What is small bets?

Small bets is a concept in personal epistemology: Test the smallest piece of your schema first before relying on the whole structure.

Example: You build a schema for how your team makes decisions: "When the data is ambiguous, we default to the most senior person's judgment." Before trusting this schema to guide a reorganization, you test it against a single recent decision. You pick last Tuesday's product meeting. Did the team actually defer to seniority when the data was unclear? It turns out they deferred to whoever had the most domain context, regardless of title. The smallest test broke the schema — and saved you from restructuring your team around an assumption that was already wrong.

This concept is part of Phase 15 (Schema Validation) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for schema validation.