What is fix root cause not symptom?

Fix root cause not symptom is a concept in personal epistemology: When the same error happens repeatedly fix the root cause not just the symptom.

Example: You keep missing deadlines on writing projects. Each time, you blame the specific circumstance — a busy week, an interruption, underestimating the scope. You resolve to 'try harder next time.' Three months later, you have missed four more deadlines and made the same resolution four more times. The symptom is the missed deadline. The root cause is that you have no estimation process — you guess how long writing will take based on optimism rather than data from previous projects. Until you fix the estimation process, no amount of willpower addresses the actual failure. A colleague who tracks time-to-completion on every project and uses the median of past projects as the baseline for new estimates stops missing deadlines — not because they try harder, but because they eliminated the structural cause of the recurring error.

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