What is false alarm rate?

False alarm rate is a concept in personal epistemology: Define clear thresholds that distinguish normal operation from problems requiring your attention.

Example: You have a morning planning agent — a routine that reviews your calendar, priorities, and energy level to produce a daily plan. Some days the plan misses a meeting or ranks a low-value task too high. That's normal variance. But when the plan misses meetings three days in a row, or when it consistently ignores your top priority for a week, something has changed. The difference between those two situations is a threshold. Without one defined in advance, you'll either shrug off a real problem or panic over routine noise.

This concept is part of Phase 28 (Agent Monitoring) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent monitoring.