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sociable systems.
The Canon

Accuracy Theater & The Accountability Gap

How '94% accurate' masks the fact that the failing 6% targets the most vulnerable.

A system advertised as "94% accurate" does not fail randomly across the population. The failing 6% is almost always concentrated in the hardest cases, where the system is already least likely to hear the people it harms.

Accuracy theater is the rhetorical move that averages these failures away. The Accountability Gap is what you get when the theater persuades an auditor: nobody can be held responsible for a statistical outcome, so nobody is.

The counter-move is distributional auditing: which 6% is failing, where, and to whom.

Tags: accountability · metrics · failure-distribution

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