What is behavioral specificity?

Behavioral specificity is a concept in personal epistemology: Vague agents do not fire reliably — specificity is required.

Example: Compare two agents designed to improve post-meeting follow-through. Agent A: 'I will be better about following up after meetings.' Agent B: 'When a meeting ends and I was a participant, I will open my notes app within 2 minutes and write exactly three bullet points: one decision made, one action assigned to me, and one open question.' Agent A has no trigger specificity (which meetings?), no condition (what counts as a meeting worth following up on?), no measurable action (what does 'better' look like?), and no testability (how would you know if it fired?). Agent B specifies the trigger (meeting ends), the condition (I was a participant), the action (three categorized bullet points in a specific app), and the time constraint (within 2 minutes). After one week, you can count: how many meetings did I attend, and how many times did the three-bullet-point protocol execute? If the ratio is below 80%, the agent is failing and you can diagnose why. Agent A cannot be diagnosed because it cannot be measured.

This concept is part of Phase 21 (Agent Fundamentals) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent fundamentals.