The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 4,828 atoms across 8 types and 2 molecules
For significant decisions, add a fifth field documenting pre-mortem risks (2-3 specific ways the decision could fail) to preserve concerns that hindsight bias will erase.
Add a single recurring check at the end of each weekly review that compares your operational handbook to your actual operations and updates discrepancies immediately.
After any operational failure, write a blameless post-mortem using five questions: what happened (factual description), what was the timeline of contributing events, what were the systemic factors, what are the action items (specific system changes), and what would have prevented this.
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.
After any event producing strong reactions, spend 90 seconds recording observations in a two-column format (left: camera-recordable facts, right: interpretations) before analysis, because this separation prevents retroactive rewriting of evidence to fit conclusions.
When drafting incident postmortems or failure analyses, complete the timeline of observable events (with timestamps and measurements) before writing any causal analysis, because mixing observation and explanation during collection produces defensive filtering.
For each named pattern in your Pattern Dictionary, document three required fields: the pattern name, its observable trigger conditions, and the default behavioral response it produces.
Record decision context at the moment of commitment using five elements: (1) decision statement, (2) forces/constraints/emotions active at choice point, (3) expected consequences with timeline, (4) confidence level 1-10, (5) review trigger date—before hindsight bias can rewrite your reasoning.
Set the threshold for decision context documentation at any choice where you deliberated between options for more than sixty seconds, because if you considered alternatives consciously, the reasoning is worth preserving against memory reconstruction.
Before evaluating any past decision, reconstruct the information environment that existed at decision time using contemporaneous records rather than memory, then evaluate the decision against that environment only.
Document decisions using five fields: what you decided, alternatives considered, information available and missing, optimization criteria, and conditions for revisiting—rather than recording only conclusions.
Before finalizing significant decision records, have an AI argue against your reasoning and append the strongest objection to your record, preserving the full deliberation rather than only your preferred conclusion.
Document system operations in five components—capture rules, processing workflow, retrieval method, review protocol, and evolution history—because each component addresses a distinct failure mode in knowledge system sustainability.
Store each schema with explicit scope documentation specifying the domain where it was built and the structural conditions it assumes, treating scope as mandatory metadata rather than optional annotation.
When forced to make a binary decision after spectrum-based deliberation, document the richer multi-dimensional signal alongside the binary outcome so future analysis can recover what the compression discarded.
When documenting information longer than one page, structure it in three disclosure layers: single-sentence summary (Layer 1), paragraph-per-section abstracts (Layer 2), and full detail (Layer 3), with each layer independently meaningful.
Reformulate validated schemas with explicit boundary clauses that specify the conditions under which they were tested and the conditions under which they remain untested.
Create a dedicated anomaly log separate from regular notes where each entry records what you expected, what happened, and which schema generated the expectation.
Write schema evolution log entries with four mandatory fields - date, schema affected in original language not current interpretation, specific triggering evidence or encounter, and the replacement belief - to defeat hindsight bias through fixed external records.
Maintain schema evolution logs with minimum viable entries of four fields - date, schema affected, what changed, and what prompted the change - reviewed weekly, to generate a dataset about cognitive patterns that introspection alone cannot produce.
For each evolved schema, document not just old and new versions but also what the old belief was protecting or enabling, because identifying the lost function reveals emotional costs of revision and increases honesty about unrevised beliefs.
For each schema you operate on, document source provenance in a single field—specific person, book, cultural norm, direct experience, or unknown—then prioritize verification effort by source weakness.
Document every agent in a structured five-component format: (1) Name, (2) Trigger, (3) Conditions, (4) Actions, (5) Success criteria, to enable systematic review and prevent silent degradation.
Write agent action steps as specific ordered procedures rather than aspirations or principles, requiring sufficient granularity that someone unfamiliar could execute them without clarification.