Foundational Review
also Reviewing Previous Floors · Backtracking
Going back to find and fix major errors in earlier-learned foundations when learning progress stalls, instead of brute-forcing the advanced material.
In CF, learning is modeled as a knowledge skyscraper: higher floors of ideas rest on lower ones. Foundational review is the diagnostic move you make when you get stuck on advanced material. Rather than treating the difficulty as a problem with the current floor, CF treats being stuck as evidence that a major error sits several floors below — and that its damaging effects have propagated upward via error propagation, growing worse with distance. So you go back down to ideas you think you already know and review them at high quality standards.
The point is not generic revision. CF’s claim is specific: the usual reason a foundation can’t bear weight is that it was learned without high enough quality standards in the first place — it seemed right, and was usable, but was never made reliable, robust, and intuitive through practice toward mastery. Foundational review therefore pairs with prerequisite work: identify which prerequisites are weak and rebuild them, often by cycling between topics rather than pushing forward.
This opposes the intuition that getting stuck means you should try harder on the hard thing, or that, per a crude reading of Critical Rationalism, foundations don’t matter. CF agrees there are no ultimate foundations, but insists that what you build an idea from matters while learning. Skipping review caps how high you can build: a major error supports at most a few more floors before everything above it breaks.