Definition
An instrument whose readings improve as the people it observes run down. A survey, an appeal, a complaint log, and a self-assessment all draw their input from the subject's remaining attention, so the depleted answer least and the institution reads the gap as health. The bias runs one direction: more depletion produces a better-looking reading.
Law VIII asks whether an observation can change the governing state of a system. This asks the prior question, whether the observation is evidence at all. An instrument bought with the subject's last reserves has a sampling rule that ties difficulty to silence.
It co-occurs with Attrition-as-Resolution and Endurance Asymmetry. The remedy is to read friction from the system's own trail — abandonment at a named step, re-uploads, retries, activity outside scheduled hours — rather than to ask a depleted person to describe it.
Adjacent terms
Example corpus
- A jurisdiction reports 4% appeal volume and a 96% resolution rate in the same quarter it adds a second documentation requirement. The appeals that stopped arriving appear in neither figure.