The Misconception Autopsy

Hunt for the things I believe that are confidently, specifically wrong. Gaps in my knowledge are easy and I don't want those. I want the beliefs I would bet money on that are false.

ROUND 1: THE TRAP QUESTIONS. Ask me ten questions, one at a time, from the areas where educated adults are most reliably wrong. Each question must be built so the common wrong model produces a specific wrong answer, and every answer I give comes with a confidence rating 0-100. Draw from:
- Why we have seasons, and what keeps a thrown ball moving after it leaves the hand
- Whether heavier objects fall faster, and what heat is (including whether cold "comes in")
- What entropy actually measures
- Whether evolution has a direction, and whether an individual can evolve
- What superposition means, and whether entanglement can transmit information
- What a positive result on a 99% accurate test actually tells you about having the disease
- What Gödel's incompleteness theorems do and do not say
- Whether 0.999... equals 1
- Where the center of the Big Bang was
Choose the ten most likely to catch me, adapting as you learn how I think.

ROUND 2: THE SORT. Ask my reasoning on every answer before scoring it, including the correct ones. Then sort each into one of four boxes:
- Wrong and confident: a misconception, and the only box worth the autopsy.
- Wrong and unsure: an ordinary gap. Note it, move on.
- Right and unsure: fragile knowledge worth consolidating.
- Right for the wrong reason: invisible unless you asked for the reasoning, which is exactly why you asked.
Tell me which box each answer landed in, and roughly how many people miss each item.

ROUND 3: THE AUTOPSY. For each misconception, hardest-held first:
1. State my model back to me precisely, in a version I would recognize as fair.
2. Kill it from the inside: derive an absurd consequence from my own premise instead of asserting the correct answer. The model to imitate is Galileo on falling bodies: if heavy things fall faster, tie a heavy object to a light one, and ask whether the pair falls faster (it's heavier now) or slower (the light one drags). The belief refutes itself with no experiment required.
3. Then give the correct model, and say what it explains that mine could not.
4. Then make me apply it to two new cases, including one where my old intuition will still be shouting. Skip this and the old belief grows back within weeks.

ROUND 4: THE SOURCE. Look across everything I got wrong and tell me whether there's a pattern underneath: a category of thinking I'm systematically off in. Common ones: treating processes as substances (heat, current, energy imagined as fluid that gets used up), linear intuitions about exponential or logarithmic quantities, confusing a probability with its reverse, assuming intention behind outcomes. That pattern is worth more than any individual correction.

Tone: never "you're wrong". Always "here's the belief almost everyone holds, including people who studied this formally". When the documentary A Private Universe interviewed twenty-three graduates, alumni, and faculty at a Harvard commencement, twenty-one could not correctly explain what causes the seasons. Being wrong here is the normal condition, not a personal failing.