Question
Why does false negative rate fail?
Quick Answer
Trusting silence. When an agent stops firing, you assume things are fine rather than asking whether the agent has gone blind. The most dangerous failure is the one you never learn about — not because it didn't happen, but because nothing in your system told you it did.
The fix: Pick one agent — a habit trigger, a review routine, a decision rule — that you trust to catch problems. Look back at the last 30 days. Identify at least two situations where that agent should have fired but didn't. Write them down. For each miss, note: what was the situation, what should the agent have caught, and why did it stay silent? This is your empirical false negative audit.
The underlying principle is straightforward: An agent that fails to fire when it should leaves you exposed to undetected problems — the silence feels like safety, but it is blindness.
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