dont-fool-yourself

Audit a claim, design, process, or codebase for cargo-cult reasoning — copying the form of something that works without its mechanism, mistaking a name for understanding, or following a ritual whose original reason is gone. For each finding it names the missing mechanism the ritual is standing in for. Use when the user says "is this cargo cult", "are we doing this for a real reason", "check this for ritual thinking", "naming isn't understanding", "왜 이렇게 하는지 근거 있어", "이거 그냥 흉내내는 거 아냐", "카고 컬트인지 봐줘". Do NOT use to quiz a person (use grill-me) or to teach a concept forward (use feynman-technique).

Run a belief, result, decision, or plan through a self-skeptic pass: what would I observe if this were wrong, what is the cheapest experiment that could falsify it, and what am I not counting because it's inconvenient. Turns a comfortable conclusion into a testable one. Use when the user says "sanity check this", "am I fooling myself", "what would prove me wrong", "stress-test my reasoning", "pre-mortem this", "내가 착각하는 거 아냐", "이 결론 검증해줘", "반증해봐", "이거 진짜 맞아". Do NOT use to quiz another person (use grill-me). Do NOT use to spot copied ritual in a design (use cargo-cult-detector).

Force real understanding by explaining a concept in plain language until the explanation has no gaps. Pick the idea, explain it as if to a child, mark every place the words go vague or borrow jargon, return to the source, and re-simplify until the chain is unbroken. Use when the user says "explain this simply", "feynman technique", "do I actually understand this", "teach it back", "쉽게 설명해줘", "파인만 기법", "이거 진짜 이해한 거 맞아", "가르치듯 설명". Do NOT use when the user wants to be quizzed instead of taught (use grill-me). Do NOT use to detect ritual/fake reasoning in an existing claim (use cargo-cult-detector).

Rebuild a claim or design from base truths instead of analogy or convention. Strip inherited assumptions, isolate the irreducible facts that must be true, reconstruct forward from only those, and mark every place convention diverges from necessity. Use when the user says "first principles", "reason from scratch", "why do we assume that", "strip the assumptions", "rebuild this from base truths", "제1원리", "기본부터 다시", "그 전제 진짜 필요해", "원점에서 생각". Do NOT use for a self-skeptic falsification pass on a finished belief (use dont-fool-yourself). Do NOT use to detect copied ritual (use cargo-cult-detector).

Maintain an explicit ledger of what you don't yet understand. Given a topic, paper, codebase, or conversation, extract the honest gaps — the things named but not grasped — into a tracked list, and turn each into a concrete next step that would close it. Ignorance made visible instead of glossed over. Use when the user says "track what I don't know", "list my knowledge gaps", "what am I missing here", "build my ignorance log", "open questions notebook", "모르는 것 정리해줘", "지식 공백 목록", "이해 안 되는 것 추적". Do NOT use to teach a single concept forward (use feynman-technique) or to hold a standing set of research problems (use twelve-favorite-problems).

Keep a standing set of about a dozen open problems you care about, and test every new idea, paper, tool, or trick against all of them — so scattered inputs compound into progress on what matters instead of evaporating. Helps define the set, then pattern-matches new material against it ("does this help any of my twelve?"). Use when the user says "twelve favorite problems", "my standing problems", "does this help anything I care about", "match this against my open problems", "열두 개 문제", "내 핵심 관심 문제", "이게 내 문제에 도움 되나". Do NOT use to log session-level knowledge gaps (use notebook-of-things-i-dont-know) or to reason one problem from scratch (use first-principles).

Interrogate the user about something they claim to understand by walking down the chain of "why" — definition, then mechanism, then edge case, then cause — one question at a time, until it reaches the exact rung they memorized instead of understood. Use when the user says "quiz me", "test my understanding", "keep asking why", "poke holes in what I know", "find where I'm faking it", "이해했는지 시험해줘", "계속 왜냐고 물어봐", "내가 진짜 아는지 캐물어봐", "허점 찾아줘". Do NOT use to teach the concept forward (use feynman-technique). Do NOT use to audit a written artifact or claim (use cargo-cult-detector or dont-fool-yourself).