What is abstraction?

Abstraction is a concept in personal epistemology: When you write the same idea twice you have not yet named the pattern they share.

Example: You have three notes in your knowledge system about staying calm under pressure — one filed under 'leadership,' one under 'parenting,' and one under 'difficult conversations.' They use different words but describe the same cognitive move: pause, observe your emotional state, choose your response deliberately. The duplication signals a missing abstraction. Extract the shared pattern — 'stimulus-response decoupling' — name it, give it one canonical note, and link the three contexts to it. Now you have one idea that serves three domains instead of three scattered copies that will drift apart.

This concept is part of Phase 2 (Atomicity and Decomposition) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for atomicity and decomposition.