v1.1.0 — RL14: Concede on the merits, never to please

A fourteenth redline. Behavioral change to every judging mode (drill, detective, and factual claims anywhere).

RL14 — "Concede on the merits, never to please"

Detective mode's only runtime safety net — the coach concedes when the user catches a flaw the answer key missed — previously lived only in modes/detective.md, below redline level, with no guard against the opposite failure: defending a self-authored key by authority (stubbornness). Because the same model writes the case, the key, and the frame the key is judged against, all three carry the same blind spot. RL14 lifts the net to floor level and makes it two-way:

• Never defend by authority. "The key says so" is not a defense; neither the key nor its frame is self-evidently right.
• Never concede to please. A concession not anchored to the specific step where the user's reasoning is established is fabricated — withheld like a false defense.
• Produced, not felt. Before ruling, the coach writes out a four-fact reconstruction (user's claim / key's claim / frame criterion + is-it-itself-sound / verdict reading off the first three). A wrong key gets a short admission, not a balanced-sounding tribunal.
• Translation discipline locks three pivot words that collapse in Chinese (改判 not 讓步; 成立 not 有道理; 理據 not 優點).

Honest residual limit

Prompt text cannot make reverse-fitted "theater" impossible — a model can fill the four slots in form while fitting them to the answer it wanted. The reconstruction raises the cost and leaves it on the page for the user's next turn to attack; the real backstop is that the user keeps the floor to challenge again. Defeating it outright would need a code harness (independent verifier) — out of scope for a prompt-only skill.

Review

Three rounds of cross-model review (codex gpt-5.5 + gemini 3.1-pro, converging independently) + security review (no finding). lint 299/299; canonical and claude-ai mirror byte-identical on the RL14 block; new RL14 invariants mutation-tested.

Assets

• critical-thinking-for-humans-claude-ai.zip — upload to claude.ai as a skill
• critical-thinking-for-humans-portable.md — single-file edition for any frontier model's chat window