Personal development

 You know the story. You admire its elegance. You have probably retold it at a dinner party. And yet, today — almost certainly this very hour — you are repeating the exact error it was designed to prevent. This is an essay about why that happens, and what, if anything, can be done about it.

I. A Hungarian Mathematician Steps Into the Room

It is 1943. The United States Army Air Forces are losing bombers over occupied Europe at a rate that is becoming strategically untenable. The planes return — or rather, some of them do — pockmarked with bullet holes clustered along the fuselage, the wings, the tail sections. The cockpits and engines, by contrast, appear relatively unscathed. The obvious conclusion, the one reached by men of evident competence and reasonable intelligence, is to reinforce the areas under fire: bolt extra plating to the wings, add armour to the fuselage, protect the places that the data show are most vulnerable.

Then Abraham Wald walks in.

Wald is a Hungarian-Jewish mathematician who fled Austria in 1938 after the Nazi annexation — an act of exile that saved his life, given that almost his entire family would perish in the Holocaust. By 1943 he is a member of the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University, a wartime body tasked with applying mathematical rigour to military problems. He is so trusted, and his work so sensitive, that his secretaries had to physically remove notepaper from his hands the moment he finished writing — he lacked the security clearance to read back his own classified analyses. As Jordan Ellenberg recounts in How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (2014), there was a running joke in the Statistical Research Group about Wald's Kafkaesque situation: the man solving the problem was not permitted to know the solution.

What Wald tells the officers is this: armour the engines. Armour the cockpit. Reinforce precisely the areas showing the least damage.

The reasoning is as simple as it is devastating. The planes they are examining are the ones that came back. The bullet holes visible on those fuselages are not a map of danger; they are a map of survivability. The aircraft hit in the engines and the cockpit are not on the tarmac because they never returned. They are scattered across fields in France and Germany, unreachable and uncounted. The data set before the officers is not a sample of all planes hit by enemy fire. It is a sample, systematically biassed, of planes resilient enough to absorb damage in non-critical zones and still limp home.

The absence of bullet holes on the engines is not a sign that the engines were protected. It is a sign that planes struck in the engines did not survive to be counted.

Wald's original 1943 memorandum, "A Method of Estimating Plane Vulnerability Based on Damage of Survivors," was classified and circulated only internally. It was not published in the open literature until 1981, when the Center for Naval Analyses released it. By then, the insight it contained had migrated from military statistics into economics, finance, medicine, management theory, and psychology — becoming, arguably, one of the most consequential statistical ideas of the twentieth century.

And it has changed almost nothing about the way most people reason.

 This essay would not exist without a Facebook post by Cristian Stancescu, published on 24 July 2026, on Romania's Border Police Day.

The post was brief, direct, without literary pretension. Someone had rung him that morning, whilst he was savouring his coffee. Come to the pitch, we've gathered for a kick-about. When he arrived, the teams were already warming up. Former colleagues from the Botoșani Border Police had organised a tournament. A fishing competition, football, chess, backgammon, tennis. It was lovely, a moment of stories, of "oh, what a team we had."

That was all.

But behind that oh, what a team we had lay something a Facebook post could not fully contain: the feeling of a man who looks at former colleagues and understands that his identity is larger than the function he once carried. That what remains after years of uniform and discipline is not nostalgia, but character.

That post was the spark. This text is the fire it lit.

A note for international readers: This essay grew out of a gathering held on Romania's Border Police Day — a national commemoration observed annually on 26 July. Former officers and current colleagues met on a football pitch in Botoșani, a city in north-eastern Romania, near the border with the Republic of Moldova. The event itself is incidental. What follows is not a report of that afternoon, but the essay it made possible.

Being a faithful and impartial account of the political anxieties of a country that had voted, forgotten it had voted, and was now being asked to vote again — with references to prior events and to devices that glow in the dark

Note. This text is an intentional fiction engaging with ideological and political concerns.Although it affects detachment, the tone is unmistakable: contempt for the current political class, for the "news" channels, for the "all-caps group chats," for the algorithms. The critique is partially warranted, but delivered in a manner that aspires to universality and ends up sounding rather like a disappointed grandfather holding forth — one who has, as he will tell you, seen it all before.

The citizen Gogonete Fănică, formerly a ticket inspector on the urban bus routes of Botoșani, retired on a second-grade locomotor disability pension acquired not in the line of duty but at a wedding in Cătămărești-Deal where he had danced too long and fallen into a ditch, was a man of exceptional goodwill and a profound understanding of public affairs, cultivated over the twenty-two years he had spent aboard the buses, where citizens speak freely because nobody of importance is watching.

On Gogonete Fănică's bedside table stood three objects: a glass of water, an agricultural almanac from 1987 which he had never read but kept out of respect for continuity, and a smartphone purchased for him by his son Cosmin from Italy, where Cosmin worked as a welder and sent money home with the regularity of a man who feels that filial duty can be discharged from a distance — perhaps more reliably than from close quarters. The smartphone was black, thin, and glowed in the dark with notifications about matters Gogonete Fănică had not requested and did not know how to stop.

Gogonete Fănică's grandfather, one Gogonete Haralambie, had lived in the same town forty years before his grandson and had possessed neither smartphone, agricultural almanac, nor glass of water on his bedside table, because the bedside table itself had been confiscated in 1940 along with the rest of the furniture by an administration whose reasons had never been fully explained, but which had produced the correct paperwork and two men in uniforms that looked official.

"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes." — Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)

A Letter Before We Begin

My son,

You will not read this today. You are probably scrolling. I know, because I can hear it — that particular silence you produce when the phone has you, the silence that is not rest but something more like suspension. The cat, Gri, hears it too. She curls up on the chair beside you and pretends not to notice, which is perhaps wiser than what I am about to attempt.

I am not angry. I am trying to understand something, and I think you might actually enjoy it if you give it half a chance.

Last week, I sat in front of my screen — as I do every day, because this is where my work lives — and I read something that made me laugh out loud. Cory Doctorow, an author and digital rights activist, described sitting on a panel in Toronto where the moderator called jailbreaking a smartphone "rampant theft of IP." Doctorow's jaw dropped. Mine very nearly did too, though I was alone in the room and there was only Gri to witness it.

I want to explain to you why that moment matters. Not because it is complicated, but because it is actually quite simple — and the simple things are the ones they prefer you never to figure out.