Richard Golian

1995-born. Charles University alum. Head of Performance at Mixit. 10+ years in marketing and data.

Castellano Français Slovenčina

Manage subscription Choose a plan

RSS
Newsletter
New articles to your inbox

Article

How I became a child again

An epistemological change
Richard Golian
Richard Golian · 6 652 reads
Hi, I am Richard. On this blog, I share thoughts, personal stories — and what I am working on. I hope this article brings you some value.
Listen to this article
0:00 / 0:00

I asked my mom, “Why?”

She answered, “Because.”

I asked again, “Why?”

She repeated, “Because it is so.”

And once more I pressed, “But why must it be so?”

And that was how I began to discover the world.

Later, when I started school, asking questions became more difficult: we studied hard, took exams, and handed in assignments—but that did not stop me from wanting to understand things more deeply.

Over time, I gradually stopped asking questions. I sought and accepted clear, true answers, convinced that everything was knowable.

Continue

Continue reading

Enter your email to unlock this article and join the newsletter. You can unsubscribe anytime.

Summary

School taught me certainty. I debated with conviction and absolute positions. Then, in my second university year, something shifted. From "I am convinced that" through "I think that" to "I am beginning to wonder." A return to a world without fixed truths. I became a child again.

Common questions on this article's topic

What is epistemological development?
Epistemological development describes how people's understanding of knowledge itself changes over time. William Perry's model, developed at Harvard in the 1970s, traces a progression from dualism (believing in absolute right and wrong answers) through multiplicity (recognising multiple perspectives) to relativism (understanding that knowledge is contextual). In the article, this progression is experienced personally through the shift from debating with absolute conviction to asking whether questions can even be answered.
Is it possible to know what is truly knowable?
In the article, the honest answer is I do not know. This position is consistent with Socratic epistemology, where recognising the limits of one's knowledge is considered the beginning of wisdom rather than an intellectual failure. The point is not to claim that nothing can be known, but to approach knowledge with humility — understanding that certainty is rarer than we typically assume.
Richard Golian

If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop me a message at mail@richardgolian.com.

Related articles

The Meaning of My Life

If I have learned anything from this experience, it is that my life is not driven by something predefined.

23 February 2025·1 864 reads
What is Philosophy? What Did I Actually Study and Why?

Why devote myself to a discipline even its practitioners can’t define?

4 January 2025·2 238 reads
Doubt vs. Determination: Striking the Right Balance

Is it better to doubt or to act with determination?

15 October 2023·3 495 reads

More articles

Where the Money Goes When AI Takes the Work

Prague, 13 May 2026. On my way to work I started thinking about something that stayed with me for days. If most routine work on a computer disappears in the next ten years, and a large share of repetitive manual work disappears with it, what happens to the flow of money? Who pays whom for what? Which economic layers will exist, how large will they be, and what relationships will run between them? This is the six-layer map I sketched as an answer.

15 May 2026·40 reads
Building an AI Stock Market Prediction System That Grades Itself

I am building an AI system to predict the S&P 500. It runs on my own machine, uses free public data — yfinance, FRED, the Shiller dataset — and grades every forecast against reality. This series documents the build itself: the decisions, the methodology, the mistakes. What I will eventually share from the running system is a separate question, and an honest one.

26 April 2026·611 reads
AI sales forecast: 9 traps so far

Yesterday I could not tear myself away from the computer. When I lifted my head, it was half past eight in the evening. I had been sitting alone upstairs for about three hours.

25 April 2026·581 reads
Will AI take my job?

Will AI take my job? A certified Google trainer told me in June 2024 that my profession would cease to exist. Twenty-two months later, my job title has not changed — but ninety percent of what I do during the day is different. I have delegated more of my thinking to AI agents than I thought possible. I am not afraid. This is why, and what it means for anyone asking the same question.

23 April 2026·364 reads
€50,000 Quote vs. Two Hours with Claude Code

One hour. Fifty-five minutes. That is how long it took to build what a Czech software firm had quoted at over €50,000. I built it with Claude Code. Not a prototype. Not a proof of concept. A working tool — the one the company actually needed. By the evening of the same day, it was running on staging. This is not about Claude Code. It is about what Claude Code exposes.

18 April 2026·717 reads
Is AI Making Us Dumber?

I have conducted roughly one hundred and fifty practical interviews over the past four years. Fifty for data specialist roles. A hundred for advertising and performance marketing specialists. Almost every one of them involved sitting down with a candidate over a practical task — something close to a real problem we actually need to solve at the company. Not theory. Not trivia. Applied problem-solving. Over time, I started noticing a pattern.

14 April 2026·670 reads
What AI Hides From You

Before you can teach AI to understand anything, you need to see what it is hiding from you.

11 April 2026·667 reads
When Your AI Agent Joins the Team

The moment other people needed access to it, the problem changed completely. It was no longer about whether the agent could learn. It was about who gets to teach it.

8 April 2026·823 reads
Training an AI Agent That Learns Between Sessions

I wanted to build an agent that doesn't just assist. One that acts.

4 April 2026·874 reads
Local AI Model Limitations: Why I Switched from Ollama to Claude for Autonomous Agents

This is what I learned about local vs cloud AI, and why I switched to Claude Code.

3 April 2026·1 473 reads
Full AI agents or fully offline.

Four days in Catalonia. No computer, no AI, almost no social media. I bought this notebook so that I could write down what I would think about, and what I would come across and learn on the trip.

10.5.2026·322 reads
NEWSLETTER
What I write about, what I am working on, what I learned.
Sent the first Sunday of the month. Unsubscribe anytime.