Individual skill
thinking-thought-experiment
When a real test is too rare, large, or irreversible, run a controlled counterfactual: isolate one variable, fix conditions, trace the mechanistic chain, and bound what the result implies.
skills/thinking-thought-experiment/SKILL.md
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- ai-tools Repository topic
- anthropic Repository topic
- claude Repository topic
- claude-code Repository topic
- critical-thinking Repository topic
- decision-making Repository topic
- first-principles Repository topic
- mental-models Repository topic
- problem-solving Repository topic
- systems-thinking Repository topic
- testing Derived category
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# Thought Experiment
When empiricism is out of reach, run a disciplined counterfactual: one isolated change, fixed conditions, step-by-step mechanism, and a hard bound on implications.
## When to Use
- You need behavior under failure, scale, or policy you cannot cheaply trigger or measure (region outage, 100x load, one-way architecture).
- A decision is expensive or irreversible and a mental trace can surface break points before commit.
- Edge cases are too costly to stage, but a mechanistic chain can still expose missing controls.
## When NOT to Use
- A cheap real test exists (load test, flag, query, spike) → run the test; do not substitute imagination.
- Adversarial security attack-path work → use red-team structure, not free-form scenarios.