It’s easy to suggest that you take an extra step to check your assumptions in the research process. But if you’re already feeling rushed, you’re unlikely to add a step, even if you’ll definitely get more thorough and creative information.
To speed things up, we’ve given you a quick-to-apply, start-to-finish research method that already has falsification baked-in. It’s the Crossthink Process. We also already gave you the best place to start your analysis. It’s called the 8 Basics.
Now, we’ll tell you how long the falsification step should take. If you had any doubt of the benefits, consider how long chess grandmasters spend on this step. They are masters of strategic advance planning!
To be better than average, double the time, at least
After studying the decision-making process of chess grandmasters, the author of a recent book recounted that: “There is a direct correlation between a player’s strength and the amount of time and effort they put into falsifying their move.” “The strongest players devote most of their thinking time to checking the consequences.”
The author asked participants to agree to verbalize their thinking process for the author to record, and enable eyetracker experiments for the author to analyze precisely where they looked at the board.
A review of the book narrowed in on the time range: “Compared to an [average] player who typically finds the best move in ~6 minutes, and only spends 2–3 minutes checking the variations, it took [a grand master] a minute to find the best move and [he spent] 7 minutes checking if it would work.” That’s a 1:7 ratio.
Another person called this the “falsification ratio” and averaged across examples to suggest a 1:4 minute ratio.
2 important lessons to quickly articulate a good first answer
Lesson 1: Use a smart heuristic.
Compared to a chess game, the international affairs work environment, information quality, and type of decisions are different. But you should be able to recall the 8 Basics and the corresponding implications in the same relative time. IAThinker recommended you start automatically to answer a quick-turn international affairs question from the 8 Basics as a type of intentional heuristic.
The 8 Basics are the language, history, geography, government, laws, economy, population, and cultural norms that make the country tick.
Knowing the 8 Basics is the same as trusting your gut. Chess grandmasters trust their gut, then quickly move on to spend at least four times the time looking for how it could be wrong. These heuristics aren’t the lazy sort you pick up based on bad information. The 8 Basics are engrained from years of study. Or in the case of the chess grandmasters, from years of high-quality practice.
Just like an athlete can form bad habits from practicing with improper form, some heuristics can lead to unhelpful bias. This is why you reserve at least four times as much time falsifying your initial hypothesis. The 8 Basics are the best place to start, but your interpretation may not win the falsification test when you look for opposing evidence.
Lesson 2: Articulate your hypothesis as clear as a chess move.
Using counterfactuals and inversion to identify if you’re wrong could take way too long if you’re hypothesis is vague. Here are some examples of vague key judgments—that are all too common—and how to improve them. All examples are hypothetical.
Government example
Vague hypothesis: “X country is taking a leadership edge on W topic at the United Nations.”
Key judgments that need defining:
- What constitutes “leadership edge”? (Vote tallies? Agenda-setting? Coalition building?)
- Over what time period? (This session? This year? This decade?)
- Compared to which other countries?
- On which specific aspects of W topic?
Sharpened hypothesis: “Since January 2024, Brazil has secured more co-sponsors than the U.S. for climate finance resolutions at the UN, indicating stronger coalition-building leadership on climate funding mechanisms.”
Invert: “Brazil has not secured more co-sponsors than the U.S. for climate finance resolutions since January 2024.”
Falsify: Count co-sponsors, compare numbers, check resolution success rates.
Corporate example
Vague hypothesis: “Investing in this greenfield project is a good opportunity for our company to grab market share in country Y.”
Key judgments that need defining:
- What’s “good”? (ROI threshold? Payback period? Strategic value?)
- How much market share constitutes success?
- Against which competitors?
- Over what timeline?
Sharpened hypothesis: “A $50M greenfield manufacturing plant in Vietnam will capture 15% of the Southeast Asian widget market within 3 years, generating 20% ROI by year 5.”
Invert: “The plant will not capture 15% market share within 3 years.” or “The plant will not generate 20% ROI by year 5.”
Falsify: Research market size projections, competitor capacity, regulatory barriers, cost structures, and past examples of greenfields leading to more greenfields.
Starting quickly from the 8 Basics and getting better at saying what you actually mean are the fundamental first steps to making sure the falsification test doesn’t take too long.
Lesson 3: Another way to falsify your hypothesis
As in the above examples, you can assume the opposite with simply inverting easy words like good-to-bad or is-to-is not.
Another way to try to efficiently falsify your hypothesis is to formulate your clearly articulated hypothesis into a counterfactual. The antecedent and consequent structure help you narrow in on what to falsify. Use the modus tollens relation of deductive logic. It looks like this:
Set up counterfactual: If P, then Q.
Find evidence that not Q.
Therefore, not P.
Additionally, you could also reverse the sequence by first finding not Q, then asking what Ps can or cannot be true. In English that would sound like, “In order for me to believe that not Q is true, what else would have to be true?” Then, look for the “what else.”
Below we use the same examples to illustrate:
Government Example
Use sharpened hypothesis: “Since January 2024, Brazil has secured more co-sponsors than the U.S. for climate finance resolutions at the UN, indicating stronger coalition-building leadership on climate funding mechanisms.”
Formulate counterfactual: “If Brazil has stronger coalition-building leadership on climate funding, then Brazil should consistently secure more co-sponsors than the U.S. for climate finance resolutions.”
Antecedent: Brazil has stronger coalition-building leadership on climate funding
Consequent: Brazil should consistently secure more co-sponsors than the U.S. for climate finance resolutions
Choose what to falsify: You could attack either piece.
Corporate Example
Use sharpened hypothesis: “A $50M greenfield manufacturing plant in Vietnam will capture 15% of the Southeast Asian widget market within 3 years, generating 20% ROI by year 5.”
Formulate counterfactual: “If market conditions in Vietnam favor new entrants, then a well-capitalized greenfield plant should capture significant market share within 3 years.”
Antecedent: Market conditions in Vietnam favor new entrants
Consequent: A well-capitalized greenfield plant should capture significant market share within 3 years
Choose what to falsify: You could attack either piece.
Benefits of counterfactuals
You’ll discover new information. This logical flexibility between antecedent and consequent is similar to inversion in the mathematical sense. Niels Henrik Abel and Carl Gustav Jacobi in the 1800s overcame a previously intractable problem by inverting the relationship between a function and its variables. They asked, “what if we treat the result as the independent variable and solve for the original variables as functions of that result?”
Why should you care? Their mathematical inversion revealed entirely new classes of functions that were not only solvable, but opened new mathematical territory. You’ll thank us on trivia night.
The same principle applies to your counterfactual analysis. When testing “If strong leadership, then more co-sponsors” proves difficult in the allotted time, invert it to “If more co-sponsors, then what type of leadership?”
It will open a world of evidence you didn’t see before. You’ll be on your way to discovering what you didn’t know that you didn’t know.
Shut down
Chess grandmasters spend 4-7 times longer checking their moves than finding them. If you at least double the time falsifying your hypothesis, you’ll still get better information, faster.
Start with the 8 Basics as your heuristic foundation, but invest most of your time systematically trying to prove yourself wrong. Sharp, specific hypotheses enable efficient falsification through inversion and counterfactual reasoning.
The goal isn’t perfection—it’s discovering what you didn’t know you didn’t know before making critical decisions.
