Kayfabe will never go away as long as we have humans.
Kayfabe will never go away as long as we have humans. Humans who want to have an edge against their competitors for the scarce spoils will have an incentive ...
Topic: kayfabe
121 mentions · 12 chunks · 12 episodes
22.1× distinctiveness vs baseline
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How much more common this term is here than in ordinary English. Higher values mean the topic is more characteristic of this corpus.
3.3x burst in 2024 Q1
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- kayfabe appears in 12 chunks across 12 episodes, from 2024-01-16 to 2026-05-11.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 1/16/24 (2024-01-16), with 1 observation on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with Radagast, Saruman, and ground truth, while by chunk count it sits between youtube video and Ben Follington; its yearly rank moved from #68 in 2024 to #120 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
PMs act like the feature specs they're delivering to the team are on stone tablets.
...ike the feature specs they're delivering to the team are on stone tablets. It's kayfabe to get the team to move to execution without questioning it.
How much of the AGI talk is kayfabe for employees and investors?
How much of the AGI talk is kayfabe for employees and investors? During the Soviet Revolution, believers talked about how "utopia is just around the corner" But at a certain point, deca...
Every organization that doesn't have to fight to survive succumbs to kayfabe.
Every organization that doesn't have to fight to survive succumbs to kayfabe. The larger and more ground truthed the organization, the longer this process takes.
Inside of an organization, the game, the kayfabe, will draw all of your attention.
Inside of an organization, the game, the kayfabe, will draw all of your attention. It will make you feel like it's what matters, when in reality it's the emergent game that sucks up all the extra en...
Kayfabe in an organization is a giant whirlpool.
Kayfabe in an organization is a giant whirlpool. It is patient, and strong, and gets stronger over time. Every time you give it an inch, it will never give y...
An org that is highly steeped in kayfabe will structurally resist observability.
An org that is highly steeped in kayfabe will structurally resist observability. Every team will intuit that observability will make them look worse than everyone's current perception of the...
Ideas that don't require miracles are radically better than ones that do.
...hat do. Most ideas have miracles that we sometimes pretend aren't there (due to kayfabe). But an idea with a full, incremental glide path with no miracles is massively important, even if it looks kind of dinky or messy or otherwise unrem...
A pattern: having a Chief Philosophy Officer.
...Philosophy Officer. That is, a "fool," a court jester, to help push back on the kayfabe of the organization. Hire a Radagast to complement the Saruman CEO energy. Try to tickle the company into novel perspectives by using safe-subversive...
There's hustle in terms of creation and hustle in terms of kayfabe.
There's hustle in terms of creation and hustle in terms of kayfabe. The former is what you find in e.g. hobby projects or 0-1 startups. Jumping in to creatively problem solve and build things. The latter is what you ...
Dysfunctional orgs put leaders in impossible situations where the only thing they can do to survive is bad faith tactics, e.g.
...ad faith tactics, e.g. spiking any projects that would possibly undermine their kayfabe to anyone. In such a situation if you act with integrity you are knocked out of the game. So you do some bad faith tactics to stay alive: "I'm just d...
I was talking to someone who recently left another company after almost 20 years.
...ven healing, to leave. When you're in a given job, you are obliged to treat the kayfabe as real--a heavy emotional and intellectual burden, especially in a dysfunctional, high-kayfabe environment. But when you leave that job, that obliga...