Skip to content
How to ThinkIn the Age of AI
Principlev1PR-680

Resolve contradictions at the highest appropriate level…

Resolve contradictions at the highest appropriate level of abstraction to prevent them from multiplying into repeated micro-decisions at the operational level.

Why This Is a Principle

Derives from Hick's Law of Choice Time (decision time increases with options), Hierarchical Chunking Expands Capacity (chunking and hierarchical organization), and Abstraction Necessarily Discards Information (abstraction discards information). The principle prescribes resolving at appropriate abstraction levels to avoid decision multiplication, following from axioms about decision costs and hierarchy.