Meaning Autopsy

Taking one real coincidence from your own diary apart in full, using the course's frameworks rather than your first instinct about it.

Autopsy report 02

Due: 17 September 2027 · Weight: 25%

Where the Pattern Diary asks you to notice, the Meaning Autopsy asks you to properly take one case apart — in public, on paper, with the same honesty the diary demanded of the noticing.

The brief#

Choose one entry from your Pattern Diary and give it a full autopsy: what happened, why it felt meaningful, and what the strongest available explanation actually is.

Pick the entry you were most tempted to call “too weird to be a coincidence.” A strong autopsy does three things in order: describes the event without already explaining it away, names what made it feel significant at the time, and then applies at least two of the course’s frameworks from weeks 1 through 7 — apophenia, base rates, omen-reading, dream theory, synchronicity, the Barnum effect, or projective symbol systems, whichever genuinely fit the case. The frameworks should explain the case, not just be name-dropped near it.

What you submit#

A written piece of 1,200–1,800 words, in whatever format your marker can open and comment on (a shared document is easiest). Workshops 2 and 3 exist specifically to help you choose a strong case and pressure-test the draft before submission — a case chosen and drafted the night before rarely survives either checklist.