Verification, Screening & Reference Standards

Primes about how claims, entities, or candidates get checked against a standard before being trusted: cheap screening filters and gatekeeping choke points, authoritative verdicts such as authentication, certification, and ground truth, and the ways reference standards decay or get quietly substituted.

18 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Asymmetric Screening — A cheap, deliberately one-sided-error filter gates an expensive authoritative check.
• Authentication — Binding an asserted identity or origin to admissible evidence through a procedure that yields a verdict, before trust, access, or weight is granted.
• Certification — A trusted third party attests, after a defined evaluation, that an entity meets a standard, and issues a portable token downstream parties use as a substitute for re-doing the evaluation.
• Due diligence — Investigate and exercise the care appropriate to a consequential commitment before relying, approving, acquiring or acting.
• Evaluation — Apply a criterion-bearing frame to a bounded object, interpret its relevant features against that frame, and produce a verdict, score, rank, or action-guiding judgment.
• Evaluative Rating — Compress an evaluative judgment into a position on a shared ordered scale that downstream actors can act on without re-examining the evidence.
• Fact-Value Distinction — Keep descriptive claims about what is or occurs distinct from evaluative claims about what is good, justified, or ought to be done, so evidence can constrain a value judgment without silently supplying the value premise that turns description into prescription.
• Gatekeeping — An actor or mechanism at a choke point exercises selective passage control, shaping the downstream distribution in ways the audience cannot directly observe.
• Ground Truth — A reference channel designated authoritative for scoring another, itself a fallible construct.
• Holdout Set — Reserve a disjoint portion of evidence to score a candidate it never shaped.
• Identity Test — The rule that decides, in a given system, when two presentations refer to the same entity.
• Information Locality — Responsibility for a decision, guarantee, or interpretation belongs at a level that possesses the information required to discharge it; less-informed levels may assist but cannot make the result correct.
• Information Use License — Transmit information under a durable agreement that permits some downstream uses while barring others until a defined upgrade, release, exception, or expiry occurs.
• Peer Review — Evaluate bounded work or performance through people with relevant peer competence, routing criterion-grounded judgments into revision, authorization, learning, or accountability.
• Recognition Justice — Judge whether people, identities, experiences, and categories of harm are represented as intelligible and worthy of equal standing before an allocation or procedure is evaluated.
• Reference Standard Decay — A measuring apparatus keeps scoring against a reference standard that has silently drifted, so its numbers stay stable while their meaning shifts.
• Relevance Substitution — A psychologically active but epistemically irrelevant signal is supplied in place of a relevant one, and the recipient updates on it blind to the substitution.
• Sanity check — Apply a fast, coarse test of units, scale, sign, invariants or obvious boundary cases to reject results that cannot plausibly be correct before investing in detailed verification.