Logic Page 9

Failure Conditions and Falsifiability

A framework becomes more credible when it identifies evidence that would count against it.

Technical failure conditions

• Reasonable attribution methods produce materially incompatible allocations from the same evidence.
• Contribution estimates are unstable under modest changes to baseline, perturbation method, benchmark, or model specification.
• Approximation error cannot be bounded tightly enough for the economic decision being made.
• Interaction effects or retraining dynamics make individual attribution non-identifiable.
• Oracle inputs can be manipulated more cheaply than the resulting economic benefit.

Economic failure conditions

• The cost of documentation, verification, dispute resolution, valuation, and compliance consistently exceeds the value made available for allocation.
• Royalty rules reduce useful contribution, collaboration, or adoption more than they increase it.
• Secondary-market pricing becomes detached from performance evidence despite the proposed anchoring mechanisms.
• Contributors cannot understand or challenge the rules affecting their allocation at reasonable cost.

Institutional and legal failure conditions

• The system requires individual moral judgments that cannot be administered consistently or with due process.
• The privacy burden of provenance reconstruction exceeds the public or participant benefit.
• Governance concentrates effective control in parties whose interests conflict with contributors or holders.
• The economic claim cannot be implemented through a valid contractual or statutory pathway without unacceptable investor, consumer, labor, or property-right risk.
• A proposed correction produces greater arbitrary treatment than the condition it seeks to correct.

Required response to failure

A failed test should produce one of four responses: revise the method, narrow the domain, reduce the strength of the resulting claim, or suspend the application. Uncertainty should never be converted automatically into entitlement.