Tools to accelerate learning, thinking, and production. Sharpen Your Mind.
BiasProof
Master your biology. Battle your urges. Never get played. A cognitive bias training app that gamifies mental calibration—addressing cognitive biases, emotional traps, and online scams.
Rocket fuel for the college application process. Speed with direction. Momentum with meaning. No AI that gets you flagged. No private tutors that break the bank.
Uses the logic of endurance athletics to build attention span and reading speed. Pre-reading, active reading, and post-reading—three skill sets for sustained, timed immersion.
Once a day, the app presents a single paradox, ethical dilemma, or thought experiment drawn from philosophy, science, and moral reasoning. You must choose. There is no neutral option, no skipping, and no undo.
One intellectually devastating fact per day—strange, true, rigorously sourced, designed to rewire how you see the world. The tone is bratty and self-aware. The content is deadly serious.
The $12.5 Billion Wound: Why Scams Aren't Just a "Dumb Mistake" and Why I Built BiasProof
By Justin Neuman
Every minute, American consumers lose about $23,800 to fraud. In 2024, reported losses hit $12.5 billion... a 25% jump from the year before, dwarfing traditional crimes like burglary or car theft. Globally, scam victims lost an estimated $1 trillion last year. Fraud may now rival the illegal drug trade in scale.
The FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network logged $306 million in imposter scam losses in Q3 2025 alone. The FBI's IC3 report: $16.6 billion in cybercrime losses for 2024, averaging $19,372 per victim. Young adults (20-29) report losing money in 44% of FTC fraud cases. Older adults see losses for big-ticket scams over $100,000 up eight-fold in recent years. AARP finds 41% of American adults... about 110 million people... have lost money to fraud. The educated and successful fall just as hard.
Now the invisible wound. Picture a literature professor who's spent decades dissecting narratives and emotional manipulation in literature. That's me, two weeks into launching Ultra-Normal LLC. My inbox floods with "urgent" emails: trademark alerts, compliance kits, credit offers, invoices screaming officialdom. One form, mimicking a federal certificate, nearly has me pulling out my credit card. Hand hovering, browser open, brain fogged by the day's chaos. I caught it... barely.
Now imagine someone who doesn't. A successful executive, credentialed and cautious, clicks a phishing link at 5 PM after a grueling day. Decision fatigue. Cognitive load peaks. The aftermath isn't just empty accounts... it's shattered self-trust. Victims report PTSD-like symptoms: flashbacks, nightmares, hypervigilance. Depression spikes. Relationships fracture under unspoken shame.
These aren't separate problems. The same cognitive vulnerabilities... anchoring bias, urgency tactics, sunk cost fallacies... power the initial scam and the shame spiral that follows. Decision fatigue depletes willpower at predictable moments. Scammers time it perfectly, overwhelming mental bandwidth to bypass rational checks.
BiasProof isn't a finger-wagging "don't get scammed" tool. It's integrated prophylaxis, drawing from bias inoculation research like Sander van der Linden's prebunking work at Cambridge. The app simulates traps in three zones: online scams, emotional manipulation, cognitive biases. It helps users build mental muscle memory through scenarios: anchoring, urgency, romance phishing... so instincts kick in before you reach for your wallet. We armor computers with antivirus. We lock doors. Why not armor our minds?
Smart people don't fall for scams because they're dumb. They fall because the moment moves faster than the mind. BiasProof is mind-armour.
Most failures of understanding are failures of scale. Businesses fail when founders can't hold daily execution and decade vision simultaneously. Writers get blocked at the sentence level when they can't see why their ideas matter. Climate paralysis happens because people can't connect individual action to planetary outcome. Personal stuckness is the inability to see how today's choices connect to a meaningful life.
This isn't our fault. Human beings evolved in linear space and time. We're built to reason locally – one step after another, one cause at a time. Scale literacy is a missing cognitive capacity, and we don't have tools for it.
The world now changes logarithmically. Technology compounds. Systems scale. A single decision can echo across continents and decades. Holding one person and eight billion people in the same frame does not come naturally. Linear minds are being asked to operate in a logarithmic world.
FractalView is my attempt to address that mismatch.
The app is a thinking environment that helps people move deliberately between orders of magnitude without losing coherence. It does not optimize your output or automate your thinking. It gives you instruments to achieve insight.
The core is a scalar ladder. Ideas are placed explicitly at discrete levels – from concrete evidence at the bottom, through working claims and structures, up to universal stakes. Moving up or down is not cosmetic. Each level demands different rigor. Downward movement demands specificity, evidence, clarity. Upward movement demands implication, stakes, vision. Root-cause analysis ("Why?") is paired with implication analysis ("So what?"), step by step.
The app is intentionally small and disciplined. It does not generate insights, detect patterns, or replace judgment. No AI. It earns trust by enforcing clarity rather than simulating intelligence.
It is also free, and local-first. Your work lives on your device. Your thinking is not mined, ranked, or trained on. FractalView is not a feed, a network, or a platform. It is an instrument.
I'm giving it to my students next semester. I hope it's useful to you.
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