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.
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.
Frame pre-mortem prompts as 'It is [future date]. This has failed completely. Write why.' rather than 'What could go wrong?' to shift cognition from speculation to explanation.
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.
Before committing to a category assignment in high-stakes decisions, explicitly name what actions that category triggers and what you would do differently if the item belonged to an adjacent category.
When two systems appear redundant but share a common power source, network segment, authentication service, or human operator, treat them as a single point of failure with cosmetic duplication rather than genuine redundancy.
Before acting on a schema in any consequential way, test it through concrete action at the smallest possible scale first and observe actual results against pre-stated predictions.
Run a pre-mortem on each critical schema by specifying what the early warning signs would look like if that model is becoming obsolete, then check whether you have already seen some of those signs.
Define environmental change triggers by listing key assumptions underlying each schema and specifying observable indicators that each assumption no longer holds.