What is revision catalysts?

Revision catalysts is a concept in personal epistemology: Record what new evidence or experience caused you to revise your schema. Every schema update has a trigger — a specific observation, conversation, failure, or piece of evidence that shifted your model. If you do not capture that trigger at the moment of change, you lose the provenance of your own thinking. Lost provenance means you cannot reconstruct why you believe what you now believe, cannot evaluate whether the change was warranted, and cannot detect patterns in what kinds of evidence actually move you.

Example: A product manager believes that users want more features. Over three months, three things happen: a usability test shows users struggling with the existing interface, a competitor wins a deal with a simpler product, and a customer churns citing complexity. Six months later, the product manager now believes simplicity matters more than feature count — but cannot remember which of these three events actually changed their mind. Was it the usability test? The lost deal? The churn? Without a record, they cannot tell whether the belief update was driven by rigorous evidence or by the emotional impact of losing a customer. They cannot reconstruct the reasoning, share it with colleagues, or evaluate whether the same kind of evidence should trigger future updates. The schema changed. The provenance was lost.

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