Daily, snackable writings to spur changes in thinking.
Building a blueprint for a better brain by tinkering with the code.
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SPIN CHESS
A Chess app from Tinkered Thinking featuring a variant of chess that bridges all skill levels!

REPAUSE
A meditation app is forthcoming. Stay Tuned.
DOES YOUR THINKING SCALE?
July 3rd, 2025
Reflecting on the fact that Infinite Books just released my book, White Mirror, a collection of sci-fi short stories, I realize that at no point in my past did I ever plan or intend to become a sci-fi writer. So how did that happen? Putting aside the entire personal backstory of tortured, starving artist that encapsulates a formative part of my past, it really boils down to a kind of cognitive quark that I believe has been with me since childhood.
If you're lucky enough to have children in your life in any capacity, you're likely familiar with the somewhat jarring experience of having a kid's current world of play explained to you, often with some drawing, or lego construction, or cardboard contraption as the center piece from which this bespoke world is inspired. If you've put any braincells to work trying to analyze what is going on with a chid in this state, you realize it's a blueprint for a skill that so many adults lack, and flounder as a result of that paucity.
The kid starts putting random things together. Suddenly they see something in the little grouping of chaos: pareidolia occurs. They associate something with the random shape and suddenly it gains meaning. They add to their creation to evoke a stronger connection to the association. A feedback loop has been born, and mind, imagination, and the real world are locked in a little virtuous cycle of building and editing: of creation.
But the implications always go beyond the physical object. There must be a bespoke world - a specific situation, imagined, in which this particular creation has a more sensible home. If it's a rocket, well then it must also have a launchpad somewhere. Perhaps that also needs to be built. And of course it's got a destination, and a trajectory which may take kid, spaceship and that bespoke world across the room to an adult, to whom all of this must be explained so they can join the world.
"Do you like my spaceship?" is a proxy question. The true answer is irrelevant. The real question being asked is
"Do you want to explore the world I just created?"
Many adults are often too busy, or too boring, or both, to confront that immersive question honestly, and with legitimate courage. I'm not calling this section of adults cowards. What's really going on is a form of ineptitude, and no one is really at fault here. Most adults have lost the ability to extrapolate - to scale their thinking.
In the tech world "scale" refers to growing to a particular TAM - Total Addressable Market. This is...fine. But it still represents thinking that has been kneecapped: literally hobbled, knees-destroyed via shotgun. "Scale" in the tech world means "extrapolate ramifications of product up to a point." This is a pretty unfortunate form of horse blinders.
That kid with the rocket ship jury-rigged from toilet paper tubes and tape is a true scaled thinker, unhampered by the limitations of TAM. And the talent of a child boils down to a simple cognitive framework that can be encapsulated by a single question, but a question nonetheless that child never actually asks themselves:
If this is the situation, then what are the implications?
The stories and worlds that children spin up are elaborate ramifications of tiny seeds of curiosity and creativity. And that question is iterative. Each time you answer it, the situation changes, which prompts the question again: Now that the situation has changed due to implications just considered, what are the new implications?
This is simply the creative process. Whether you are building a tech product to sell to a large TAM, or you are a writer in the middle of a story, or you are a child looking at a toilet paper roll and seeing something more than a toilet paper roll.
Thinking scales through implication and ramification. It's the ability to think about second and third order effects. A couple of examples:
-If driving becomes fully automated, the death rate from automobile accidents will plummet. This means available organs for organ transplants will essentially drop to zero.
-If we solve aging, and people become functionally immortal, what happens to marriage as an institution? If it's based on "until death do us part", what happens now? Do people start to consider term limits to marriages?
-If humanoid robots become as ubiquitous and useful as it seems they are poised to be, does that nullify the fertility crisis, meaning we can have a much smaller population without civilizational collapse? Does anti-aging also contribute a solution to the fertility crisis?
-If food production becomes 100% automated, does the cost of food drop to zero? What happens to the economy if food becomes free? Perhaps UBI is a red herring and is completely unnecessary if food is free. Perhaps the status game remains the engine of the economy, but it's opt-in, and most people can opt-out and live more fulfilling lives?
These are just a couple of examples. They are fair questions based on very real initiatives that are being taken up by very smart people with a lot of money behind them. Many of the first order effects are fairly obvious, and yet few people seem to be thinking of nascent technologies in terms of these simply questions. The ability to scale in thought is the ability to extrapolate. In today's age of increasing rates of progress, it's virtually impossible to consider ramifications without accidentally becoming a sci-fi writer.
THE MECHANICS OF DENIAL
June 11th, 2025
Someone was commenting on how wild politics is these days so I told them what happened between Hamilton and Burr and their jaw dropped. If you don't know, they had a duel with pistols, Hamilton missed, Burr hit Hamilton and he died. Imagine if that actually happened between two American politicians today. Modern politics is about as tame as a gossiping sewing circle compared to when the United States was founded.
The disconnect between a modern assessment of current politics and it's accuracy relative to politics as it's existed throughout all time has to do with an inability to keep things in perspective, in proportion.
Our focus determines our reality, and if we focus narrowly on some current event and divorce it from all of history, then that object of focus has the entire spectrum of reaction applied to it, because there is nothing else to act as a counterweight.
This disease of narrow focus and recency bias makes people woefully untalented if not flat out incapable of assessing proportion. But what's the antidote? How does the inverse function?
First, another example: Cancellation in the last decade has meant losing a job and some digital public embarrassment.
Cancellation used to mean getting burned at the stake, the Spanish Inquisition, guillotines in France or getting sent to a gas chamber.
If anything social networks may have greatly reduced the violent tendency of the censor-impulse in culture by making it digitally simulated instead of physically carried out. That censorship-impulse has been lurking within human culture forever (at least since we drove other humanoid species extinct several hundred thousand years ago) and now forums like Twitter and Facebook have functioned like a ghostbuster's trap, and captured that impulse in the digital space where it's physical impact is stunted.
Instead of putting things into proportion by examining events within a larger context, those events become all consuming - perspective becomes very skewed.
To zoom out even more: have you ever heard any one say Not in my lifetime! This thought-terminating cliche is a favorite because it's so indicative of the calcified echo chamber that doubles as a personal shrine to one's own pride about the horse blinders they've constructed and proudly wear. When someone like this hears about some impending innovation and says "Not in my lifetime" I bite my tongue. It's futile to argue. One of these inevitable tomorrows will unveil their hasty judgement and I know by that time their slippery logic and feeble memory will have found some convenient way to completely forget those fatalistic words they'd uttered: Not in my lifetime. Instead, they'll complain about how said innovation doesn't work perfectly.
Again, its a matter of proportion, but its time that must be examined. The widespread mistake is to make judgements based on the present as a static snap shot - which is what most people do. Again it's a kind of recency bias mixed with an inability to zoom out and place events in a larger time line.
Let's zoom way out: Think about the time between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, compared to the time between the industrial revolution and the digital age? And you really think the time between the digital age and the next level of magic isn't going to occur in a far more contracted period of time? ...ok.
I've been thinking about denial quite a bit lately, and I've realized that it's seed, stem and root is far more subtle than they first appear. Willful ignorance seems to be at the heart of denial, but I think that's a contradiction. People are certainly capable of hypocrisy, but ignoring something you know isn't the same as being unable to envision the implications with enough visceral force to change behavior. I think in most cases denial is the result of a weak imagination.
There's another software engineer in the family and I'm always shocked when we talk about tech and the future. He seems to be fully committed to the idea that his profession and career has a few more decades to fill out what he thinks will be a normal human lifespan. (His company is beginning to talk about incorporating Cursor into their workflow. Meanwhile I show him a couple full stack applications that I've built and launched within the last few months that are in production and being used across an entire company and his jaw drops) While I do worry about him and his family, all of whom I'm very close to, I realized that he simply lacks the imagination required to extrapolate the implications of recent innovations. I suppose this is maybe why not everyone writes sci-fi? Such implications seem to come naturally to me in daydreams. I invested in Tesla in 2016 because the advent of robotaxi seemed obvious after watching a lecture from Tony Seba about disruption technology. It was just a matter of....time. And time is the only reliable superpower for investing.
Imaginative extrapolation is again a matter of proportionate thinking. It's seeing today - not as a static snapshot - but as a vector, one that creates a ratio of yesterday:today:tomorrow. We always have two parts of that equation, and the more yesterdays we stack into it, the easier it is to solve for tomorrow. This is why the ratio of time between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution compared to the industrial revolution and the digital age is so important. The staggering contraction makes the implication clear: unless you're already on your deathbed, the future is definitely going to happen in your lifetime.
THE CRAYON QUESTION: CREATION IN THE AGE OF AI
November 21st, 2024
Why are refrigerators plastered with crayon drawings in the homes where there are young children? Are these drawings products for the parents and adults to consume? Perhaps. But phrasing it this way is a little ridiculous. It's infusing a situation that is somewhat devoid of capitalistic structures with the terminology of capitalism. So why do these crayon drawings exist? If the answer is obvious, keep it in mind.
VASA SYNDROME
October 6th, 2024
The Vasa was an enormous and beautiful Swedish warship that sailed about 4,200 feet, and then sank. Building a ship, especially in the 1600's before the Industrial Revolution is no small feat. It requires a staggering amount of elbow grease, from cutting the trees down, to shaping the wood, to making the rope to nailing everything in place - even the nails had to be made by hand.
LINGUISTIC PACIFIER
September 11th, 2024
What do we say when we don't know what to say?