Concepts
The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 4,828 atoms across 8 types
When dashboards are all-green but something feels wrong…
When a system reports all-green status but something feels wrong, immediately check for missing log streams, absent metrics, or silent services rather than trusting the presence of positive signals alone.
Same three symptoms before three failures = name…
When the same symptom triad precedes system failures across three independent incidents, document it as a named detection pattern and build an automated alert triggered by that specific combination.
For each schema, list its key assumptions…
Define environmental change triggers by listing key assumptions underlying each schema and specifying observable indicators that each assumption no longer holds.
Accumulate anomalies on a running list — trigger schema…
Accumulate anomalies (observations that don't fit the schema) in a running list and trigger full schema review when the count reaches a pre-defined threshold, rather than treating each anomaly as requiring immediate action.
Design early warning indicators for polarity drift…
Design early warning indicators for polarity drift by identifying the characteristic downsides of each pole, then monitor for those downsides to trigger course-correction before crisis.
Monitor your error detection system itself — track what…
Build error detection infrastructure that monitors both your primary outputs and your detection system's own performance, tracking what errors you catch versus what you miss through other means to detect detection failures.
Define your error budget in writing
For any system you operate, define four components in writing: (1) ideal behavior, (2) minimum acceptable behavior, (3) numeric deviation threshold, and (4) time window before triggering investigation.
Three-tier error budgets
Define error budget thresholds in three tiers—green (within budget, no action), yellow (approaching limits, investigate), red (exceeded, halt and redesign)—with pre-committed responses for each zone.
Three verification layers
Design verification as three independent layers—continuous signals (daily metrics), periodic samples (weekly/monthly spot-checks), and infrequent structural audits (quarterly full reviews)—with each layer optimized for different failure detection at different resource costs.
Cascading verification escalation
When a verification signal degrades, escalate to deeper sampling; when sampling reveals a pattern, trigger a structural audit; when an audit reveals a structural problem, modify the delegation itself—this creates a cascading response protocol where each verification layer can activate the next.