Relevance: An Unfinished Education

A personal essay by Trace J. Hancock

In a life spent trying to make information useful, some of the most important lessons have come from the least predictable places: a classroom across town, an unexpected conversation, an unfamiliar country, and a question stamped in red ink.

The man in the way

In November 2025, a woman tapped me on the shoulder at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco. Of all the seats in the house, she had somehow found herself behind a man who was six feet six inches tall.

I turned around. The woman was Barbara Tversky.

I was there to hear Michael Lewis in conversation with Richard Thaler and Alex Imas. Barbara was the widow of Amos Tversky, the mathematical psychologist whose work with Daniel Kahneman had fundamentally changed the study of human judgment. For years, I had been studying Amos and Danny, filling notebooks and computer files with their ideas, trying to understand not only what they had discovered but why so much of it remained unfamiliar to people who might benefit from it.

And now I was blocking Barbara Tversky's view of the stage.

I remember freezing. Then I showed her a photograph on my phone: a copy of Noise, the book by Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein, held in front of an Egyptian pyramid. There was much more I could have told her about that picture. A theater, however, is not the ideal place to explain how a book, a pyramid, and your husband's work came to occupy so much of a stranger's life.

So I moved one seat over.

I still find that encounter funny, improbable, and a little difficult to explain. The longer explanation begins nearly fifty years earlier, in a part of Portland where none of this would have been an obvious prediction.

Across town

I was born on January 4, 1978, and raised in North Portland by my mother, who cleaned houses and sometimes needed public assistance to keep us going. We had very little money. More than once, where I lived and what my mother did for work seemed to determine what the world expected of me.

One of her housekeeping clients suggested a school called Catlin Gabel. I had no particular reason to think that an affluent private school across town was looking for someone like me. But Ron Sobel, a teacher and administrator there, helped make admission and financial aid possible. In 1991, I entered Catlin in eighth grade.

It was an extraordinary opportunity. It was also an extraordinary adjustment.

The differences were impossible to miss: money, race, neighborhoods, assumptions about college, assumptions about what life would look like afterward. I was a poor Black kid in a school where many of my classmates occupied an entirely different economic world. Sometimes I tried to conceal the circumstances I came from. At other times I simply concentrated on getting through the work.

There was a junior-year English course taught by Clint Darling in which I earned a C-minus. I remember it as an achievement. I had worked very hard for that C-minus. Paul Dickinson, one of my science teachers, helped me appreciate the discipline of scientific inquiry. And my history teacher, Dave Corcoran, possessed an unusually effective teaching instrument: a rubber stamp bearing one word.

Relevance.

He would stamp it on assignments when we hadn't explained why our arguments mattered. It wasn't enough to know something or to repeat it correctly. What was the point? What did this have to do with the question? Why should anyone care?

Thirty years later, I can still hear the challenge. Sometimes I think that stamp has followed me into every meeting room, every dashboard, every book, and every page I've written since.

I played basketball at Catlin and was elected class president twice. I also came to appreciate how demanding the place could be and how generous it could become when someone chose to help. When I graduated in 1996, my family still owed several thousand dollars toward tuition. An anonymous handwritten note arrived saying the debt had been forgiven. I never learned who had paid it.

The person who wrote that note probably never imagined I'd still be thinking about it decades later. But I do. One lesson at Catlin was that an argument ought to matter. Another was that a quiet act, done without seeking credit, could change the course of somebody else's life.

I went on to Kenyon College in Ohio, where I majored in economics with a concentration in public policy. I was elected president of both my junior and senior classes and delivered the commencement address to the Class of 2000. Considering where I'd started, the occasion meant a great deal to me.

Yet one of the most durable parts of my education took place off campus, far from any classroom.

Seven countries and a rail pass

In January 1999, I went overseas for the first time, spending a semester at the University of York in England. I played basketball there, discovered that even a university athletic facility could contain a pub, and during a break bought a Eurail pass and backpacked through roughly seven countries in western and central Europe.

I came home with the travel bug. More importantly, I began to notice something that would recur over many later journeys: people separated by geography, language, and circumstance could nevertheless have remarkably familiar concerns and pleasures. Differences in culture were real, but there was also much more common ground than I had imagined.

After Kenyon, I moved to Boston and worked first in the travel industry and then in finance. I was working at EF Educational Tours on September 11, 2001. By 2004, I had a respectable enough career underway, though I wasn't sure I wanted the life that seemed to come attached to it.

So that June I quit my job and flew to Bangkok.

I traveled through Southeast Asia for about three months, staying in inexpensive accommodation and sending long, occasionally ridiculous dispatches to friends. I called them T-Wee's Big Adventure. The emails included tuk-tuks and night markets, orangutans in Sumatra, a volcano in Java, the ruins of Angkor Wat, and the small humiliations that attend travel on a budget. Friends wrote back telling me I ought to become a travel writer.

I loved the act of observing, then trying to describe what I'd observed well enough that people back home could see it too. I didn't think of that as a professional skill at the time. It was simply something I liked doing.

Eventually I came home and returned to work. In 2005, I joined Redwood Trust in Mill Valley, California, analyzing mortgage-loan and collateral data. The work gave me a close view of a financial industry that had become very sophisticated at quantifying risk and, as events would reveal, less sophisticated at understanding some of its own assumptions.

Then the mortgage market collapsed. I lost my job in late 2008.

In December I dealt with severance paperwork. In January 2009, I put my belongings in storage and headed to Brazil. By my own count, it was country number thirty-seven. Not bad for a poor kid from Oregon, I thought.

My time in Brazil included a memorable episode in Teresópolis. The hostel I had intended to stay in was closed, so I checked into a nearby hotel that a guidebook had characterized as basic but clean. The description was not entirely persuasive once I saw the room. A local guide later explained, with considerable amusement, that the hotel mainly served a clientele other than backpackers looking for a cheap night's sleep. I had apparently checked into a brothel.

That was one night. The journey was much bigger.

For roughly six months I traveled south from Brazil through Argentina to Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia, then worked my way north along the continent's western edge—through Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. I crossed the San Blas Islands to Panama and eventually flew home from Costa Rica. It was a budget trip: hostels, modest pensiones, long overland journeys, and more encounters with other travelers and local people than I could possibly catalogue.

The landscapes were extraordinary. The company was often even better. Again I came away impressed by the things that seemed to unite people who, on the surface, had very little in common. I didn't yet have a formal language for that observation. I had stories, photographs, and a growing desire to understand human behavior.

By the time I got home, the money was gone. I moved into my mother's roughly 400-square-foot Section 8 apartment in Southeast Portland. For a long stretch I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag. A journey across a continent is wonderful for the imagination; it is less effective at paying the rent.

In 2010, while unemployed and struggling with depression, I began seeing a psychologist. I was diagnosed with ADHD. I had never known I had it. Treatment, including medication, made a substantial difference in my ability to concentrate and function. Looking back, I was astonished that I had made my way through Catlin Gabel and Kenyon without understanding this part of myself—on top of everything else we had faced economically.

The diagnosis didn't explain my whole life, nor did it erase my mistakes or difficulties. It did give me information I wish I had possessed much earlier. It changed how I understood both the effort required to achieve things and the years in which I had assumed that effort was simply supposed to be so difficult.

I found work again, eventually got my own apartment, and started another chapter. The pattern was not entirely flattering: find a job, save some money, become restless, leave, return uncertain, begin again. At the time, whatever I was trying to accomplish did not yet have a name.

The email

In 2011, I was working in market intelligence at Nike. Much of my job involved reports filled with useful numbers that were not always presented in ways people could easily use. I began teaching myself Tableau, software that could turn sprawling spreadsheets into interactive visual displays.

It felt like an extraordinary improvement. A report that had been tedious to update could become something a manager explored in minutes. A chart might reveal a pattern hidden inside rows of figures. The difference wasn't decorative. It changed the questions someone could ask.

I was not the first person at Nike to use Tableau. But I was unusually enthusiastic about what it could do for our sales and marketplace data, and increasingly frustrated by how little of that potential was being realized in my part of the organization.

On September 16, 2012, I sent a message directly to a senior executive, attaching examples of the dashboards I'd developed. I argued that a better approach to analyzing the data could improve decisions without requiring a giant technology project. Near the end, I acknowledged that my managers would probably kill me if they knew I'd sent the message. It might, I wrote, be the boldest—if not dumbest—move of my professional career.

The executive replied enthusiastically. She liked the idea of actionable data and wanted to arrange time for me to show her more. I was delighted.

The delight didn't last long. My immediate manager learned about the email, and my contract ended shortly afterward.

I still believe the work deserved attention. I also know I had gone around people I worked for, and I can see why they objected. Later I wrote an apology acknowledging that I should have handled the matter differently. Getting a senior executive excited about an idea and building the relationships required to implement it are two distinct accomplishments. I had managed the first and misjudged the second.

Years later, Tableau people told me about Nike's growing relationship with the software. I believe the work I showed helped put some possibilities on the radar. But there is no reliable way for me to isolate the effects of one email from everything else happening inside a company that large. The more important lesson was already mine: information doesn't persuade on its own. People, relationships, incentives, and institutional habits enter the picture whether an analyst likes it or not.

Around this period I began reading Stephen Few, whose books on quantitative communication and information design changed how I thought about my craft. Few was interested in perception: what the eye notices, what it misses, and how badly designed displays can obscure information while pretending to illuminate it.

I first met him in Portland around 2012. After another long conversation in October 2013, I wrote a friend about a remarkable discovery: Few, too, had experienced professional trouble after standing up for an idea he believed in. I had thought of the Nike episode as a peculiar misfortune. Here was someone whose work I admired who understood something about the experience.

We stayed in touch. We had breakfast at Saul's in Berkeley in 2014 and exchanged ideas over the years. But by then my questions were moving beyond charts. Suppose you give people information they can actually see and understand. Why do they still ignore it? What happens between recognizing evidence and making a choice? Is the obstacle the display, the organization, or the mind interpreting both?

I followed those questions into cognitive psychology and behavioral decision science.

The book that kept growing

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky helped me understand judgment under uncertainty. Richard Thaler challenged assumptions I had absorbed while studying economics. Philip Tetlock offered lessons about forecasting. Daniel Levitin helped me think about attention and learning. Cass Sunstein showed how the structure of a choice could influence what people do.

I found their work absorbing—and sometimes maddening. These were ideas with practical consequences for nearly everyone. Yet much of the material seemed to circulate among people who already knew where to look for it.

Around 2015, I started an unusual private project. I would read a book, set it aside, and later return to passages I wanted to retain. Instead of merely highlighting them, I typed them out by hand. I grouped the excerpts by author and concept, added my own notes, and built a searchable collection that let me compare how different thinkers approached the same question.

I called it The Foundation.

The title sounded more elaborate than the operation: one person, a keyboard, books spread nearby, and a lot of retyping. I wasn't writing an original scientific treatise. I was trying to make difficult material available to myself in a form I could revisit, connect, and eventually use. No one had assigned it. There was no graduate degree waiting at the end.

By 2016, it had grown to hundreds of densely packed pages. It kept growing, absorbing material from more than twenty-five books and papers and countless hours of reading and reflection.

Sometimes I called myself a working-class academic. The description was partly playful and partly an expression of frustration. I did not have the institutional credentials of the scholars whose work I admired. But I cared deeply about the same questions: How do people evaluate evidence? What makes a belief hard to revise? How can knowledge become an actual improvement in judgment?

I wanted to make those questions useful outside academia, including for people who had never heard of the scholars asking them.

Two jobs, one larger question

Electronic Arts gave me a place to put some of this thinking to work. I joined its publishing analytics operation as a contractor in October 2014 and quickly began building interactive reporting tools from sales information. The work expanded from individual dashboards toward a more consistent way of understanding the global publishing business.

As that initial contract neared its end, I accepted a part-time data-visualization role with Stanford. Then, only days before I expected to leave EA, I noticed an internal posting for a Senior Manager of Data Visualization and Analytics. EA had assumed I was headed to Stanford and hadn't approached me. I approached them instead.

They offered me the position. I accepted on the condition that I could honor my existing commitment to Stanford. For a stretch, I worked full-time at EA and part-time for Stanford at the same time.

The two assignments involved very different questions. At EA, the work concerned video games, sales, financial performance, and executive decisions. At Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, I helped researchers working with Giulio De Leo examine data connected with schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease affecting vulnerable communities. It was the same underlying skill—making complex evidence easier to examine—serving a completely different purpose.

At EA, I had learned that producing a good dashboard was only the beginning. An organization had to trust the information, understand the tool, and have people who knew how to use it. Training wasn't an afterthought. Neither was the question of who owned the work when I wasn't there.

In September 2015, I went to Europe to support Tableau's rollout across our international publishing organization. The North American group had already spent months piloting the software and incorporating it into its work. The trip included Tableau training in London led by an external vendor for European analysts. We wanted the people closest to the data to acquire the skills to explore it themselves.

During that same visit, a program manager and I met with roughly ten to fifteen groups of senior European publishing leaders, usually for about half an hour. I had prepared and rehearsed the demonstrations for weeks. Each meeting began the same way: a Tableau workbook containing their own European business data, not an imaginary example supplied by a software company.

For about ten minutes, I navigated through the dashboards—moving from a broad performance picture to specific markets, products, and patterns. The remaining time was for questions. The question I remember hearing most often was simple: When can we have this?

I could tell them the analysts had just received training and that piloting could begin before the broader implementation was complete. In other words, there was something practical they could do with the idea now.

The demonstrations worked because the leaders could recognize their own business in what they saw. I wasn't asking them to believe that visualization was important in the abstract. I was showing them questions they could answer with information they already possessed. What I had spent weeks preparing was not simply a display of dashboards; it was a demonstration of what the tools might help people think through.

One European colleague later wrote that the roadshow had opened people's eyes to what Tableau could achieve, comparing the demonstration to being offered a Ferrari instead of a minivan. He also made an important qualification: however impressive the vehicle, it wouldn't win any races if the data powering it was wrong.

That observation stayed with me. Design matters. So does data quality. So does the judgment of the person sitting behind the wheel.

My manager's 2016 performance review credited me with transforming the way the publishing business reported information and helping analysts become more self-sufficient. I was proud of that work, especially the part that meant people no longer needed to come to me for every answer.

But I was also increasingly conscious of its limits. A person could have a beautifully constructed dashboard in front of them and still ask the wrong question, overlook an important assumption, or cling to a comforting explanation. Clearer information was necessary; it wasn't sufficient.

In early 2016, I wrote a proposal for what I thought should come next: a decision-science function devoted not only to reporting but to improving how an organization evaluates evidence, confronts uncertainty, and makes choices. I shared the proposal with Stephen Few, along with The Foundation. We exchanged thoughts about what it would take to bring ideas from academic research into business practice.

I was excited. I was also tired. Years of studying, advocating, and trying to build an unconventional kind of career had cost me time and money. In an April 2016 email, I explained the motivation as plainly as I knew how:

“I'm doing this because I can't not do it.”

I was thirty-eight.

One country at a time

That summer, I resigned from EA and Stanford. The commute to Redwood Shores had become exhausting, and I felt the reporting work at EA had reached a point where others could carry it forward. I wanted to travel, explore possibilities abroad, and give more attention to the intellectual questions that had taken over so much of my free time.

I flew to Iceland on July 1, 2016. The original reservation included an August return flight. My plans changed. I stayed away until March 2017.

Over the months that followed, I traveled through Iceland, Scandinavia, the Baltic states, other parts of western and eastern Europe, and then Southeast Asia. By November I was flying from Belgium to Bangkok. From there my travels took me through Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and the Philippines. At one point I counted more than twenty countries visited on that journey alone.

I brought Thinking, Fast and Slow and continued reading it as I went. After years of encountering the work largely through books and professional applications, I was curious how familiar questions about judgment might appear in other places. Would the ideas seem relevant across different cultures and levels of economic development? How much of what I thought I recognized was universal—and how much was my own interpretation?

I wasn't carrying out a scientific experiment. I had no protocol, no comparison groups, and no way of knowing whether the same behavior sprang from the same psychological mechanism. What I had was time, curiosity, and the freedom to watch people—including myself—in unfamiliar situations.

The photographs and travel notes from that journey show Christmas in Hạ Long Bay, a birthday motorbike trip through the mountains and caves of Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng, and diving in the Philippines. The experiences themselves were memorable enough. They also gave me reasons to think again about snap judgments, unfamiliar customs, and how quickly a first impression can seem like the whole truth. I would not claim that these journeys proved Kahneman and Tversky right. They made me want to keep asking better questions.

Travel had always reminded me that people from different places can have surprisingly similar needs and concerns. Behavioral science complicated that familiar insight in a useful way. It suggested that some of the ways we interpret those needs—and misinterpret one another—deserve just as much attention as the similarities.

Meanwhile, the practical world remained very much present. I explored employment opportunities abroad, watched my savings, and kept studying. In February 2017, writing to former EA colleagues from a small island in the Philippines, I said I'd continued reading decision science several hours a week and asked about the possibility of returning to work in that field. I wasn't conducting a heroic retreat from the professional world. I was trying to find a way back into it on terms that made sense to me.

By March, I was back in Portland, staying with my mother as she recovered from knee surgery. Again I had an abundance of experiences and a less abundant bank account.

In the years that followed, I worked at Grovemade, 2K Games, Tableau, Apple, and Salesforce. At Apple I helped the Online Retail organization understand performance through clearer metrics and reporting products. At Salesforce I worked on analytics for major strategic events. The settings and assignments changed, but my questions didn't. I knew how to make evidence more visible. I still wanted to work on what happened after people saw it.

A voice in the stone

In July 2021, I traveled through Egypt and Greece. Egypt was magnificent and exhausting, especially in the midsummer heat. The temples, tombs, and pyramids confronted me with an unfamiliar scale of time. People had spent lifetimes making inscriptions they expected others to read long after they were gone.

At an ancient temple in Aswan, I recorded a short video while moving through a succession of stone doorways toward an inner chamber. I read Kahneman aloud there. I remember wanting, in my own slightly peculiar way, for the spirits to hear.

I also photographed Noise against an Egyptian pyramid. Years later, when Barbara Tversky turned out to be sitting behind me in San Francisco, that was the image I showed her.

By 2026, I had visited sixty-three countries. I don't regard travel as a substitute for scholarship or as proof that I understand every place I've been. But it has continually reminded me how much there is to learn from paying attention—and how easily my own expectations can distort what I notice.

A yellow light

In August 2025, another Salesforce contract ended. I was unemployed again, facing a difficult job market and increasing financial pressure. There had been painful losses in my personal life as well, including my mother and my longtime cat, Nacho. I wasn't building a project from some serene distance above ordinary worries. I was building it in their midst.

For years I had wanted a way to bring behavioral decision science to people who weren't reading academic journals or attending specialized conferences. Generative AI had made something newly possible. Although I was an experienced analyst and data-visualization professional rather than a conventional software engineer, I could now create interactive experiences around the ideas that interested me most.

That became Yellowlights.ai: part laboratory, part library, part invitation to practice thinking. A visitor could explore framing, work through a forecast, challenge assumptions, examine alternatives, or simply discover how a change in wording can change a decision. The Journal grew alongside the applications, offering stories about Kahneman, Tversky, Thaler, Sunstein, Michael Lewis, and others who helped me understand the questions in the first place.

I had arrived at the Journal through an unlikely experiment of my own, using simulated conversations with those thinkers to generate ideas. They weren't the real men, of course. But one suggestion—to tell the human stories behind the research—was worth following. Their lives were as interesting as their findings, and sometimes inseparable from them.

The name Yellowlights is meant to be modest. A yellow light is not a command to stop thinking for yourself or to delegate the decision to a machine. Nor is it a demand to agonize over every trivial choice. It is an invitation to pause briefly when a decision warrants it: examine the evidence, consider what is missing, question the first story that comes to mind, and then choose.

I don't know whether Yellowlights.ai will find an audience, support itself financially, or grow into something larger. I still need to earn a living. The hours I devote to this work have costs. Those facts deserve a place in the story because they are part of the judgment problem I claim to care about. Outcomes are uncertain even when motives are sincere.

On March 29, 2026, I visited Hills of Eternity Memorial Park and found Amos Tversky's grave. His name was carved in English and Hebrew on a weathered stone, alongside the dates March 16, 1937, and June 2, 1996. In the photograph I took, my hand rests on the marker.

Amos had died in 1996, the year I graduated from Catlin Gabel. It was the thirtieth-anniversary year of both events. I went to the cemetery because I wanted to honor a man whose contributions, I felt, were less widely recognized than they deserved to be. I wasn't trying to create an origin myth for anything.

Two days later, I publicly announced Yellowlights.ai.

I cannot make an objective accounting of my life from the inside. I have taken risks that didn't work out, passed up forms of security I might now wish I had kept, and benefited from opportunities no amount of planning would have produced. A housecleaning client suggested a school. An educator helped me enter it. Someone I never met paid a debt. People across the world gave me stories to bring home. Teachers, colleagues, writers, and researchers offered different ways of seeing.

I still come back to the stamp in my history classroom.