What is when to validate?

When to validate is a concept in personal epistemology: Testing takes time and energy — validate the schemas that matter most first.

Example: You spend three weeks researching whether your morning routine is truly optimal — reading chronobiology papers, testing cortisol timing, comparing cold-shower protocols — while your career strategy (a schema with ten times the impact on your life) runs unexamined. The validation effort you poured into a low-stakes schema was unavailable for the high-stakes one. Every hour spent testing one belief is an hour not spent testing another.

This concept is part of Phase 15 (Schema Validation) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for schema validation.