Checklists are a rationality technique, mentioned previously on OB. Everyone knows this, but we don't hear about them as often as we should, possibly because they seem prosaic and boring.

In the context of doing something over and over, there is a checklist improvement cycle.

• You try to make the thing (e.g. the blog post, the rational decision, the mathematical proof)
• For each kind of error in your checklist, you search the thing for that kind of error, and fix it if it occurs.
• When something that passed your checklist turns out to have had an error, you add that kind of error to your checklist.

There are many caveats to this description: Some checklists are not primarily lists of errors, but primarily ordered procedures. You may want to complicate the cycle to track the cost and benefit of the items on the checklist. We're assuming that errors are eventually discovered. I want to pass over those caveats and claim that this kind of checklist-of-errors is very successful. If you agree, my question is: What feature or features of our minds are checklists compensating for? If we understood that, then we would be able to use checklists even more effectively.