Goal

A goal (sometimes called a purpose or aim) is what an idea is being evaluated against. An idea succeeds or fails at a goal. Goals can be concrete ("get from A to B without falling") or abstract ("have true ideas about physics"), and any group of goals joined with logical operators (e.g. avoid dehydration AND have true ideas) is itself a goal.

Goals matter because:

• They define success and failure. Without a stated goal you can't say what an error would even look like.
• They make evaluation contextual. The same idea can succeed at one goal and fail at another. "Don't eat" succeeds at the goal of avoiding choking, fails at the goal of not starving.
• They let you brainstorm deliberately. When you're stuck, list candidate goals to clarify what you're really trying to do.

CF recommends putting goals in words whenever possible, especially in goal trees that decompose big goals into sub-goals. The ToC tradition pushes this hard: Goldratt's The Goal is literally a novel about a manager who must state his goal explicitly before he can improve anything.

"An error is a reason that an idea fails at a goal." — criticalfallibilism.com