Concepts
The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 4,828 atoms across 8 types
Schema awareness
metacognitive awareness applied to one's own interpretive frameworks, specifically the capacity to observe schemas operating in real-time without conscious consent, bringing them into the global workspace of conscious access for evaluation and potential modification
Schema blindness
the systematic inability to detect schemas operating in one's own thinking due to their operation below the threshold of conscious access, making them invisible to introspection while remaining obvious to external observation
Schema competition
the process by which multiple schemas simultaneously activate in response to a situation and compete for dominance in shaping perception, emotional response, and behavior, with the winning schema determining the outcome regardless of accuracy
Default schemas
the automatic, unconscious cognitive frameworks that operate below the threshold of conscious deliberation to evaluate people, interpret situations, predict outcomes, and decide what deserves attention, which produce conclusions that feel like direct perceptions of reality rather than products of interpretation
Schema
a mental model or framework that organizes and interprets information, including the implicit assumptions, patterns of thinking, and cognitive grooves that are activated when specific words or concepts are used, which can be encoded in language, shaped by experience, and resist change even in the face of contradictory evidence
Schema inertia
the structural tendency of established mental models to persist even when the evidence that created them has been discredited, contradicted, or destroyed, characterized by the asymmetry between assimilation (cheap) and accommodation (expensive), and defended through confirmation bias mechanisms
Schema shock
the moment when your mental model of how something works meets undeniable evidence that it doesn't work that way
Disequilibrium
the cognitive discomfort of a model that no longer works, which serves as the necessary precondition for accommodation—the process of restructuring a schema to account for new information
Warranted confidence
the epistemically honest recognition that a schema is valid only within its tested conditions, with explicit acknowledgment of the domain boundaries where validation has not occurred
Ubiquitous language
a shared schema between developers and domain experts where every term used in conversation, documentation, and source code means the same thing to everyone involved, ensuring alignment on conceptual meaning rather than just terminology
Schema literacy
the ability to look at another person's behavior, arguments, decisions, and reactions — and reverse-engineer the underlying model that produces them, such that you could articulate it back to them and they would recognize it as accurate
Cognitive perspective taking
the ability to infer another person's thoughts, beliefs, reasoning structures, and interpretive frameworks, as opposed to merely feeling what they feel (affective empathy)
Cognitive inertia
the tendency to maintain current interpretive frameworks and process new information through existing schemas rather than updating those frameworks, even when confronted with contradictory evidence
Load-bearing assumptions
early design decisions or foundational beliefs that a system or organization depends on so completely that removing them requires rebuilding everything constructed on top of them
Schema construction
the active, deliberate skill of creating, inspecting, testing, and revising explicit organizational structures that govern how knowledge is perceived, processed, and applied in specific domains
Classification
the cognitive process of carving reality into categories that determine what you group together, what you separate, and how you respond to information.
Constructed categories
classification systems that are built by humans for specific purposes rather than discovered as natural features of reality, with each category serving a particular function and creating feedback loops that change the behavior of those classified.
Explicit categories
named and defined classification systems that exist as objects in a system you can inspect, debate, test, and version, as opposed to implicit categories that exist only in intuition and shift with emotional state
Binary categories
classification systems that divide phenomena into exactly two buckets, reducing multi-dimensional information to a single bit of information (zero or one, yes or no, in or out), which destroys information during the process of understanding
MECE
a classification system that eliminates both overlap (mutual exclusivity) and gaps (collective exhaustiveness) such that every item belongs to exactly one category and every possible item has a category.
Type system
a set of rules that assigns a property called a 'type' to every object in a system, then restricts which operations are valid for each type, making certain categories of error structurally impossible rather than detectable after the fact.
Classification debt
the compounding cost of lazy, inconsistent, or outdated categorization that accumulates silently and exponentially increases cleanup cost over time
Reclassification
the process of changing how you categorize things as a sign of learning and cognitive growth, not inconsistency or failure, occurring when existing categories no longer adequately serve current understanding or when the domain has evolved beyond the categories' capacity
Accommodation
the cognitive process of modifying existing schemas to handle experience that resists assimilation, which is equivalent to reclassification and represents the mechanism of cognitive growth rather than mere maintenance of existing categories