What is decision classification?

Decision classification is a concept in personal epistemology: Most decisions you face are variations of types you have encountered before.

Example: You are deciding whether to accept a new project at work. It feels unique — different client, different scope, different timeline. But strip away the surface details and you recognize the underlying type: a resource allocation decision under uncertainty. You have made this type of decision dozens of times. The variables are the same: available capacity, opportunity cost, estimated return, confidence in the estimate, and reversibility. You do not need to reason from first principles. You need to recognize the type and apply the framework you have already built for resource allocation decisions. The experienced manager does this automatically. The junior employee treats every project decision as novel and exhausts themselves re-deriving the same logic each time.

This concept is part of Phase 23 (Decision Frameworks) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for decision frameworks.