The Less Crazy Manifesto

People aren’t crazy.

The world has simply become harder to navigate.

Information moves faster than our ability to process it. Technology evolves faster than institutions can adapt. Systems compete for attention, not understanding.

The result is predictable.

People feel lost. Untethered. Confused. Sometimes angry.

Not because they are broken.

Because the environment is overwhelming.

The Signal Problem

Human beings evolved to process small groups, direct conversations, and tangible problems.

The modern environment is something else entirely.

Every day we encounter thousands of messages, competing narratives, constant alerts, systems demanding attention.

The signal-to-noise ratio collapses.

When that happens, decision-making collapses with it.

People begin to rely on shortcuts:

A or B
Yes or No
Us or Them

This isn’t stupidity. It’s cognitive overload.

Structural Confusion

Much of the modern world is built to maximize engagement, not clarity.

Algorithms reward attention. Platforms reward outrage. Institutions reward complexity.

When systems become opaque, people lose trust in them.

When people lose trust, they become angry.

When anger replaces understanding, societies fracture.

The Response

The answer is not to remove complexity.

The world is complex.

The answer is to build systems that make complexity legible.

Systems that help people understand problems, see tradeoffs, make decisions, and act with confidence.

Clarity restores agency.

Engineering for Sanity

This idea applies everywhere. In technology. In organizations. In public life.

Good systems reduce chaos. Bad systems amplify it.

When systems are designed well:

confusion → structure → clarity

When systems are designed poorly:

complexity → noise → frustration

Engineering, at its best, exists to push systems toward the first path.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A software team builds a feature. They write code, make architecture decisions, create documentation. The knowledge exists —in git commits, in markdown files, in session logs.

But the people who need to understand that work —stakeholders, partners, investors, customers —don’t read repos. They don’t open markdown files. They don’t dig through commit history.

Documentation that nobody reads is documentation that doesn’t exist.

Sending someone a website doesn’t fix their problem. Sending them only the information that is relevant to them, in a format they can consume, does. The investor doesn’t need the ADR. The customer doesn’t need the sprint report. Each one needs a different slice of the same knowledge, shaped for how they’ll actually use it.

Knowledge (exists) → Relevant slice (extracted) → Consumable format (delivered) → Understanding (achieved)

Today, a shareable page takes 10-20 minutes to build. A cleaned meeting transcript with summary and action items takes 5 minutes and could be automated. But the format is not the point. The principle is.

The same knowledge that produces a web page could produce:

A spoken-word summary —a 3-minute audio brief someone listens to on their commute
A trained chatbot —an interface where the recipient asks questions and gets answers grounded in the actual source material
A push notification with context —status delivered to the person who needs it, instead of a dashboard they have to remember to check

The knowledge already exists. The gap is always distribution. The format should match how the recipient consumes information, not how the creator prefers to produce it.

The Multiplier

When you make information legible, behavior changes.

A partner understands your capabilities before a call. They ask better questions. The meeting is productive instead of introductory.
An investor understands what shipped without scheduling a call. Trust builds without overhead.
A team member knows what changed and why. Alignment happens without a standup.

This isn’t magic. It’s reducing friction between knowledge and the people who need it. The medium doesn’t matter. What matters is that the right information reaches the right person in a form they’ll actually absorb.

Small improvements compound.

The Goal

We are not trying to fix the entire world. That would be unrealistic.

But we can make things a little less crazy.

And sometimes that’s enough to help people find their footing again.

People aren’t crazy.

The world is.

Let’s make it a little less crazy.