How You Know What You Know
Most of what we call knowledge is actually familiar repetition or untested assumption. Learn how to stress-test your own understanding, trace where your beliefs came from, and tell real insight from borrowed certainty.
Like Duolingo, but for How You Know What You Know. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 11 levels across 2 sections, about 22 minutes end to end, roughly 4 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Separating Understanding from Familiarity and Stress-Testing Claims in the Wild. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in How You Know What You Know
- Recognizing a term, object, or concept feels subjectively identical to understanding how it works
- Recognition only checks whether something is familiar, while explanatory knowledge requires reproducing causal steps from memory
- Attempting to explain the underlying mechanics from scratch is usually what first reveals the illusion of explanatory depth
- Domain-specific buzzwords can act as verbal placeholders that skip over the actual causal links in your knowledge
- Restricting yourself to plain, everyday language forces you to supply the missing mechanisms yourself
- Struggling to express an idea in plain words is a reliable signal that you know the vocabulary rather than the mechanism
- Verbal knowledge relies on remembered labels and slogans without tracking spatial or causal connections
- Functional knowledge requires tracing physical or causal links from one moving part to the next
- Drawing a physical system forces you to commit to how parts actually connect, immediately exposing whether your knowledge is only verbal
- Treating subjective confidence as a testable hypothesis prevents defensiveness when an explanation stalls
- A breakdown in an explanation pinpointing a gap is valuable feedback about where knowledge actually stops
- Defensive reactions treat confidence as a measure of personal intelligence rather than an estimate of current explanatory depth
- The brain stores the final conclusion of an inquiry to save mental effort, rather than keeping the full chain of evidence on file
- Feeling confident in a belief does not mean you actively possess the facts that originally convinced you
- Realizing you cannot state where a belief came from is a normal quirk of human memory, not immediate proof that the belief is false
- Hearing a statement repeatedly makes it familiar, and the mind easily mistakes familiar processing for truth
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives How You Know What You Know the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
How is explanatory knowledge different from simple recognition?
Get it right to open this lesson and 10 more in the app.
Where How You Know What You Know takes you
- 1
Separating Understanding from Familiarity
- Testing Your Explanatory Depth
- Tracing Where Your Beliefs Came From
- 2
Stress-Testing Claims in the Wild
- Spotting Testable Knowledge
- Judging Consensus and Expertise
2 sections · 4 units · 11 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
Tomo is in ChatGPT
Tomo is also a ChatGPT plugin: the same playable courses, built and played inside your chat.
Add Tomo to ChatGPT- What to ask
- “Make me a Tomo course on black holes.” “Turn this chat into a Tomo course.”
- What you get
- Quick questions with instant feedback, hearts and stars, ready to play in about a minute.
- Where it goes
- No sign-up to start. Connect your Tomo account and your streak carries on in the app.
You pick the voice
How You Know What You Know is taught in the Bestie style: your friend who just gets it. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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Start How You Know What You Know today.
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