CONCEPT
Burden of Proof Asymmetry
The structural imbalance in production environments by which the party wishing to proceed bears no special evidentiary burden while the party wishing to stop must produce compelling novel evidence — the mechanism that makes reasonable exceptions rational and their accumulation catastrophic.
Vaughan identified burden of proof asymmetry as the institutional structure that converts production pressure into decision-level distortion. At NASA, the engineer who wished to proceed could point to the accumulated record of successful flights, the engineering analyses classifying anomalies as within acceptable limits, and the production schedule that rewarded forward motion. The engineer who wished to stop had to demonstrate, with quantitative evidence compelling enough to override the record, that the specific conditions of this launch exceeded the established limits. The asymmetry was not a policy; it was a feature of the institutional environment, as ambient and invisible as the air in the room.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The asymmetry is structural rather than designed — no one decided that stopping should require more evidence than proceeding; the structure emerged from the institutional reality that proceeding produces visible measurable outputs while stopping produces invisible unmeasurable protections.
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