Diane Vaughan — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Diane Vaughan — On AI. 13 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
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 exc…
Flow State
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's name for the condition of optimal human engagement — and, in Wiener's framework, the subjective signature of a well-regulated negative feedback system.
Normalization of Deviance
Diane Vaughan's name for the four-phase organizational process — observation, assessment, normalization, baseline shift — by which anomalies become routine and the standards that would have caught them erode incrementally, invisibly, and …
O-Ring Erosion
The anomalous combustion-gas damage to the rubber gaskets sealing the Space Shuttle's solid rocket booster joints — the specific engineering phenomenon whose progressive normalization across twenty-four flights produced the structural tem…
Practical Drift
Scott Snook's extension of Vaughan's framework — the gradual divergence between how work is supposed to be done and how work is actually done under the pressures of daily practice, producing a gap between doctrine and reality that no sing…
Production Pressure
The structural force embedded in institutional environments — operating as gravity rather than directive — that rewards proceeding and penalizes stopping, reshaping judgment without announcing itself and producing the conditions under whi…
Structural Secrecy
Vaughan's concept for the way organizational architecture — divisions, hierarchies, specialized vocabularies, reporting channels — filters and distorts information as it moves between units, with the result that critical signals are lost…
Tacit Knowledge
Michael Polanyi's term for the knowledge that lives in the hands and nervous system rather than in explicit propositions — acquired through practice, failure, and embodied pattern recognition, and dissolved by AI workflows that produce ou…
The Comprehension Gap
The separation — novel in the history of knowledge work — between competent output and the understanding of how the output works, produced by AI tools that make it possible to evaluate results functionally without comprehending the reasoni…
The Reasonable Exception
The atomic unit of normalized deviance — the individually defensible judgment, supported by evidence and precedent, that is rational in isolation and catastrophic in aggregate because each exception is evaluated against the standard the p…
Dead Reckoning
Vaughan's 2024 study of air traffic control — the product of years embedded with controllers at major facilities — that extends her framework into the cognitive work of maintaining situational awareness under conditions of increasing autom…
The Challenger Launch Decision
Diane Vaughan's 1996 landmark study — the product of nearly a decade of archival reconstruction — that rejected the prevailing narrative of managerial wrongdoing at NASA and demonstrated that the Challenger disaster was produced by the or…
