What is shoshin?

Shoshin is a concept in personal epistemology: Approaching familiar situations as if seeing them for the first time reveals hidden details.

Example: A senior engineer inherits a codebase she built three years ago. She walks through it with a new hire, explaining each module. Halfway through, the new hire asks: 'Why does the auth service call the database twice?' She has no answer. She wrote that code. She reviewed it dozens of times. She never saw the redundant call because her expertise told her the auth module was 'done.' The new hire, unburdened by that assumption, saw what was actually there.

This concept is part of Phase 5 (Observation Without Judgment) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for observation without judgment.