What is observation vs interpretation?

What you saw and what you concluded from it are distinct and must not be fused.

Example: Your coworker didn't respond to your Slack message for four hours. That's the observation. 'She's ignoring me because she's upset about the code review' is the interpretation. Write both down — separately. The observation is stable. The interpretation is a hypothesis you can test, revise, or discard.

This concept is part of Atomicity and Decomposition in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for atomicity and decomposition.