What is recurring patterns?

Recurring patterns is a concept in personal epistemology: When the same structure appears three or more times, treat it as a pattern worth naming — not a coincidence to dismiss.

Example: An engineering lead notices the same three symptoms before every production outage: a spike in 99th-percentile latency, a flurry of retry storms, and a deploy within the last four hours. The first time it happened she called it bad luck. The second time she felt deja vu. The third time she wrote it down: 'pre-outage triad.' Now her team has a runbook triggered by those three signals, and they catch incidents before customers do.

This concept is part of Phase 6 (Pattern Recognition) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for pattern recognition.