Glossary entry in Measures & indicators. Definitions, checks, and evidence for Performance Decomposition.
Quick takeaways
The analytical formalization that observed institutional throughput or success decomposes into intrinsic designed capacity plus uncredited compensatory…
The analytical formalization that observed institutional throughput or success decomposes into intrinsic designed capacity plus uncredited compensatory human labor: Observed Performance = Designed Capacity + Human Compensation. When the second term is omitted from the accounting boundary, the apparent efficiency of the automated system is counterfeit.
MeasurableBurden
Scope
G. Measures & indicators. Quantifiable indicators for tracking institutional burden, correction latency, and system health.
Genealogy
Formulated in the Ethotechnics research program to defeat the falsified denominator.
v1.17.0 · 2026-10-02 — Added six canonical terms: Compensatory Inputs, Manufactured Virtue, Structural Coercion, Epistemic Erasure Cycle, Automation Bias, and Verification Tax, formalizing how informal human adaptation subsidizes institutional continuity and destroys failure evidence.
v1.16.0 · 2026-10-02 — Added three canonical terms: Manufactured Necessity, Adaptation Externality, and Compulsory Heroism, codifying the boundary between genuine material limits and illegitimate institutional extraction of finite human adaptive capacity.
v1.15.0 · 2026-10-01 — Added four core terms: Tripartite Invariant, Counterfeit Buffering (The HITL-Alibi), Performance Decomposition, and Corrective Standing as Epistemic Admissibility, formalizing the boundary between craft stewardship and uncredited human absorption.
v1.14.0 · 2026-09-26 — Added three terms: Principle of Non-Expropriation of Resilience, Compensated Performance, and Intrinsic Performance. They separate how well a system works on its own from how much of its success depends on people quietly absorbing its errors, and limit how much of that absorption an institution may demand.
v1.13.0 · 2026-09-22 — Rewrote category descriptions and scope notes to the current framing, replaced vague or promotional definitions in 89 entries and 109 short definitions, removed unsourced adoption and effect claims, and cut filler words and redundant sentences from 38 entries and 20 short definitions. No term was added, removed, or renamed.
v1.12.0 · 2026-09-22 — Added Typed Decision Model and Confidence-Gated Execution, cross-linked to the worked example of a decision-model gate on refunds.
v1.11.0 · 2026-09-22 — Added Decision Threshold, Shaping Hop, and Reason Substitution: the places typed decision models locate authority, shape decisions without making them, and separate the reason from the decision.
v1.10.0 · 2026-09-19 — Promoted 64 orphaned short definitions to full canonical entries across core concepts, governance, decision states, and anti-patterns, and removed three redundant short definitions (procedural-realism, intake-cinema, legibility-illegibility).
v1.9.0 · 2026-09-19 — Added Feedback Proximity, Asymmetric-Capacity Restraint, Adaptive Capacity, Compensatory Adaptation, and Corrective Power, aligned the short definition of Ethotechnics with its canonical authority-and-correction framing, and refreshed the glossary's category scaffolding off the earlier moral-system vocabulary.
v1.8.0 · 2026-09-19 — Added Insulation, the unifying failure mode of the framework: whatever stops the consequences of institutional decisions from traveling back to those who can revise the generating rules, with its channels, its good and bad forms, and its self-ratifying loop.
v1.7.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Non-Finality, Consequential Contradiction, and The Excluded Case, and generalized the falsified denominator into the falsified ledger — completing the five concerns and the fallibilist ground they stand on.
v1.6.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Human Non-Substitutability, Safe Incompleteness, Anti-Conversion Rights, Abstention, Constitutional Debt, Discretion Migration, and Corrigibility Rent — the person-side principles, the three abstentions, and the rent concept.
v1.5.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Exception Absorption, Exception Learning, Case Corrigibility, Structural Corrigibility, Institutional Learning, Corrective Debt, and the Workaround Presumption, formalizing the historical turn: reading institutions through their failure trajectories rather than their stated controls.
v1.4.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Residual Complexity, Complexity Displacement, Falsified Denominator, Closure Without Remainder, Constitutional Governance, and Post-Optimization Rigor, embedding the foundational contention of burden redistribution.
v1.3.0 · 2026-09-11 — Added Attestation, Liability Record, Carve-Out, Delegation Chain, Composed Latency, and Silent-Harm Discovery, each bound to the standard clause that requires it.
v1.2.0 · 2026-09-08 — Added The Non-Conversion Principle, Exit Cost, and Jurisdictional Path Dependence, each linked to the theory essay that argues for it.