When I first began to develop the framework for what would eventually become the CRAP framework, it was because I felt the language I was using to discuss ideas was broken somehow. I needed a better vocabulary with which to define and expand on my own disillusionment with institutional education and intellectual life. I’ve long felt, especially for Autodidacts, our discourse could be improved substantially without too much complaint or misguided ranting to drag down the course of potentially progressive and useful conversations in what boiled down to ranting and raving and complaining without much thought of asking the right questions, etc. 

My own autodidactic journey began very early as at a very young age I was reading far above my expected reading level. Of course it took me well into my preteen years to recognize the postmodern nihilism, although it took me many more years to understand how it came about (one could argue it has become more of an aesthetic choice than any sort of philosophical conclusion but we will get to that. Now in the age of LLM proliferation and algorithm driven social media powered by hot takes and rage baiting, we’re living in a vast hellscape of endless derivation, with trendy aesthetics covering up a lot of institutional and societal rot. 

One of the key inspirations which spurned on the creation of this tome was the essay “Make Something Heavy” by Anu Atluru. (It was also from an interview she did with Sublime from which I gained the knowledge of the ABCD critique method which is a ready and able companion to test the durability of ideas within the framework in laying out here.) She spoke of the world of frictionless creation we now inhabit. Our social media addicted world rewards motions over mass and rants over reckoning. Much of what is offered today on popular media as intellectual content feels light and leaves us feeling hollow and unsatisfied. We are constantly consuming what is the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy, which leaves us wanting more but often unsure where to look next, or what questions we should ask to come to more satisfying conclusions. 

Such disillusionment is widespread nowadays, and not even just among intellectual types. We see more than ever people turning to indulging their curiosity as a sort of defense mechanism to protect ourselves against the hopelessness and bleakness of this current million which many human beings are watching their value seemingly evaporate overnight because of “AI” making their occupations redundant. The late stage capitalism that has become the popular punching bag for our frustrations with rising costs of living, traditional avenues of employment drying up, and institutional education promising useful credentials requires costs much too crippling for most folks. Thing is, all this doom-mongering only deepens our frustrations and results in people getting into unproductive feedback loops of crippling anxiety, depression, and malaise.

Thus, I have been trying to construct much more useful frameworks of indulging my own curiosity while also keeping my eyes on having my independent studies offer actionable advice and helpful ways to learn to ask better questions when the conclusions are less than satisfying. In fact, I am almost purely focused on asking better questions, even when a satisfactory answer appears before me. I have decided I can never simply be happy with satisfactory when I can go harder and deeper and make the interrogation of my now biases, assumptions, preconceptions, and knowledge gaps my life purpose entirely. The trick is to not turn egocentric and inward, lest I remain the shoegazer I became in the balance of 2025 and the first couple months of 2026. I need some way to convey the useful things I’ve learned or all the struggle was for nothing.  

So in my search for building better language, I discovered that creating a framework for thinking deeply and critically, arguing with the devil’s advocate in mind, and creating an environment in which there are no stupid questions but the ones you don’t ask… I’ve built a system to ask better questions and never be completely satisfied with any one answer. That being said… I needed to first set some guardrails so that my work didn’t devolve into more of the same rambling that has plagued my journals and even many of my past published essays.

A few principles I now keep in mind.

Let’s be Constructive, not Reactive, in our discourse. Even within ourselves, and in our own self-talk. With others we must refrain from rewarding the performative arguments designed to provoke “engagement” which often turns into needless conflict. This collective “clickbait” mindset has ruined our own internal narrative to a point in which we learn not to trust our own “bullshit detectors.” 

Let’s be Precise, not Vague, with our language or allow ourselves to slip into agreeing with comfortable, misleading rhetoric. We must understand the definitions of the words we are building our arguments around. We must understand the way that words can be weaponized when the dictionary definition clearly is divorced from the current vernacular, and we must recognize and take advantage of this gap to either reassert the dictionary definition or build a better one in the context of our own work. By focusing on defining the terms we use to present our thoughts, we give our ideas density and weight. 

Let’s be Grounded, not Derivative. We must anchor our ideas in our own life experience and not simply copy what we see others doing. Yes we can take inspiration and adapt useful concepts into our own work, but we must also be intellectually honest and give credit when due while also not keeping our messy human selves hidden behind a carefully curated persona. The narrative of our own struggles and the friction we encounter every day within our own lived experiences is what will ground our work with an authentic imprint worthy of existing in the sea of slop we must navigate. 

Let’s be Durable, not Ephemeral. I’ve written for years about my intended focus on evergreen content, and yet I slipped back into “relevant” and “trending”’topics far too often l, making a lot of my work ephemeral and today entirely useless outside of reminding myself of past failures. This isn’t to say that trending topics are something we should ignore either, though. In fact, we should always be keeping our ears to the ground for certain, specific rumblings. When we set ourselves to intellectual projects, we need to make them durable by anchoring them in questions that people keep asking but can’t find any sort of rewarding content when they do so. Seeking to fill  knowledge gaps where they currently exist is an important task, but it can only be the beginning. Our legacies in intellectual pursuits should be laid brick by brick with an eye on building a monument, but we don’t yet know its final form. 

The Four Pillars of CRAP

The CRAP framework is organized around four interconnected pillars around which I’ve found many of my pursuits seem to anchor themselves: Criticism, Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Philosophy.

We shouldn’t see these as independent subjects, but the four corners of a single, dynamic system for engaging with any idea we encounter worth considering more deeply. 

Criticism (The “What”)

Criticism is a key component of intellectual life. It’s also greatly misunderstood by many because of today’s procreation of click-baiting hot takes and rage-baiting arguments built entirely for engagement. The term Criticism itself has been corrupted with negative connotations. What it really means is refusing to accept surface level judgments and opinions, never taking anything at face value. 

Good, honest criticism shouldn’t break down into ranting and raving, and never should it be used for personal attacks. The only thing we should be doing with criticism when it comes to tearing anything down is poor inductive reasoning and misguided deduction. We should be deconstructing unproductive worldviews and ideas starting from first principles, not name calling or bullying. Once a critic becomes a bully, he or she is only the latter and no longer the former. Nor should critics simply dismiss certain ideas out of hand, nor should they look to be the sole authority on any given topic, because there is always more to know and perspectives that will come along and turn everything in that particular realm of thought inside out.

Criticism should be an act of deep engagement, and it’s going to often cause a lot of uncomfortable friction and cost you friends and family members who decide to dismiss your well-reasoned arguments as attacks against their worldviews. But building durable and evergreen criticism means making enemies. That’s just an unfortunate reality. As long as you are not making personal attacks, and respecting people’s beliefs and ideas in your statements, you simply need to accept that some people will simply choose to react illogically and emotionally. Sadly, there is nothing you can do but find better, more reasonable people to associate with. It sucks, but it’s just life. Yes, you might be wrong in the end, but you have to accept the possibility of being incorrect when you set yourself to doing the dirty work of telling people what they don’t want to hear when the truth is staring them right in the face. Other people will listen. And you need to be aware of that, even when you’re being called horrible names and receiving death threats. Thank fundamentalist religions and our hot take obsessed culture for that!

In our framework, Criticism is our foundational tool. Its job isn’t to end a conversation (“This is bad”) but to begin one (“What is this?”). It requires an absolute refusal to be intellectually passive. In this context, Criticism is the active, deliberate process of looking past the “surface level” to understand the mechanics of an idea, an argument, or a piece of art.

Why Criticism is the First Pillar

Not only is Criticism a great anchor for the whimsical acronym of CRAP, but there are fundamental reasons why it comes first. Before we can understand how an idea is presented (Rhetoric), how it feels to us (Aesthetics), or why it matters more broadly (Philosophy), we must first understand the core components of that idea. I turn to the classic pillars of journalism, asking The Who, What, When, Where, and How of a certain assumption or preconception. This is how most ideas start out, after all. Good criticism means being a journalist not reporting on current events or uncovering private matters for public consumption – although criticism is just as helpful for keen journalists, too – but in deconstructing all the things that we and others take for granted.

Accepting ideas at face value, even from well educated and regarded sources, is the comfortable and frictionless path. This passivity is the mortal enemy of an autodidact. In fact, this is what has led to a content creation environment that is first and foremost a “vast hellscape of derivation. Many of us are simply repeating what we have been told in response to what a lot of people are searching for in google. 

The sort of criticism that is necessary to stop this building intellectual inertia starts with asking ourselves three questions about any idea we come across that we stumble over or gives us pause. 

• Is this true?
• What are the unstated assumptions here?
• How does this align with my lived experience?

By refusing to accept surface level judgments, we force ourselves to build our own. This is the first and most crucial step in escaping the common mode of passive consumption and entering a new mode of active, durable, and deeply reflective intellectual consideration.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s solid criticism going on today. But what I see, despite some of the work I see coming to some very interesting conclusions about their discoveries, it still appeals far too much to certain authorities who themselves are extremely biased in some dangerous ways. I will get to that in a bit, especially in terms of Rhetoric.

Rhetoric (The “How”)

I’ve come to regard Rhetoric as a necessary extension of my critical work, regarding how things are said and presented as much as the content, if not more so.”

Whereas Criticism gives us the tools to thoroughly deconstruct, Rhetoric is how we share these critical ideas we have. I have found that the transmission of ideas may be just as important, if not even more important, than the ideas themselves. 

For this reason, understanding rhetoric is a necessary extension of Criticism. Once Criticism deconstructs an idea, Rhetoric dictates how that idea is presented.” How an idea is packaged is often more so important than the content itself.

For me good rhetoric requires intentional, deep work of shaping language to build a progressive and useful argument. It’s an art of building a strong, durable bridge between your idea and the reader.

Why Rhetoric is the Second Pillar

The study of Rhetoric serves two functions in this framework. One is defensive (critical) and the other is offensive (creative). Defensively, we must recognize when certain rhetoric techniques are being used to our disadvantage. We can see the structural flaws in arguments, recognize when language is being used to provoke an emotional reaction that could end up making us bypass our critical thinking. We can also use knowledge and practice in understanding  rhetoric to identify the sort of frictionless, mechanical language used by generative AI that people try to pass off as human written.

Three specific examples of learning how to protect ourselves from wayward or injurious rhetoric:

• How to spot a “hot take”: let’s learn to identify arguments that prioritize speed and novelty over substance, in which the author favors hyperbole and contrarianism for its own sake.
• How to spot “doom-mongering”: let’s identify language designed to overwhelm our critical faculties with emotion (like fear or despair). Such rhetoric often uses absolutist terms (“everything is broken,” “it’s all hopeless”). And believe me, I’ve felt this way many times, but this isn’t productive. 
• How to spot a “misguided rant”: let’s understand how rants are constructed: some are genuine “from the heart” rambling, but there’s also lots of “performative anger” (pathos) but no constructive proposal (logos). Such critiques offer no solution other than making us feel justified with our frustration. 

The “offensive” function is creative, using what we see in the flawed rhetoric of others to seek better language that inspires further curiosity and interrogation. We want to use rhetoric that actually makes people a bit uncomfortable. We don’t want to reinforce others’ misunderstandings or ignorance by appealing to certain types of authority or baser instincts. I’ll get into specifics when it comes to more traditional breakdowns of rhetoric, but what I’ll say is that the overuse of academic rhetoric is actually a major problem in so much literature past and present. In many ways we want to simplify our rhetoric to invite others to join in the conversations we are having with ourselves and the ideas of others which fascinate us. It should be something that people want to share, that’s relatively easy to understand and be built upon. Not dumbing down, but outlining things in a straightforward manner and yes, we can use narrative, but it should be used proactively and illustrative without being reductive or cliche.

Three examples of rhetoric we can use to create work with lasting value.

• Seeking Precision: let’s invest the upfront labor of defining our terms, just like we’re doing right now for each pillar. We shouldn’t ever use vague language because work worth standing the test of time is built on a foundation of precision.
• Planning Structure: let’s build progressive and useful arguments, rather than regressive and recursive ones. We can structure it like a blueprint (one point leading to the next, like our pillars) rather than a “pile of snowflakes” (a light collection of disconnected thoughts, like an uncurated blog).
• Making Ideas Sticky: let’s find “heavy” metaphors to give our abstract concepts meaningful weight and tangibility. This is the bridge between Rhetoric and Aesthetics.

Aesthetics (The “Sense”)

Aesthetics as we refer to it in our framework deals with the optics of subjects. Just considering the form and shape of things in general, it’s fascinating how we humans have such wildly different perceptions of art and reality generally.

If Criticism is concerned with the content and Rhetoric is focused on the presentation, Aesthetics is the sensory impact of the two combined. It means studying the form and shape of things, the optics of an argument, and the feeling an idea gives us.

This is a critical, and often dismissed, component of intellectual life. Aesthetics are exploited often in our modern world as performative trends. Even the postmodern nihilism and doom-mongering were looking to deconstruct are, at their core, each an aesthetic useful for some group to try and justify their own worldviews. You could say they are combined with an aesthetic of despair, used to make “light” or derivative ideas feel “heavy” and profound.

But how we are treating Aesthetics is the reverse. We want to create a form that is in harmony with our midweight and heavy ideas. Anu Atluru’s “Make Something Heavy” essay is a perfect example. The central aesthetic is the metaphor of weight. This anchor gives the entire essay a tangible density and makes the idea “durable.”

Why Aesthetics is the Third Pillar

This pillar is the key to understanding why we have wildly different perceptions. Often, we are not arguing about the content (Criticism) but about the sense or feel (Aesthetics) of an idea. Considered critically, Aesthetics is our tool for perceiving the discourse in our world more clearly. We can look past the optics of a given view and ask ourselves: “Is this argument actually profound, or is it just dressed up in the aesthetic of profundity?” It allows us to see when a “heavy” feeling is masking a “light” idea.

Creatively, our command of Aesthetics is how we intentionally choose the shape of our arguments. It’s how we ensure the experience of our work matches the purpose we’ve built into it.

Aesthetics is the pillar that connects the substance and logic of our argument (Criticism, Rhetoric) to the human experience of the reader. It’s what makes an idea not just understood, but felt.

Philosophy (The “Why”)

I have many disagreements with classical philosophy and modern philosophy is a vast hellscape of derivation and ‘hot takes’ often preoccupied with postmodern nihilism and doom-mongering. Thus, this is why Philosophy is the fourth and final pillar. It is the “why” of why we do the work in the first place, the capstone that synthesizes the other three pillars into a coherent purpose.

My work isn’t just about defining philosophy in a current context, but rather issuing a challenge to the entire field as it currently stands. I wish to critique postmodern nihilism, religious fundamentalism, and the propagation of performative rebellion as all philosophical “copium.” What 21st century Philosophy needs is a reckoning. We must learn how we are constructing our own meaning in an indifferent and chaotic universe that doesn’t provide us with one other than the very fact of our existence. This is the end goal of the entire framework, to find meaning, no matter what that might be for each of us as individuals. If we are able to find some shared meaning that can move us forward as a society, that would be wonderful. But for me, the work to make my own meaning for my own life is itself, the meaning. 

Why Philosophy is the Fourth Pillar

This pillar is the “endgame” that Anu’s article mentions. It’s something “heavy” that gives all our “light” and “mid-weight” work the chance to be brought together into something culminating with lasting value.

Our stabs at creating our own personal Philosophy acts as the final filter. We must judge the “why” of other’s work. Does an argument, however well-criticized, well-argued, and well-presented, ultimately lead to a useful conclusion or is it just reinforcing a tired, unproductive, or even reductionist worldview?

This work of philosophy is the synthesis of all our work. It takes our Criticism (the “what”), our Rhetoric (the “how”), and our Aesthetics (the “sense”) and fuses them into a single purpose. It’s what holds our work together. 

It is the “why” that drives our “what,” “how,” and “feel.” It is the reason we engage in the “struggle” of “heavy” work in the first place: to “improve… intellectual life” and build something that has real, “durable,” and “defining” weight. This is the ultimate “heavy” work

This pillar is what ensures we check our work, when we use Anu’s ABCD critique to suss out any gaps in our thinking, and any biases and preconceptions we have brought forward. We ask ourselves four questions when reading over our notes or essay drafts. What’s Awesome, what’s Boring, what’s Confusing, and what’s Disbelievable? We can use this critique of any content we consume, too, which is a great method by which to learn from the mistakes of others. You can reverse engineer someone’s philosophy of content creation if you’re being critical enough of their theories and aesthetics in addition to their content.

There’s much more to say on this framework, of course. But for now these are the basics and the fundamentals with which Obscure Curiosities uses in its autodidactic pursuits.

~ Amelia Desertsong

Updated 4/18/2026