Nagarjuna, the second-century Buddhist logician, spent his career dismantling a trap that quietly ruins most careful thinkers: the assumption that a framework's internal consistency proves its contact with reality. His method, prasanga — drawing out the hidden consequences of a position until it collapses under its own weight — was not skepticism. It was a surgical tool for exposing when a model has become self-sealing, generating only the evidence it was built to accept. The mental models most worth interrogating are rarely the sloppy ones. They're the elegant ones — the frameworks that have served you well long enough that you've stopped noticing they're frameworks at all. What Nagarjuna saw, and what's easy to miss, is that sophistication accelerates this drift: the more refined your model, the more smoothly it reclassifies anomalies as noise rather than data. The concrete practice this points to is uncomfortable but precise — identify the last time a framework you trust was genuinely threatened by evidence, and notice whether you updated the model or reclassified the evidence.

What evidence have you quietly reclassified as an exception to protect a framework you rely on — and when did you last let that evidence actually challenge the model instead?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy — Nagarjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, c. 2nd century CE)