The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides argued that most of our errors aren't failures of intelligence — they're failures of *category*. In his 'Guide for the Perplexed,' he described how people get trapped by language that smuggles in false assumptions, treating words as if they carve nature at its actual joints. Pair that with George Kelly's 'personal construct theory' from 1950s psychology: Kelly found that people don't see the world directly, they see it through a lattice of inherited bipolar constructs — fast/slow, strong/weak, success/failure — and those constructs were mostly handed to them by someone else. The practical edge here is sharp: the mental categories you use most confidently are often the ones most worth interrogating, precisely because confidence signals adoption rather than examination. This Saturday, pick one pair of opposites you use constantly — productive/unproductive, important/trivial — and ask whether that binary is actually doing your thinking for you.

Name a binary distinction you applied this week — a person, task, or idea filed under one label versus another. Who taught you that particular dividing line?

Drawing from Jewish Philosophy / Constructivist Psychology — Moses Maimonides (Guide for the Perplexed) and George Kelly (Personal Construct Theory, synthesized)