How to think about it
A question, not a finding. Nothing here tells you what to conclude, and running all ten does not mean you are right. A person who has asked ten good questions and a person who has the answer are not the same person.
A lens that claims to see everything has stopped being a tool and become a worldview. Handing a citizen a worldview is the failure this whole project is built against, so every lens on this page carries the thing it is bad at.
Systems
A school board vote on bus routes is also a housing question, a work-hours question and an attendance question.
What this lens misses
It can make everything look connected to everything, which is a way of never having to decide anything.
Second Order
A cap on rents is a first-order answer. What landlords, builders and buyers do next is where the argument actually is.
What this lens misses
Second-order guesses are guesses. Stated confidently they sound like knowledge.
Inversion
Before asking how to raise turnout, ask what you would do to suppress it. The list is shorter and far more specific.
What this lens misses
Avoiding failure is not the same as achieving the thing. You can dodge every hazard and arrive nowhere.
Incentives
Read who filed the lobbying disclosure before you read the bill's title.
What this lens misses
Incentives explain tendencies, not individuals. Used on a named person it becomes an accusation, which this project does not make.
Base Rate
Before deciding voter fraud decided an election, ask how many cases were charged in the last one.
What this lens misses
A base rate is history. It is worst exactly when something genuinely new is happening.
Scale
A town meeting works at 200 and cannot work at two million. That is why representation exists, and where its costs come from.
What this lens misses
Some things should not scale, and asking this can quietly make bigness the goal.
Time Horizon
A pension promise and a bond issue are both decisions made by people who will not be paying them.
What this lens misses
Long horizons can be used to postpone every urgent thing indefinitely.
Reversibility
A pilot programme and a constitutional amendment carry the same idea at wildly different costs of being wrong.
What this lens misses
Reversible things get treated as unimportant, and small reversible harms still land on real people while they last.
Steelman
State the other side's argument well enough that somebody who holds it would say yes, that is it.
What this lens misses
A steelman can be so generous it stops describing anything anyone actually argues.
The Unowned Cost
The people at a 2pm weekday hearing are the people who can attend a 2pm weekday hearing.
What this lens misses
It can be used to speak for absent people who never asked you to, which is its own problem.
These carry no sources because they assert nothing about outcomes. Claims that need evidence — spaced practice, interleaving, retrieval practice — live in the teaching standard with a source and a verification date against each.
Explain It Plainly
Ask the learner to say it in ordinary words to somebody who does not know it. Where they reach for jargon is where the gap is.
From the Feynman technique, from the 'superhuman learning' prompt. This is a practice we use, not an efficacy claim. Its evidenced cousin — retrieval practice — lives in pedagogy_core with a source and a date.
Staged Apprenticeship
Show the whole thing done, then do it together, then let them do it with help available, then step back. The help fades; the task does not get easier.
From the 'train me as your apprentice' prompt. The real name is cognitive apprenticeship. Naming it properly is how somebody can go and check it rather than take our word.
Watch Your Own Thinking
Before answering, say how confident you are and why. After, check which way you were wrong.
From the 'audit my thought patterns' prompt, with the rewriting removed. Metacognition is the honest name. The prompt's version audits a person; this audits a judgement, which is the part that can be taught.
These came in the same set as the ten above. They are here with their reasoning because a refusal nobody can read gets quietly reversed by the next person who likes the idea.
speed and rank
'10x faster', 'top 1% within 90 days', 'billionaire thinker'. These are the claims the FTC fined Lumosity over in 2016 and that brain_games_core already fails the build on. We would be tripping our own gate, and it would deserve to fire.
rewriting a person
'Destroy my current limiting identity and install a new operating self-image.' Refused hardest, and the reason is the founder's own doctrine: he wrote that minds are programmable and have been programmed wrong. Answering that by reprogramming people differently only changes whose hand is on the dial. Teaching somebody to think for themselves is the opposite move, not a milder version of it. It is also a children's platform.
trained on named living people
'Trained on the minds of' three named living men. We do not claim to represent what a real, named, living person thinks — that is the person-record standard, and it does not stop applying because the framing is flattering.
10 lenses, 3 teaching moves adapted, 3 framings refused. Nothing here claims to make anybody faster or smarter — a lens is a question, and asking ten good questions is not the same as being right. Claims that need evidence live in pedagogy_core with their sources.
