---
title: 'Possibility / Exponentiality Training'
subtitle: 'Retraining the two reflexes that cost the most right now'
slug: 'possibility-exponentiality-training'
date: 2026-05-12
type: 'essay'
status: 'published'
tags: ['visual-essay', 'training', 'deutsch', 'exponential', 'cognitive-bias', 'enviroai']
abstract: 'A daily five-to-ten-minute training exercise to retrain the two reflexes that cost the most right now: the instinct to call something impossible, and the instinct to assume change is linear. Both were usually right for most of human history. Both are now usually wrong.'
license: 'CC-BY-4.0'
author: 'Jed Anderson'
co_authors: []
canonical_url: 'https://jedanderson.org/essays/possibility-exponentiality-training'
hero_image: '/images/possibility-exponentiality-training-hero.jpg'
supporting_files: []
interactive_url: '/visual-essays/possibility-exponentiality-training/'
interactive_cta: 'Begin the training →'
---

We are linear thinkers evolved for a linear world, now living in an exponential one. That gap is the most expensive cognitive bias of our moment. Two reflexes were usually right for most of human history and are now usually wrong: the instinct to call something impossible, and the instinct to assume change is linear.

This piece is a training exercise. Five to ten minutes a day. Two sets of quotations—thirty-eight on the word *impossible*, thirty-nine on the word *linear*—read slowly enough to let the reflexes loosen. The anchor for the first set comes from Deutsch: if it isn't forbidden by physics, it is an engineering problem, and engineering problems are soluble. The anchor for the second comes from Gretzky, retrofitted for an exponential world: skate to where the puck will be, but the puck now accelerates, so where the puck will be is no longer where linear extrapolation puts it.

This sits alongside the rest of the corpus on information physics and environmental superintelligence as the cognitive prerequisite. The bond-bit asymmetry, Maxwell's demon at planetary scale, zero-cost stewardship—none of it reads as a serious claim if the reflexes that say *impossible* and *too slow* are still running.

Best experienced full-screen. Scroll slowly. Read daily.