What is meta-cognition schemas?

Meta-cognition schemas is a concept in personal epistemology: You can build models of how your models work — this is the beginning of recursive self-improvement.

Example: You have a schema for evaluating job offers (weigh compensation, culture, growth). But you've never examined how you built that schema — whether it came from a single bad experience, parental advice, or systematic research. A meta-schema would let you ask: where did this model come from? What assumptions does it encode? When should I rebuild it from scratch? Without that meta-level view, you're running decision software you've never audited.

This concept is part of Phase 17 (Meta-Schemas) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for meta-schemas.