Every mental model you use was built under conditions that no longer exist. The Nyāya school would call this an unexamined vyāpti — a universal rule whose scope you've never tested — but the sharper version comes from the Cārvāka materialists, the great dissidents of Indian philosophy who insisted that induction is always a leap of faith dressed up as logic. They asked: what gives you the right to assume your rule holds beyond the cases you've actually seen? This is not skepticism for its own sake. It's a diagnostic. The models that quietly govern how you structure an argument, how you judge which ideas are worth developing, how you decide when a draft is ready — most were formed from a handful of early experiences and have been running on autopilot ever since. The Cārvāka move is to demand the evidence trail: not 'does this model feel true?' but 'what is the actual sample it was built on, and is that sample still representative?' Carry that question into one framework you currently take for granted.

What would someone observing your decision-making conclude is your most load-bearing mental model — and what are the three or four experiences it was actually built from?

Drawing from Cārvāka (Indian materialist and skeptical philosophy) — Cārvāka school (represented in Mādhavācārya's Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha, 14th century)