The Confucian scholar Xunzi had a strange obsession with ritual — not as religious performance, but as a technology for reshaping who you are. His insight: the categories you habitually use don't just describe your world, they train your attention to carve it that way. Every mental model you carry is like a groove worn into a path; the more you walk it, the more invisible the terrain beside it becomes. What Xunzi called 'rectification of names' (zhengming) was partly about this — bad categories don't just mislead you, they make you functionally blind to whatever doesn't fit them. This connects surprisingly well to what cognitive scientist Eleanor Rosch found in her prototype theory: we don't sort experience into neat logical boxes, we sort it by resemblance to a mental 'best example,' and that prototype is shaped by what we've been trained to notice. The practical edge: the mental model you reach for first on a Sunday isn't neutral. It's a habit. The question is whether the habit was chosen or inherited.

In the last 48 hours, what did you explain to yourself or someone else using a framework you've never seriously questioned — and what might have been invisible inside that explanation?

Drawing from Confucianism / Cognitive Science — Xunzi (Xunzi, ch. 22: 'Rectifying Names') and Eleanor Rosch (prototype theory, synthesized)