What is error management training?

Error management training is a concept in personal epistemology: Expecting perfection creates fragility — expecting and handling errors creates resilience.

Example: You launch a new weekly writing habit. Your expectation: publish one polished essay every Sunday, no exceptions. Week three, you miss the deadline because a work emergency consumed Saturday. You feel like a failure, skip the following week out of discouragement, and the habit collapses by week five. Compare this to a writer who sets the same target but builds in an explicit error budget: 'I will publish 48 out of 52 Sundays — four misses are pre-authorized.' When the work emergency hits, she logs the miss, notes it against her budget, and publishes the following Sunday without guilt or momentum loss. Same ambition. One system shattered on first contact with reality. The other absorbed the error and kept running.

This concept is part of Phase 25 (Error Correction) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for error correction.