What is prevention vs correction?

Prevention vs correction is a concept in personal epistemology: Every correction takes time and energy — reduce the error rate rather than just correcting faster.

Example: You notice typos in every email you send, so you start proofreading each message three times before hitting send. Your error rate drops, but now a two-sentence reply takes ten minutes. You have traded one cost — embarrassment from typos — for another: time, cognitive load, and a growing backlog of unread messages. The correction eliminated the visible problem but introduced an invisible one. A colleague who uses autocomplete and a grammar checker sends the same quality of email in ninety seconds. She did not get better at correcting — she reduced the conditions that produce errors in the first place.

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