What is error reduction?

Error reduction is a concept in personal epistemology: An agent that acts fast but wrong is worse than one that acts slowly but right.

Example: You have a morning agent: 'When I sit down to work, I pick the highest-priority task and start.' It fires quickly — you're working within a minute of arriving. But you keep picking the wrong task. You choose what feels urgent over what actually matters. You ship responsive emails while strategic projects rot. The agent is fast. The agent is wrong. Optimizing speed made you efficiently inefficient. Instead, you add a five-minute accuracy check: review your priority list, confirm the top item against your weekly goals, then start. Your start time goes from one minute to six. But your hit rate — working on the thing that actually matters — jumps from roughly 40% to over 90%. The agent got slower. The outcomes got dramatically better.

This concept is part of Phase 29 (Agent Optimization) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent optimization.