Checking Your Map Against Reality
Keeping the model accountable to reality — the corrective discipline against mistaking the analytical apparatus for the thing itself. When map and territory diverge, the model needs revision, not reality denied.
Knowledge
The Work
Every model is a map, and every map can drift from the territory it claims to represent. The work of this category is to keep the model accountable to reality: to catch the moment map and territory have diverged, and to revise the map rather than deny the territory. The failure it guards against is mistaking the analytical apparatus for the thing itself, treating the model as more real than what the model was built to track.
The Tools
Report Fidelity. The diagnostic for whether a report still supports the interpretation and decision built from it, or has quietly begun reporting something other than what its label claims.
A candidate tool is queued for admission through the source-inherited Toolkit candidate protocol: rectification of names (the Confucian zhèngmíng tradition), the discipline of keeping names matched to the realities they designate, so that the language a system uses to describe itself does not drift away from what the system actually does.