The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 4,828 atoms across 8 types and 2 molecules
Before committing resources to a plan, extract every assumption it depends on and classify each by importance (would the plan fail if this is wrong?) and vulnerability (how likely is this to be wrong?), then test assumptions marked both high-importance and high-vulnerability first.
When presenting compound statements to AI systems, explicitly ask for assumption enumeration rather than direct answers, then critically verify the decomposition's completeness since the AI may introduce its own hidden assumptions.
Before entering any design conversation or architecture review, write one sentence answering 'What am I assuming is already settled here?' to surface expertise-hidden assumptions that should be re-examined.
After explaining a system to someone with zero context, revisit any point where you said 'obviously' or 'of course' and document the unstated assumption those words concealed.
Maintain an assumption register with five components for each assumption: the specific testable claim, what would change if false, current evidence for/against it, validation status, and next action to test it—reviewing weekly for active projects.
For each major domain where you make decisions, explicitly write down the single deepest assumption everything else depends on, then list 5-10 decisions that would change if that root were different to verify you've found an actual root.
State the negation of any root concept you identify and ask what you would do differently if the opposite were true, not to believe the negation but to break the structural lock that makes the original feel inevitable.
Define environmental change triggers by listing key assumptions underlying each schema and specifying observable indicators that each assumption no longer holds.
For each schema, list assumptions it makes—things it takes for granted without defining—then compare assumption lists across schemas to find shared dependency gaps where both schemas assume the same foundational concept but neither defines it.
Before building any agent, explicitly name the schema it operates on by writing what the agent assumes about how the world works, because unexamined schemas produce systematically wrong outputs despite reliable execution.
Before committing significant resources to any project, list the 3-5 assumptions that would invalidate the most work if wrong, then design and execute the cheapest falsification test for each assumption in order of potential damage.
Within 24 hours of an error, write one mechanistic sentence describing what happened stripped of emotion, then identify the single incorrect assumption the error revealed before the memory reconstructs itself.
When modifying organizational processes, surface embedded schemas first to distinguish processes encoding hard-won lessons (whose removal reintroduces risk) from processes encoding obsolete assumptions (whose removal reduces waste).