What is knowledge deprecation?

Knowledge deprecation is a concept in personal epistemology: Some schemas should be marked as outdated and replaced rather than patched indefinitely.

Example: Your team has patched its sprint planning process fourteen times — adding new rules, exceptions to rules, and exceptions to exceptions. Nobody remembers why half the rules exist. The process is not evolving. It is accreting scar tissue. The correct move is not patch fifteen. It is deprecation: mark the current process as retired, document what it taught you, and design its replacement from the ground up.

This concept is part of Phase 16 (Schema Evolution) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for schema evolution.