If a belief flips three times without converging…

When This Fires

• Your assessment of a project, person, or strategy keeps flipping between positive and negative
• You notice yourself saying "wait, actually..." for the third time about the same topic
• A belief about a high-stakes situation changes dramatically after each meeting or report
• Your confidence oscillates rather than gradually settling

Common Failure Mode

Treating each flip as a thoughtful revision rather than an oscillation. "I'm just being responsive to new information." Genuine responsiveness converges. If each piece of new information reverses your position rather than refining it, you're being jerked around by individual events rather than building an increasingly accurate model.

The Protocol

When a belief has revised 3+ times in a short period: (1) Stop updating temporarily. (2) Write down the belief trajectory: what you believed at each point and what triggered the change. (3) For each trigger, ask: "Was this genuinely diagnostic? Would I have seen this event regardless of whether my belief is true or false?" (4) If the triggers are low-diagnostic (you'd see them either way), your oscillation is base-rate neglect. Return to the base rate and update only for genuinely diagnostic evidence. (5) If the triggers are high-diagnostic, you may have a genuinely uncertain situation — in which case, hold the uncertainty explicitly rather than oscillating between false certainty in both directions.