🎓 Ages 15–18 · Grades 9–12 · Systems Thinking & Statistics
BottleneckForge
Almost everything you want — faster, more likely, done — runs through steps, and one step usually governs the whole. Read a real situation, predict what the numbers will do, then watch a deterministic engine work it out. No jargon, no lectures, nothing sent anywhere.
Start here
Speed up one step A process has several steps. Someone speeds up one of them a lot — predict how much the WHOLE thing actually speeds up, then see the arithmetic (Amdahl’s law). Survival funnels Of 1,000 that enter — a drug pipeline, an audition, a job hunt — how many make it all the way through? Predict, then multiply the rates. How many shots Each try has some chance. Predict how many independent tries you need for a real chance of at least one hit — then compute it. Concept practice 16 kits from “what a bottleneck is” to Amdahl’s law, base rates, the base-rate fallacy, attrition, and your own plan A.
Concept kits — 16 kits of bottleneck & base-rate reasoning
Kit 1: What a bottleneck is 25 questions Kit 2: Multi-stage processes 25 questions Kit 3: Amdahl's law (speed up one step) 25 questions Kit 4: Why the whole barely moves 25 questions Kit 5: Survival funnels 25 questions Kit 6: Multiplying stage rates 25 questions Kit 7: Base rates 25 questions Kit 8: The base-rate fallacy 25 questions Kit 9: How many shots for one hit (geometric) 25 questions Kit 10: Most trials fail (attrition) 25 questions Kit 11: Cost vs value across stages 25 questions Kit 12: Bottleneck in a startup, audition, or job hunt 25 questions Kit 13: Your own plan A 25 questions Kit 14: Optimizing the wrong step 25 questions Kit 15: Real case (structure is not a cure) 25 questions Kit 16: Capstone — find the real bottleneck 25 questions
Meet the cast — then teach one
- The Analyst — measures the whole pipeline, not the favourite step (the mentor)
- Cap — hunts the slowest step — the one that caps the whole (the bottleneck)
- Tally — counts survivors at each stage of a funnel (compounding attrition)
- Reframe — asks whether one more push is even the right bottleneck to fix