1. Something moved you.
   • A price, a headline, a friend’s face, a number on a chart.
   • You could not say which one did it.
   • The question is never which one you believed. It is which one moved you.
   • The reason is up here somewhere. Keep going and it gets smaller.
2. One question gathers.
   • What makes a person choose this and not that.
   • That question is the whole job.
   • We study how people actually decide, not how they say they decided.
3. Influence is a force.
   • Impel draws you toward.
   • Repel pushes you away, the pitch that tried too hard.
   • Compel takes the other options off the table.
   • A force is two things: how hard it pulls, and where it points. So is an argument. That is not a metaphor.
4. Then someone decides.
   • A decision looks like a single point.
   • It was never a single point.
   • They cannot see the forces either.
   • So watch two people instead, and see what passes between them.
5. It takes two.
   • One speaks, one hears.
   • Something moves across the gap that neither of them owns.
   • There is one pot of attention between them. Everything spent comes out of it.
   • That is what we count.
6. Say it to a room.
   • Same words, more ears. The force does not multiply.
   • It gets thinner, and it lands differently in every seat.
   • So which seat are you measuring?
   • Now make it a million rooms.
7. Everyone at once.
   • A society is not one big conversation. It is millions of small ones, most of them out of earshot.
   • Average them together and you get a number that describes nobody.
   • Look at it long enough and it turns back into a sky.
   • Same specks, same problem. Something has to read them.
8. Two brains, one job.
   • Two hundred thousand years at this, and it still cannot tell you how it works.
   • Ten years at this, and it can show its work.
   • Machines helping humans understand humans.
9. Letters and Numbers.
   • Neither door contains the other.
   • A magnitude needs a table. A direction needs an argument.
   • Pick one. You can come back for the other.

Hidden in the opening sky are 18 constellations drawn from typographic marks. From the Letters side: the quill, the codex, the serif, the quotation, the ampersand, the ellipsis, the exchange, the marginalia, the diacritic. From the Numbers side: pi, the tally, the wave, the sum, the ratio, the root, the prime, the integral, the zero. Move a pointer across the sky to reveal them.

The one solid thing those forces settle onto is marked “you are here”. It is the world you are reading from. Hover the planet with a pointer to reveal the pin.