Flipping Bits in the World
“Change the System by Flipping One Bit”
X: @theOpusLABS
A few nights ago, my friend and I were talking about ideas, specifically how people come up with good ones. Not the kind of ideas that get you a few likes on X, but the sort that can bend reality a little. The kind that could turn into startups, useful products, papers, new fields. The kind that last.
What I realized is that most people don’t really think in systems. And that might be the core problem.
Instead, people think in anecdotes, or goals, or isolated products. “Let’s build a to-do list app.” “Let’s make a meditation tool.” “Let’s solve loneliness.” These might all be fine ends, but they’re weak starting points. They skip the actual structure of how things work.
Systems thinking sounds intimidating. It makes people imagine flowcharts, jargon, and whiteboards filled with diagrams. But in practice, it’s simpler and more powerful than it seems. At its core, systems thinking just means this: try to understand how things work together.
What are the inputs? The feedback loops? The incentives? What does the system want to do by default? And this is the real kicker, what happens when you flip a single bit?
That’s the trick I came up with: if you want to generate big ideas, flip a bit in a large system.
Let me explain.
Imagine some large-scale systems: education, banking, healthcare, social media, manufacturing. Now pick a tiny assumption inside that system and invert it. Flip one bit. Then ask: what would the consequences be?
For example, flip this bit in education: what if students graded teachers instead of the other way around? Or in health: what if you owned your health data like property, and could lease it out instead of letting companies farm it for free? Or in finance: what if interest rates were algorithmically adjusted per individual based on real-time behavioral data?
Some of these sound absurd. That’s good. The goal isn’t to get a perfect answer right away. The goal is to stretch your intuition into places it normally doesn’t go. Flipping a bit forces you to interrogate assumptions that have become invisible, assumptions so baked into the system that no one questions them anymore.
When you flip a bit, a few things happen:
You reveal the hidden structure of the system.
You create space for new kinds of leverage.
You generate non-obvious questions, which are often more valuable than answers.
Thinking this way makes you better at spotting weak points in the world, places where the whole machine wobbles if you nudge just one gear. That’s where startups live. That’s where revolutions begin. That’s where jokes that feel like prophecy come from.
It’s not magic. You don’t need a PhD. You just need to get good at asking: “What’s the default setting here? What happens if I flip it?”
Most people never do this. They take systems as given. But the world wasn’t built to be efficient. It was built by a series of accidents. Which means it’s full of arbitrary bits, just waiting to be flipped.
And that’s the real insight: the world is like software. Messy, emergent, badly documented software. If you learn to think like a systems debugger, you’ll see opportunities everywhere.
You just have to start flipping bits.
It’s interesting way to examine the world. However I feel that it’s a bit arrogant (maybe not the word to describe it). I mean it implies very-very intimate understanding of the system (which is already hard) and also belief that you truly can assess what flipping a bit will result. I am sure if you take 2 smart people, they may come to very different conclusion about flipping the same bit. And based on that come to very different assessment of startup viability. Maybe “let’s created another todo app” is too simplistic, but it feels like “let’s flip random bit, try to predict behavior of huge, complex system that we don’t fully know” is a bit esoteric. What feels right is classical: “do you see a pain that people are willing to pay to solve”.