Documenting cognitive patterns for better human and AI collaboration
My notes repository stores sources, concepts, and investigations. Sources preserve what another author said. Concepts combine knowledge about one idea. Investigations record how I examined a specific question. I recently added a fourth kind of note that records how to reason about many different questions.
I call these notes cognitive patterns. A cognitive pattern is a reusable reasoning procedure. It contains questions, steps, failure modes, checks, and an example of how the same procedure can work in another field.
The goal is to make the reasoning between a question and an answer easier for a human and an AI to inspect together. A pattern can help them choose a suitable procedure, notice missing checks, and improve the procedure after using it. It does not make the answer true. Evidence still has to support every claim.