Notes

Two kinds of writing live here, and the label on each one tells you how much weight it can carry.

A field note is something I noticed. One observation, one takeaway, written close to when it happened. No citations, no mechanism — just the thing that occurred and what I made of it.

A discovery is something where a claim needs defending. It has a mechanism, sources, and usually a number someone could act on. It takes a real sitting to write, because it has to survive being wrong.

The test I use to decide is not a mood call:

If a reader could reasonably do something risky based on it, it's a discovery.

Dosing, a threshold, a lab value to act on, a recommendation that could backfire — any of those and it gets the heavier treatment. When I can't tell, it goes in the heavier pile.

A field note that I keep circling back to is usually telling me it wants to become a discovery. That promotion is decided by what holds up, not by what I hoped.