Three Translations

When you can't tell whether your framing or your format is failing, encode the same content in three media and run the same task on each.

You've re-read your econ notes on comparative advantage four times and it still won't stick. Here's the diagnostic problem underneath: you can't tell whether the concept is genuinely hard for you or whether prose is simply the wrong container for it. Frame failure and format failure feel identical from the inside, and that ambiguity is the exact cue for this heuristic.

Three Translations is a 30-second experiment. The procedure: encode the same neutral content in three different media, then run the same task on each and compare. For comparative advantage: keep the prose explanation; build a small table (two countries as rows, output per hour for two goods as columns); and build a tiny worked example you can vary (change one number, recompute who should make what). The task: predict what happens when one country gets better at everything. Run it against all three. If the table and the worked numbers make the prediction easy while the prose stays foggy, the format was failing, not you, so study from tables. If all three stay foggy, the concept itself needs different groundwork. It works when the ambiguity resolves into a specific verdict with a specific next step. The spec's warning: keep the content constant across translations, or the comparison is invalid; three versions with different facts test nothing.