Nāgārjuna, the second-century Buddhist logician, demonstrated that any system of concepts becomes self-undermining the moment you treat it as foundational — a move he called prasanga, showing that a framework collapses when you follow its own logic to the edge. Most technology builders never reach that edge. They inherit abstractions — 'user', 'engagement', 'growth' — and optimize inside them without noticing that the abstraction is already doing half the thinking. The danger isn't bad data or flawed algorithms. It's that the conceptual vocabulary you chose in 2019 to describe your product is now generating your strategy in 2026, like a river that has cut so deep it can no longer change course. Nāgārjuna's practical move was to hold concepts as provisional tools rather than descriptions of reality — useful precisely because you know they will eventually fail, which means you keep watching for the failure. For technology work, this looks like a simple but rare discipline: periodically treating your core product vocabulary as a hypothesis, not a given, and asking which user behaviors you are currently unable to even name because your conceptual system has no slot for them.

Name the one word your team uses most confidently about your users or your technology — then describe a behavior you've observed recently that that word cannot capture.

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy — Nāgārjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, c. 150 CE)