What is schema selection heuristics?

Schema selection heuristics is a concept in personal epistemology: You need rules for choosing which schema to apply in a given situation.

Example: A startup founder faces a product decision. She could analyze it through a customer-jobs-to-be-done schema, a competitive-moat schema, a unit-economics schema, or a team-capacity schema. Each is valid. Each produces a different recommendation. She doesn't have time to run all four. So she asks: What is the cost of being wrong? The answer — low, because the decision is reversible — triggers a speed-over-thoroughness heuristic. She picks the customer-jobs schema because it has the shortest feedback loop for reversible product bets. She didn't pick the 'best' schema. She picked the best schema for this problem's structure.

This concept is part of Phase 17 (Meta-Schemas) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for meta-schemas.