Validation

Confirming that an artifact actually solves the intended problem in its real operational context, as distinct from confirming it was merely built to specification.


Validity-ending Event

A discrete, dateable moment at which a previously in-force entity is declared no longer valid while continuing to exist as a retained historical object.


Value Commensuration

Translate heterogeneous values into common metric for comparison.


Value of Information

Measure evidence by how much having it before acting is expected to improve the best available decision, relative to acting now and net of the cost of obtaining it.


Vantage-Induced Omission

An apparatus's structural vantage makes some regions of a landscape reachable and others constitutively invisible, so its output is mistaken for the landscape rather than the landscape-restricted-to-its-vantage.


Variance Bounds Selection Response

The rate at which selection shifts a population's mean equals within-population variance times selection intensity, so variance is the fuel selection consumes and must be regenerated.


Alias-to-Authority Mapping

One canonical form for a referent is maintained while every variant label routes many-to-one to it, so identity aggregates while the referent stays reachable by any name.


Variation Strategies

Deliberately injecting controlled variation into a system and selecting from the results to explore alternatives, accelerate learning, and gain robustness.


Vector Space

A collection closed under linear combination, where adding and scaling are coherent.


Verification

Check that an object conforms to its specification via a defined procedure yielding evidence and a verdict.


Verifier-Prover Asymmetry

Verifying a candidate solution is qualitatively cheaper than finding one, and the cost-ratio supports a characteristic class of designs that split finding from checking.


Viewpoint

A position fixes an access set, an occlusion set, and a bias profile.


Vouched Anonymity

Let a trusted intermediary privately verify a hidden contributor and stake its own reputation so a recipient can rely without inspecting the contributor directly.


Vulnerability Decomposition

A system's vulnerability to a named stressor factors into exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, each admitting its own intervention family.


Vulnerability Hotspot

A place, population, or component where multiple independent sensitivities co-locate, so the joint probability of harm there is far larger than the product of marginal probabilities elsewhere and risk clusters rather than spreads evenly.


War Of Attrition

A contest decided by who pays continuously the longest, with all paid cost sunk and the prize dissipated in the paying.


Wargaming

Rehearse a plan against an adaptive opponent, turn by turn, to surface the assumptions it hid.


Washout Failure

When the same unit is observed under successive conditions, residual state from the first contaminates the second unless a gap long enough to dissipate it is built in, so underestimating that dissipation time reads the decaying tail of the old condition as an effect of the new one.


Weak Ties

Distant acquaintances that bridge otherwise separate social clusters.


Winner's Curse

Winning a common-value contest is itself evidence of overpayment.


Winner Take All Market

A payoff structure convex in rank concentrates most reward at the top, so small skill gaps produce vast reward gaps.


Wisdom of the Crowds

Many independent noisy signals combine into an estimate better than any individual (information aggregation).


Withdrawal Rebound

A system that adapted to a sustained input by mounting an opposing internal compensation overshoots in the opposite direction when the input is abruptly removed, because the now-unopposed compensation is still pushing against an input that is no longer there.


Wizard Of Oz Prototyping

Validate a planned system cheaply by making its surface convincingly present while a hidden operator supplies the not-yet-built interior.


Yield Loss

The gap between a transformation's theoretical maximum output and its realized output, decomposed under a balance constraint into named loss channels that sum to the deficit and can be ranked and attacked.


Zero-Force Null Baseline

A deliberately false idealised model with all named perturbing forces set to zero, whose empirical departures are read as attributable diagnoses of which forces operate and at what magnitude.


Zero Knowledge Proof

Convince a verifier a claim is true while revealing nothing beyond its truth.


Zero Sum Game

The total payoff across participants is fixed, so one party's gain is necessarily another's equal loss and the only strategic question is distribution.