Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid noticed something his contemporaries missed: most reasoning errors don't happen at the point of conclusion — they happen at the point of framing, when we silently decide what kind of problem we're holding. He called the unexamined starting categories 'common sense principles,' and argued they do more work than all the logic layered on top of them. For investors and decision-makers, this maps onto something uncomfortable: we spend enormous energy refining our analytical methods while leaving the initial categorization — 'is this a risk problem or an uncertainty problem?', 'is this a valuation question or a narrative question?' — almost completely unexamined. The quality of your second-level thinking is capped by the accuracy of your first-level framing. A sophisticated model applied to a misclassified problem doesn't produce sophisticated output; it produces confident nonsense. Today, before you analyze anything, try naming the category of problem you think you have — then ask whether that categorization is earned or just inherited from habit.

In the last 48 hours, when did you categorize a problem before you'd actually examined it — and what did that categorization quietly rule out?

Drawing from Scottish Common Sense Philosophy — Thomas Reid