Blog post is interesting, but is kind of not organized. Almost like author did not spend enough time "deep thinking" about it before doing information dump.<p>Here is the flow of how to analyze something deeply as I see it:<p>1. Take your idea to extreme. This is about mapping out overall constraints of the problem. It will help you understand not only the issue you are trying to think about, but also how set of options is constrained by environment of problem lives in.<p>2. Come up with analogies, understanding constraints and environment will really help you to map out useful analogies.<p>3. Based on analogies you can come up with real world examples. Because you mapped out constraints and came up with analogies, you will appreciate subtle differences between examples (and the problem you are thinking about).<p>4. Now, you can check out situations historically similar to your examples to see how those subtle differences affected the outcome.<p>5. By now your should have sufficient understanding of the problem to set up either thought or real experiments to see how tweaking variables will affect the problem.<p>All of those connections between steps are in the article, but it is hard to notice them amongst other noise. Really cool thing, that after going through once you can come back to first step with significantly expanded understanding, which will lead to mapping out constraints better, and thus the space whatever you are thinking about lives in.