StillThinking has been on the internet since 2011. Long enough to have accumulated a record of thinking through difficult things in public — political questions, philosophical tangles, ethical dilemmas, things that don’t resolve neatly. That’s still what this is.
What has changed is that the thinking has become more structured over time. After many years of applying a loosely consistent approach to complex problems, the underlying principles were formalised into a framework — eleven principles, governed by a single meta-principle, designed to help people interrogate issues more honestly without prescribing what to conclude.
This site is now the home of that framework and the tools built on it. The older posts remain — they are the evidence of the framework developing in practice, before it had a name. The newer work is more deliberate.
Why bother?
Most of us, most of the time, are not thinking as clearly as we believe we are. This is not a character flaw — it is a structural feature of how human cognition works, how information reaches us, and how social environments shape what feels obvious. The question is not whether our thinking is compromised by bias, assumption, and incomplete information. It is. The question is whether we are doing anything about it.
StillThinking is not a cure for this. It is an honest acknowledgement of it, and a set of tools for working with it rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. The framework will not tell you what to believe about immigration, democracy, technology, or anything else. It will ask you questions you hadn’t thought to ask yourself — and it will make the assumptions underneath your current position harder to ignore.
These principles must stand up to rigorous scrutiny and be workable through the vast matrix of human social context. No easy task. Yet here is the attempt — one that has evolved through sustained application and honest confrontation with its own limitations.
Pour yourself something. Stay a while. The content here is not organised by news cycle or algorithm. Old posts are often as relevant as new ones — the issues under consideration are not transient. Work through something that has been sitting at the back of your mind. Or bring it to the Agora and see what happens when it is argued properly from every side.
About this site
StillThinking is written and maintained by Michael O’Hara — a financial planner based in Perth, Western Australia, with a long-standing interest in philosophy, history, art, and what he calls human systems: the ways in which people choose to organise themselves as societies.
The philosophical framework developed here is original intellectual work. It draws on a wide range of influences — Popper, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rawls, among others — but is not reducible to any of them. It has been developed through years of application, stress-testing, and revision rather than through academic study. That is a limitation and an advantage: it is grounded in the friction of real problems rather than in the controlled conditions of academic philosophy.
The Agora tool is built on this framework and powered by Anthropic’s Claude. It is freely available. Feedback is welcome.