What is infant mortality curve?

Infant mortality curve is a concept in personal epistemology: New agents are most fragile in their first month — they need extra attention and support to survive.

Example: You design a new decision agent: 'Before accepting any meeting, ask whether it advances one of my three quarterly priorities.' The first week, you use it four times and it works well — you decline two meetings that would have wasted three hours. The second week, a senior colleague sends an urgent-sounding invite and you override the agent without thinking. By week three, the agent is effectively dead. It never failed because it was wrong. It failed because it was new, and new agents cannot survive neglect.

This concept is part of Phase 30 (Agent Lifecycle) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent lifecycle.