The Piece Nobody Has Written: Every Dimension the POS Wants You to Build Is the One Institutions Are Designed to Destroy
The Capture
The piece nobody has written yet because they'd need to have read Simmons's Blockbuster framework and the vault's Generational Myopia + Long Game Orientation + the five IC research studies in the same week is: every single one of the most important POS dimensions is specifically disincentivized by the major institutional structures that shape professional life — not by accident, but structurally.
IC: penalized by academic and professional norms that reward swift, confident conclusions. Long Game: undermined by quarterly earnings, annual reviews, algorithmic content cycles. Polymathic Breadth: gatekept by disciplinary loyalty requirements in academia and accreditation. Mental Models Library: never explicitly built in formal education, which teaches domain content without ever naming the models. Infinite Devotion: can only be discovered, but every institution wants to install obligation in its place. Deliberate Experimentation: punished by cultures that treat failure as performance data.
The essay isn't "here are six dimensions the system ignores." The essay is: the same institutional system that produces professional competence is, by design, a machine for ensuring that the specific cognitive capacities associated with extraordinary performance never develop in most of the people inside it. The question is whether this is a conspiracy or a selection effect — and whether the answer matters.
The Live Wire
- First wire: The institutional system doesn't know it's doing this; it's an emergent property of coordinating large numbers of people.
- Second wire: Whether it's intentional or not is irrelevant; the effect is the same. The more interesting question is: what do the people who successfully escape it have in common? Not their privilege necessarily — but the structural conditions that let them insulate their developmental investments from institutional pressure long enough for the dimensions to actually compound.
- Third wire: The essay's uncomfortable implication is that POS development requires a degree of institutional non-conformity that most people cannot afford and some people won't risk even when they could.
What It Could Become
Essay seed full form: "The institutions that produce professional competence are the same ones that systematically prevent the development of the cognitive capacities that distinguish extraordinary performers from competent ones. This is not a conspiracy — it's selection pressure in reverse. And the people who beat it don't beat it by working harder inside the system."
Audience: Newsletter — mid-career creatives and professionals who are inside institutional structures and wondering why they feel like something essential is being squeezed out.
What I'd need to argue it confidently: One or two specific, documented cases where an institution explicitly reformed in ways that started rewarding IC or Long Game thinking — and what happened. If there are no such cases, that's the stronger argument. If there are, the question becomes: what made those institutions capable of that reform?
Promotion Criteria
[ ] A second source touches this independently [ ] Has survived two sessions without weakening [x] The Live Wire second or third framing holds [x] Has a falsifiable core claim (not just an interesting observation)