Counterexample-First Search
Strategy prioritizing counterexamples over supporting evidence
Counterexample-first search is an exploration strategy that treats popularity as a risk signal rather than evidence of quality. The more widely a claim is repeated, the more valuable it becomes to find counterexamples and boundary conditions, because errors in popular claims have a larger blast radius in Encyclopedia Meltdown.
This strategy inverts the normal retrieval priority. Standard search ranks by relevance or frequency, which tends to surface agreement. Counterexample-first search deliberately seeks disagreement, edge cases, and failures, because these are more informative for updating knowledge.
It is related to but distinct from rebuttal-first search, which is a validation protocol for accepting claims. Counterexample-first search is a discovery strategy: actively looking for what breaks rather than what confirms.