Navigating Uncertainty
A Repeating Pattern
There's a thing I keep noticing that I've never been able to name well. I see it in how people approach problems, disagreements, decisions; a pattern that feels obviously wrong to me in the moment, and that I almost never manage to point out in a way that lands. I've tried a few different framings over the years, and none of them have quite worked. This is my latest attempt, and I don't think it's the last one either.
The pattern, roughly: most of us treat the first move on a hard problem as a step toward the objective we want. It feels productive. But it's usually the least efficient thing you can do, and I think there's a genuinely useful way to see why. One that comes from three word games most people play half-asleep before coffee.
I want to be upfront that I'm not fully sure I've got this right. It's less a thesis than a lens I keep finding useful, and I'd rather hand it to you loosely than oversell it. But I think there's something real underneath it, and I think it's worth fifteen minutes of your attention to see if it lands for you the way it has for me.
It's All Fun and Games
Every guess in Wordle does one job: it splits the roughly 2,300 possible answers into buckets based on the feedback pattern it could produce. A word like SALET splits that space into many buckets, most of them small. A word like FIZZY splits it into a few buckets, most of them nearly empty. The first word is a better question even before you know the answer, because on average it leaves you with far less to search. This is the same math that tells a doctor which test to order first, or a debugger which print statement to add. The value of a question isn't what it might reveal, it's how evenly it can cut the remaining possibilities down to size.
In Wordle every guess narrows the field. In Connections, a guess can lie to you. The sixteen words sit in a space of possible groupings, and the puzzle deliberately plants overlaps. A word that looks like it obviously belongs to one category was placed there because it also, less obviously, belongs to another. A correct-looking guess that turns out wrong doesn't just cost you a life; it tells you the board's real structure is different from the one you assumed, which is often more valuable than a guess that's simply right. The people who solve these fast aren't the ones who spot categories first, they're the ones who notice which words are doing too much work in their first hypothesis, and treat that suspicion as information before it costs them a guess.
Strands runs two searches at once: which words, and where they sit on the board. Neither pays off alone. A word you can't place is trivia, and a path with no word attached is just a shape. But they aren't independent: finding one theme word retroactively changes what's likely near it, so the puzzle gets easier in jumps rather than a steady rate, the way a hard puzzle sometimes cracks open all at once after one right guess reframes everything around it. That's a different kind of information gain than Wordle's. It's less "which of these is eliminated" and more "which of these now looks connected that didn't before."
Yeah, so what?
Every one of these games starts the same way: a player facing a huge space of possibilities, with no information yet about which one is real. What separates a good player from a bad one isn't speed, and it isn't even vocabulary size. It's what they do with their first move.
The instinct most people have, in games and in life, is to aim the first move at the answer. If you're trying to solve a problem, you get precise about what you want the outcome to look like, and you take a step toward it. This feels efficient. It's usually the opposite. A first move aimed at the outcome only pays off if you happen to be right, and if you're not, you've learned almost nothing. You're just wrong, and no closer to knowing why.
A good first move does something different: it targets the constraints, not the outcome. What actually limits the possibilities here? What does the structure of this problem rule out before I even start guessing? In Wordle, that's the reason a word like SALET beats a word like AUDIO as an opener. Not because it's more likely to be the answer, but because whether it's right or wrong, it tells you more about the whole remaining field. The goal of the first move isn't to be correct. It's to make the next move obvious.
This is the part that's easy to skip, because identifying constraints doesn't feel like progress. It feels slower than just heading toward what you want. But a first move that only chases the goal is a one-dimensional move; it succeeds or it doesn't, and either way you've bought yourself exactly one bit of information: right or wrong. A first move that maps the constraints is doing two jobs at once: it's still progress, but it's also reducing the noise around every move that comes after it. The second question gets easier to ask not because you got lucky, but because the first question was designed to make it easier.
Repeat that enough times, move toward the goal, but let each move also clarify the space you're moving through, and you get something that looks, from the outside, like intuition. It isn't. It's just what compounding uncertainty reduction looks like when you're the one doing it. The player who seems to "just know" the Connections category, or the person who seems to "just get" what's actually going on in a messy disagreement, is usually someone who spent their early moves mapping the shape of the problem instead of sprinting at the answer they wanted to be true.
One for the Road
That's the transferable part. Communication goes wrong most often not because people lie, but because they skip the constraint-finding step entirely. They arrive already certain what the outcome should be, and every question they ask is really just a demand for agreement wearing a question mark. And most of what people call "getting stuck" on a hard problem is really a first move that was aimed at the goal instead of the space around it; the equivalent of guessing AUDIO because you like the word, instead of asking what would actually teach you the most no matter what came back.
The games make this cheap to practice, which is what makes them worth taking seriously as more than diversions. Six guesses, four categories, one theme — small enough stakes that you can watch yourself make both kinds of first move and feel the difference. The lesson doesn't stay small.
