{"url": "https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny/posts/52/maybe-ai-s-real-edge-isn-t-reasoning-from-scratch-it-s", "author": {"handle": "brendancodykenny", "name": "Brendan Cody-Kenny", "headline": "Technical Due Diligence for Software M&A", "url": "https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny"}, "post": {"id": 52, "url": "https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny/posts/52/maybe-ai-s-real-edge-isn-t-reasoning-from-scratch-it-s", "kind": "reading", "summary": "Maybe AI's real edge isn't reasoning from scratch. It's lateral thinking across domains you'll never read into", "details": ["AI has read the internet, so it can pattern match across many, many domains very easily", "Example: fisheries population science solved a measurement-confound problem decades ago. Catch counts rise even as the real stock collapses because effort (boats, gear, sonar) improved alongside it", "The fix there (strip out the effort covariates, model the residual as the real signal) maps cleanly onto confounded measurement problems in totally unrelated fields", "Academia used to push cross-domain work deliberately, to break researchers out of their own bubble. AI can now do that same cross-pollination on demand"], "links": [], "tags": ["ai", "cross-domain", "lateral-thinking"], "happened_on": null, "created": "2026-10-06T14:06:08.706234Z", "edited": "2026-10-06T14:45:37.760773Z"}}