A curated failed-replications reference other
A list of famous psychology experiments that did not replicate, to check before you cite one.
The AeMug Thinking Toolbox
This page lists every thinking tool ever used on Aether Mug. I call “thinking tool” (or “tool for thought”) any reusable idea or method that expands what your brain can do.
The list is divided into several categories. Many of these tools were invented by others, and I used or adapted them in my blog posts. Others I named or described myself, but even then they’re not necessarily my original inventions: usually I borrow ideas, remix them, and package them in a new way. I’m not automatically claiming credit for all tools marked “named here”.
For each thinking tool, the “Occurrences” line shows which blog posts it appeared in, and what the blog post did with it, according to these marks:
- named here
- borrowed
- borrowed & developed further
- developed further
- used again
Hover over a mark to see which post it stands for, and click it to read that post. On a phone, tap a mark once to see the post, then tap it again to open it.
Sort:
147 tools, sorted alphabetically.
A framing is a choice of boundaries principle
Every framing decides where to draw lines and what to treat as a black box.
A visual notation for framings and models method
A way to draw framings and models with boxes and arrows, adapted from UML class diagrams in software design.
AAT – Anatomy of Augmented Thought framework
A map of nine kinds of thinking, to see which ones an AI helps and which it replaces.
Acquired humor concept
Jokes that are funny only after you have seen them land with a group.
AI as an assistant, not a consultant distinction
Treat an AI as a fast, smart assistant who lacks experience, not as a consultant you can hand your thinking to. You guide it, and you answer for its work. The opposite of the magic wand illusion.
Alignment concept
How interacting systems are positioned in space and time relative to each other.
Always Between (things happen between entities, not to them) principle
Things never happen to an entity, only between entities. Both sides change.
Anthropomorphism as a cognitive bias phenomenon
Our reflex to see human minds in things, and why chatbots trigger it so well.
Anti-Magic Effect phenomenon
Using an AI tool well can take more work than not using it at all. It is the reverse of the magic wand illusion.
Aphantasia phenomenon
The absence of a mind's eye: thinking with no mental images.
Assumption-digging method
Dig under a disagreement until you find the goals each side holds.
Attention vs. interpretation distinction
Perception has two parts: what you attend to, and what you make of it.
Backgrounding method
Reading a story for what it takes for granted, not for the lesson it intends. It is a spin-off of foregrounding.
Bad framings concept
Framings that confuse us, and the more dangerous ones that mislead us without notice.
Ballistic moments of weightlessness analogy
Short stretches of life when purpose is suspended and you are simply in flight.
Basis-change and quantization model of language translation analogy
Translation as moving meaning between two sets of axes, where some detail must round off.
Bayesian inference concept
Update your beliefs by how much new evidence should shift them.
Bespoke one-of-a-kind personal software as a newly affordable category concept
Software made for one person only is now cheap enough to build.
Black boxes (Ashby, cybernetics) concept
Treating a thing by what goes in and what comes out, ignoring what is inside.
Boundaries Are in the Eye of the Beholder (BAEB) principle
Boundaries Are in the Eye of the Beholder. Things exist as things because a purposeful being cut the world there, and where we draw lines depends on our goals.
Brooks' essential-novelty argument (The Mythical Man-Month) principle
New software is late because the hard part is always something nobody has done before.
Change resolution / move boundaries method
Two moves to improve a framing: zoom in or out, or redraw its lines. Some behavior makes sense only at a larger scale than its parts.
Character amnesia (wahpro baka), plus gist-vs-verbatim memory phenomenon
Forgetting how to write kanji you can still read, and why the gist survives the details.
Cognitive debt phenomenon
Leaning on AI to think for you can leave you less able to think on your own. The term comes from a 2025 MIT study of essay writing with ChatGPT.
Computation concept
Differences that transform other differences.
Continuity of intention, not material permanence principle
A thing may stay the same thing because the intention behind it continues, not its material.
Control concept
A feedback loop that someone designed to reach a goal.
Counterfeit people (Daniel Dennett) analogy
Dennett's warning about machines that pass as people.
Cross-section reading method
Any reading method or tool (like the Foldable Tractatus) that allows you to read only the parts of a book pertaining to a chosen theme.
Culture as the mass-synchronization of framings phenomenon
A culture is many people sharing the same framings at once.
Detachment from the fruits of labour (Bhagavad Gita), as a writing discipline method
Write for the work itself, not for the response it gets.
Difference Conductance and Transparency concept
Two measures of a system: how strongly the differences that pass through it change it, and whether they leave in the same form they came in. They are the axes of Glass Circuits.
Differences concept
Bateson's idea that the world is made of differences, not of things.
Differences that make a difference concept
Information is a difference that matters to someone.
Diverge / Converge bullet-list method method
Dump ideas into a list, then reorder, nest and prune them: divergent, then convergent thinking.
Divergent and convergent thinking distinction
Thinking that opens up options, and thinking that narrows them down.
DNA as a survival kit, not a script principle
DNA does not dictate a life. It sets up loops that let an organism improvise.
Dokki concept
Reading ripeness: the right time in your life to read a given book.
Embedded prophesy devices analogy
The models inside us that predict what will happen next.
Embedding space as a semantic map analogy
A map where meanings sit near similar meanings, as an AI model encodes them.
Emergence concept
How wholes do things that none of their parts do.
Engineering for emergence (Susan Stepney) concept
Stepney's goal of designing systems whose useful behavior emerges.
Enlarge / merge / intersect method
Three ways to redraw a boundary: make it bigger, join two, or keep the overlap.
Evolution as elimination, not selection principle
Evolution removes what fails. It does not pick what wins.
Evolutionarily stable strategies, applied to linguistic inertia concept
Why awkward language habits persist: switching alone does not pay.
Family Resemblance (Wittgenstein) concept
Wittgenstein: members of a category share overlapping traits, not one essence.
Feedback concept
A process in which an outcome affects the next occurrence of the same process.
Fog of war (Clausewitz / strategy games) analogy
The parts of the map you cannot see until you go there. How much of the world you can make sense of depends on where you stand.
Foldable Tractatus software
A web app for reading tree-structured texts by folding and unfolding branches.
Foregrounding concept
The literary devices that make some parts of a text stand out.
Four failure modes of language framework
Four ways that words fail to carry what we mean.
Framing concept
A way to cut the world into parts and relations. The same facts can be cut up in different ways, and each cut lends itself to different models of the world, and different predictions.
Framing-expansion as a critique method method
Critique an argument by widening the frame it sits in.
Gall's Law principle
Complex systems that work grew from simple systems that worked.
Generalism as a masterable meta-skill principle
Being a generalist is a skill you can get good at.
Generative AI as a lens into embedding space analogy
Generative AI as an instrument for looking into a map of meaning, not as a person.
Glass Circuits framework
Place any system on a chart with four quadrants, by its difference conductance and transparency.
Halos of attention phenomenon
How an image-free mind 'sees' a shape: as areas that feel more important.
Hills, not walls analogy
Progress is crossing hills, not breaking through walls.
History as a strange attractor principle
History never repeats exactly, but it keeps circling the same shapes.
Honeycomb Slop Framework / Personal-Functional axis framework
AI text is fine for functional writing and wrong for personal writing.
Hoshi Shin'ichi's "Shoulder-Top Secretary", as a lens on LLM writing analogy
A 1960s story about a parrot that speaks for you, read as a warning about AI writing.
How-Come (Causal) vs. What-For (Purposive) Questions distinction
Two kinds of 'why': what caused this, and what is it for.
"I choose not to prioritize this" method
Say "I choose not to prioritize this" instead of "I don't have time", and see the choice you are making. In the same way, "impossible" often means "not worth the cost to me".
Informed anthropomorphism (Frans de Waal), applied to LLMs concept
Use human comparisons for AI with care, the way de Waal does for animals.
Intention-behavior gap / value-action gap phenomenon
What people do does not reliably show what they intend. It matters for design.
Introspective descriptions method
Careful first-person accounts of inner experience, as a genre worth growing.
Kakugo concept
Knowing the worst that can happen, and choosing to go anyway.
Kodawari concept
An obsessive devotion to getting a detail just right.
Language as a bottleneck for thought phenomenon
Words are too narrow a channel for everything we think.
Language as serialization of a network phenomenon
Speech turns a web of ideas into a single line of words.
Laplace's Demon concept
A perfect predictor would need perfect knowledge, which nobody has.
Magic Wand Illusion phenomenon
The belief that an AI tool needs only a prompt to do the work. The reality is often the anti-magic effect.
Mass noun vs. count noun framing (Dennett's anteater example) distinction
Whether a language treats things as countable shapes how it carves the world.
Me Map vs. Humanity Map distinction
What I know of the world, and what all of us know together.
Meaning as the specific difference made by information concept
Meaning is the link between information and a purpose.
Memory as model-updating rather than episode storage principle
Memory updates your model of the world. It does not file away episodes.
Metacognition as the bottleneck with AI principle
Using AI well depends on thinking about your own thinking, which few people practice.
Model concept
A simulation in the mind, built on a framing, that predicts how the parts of the world will behave.
Modelese concept
Everyday sayings translated into the language of internal models.
Morphological computation concept
A body's shape can do part of the work of control.
"My head as a lake" analogy
A guest's image of an inner life without pictures: a mind like a lake.
Naming Things 1.0 concept
Names are a technology: useful shortcuts that draw lines on a continuous world. A newer, improved version is Naming Things 2.0, i.e. "systems".
Never Slide Out of the Day method
Spend almost all your time immersed in each day's life, with short planned trips out of it.
No side effects, only effects principle
John Sterman's principle: unintended effects are as real as the intended ones, as POSIWID implies.
Noise (differences that don't make a difference) concept
Differences that do not matter for the purpose at hand. The opposite of information.
Non-sensory / spatial-model imagination concept
Imagination as a web of relations and positions, with no pictures, as seen in at least some people with aphantasia, and possibly in all humans.
Non-teleological thinking (Steinbeck and Ricketts) concept
Look at what is, without asking what it is for.
Object / perturbation / outcome framing of grammar framework
Every sentence says something about a boundary, a possible perturbation of that boundary, and of a path taken by it.
Open exposition problems concept
Topics that nobody has yet managed to explain well. Explaining them is real, valuable work.
Paradigm-shift test for reframings method
Test a new framing by which questions it raises, keeps and dissolves.
Pattern as predictability concept
A pattern is anything that lets you predict, because the past shapes the present. Randomness has no history or predictability, so it is the opposite of pattern.
Personal English-error dashboard and practice game software
An app that tracks one writer's English mistakes and turns them into practice.
"Place" concept
The space that suits one person's being uniquely well.
POSIWID principle
Stafford Beer's principle: the purpose of a system is what it does.
Process world, object-oriented mind principle
The world runs as processes, but our minds sort it into objects.
Promiscuous Teleology phenomenon
The habit of seeing purpose in everything. It may come from a hyperactive agent detection device: our tendency to see intention behind every rustle in the grass.
Proteus Effect phenomenon
We start to act like the avatar we wear.
Purpose & Goals concept
Purpose is having a goal, and a goal is a particular system state that a human wants to achieve by avoiding all other states.
Purpose Diagrams method
Arrows and nodes to draw plans, goals and how they connect.
Purpose Paths and Purpose Networks concept
Purposes as paths that cross, merge and split, helping or blocking each other.
Randomness as a creativity stimulus method
Meaningless input can shake loose new ideas.
Reading in stereo phenomenon
Reading Japanese, where the sound and the characters can carry two messages at once.
Readwise ↔ Obsidian resurfacing system software
A setup that brings old highlights back to you at random and lets you keep discovering connections between them.
Reality is emergence principle
Reality is emergence, and emergence is reality.
Recursion concept
What feedback does when it runs round after round: each pass starts from the result of the last, so the effects build up. Feedback makes recursion possible, and recursion makes the unlikely likely.
Relativity of talent principle
Talent depends on the fit between a person, a goal and the circumstances.
Ripple Universe analogy
The universe as differences that spread and meet like ripples on a pond. A chain-reaction contraption is a small model of it.
Science as the seamanship of life analogy
Science as the craft of making fewer mistakes, in any part of life.
Scientific Image vs. Manifest Image (Wilfrid Sellars) distinction
The world as science describes it, and the world as we live in it.
SDAM phenomenon
Severely deficient autobiographical memory: knowing your past without reliving it.
Seken concept
The vague, watching 'others' whose judgment shapes Japanese social life.
Sticky heuristics as cultural intuitions concept
Scientific ideas that a culture absorbs as common sense, like washing hands.
Stigmergy / Environment as externalized memory concept
Coordination through traces left in a shared environment, as termites do. People do it too: the traces we leave in our surroundings remember things for us.
Structure, Behavior, and Alignment framework
Three things that decide what systems do when they meet: their structure (how their matter is arranged), their behavior (what changes in and around them), and their alignment (where and when they meet).
System / Naming Things 2.0 concept
Call something a system to see its interactions and boundaries, not its properties.
Systemic perspective analogy
A sense of distance for systems, like the one our eyes give us for space.
Teleological King Midas phenomenon
We turn everything we touch without thought into something purposeful.
Teleporting-Einstein thought experiment method
Imagine a great achiever born somewhere else, to see how much the setting mattered to their talent.
Tellability concept
What makes a story worth telling, and so what it will put in front.
The 15-item checklist of thinking errors method
Fifteen common errors in models and framings, small enough to carry.
The 26-step friction checklist method
Twenty-six small (big) changes that make your phone harder to reach for.
The Bad Framing Kraken analogy
The monster of misleading framings, and philosophers as its hunters.
The dome of ignorance phenomenon
We assume everyone's inner life is like ours because nobody checks. We may even claim inner experiences we do not have, because everyone else seems to have them. Inspired by the dome in The Truman Show.
The gradient of indirection in control concept
Control loops range from simple, like an hourglass, to indirect, like a thermostat.
The group as a distinct identity concept
Draw the boundary around a group and it becomes a thing with its own behavior.
The Miracle of Stillness concept
The puzzle that anything stays the same in a universe of ripples.
The naturalistic fallacy concept
"Natural" or "normal" does not mean good.
The ontology of holes, as an open framing question concept
Is a hole a thing? An open question about framings.
Thinking on the page method
Writing as a way of reasoning, not only of reporting.
Thomas Theorem principle
If people define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences.
Three categories of emergence: plain complementarity, advanced complementarity, and context emergence framework
Three kinds of emergence, from parts that complement each other to whole new contexts.
Three-category joke taxonomy (linguistic / cultural / universal) framework
Jokes come in three kinds: linguistic, cultural and universal.
Translation redefined as achieving the original text's goals concept
A good translation achieves what the original text set out to do.
Transparent etymology as a vocabulary-acquisition asset principle
Words whose parts show their meaning are easier to learn.
Tree of Possibilities (ToP) concept
Reason about what may happen as a tree of branches, given what you do not know.
Tree-structured writing method
Writing as a tree of statements that you can read along many paths.
Trough of laziness phenomenon
The phase where you rely more and more on AI to do things for you, until you stop thinking and your skills start to fade.
Tunnel Vision phenomenon
When you sink so deep into a framing that you mistake it for all of reality.
Urgency-Transience-Importance framing framework
Sort any notification by urgency, transience and importance into eight responses. Senders can flag urgency, and transient notifications can remove themselves.
Vibe Check UX software
Ask users what they are here to do, instead of guessing from their behavior, because of the intention-behavior gap.
Virtual Physics concept
The laws we imagine to be in force in the worlds within our heads, used to predict and act.
Visual Koans software
Thousands of meaning-free images, each shown for four seconds, to prompt the mind with randomness.
Water Lilies concept
We were never in control principle
Today's big problems are not new crises of a world more complex than ever. The world was always too complex for us, and the old solutions never worked. Talk about the kind of problem, not about a new world.
Wild vs. Intentional Water Lilies distinction
Water Lilies made by mindless loops, and those made by intent.
147 tools in 102 posts