Disconfirm

Disconfirm — research + falsify before you conclude

Confident-feeling conclusions are routinely wrong. This skill forces you to try to break your own claim with evidence before you state or act on it. Reserve it for consequential beliefs — not trivia.

Origin: it was built after an over-engineered verification exercise where the only parts that earned their cost were a grounded research pass and a calibration that disproved the author's own assumption. This skill is those two parts, isolated — minus the wasteful machinery around them.

Method (right-sized — do the minimum that can falsify)

1. State the claim + the kill criterion. One line for the belief; one line for the single observation that would prove it FALSE. If nothing could falsify it, it isn't an empirical claim — stop presenting it as one.
2. Ground it (research, don't recall). Gather real evidence — search/cite, read the actual source, code, or data. Deliberately collect what contradicts the claim, not only what supports it. If you can't cite it, you don't know it.
3. Design the cheapest falsifying test. The smallest experiment whose result could kill the claim: a small labeled set + confusion matrix, a repeat/variance check (does it hold across N runs?), an adversarial probe, a held-out case, a quick A/B. Pre-register the pass/fail line before running.
4. Run it. Report what the data said — especially if it disconfirmed you. State the measured result, then hold / revise / retract the claim. A disproved assumption is the success case, not a failure.
5. Right-size — discipline, not ceremony. The test is the minimum that can falsify, not a fleet of agents. (Hard-won: building elaborate apparatus to "validate" a claim one sharp test would settle is the exact anti-pattern this skill exists to prevent.)

When to use

• "X is better / faster / safer / cheaper than Y"; "we should use Z"; "the best approach is…".
• A benchmark, evaluation, or comparison whose result drives a decision.
• "The root cause is…", "this fix works", "this is injection-safe / correct", before you ship or act on it.
• Any time you're confident and haven't yet tried to break the belief.

When NOT to use

• A verifiable fact — look it up once (that's research, not a calibration).
• Trivial or easily-reversible choices where being wrong is cheap.
• Pure execution with no contested claim.

Output (lead with whether the data changed your mind)

• Claim + kill criterion.
• Evidence (cited — supporting and contradicting).
• Falsifying test + its measured result.
• Updated claim: held / revised / retracted, and why.