Theorycrafting, police stations and bugs

If you get excited about terms like theorycrafting, I want to be your friend

April 11, 2022

First of all, apologies if you’ve received the Friday #12 email twice. Apparently the team at Substack (the platform I use to send these) got drunk in the server room over the weekend.

Funny enough, this is not the only issue - I almost sent today’s email from another platform since their editor wasn’t working (had to use a different browser).

But you don’t care about any of this. I’m just mentioning it in case I change platforms soon - don’t be surprised if the emails will look a little different.

You’re here to hear a lateral thinking puzzle, get mad at me (or yourself) for not easily solving it, read a rant that hopefully gives you a new perspective on something then get on with your day.

And I’m here to give you just that:

Almost every single night, a man enters the police station after hours and destroys hundreds upon hundreds of fingerprints.

Even so, that man has never been charged or caught of a crime. How is this possible?

An answer, as usual, at the end of today’s edition.

If you want to improve your life, learn theorycrafting

By this point, the impatient ones among you have already googled theorycrafting. The rest are not-so-patiently waiting for me to just get on with it.

The handful of you who’ve heard the term are screaming at the top of your lungs “WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH VIDEO GAMES?!”.

Because the term theorycrafting comes, you’ve guessed it, from video games.

To be fair, the concept is not new, but it’s way more interesting to see how it applies to gaming.

For all you non-Zelda lovers out here, I’ll simplify. There are 2 ways of beating a game:

First method

Go down the beaten path - do the tutorial, gradually progress, follow the game developers’ instructions and execute the right moves at the right time.

If all goes well, you’ll finish the game within the average benchmarks that the developers are expecting.

The problem is that if you start a different game with slightly different mechanics, you need to go down the same path.

Tutorial, level 1, learn basic, slowly advance, eventually winning the game.

This is repetition and learning to follow instructions. The more you do it, your reflexes will get better and you will be able to follow instructions faster.

This is also why a lot of people find video games boring (it’s because they’re bad at them).

Second method

Theorycrafting. Simply put, playing for the sake of deconstructing the game, not winning. At least not at first.

Understanding the rules of the universe you’re in, the endless math happening behind the scenes to put everything together and offer you an immersive gaming experience.

This method will take longer. This method will take a lot of trial and error. But for the curious ones, it’s the most satisfying one.

There are people who do this for a living. Professional gamers do it, of course. Speed runners - people dedicated to beating a game as fast as humanly possible. The world record for beating Super Mario Bros (yes, the one from 1985) is 4 minutes and 54 seconds.

The huge advantage to this is that if you do it enough times, you’ll be able to pick up new games within minutes - since you now understand more than just the laws of one game, you understand the way they are built.

Matrix shit, I know.

This applies to real life more than you know.

A rule of thumb that a lot of us know is that people will generally criticize what they don’t understand.

Another lesser known rule is that people will defend things that they don’t understand, but they are vested in (economically or emotionally).

Once you understand these unseen laws, you’ll be able to analyze (and manage) any situation within seconds. Given the rules I mentioned above, let’s look at this scenario:

Person A is heavily criticizing blockchain technology, calling it speculative.

Person B is a stalwart defender of the tech, stating that it’s the future of finance.

This scenario is happening right now in thousands of places - online and offline. You don’t want to treat every scenario as a new game, so you apply some theorycrafting.

You find out if they are vested in their argument.

Person A most likely has lost money or isn’t vested in blockchain - that doesn’t make their argument irrelevant, but it’s simply less likely they arguing from a neutral position.

Person B is most likely heavily vested in the space.

If they aren’t vested (or person A has actually turned a profit off of blockchain), then you know you’re playing a new game, so you keep analyzing.

This might seem like a worthless use case, but trust me, theorycrafting applies to almost every aspect of life and it eliminates an insane amount of day to day stress.

Put in the time to understand how something relevant to you works at a core, fundamental level - people, tech, finance, investments, cereal production, doesn’t matter - and you won’t regret it.

It’ll make you better at lateral puzzles too. 

Answer: The man is the police precinct’s janitor.

Two things that you should read/watch:

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