CONCEPT
The Architecture of Calibrated Trust
The three-element institutional infrastructure — feedback mechanisms, professional standards, and educational programs — that Daston's framework identifies as necessary for calibrating trust in any knowledge-producing technology.
Calibrated trust — the disciplined practice of extending confidence in proportion to evidence rather than to the technology's confidence artifacts — is never achieved by individuals alone. It is achieved by institutions: by sustained, collective, formally organized efforts of communities that develop shared standards for evaluating the technology's outputs, shared methods for detecting its characteristic errors, and shared practices for transmitting evaluative competencies to new users. Daston's historical research identifies three elements that must work in combination for calibrated trust to be institutionally sustained: feedback mechanisms that make errors visible, professional standards that codify practices, and educational programs that develop the relevant evaluative competencies.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The first element — feedback mechanisms — consists of structures that make a technology's errors visible to its users, enabling the learning-from-error process on which calibration depends. For previous technologies, feedback mechanisms included controlled experiments that tested outputs against independent standards, comparative studies across domains, and systematic error databases that accumulated