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Trust & Trustworthiness

When may we rely on an artifact or agent?

Trustworthiness is the property (status, atomicity, uncertainty). Trust is the decision to rely given stakes and incomplete knowledge.

28 published articles

From Towards Wisdom
00
Towards Wisdom
Series preview — judgment infrastructure for organisations under uncertainty
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From Genesis
01
Where Everything Breaks
Nine failures, one problem wearing nine costumes
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08
Thinking by Writing
Decision as emission — why humans and machines both reason in symbols, and why capture is not the same for each
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09
The Moment of Commitment
Where derivations become decisions and accountability crystallises
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10
But Commitment Is Not Enough
Authority, weight, and the difference between rank and standing
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12
Every Statement Has a Tier
Tracking the strength of a claim is a commitment to truth, not a claim to certainty
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13
The Epistemic Ladder
Fourteen levels from the Real to the refuted claim — and the rules for climbing honestly
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14
Why Atomicity Matters
How far an artifact sits from the irreducible — and why that governs what may depend on it
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15
Why Uncertainty Matters
How confidently an artifact reflects the truth — at the moment you actually use it
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16
Disposition and Processor Fidelity
When the judge — not the evidence — distorts trust
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17
The Facets Composed
Six orthogonal facets, one question: how much may I trust this?
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18
What Information Theory Says
The formal underpinning of the facets
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19
When Trustworthiness Is Not Enough
World vs method, genuine vs false uncertainty, and politics at the bind
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20
When the Commitment Boundary Needs Reinforcing
Severity, task nature, and who is affected
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21
Strengthening the Commitment Boundary
Challenge, calibration, and independent review at the bind
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22
When Social Stability Matters More Than Quality
Legitimacy, authorization, and acceptance — not better decisions
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23
Meritocracy — The Sweet Spot
Where quality meets legitimacy — and why it has been so hard to build
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24
We Already Decided
When holding course is rational — and why those cases are rare
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25
Decision Principles and the Record
Seven irreducible rules, one log, and why honest decisions need both
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26
Architectural Decision Records
Industry ADR, corpus (A)DR, and why hypothesis closure matters at bind
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27
One Authority Per Invariant
The principle that makes distributed systems consistent makes organisations accountable
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29
One Authority Per Invariant — At Scale
How the single writer principle applies when multiple product teams share cross-cutting obligations
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30
LLMs at the Commitment Boundary
Classifying every meaningful LLM variant — and why the harness, not the model, sets the trust
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31
Event Sourced Science
Why the ML reproducibility crisis is an architecture problem
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32
From Immutable Events to Immutable Software
Why a foundation of atomic ground truth makes software cheap to extend in the age of AI
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33
Immutable Infrastructure
Why containers are a statement about truth
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34
The Unified Theory
One problem. One axiom. Six facets. Zero coincidences.
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35
Outlook
What this opens — biases, dispositions, and AI in service of truth under uncertainty
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Other threads
Truth and Epistemology (33) Belief (1) Tacit Knowledge (1) Data (15) Information (15) Knowledge (4) Intelligence and AI (12) Judgment (23) Strategy (8) Organisation (15) Development (10) Operations (1)