thinking-thought-experiment

1# Thought Experiment
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3When empiricism is out of reach, run a disciplined counterfactual: one isolated change, fixed conditions, step-by-step mechanism, and a hard bound on implications.
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5## When to Use
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7- You need behavior under failure, scale, or policy you cannot cheaply trigger or measure (region outage, 100x load, one-way architecture).
8- A decision is expensive or irreversible and a mental trace can surface break points before commit.
9- Edge cases are too costly to stage, but a mechanistic chain can still expose missing controls.
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11## When NOT to Use
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13- A cheap real test exists (load test, flag, query, spike) → run the test; do not substitute imagination.
14- Adversarial security attack-path work → use red-team structure, not free-form scenarios.
15- You already know the mechanism and only need a decision under known facts → decide; do not dramatize.
16- Vague "what if everything" brainstorming without a single isolated variable → tighten or stop.
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18## Procedure
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201. **State the question and isolation.** Name exactly one primary variable or counterfactual change. Freeze all other conditions as the control world. Reject multi-variable "and also" scenarios.
212. **Fix initial conditions.** Specify system state, load, configuration, actors, and what is *not* changed. Write values concrete enough that another agent could replay the setup.
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