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The Watchdog / Canon / accuracy-theater
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 — on the most vulnerable, the hardest cases, the people who already cannot make the system hear them.

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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