Concepts
The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 4,828 atoms across 8 types
Clean agent retirement
the process of gracefully discontinuing an agent by documenting what it did, why it's being retired, mapping its dependencies, naming replacements for each dependency, and executing the retirement in phases with monitoring
Extinction burst
a temporary increase in the frequency, duration, or intensity of a behavior that occurs immediately after the reinforcement for that behavior is removed, caused by the organism's attempt to recover the lost reinforcement before concluding the contingency has changed
Agent succession
the process of ensuring that the responsibilities carried by a retired agent are transferred to a new agent, consciously dropped, or temporarily covered with a specific replacement, rather than allowing them to become invisible gaps
Agent archaeology
the practice of excavating diagnostic information from retired cognitive agents to identify recurring design assumptions, environmental constraints, and systematic failures that inform future agent design
Agent portfolio
the full set of active cognitive agents that should be balanced, diversified, and managed as a system of interacting parts where balance, diversification, and correlation matter as much as individual performance
Portfolio rebalancing
the active maintenance discipline of periodically reviewing and adjusting an agent portfolio by retiring underperformers and investing in high-value agents to maintain alignment with evolving priorities
Agent inheritance
the design strategy where new cognitive agents acquire properties, patterns, and proven components from existing successful agents rather than being built from scratch, with selective extraction of reusable elements to avoid fragile coupling and enable faster establishment with reduced experimental risk
Legacy agent
a cognitive agent that was created for a context that no longer exists, persists due to psychological biases and sunk costs, consumes cognitive resources without producing measurable value, and cannot be clearly articulated as serving a current purpose
Agent documentation
the structured record that captures an agent's purpose, behavior, triggers, dependencies, outputs, failure modes, and changelog, which evolves with the agent throughout its lifecycle to maintain alignment between documented intent and actual behavior
Agent sprawl
the condition where a portfolio of cognitive agents exceeds the coordination capacity of the individual managing them, characterized by quadratic growth in coordination overhead that outpaces linear value growth and creates a system where the cost of managing agents exceeds their collective benefit
Agent lifecycle stage
the phase of development an agent is currently in, determined by its maturity level and management requirements, which dictates the appropriate type and intensity of attention it should receive
Situational awareness
the three-level cognitive skill of perceiving agent states (Level 1), comprehending their relative health and portfolio status (Level 2), and projecting future trajectories to inform strategic attention allocation (Level 3)
Cognitive infrastructure
the collection of cognitive agents and their interrelated lifecycle stages that function as a system requiring strategic attention allocation based on each agent's developmental phase
Learning lifecycle
the process through which knowledge is acquired, practiced, internalized, and eventually let go or replaced as conditions change, following a trajectory of growth, maturity, and senescence
Self-authority
the recognition that you — not your culture, your employer, your algorithms, or your defaults — are the legitimate governing agent of your own cognitive infrastructure
Epistemic autonomy
the philosophy of thinking for yourself, defined as someone who determines the course of their intellectual life for themselves — incorporating four dimensions: self-governance, authenticity, self-creation, and independence
Self-determination
acting from a sense that your behavior originates from your own values and interests rather than from external pressure or internal compulsion
Locus of evaluation
the standard by which a person assesses what is true and what matters — an internal locus of evaluation trusts one's own experience, values, and judgment as the primary standard, while an external locus of evaluation habitually defers to others' standards
Permission culture
an organizational environment where people have given up their work-based autonomy and respond to instruction and direction rather than exercising judgment, characterized by waiting for approval, sign-offs, or validation from others
Self-efficacy
the specific belief that you can execute the actions required to produce specific outcomes, built through mastery experiences
Authority
the right to make the final determination over one's own thinking and the responsibility for the quality and consequences of that thinking
Influence
any external input that has the potential to change one's thinking, including expert opinions, peer recommendations, emotional appeals, data presentations, social norms, cultural expectations, algorithmic suggestions, and daily signals that shape perception
Compliance instinct
the neurological tendency to automatically defer to authority signals, operating below conscious awareness and evolved to detect and respond to social hierarchy cues in order to maintain group cohesion and survival
Authority bias
the cognitive heuristic that automatically attributes greater accuracy to opinions of authority figures, independent of content quality, and functions as a mental shortcut that substitutes 'who said it' for 'is it true'