Postmortem

A postmortem is the investigation you do after making an an error to find what caused it and what change would prevent the broader category of mistakes that share that cause. The name borrows the medical sense of “after death”: you examine the failure to learn from it. CF treats postmortems not as a formality but as one of the main routes to becoming a better thinker.

The core CF argument is evidential. We are unaware of most of our mistakes; a known error is therefore scarce data about hidden thinking problems in our heads. Many errors flow from a reusable thinking process, method, policy, habit, or bias that quietly generates an unlimited stream of further mistakes. So merely correcting the single case — the kind of one-off straightforward correction people rush to make — wastes the data point. CF instead pushes toward the underlying mechanism: identify the systemic cause and change it, which simultaneously discharges many past and future criticisms.

This distinguishes CF from cultures that merely tolerate mistakes. Effective Altruism and Popperians (“let your ideas die in your place”) reduce the shame of being wrong, which CF endorses, but neither strongly demands postmortems or stresses that errors come in patterns. CF also warns against superficial postmortems that name a familiar cause or dismiss the error as random, then close fast — usually itself a symptom of hostility to criticism. Because most mistakes involve the subconscious, a real fix typically means a new policy or habit installed through practice, not just consciously changing your mind. Done seriously, postmortems are part of CF’s wider error-correction machinery.