Concepts
The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 4,828 atoms across 8 types
Treat every tool as a component of your extended cognitive…
Treat every tool as a component of your extended cognitive system rather than as an external convenience, selecting and configuring tools based on architectural criteria of reliability, maintainability, interoperability, and failure-mode transparency.
Maintain practice of capabilities you delegate to tools…
Maintain practice of capabilities you delegate to tools to prevent atrophy of the biological original, especially for capabilities whose loss would compromise judgment or effectiveness.
Design habits as contextual cue-routine pairs rather…
Design habits as contextual cue-routine pairs rather than motivation-dependent behaviors, making the context itself trigger the automatic behavior without requiring conscious decision.
Align habit rewards intrinsically to the behavior itself…
Align habit rewards intrinsically to the behavior itself rather than adding external incentives, since genuine automaticity requires satisfaction built into the completion rather than bolted-on consequences.
Verify habit automaticity by checking whether the behavior…
Verify habit automaticity by checking whether the behavior fires from context without conscious decision rather than checking whether the behavior occurs consistently, since consistency can be maintained through willpower without successful delegation.
Write documentation that answers specific questions…
Write documentation that answers specific questions with full decision context (constraints, alternatives, rationale) so the document can replace the author's presence entirely.
Force clear thinking by requiring complete sentences…
Force clear thinking by requiring complete sentences with explicit causal structure rather than bullet points that allow ideas to remain unexamined.
Create pre-committed decision rules for recurring…
Create pre-committed decision rules for recurring, low-to-moderate consequence situations to eliminate deliberation at every instance while preserving judgment for novel cases.
Schedule periodic rule audits to detect when changed context
Schedule periodic rule audits to detect when changed context has made previously effective rules obsolete or when rules are being used to avoid necessary decisions.
Maintain ability to explain what delegated systems are doing
Maintain ability to explain what delegated systems are doing in concrete terms—if you cannot articulate method, tradeoffs, and quality criteria, you have over-delegated.
Preserve the ability to perform delegated work at acceptable
Preserve the ability to perform delegated work at acceptable levels yourself—if the delegate's disappearance would leave you unable to function, delegation has become dependency.
Capture-before-organize pattern
the recurring tendency for people to merge capture and organization into a single step, which creates friction that kills the capture habit, whereas separating them into distinct operations preserves both
Thought decay pattern
the predictable degradation curve where novel cognitive signals lose fidelity within seconds to minutes, following Ebbinghaus-like forgetting dynamics that operate faster for unstructured insights than for narratives
Writing-as-thinking pattern
the recurring phenomenon where the act of writing generates new thoughts rather than merely documenting existing ones, because externalization forces linearization that reveals gaps and connections invisible to internal monologue
Lossy internal compression pattern
the systematic distortion where internal monologue summarizes and simplifies thoughts, creating an illusion of understanding that collapses when externalization is attempted
Confusion-as-signal pattern
the recurring phenomenon where the gap between feeling one understands something and being unable to write it clearly reveals genuine confusion, functioning as a diagnostic that identifies knowledge gaps invisible to introspection alone
Review-completes-capture pattern
the structural tendency for captured information that is never reviewed to remain effectively lost, because capture preserves raw material but only review converts it into usable knowledge
Duplication-as-missing-abstraction pattern
the recurring signal where writing the same idea twice indicates an unnamed shared pattern, functioning as a diagnostic for insufficient decomposition that recurs across note-taking, code, and organizational knowledge
Compound-idea-hiding-dependencies pattern
the structural tendency for ideas that appear singular to actually be multiple fused components with independent assumptions and failure modes, which only decomposition reveals
Capture-resistance-as-diagnostic pattern
the recurring phenomenon where resistance to capturing a thought signals avoidance of the thought's content, making the resistance itself valuable diagnostic data about unprocessed emotional or cognitive material
Surprise-as-model-gap pattern
the structural tendency for surprise to indicate a discrepancy between one's mental model and reality, making surprise a reliable signal for where learning and model updating are most needed
Refactoring-improves-understanding pattern
the bidirectional relationship where restructuring notes or knowledge representations simultaneously restructures the understanding they encode, because the external structure mirrors and shapes internal cognition
Hot-cold storage separation pattern
the recurring design principle where new captures go to a temporary inbox and only processed items move to permanent storage, preventing unprocessed material from contaminating the retrieval system
Trusted-system-frees-cognition pattern
the structural tendency for working memory to release items only when a trusted external system is available, where establishing trust in the capture system is the prerequisite for cognitive freedom