contradiction-mechanism-lab

Files (3)

• SKILL.md
• operators.md · references/
• contradiction-matrix.md · templates/

SKILL.md (first lines)

# Contradiction and Mechanism Lab

Use this skill when a system must satisfy requirements that appear to conflict. Treat a contradiction as a search handle: identify which variables, times, locations, scales, users, or operating modes can be separated rather than accepting a compromise.

## Workflow

1. **State the contradiction.** Write the desired improvement and the cost it normally creates. Express both sides as measurable functions or operational requirements.
2. **Expose assumptions.** Ask which constraints are physical, informational, economic, regulatory, historical, or merely inherited from a current design. Mark assumptions that have not been tested.
3. **Locate the conflict.** Determine whether the conflict occurs across time, space, scale, phase, frequency, material state, user group, lifecycle stage, or control regime. Use [operators.md](references/operators.md) for prompts.
4. **Generate separation mechanisms.** Explore temporal separation, spatial separation, selective permeability, adaptive switching, modularity, redundancy, inversion, feedback, preconditioning, and resource substitution. Do not accept a mechanism that only renames the trade-off.
5. **Run a conservation audit.** Identify conserved or budgeted quantities—energy, mass, information, latency, cost, risk, attention, and maintenance—and state where each cost moves under the candidate.
6. **Create competing hypotheses.** Produce at least three mechanisms with different causal stories. State the intervention, the measured metric, what each preserves, sacrifices, and predicts.
7. **Attack the mechanism.** Search for conservation-law violations, hidden externalities, boundary failures, base-rate neglect, and simpler baselines. Call `critical-creative-thinking` for an adversarial review.
8. **Hand off.** Send surviving mechanisms with variables, constraints, budgets, intervention-versus-metric definition, evidence, and falsifiers to `cross-domain-recombination` and `conjecture-formalization-lab`.

## Mechanism test

A valid mechanism must explain **how** the contradiction is resolved, identify the state variable or intervention that changes the outcome, preserve the governing constraints, and predict an observation that a baseline would not produce. A desired outcome, metaphor, or list of features is not a mechanism.

## Output

Use [contradiction-matrix.md](templates/contradiction-matrix.md). Include the contradiction, assumptions, separation axis, candidate mechanisms, predicted signatures, counterexamples, and handoff fields. Label proposed mechanisms as conjectures until tested.

From minagayid/innovator, MIT.

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