David Carson

Made things that reached millions. Trying not to ruin the streak

[David Carson @davidcarson]

My agents kept patting themselves on the back for giving me the same beige answer they give everyone else. I'd ask five different agents the same question and get five variations of the same basic response. Different words, but with the same thought every time.

I got frustrated and decided to dig in and fix. Easier said than done, but there's like 70 years of research on this and it all pointed to the same thing. The biggest enemy of a good idea is the obvious one.

As humans, we grab the first reasonable answer and then convince ourselves we're done thinking.

Turns out LLMs do this too, but even faster. They race to the most statistically likely answer and then just stop.
But the research also found a fix. You have to force the system to keep exploring past the point where it thinks it has the answer. Go wide before you go narrow.

So I built Paralogy. 15 divergent thinking skills and a router you drop into Claude Code or any agent stack.

They make your agents reframe the problem, look at blind spots, try approaches they'd normally skip over entirely. Structured divergence based on actual research. Not random noise.

I tested across 10 domains (strategy, research, engineering, law, product, policy, design, education, science, marketing). Every domain scored A or A- on LiveIdeaBench, a divergent thinking benchmark published in Nature Communications. Vanilla prompting averaged a C+. The gap wasn't volume. It was that Paralogy consistently surfaced problem reframes and entire solution categories that the vanilla runs never reached.
https://t.co/V7ALHLf5qE

[David Carson @davidcarson]

https://t.co/cxxTIIPtog

[David Carson @davidcarson]

"Be more critical" in the system prompt doesn't fix this. I built MCP skills for Claude that force structural divergence so cheerleading isn't possible. They score whether your ideas are actually different, generate deliberately terrible ideas to find hidden value, inject friction the model can't opt out of. https://t.co/UUal2gKxmU

[David Carson @davidcarson]

This week's episode on Apple: https://t.co/U2VdYnoWMU

[David Carson @davidcarson]

I watched videos of Punch the baby monkey for hours last week. Not just on tiktok, the whole video universe of Punch the motherless monkey. At one point, I even whispered "you got this, little guy" at my phone, alone in my living room, like the monkey could hear me through the glass and would be comforted by the support of a man in unwashed sweatpants. Meanwhile, there were six thousand GoFundMes for actual human crises live on the internet, and I didn't even click "see more." I didn't whisper encouragement to a single stranger's chemo update. I am a person who would offer a pep talk to a primate but won't even scroll slowly past a stranger in need.

It makes you feel like a glitchy person. Like your soul has a "skip ad" button when it sees humans in need because your brain starts asking logical, cold questions like "is this a scam?" or "is someone else already helping?" But you see a dog with a sad violin soundtrack and your brain just screams, "TAKE MY HOUSE." I’d like to think I’m not heartless. That I just have a very specific, furry-shaped, doe-eyed blind spot. I don’t think I’m alone in this. We’d rather care about a creature that will never fill out a tax return than a person who lives down the street. It’s an evolutionary error where we've decided that if a tragedy doesn't have paws, it’s basically just a statistic.

My latest dumbify episode is a support group for anyone who has ever felt more emotional resonance with a cute motherless monkey than a coworker. I’m looking at the actual data behind why a dog in an ad raises twice as much money as a dying child. It turns out our empathy system has a very small, very leaky bucket. And Understanding why it leaks, and why we’re all suckers for a pair of wet doe-y eyes, is the only way to actually start acting like the "higher species" we claim to be.

Link in the comments 👀👇

[David Carson @davidcarson]

This week's episode on Spotify: https://t.co/VH0N5WXIjS

[David Carson @davidcarson]

Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/5sZ9l9mlAA

[David Carson @davidcarson]

I had a terrifying realization while watching my 17-year-old daughter laugh hysterically at a video of a dying deep-sea anglerfish. She wasn’t laughing at the fish, because that would require a very specific, troubling kind of darkness. She was laughing at the comments. It turns out, the internet is basically a museum where we all just sprint past the paintings so we can read the graffiti in the bathroom. I used to think the person making the video was the artist, but really, a video is just a designated meeting spot for anonymous strangers to be way funnier than the person who spent forty hours making it. Content isn't the main course anymore. It’s just the little paper tray that holds the comment section.

On the latest episode of Dumbify, I explore why the anonymous heckler in the comments is actually the most important creative force alive today. And apparently, there is 2,400 years of historical proof backing this up, involving professional fake-criers in 1820s Paris and a guy who kept 320 isolated human laughs padlocked in a wooden box. If you’ve ever felt a deep, existential guilt about spending two hours lurking in the replies instead of doing anything "productive," I have some excellent news for you. You aren't wasting time. You might actually be doing the most culturally significant work of our generation. Give it a listen to find out why leaning into your inner lurker actually makes you a modern-day genius.

Link in the comments 👇

[David Carson @davidcarson]

Spotify: https://t.co/jf2o7vKCVR

[David Carson @davidcarson]

@daremarket @SolJakey @chooserich If overconfidence was a dress code

[David Carson @davidcarson]

wisdom from Kevin Kelly https://t.co/nSgfqkz7aj

[David Carson @davidcarson]

I found a word today called "Pronoia" and now it is vibrating in my brain like a bee in a jar. It is the opposite of paranoia. Paranoia is when you think the barista spelled your name wrong on purpose to dismantle your ego. Pronoia is the suspicion that the universe is actually a massive secret conspiracy designed specifically to help you win. It is thinking that traffic jams are just the world protecting you from arriving somewhere too early and being awkward. I have decided to adopt this worldview because I am tired of thinking the squirrels are organizing a coup against my credit score. In this week's episode we explore this concept because it turns out believing everyone is out to save you is a much funnier way to live than hiding under a weighted blanket waiting for the sky to fall.

We also talk about Kevin Kelly who is a very smart man who spent his life acting like a helpless toddler for science. He hitchhiked to work every day just to see if the universe would catch him. He knocked on random doors and asked to sleep in backyards and instead of getting arrested he got ice cream. He calls it "The Art of Being Kinded" but I call it Professional Mooching. The science actually says that when you ask a stranger for help you are giving them a blast of dopamine in their brain. So really if you refuse to ask for help you are hoarding all the happiness chemicals for yourself and that is selfish. Come listen to the episode and learn how to be a burden on society in a way that makes everyone feel like a hero. It is the only responsible thing to do.

https://t.co/RHQRii59XR

[David Carson @davidcarson]

IYKYK https://t.co/bCNk4oGvJS Daily #82 - Jan 29, 2026
Easy ✅ Hard ✅ Impossible ✅

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Solved in 3

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Solved in 3

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Solved in 2

[David Carson @davidcarson]

Yesterday, I dropped my pen on the floor. Instead of bending over to pick it up like a functioning member of society, I spent a solid two minutes trying to pinch it between my toes while keeping my butt firmly planted in the chair I was sitting on. I looked like a gargoyle practicing ballet. My hamstrings were trembling, I was sweating, and I probably burned more calories struggling to stay seated than I would have if I'd just stood up.

My wife walked in, watched this pathetic display of "toe dexterity," and sighed. But while she saw a grown man failing to be a person, I realized I was actually engaging in an evolutionary biological imperative. Because it turns out this specific type of defective behavior is actually the key to world domination.

This week on Dumbify, I'm exploring how "laziness" can be a competitive advantage. If you've ever felt guilty for finding the easy way out, this episode is for you because science and captains of industry say it's a sign of superior intelligence.

Let's get dumb: https://t.co/pymOpzvWQQ

[David Carson @davidcarson]

Did I mention I also nailed the speed round? https://t.co/bCNk4oGvJS Bonus Speed Round ⏱️ :50

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[David Carson @davidcarson]

I kinda ruled today. https://t.co/bCNk4oH3zq Daily #79 - Jan 26, 2026
Easy ✅ Hard ✅ Impossible ✅

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[David Carson @davidcarson]

Feels like I just barely made it through today’s puzzles. https://t.co/bCNk4oGvJS Daily #78 - Jan 25, 2026
Easy ✅ Hard ✅ Impossible ✅

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[David Carson @davidcarson]

TOUGH Linkle day!
https://t.co/bCNk4oGvJS Daily #77 - Jan 24, 2026
Easy ❌ Hard ✅ Impossible ❌

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Nope.

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Nope.

[David Carson @davidcarson]

→ be Daisuke Inoue
→ spawn in Osaka
→ go to school “to sleep”
→ pick drums because “all you have to do is hit them”
→ can’t read music
→ learn songs by repetition + vibes
→ play bars/clubs around Kobe
→ notice the real stars are the businessmen
→ they LOVE singing along (badly)
→ get invited on a company trip to play accompaniment
→ can’t go
→ make a tape instead
→ tape works
→ brain lights up
→ “wait… we can sell absence”
→ build 11 homemade boxes (1971)
→ amp + mic + coin box + 8-track car stereo
→ lease them to bars
→ week one: nobody touches them
→ deploy a decoy singer to kickstart the shame
→ suddenly everyone wants the mic
→ machines spread Kobe, Osaka, Tokyo, everywhere
→ end up making ~25,000 units
→ told to patent it
→ don’t
→ because: “it's silly”
→ bigger companies copy it
→ you don’t get rich
→ karaoke becomes global religion
→ key insight: people weren’t looking for good music
→ they were looking for permission
→ to be publicly terrible together
→ win the Ig Nobel Peace Prize
→ for giving humans “an entirely new way… to tolerate each other”

[David Carson @davidcarson]

@zarazhangrui Magic Path is super solid