What is track record keeping?

Track record keeping is a concept in personal epistemology: Self-trust is not built through affirmation — it is built through keeping promises to yourself and accumulating evidence that your judgment is reliable.

Example: You predicted that a particular vendor relationship would go sideways because of misaligned incentives. Your manager disagreed. Six months later, the relationship collapsed for exactly the reasons you identified. If you never recorded that prediction, the episode fades into vague memory and your self-trust stays the same. If you wrote it down — date, reasoning, confidence level — you now have a calibrated data point: your judgment about incentive misalignment is demonstrably reliable. Twenty such data points, accumulated over two years, transform your relationship with your own authority. You stop asking 'Am I right?' and start asking 'What does my track record say about situations like this?'

This concept is part of Phase 31 (Self-Authority) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for self-authority.