Some vibes of the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer here.

Please come up with questions to ask me to determine where I completely fail to have a coherent mental model of something, in interesting ways or in important or very common spheres. Some failures to have gears-level models are: “The Internet is a series of tubes”; “you’re feeling ill because you’re fighting off an infection”. Some incorrectnesses which indicate a completely defective mental model: “The efficient markets hypothesis states that markets efficiently obtain the incentivised outcomes”, or “everything’s going to go wrong because Saturn is ascendant”. I’m happy to undergo some quizzing here, because it’s necessarily not easy to point out from the inside where my mental models are nonsense.

Ask this of Claude Opus 4.6, for example! If you find you don’t understand something, you can always spin up a dedicated chat session to learn it to arbitrary levels of detail.

I’ve tried a few iterations on this prompt, and I think that version is my favourite. You could literally have decades of fun with this!

Claude’s response

(Kept here as an illustrative example.)

Fun exercise. I’ll aim for areas where technically-minded people often have confidently structured but wrong mental pictures, rather than just gaps. I’ll go domain by domain — answer whichever catch your eye.

Body & physiology (relevant given your training):

• When you lift weights and get sore the next day, what’s physically happening at the tissue level that makes the muscle eventually bigger? Walk me through the causal chain as you understand it.
• You eat a sandwich. Describe what happens to it, mechanistically, from mouth to “energy available in your muscles.” Where does the energy actually come from at the moment of muscular contraction?
• What does your immune system actually do when you catch a cold? Why do you get symptoms, and why do they stop?

Physical infrastructure:

• You flip a light switch in your flat. Describe what’s happening electrically — where does the energy come from, how does it get to you, and what’s actually moving through the wire?
• You turn on your tap. Where does the water come from, what makes it pressurised, and where does it go after it drains?

Economics & money:

• When Barclays gives someone a mortgage, where does the money come from? Walk me through what happens on the bank’s balance sheet.
• Why does printing money cause inflation? (Not “what is the correlation” — what’s the causal mechanism at the micro level?)

Chemistry / materials:

• What is fire? A candle is burning — what’s actually happening, and where does the light come from?
• Why is glass transparent but wood isn’t? What property of the material determines this?

Everyday physics:

• Why is the sky blue? (Classic, but most people’s model is wrong in a specific and revealing way.)
• How does a refrigerator make things cold? Where does the heat go and why does it go there?

I’d suggest picking 3-4 that you feel most confident about — those are the ones most likely to reveal load-bearing misconceptions rather than known unknowns. The ones where you think “obviously I know this” are the interesting ones.