Values at Work shines a light on values as practiced rather than proclaimed—especially overlooked, unfashionable, or costly values that shape how we work, choose, and respond.
WIP: Work in Progress | Wrong in Public
Most values pages offer admirable nouns that almost everyone endorses. The agreement is pleasant, but not especially revealing.
Values become more interesting when they make distinctions, expose trade-offs, demand something of us, or conflict with other things we also value. Trade-offs reveal values. Economics distinguishes stated preferences from revealed preferences; similarly, what we repeatedly choose—and what inconvenience or cost we accept—may say more than the values we profess.
Values at different levels
These distinctions are aids, not a strict taxonomy. One idea may operate at several levels.
| Level | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Value | Names what is held to matter | usefulness, care, autonomy |
| Tension or trade-off | Reveals relative priority | do good > look good |
| Principle | Converts a value into a decision rule | diagnose before prescribing |
| Practice | Enacts a value repeatedly | caring for, not merely caring about |
| Virtue or disposition | Describes a cultivated way of responding | responsibility, courage, carelessness |
| Ethical framework | Organizes several values and principles | Supply-Side Ethics |
| Alignment | Examines correspondence between values and action | calendars, habits, choices, institutional behavior |
| Purpose or calling | Gives direction or summons | what the value is exercised toward |
| Identity | Shapes who acts—and who they understand themselves to be | “the kind of person or professional who…” |
Values already at work
An earlier public formulation of PoP’s values includes:
- Do good > look good — resist optics-over-ethics.
- Make things as simple as possible—but not simpler — resist both obscurantism and false simplicity.
- Oneness: Unique + Universal — attend to how each person is like no one else and like everyone else.
- Sow peace in the cultural wars — acknowledge conflict and try to turn disagreement into dialogue.
- YMMV — qualify works-for-me advice by asking whether it works with another person.
- Diagnose before prescribing — understand and frame before rushing toward solutions.
- Be useful, usable, and used — information and inspiration are not enough.
- All knowledge should lead to self-knowledge — turn learning back toward the learner.
- Care FOR > Care ABOUT — treat care as action, within a real locus of control and responsibility.
These do not all occupy the same editorial level. Some name priorities; some express tensions; some function as principles or practices. That variety is material for the inquiry rather than a defect to tidy away.
Underpriced values
begin from a different premise: most lists contain platitudes—and usually fashionable ones.
Try asking: Which values do you hold that differ from those around you?
Current candidates include:
- Carelessness
- Goal-lessness, related to Supply-Side Ethics
- Inconvenience
- Anti-Redundancy
These are not yet declarations or recommendations. They are prompts: possible values, counter-values, constraints, or provocations whose meanings need to be worked out.
How values show themselves
A few diagnostic questions:
- What do you value that your peers may not?
- What inconvenience will you accept for it?
- Which stated value survives contact with your calendar?
- What do your pet peeves or anger reveal that a checklist would not?
- Which value has genuinely cost you something?
- Where do your actions contradict your professed values?
- When does a value liberate—and when does it become an “ought” imposed on yourself or others?
- What do you want to want—and who or what shaped that desire?
Values as hypotheses
Values need not enter fully formed as declarations. A suspected or proposed value can begin as a hypothesis: perhaps this matters; perhaps it explains a pattern; perhaps cultivating it would change how we work or live.
Applying the “flavors” from Hypotheses at Work creates a bridge between the collections:
- Hmmpothesis: “Could inconvenience be a value?”
- Hunchpothesis: “My recurring choices suggest that I value autonomy.”
- Trypothesis: “What experiment could test whether this value is really at work?”
- Whypothesis: “Could this value explain an otherwise puzzling pattern?”
- Mypothesis: “This may work with me without becoming a universal recommendation.”
- Diepothesis: “I call this a hill I would die on—but what cost would I actually incur?”
- Crypothesis: “What value do I fear may already be governing my choices?”
The traffic runs both ways: values give hypotheses consequential material, while hypotheses let us propose, examine, test, qualify, and revise values before turning them into creeds.
These pages are related without necessarily belonging inside this collection. For now, links can preserve the connections without prematurely relocating or reorganizing everything.
- Supply-Side Ethics — begin with what you have and can do.
- — internal moral governance, external obligations, and the danger of prescriptive oughts.
- — correspondence among values, goals, identity, habits, and action.
- Identities at Work — values help shape the self that chooses; identity shapes what becomes visible and valuable.
- — alignment, authored desire, moral supply chains, hidden costs, judgment, and play.
What might grow here
Possible paths—not yet a required taxonomy—include:
- Underpriced Values
- Values in Practice
- Values in Conflict
- Trade-offs and Costs
- Values We Profess / Values We Perform
Some may become child pages. Others may remain sections, sidebars, essays, or links into the wider Notion workbench. The structure should follow the material as it coheres.
Making the collection
Is there a place for Values at Work?
This page began with that question.
Values overlap with identity, ethics, purpose, calling, alignment, principles, and practice. That could make this collection impossibly broad—or it could be precisely why the inquiry is needed. Some overlap may be better than leaving gaps between the categories.
The aim is not to force every idea into one correct box. It is to ask how values operate at different levels: as things we prize, rules we follow, dispositions we cultivate, frameworks we use, and evidence visible in our choices.
There is also a danger in the generic. “Values” can become a display of fashionable abstractions: optics without ethics. That danger belongs inside the inquiry. One recurring question here will be whether a stated value is genuinely at work or merely on display.
So the answer is provisional: yes, there may be a place for Values at Work—and this page will show some of the discernment involved in making that place.