Overreach

Overreach is one of Critical Fallibilism‘s original ideas: doing work whose error rate exceeds your error-correction capacity. When you generate mistakes faster than you fix them, an unsolved-problem backlog accumulates and grows without bound. As it grows you become overwhelmed, criticism starts to feel unpleasant, and you begin ignoring errors rather than correcting them — which, CF argues, explains a widespread dislike of criticism and a main cause of failure at any learning task, goal, or project.

CF’s distinctive move is to treat error correction ability as a budgeted resource, not a free background activity. This builds on Critical Rationalism’s claim that error correction is the central issue in epistemology, then adds a management discipline: keep consumption below capacity, and raise capacity by getting better at reasoning. The Theory of Constraints supplies the budgeting model — Goldratt’s argument in The Goal that a balanced plant is a mistake, and that leaving buffer capacity as a margin of error beats trying to spend every resource, maps directly onto leaving error-correction headroom rather than running at the edge.

The recommended remedy is to reduce ambition until a problem is manageable: prefer activities you find easy (resource-efficient), advance in small steps of at most ~20% harder than a prior objectively-verified success, and pursue mastery so hard tasks become cheap before you attempt them. Avoiding overreach also requires objective reasoning to tell success from failure — without that, you cannot judge what counts as an error to correct. Temple cautions this diagnoses a problem more than it delivers a complete solution.