The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 2,888 atoms across 3 types and 2 molecules
Thoughts are discrete cognitive objects that can be separated from the identity of the thinker; a person can observe, craft, version, and evaluate their own thoughts as external material.
Memory reconstructs rather than faithfully stores prior beliefs, systematically shifting them toward alignment with known outcomes (hindsight bias), making genuine learning from unrecorded predictions impossible and requiring external calibration systems to align subjective confidence with objective accuracy.
Metacognition consists of two functionally distinct levels: an object level where cognitive processes occur and a meta level that monitors those processes through upward signals and regulates them through downward control.
Humans exhibit systematic overconfidence across domains, with subjective confidence consistently exceeding objective accuracy in three distinct forms—overestimation of absolute performance, overplacement relative to others, and overprecision of confidence intervals—that behave differently across task difficulty levels.
People judge frequency and probability based on the subjective ease of mentally retrieving examples rather than the content count of retrieved instances, using retrieval fluency as a proxy for actual frequency in the world.
Calibration develops from domain-specific feedback loops that provide rapid, unambiguous outcome information after predictions, and does not transfer automatically across domains.
Human observers systematically fail to detect cognitive biases and behavioral patterns in their own judgment while readily identifying them in others (the bias blind spot), because self-evaluation relies on introspection while other-evaluation relies on observable behavior.
Externalizing thought processes—through writing, explaining, or step-by-step articulation—exposes gaps, logical jumps, and unstated assumptions that remain concealed in internal processing, converting tacit knowledge into explicit, transferable form.