, 13 days ago

There’s still an issue on ideas#show. When an idea has nothing but a code block, there’s too much of a margin at the bottom, between the block and the border of the highlight.

#3953·Dennis HackethalOP, 13 days ago

Done as of cc1ab95.

Ruby example:

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ruby

def criticized? idea
  pending_criticisms(idea).any?
end

def pending_criticisms idea
  criticisms(idea).filter { |c| pending_criticisms(c).none? }
end

def criticisms idea
  children(idea).filter(&:criticism?)
end

JS example (h/t ChatGPT):

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javascript

function criticized(idea) {
  return pendingCriticisms(idea).length > 0;
}

function pendingCriticisms(idea) {
  return criticisms(idea).filter(c => pendingCriticisms(c).length === 0);
}

function criticisms(idea) {
  return children(idea).filter(c => c.isCriticism);
}

#3951·Dennis HackethalOP, 13 days ago

Code blocks need syntax highlighting.

Veritula used to have this feature but I removed it when diffing changed.

#3950·Dennis HackethalOP, 13 days ago

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const posts = [
  {id: 1, title: "Understanding JavaScript Closures in Depth", url: "https://example.com/articles/javascript-closures-deep-dive"},
  {id: 2, title: "A Complete Guide to Modern Web Development Practices", url: "https://example.com/articles/modern-web-dev-guide"},
  {id: 3, title: "Exploring the Node.js Event Loop and Async Patterns", url: "https://example.com/articles/nodejs-event-loop"}
];

function formatPost(post) {
  return `${post.id}: ${post.title} -> ${post.url}`;
}

function prettyPrint(posts) {
  return posts.map(formatPost).join(" | ");
}

console.log(prettyPrint(posts));

Code blocks need syntax highlighting.

Veritula used to have this feature but I removed it when diffing changed.

#3950·Dennis HackethalOP, 13 days ago

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def criticized? idea
  pending_criticisms(idea).any?
end

def pending_criticisms idea
  criticisms(idea).filter { |c| pending_criticisms(c).none? }
end

def criticisms idea
  children(idea).filter(&:criticism?)
end

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function criticized(idea) {
  return pendingCriticisms(idea).length > 0;
}

function pendingCriticisms(idea) {
  return criticisms(idea).filter(c => pendingCriticisms(c).length === 0);
}

function criticisms(idea) {
  return children(idea).filter(c => c.isCriticism);
}

Summary

People are losing their ability to think and act on principles. But they need principles to set long-range goals and make decisions. Without them, people become their own destroyers. Modern philosophy is to blame because it attacks reason.

To stop this suicidal trend, we need to understand the following rules about principles and the relationship between principles and goals:

First, when two men or groups are in conflict while having the same basic principles, the more consistent one will win.

Since they are in conflict, at least one of them must be inconsistent. So the one with the clearer vision of his goal, who more consistently works toward it, will win. The less consistent one just hastens his adversary’s victory and becomes weaker in the process.

This dynamic applies regardless of the merits of their shared principles.

Example: republicans vs democrats. Both agree that the government should interfere with the economy. They just disagree on implementation details. Democrats are more consistently committed to growing government power; the republicans just end up “me-too’ing” them. Recent example.

As a result, government control has been growing over the decades. It will continue to grow until the communists replace socialists and ‘achieve’ “universal immolation”.

This trend can seem inevitable. Some people mistake it for historicism, but it can be reversed by a change of basic principles.

Second, when two men or groups collaborate while having different basic principles, the more evil or irrational one will win.

Mixing opposing basic principles favors bad ones and drives out the good ones. “What is the moral status of an honest man who steals once in a while?”

When good and evil collaborate, it hurts good and helps evil. The good has nothing to gain from evil, while evil stands to gain everything from the good.

Example: collaboration between an honest businessman and a swindler. The swindler does not contribute to the success of the business; the honest man’s reputation ends up luring in more victims than the swindler could have fooled on his own.

Another example: membership of the Soviet Union in the UN. The resulting collaboration between the West and the Soviet Union gave the latter unearned respect, moral sanction, and access to resources. As a result, the Western world has been swallowed by “cynicism, bitterness, hopelessness, fear and nameless guilt…”

Third, defining opposite basic principles clearly and openly helps rationality; hiding or evading them helps irrationality.

The rational side of a conflict wants to be understood. It’s in harmony with reality, so it has nothing to hide. But the irrational side “has to deceive, to confuse, to evade, to hide its goals.”

The good, the rational must be actively upheld; the bad, the irrational is achieved only by default, by not acting. Construction is hard; destruction is easy.

Lessons

1. Adhere to your principles with consistency.

2. Never mix opposing basic principles! Leave irrational/evil people to the consequences of their errors.

3. Be open and transparent; don’t hide things.

#3947·Dennis HackethalOP revised 14 days ago

Summary

People are losing their ability to think and act on principles. But they need principles to set long-range goals and make decisions. Without them, people become their own destroyers. Modern philosophy is to blame because it attacks reason.

To stop this suicidal trend, we need to understand the following rules about principles and the relationship between principles and goals:

First, when two men or groups are in conflict while having the same basic principles, the more consistent one will win.

Since they are in conflict, at least one of them must be inconsistent. So the one with the clearer vision of his goal, who more consistently works toward it, will win. The less consistent one just hastens his adversary’s victory and becomes weaker in the process.

This dynamic applies regardless of the merits of their shared principles.

Example: republicans vs democrats. Both agree that the government should interfere with the economy. They just disagree on implementation details. Democrats are more consistently committed to growing government power; the republicans just end up “me-too’ing” them. Recent example.

As a result, government control has been growing over the decades. It will continue to grow until the communists replace socialists and ‘achieve’ “universal immolation”.

This trend can seem inevitable. Some people mistake it for historicism, but it can be reversed by a change of basic principles.

Second, when two men or groups collaborate while having different basic principles, the more evil or irrational one will win.

Mixing opposing basic principles favors bad ones and drives out the good ones. “What is the moral status of an honest man who steals once in a while?”

When good and evil collaborate, it hurts good and helps evil. The good has nothing to gain from evil, while evil stands to gain everything from the good.

Example: collaboration between an honest businessman and a swindler. The swindler does not contribute to the success of the business; the honest man’s reputation ends up luring in more victims than the swindler could have fooled on his own.

Another example: membership of the Soviet Union in the UN. The resulting collaboration between the West and the Soviet Union gave the latter unearned respect, moral sanction, and access to resources. As a result, the Western world has been swallowed by “cynicism, bitterness, hopelessness, fear and nameless guilt…”

Third, defining opposite basic principles clearly and openly helps rationality; hiding or evading them helps irrationality.

The rational side of a conflict wants to be understood. It’s in harmony with reality, so it has nothing to hide. But the irrational side “has to deceive, to confuse, to evade, to hide its goals.”

The good, the rational must be actively upheld; the bad, the irrational is achieved only by default, by not acting. Construction is hard; destruction is easy.

Lessons

Adhere to your principles with consistency.

Never mix opposing basic principles! Leave irrational/evil people to the consequences of their errors.

Be open and transparent; don’t hide things.

#3944·Dennis HackethalOP revised 14 days ago

Did you mean to criticize #733 instead?

#3930·Dennis HackethalOP, 17 days ago

How is this theory new?

#733·Dennis HackethalOP, over 1 year ago